Mars red is a sound theatre originally written by Bun-O Fujisawa. It got adapted in an anime and was released on April 6 this year as part of the ongoing Spring 2021 Animes.
Mars Red: Edge of The Nightmare is a mobile game adaptation in English and Japanese developed by D-techno Co.,Ltd. The game was released on May 20 this year.
As someone who is currently watching the Mars Red series, it is an interesting show and I love the theatrical feel to it mixed with vampires. Compared to the anime, the game’s storyline is much different and offers new content, so it’s definitely worth playing if you are a fan of the show!
In the anime, we focus more on Code Zero, known as the undercover vampire-hunting unit led by Yoshinobu Maeda. The unit was originally created to counter Europe’s vampire unit. The team consists of five members in total: Maeda, Suwa, Shutaro Kurusu, Takeuchi, and Tokuichi Yamagami. They are sent out to hunt down and terminate vampire, but they would be given registration and blood if they join their team. The concept is pretty much the same with the anime and game, but the anime centers more on the military.
The game is different because we play as the protagonist, Yatsufusa Yuki, that doesn’t appear in the Anime. Yatsufusa Yuki, who was a recently bitten C-class vampire, came from a military family, but due to his poor health he was seen as a disappointment to his father. After he was turned into a vampire, he was searching for the meaning of life and thought about killing himself, but Code Zero sent him to work for Tenman-ya instead. Tenman-ya was shortly introduced in the anime as a shop ran by Shinnosuke Tenmanya and Ishikawa that supports vampires. They gave jobs to vampires ranging from finding missing cats to assisting Code Zero on secret missions, and they paid with blood instead of them rampantly killing people. This allowed them to remain human at heart which was a perfect place for Yatsufusa to be employed at.
We play stories and cases around Yatsufusa, and it appears that he has a special ability for being able to reenact crime scenes of the perpetrator from looking at the evidence. This ability comes in handy when tracking vampires, and he even got acknowledged by the S-class vampire, Defrott. Some of the cases make you realize how tough it can be for older vampires to adapt to the growing civilization, which can be pretty sad. Many lost their home due to registrations, since they don’t age, they would stand out among the humans. Strays and older vampires don’t feel obligated to restrain themselves from killing people in the newer era, and they have many weaknesses such as the sun and water. However, their greatest weakness is adjusting to eternal life. There are also foreign vampires from Europe and western countries.
The game consists of investigations within the stories where you would be asked questions referring to previous information. If you answer incorrectly a number of times or make a wrong choice, then you will reach a bad end. However, you can start back from where you left off to make the right choices! By using the exploring option, you can send two characters out and unlock dialogues and acquire coins used to exchange for stories. Some chapter stories will require an amount of points from exploring. There are also gatcha where you can obtain a short story between characters.
Overall, the story was interesting and we got to learn more background information about our characters such as Suwa, who is one of my favorite characters in this series. Some more backstory on Defrott would certainly pique my interest, but we do find out how most of them got turned into a vampire. Chapter 6 has left me wondering who that person in the cape was, and I hope we meet some of the European vampires as well. The art style is pretty unique, and if you like games with a theatrical style and vampire, then you may enjoy this!
Images from official Website!
Official Game Page: https://marsred-game.net/en/
ⓒBun-o Fujisawa/SIGNAL.MD/ MARS RED Production Committee ⓒ D-techno
Anime Tokoyo 