I've been looking for something to help me through the hot 'n' humid summer months and what better way to beat the heat than to stay indoors watching questionable anime and playing questionable games based on said anime? For a rundown of this little project, check out the first episode.

Programming Note: Last time I mentioned I'd be switching to a "dark fantasy" anime with every intent to cover Kazushi Hagiwara's heavy metal-inspired Bastard!! The Dark God of Destruction and its bizarre SFC fighter/RPG hybrid, but at some point between now and when I pencilled-in a rough outline of episodes prior to the beginning of summer a brand new Bastard!! anime adaptation started airing worldwide through Netflix. That made it a little too current and "SEO-y" for what I'm doing here, so I switched focus for Episode 3. (I am eventually going to check out that new anime though; Bastard!!'s premise sounds sorta rad in an "a middle-schooler's idea of cool" way.)

The Property

So instead of that juvenile nonsense we're instead going a more little high-brow with our next candidate, Ghost Sweeper Mikami: an anime about an attractive woman who defeats ghosts with her sex appeal. OK, it's not quite that, but it's not far off either.

The basic outline of the manga and its adaptations is that protagonist Reiko Mikami, though talented at what she does, is not particularly invested in hunting ghosts for any personal or spiritual reasons but, much like the Ghostbusters, does so simply as a day job (or night job, since ghosts tend to run nocturnal hours) to cover the rent and more besides. Beyond her prodigious ability to exorcise the undead she kinda comes off like a regular 20-something career woman, albeit with Scrooge McDuck's level of parsimony. Her assistants are the perpetually hormonal high-schooler Tadao Yokoshima, who is paid very little due to being a minor, and a ghost girl nicknamed Okinu that Mikami rescues from captivity who then becomes her spectral secretary. Spectretary? Let's go with that.

The Ghost Sweeper Mikami manga was written by Takashi Shiina, and is his most famous work. Others of his include Zettai Karen Children ("Psychic Squad") and the manga adaptation of the Inuyasha sequel anime Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon. Those last two are fairly current; the dude's had the good fortune to see consistent work since the '80s. The Ghost Sweeper manga ran for most of the 1990s - May '91 to September '99 to be exact - so I'm hoping for plenty of the self-aware, satirical humor that defined that decade of primetime animation by way of The Simpsons, Duckman, or The Critic. Or it could just be a bunch of boob jokes. (Honestly, I should probably write this section after watching the anime, but... well, I have a system now. Impossible to change the formula of something three episodes in.)

The Anime

The Ghost Sweeper Mikami anime is a Toei Animation product - the studio responsible for almost every major '80s and '90s serial anime you might name (Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, Digimon, Transformers, etc.) - which ran for forty-five episodes from spring 1993 to spring 1994. This was followed by a 1994 anime movie later that summer, GS Mikami: Gokuraku Daisakusen!! ("Great Paradise Battle!!"), which was also one of the many localized for international audiences by Manga Entertainment. Both the show and the movie were directed by Atsutoshi Umezawa, whose few other director credits include the OVA adaptation of Falcom's Xanadu: Dragon Slayer II. For this episode of Game OVA, I'll be checking out the first four TV episodes and that movie.

Episode 1: "Here Comes the Super Sexy Exorcist!"

In this introductory adventure, Mikami and Yokoshima are called to a mountain resort to exorcise a "slovenly man ghost" that is putting people off of the onsen. The ghost turns out to be a dead mountaineer who asks that his body, lost on the nearby mountain summit, be properly put to rest before he can move on. Turns out he's luring travellers to the real menace: a centuries-old spook that has claimed the mountain's hot springs for himself. With some effort, and a little help from the friendly Okinu, they exorcise the hot springs ghost. Having accidentally destroyed one of Mikami's valuable exorcism talismans, Okinu is forced into indentured servitude to pay it off.

This first episode establishes the show's formula: Mikami is competent but lazy and greedy, Yokoshima is lecherous and stupid and pays for this with the amount of abuse he (mostly willingly) suffers, and Okinu is sweet but far too naïve. It also establishes that Mikami uses expensive talismans and what is basically a nightstick that turns into a lightsaber when her spiritual power is channelled through it as her primary tools of the trade. Finally, it establishes the show's type of humor: broad vaudeville silliness with a whole lot of long pauses for comedic emphasis, and City Hunter-style violent retribution for sexual harassment.

