Gunple: Gunman's Proof

released on Jan 31, 1997

Action-adventure with slight RPG elements (buying and upgrading weapons, etc.) set in Wild West. While featuring traditional dungeon-crawling and many enemies to dispose of in real time combat, the game doesn't equip you with standard medieval swords, but with pistols, shotgun, machine gun, and even a flamethrower. Your weapons have infinite ammo. You can duck to avoid the alien monsters' fire, and perform special attacks with various types of weapons.


Released on

Genres


More Info on IGDB


Reviews View More

A humorous and visually impressive Zelda-like, the story is silly but entertaining. The gameplay however is not much like Zelda other than its presentation, no real progression based equipment, no puzzles to speak of, and no secrets really to speak of outside of items that give gold (which is largely useless). Still fun and a novel concept.

Interesting lil Zelda-type. The overall progression is definitely not much compared to a solid Zelda game (you don’t get the kind of freedom and sense of wandering adventure you would in a mainline Zelda title), but it does some cool stuff mechanically and it has its charm. Definitely likes its casual racism, though. Worth a go if you’re interested in Zeldalikes and can get past that stuff.

Game Review - originally written by Spinner 8

Imagine Link to the Past, with all the puzzles taken out, and instead you’re given a bow with infinite arrows. Oh, and all the enemies shoot at you. Now you have Gunman’s Proof. You’re a boy in the Old West who willingly becomes possessed by an alien sheriff with the intention of capturing the evil Demi, another alien who probably did some unspeakable atrocities. You live in the only town, in the center of the island, and go through a bunch of sequential dungeons before going through the last dungeon and, I assume, taking Demi down. Pow! There’s some nice additions to the gameplay, like being able to duck under the bullets that are being shot at you, and, uh, shooting diagonally and stuff. Okay, maybe, just maybe this game kinda rubbed me the wrong way. Either that or I got pissed cause I can’t beat the first dungeon boss. I suck so much.

…Anyways, this is, like everyone else will tell you, a Zelda game with a heavy emphasis on action and almost nothing to speak of concerning puzzles or thinking. And the music totally kicks ass.
(editor's note: sorry to all gamers who were hoping to play a game about a gunman doing math, there's no proofs in this game, no theorems, not even a single axiom)

Overall I liked this game. It's a decent Zelda-style game. Though it doesn't really have the whole "get new item to progress". The weapon system of learning how to use a gun and then it appearing as a drop is weird. I do think the pacing was a bit fast. You just kinda go from dungeon to dungeon pretty fast.

I liked the ghost town dungeon though, a very unique dungeon.

Not a fan that you can miss certain skills in this game if you try to get them too late. It wasn't required, so it wasn't a huge deal, but not great.

RG35XX

its like a link to the past with guns (and racism)

Proof of what? The most charming, accessible yet busted, facile and creatively compromised Link to the Past ROM-hack you've ever imagined? That's Gunple and then some. If there's ever an iceberg meme for "seemingly innocuous but critically bizarre video games", this will rest near the bottom.

There's more angles to analyzing this bemusing ride of a Zelda-meets-Commando experiment than you'd think. (I also see the Zombies Ate My Neighbors! resemblance, but this calls to mind more arcade-y faire.) We've got, what, around 5 hours of fast-paced action adventuring with standout themes, politics, odd designs, and rehashed yonkoma comedy? The latter's all the handiwork of Gunple's key artist, Isami Nakagawa, a mangaka specializing in four-panel gag comics since the turn of the 1990s. His success with Kuma no Putaro, serialized in Big Comic Spirits from '89 to '95, is likely why Lenar worked with him on Gunple. The game's story is rich with recycled tropes, meta-humor, and a general irreverence the artist is familiar with. And it's that slightness, that refuge in audacity at its own expense, that both saves and curtails this game.

