Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is apparently based on the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, but I don’t think you can necessarily take Ninja Theory’s word on that. Yes, the character names are the same and there’s some kind of journey involved, but I’m pretty sure ancient eastern literature didn’t go in too much for giant robot scorpions the way Enslaved does.

Years of steroid abuse have transformed Sun Wukong the Monkey King into a gruff, feral nomad. Tripitaka (Xuanzang in the original text) has suffered an inexplicable gender shift and is now a sassy, tech-savvy chick (or sometimes a  ball-and-chain damsel in distress) that looks suspiciously like the protagonist from one of Ninja Theory’s earlier games, and fantastical Ancient China is now post-apocalyptic New York, ravaged by a global war that has something to do with robots. I understand that adapting classic literature is never going to be a smooth ride, but Enslaved is so far removed from its “source material” that I’m just going to treat it as its own intellectual property and forget about Journey to the West altogether.

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