Iji (Fighting Aliens and Other Questionable Decisions)

If you liked freely blasting your enemies to bits in Cave Story, Iji is going to be a fun and interesting experience for you.

A young girl stares at her own name projected in the sky.

Iji is just an ordinary girl, taking an ordinary trip with her ordinary family to the ordinary research facility where her ordinary dad works, when she looks out the window and sees some definitely-not-ordinary lights in the sky. The next thing she knows, she's laying in a bed, and the bodies of several researchers are laying right outside the door. As her brother Dan explains over the facility's speaker system, the lights came from aliens called Tasen who struck the building with a barrage of lasers before descending into the facility and killing everyone they could find. However, all hope is not lost, as the survivors have spent the last six months(!) using Tasen nanofield technology to turn Iji into a weapon capable of standing against the invaders, able to use Tasen weaponry, upgrade abilities, take machine gun fire to the face, survive long falls, crack codes, and basically do anything a video game protagonist would need to do. Now, Iji is the last hope for the humans against the Tasen invading force.

And all that before you even get to the controls.

So begins the tale of Iji's fight against the Tasen. Gameplay-wise, the game is essentially based around shooting aliens and trying not to get shot by them in turn. The research facility setting, while full of branching corridors to explore, is not exactly conducive to jumping around and falling into pits, so instead, Iji gets its difficulty from constantly thrusting its heroine into combat.

A fairly standard situation for Iji.

Enemies get stronger and more numerous as the game progresses, and Iji too gets stronger as she gains more experience in fighting. Killed aliens drop nano fields, which can be picked up to increase stats and gain the ability to wield rocket launchers, machine guns, and ever more powerful guns. From beginning to end, Iji is a constant battle against merciless foes, and Iji guns them all down, because that is the only way that she can save the last vestiges of humanity.

...or is it?

Near the beginning of the first level, Iji encounters her first opponent, the lowliest of Tasen foot soldiers. Dan's advice says that while she should kill the enemy in order to grow stronger and get used to fighting, there is nothing stopping her from simply walking past. Some players might not even notice this line before they open fire and clear the path; after all, the alien has no qualms about attacking the moment it sees Iji. In truth, this is a choice that will be repeated throughout the game. Iji herself expresses doubt about killing Tasen, and while players used to other games may not think twice about mowing down a hallway filled with alien soldiers, sparing their lives is always an available choice.

And ultimately, it is choices that define Iji's journey. The game does a brilliant job of handling the player's choices and reacting to them. As stated before, the most commonly recurring choice throughout the game is whether or not to kill. It is in fact possible to complete the entire game without taking a single life, and without going into too many plot details, this does have an effect on how the story plays out. Both pacifism and murder are viable solutions here, and Iji, Dan, and the rest have their own opinions on how the situation should best be handled, but it comes down to the player to guide Iji down their chosen path. And, by the end, the player will have to decide whether they really made the "right" choice.

Dan would rather not think about things like that.

Player choices extend beyond the simple "fight-or-flight" of combat. Head down this hallway, or take that elevator? Upgrade health to take more hits, or upgrade weapons to deal out more damage to enemies? Use a valuable item now, or save it for later? All of these choices can end up changing not only the player's experience of the gameplay but how the characters themselves experience events, and many actions, even ones as minor as ignoring a single logbook, will be commented on by the characters. The result is a game where every action the player takes feels important.

What begins as an ordinary sci-fi gunfest quickly blooms into something surprisingly deep. Everyone, whether human or alien, generally avoids being one-dimensional or stereotypical, and their actions and reactions make sense; Iji herself in particular reacts just about as well as you would expect to suddenly having all the hopes of humanity riding on her. Surprisingly for a game with such a bleak premise, there's a good amount of humor as well, as Tasen logbooks complain about everything from the weather to the pests to the guns that only their higher-ups are allowed to have. There's a terrific attention to detail as well, and while the game only takes two or three hours to play all the way through once, bonus features, difficulty levels, and loads of secrets keep things fresh even when replayed.

One of the advantages of video games as a medium is that they give players the power to make choices that affect how things turn out, and Iji is possibly one of the greatest examples of how the element of choice can be used to make an impact on players. When your homework's done and you're looking for a game with an excellent story, playing Iji is definitely a good decision.