You know you’re old when you recognize a 1982 anime that was featured in a 1991 Matthew Sweet music video. Yes, I’ve seen that anime prior to that music video. I’ve lived them both. I lived through the late 1900s. I’m so old.
Anyway, while Matthew Sweet didn’t make it into Space Adventure Cobra – The Awakening from developer Magic Pockets and publisher Microids, it still brought some good beats, fantastic acting, and a healthy mix of interactivity and old-school anime narrative. While all is not perfect with this platformer, it is still fun, challenging, and nostalgic of an anime that needs a new generation to get into it.
So, light up that cigar, call on Lady to prep that ship for an adventure, and let’s get this anime game going.
Cobra commands your attention.
The narrative from Space Adventure Cobra – The Awakening relates directly back to the original anime and manga. You play as Cobra, a famous space pirate with a gun for an arm, called the Psychogun, and who is trying to figure out what crazy pirate treasures his fellow scurvy dogs at the Pirate Guild are going after. To top the narrative off, Cobra must figure out how three sisters fit into this treasure-driven mystery.
To help carry that story flow, the dialogue was well-written, and the actors nailed their respective roles with personality and passion. When you feel the effort given by the actors, you understand the buy-in with the story, and that buy-in only happens because of a good script (or large amounts of money…or both). You can just tell it was a fun project to work on as soon as you hear Cobra speak for the first time. It’s so natural, so easy, and so anime. Outside of the heroes, the whack-a-doodle Pirate Guild bosses shone in the story with the right amount of over-dramatic and charismatic play. From writer to cast, everyone did a great job of bringing the narrative to life.
So, enjoy this adventure because it’s good.
Gameplay
Space Adventure Cobra – The Awakening’s gameplay is mostly good with what it is trying to do. The game is action-packed and follows the story closely. And I mean really closely. The gameplay situations are set up by the story, so when Cobra is running for his life, you feel that intensity and that need to get him out of a bad situation because the story is carrying the gameplay. When Cobra is angry and wants to take down enemies, you’re right there with him, as the gameplay flows through the story and makes the action just a constant from beginning to end. The gameplay depends on the narrative to see it through, and that’s not a bad design for this type of platforming experience.
To add more to this adventure, the game does a good job of throwing enemies at Cobra rapidly, which adds to the chaos of whatever situation Cobra is in. For example, there is an early stage where Cobra’s garage is invaded by one of the pirates in the Pirates’ Guild. He is basically running through his garage, which is huge, taking out multiple waves of enemies along the way. Just constant action.
Now, even though the common enemies are slow and steady with variety and difficulty, that doesn’t mean you won’t have a healthy challenge ahead of you. The mid-bosses and bosses ramp up the difficulty of the game considerably and stand out from the commoners. For example, in the aforementioned garage level, you will run into a giant robotic globe that is protected by a shield and is surrounded by three mini-globes that you can’t touch. You can shoot them, but they reappear after a few seconds. To make matters worse, you physically interact with them. Anyway, this robotic globe is a considerable step up from the commoners and requires on-the-go strategic thinking to avoid a bullet hell-type situation. The moral here is that the mid-bosses and bosses are spectacles and reasons to go through droves of enemies that eventually begin to repeat. Those bosses are tough cookies, but worth the journey.
What good are enemies and bosses if you don’t have good ways to take them out? Thankfully, Cobra comes packed with his famous Psychogun arm, additional arms, and three nasty ways of disposing of enemies in the most authoritative way. The first big nasty way is a large, lined laser that the user can curve and take out multiple enemies at once, and it can also be used for a minor number of puzzles thrown at you. How it works is the player hits R1 on the controller, and can launch into a slowmo attack, where the player can curve and move the laser line the way they want it using the thumbstick on the controller. The attack is finite in time, meaning that you only have an X number of seconds to move it at your whim, but it’s fun to execute when you have multiple enemies on the screen at once. It is one of the cooler parts of Cobra’s arsenal.
The second nasty Cobra move is executed by hitting triangle and R1 together, which launches into a brief cutscene of Cobra’s Psychogun going off, and then a laser line is automatically launched through every enemy on the screen. It’s brilliant, exciting, and it fits right into the story, its lead character, and the ambience of the entire series. So over-dramatically beautiful.
The third nasty weapon? Well, enjoy that one. No reason to ruin surprises.
Outside of enemies, action, and ways to dispose of enemies, the game features a minor amount of exploration through treasure markers and memory fragments. These are tiny items scattered throughout levels, hidden away through easily breakable barriers, and some you may have to revisit later, which will only add to the game’s push to create more than just an action platformer. In the overall scheme of things, these items don’t outshine the purpose of this title, pure action, but they’re fun little side quests that have you paying attention to the levels more than you normally would with this genre.
The biggest issue I have had with this game was the default control scheme. To put this in perspective, I have almost always used the default control scheme for every game I have played in my life. The one exception was changing Destiny’s controls to a Halo-jump scheme, which I still use to this day. It’s a comfort thing, which is important when you game.
Anyway, the default control scheme for Space Adventure Cobra – The Awakening is nearly unusable. It’s tough to do what one would need to do with the default scheme. It felt disorganized and messy, and most of all, uncomfortable. I nearly saw myself out with this game when I started it with the default scheme.
Thankfully, the game gives you an additional configuration that works so much better. And what’s hilarious about this complaint is that it’s merely a single button shift in the control scheme that makes everything better. Configuration 2 on the controller menu takes your gadget button and switches it with the dodge button. The latter of which just doesn’t feel right in the R2 position. Putting dodge in R2 throws off the rest of the control scheme. It’s so weird, and when you switch to config 2, it feels so much more natural. Maybe left-handed people would appreciate configuration 1. After all, they’re the smart ones, right? They live on a different level than we righties.
ANYWAY.
I understand this is a weird complaint (the control scheme, not the dominant hand) with an odd problem, but at least it has an easy solution. Control scheme comfort is important to me in gaming, and this one just started with the wrong configuration in place. I highly recommend going straight to config 2 when you begin the game. You’ll be happier.
Other than these two hiccups, the gameplay is fine and fun. It is a normal action platformer based on a familiar anime. While it doesn’t do anything spectacular, it does enough to entertain, and the fun weapons and difficult, yet entertaining bosses make the trip through Space Adventure Cobra – The Awakening’s gameplay worth it. And the story, characters, and acting also make it so much more than expected.
On that sweet note, let’s wrap up this review.
Conclusion
Space Adventure Cobra – The Awakening is a fun action platformer that brings an entertaining story, familiar characters, and good gameplay to the table. It does have some faults, but it’s a cool and stylish Cobra adventure.
