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Portus (By Jun Abe/Viz/Oct 07) is about a video game that kills you. No, not that one. No, not that one either. Portus, the eponymous game, follows the J-horror standard of taking some innocuous thing (a videotape, a house, a phone number) and turning into a portal through which the protagonist can be menaced by malnourished, otherworldly children. I’m sure somewhere in VIZ’s catalog, there’s a toaster waiting to scare us.
Portus starts off promisingly enough with the requisite urban legend. Character one says, “Did you hear about the video game that kills people?” Character two says, “Yes, it came out for the Famicom in the 1980s and was pretty popular and I don’t know anyone who died from it.” And then character three slinks in like Excel Saga’s Hyatt and whispers, “Guess what I played last night.” From that point on it turns into a Ju-on/Ringu hybrid, not that those franchises haven’t milked the goodwill from our collective udders already.
It’s not that Portus is bad; it’s more underwhelming. Scares that might work on the big screen fall flat here. The translation makes for stilted dialogue, “Eh?” and the whole plot device works by a convenient curse, letting evil to and fro when the story requires it. Earning its Mature rating with suicide, rape, multiple murders, and creepy Kokeshi, I’d recommend this book only to the type of person who thinks that butterflies are their dead friends come to visit.
On October 24th, 2007 at 9:47 am, Amanda wrote:
. . . what about cake?
On October 24th, 2007 at 9:56 am, Terry wrote:
I wish GlaDOS had overseen this.