Going in only knowing it had an odd name and a great box art I found Short Peace to be a constant befuddling joy, the long and well produced opening gave no hint as to the gameplay style, so much that part of me though there might no be any at all.

A clean yet visually dense art style, a focus on its animated segments it at first presents itself as very character and story based, setting up a simple if shocking primes for its narrative.

Our main character is a school girl who inherited a lot of wealth from her fathers car storage company, she lives alone in a series of shipping containers that are moved into place by one of these automated car holds, each container is its own room and she jumps from one to the other. Even though she seems embedded in her fathers world towards the end of the intro she admits to the audience that she blames her father for her mothers death and so will seek out and kill him.

His and her only two friends should be enough for the story to be getting on with. Well, that’s what I though at this point anyway.

Then the CG anime video ended and there was a traditional ‘static characters standing either side of the screen’ moment, this was a relief as many games transition from A cutscenes with big budgets and full animation to the much cheaper D level cutscenes, this was the first time since the start menu that it had conformed to any recognizable game ideas, but even this was twisted when a banner started to run across the bottom of the screen next to a sad looking icon of the main character. The message is an apology for the cutscene and erasures that gameplay will follow shortly.

Long before the message turned up I was exited to find out what type of game it would be and… I won’t say in this review, just encase anyone does ever read this I won’t spoil something that is worth finding out for oneself.

So some gameplay happens and we get more story, this one follows on with some logic of what the first one set up, this is the end of that, the narrative after this points goes in lots of directions and by the end even though they still are playing with the same characters its obvious telling a cohesive story is not a goal of the piece.

The scale and pace of the story is so much more important then the story that by the end and seemingly to set up a sequel they show the main character’s (Rankos) sister transformed into a space demon lead an army against earth as Rankos herself narrative about how the war isn’t over yet and how the fight will continue,

the problem with this is that wasn’t anywhere in the game I watched all this faux importance was placed on a twist to a story they didn’t tell. This comes about an hour afters starting the game and the ‘end twist’ is preceded by Rankos father who died when you removed an 8-bit version of his wrestling mask 8 times in a dream about the future turns up in a Karaoke bar screen and tells her its not over. Since as stated above this happens an hour in its easy to be tricked into thinking the game will continue, but this is a real ‘twist’ as for once the twist early ending is actually the ending and all you have left is a quite good credits scene and the mock sequel bait.

This is part one because the game that is more of a movie can also be a whole movie as the PS3 lets it be played like a normal Blu-Ray, so next post will be about what ever crazy thing that is.

While I won’t reveal the type of game play I will do so for the duration, below are the clear times for the games stages as such time spend on failed tries won’t be shown, but I would bet that would add up to less then 5 minutes all told.

Time given in minutes,seconds,tens of seconds

Stage 1. 2.41.67

Stage 2. 2.22.22

Stage 3. 2.18.55

Stage 4. 1.49.85

Stage 5. 1.58.60

Stage 6. 1.00.09

Stage 7. 1.57.54

Stage 8. 2.35.10

Stage 9. 2.30.07

Stage10. 2.17.09

PART 2

After seeing a little bit of the gameplay I exited the game and went to watch a video that was saved on my PS3, then I noticed that Short Peace was also recognized as a Blu-Ray, while not the first I’ve come across it being Short Peace it was bound to be something interesting.

It could have been just some extras like making ofs and interviews, it could just be lots of adverts for both Short Peace and other projects or it might have just been a bug where you can watch the raw video files without going though the gameplay segments.

While it was loading the big hope was that it was a feature length animation that works along side the game. Seeing a run time of 1hour and 8minutes I felt exited and decided to save it for post game.

Then far sooner then I thought the game ended with lots of gags about how little the games story meant then going into the hour plus of side B I was looking for it to plug the gaps and grow the style and story outwards.

Instead it turns out to be 4 very impressive short films that try and recreate anime with 3D animations and be based around the words ‘Short Peace’.

The first is about a guy stumbling into a hunted shack and using his love of crafts to appease the demons.

Visually this contained both the highs and the lows, with the very solid character model often lacking the finer details like animations on fingers and toes.

The story is very simple but does enough to endear it.

The second is about a love story stifled by the culture and rules of feudal Japan.

This is either the only one that uses exclusively 2D animations for characters or is the best 3D pretending to be 2D that I have ever seen.

The narrative could have used more time to show the central relationship and build up some of the background of the time, as is its ending got little more then a shrug even though I was along for the ride until that. Its most distinguishing feature ends up being the very cleaver framing it uses to transition from its intro.

Gambo follows and is the story of a white bear who fights a demon to protect a little girl.

This one used its time to much greater effect then the last and does as much as you could with the time and elements set up in the story.

The demon is a of the traditional Japanese style with some bits I’ve never seen before, like just how gruesome the fate of the girls taken from village ends up being, this is not Dragon Ball.

The fight between the White Bear and the Demon had be captivated and truly caring about the outcome it would have been the best short if it wasn’t for what would follow.

A Farewell To Weapons

Is the most well realized in every way possible, characters, art style, animation style, world, story structure.

The only problem is that it should be a full feature by itself, watching it tough it would be hard not to want more.

By the end I was both laughing at the wonderful satire, lamenting the course of the narrative and being in awe of the world set up.

Rather then what side A was I would rather just have had a longer version of A Farewell To Weapons.

In a series of posts I talked about wanting the creative output akin to the PS1 and by the end of the PS3 it might have dragged itself to a respectable level, maybe that is worth looking into, in a post …tomorrow.

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