The neat thing about Doom's classic mod scene is how easily you can observe the evolution of game design over time, as well as a community's priorities and preferences; it becomes clear what ideas had lasting power, and which didn't. As Doomsday of UAC approaches its 30th anniversary this summer, this early fan level retains its iconic status despite how unkind time has been to it. The minute I exit a cleverly sculpted wreck of an 18-wheeler, greeted by an industrial park teeming with demons and "realistic" features, that's how I know I'm playing something special.

Doom modding in its nascent days amounted to either (a) poking around in hex editors, trying to create a cogent WAD file through trial and error, or (b) wrangling the initial batch of pre-Windows map editors which loved to crash and/or corrupt your hard work! It's a miracle that something as fun, well-paced, and innovative as this map from Leo Martin Lim came together at all. (The other miracle is that levels this old are still preserved in their original archived form, and we have Ty Halderman and his successors in charge of the /idgames FTP archive to thank for that.) All college kids who played some version of id Software's original Doom in its launch days had many ideas for mods, but so little experience and precedent to build from. Lim wasn't even the first to release anything beyond a series of sketchy boxes with monsters and weapons—Invasion…: Level 1 - Contamination beat it to the punch by about a month, replete with special effects and new assets like music and textures. But Doomsday of UAC proved that you could make a similarly cinematic experience using just the base game and a host of magic tricks exploiting Carmack's engine. It helps that this map has solid combat and exploration in its bones, too.

After crawling from the wreckage, you're pressured from all sides by a trickle of imps, pinkies, and shotgunners ready to pounce before you can assemble an arsenal. This prompts a mad dash through a midnight maze of boxes, trailers, and enemy groups one might want to use against each other. We're far from the clean, abstract but believably efficient spaces that Romero designed for Doom's Episode 1…nor is this anything like the trap-driven dungeon crawling one finds in Sandy Petersen's levels. Doomsday of UAC marked the beginnings of what FPS modding circles call "Doom-cute": heavily kit-bashed replicas of architecture and objects like cars, toilets, etc. using only the original game's resources. The tipped-over truck with a spinning wheel looks impressive already, nothing like what id's crew displayed in the shareware and payware episodes. It gets even more exciting when you realize it took a lot of sector geometry manipulation and a well-placed texture animation effect on certain lines for this to function at all! There's just enough breathing room to admire the scenery while gunning down monsters and collecting the necessary ammo and key cards to proceed.

I shan't spoil the rest of Lim's one and only wonder-mod since it relies on a clever twist or two, but just know there's some trickery afoot, creeping up on players as they head further into this corrupted corporate complex. Hidden usable doors guard access to visible yet seemingly unobtainable power-ups. A conference of powerful baddies lies deeper within the offices, guarded by hapless imitations of the salarypeople who once roamed here. Even the bathrooms and parking garage aren't safe! Considering that Lim and other authors also had to build around the Doom engine's strict limits in this pre-source port era, the level of detail and scope in Doomsday of UAC matches and sometimes outdoes OG Doom maps like Mt. Erebus. I don't know that it exceeds the best parts of id's game, particularly Computer Station or Containment Area, but the ingenuity on display here always brings a smile to my face. Best of all, there's never too much going in the player's favor, nor too little. Weapon and encounter balance feels spot on, the secrets are rewarding to find (nor essential to a fault), and the sequencing of incidental combat into traps and back rarely feels awkward.

Doomsday of UAC is still a 1994 FPS mod, though, warts and all. It's very easy to get through for a modern Doom fan, even those who have only played the official games. Texturing and level of detail is mostly sparse aside from the aforementioned set-pieces. The famous "crystal sector" room can just end up feeling gimmicky or frustrating if you haven't kept a backup save ready. Nor is the original Doom's bestiary and set of player options as ideal for these large open spaces as Doom II's equivalents. I've warmed up to the original's emphasis on cacodemons, rockets, and copious cannon fodder thanks to later WADs like Beginning of the End and Doom the Way id Did, but the general experience for early Doom mods can feel underwhelming if you've played anything much newer. The best moment arguably comes right before the end as you deal with an elaborate cyberdemon trap to nab the red skull key, which involves tangoing with barons of hell and lost souls in the process. This would have been an intimidating puzzle for players of that period, and I get a kick out of it now. But in the back of my mind, all I can think is how much crazier I'd redesign this into, using modern tools like Ultimate Doom Builder and such. At least the transition from "invaded office space" to hellscape remains evocative today.

Overall, I'd say Doomsday of UAC more than deserves its lauded spot in the history of DIY world-crafting and FPS fandom. It features prominently on Doomworld, both in its 10 Years of Doom feature, with its close rival Invasion…: Episode 1 unfortunately absent. [1] Lim's mod was further recognized fifteen years later via the site's Top 100 Most Memorable Maps retrospective, the only map predating Doom II's release to rank in the top 10! [2] And if that's the consensus from community veterans, so often locked in debate over what classic mods and maps truly influenced what, then who am I to downplay the quality and significance of this one? Running through the infested UAC corporate park has become a rite of passage for many players seeking entry into the depths of Doom modding madness. I won't deny it seems quaint and clouded by nostalgia nowadays, yet even Romero himself has highlighted this as an example of the game's impact on future developers, if not id Software themselves. [3] The early success of mods like this and Slaughter Until Death paved the way for id (and competing developers) to hire these amateur designers, or simply license community projects like TNT: Evilution for commercial release as shown with Final Doom. My heart goes out to the unsung pioneers like STONES.WAD; it's simply hard to compete with a milestone like this.

[1] Tropiano, Matthew, and Not Jabba. “Top 100 Memorable Maps 10-1.” Doomworld, December 9, 2018. https://www.doomworld.com/25years/top-100-memorable-maps/page10/.
[2] Watson, Mike, and Andrew Stine. “The Top 100 WADs Of All Time: 1994.” Doomworld, December 10, 2003. https://www.doomworld.com/10years/bestwads/1994.php.
[3] John Romero (20 January 2015). "Devs Play Doom." YouTube. Retrieved 21 January 2015.

The Original Sworn Brother Simulator: hours upon hours of chaos, hordes upon hordes of hapless soldiers as blood sacrifice for the honor, glory, and jealous one-upmanship of the Three Kingdoms' ruthless, sexually repressed macho men. Sure, I've heard of the Peach Garden Oath…but how about that whole Shu roster looking like the future winners of Eurovision Asia? Or the way Lu Bu and Zhang Liao glance at each other while riding out to stop Cao Cao? And why do I gotta keep pounding on these guys to get meat buns and stat upgrades outta them?! I take back last month's comments about *Romance of the Three Kingdoms VII—this one's the real Bromance. It also just happens to be a major turning point for Koei, a "safe" brand that ventured out of its RPG, sim, and strategy comfort zones to finally break into the mid-range action market. The big cuddly bear of Japan's game industry started laying down the fight; few knew where musou would go.