I actually found it sorta funny, though if they persist with the same jokes episode after episode I could see it getting old fast. The way Yokoshima might be practically hysterical one moment about some fatal peril he's being placed in, and then instantly switches to a compliant, chill demeanor with an "ikemen" (cool and handsome) voice if he thinks there's the slightest chance of female attention in store, is a good bit.

What amuses me slightly is that the pilot of Mob Psycho 100 also has a similar premise: a professional ghost hunter and his assistant go to a remote mountain area to exorcise a spirit that has been attacking people. Of course, the formula of that show is very different (though Mikami's hustling does remind me of a Reigen a little), but since it's one of my favorite active anime shows it makes me a little bit more hopeful for GS Mikami.

Oh, and before I forget, here's the OP. That theme song is like City Pop Castlevania, and I'm here for it. Especially that big sell on SWEEEEEEPA at the end.

Episode 2: "Armed Robbers Have No Tomorrow!"

Two would-be bank robbers die en route to their heist, causing their spirits to haunt the bank and its wealthy customers. While Yokoshima is doted on by the bank's flirty tellers for money he absolutely does not have, the manager meets with Mikami but low-balls her on the exorcism fee: Mikami counter-offers that she and and the ghosts will rob the bank for real during a pre-determined drill day as a way of resolving their unfinished business, and whatever she manages to keep from the heist will be her fee. The next day, she and Yokoshima successfully rob the bank with the spectral robbers using special ghost guns that shoot out distraction spooks that have been hired for incredibly low pay (though, amusingly, are still paid more than Yokoshima). The robbers ascend to the afterlife during the getaway but Mikami is determined to keep the money regardless, foiling the bank's pursuing security forces in a daring car chase. It's only at the airfield after she tries escaping the country that she's finally defeated by a female commando team with assault rifles: shown to be the tellers from before. Crying crocodile tears as her stolen money is returned, we're shown that Okinu has been quietly using the bank's computers to send cash orders to Mikami's secret Swiss bank account while everyone else was busy.

I wasn't quite expecting there to be a bank robbery in the second episode, but then Mikami does love money and I guess the set-up means she's not going to jail after this. Even so, it felt like the exorcism aspect of this episode was entirely incidental to the heist and getaway chase. Maybe it's for the best that the show can be this thematically versatile, especially if has another forty-plus stories to tell. (How does Okinu - who died in the 17th century - know how to use a computer?)

Episode 3: "The Empire of Haunted Dolls!!"

Beep beep beep-beep beep beep! We got a haunted doll watch! A show about ghosts wasn't going to be able to keep away from haunted dolls forever, and like the desperate con-artist branch of eBay this episode is full of the things. The client this time, Aya, is a kindergartener whose Moga Doll (a stand-in for Barbie, or Jenny which was Japan's equivalent) is abducted by a pale ghost who visits her bedroom at night. Mikami gives herself a fortune-telling that informs her she must take the next job or be destroyed, which explains why she would ever work for a penniless child, and so she and her crew enter a portal to the ghost's lair to find that the culprit is none other than Mikami's own childhood Moga Doll, who somehow absorbed some of the exorcist's latent psychic energy growing up and is disgruntled that Mikami abandoned her as she got older. It's sort of like a psychotic version of Jessie's background from Toy Story 2. Before Mikami's doll can enact her vengeance and start turning humans into dolls, Aya shows up and identifies her own Moga Doll in the throng, who in turn remembers Aya's kindness and rebels against the others to draw out their leader in time for Mikami to exorcise it.

A pretty traditional story without a whole lot of wackiness - besides the notion that powerful ghosts can create their own alternative dimensions - but honestly, pretty cute all round. Especially the little girl version of Mikami. The episode ends on an ominous hint that some of Mikami's other old toys may have become sapient as well, though I don't think the show will run out of steam so quickly that they'll revisit the same idea.

Episode 4: "Ghost Sweeper in Space!!"

So far the series has been gradually cementing its own grounded sense of reality, factoring in the ridiculousness of ghost battles and a version of modern Japan that has become so used to hauntings that an entire cottage industry of professional exorcists has popped up to fight them while also ensuring that this particular setting still has an otherwise logical consistency to it.