Everything starts out quite innocuous. You've got a meteor crash landing on a small frontier island, somehow not absolutely destroying it given the speed and size of impact. None of the villagers care. Then an alien outlaw emerges, transforming the local fauna, flora, and lore-a into monsters of his own design. Now the Western-style colonists are shook, unable to fight back. How the turn tables! Except you play from the viewpoint of a boy-turned-deputy, tasked with stopping this big bad by the same space sheriff that body-snatches him. Oooooooooooookay, that's just a little off-putting. But it's also a convenient framing device on Lenar's part, allowing them to spare the kid any real trauma or growth while you get to cosplay as a murderhobo in cowboy's clothing.

The game loop is simple but effective for what it's trying to do. You stock up on key items and skills in town, get a basic progress hint from the sheriff, explore the overworld until you find the right dungeon, beat it, and return home to claim your bounty. Rinse and repeat until endgame. Character advancement's just as predictable, with static weapon upgrades in dungeons and health boosts either tucked away on the overworld or rewarded for beating bosses a la Zelda. Anyone hoping this has the same amount of elegant, varied progression you find in LTTP should lower their expectations. Repetition sets in rather quickly. It's an early sign of the game's rushed production colliding with clearly larger ambitions from a developer known most charitably for contract game production. (The less we talk about Bird Week or Deadly Towers, the better.)

Gunple's overworld itself isn't on par with a detailed Zelda or Metroidvania, not that I'd necessarily want that. Navigation is quite painless, as is finding the few secrets off the beaten path. The game's nice enough to hand you a very detailed world map right at the start, too, with only one required location sneakily hidden behind the "Map" label itself. Lenar managed to tuck some areas and items behind skill-locked blockers, like deep water zones you can only traverse with a late-game snorkel. But you're also blatantly denied entry to the northeast by a self-described Blocking Ghost, only passable once you buy a crucifix in town. Exploring this frontier island may not bring much, yet I think it's got a joie de vivre the game would otherwise sorely miss.

You do get a larger roster of skills as the game progresses, from boulder-breaking punches to rapid-fire gun spam. No alien powers, though. Space Sheriff Zero may have all the skill and know-how of our nemesis Demi, but he's strictly playing to the lone-ranger playbook with this boy. And only one villager ever learns that this isn't the boy suddenly whupping Demiseed ass, but a visitor from beyond. Finally, there's an interesting lives system, where treasures chests and high scores at the ends of dungeons will give you a second chance. That's all on top of infinite continues. Did I mention this Zelda clone has a scoring system?!

It's wild to me because this feels much less like a score attack experience and more like a speedrunning one. Because completing each dungeon triggers a summary where you're awarded a higher rank (and score) based on how fast you cleared that part of the game, it makes sense to play quick. But collecting dungeon treasures while preserving your healthbar adds to that, and you get extra 1ups in turn. It's far from complex, but a somewhat clever way to reward swift play. Much of Gunple's fun comes from the strong pacing this structure allows, alongside good controls via shoulder strafing and 8-way ranged attacks. Hopping between town and dungeon rarely feels tedious due to the well-designed aboveground map, and there's always that "one more room!" feeling once you're actually underground.

Of course, when lives are abundant and fail states so rare, the economy hardly means much. Maxing out that 9999 rupee pou—sorry, dollar pouch also only factors into one mid-game dungeon that doesn't make a huge dent in it with paywalls. And since your main gun's ammo never runs out (so you never have to pay for more), why bother with all these optional power-up weapons you learn to use across the playthrough? A big problem with Gunple's combat is that you always want to strafe—after all, that's the best way to avoid enemy fire. (Ducking's also an option, but enemy hitboxes are jank enough to make it too risky should they glomp you while prone.) Most of the extra weapons keep you stationary while firing, making the flamethrower supreme among them. And even that armament fails to keep up with the fully upgraded pistol you get soon after. It doesn't help that you middling kinaesthetic feedback during fights, especially during boss battles where wimpy animations and sound effects make it seem like you aren't hitting a weak point or doing any damage.