I had my reservations going into my Normal skill playthrough of Dynasty Warriors 2, having heard about its jank, slim content, and overall difficulty—these fears were validated, but I'm liking it more after trying part of it again on Hard. Faithfully covering the Three Kingdoms in any action game up to this point meant focusing on the set-piece battles and character stereotypes derived from Luo Guanzhong's classic novel, something which Koei's then youngest division Omega Force (OF) had to translate into mainstream 3D polygon game terms. It's natural that they'd combine the arcade beat 'em up with a light strategy layer. What's special about Shin Sangokumusou are the ways in which it recycles the original Dynasty Warrior, an average versus fighter reborn as the unlikely usurper of trends in beat 'em up design started by Dynamite Deka and SpikeOut. This game ultimately saw much success for OF, its talented staff led by Akihiro Suzuki and Kenichi Ogasawara, and an odd first impression for PS2 adopters expecting something more substantial. These days players tend to view DW2 strictly as a curiosity, and hardly without reason. I just think there's a bit more going on here.

| Yellow Storm |

Romance of the Three Kingdoms looms high in East Asian cultural history, hence all the different ways it's been retold across comics, film, music, and games. (Arguably only Water Margin aka All Men Are Brothers supersedes it in influence—see every shonen manga ever.) In the video game realm, Capcom was first to take a more action-oriented approach to portraying the Three Kingdoms conflict, first with a dramatic post-Dragon Quest series called Tenchi wo Karau (Destiny of the Emperor), and then the pre-Final Fight belt-scroller Dynasty Wars in 1989. By contrast, Koei's grand strategy treatment, initially restricted to Japanese home computers, traded out flash for in-depth systems, letting players role-play as provincial rulers far away from the battlefield. How could these divergent angles meet to make a flashy but accurate, strategic but skillful rendition of the saga?

Omega Force started as Koei's fourth internal division (hence "force", which reads in Japanese as "fourth"), and it saw Suzuki and Ogasawara attempting to solve the aforementioned problem. Though decently regarded in 1997, Dynasty Warriors didn't become the phenomenon they hoped, crowded out by other weapons-based fighters like Soul Edge and Battle Arena Toshinden. (Still better than the results for Destrega…) The team would find more success with WinBack, proving they could bring innovations to 3D third-person action and engage with arcade stylings without trend-chasing. While Suzuki and other veterans from the early-'90s brought their historic knowledge and development experience to the group, Ogasawara represented the new batch of Koei recruits ready to build something console players could uniquely enjoy, rather than PlayStation owners seemingly getting the scraps of PC releases. He saw his colleagues playing RTS games during lunch breaks and was inspired to make a prototype of the archetypal musou game, with single fighters now accompanied by tiered ranks of followers all tied into a morale system which players manipulate to win the larger battle. [1]

It had already taken a nascent Omega Force around a year and a half to make just their first game…once they got their hands on PS2 development kits, there was no time to lose if they wanted the sequel out around launch! (The main team under Koei head Yoichi Erikawa were already wrapping up Kessen for that crucial March 4th, 2000 launch date.) So it goes that Dynasty Warriors 2 narrowly became one of the the system's first 25 releases and proceeded to sell very well. New adopters quickly got a taste of the opening level, a congested assault on the Yellow Turban Rebellion which brought the ailing Han Dynasty to its knees and decorated the careers of many warriors old and young. Pounding heavy metal music, loud and chunky martial arts ambiance, and a tight balance between difficulty and power fantasy all came together despite the odds. It'd be just a year until Koei & OF promptly hurried a sequel to market, knowing they had a new franchise in the making. Critics were impressed that the company had produced anything so unlike their typical history software, feeling more like the work of arcade-based developers rather than home-oriented ones [2].

| Killing Time |

Dynasty Warriors 2 gives you 28 generals from the Wei, Wu, and Shu forces (plus "rogue" players like Lu Bu) to play across 8 battles, with most characters sharing similar story mode progression. Not everyone's available from the start, unlocking as you play with fighters from all sides or achieve feats like earning a thousand kills at Hu Lao Gate. This amount of content hardly seems light until you realize just how many fighters share the same movesets. In musou/fighting game jargon, these are clones with only secondary differences like stat assignment and different hitboxes. Each character's got health, attack, defense, and "musou" stats affecting their abilities in combat, and each variety of character can combo their square attacks up to four moves, or follow that regular combo with a charge move (ex. a "charge 3" (C3) = 3 □ + ∆).

Fighting itself is something Dynasty Warriors 3 and its successors would greatly improve, though I find it fine in this early form. Chaining moves doesn't take a whole lot of practice, or even that much mashing once you've internalized the animation timings for attacks. Actually hitting foes can sometimes be fickle with certain weapons, but that's usually just an issue when trying to C1 (juggle) a gate captain or general. Swap guys often, though, and it'll quickly become clear how busted certain combos of moveset and weapons can become. Let's put aside Lu Bu and talk about Dian Wei. His big axe should slow everything way down, yet he runs about the same speed as most other guys (poor Xu Zhu) and has a broken AF C3 where the axe becomes a veritable boomerang. When a fighter's only flaw is this AoE move not always working as it should (the axe can't fly behind the camera frustum and hit enemies), Now That's What I Call Imbalancing! The gulf in performance between crowd-control gods and the weaker units like Zhuge Liange wouldn't be this pronounced in the series for some time.

Archery and mounted combat are also introduced in this installment, albeit with issues that would plague them up until the later PS2 games. The former involves stopping still and holding R1, transitioning to a slow and clunky first-person view where you can periodically string single arrow shots, regular or charged. In practice, bow play gets the most use against guard tower turrets and bosses you shouldn't approach until low on health (again, Lu Bu). It's too inflexible and awkward to use for anything else vs. closing in. Meanwhile, cavalry charges go haywire half the time you try. Enemies will gladly jump to knock you off, with varying success due to hitbox weirdness. Running into large groups will often provoke your steed into rearing up and losing momentum, which can lead to someone dismounting you. And killing enemies via trampling doesn't net you kills, because only weapons kill people apparently! This sucks for characters like Xiahou Yuan and Ma Chao, masters of archery and equestrian respectively, who don't get to shine despite debuting in this game. At least jumping is still useful for level traversal, even if there's a surprising amount of invisible walls preventing you from hopping onto stairs from the side, among other things…

Grinding's a dirty word in the musou fandom, insofar as no one quite agrees on how much padded-out gameplay exists in these titles. Dynasty Warriors 2 easily earns the accusation. Ho boy can this one become a grind if you're unaccustomed to a couple of things. For starters, the game's mostly designed for players to take a character between their Musou Mode playthrough and Free Mode runs—usually from Easy or Normal difficulty depending on playstyle—before being able to try Hard mode comfortably. This becomes a trend throughout the PS2 games, though they've solved the pacing issues by Dynasty Warriors 5 with mechanics like out-of-battle weapon tuning. So that's fine, it's just more kickass brawling action, right? Maybe, but there's a pernicious little thing that officers major and minor love to do: repeatedly heal up before they die. Every non-generic officer (plus the gate captains) gets a limited but scaling supply of dim-sums and other power-ups, used randomly but frequently when recovering from knockdown. The closer they get to dying, the more likely they use an item! This uses the typical combo flow against players, rather than to their benefit, and can throw a lot of people off. I don't like this system in practice, despite how it cleverly encourages cheesy tactics like weak arrows or refusing to finish combos. It's something I haven't missed going into later games, but there's the seed of a clever idea here.

I'm happy to say the animation quality and kinaesthetics haven't aged much at all, notably when using the game's special musou attacks. Should you get stuck on the other end of a brutal assault, a timely musou can change the outcome in just several seconds. Sword wielders slash through the crowd before launching everyone around them with a single swipe; ax and club battlers pummel unlucky soldiers into a pulp with plenty of knockback; and those cultured fan users basically unleash black magic in a flash. The spectacle's always exhilarating, as is the freedom these specials give players when dueling the nastier opponents. While this game has a subtle auto-lock tendency, influencing your character to hone in on a single enemy at a time, it's much less restrictive than how Omega Force implemented this in the following two games. Dynasty Warriors 2 cares more about making each link of hits satisfying to pull off than keeping the player down for the AI's sake. It becomes tempting to leap around, sucker-punching guys from the air just to watch them fall to the floor as you prepare a deadly finisher. When all else fails, one can always guard attacks by holding the camera face button (L1), which works as stiff but reliable as ever.

