Quick Critique: Ghostbusters: Get Real (Patreon)

The latest Ghostbusters comic series is dumb. Reaaaaallly dumb. I'm mad at myself for being susceptible enough to buying something like this, but it's fun. It would be less excusable if they tried to play it off as anything other than a cash grab, but they fully lean into it. The backgrounds for the firehouse have just random GB stuff in them from board games to foreign posters to a picture on the chalkboard done up like the sprites from the games. They even have a scene where they reference everything from Dan Aykroyd's original pitch for the movie to the Ghost Busters' Tracy, Eddie, and Jake to that crappy Sanctum of Slime game. The non-GB cameos are a mixed bag though. Janine drinks out of a Wally World mug at one point, and that works for me given the comic series's repeated SNL callbacks and the fact that they made Chevy Chase a villain, but then in one scene Iwata and Miyamoto are in the background and that feels totally unnecessary and the bad kind of gratuitous that the rest of the comic avoids.

They did a really good job on the art side as far as turning the cartoon visuals into comic art and it really has the feeling of a cell placed over a background. It's a little weird that the cartoon team maintain the cartoon style while in the "real" world, but I can accept the necessity of that rather than converting the designs over to match the real world and then having cartoon versions of the real team. The series also goes back and gives context to the ending to an episode that kind of always bugged me how it ended. Glad to see I wasn't the only one bothered with the cop-out they used!

The more of these mini-series they do, the faster I'm getting burned out on them, and this one straight up ends with the pitch for the next series. I'd be thrilled if they made another game using this art style and setup, but it's really time for them to take a break and do something new.