With the new Sony reboot of Ghostbusters releasing this week, it's safe to say that the franchise has been on my mind as of late. With all the hubbub surrounding the new film, it's easy to forget that we did in fact get a third entry into the original Ghostbusters series. This story came not in the way of a feature film or a television cartoon or even through the superb comics from IDW, but rather in the form of a video game released for essentially every platform available back in 2009. Reuniting the main cast (with the exception of Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis) for a story penned by Dan Aykroyd and the late Harold Ramis, Ghostbusters: The Video Game is essentially the second sequel we've always wanted. While it's a little unorthodox for me to be reviewing a video game, I'd like to make it clear that I'm only going to look at this in terms of the story and characters; I've played through it multiple times, so I clearly had my fun with it, but I feel as though its true worth lies in how it continues the story established in the first two Ghostbusters films.
Taking place in 1991, we find the classic quartet of Ray (Dan Aykroyd), Egon (Harold Ramis), Venkman (Bill Murray), and Winston (Ernie Hudson) operating under an official contract from the city of New York. Thanks to this lucrative new position, they see fit to introduce a new 'Buster into the mix; the player, in the role of a nameless, speechless Rookie. Around the same time, the team find themselves at odds once again with Gozer the Gozerian, who returns in the guise of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. Once the Goze is defeated with an almost surprising amount of ease, it becomes evident that this is merely a sign of things to come, as the Ghostbusters begin investigating into the history and background of one Ivo Shandor, known Gozer worshiper and architect of Dana Barrett's apartment building from the first movie. The story sees the player joining the boys in beige as they travel from the Sedgewick Hotel to the New York Public Library to the far side of the astral plane in a quest to stop Shandor and save the city (and indeed, the world).
It's almost astounding how well the game developers understood what made the original film work so well. Sure, it would be fun to play as the Ghostbusters, but it was a pure stroke of genius to realize that the true value lied in playing alongside the Ghostbusters. You, yes YOU, are along for the ride on this one; not only does it make my inner child giddy with excitement to help Bill Murray re-capture an escaped Slimer in the iconic Alhambra Ballroom, but it also allows the four main characters to bounce dry witticisms off one another with the same natural flow as in the movies. You're both a participant and an audience member here, and as the Ghostbusters' new experimental equipment technician, it means you get to play with all of Ray and Egon's fancy new gadgets; it's a nearly perfect example of adapting an existing property into an interactive medium.
The plot also does exactly what a sequel should do; build off of the world that was already established. It would have been very easy for this game to simply be an adaptation of iconic scenes from the first two movies, and while there are more than a few levels that pay homage to the established iconography (you capture Slimer at the Sedgewick, stop a rampaging Stay-Puft in Times Square, and finally close the lid on that freaky library ghost once and for all), all of it is tied directly into the plot in a way that doesn't really feel shoehorned in the slightest. Defeating Gozer, the big bad of the first movie, in the second level puts things in perspective; the Ghostbusters have continued to grow and learn since we last saw them (there's no Ghostbusters 2 "everything reset to the status quo in the meantime" shenanigans at play here), and now they're faced with a new kind of threat. Minor details from the first film like Shandor and the cult of Gozer and even the giant slor are all brought back here and expanded upon; this is a sequel that builds directly off of the foundation of the entries which came before it, which is exactly what good sequels do.
That said, the game isn't without its faults. While everything about the look and feel of it is spot-on, from the sound effects to the minutiae scattered about the firehouse, the score becomes more than a little grating after a while. Rather than orchestrate something original, the game simply reuses the music from the first movie, meaning that you'll have had your fill of Ray Parker Jr and then some by the time the credits are rolling. The Ghostbusters score was made for a two-hour movie, not an eight-hour game (even though I only watched gameplay assembled into a three-hour "film" for the purposes of this Review, the repetition of music still became a bother by the end). There's also a romantic subplot between Pete Venkman and a new character, Dr. Ilyssa Selwyn (Alyssa Milano). The two have very little in terms of chemistry and the whole subplot feels like a tacked-on attempt to recreate the dynamic between Murray and Sigourney Weaver from the original movie. It also doesn't help that Milano and Murray are easily the weakest performances in the game (while they're not necessarily bad, "passable" just doesn't hold up well compared to the sheer electricity and enthusiasm of Ramis, Aykroyd, and Hudson). These are relatively minor complaints, but complaints I had all the same. They by no means outweigh the game's positive attributes, but they do indicate that there are some things I would have liked to have seen done differently.
Ghostbusters: The Video Game is a better Ghostbusters sequel than Ghostbusters 2. While it occasionally toes the line of rehashing iconic scenarios and imagery for nostalgia's sake, it still rings true that, even though it's not a film, it's the true third entry in the original Ghostbusters saga. The story is compelling, the performances are (for the most part) perfect, the attention to detail is nothing short of stunning, and the technobabble/joke ratio makes it feel like this was actually written in the early 90's, intended to be released in theaters. Aykroyd and Ramis didn't miss a single beat. After the tragic passing of the late, great Harold Ramis, we're never going to get another anything (be it film, video game, cartoon, or otherwise) starring all four original Ghostbusters, all portrayed by their original actors. Even though the (truly excellent) comics are continuing the story to this day, even though the developers didn't know it at the time, this video game is the swan song for the original generation of Ghostbusters. Looking objectively at what we've got, I'd say we'd be hard pressed to do better than this.
If you'd like to read more about the how miraculous it was that this game turned out as well as it did, check out this article by Matt Paprocki, it's some fascinating stuff!
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