That's why the fourth episode of GS Mikami has the team go into outer space to fight a cosmic gremlin that is sabotaging a space shuttle in much the same way as one once did to William Shatner's commercial airliner. Yokoshima is volunteered (by Mikami) as the one to go into space to remove the gremlin, but they don't actually launch him up there in a rocket. That'd be nutty. Instead, they send his disembodied spirit up via a ritual and televise it live so the satellite TV company paying for all this can recoup some of Mikami's exorbitant fee. We even get some fake Star Trek music once Yokoshima's spirit escapes the atmosphere. The original plan to stop the gremlin fails - they're weak to beautiful singing voices, so Mikami saw the wisdom in giving Yokoshima a tape deck with no batteries - but as Okinu was there to record the whole thing with her camera she is able to save the day by singing a traditional Japanese ballad. I'm just going to skip over the part where they could produce any sound in space, given it's a show where a ghost and a teenager having an out-of-body experience just fought what looked like a Dragon Quest monster.

The Movie

I'm a little reluctant to jump so far ahead in the continuity since I'm sure the anime had many more characters to introduce - the show's intro has six or seven rival exorcists that we've yet to meet - but I'm not sticking around for another forty episodes to see what equally improbable adventures follow its takes on Heat and Armageddon. I'm watching the official dub this time - I'm curious if an English VA can somehow make Yokoshima even more annoying - and there's already a remarkable uptick in animation quality in the opening fight scene with a horde of snake-like ghost heads. The plot takes over soon after: Mitsuhide Akechi, the samurai famous for betraying and murdering Oda Nobunaga, was actually an exorcist who destroyed a powerful vampire posing as Nobunaga. He leaves behind a spear tipped with a spiritual stone with immense power to the most worthy exorcist candidate in the present: Reiko Mikami, who instantly yearns to sell it as a priceless artifact. (Incidentally, these conversation scenes are as minimally animated as ever, so I guess even the movie had a strict budget. We even get two excruciatingly-long "dramatic pause" gags in the first ten minutes, and this movie's only an hour.)

The idea that Nobunaga was some kind of supernatural monster is not a new one, as he's depicted as such in the Onimusha series and the Samurai Warriors musous as well as I'm sure lots of other fiction both in and outside of video games. Since he was not the one to unify Japan, though he certainly came close, historical re-enactments seem divided on the man between his semi-benevolent and ambitious goal to end the constant bloodshed and the ruthless "means to an end" approach with which he aimed to achieve it. Either way, he's a vampire now, and not a cuddly vampire like this Pete character I've never seen before (like I said, skipping ahead has cost me some introductions). It is a little bit of a cop-out to suggest that Nobunaga was a regular human who got ate and replaced by a vampire around the time he started to lose it, but maybe him getting secretly replaced as the reason for his sudden change of temperament is a popular theory in Japan?

At any rate, in the process of trying to find Nobuferatu's resting place so they can jab him with the spear they accidentally wake him up and he goes on a rampage across Tokyo after kicking everybody's asses, creating a legion of zombies. This gains the attention of the Vatican, who confirms his identity and offers $50 million for his destruction (which, for whatever reason, the heroine mentally converts to ¥60 billion - either the conversion rate was crazy that soon after Japan's economic bubble burst or someone added a zero where they shouldn't). Nobuferatu, meanwhile, realizes he gained enough power to resurrect from just the small trickle of Mikami's blood that fell on his grave, and seeks to draw in all of Tokyo's ghost sweepers - whom the show will have already introduced one by one, I suspect - to siphon their psychically-enriched blood.

He kidnaps them all effortlessly thanks to the help of his spider-demon-samurai lackey, Ranmaru Mori, and the fact that every other ghost sweeper is either overconfident or an idiot or both. Mikami eventually makes it to where Nobuferatu is building a second Azuchi Castle on top of some skyscrapers (it's a kinda neat effect, like the transformation of the top of the Shandor Building in Ghostbusters). She takes down Ranmaru with some difficulty but is outclassed by the empowered Nobuferatu, even after striking him in the heart with Akechi's spiritual stone spear. Nobuferatu shrugs off the blow and destroys the spear, switching into his true Gargoyles-like form in the process. Suddenly, Yokoshima pops out of nowhere to deliver some powerful attacks - he didn't suddenly become cool; he's being possessed by Mitsuhide - and provides the instruction necessary for Mikami to create another spiritual stone weapon powerful enough to finish off Nobuferatu once and for all. (Later, in a post-credits scene, Mikami tries to make more spiritual stones so she can sell them.)