Shoutouts to Robaton, this game's equivalent of Epona. It's nice to play an LTTP-like where you actually have a cool, relevant mount that even plays a story role. As another alien trapped in an earthling's form—this time a goofy, highly expressive horse—Robaton's the beating heart of this game's comedy. He goes from a trapped buffoon of a space sheriff to your only rescue at Demi's lair, after all. And he's the fastest way to get around the overworld…when you can rent his services. Enemies drop carrots which, upon pick-up, summons him to the screen. He's not just speedy, but a way to one-hit-KO any enemy, at least until the equine power-up wears off and you're back to walking. I certainly didn't have much trouble one-shotting enemies by late-game, yet this power-up felt most useful of them all whenever I got stuck in the dungeon-crawling doldrums.

Couple all this with competent but uninspired enemy variety and you've got a pleasant but overly easy and tiresome few hours of C-rate Smash TV. Dungeons themselves lack any notable puzzles, except in the form of dodging puzzles involving bats or unkillable entities. Drops like health hearts and power-ups come from every other enemy you down, and treasure chests couldn't be more obvious everywhere you go. I think Gunple would be a legit great choice for anyone new to 2D Zelda-like action adventures, but it's much less satisfying if you know even a few of those games' tropes. Only a couple of boss fights have patterns I'd consider threatening or simply interesting; the hitboxes on many attacks are a bit jank and misshapen, too. Most of the time I'm just barreling through copy-paste rooms and corridors with nary a fight, having some fun zipping by. I suppose your kid's fast jog and overpowered arsenal remedies things.

What can't be remedied, or easily explained, is this game's wildly vacillating tone and presentation. It goes from super-deformed frolicking among green hills and dusty canyons to your own dad abusing you up because you want to leave home and defeat the evil. We have these wild-west aliens running the plot, from the space sheriff possessing the protagonist to Demi corrupting this island's indigenous everything into your opposition. Though many of the NPCs have enough dialogue across the game to give me a sensible chuckle or two, it never gets that cute or amusing like EarthBound before it. As other reviews point out, there's a shallowness to the trope use, slapstick, and stereotyping used here which gets under your skin after an hour or two. It's hard to shake the feeling that Gunple's just action-packed Mother 2 fastened onto a Link to the Past weaving pattern.

Hardest to shake off would be the golliwogs. These foes, the first bandit baddies you meet and defeat, look so much like ye olde Mr. Popo or a classic minstrel doll that it leaves a strong first impression. Not a good one, might I add. You also fight tomahawk-throwing, Indigenous American-looking soldiers very late in the game, yet I'm torn on what that's actually suggesting. The wrench this game's story throws in its importation of White America-borne racial pejoratives is that Demi, the villain, is outright said to be creating, brainwashing, or working with everyone you fight. As such, it's left to interpretation whether the golliwog cowboys are, in fact, just some kind of life or matter he's morphed into a form familiar and threatening enough to the Western villagers he's encroaching on. Same goes with the tomahawk guys, who resemble the idols and statuary in their ancient abandoned tower on the edge of this world.

You see this kind of design and narrative which feels offensive at first, but then just frustratingly ambiguous all over the game. Another example: the martial artist monkeys in the northwestern tower, matching the dungeon's bosses in theme but also prompting other questions. Where these simians a fully-fledged society of their own before Demi and his Demiseed gang arrived? Did they make the tower to begin with? Have they always had these skills and smarts, or was that just the antagonist's own invention, using his tech wizardry to fashion monkeys into sentient apes? I ask all this because the game tries to go for a sort of environmental lore at one key junction in the plot: the ghost town.

This once-inhabited colony, clearly resembling your own village in scope and culture, now houses an army of the undead. Given their hostility towards you and their bosses' allegiance to Demi, I'd wager the evil alien awoke the spirits of the deceased (who all died on the surface, as if from an acute plague) to harness their disquiet. So, in the process of defeating Demi and his posse, you're inevitably returning the island to a peaceful, sustainable status quo, both for your village and the larger ecosystem. Gunple suggests that these distorted stereotypes of native things you're fighting are going to be better off once your quest's over. I don't think I'm stretching with this interpretation so much as the game simply cannot decide whether or not it's going to be clever with its lore, and how that plays into the story's themes.