Put it all together and the magic starts to happen. Charismatic leaders advance across plains, canyons, farmlands, and fortresses with retinues in tow, with enough numbers to make this world feel alive and bustling. The iconic moments are all here: crunchy impacts as combo finishers send troops flying, crashing into each other like ragdolls; rivals appear from the fog of war to challenge you, either to win and end the match or fall and herald your victory; gates open as officers retreat, traps are sprung right upon your allies' feet, and the cadence of battle hits climax. It's hard to explain how this game, with its aforementioned core flaws and priorities, manages to enthrall me so much. Sure, I could whinge about the genre's perceived repetition or this game clearly being a prototype of things to come, but OF really understood how these games can and should be paced. I can have fun going full 1v1000 with OP fighters like Lu Bu and Dian Wei, but also get a kick out of managing upsets with sub-optimal choices like Sun Shang Xiang or Jiang Wei—the "what if?" attraction of future titles clearly existed this far back. Role-playing beat 'em ups weren't new, but this variation sure was.

| Divine Wind |

Musou games live or die based on their game loop, and strong combat doesn't mean as much without a similarly worthwhile campaign that challenges players, maintains variety, and delivers that sense of martial adventure. Again, here's where Dynasty Warriors 2 shows its budget and design limits, as Omega Force needed to spend precious resources on getting all those scores of units to render at the expense of level design. It arguably wouldn't be until Dynasty Warriors 5 that Koei found an ideal ratio of asset and SFX complexity to level density and novelty. What we do have in DW2 is quite good regardless, as shown in the multi-layered, ambush-laden attack on Zhang Jiao's peasant rebels. Allied and enemy forces always start from their own forts and hidey-holes, accompanied by reinforcement points leading off the map. Most mission goals revolve around defeating the main enemy commander, but raising your side's morale (let alone deflating the enemy's) often becomes most important of all.

There's a common line of debate about old vs. new Dynasty Warriors (and musou in general) about how important or relevant it should be to fight within your army, rather than steamrolling ahead with nary a consequence. I tend to prefer the former myself, something which this game promotes by having very aggressive AI on Normal and Hard difficulties. Later games make the 1v1000 meme real largely by empowering player characters and dumbing down AI fighters, but almost all the PS2-era musou titles preferred to have peons and corporals interrupt your combos or even use special attacks to weigh you down. It's truly dangerous to wander away from friends and get surrounded; I've lost a couple times while playing Yi Ling and Wu Zhang Plains on Hard this way. Getting juggled sure isn't as fun as juggling them yourselves! For lack of something more complex like holding/sieging bases or keeping supply lines established the further in you go, this mix of active AI (without gimped movesets) and limited on-map resources like health or save points hems the player in from trivializing campaigns.

Taking out officers and large groups of foes, preferably via long combo chains, yields item drops affecting either temporary stats (e.g. current health and arrow stock) or permanent ones. Some of these also pop up from busted crates or pots lying around settlements, but it's often viable to forage these from the killing fields as you go. Something I really like are the limited-time stat boosting power-ups which any musou fan will recognize: armor and attack buffs, drinks to restore your special meter, etc. Encouraging players to keep moving and plow forward, skipping from one skirmish to another while making optimal use of item drops…It Just Works™. Another thing enriching the gameplay is the battle UI, displaying informative chyrons whenever you hit an "X units defeated" milestone or when an ally/enemy unit's morale rises or declines. Information travels faster to our screens than could possibly have reached officers' eyes and ears all the way back in the past, and that's okay. It's yet one more decidedly unrealistic element which brings players into the stressed, frenzied state of mind that anyone fighting on these fronts would have had. There's always something going on, for better or worse, and late-game stages can really test one's endurance.

And even with its teething problems, Dynasty Warriors 2 makes good use of its large stages and flashy art direction to compensate for things outside of Omega Force's budget or expertise. I can list quite a few set-pieces and vistas that'll stick with me all throughout the series: the claustrophobic gauntlet at Hu Lao Gate, Zhang Fei's bridge standoff at Changban, the fire attack raging across Yi Ling, and the dread expanse of death at Wu Zhang… All these levels would eventually improve and expand over the years, with more events and intricate pathways to explore, but it's cool to experience them in this formative state. It's just a shame that textures are comically low-res and that the engine can't yet gracefully handle level-of-detail loading, leading to a lot of pop-in and disappearing combatants which adversely affects the game loop. Thankfully you're always able to see your fighter, one of many flamboyantly designed heroes balking at RoTK's conservative character design ethos. Even the most conservatively dressed fellas here look amazing, yet still believable enough (if ceremonial outfits count as wartime or official attire). The cast only gets more colorful and distinct from here on, referencing famous legends about individuals like Xiahou Dun or Gan Ning to embellish them.

| The Boundless Ground |

Maybe the best example I can give for Dynasty Warriors 2 remaining relevant today is its soundtrack. Omega Force's then novice musician MASA (aka Masayoshi Sasaki) banged out one of the most era-defining hard rock soundtracks in the PS2 library, all without having played a Koei game before. [3] From the opening march upon the Turbans, across the splattered red cliffs at Chi Bi, and at the bitter end of generation-spanning warfare, MASA's percussive guitars, synths, and rhythms attune every play session to the pulse of confrontation. The grunge and Y2K electronica of everyman PlayStation games in years preceding gave way to a gentler mix of genres with improving production values, even from inexperienced developers like him. These songs are so fun and memorable that Dynasty Warriors 3 imports almost all of them with slight rearrangements. Nor is the foley any slouch, either. Hit effects, hoof-steps, and rancorous environmental sounds pervade every inch of the game's missions, all without blaring over the tunes.

I've been giving this game a lot more praise, or at least apologizing for its shortcomings, compared to most opinions I read in the current year. It's a hard one to get into now because it's been so thoroughly obsoleted by its sequels, save for hacking potential (seriously, DW2 has some of the most absurd cheats and custom fan levels I've seen from a musou game). For new Warriors fans, I'd say there's a bit more here to experience than just a history piece. Oddities like cinematic kill cams, on-map save slot collectibles, and musou canceling (denying a unit's special with your own!) give this entry a more arcade-y feel than would become the norm. The sheer moxie of infantry doing anything to hitstun you outdoes the harder PS2-era games like DW 3 or DW 4. And while it's low on overall content, the unique level designs for stages like Yellow Turbans and Chi Bi keep me coming back. Bonus points for carrying a smaller filesize footprint than the following games, too! I guess that's what happens when you've got minimal voice acting and cutscenes (both of which are surprisingly less awkward than in Dynasty Warriors 3 for whatever reason).