Like most anime movies it's really just an extended episode of the show, though with a slightly improved look that still embodies Takashi Shiina's art. Notably, it switches animation styles for at least one sequence where Meiko, one of the other ghost sweepers, is tricked into thinking Ranmaru will take her to her Prince Charming and has a little fairytale daydream about the encounter. The action scenes are used sparingly but are fairly well done - the show has them too, but they're usually not the emphasis - with an evident amount of sheen put into them. I'm not sure I'd wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone since it's a little formulaic and dumb, but it's a fine complement to the TV show and I'm sure the manga's fans appreciated the anime adaptation going out with a bang. (The dub meanwhile is very much what you'd expect from 1994, but at least the guy playing Nobuferatu was clearly having fun.)

The Game

Our first game is GS Mikami: Joreishi wa Nice Body ("The Exorcist with the Nice Body") for the Super Famicom, released in September 1993 about halfway through the TV show's run. Any fears that this would be a low-quality tie-in are assuaged, somewhat, by the choice of developer: Natsume. While Natsume has made many memorable games for the SNES - Wild Guns and Ninja Warriors being two popular examples - they're also known for the KiKi KaiKai franchise, known overseas as Pocky & Rocky. If I'm going to trust any SNES-era developer with a game based on a silly TV anime about exorcists, they'd be high on that list. (I have no idea who the publishers, Banalex, are. A cursory glance at the internet suggests they were a Bandai subsidiary, which wouldn't surprise me.)

Rather than the top-down shooter antics of the Pocky & Rocky franchise, however, the GS Mikami game plays a little closer to Valis with its application of a large, central protagonist sprite fighting enemies with her sword-like exorcism rod as they fly in from the sides. As well as a direct horizontal slash and a vertical slash for fliers attacking from above, Mikami can also rely on single-use talismans which clear the screen of weaker enemies. There are also power-ups that can extend the range of Mikami's default weapon, many projecting energy in various directions, though these go away if you get hit once: the game can feel a little punitive as a result, as it gets way harder without the benefit of that added reach.

I've gathered some spooky screenshots below to demonstrate the game:

Does it do right by the anime? I feel like I set myself up for disappointment last time thinking Hyper Iria would be like a Metroid game given the similar themes, and the same is true here for Ghost Sweeper and Castlevania. A 16-bit era Natsume game is going to be better than most of its contemporaries so I certainly couldn't say Joreishi wa Nice Body is a bad game at any stretch, but it is very limited in scope and isn't without its flaws. Probably not the Natsume game I'd recommend first if pulling from its SNES library, though I guess something short and simple in whatever harsh deadlines they had (remember, it came out five or six months into the show's run, and probably started development around the time of its premiere) is better than some overly ambitious jank that had no hope of coalescing into a proper game within that timeframe.

The second Ghost Sweeper Mikami game, simply called Ghost Sweeper Mikami, was released on the PC Engine CD-ROM (i.e. the TurboGrafx-CD) and comes to us from JTS and AIC Spirits. Neither developer are particularly renowned even within Japan, and their few other credits on GameFAQs are mostly other anime tie-ins for Tenchi Muyo, Macross, and Magical Girl Pretty Sammy. AIC Spirits was itself part of AIC, or Anime International Company, an animation studio almost as prolific as Toei; AIC Spirits is not to be confused with another internal division of the same name, which started creating anime from 2003 onwards.

The PC Engine CD-ROM GS Mikami game is one of those menu-driven adventure games, albeit with a distinctive card-based combat system for its ghost encounters that reminds me of the dice battles of those DBZ NES RPGs. The resulting flow is similar to how Snatcher will break up the talky bits with that shooting gallery mini-game. Sadly, without a fan translation I'm not going to be able to make heads nor tails of it. I've included a few screenshots below for posterity:

Beyond those, it's mostly just cameos for Reiko Mikami and the gang. She shows up in the DS anime crossover baseball game Sunday x Magazine: Nettou! Dream Nine along with Yokoshima and the robotic ghost sweeper Maria, and the DS crossover RPG Sunday & Magazine: White Comic, both of which are based on the many manga featured in the Shounen Sunday and Shounen Magazine periodicals which at the time (2009) were celebrating their respective 50th anniversaries.

That's going to do it for this week's look at the anime of yesteryear as we sweep away any errant spooks to make room for whatever I'm covering next. Maybe I'll pick something where half the jokes aren't about sex crimes. That'd be a nice change of pace, I think.