If you are reading this review, you have most likely seen or heard of the Anime Ghost in the Shell and are curious about if the game is good or not. I can already say that if you are a fan of the Anime, you’ll be a fan of the game. That is usually the case with all the Anime to game conversions. With a die hard fan base, Bandai has brought the cult hit to the PSP in the form of a thinking man’s first person shooter. Does the game impress or does it leave more to be desired?

Graphics

The choice in graphics is perplexing, while an Anime cell shading style would have worked really well, GITS: SAC goes for more of a standard set of FPS textures, guns, and enemies. The cut scenes are in 3D, no animation from the series is used. The main characters are nicely modeled and so are a few of the guns. What hurts are some of the other blurry looking textures and blocky looking guns; they just don’t look finished. When intense fire fights break out, bright orange tracers make it so you can track where the enemies are coming from. It seems, to save on PSP system resources, that there are never hordes of bad guys lining the walls to shoot. There are two maybe three guys shooting at you when you are engaged in combat, nothing too hard to handle.

The menus and HUD are clean and nice, for the most part. Navigation of menus is easy and just about fool proof. The HUD on the other hand looks nice but some times can get in the way because it is too big. Also, when trying to interact with objects, like an elevator door, it is next to impossible to read what pops up in the interaction bubble.

Sound

Guns that give off a rat-a-tat-tat? Check. Competent voice acting? Check. Engaging sound track? Not so much.

This game isn’t a treat for the ears to say the least. While the gun noises and voice acting are decent to good, the soundtrack is repetitive and annoying at best. It will take some fine tuning in the options menu to get the sound levels to where you want them.

The voice acting is good but there is a weird problem with it. All too often you are left wondering who just got done talking. With a complex story like this, you need to know who is interacting with whom. It also seems that dialogue was added at the end of the development cycle because sometimes a character will talk and their lips won’t move and their voice sounds like it is coming out of a tin can. Through out the whole game, the sound feels like an after thought. The Tachikoma voices are simply annoying.