Ghost in the Shell – Virtual Reality Diver review: frantically spectacular

I don’t experience motion sickness in VR, but I’m willing to bet many have ripped off their headsets while watching this 16 minute production and bolted for the bathroom. That’s not a criticism: in fact it’s rare for a 360 video to have such a wild, high octane, no-holds-barred visuality, director Hiroaki Higashi giving the virtual camera a face-melting whoosh and charge. It’s as if the experience was recorded from the front of a rollercoaster rocketing through tears in the space-time continuum.

It’s hard to write about Ghost in the Shell – Virtual Reality Diver without resorting to this kind of giddy language; the sheer, freakish velocity of this thing really is quite something. In some ways it’s a bit too much, but I give Higashi credit for going all in: it’s an experiment in 360 storytelling that does nothing by halves.

The protagonist, as per other Ghost in the Shell narratives, is Major Motoko Kusanagi, a full-bodied cyborg who—as she explains during a slab of introductory voice-over—has been “dismantled and regenerated countless times.” Kusanagi experiences “sensations of pain” as well as “memories and self-awareness,” but “these are merely signals.” We hear this while we float around in an ultra high-tech room, watching robot arms and other devices assemble her into a human-shaped form. 

“Floating” is the operative word, because this opening moment has no gravity: we’re spun, twirled, curved and curled around in the air, in a single fluid sequence that culminates with us being hurled through Kusanagi’s left eyeball. Because…why not?! It’s quite an intro—and the party’s just getting started.

Set in a futuristic cyberpunk Japan, where juicy neon colours contrast dank and grimy textures, the narrative follows Kusanagi as she tracks down and confronts a hacker with a history of terrorist activities. He’s behind a recent bomb threat, which, she reasons, is a distraction from some kind of all-out attack. To investigate / cause carnage / kick ass we’re dropped from very high in the air— a sensational vertiginous spectacle—and when we get on the ground, Kusanagi faces off against the (mech-equipped) terrorist. This moment precedes another giant drop, from an even greater height.

I love the vertical depth of this experience; when we’re sent plummeting down from the sky, boy do we feel it. In sheer stomach-turning spectacle Virtual Reality Diver reminds me of Robert Rodriguez’s 180 video The Limit, a similarly rootin’-tootin’ assault on the senses, with one scene in which the protagonist leaps out of an airplane that—as I noted in my review—“made me contemplate whether I might soon witness the return of my breakfast.” The visual flow of The Limit feels comparably sedate, the virtual camera embodying us inside said protagonist, meaning the laws of gravity apply—it can’t crash and careen through the air willy-nilly.

It can, and does, in Higashi’s frantic production. The remainder of the experience sends us hurtling through a futuristic cyberpunk spectacle, in which Kusanagi learns more about, and confronts, the terrorist, whose mission of destruction is connected to false memories of his ;ate wife—the old “wanting to bring back the dead” chestnut. The narrative is loud and the action louder. I wonder how this experience would feel if the runtime were stretched out to, say, 45 minutes or an hour. Would we even be able to handle it? Those 16 frenetic minutes left me wobbly in the knees.