Dynasty Warriors 2 set a standard for console-bound 3D beat 'em ups to follow. While SEGA and Capcom eked out some '90s arcade-style examples of the genre up until the HD transition, even the latter ended up creating Sengoku Basara to meet Koei's new cash cow on its own terms. The newfound emphasis on influencing a larger world at war, rich in unlockables and storied presentation, made for a compelling combination of elements that Omega Force did better than anyone for quite some time. Eventually there'd be competition from the likes of Ninety-Nine Nights, Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders, or the ill-fated Demon Chaos, but Dynasty Warriors ended up having to worry more about OF's own Samurai Warriors series more than anything. The musou genre lost its freshness fast, too, with criticism most often coming from jaded fans or critics perceiving stagnation within these core series. Yet it's still a hugely successful part of the AA+ gaming market today, and it's meaningful to trace these ups and downs back to their source. If you've bounced off DW2 in the past, maybe consider a retry; there's some very nice PCSX2 cheat codes to enhance graphics and playability if desired, too.

| Sources |

[1] 任天堂ホームページ. “社長が訊く『ニンテンドー3DS』ソフトメーカークリエーター 篇｜ニンテンドー3DS｜任天堂.” Nintendo Co., L. Accessed January 22, 2024. http://www.nintendo.co.jp/3ds/interview/creators/vol16/index2.html.
[2] “鈴木 亮浩 | 社員インタビュー | 新卒採用2017 | コーエーテクモ ホールディングス.” Koei Tecmo Holdings Co., Ltd., January 4, 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20160104172459/https://www.koeitecmo.co.jp/recruit/graduate/2017/member/vol-01/.
[3] “佐々木 優嘉 | 社員インタビュー | 新卒採用2017 | コーエーテクモ ホールディングス.” Koei Tecmo Holdings Co., Ltd., January 4, 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20160104172514/http://www.koeitecmo.co.jp/recruit/graduate/2017/member/vol-03.

Humanity sleeps in the machine. It gurgles for breath, suffocating beneath smoke and gunfire within the netherworld. I grip the joystick with hands like claws; the sweat feels wrong, like oil on water. Heads-up display signals flare all around my vision as I wrench the exoskeletal warrior through warehouses, space stations, and forlorn caverns. When the foes aren't robots, they're pilots just as feckless and desperate as I. The job is king—morals are optional. Captains of industry march us inexorably towards doom, and I'm just trying to keep my head down, chin up against the rising tide. The harder I fight, the deeper I explore, the more I sense the great chain of being start to fray.

Armored Core…that pit of vitality lying within the most veteran of mercenaries, and an apt title for the series to follow King's Field. From Software staff would tell us they bungled their way into developing this game to begin with, but it's appropriate they'd shift from one dark fantasy to another. Both series deal in obscure, arcane worlds, just with divergent approaches to non-linearity and game complexity. They started life as 3D tech demos before unfolding into realms of mystery and danger hitherto unseen on consoles—the kind of innovative experience Sony hoped would set their PlayStation apart from the competition. And for all the nitpicks and missed potential I can (and will) bring up, it's impressive how effectively this studio captured the one-man-army appeal of mecha media versus other developers' outings at the time. From a simple animation test to one of the studio's core franchises, it's a hell of a leap. [1]

| From this point on, you are…a Raven… |

Mecha action games on the PlayStation weren't in short supply before Armored Core (AC) arrived, though I'd forgive you for believing that. The earliest examples—Metal Jacket, Robo Pit, and Extreme Power—all featured some amount of mech customization and variety in scenarios, but always with caveats. None of them had the storytelling emphasis that From Soft's game introduced. At most, Extreme Power let players choose which missions to attempt first, acquiring points to buy new parts if successful. But that still lacked elements like e-mail chains and running a deficit after overusing ammo and/or failing missions. Robo Pit introduced the extensive parts system within a 3D versus fighter context, and Metal Jacket focused on simpler open-field battles a la MechWarrior. (Though the latter remains maybe the biggest influence on so many mecha games to come, it didn't receive a PS1 port until the same year as Armored Core.)

If anything, I see a lot of commonality between the first AC and Front Mission: Gun Hazard, the latter releasing in 1996 with some notability. Combining the series' heavy geopolitical tone and intrigue with a game loop and structure akin to Assault Suit Valken, Squaresoft's game reviewed well and prefigured the genre hybrids they'd produce for Sony's machine. Critically, they also reworked the parts-as-equipment framework from Front Mission, balancing it with arcade-style pacing and more wiggle room for players wanting to test drive multiple builds. The trouble with mecha xRPGs, then and now, is motivating constant character creation (aka editing your mecha) in order to complete stages, ideally while avoiding damage and long-term costs that could ruin a playthrough. I have no way of knowing if the original AC devs were familiar with Gun Hazard and how it elegantly solves these issues via its mix of complex story, set-pieces, and missions designed to reward creativity.

It's hard enough to make a sci-future this dreadful so enchanting and replayable. Armored Core's semi-linear plot and trickle feed of environmental worldbuilding go far in reifying the player's ascension to ace pilot, a new hero of chaos. People are right to point out the jarring, confrontational "initiation" battle, a middle finger to trends of tutorialization beginning in the mid-'90s. Surviving this teaches one to never fully trust the world they're thrust into, be it the obtuse mecha controls or the machinations of agents, corporations, and other Ravens contracting and challenging you. The fun comes from accepting these additive layers of masochism, a reflection of the decaying worldview which From Soft presents without irony or pomp and circumstance. It's on the player to investigate and understand their predicament. Future series entries add fleeting moments of cooperation and optimism to mitigate the grim bits, but the tone here's consistently muted and adverse. Absent are the triumphant flourishes of Gundam or even VOTOMS, replaced by an engaging but ever-present indifference to the erasure of people and elevation of proxy warfare.

| You have the right…the duty to find out. |

Opening missions in this game settle into a formula of scout, destroy, rinse and repeat, followed by a shopping spree. It's never quite as comfortable as you'd hope; browsing for a new radar attachment after gunning down protesters feels ever so morbid. Nor are you interacting with fellow Ravens during the majority of a playthrough, instead fighting or helping a select few through happenstance. Armored Core keeps players at arm's length from the consequences they wreak upon the world, often chiding them through AI monologues and tetchy e-mail chains. This odd pacing and story presentation lets From Soft transition between unusual missions and plot beats without breaking a sweat. The further you work for Chrome or Murakumo to the other's downfall, the murkier the mystery gets, with ulterior motives of anonymous agents pressuring you into service.

Thankfully there's a decently balanced in-game economy to support the amount of experiments and risk-taking the campaign requires, though not without problems. Buying and selling are 1-to-1 on cash return; you'll never enter the red just through shopping. Instead, the way most players wreck their run is by abusing ammo-based weapons and continuing after failing missions with mech damage. Save scumming isn't a thing Armored Core looks down on, but it will go out of its way to promote ammo-less tactics with energy swords and simply dodging past optional foes. Around halfway through the game, it arguably becomes more important to scour levels for hidden parts instead of relying on the diminishing returns from Raven's Nest inventory. I wish this first entry had done better at keeping the market relevant, but it wasn't to be.

My go-to build throughout the story was an agile, energy-focused quadrupedal range specialist dressed to the nines with secret parts. (If the game let me use the Karasawa with these legs, oh boy would I have been unstoppable!) Sure, there's a lot of fun one can have with beefy machine guns and missile options, but getting the most cash out of missions requires plasma rifles and mastery of lightsaber stabbing to play efficiently. While Project Phantasma struggled to balance the economy back towards non-energy offense, it wouldn't be until Master of Arena that the series largely evened out the trade-offs between common mecha archetypes. For instance, tank-tread mecha in this first game are actually damn powerful due to a lack of movement tricks for the bipeds, but it all falls apart when it's time for platforming or quickly escaping. Bipeds often get the class-favorite treatment in this genre, yet struggle to wield a variety of parts and weapons to handle most challenges this game throws at you later on. That leaves quad-legs builds as the most flexible and resilient option at higher levels of play, a flawed but interesting subversion of what's usually seen in mecha anime and manga. (Ed: Yes, I'm aware reverse joint legs exist. No, I don't use them in a game that punishes jumping all the time. Later AC games handle it better.)

