A Really Terrible Promo for a Phenomenal Game

Squaresoft back in the 1990s meant RPGs, and those RPGs were really good. That’s not to disparage the games that SquareEnix has released since then (and since their merger) but it does feel like a different company now than it was back then. When Square said they were making a new RPG everyone cheered and looked forward to just how interesting their game would be. What new mechanics would be introduced? How would it relate to the games before? Would it be something tied to Final Fantasy or would it have its own vibe, taking new ideas and making something bold and refreshing. Square was willing to experiment, with great releases like Super Mario RPG and Chrono Trigger, and each time they made another instant classic, right up through the dawn of the PSX era and Final Fantasy VII (your thoughts on later games may vary, though).

While the Final Fantasy games, and even Super Mario RPG, had built in fanbases, the same couldn’t be said for Chrono Trigger. While it might have started life as Final Fantasy VII, the design “dream team” of Hironobu Sakaguchi (creator of Final Fantasy), Yuji Horii (creator of Dragon Quest), and Akira Toriyama (character designer of Dragon Quest and author of Dragon Ball) eventually moved it away into its own thing. That allowed the game to find its own style, its own life, but it also meant that the game had to stand on its own. It had the pedigree behind it, sure, but not the name, and in a crowded field name helped creations stand out.

As part of the marketing blitz Square elected to commission a promotional video for a Chrono Trigger OVA titled “A Time-Space Adventure: Nukiwalanja” (Japanese title Jikū Bōken Nūmamonjā). It was produced by Production I.G, written by Hiroshi Izawa and Akihiro Kikuchi, and shown during the 1996 Japanese V-Jump Festival. Notably, after its reveal it was never released commercially, with the little OVA essentially existing now only as recordings saved to YouTube. Square apparently decided that one airing was enough.

And that makes sense because this anime is pretty terrible. I love Chrono Trigger, and I’ll go back and play any version of that game, watch the barely connected anime cut-scenes, run through the loose sequels, and will even pick up random collectables if I can find them. And even as a deep fan that would be down for more Chrono Trigger in any form I can get it, this anime is so awful, so wretched, that I don’t plan to ever watch it again. It is just completely and utterly bad and I have to wonder how the producers at Square even let it out the door.

The anime focuses on two characters, the loud-mouthed Spekkio and the big, dumb Nu. After the citizens of Guardia set up their celebration for the Millenial Fair in 1000 AD, heading home for the party the next day, the monsters come out at night to celebrate as well. They party, they drink, they race, and through it all there’s Spekkio and Nu trying to have a good time. They want to make money selling merch, but none of the other monsters seem to care, so they venture off to see what kind of trouble they can get into.

Along the way they make enemies with Johnny, the racing extraordinaire from the future who has come to the fair to party and have fun. But he’s a star and Spekkio and Nu get in his way, leading to quite the conflict. After, Spekkio and Nu stumble across Gato, the fighting robot that’s powered down for the night. They awaken the bot, get it to sing, and then they think they defeat it when it runs out of juice. Only, the robot is just slumbering, and once its power cycle starts again, it goes off, chasing the monsters and causing carnage. And with a giant, dangerous robot on the loose, it’s going to be a dangerous night for the monsters of Guardia.

I suppose I should note that I’m not Japanese. I tend to not enjoy anime because the storytelling style, as well as humor and other cultural marks of their films and shows tend to not play well with the storytelling style I like and the expectations I have for films and movies as a Westerner. I know plenty of people that can get into anime and enjoy it just fine, but I am not one of those people. And not being Japanese, I didn’t grow up in that culture and plenty of things about anime in general, and this OVA in particular, won’t play well for me simply because of that cultural difference.

That’s a big lead up, I know, just to say that I really hated this anime. While I think the idea of the monsters coming out to play in Guardia’s fair is an amusing idea, one that could lead to some funny situations that could delight and entertain, I don’t think this anime works at that level. It’s dumb on just about every front, with the humor of the film never landing. It’s like it was written by people that think they’re funny and really aren’t and they were given free rein to do as they liked for fifteen minutes, so they went hog wild with their idea of “humor”, making the rest of us suffer.

I think a big part of the problem is that Spekkio and Nu are utterly unlikable. Spekkio is a loud-mouth, screening at a high-pitched tone, acting superior to everyone around him while acting like a brash idiot. While that can work in certain circumstances, you usually need a good straight man to play off of them, someone to rein them in and act as a counter to their worst actions. That doesn’t happen here, though, as Nu is a big, dumb idiot that barely knows what’s going on around him at the best of times. He can’t counter Spekkio’s worst impulses because he’s just as bad, if not worse. You end up hating these two from the moment you see them (actually before that even, as Nu very slowly, off camera, snuffles up a long line of snot and you get to hear every bit of that awful noise) and it never gets better from there.

Also holding back the anime is the fact that the art style of the animation looks nothing like the work of Akira Toriyama. While I’m sure they couldn’t get Toriyama to actually do work on this anime, which meant as cheap promotion, it should have been easy for the creators to look at his drawings and sketches and come up with artwork that would match it. That would be essential to capturing the feel and style of the game they’re promoting since that artwork is prominent throughout the game. But now, this feels far removed from the game’s artwork, or anything else. Like the humor, the art is just bad.

The one thing this OVA does get right is the music, but then that makes sense: it’s stolen right from the game. There are clips of the game’s soundtrack used throughout the anime and that does help to liven up the experience some. What it does is show that the music is great and could have transcended anything it was put in. Thankfully, Chrono Trigger was an instant classic and the soundtrack complimented the game, and vice versa. This OVA is far from an instant classic. If there’s an exact opposite statement, that would apply to this anime.

It’s really mind-boggling to think that “A Time-Space Adventure: Nukiwalanja” actually exists, that Square actually let this terrible thing ever see the light of day. It’s so bad you would think they would have dumped it in a closet and ignored it until the terrible humor haunted their offices and they were forced to burn it down so no one could ever learn the terrible truth that this thing exists. I don’t know why they let it out, and I don’t know how anyone could have thought this would be a great promotional skit to use for Chrono Trigger. If I’d seen this before buying the game, I would have run as far away from the title as I could. It’s simply awful.