Rather than actively pushing a white man's burden at the expense of all those outside the white village's purview, Gunple just seems to make a mockery of it all. If there's any critique or praise of imperialism happening in the background, it's mostly coming from the Demiseeds' transformation of this island into a colorful wasteland. And if doing a little tomb raiding for 1UPs helps you save the village from destruction, what's to say that isn't a better alternative? Sure, it's all way too frivolous to mean much of anything, but I disagree with interpretations of this as subliminal Manifest Destiny apologia.

(Except the whole Lara Croft-style looting of archaeological artifacts from dungeons, namely the aforementioned towers. They only end up as score points, but for whom? The space police keeping track of all this? Not like the villagers care—they're just happy to inflate your wallet for clearing a bounty on each boss.)

The child-beating and damsel-in-distress moments are more damning to me, especially since they happen at key turns in the game's plot. Gunple paints your hero's journey as a test of manhood, a lightly patriarchal "man's gotta do what he must" story echoing the classic western media that artist Nakagawa was familiar with in the manga sphere. And for all the spoofs and cast's laughing at you, the most amusing thing is how easy this game portrays your rite of passage. Hell, it pokes fun at itself, with most of the village slack-jawed in awe at this kid mercilessly gunning down a whole range of bosses and bestiary. Only the obligatory childhood sweetheart realizes and learns to her dismay who's really behind the heroics. This makes for a cute happy ending after all the chaos, but the aftertaste is foul.

Despite all my prior critique, I managed to have fun playing Gunman's Proof in one go. A lot of that comes down to generally excellent audiovisuals, from the lavishly animated main characters to richly illustrated landscapes. Sure, many of the dungeons are basically copying Link to the Past's presentation, but they also try different types of decoration and art stylings than Lenar's inspiration. At the very least, having such a nice backdrop makes traveling the world pleasing despite other hang-ups. Many bosses and enemies also have appealing, fantastical designs and animations, specifically guys like Ghost Suzuki (who you fight twice) and Baron Alps (whose hubris contrasts with him losing his pants) wielding their bevy of gizmos and secret weapons. The art budget here exceeds what time and resources the team had for making a more coherent game elsewhere.

Same goes for the music, which is surprisingly great! I really wish Gunple had any credits screen at all so I could learn who wrote and/or programmed the soundtrack. Plenty of tracks evoke the island's history and surroundings, while others create moods of adventure or sheer menace. In this Strange World, the dulcet tones of home mix well with a galloping hoedown across the land.

For as chaotically mid as the game is, Gunple: Gunman's Proof is, well, proof that the whole can exceed its parts. Definitely approach this one with a grain of salt, but if you find the game loop enjoyable, don't hesitate to surrender to its whims for a while. I think it's decent enough for the 5-hour runtime, even if I'll very likely never replay it. This gave me such a wickedly up-and-down ride that I can't recommend it in good conscience, but maybe you'll get a kick out of this. Others have pointed out worse ways to spend a few hours than an inconsistent Zelda-clone turned run 'n' gun. At least there's some cool tokusatsu-style villain interactions, and fun easter eggs like the developers apologizing to you when trying to open a chest upon Robato.

But above all, I believe this game would be perfect ROM-hack material for any intrepid 6502 coders out there! It hints at such a better game that I can't help but wonder what we'd get from its assets and mechanics today. A remake could turn this from an entertaining but misguided story of heroics into a more complex Western reckoning with the frontier's past and future. Dungeons could get new, simple puzzles and other set-pieces for variety, plus a tangible use for that scoring system beyond 1UPs. The late-game difficulty sorely needs a boost, as do your power-up weapons and moveset in general. And removing the golliwogs + other problematic content in favor of appropriate but less offensive material would help so much. I'd give a yeehaw for any of that!

And so another game nearly too simple to deserve my ravings races off into the sunset. Here's to the next highly questionable but fascinating game of its, uh, caliber.

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Jan. 31 – Feb. 6, 2023