With all these incentives combined, the pressure to learn the classic Armored Core control scheme and physics becomes bearable, if still overbearing. I've come from other tank-y mecha games like Gungriffon, so the adjustment period wasn't too bad for me, but I get why many newcomers stick with analog-patched versions of the earlier entries. Memorizing the timings for boosting before landing to minimize lag, or how to effectively pitch the lock-on reticule and snap back to center, matters more than anything in the first couple of hours. Then add on tricks for circle strafing back away from enemies, often while firing guns or launching missiles, and the combat evolves from awkward plodding into a dance of destruction. And there's no arena mode here to let you practice these techniques in a consistent, scaling environment. A veteran Raven or horse of robots can descend upon you in any of the mid-game/late-game missions, requiring quick reactions and establishing a zone of control (or retreat). It's sink or swim in the truest sense. Past the teething phase, it's easy to return to this control scheme and feel one with the AC, even after years have passed. I won't doubt that full dual-stick analog controls will work even better and enable a longer skill progression, but I adapted to the famous claw-grip style quicker than expected.

| "Pledge allegiance to no one!" |

Any problems significant enough to keep Armored Core below a 4-out-of-5 rating or higher must be deep-rooted in the game's loop and structure; that's sadly true for the level and encounter design here. I'm far from opposed to dungeon crawling in my semi-linear mecha action-RPGs, at least when there's room enough to blast around duels (plus verticality to reduce the claustrophobia). Still, a few too many stages in this debut feel like holdover concepts from King's Field II instead of properly scaled settings to wrangle a mech through. The difference between enjoying "Kill 'Struggle' Leader" and dreading "Destroy Base Computer" boils down to whether or not the story framing is compelling enough to justify zooming through non-descript (though nicely textured) hallways for most of their runtime. Occasionally the designers get clever with metal-corroding gas, inconveniently placed explosives, and other traps to keep the spelunking varied; I had a hoot tearing through the insectoid lairs like I was playing an antique musou game! But later series installments improved these confined missions with more arena-like rooms and affordances to players who make it far in and then can't win due to a sub-optimal build.

If I had to speculate, wide open-ended maps are less common here simply due to hardware constraints, be it rendering ACs and other actors in any abundance (regardless of level-of-detail scaling) or the enemy AI struggling with pathfinding in combat on a broader scale. It's a shame regardless since bombarding installations across water ("Reclaim Oil Facility"), going en guarde with a berserker atop a skyscraper ("Destroy Plus Escapee"), and rampaging down public avenues ("Attack Urban Center") offer some of the best thrills in Armored Core. Objective variety and complexity never reaches especially high regardless of mission category, so just getting to rip up groups of MTs, droids, and ACs goes a long way. Defending a cargo train in the desert starts off humble, then escalates to defeating a full-bore Human Plus combatant interceding on the situation. A series of undersea tunnels and chambers, well-defended and secretly primed to implode, threaten to bury you while avenues of escape close off. A select few dungeon crawls also open up in unexpected ways, particularly those set on space stations where vertical engagements come into play. I didn't think mecha and sewer levels could work, but here I am grinning as I pursue Struggle operatives down waterways or methodically undo their bombs within a rat's maze of air treatment tunnels.

Armored Core rarely has bad missions so much as disappointing or overachieving ones, which makes the finale so uniquely odd. By this point, the entropic cycle ensnaring Chrome, Murakumo, Struggle, and adjacent organizations has caused untold devastation across the earth. Now even the Raven's Nest falls, revealed as the illusory sham of governance it always was. Even bit players in the narrative pitch in, waxing over e-mail about the futility of these conflicts and what's really driving it all behind the scenes. So, with all this build-up and conspiracy baiting, I had high hopes for the last hour, wishing for an epic battle and world-shattering revelations to boot. Sure, I got the latter (if in a minimal, trope-adherent form), but instead of satisfying gladiatorial action, I had to ascend the fucking cubes. Everyone's got a horror story about "Destroy Floating Mines", it seems, and I'm just glad to have survived this much awkward, drawn-out platforming using my quad-leg AC. Squaring off against Nine-Ball afterward isn't quite enough to compensate either, not unless you can have an even pitched fight against this iconic rival and win the first couple of attempts. (The penultimate chambers also reflect poorly on the camera's ability to track fast-moving combatants, even if it makes for an exciting sequence.) I can still appreciate how From Soft didn't explicate too much at the end, instead trying to confound players with interesting questions and non sequiturs in the level design itself. It's all a big joke and we get to grimace through it.

| Shape Memory Alloys |

In conclusion, it's a good thing From Soft nailed all their game loop, distinctive mechanics, and interweaving systems here. The original Armored Core is unfortunately limited with how it challenges players, both in level design and mission pacing. Not having an arena to lean on makes completing the missions with maximum efficiency more of a priority, which can lead to excess retries and scrimping on investments in hopes of affording something better later vs. smoother upgrades in the short term. (I do appreciate how only fighting other ranked ACs within missions makes the Ravens' dynamic more hostile and contradictory, but the game does so little to expand on that angle.) These problems sting less knowing that, as a prototype of adventures to come, this game still accomplishes so much with so little.

Not many series strive to reach a profile this high while teasing players with details out of reach and mysteries about its development unanswered. Anyone invested in the wider world Armored Core hints at, from the shadowy groups running these underground beehive cities to the horrors hiding behind Human Plus, has to read through "data books" (artbooks) and track down magazine previews for scraps. We're only now getting English translations of the artbooks and related articles, all of which are coloring the fringes of the AC universe while only letting trace amounts of humanity through the barrier [2]. And as far as these games are concerned, pilots' backstories and white papers on neural augmentation procedures amount to nothing. Heroes and villains drop in and out of history like mayflies—only shocks to the system register on the scale From Soft's using. We're just along for the ride.

It feels like there's still so much else to analyze here: how the studio crowbar-ed their King's Field engine into handling these pyrotechnics, the peculiarities of Human Plus endings as difficulty modifiers, let alone the timely yet appropriate electronica soundtrack. A lot of PS1 releases from this period struggle to make the best use of their developers' skills, assets, and remaining CD space. I wouldn't say Armored Core succeeds at the latter, using only a few FMV sequences at key points in the story, but it's a remarkably lean and appealing game relative to its own premise. Replays come naturally thanks to multiple Human Plus tiers and the freedom to play all missions upon completing the story (plus making new saves to transfer into Project Phantasma). The controls here, though lacking in finesse, carry forward into a good chunk of the later games, with concepts like boost canceling staying relevant even after the switch to analog. Contrast this maturity with all the pratfalls From Soft made during their King's Field days. They'd learned how to not just lead in with a better start, but retain their creative momentum on budgets larger and smaller with each sequel.

Armored Core represents a coming-of-age for the PlayStation as it entered the midpoint of its lifespan, setting a bar other mid-sized studios could aspire to. Its rough edges hardly mar what I'd call one of my favorite experiences in the system's library so far. Maybe I'm going easier on this one due to my enthusiasm for the genre and the myriad themes this game explores, from cyberpunk dystopia to the malleability of history in the post-modern. It could just be that the core game's so, uh, solid after all this time. I chose not to rely on Human Plus for my first playthrough and that might have helped. No matter how you approach the series today, it's awesome to see it debut this confidently, and plenty of players must have thought so too. The Armored Core series became From Soft's backbone for a decade before the Souls-likes came to replace it, and what AC achieved for mecha games (and ARPGs in general) can't be overstated.

| Bibliography |

[1] Alex “blackoak,” trans. “Armored Core – 1997 Developer Interview - Shmuplations.Com.” PlayStation Magazine. 1997. Shmuplations. https://shmuplations.com/armoredcore/.
[2] Reddit. “Translations of Pages 103 to 105 from the Book Armored Core Official Data Book.” Accessed January 14, 2024. https://www.reddit.com/r/armoredcore/comments/x940dj/translations_of_pages_103_to_105_from_the_book/.

"On the other hand, however, there are people who still only use stone. How do they catch game and defend themselves from outsiders? Using only their strong jumping power and stone spheres. They use those skillfully to defend themselves. Here, we introduce two such people. It seems their names are Mario and Luigi. Will they ever learn about sophisticated culture?" These wry words from the game's manual point to the absurdity of Mario Bros., but also the predicament that Hudson Soft's version of the game found itself in. Spread over so many Japanese PC platforms in October 1984, it's a seemingly simplistic variation on the arcade original in a time of rapidly evolving competition from developers at Namco and elsewhere. What more can a few overburdened programmers crank it out before the window of success for this type of game disappears?

Punch Ball Mario Bros. is fun enough despite its platform limitations and unwillingness to go farther with its deviations from the source material; it's also a benchmark for the systems it got ported across. Hudson knew how to get the most from their partnership with Nintendo, bringing conversions like this everywhere it made sense. The weaker but cheaper PC-6001? Yep. The graphically powerful but expensive Sharp X1? Why of course! And it's fascinating to see how much the coders wrought from less powerful PC hardware vs. the best of the bunch, too. I was expecting major sprite and color clash going into the PC-6001mkII version, yet it felt hardly less clean and responsive to play than the Sharp PC varieties. (Considering the X1 has its own sprite-ing hardware, its stiff performance had me underwhelmed.) I expected Hudson to struggle with the FM-7's poor keyboard I/O, however, and that bore true.

See, there's a problem afflicting so many FM-7 games, at least the ones reliant on predictable inputs: the system doesn't fully poll keyboard inputs. This means you can tap anywhere on the numpad (or "tenkey") to move a direction and the game will act as if you're holding that down. But while that first input's still active, no further repeats of it are counted; this doesn't enable a soft autofire, basically. FM-7 keyboard play manages to wedge itself into the worst of both worlds, and I find action games for the system less pleasant for it. The only way to mitigate this is building up muscle memory, tapping a neutral key (ex. "5" on numpad) to reset your movement or switch to another constant action. This habit does help with other versions of Punch Ball Mario Bros., thankfully, since returning to neutral means conserving momentum and, thus, narrowly avoiding critters, fireballs, and other hazards. Sure, the other NEC and Sharp PCs don't suffer anything like the FM-7, but it's ultimately helpful to internalize these controls and work around the lag.

Judging ground and air momentum matters even more here than in Nintendo's game because your main trap-em-up mechanic is throwing a ball, not bumping enemies from below. It's a neat lil' twist on Mario Bros., incentivizing more tactical movement to line up shots and then recover your weapon afterward. The ever-present pipe in the middle provides a route back to the top-center of the action; dropping the stone below resets it atop the POW block. Since the space key fires at neutral and lets you jump when running, the player has to act more deliberately than ever. Your ability to fight at the ground level adds a feeling of empowerment missing in the arcade game, turning this into an action-platforming hybrid without any use for hammers or other power-ups. Where Miyamoto and co. saw their design as leaving players exposed to threats depending on the level layer they're on, Hudson figured their PC audience would be familiar enough with that paradigm to want something different…something aggressive. I could chew right through this game with extra practice, playing faster than the original generally allows.

Compared with Mario Bros. Special, this later port hews closer to what Nintendo must have expected from their new bedfellows, yet the game design comes out subtly different in a manner reflecting different hardware. Punch Ball Mario Bros. doesn't need to employ the myriad gimmicks of its cousin because it's already diverged from the jumping-first model. That's a problem because, as satisfying as it can be to chuck dodgeballs at turtles, the combat never gets any deeper or more explosive. In trying to find the balance between speed, quantity, and quality for their Famicom-to-PC schedule, Hudson ended up compromising most on ambition. Someone's going to accuse me of being unfair, given the obvious additions and reductions in these PC versions, but I just feel like the developers could have gone farther. Awkward co-op via a shared keyboard means these releases needed a lot to distinguish themselves from a trip to the local cabinet, as demonstrated by the excesses of Donkey Kong 3 and Super Mario Bros. Special. Everyone at the company knew that the future wasn't strict arcade adaptations, but remakes like what Nuts & Milk received when it jumped from PC to Famicom.

I won't hold that quality of spareness too hard against Punch Ball Mario Bros.. It's disappointing how slight in new content and mix-ups this version has, yet it still plays well within its constraints. Switching from bumpin' to ballin' no doubt circumvented the rendering and physics problems of the former on these PCs, and it's a small miracle that the end product looks and sounds this consistently everywhere you can run it. Producing this many multiplatform ports is never easy, even back in the bedroom coding era, so it's cool to witness Hudson working their magic in that regard. Most importantly, I think it's telling that Mario fans poo-poo the mid-'80s J-PC ports while conveniently ignoring this one to fixate on SMB1's misfire instead. PC users of the time had seen considerably worse efforts, even from Nintendo's original PC porting partner Westside. The Famicom had undeniable sprite-ing and scrolling advantages over contemporary PCs and Hudson still proved you could bring similar experiences to those machines largely intact. Arcade perfect wasn't the name of the day, but it's surprising and awesome when talented coders got close. Perhaps the worst I can say about this game is that no amount of fidelity would have elevated Mario Bros. beyond the system exclusives and genre revolutions to come.

Citizens! Look around! Can you hear that fearsome sound? It’s that corpse of a game done dirty, killed off by the 3DS' closing! Enjoy the meme, that so-called Code Name S.T.E.A.M.~! (Load up your drive to fight back the reductive menace) What a dream~, why hate on Code Name S.T.E.A.M.~?! United they stand with every Valkyria, XCOM, and—[record scratch] erm, just those two and Fire Emblem mainly.

| Trouble Brewing |

I speak of Intelligent Systems’ 3DS character strategy experiment that debuted alongside Splatoon yet couldn’t have had a worse fate. It came a long way from rocky origins and launch reception, yet now so few are interested. At best, physical copies go on sale at different stores, retailing far cheaper than any other evergreen Nintendo titles I know. Then people pay attention, or remark that the game deserved its bomba-stic fate. With the death of the 3DS eShop and any pull the system had outside its fans and retro enthusiast press, there's an increasing risk of this becoming a mere footnote, something misunderstood back in 2015 and only a bit less so now.

Code Name S.T.E.A.M. deserves better, both because it plays well and because it’s a great example of the developers' ambitions, even as the Awakening/Fates gravy train steamrolled all in its path. We’re talking about an alternate late-1800s steampunk Earth where Lincoln’s alive, everything looks like pulp fiction, and public-domain American literature heroes work together to defeat Lovecraftian horrors before everyone’s dead. Yes, the premise sounds as bonkers as it gets, including a multi-stage trip to Oz and invading Antarctica with the likes of Tom Sawyer and Tiger Lily in your crew. Compare this to the florid, but often predictable, heightened medieval exteriors of most Fire Emblem worlds. Int-Sys gets extra mileage from fresh settings like late-Victorian London, the bowels of Miskatonic University, and what might as well be the Schwarzwelt from Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey.

This wargame’s more puzzle than adventure, but it feels like both. Due to challenges like relying on units’ sightlines and exploring every nuance of each map to progress, I had to really apply myself in ways I'd expect mainly from a classic Jagged Alliance title. Here’s a game where replaying missions becomes more comfortable and advantageous because nearly every character and strategy can become viable. Want to turtle through long maps, abusing overwatch during the enemy phase while moving across every inch? How about rampaging through on the first try, surviving close calls and leaving collectibles untouched for a replay? It all works! The final set of maps epitomize what’s great about this mix. Elevation conflicts, alien baddies acting in cycles, sightline control, and clutch aiming for weak points are all so satisfying to juggle. Intimidating, also, since your lack of a top-down view, or any map really, enforces a fog of war linked to your guys' individual and combined vision. (Those who hold this decision against Int-Sys when it's clearly a way to solve the age-old problems associated with FoW in Fire Emblem's paradigm will always amuse me!)

I have to admit the game’s pacing isn’t all there, same with do-or-die motivation to complete it (and I only completed this a few years after buying it full price…). The problem almost everyone had around launch—enemy phase speed, which got patched up not nearly quick enough to cool down the anti-hype—didn’t help at all. I think waiting around to see enemies move, take position, and wreck my last move keeps my interest, but it doesn’t appeal to everyone. Beyond that, it’s hard to get in the mood for maps featuring constant reinforcements or intimidating boss encounters. Adding the ABE mini-game at story intervals makes a bit of difference, though, as do the shorter, more puzzle-slanted maps. Code Name S.T.E.A.M. strikes a good balance of map types, mission designs, and introducing new element when needed. Maybe they could have tightened up the mecha mini-game's controls and given it a lot more substance, though.

S.T.EA.M.’s strengths take a bit to properly describe, likely the reason why this will remain a cult classic. The game’s frustrating but rarely unfair, presenting a ton of maps where you find new ways to abuse your party’s advantages. It’s got excellent replayability thanks to later character introductions (meaning new ways to replay earlier maps) and extra modes like Merciless or multiplayer. Eschewing traditional strategy game tropes, like an overhead map or the inability to extend visibility and movement for a unit, gives this game a strong identity. Peeking around corners, hoping to not aggro a counterattack or worse, means there's almost always some healthy morsels of tension to feed on. And the presentation’s quite excellent: catchy progressive rock, the comic-book story sequences, and a short but very memorable eldritch-invasion steampunk story works so well for me. (Shout-out to the voice acting! I loathe Adam Baldwin’s involvement, but everyone fits their roles perfectly, especially James Urbaniak as Randolph Carter.)

| Deadly Dance |

Here’s a list of awesome things you can do in Code Name S.T.E.A.M.:
•Launch bomb aliens onto mines (using John Henry or another explosives user) to create a domino effect of explosions that tears through spawners and enemy lines
•Stun literally every enemy, then have a scout fighter pick them off thanks to extra damage on stunned foes
•Jump from wall to tower to behind the enemy’s weak point using Lion, picking up Gears and plenty of extra steam packs along the way for maximum damage in a round
•Explode enemy squads from afar with penguin droids; waste them with specials like Queeqeeg’s harpoon
•In general, do ridiculous stunts with North American literary legends (plus Abraham Lincoln) that are super silly yet serious—you might call this camp, even

| Intersection: Me vs. You |

I highly recommend trying this bad boy out if you want something like Intelligent Systems’ 3DS puzzlers, wrapped into a wargame premise that’s rather unlike the games it’s frequently compared to. Yes, you have interception fire and squad-level combat like in XCOM or Valkyria Chronicles, but this game emphasizes exploring very precisely-designed environments with stakes changing a lot of the time. Reinforcements, too, are a big No to players who tried or wanted to try this, but I think they’re more manageable here than usual because of your skill pool. Knowledge of character skills, shot-to-hitbox detection, and the foibles of managing your steam gauge makes for a satisfying feedback loop.

Quick note: play this on a New 3DS for maximum enjoyment. That system gives you a 3x enemy phase speed toggle for situations where you really need to skip enemy actions or replay a mission. I used an OG 3DS + Circle Pad Pro to get analog camera movement, so consider that if you want to minimize stylus or face button use. Consult a guide when necessary to find all the Gears so you can get different steam boilers early on. Getting better equipment up through mid-game helps a lot later on while pushing you to understand each map in depth.

In oh so many ways, Code Name S.T.E.A.M. was Int-Sys' attempt to prove they could bring their wargame design chops outside the Fire Emblem mold, synthesizing many well-appreciated aspects of other big-name character tactics games into a unique whole. Woeful release-period impressions. and a lack of retrospective coverage from outlets that ought to have one or two writers interested, basically sunk this title's reputation and left it unable to resurface. It's hardly the fault of some conspiracy of journalists or FE fanboys as some will resort to suggesting. Nor is this (or any) Nintendo software exempt from incisive critique, as I can understand where the detractors are coming from WRT no map, slow between-turn waits, and an emphasis on puzzle solving over constantly improvising to hobble through the campaign. Yet I'm hopeful that this and other 3DS-era experiments like Rusty's Real Deal Baseball can eventually attain some prominence and reevaluation in the system's library, an era of tumult and risk-taking uncommon for the publisher.

(In case you couldn't tell, I wrote this review a few years before joining Backloggd, hence the somewhat different style. Alas, ResetEra wasn't too interested in *Code Name S.T.E.A.M. at the time, and anyone wanting to give it a go now might as well visit a certain website rhyming with "ache chop" to get a digital copy for Citra or their homebrewed 3DS. Thankfully the game runs and plays like a dream in emulation, as this detailed r/FireEmblem poster can testify. I'm sure a replay would reveal some bullshit to me, but also various things I couldn't appreciate at the time.)

Fellas, if your game has platforming, comical traps, and a giant angry gorilla attacking you from above, that's not Donkey Kong, that's Crazy Climber!

The similarities are plain to see, yet there's a good reason why Miyamoto swapped out wall-climbing for jumping. Rarely does an arcade game use controls this unique and vexing, a great fit for gated joysticks and a horror with analog sticks. Crazy Climber asks you to learn an 8-way movement scheme and scramble up four increasingly challenging towers, with falling objects ready to knock you into the air like Hans Gruber. Imagine trying to learn how to walk all over again, frustrated in your attempts to reconcile how you think movement works with how it really does. This game might as well have pioneered the "difficulty wall" as a concept. It's just too damn happy to end your runs because of a split-second mishap, as was the case for me when trying to scale past closing windows or escape the Kong's punching range. Were it not for how unique and engaging it is just to learn the game's controls, I would have given up a long time ago. Surviving one round is a feat unto itself, and playing fast and efficient becomes a test of skill and endurance like little else at the time.

I'd ask what sick, twisted, and clever minds could engineer this monument of a 1980 arcade classic, but the development history's more complex than I expected. Basically, Nihon Bussan (aka Nichibutsu) had much less involvement in the creation of their earliest hits than the Western world thinks—almost all design, art, and coding work came from the often-forgotten Jorudan Co. [1] Both Crazy Climber and its older cousin Moon Cresta trace their concepts back to the late Mitsuo Honda, a planner working with Nichibutsu's home staff, plus freelancers Kiyoshi Oda and Toshikazu Sato at Jorudan, to bring new concepts into Japan's arcade market. Like other ambitious post-Space Invaders titles from the turn of the '80s, this one saw a rushed release, with concepts like clambering away from fires (a la The Towering Inferno) scrapped for time or avoiding bad press [2]. Whereas the publisher's space shooter innovated via a Voltron-like power-up system, Honda and co.'s second game practically reinvented the action game overnight. Only Space Panic was even toying with the idea of gravity-based threats and vertical progression by this point.

My enjoyment here came from narrowly dodging seemingly everything and the kitchen sink while I played human fly. You're able to straddle across and ascend up the windowsills not just in cardinal directions, but between two adjacent columns when positioning your arms just right. This all happens via a dual-stick control setup mimicking climbing motions, which takes up plenty of mental bandwidth before dealing with the towers themselves. All four stages vary in layout, alternating between wide and narrow columns sectioned by different kinds of traps. Sometimes it's burger-headed guys poking out and dropping plants, buckets, etc. on your head; one collision dislodges a hand, another send you falling! (And it's a life lost if you're in the middle of your climbing pose/animation, so staying put can be safer than risking a last-second escape plan.) Elsewhere, there's big 'ol birds crapping on you from a considerable height, or the aforementioned King Kong pastiche guarding the way to the roof. These earlier obstacles mainly affect one or two routes upward, but then there's malfunctioning signs spanning half the screen to get around. Yeah, it's a lot.

For creating what might as well have been the very first platformer, Jorudan struck gold. It's criminal that Honda, Oda, and Sato got paid a measly 8 million yen vs. the large revenues Nichibutsu's cabinets grossed [3]. Crazy Climber works because of its difficult controls, where finding a rhythm and consistently staying out of harm's way. The cute flourishes layered throughout, like the public domain song jingles announcing each stage, amount to something more than the sum of its parts. Maybe I'm just going easy on this one because it looks and sounds much better than almost anything from 1980. Blue sky background? Check. Crunchy sound design that would have made Namco proud? Absolutely. The game loop itself manages to find that one-more-turn addictive appeal despite its obtuseness. For example, obstacles that don't immediately drop you will still reduce the end-of-stage score bonus. Looking upward and juking enemies into wasting their shots on either side of you becomes a tantalizing activity for score-chasers. It's also just damn funny to watch my poor lil' guy get electrocuted while launching past an electrocuting banner, lighting up in the process. Just don’t dawdle for too long, though, or the game gets properly mean.

There's not much complexity to the average Crazy Climber—enough for a well-paced 1CC, not quite there for a repeat visit. It's a shame that the developers had to scrap four more levels, for which they'd built out new baddies and things to avoid, but had to scrap and move forward without or risk missing their deadline. Thrills come quick and linger around in this game, from the complications of getting anywhere up and around skyscrapers to the simple joys of finally grabbing that helicopter at the top. As unintuitive and hostile as it seems, I think it ends up becoming a fun, appropriately zany Harold Lloyd simulator (no suspended clock included). The score-run videos I've seen demonstrate the depths of player skill one can reach with this premise, to say nothing of the later sequels. That said, Crazy Climber is still a hard sell for anyone not into the more arcane depths of MAME set-up or who lacks one of the simplified console ports. I personally wouldn't settle for anything but the Famicom conversion since it adds content to compensate, but the home ports largely avoid the troubles I faced with rebinding sticks.

| Bibliography |

[1] 前田尋之. “『乗換案内』のジョルダンのルーツはアーケード開発だった？ 前編.” Institute for Game Culture Conservation (ゲーム文化保存研究所) (blog), March 9, 2019. https://igcc.jp/ジョルダン1/.
[2] 前田尋之. “『乗換案内』のジョルダンのルーツはアーケード開発だった？ 中編.” Institue for Game Culture Conservation (ゲーム文化保存研究所) (blog), March 16, 2019. https://igcc.jp/ジョルダン2/.
[3] 前田尋之. “『乗換案内』のジョルダンのルーツはアーケード開発だった？ 後編.” Institute for Game Culture Conservation (ゲーム文化保存研究所) (blog), March 19, 2019. https://igcc.jp/ジョルダン3/.

[AVGN voice] More like faxing in a doodie! [Cue skit]

Simon's Quest never stood a chance. Zelda II? Just another competitor for the best NES action-RPG of 1987. Xanadu who? That ain't affordable! Why buy a home computer when you can get the [approximate] thrills of computer role-playing action on your TV?! Faxanadu, baby. It's only the lovechild of two of Japan's most lauded developers, seizing the chance to entertain untold numbers of schoolboys with fantasy swashbuckling and dungeoneering like nothing else. Well, maybe that last part's an exaggeration. Maybe this was the best you could get on a cartridge, but any kid lucky enough to own a Famicom Disk System had similar titles well within reach, all iterating on the likes of Xanadu, Zelda, Metroid, and Castlevania.

Poisoned roots flow from the base of World Tree, our hero's old home now corrupted by a cosmic evil. Faxanadu toys with a kind of dark fantasy that had so far evaded the Famicom's library, bewitching its owners with sojourns into caverns, forests, castles, and places that should not be. The people once called Dwarfs now scour this Yggdrasil in mutated forms, and the wise men of the realm wait patiently by desecrated fountains and shrines, hoping for a hero patient and skilled enough to heed their call. While I'm happy to report the game comports itself admirably versus the other ARPGs in the room, its niggling flaws and inability to transcend its inspirations pose a problem for the game today. Nonetheless, it's a testament to how quickly its developers improved at making Famicom exclusives, and one of the breeziest but filling genre exercises that Hudson Soft made for the system.

| "Daggers and wingboots, mantras and monsters await you." |

Famicom Xanadu, as the portmanteau suggests, had a mission to fulfill: bring Nihon Falcom's seminal 1985 PC RPG to the console-bound masses, no matter what it costed Hudson. The two companies knew each other distantly via the Japanese PC games market already, and this collaboration marked the start of a several years' long partnership. Hudson later ported key Falcom titles like Ys I & II and Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes to the former's new console of choice, the PC Engine (CD). Falcom, meanwhile, reaped the crop, collecting hefty residuals from sales of their games on platforms they had no experience with, expertly handled by their partners from Hokkaido. From '87 onward, Falcom made inroads on the far larger console market without having to divert their staff away from the tighter, more competitive J-PC realm, at least until they made their own PC-to-console push in the early '90s.

What we now deem the side-scrolling ARPG had blossomed beyond its niche by '87, thanks to early hits like Namco's Dragon Buster and the diversification shown with cult classics like Layla and Mugen Senshi Valis. Developers tackling the genre sought to meld dungeon crawling, cinematic pacing, and skillful play into something you could play on the simplest of systems. In that sense, '87 was maybe the most important year in ARPG history: Falcom came out swinging with three of the genre's all-time classics (Ys, Sorcerian, and Drasle Family), followed by the likes of Konami (Maze of Gailous, Arumana no Kiseki), Capcom (Black Tiger), Westone (Wonder Boy in Monster Land), Game Arts (Zeliard), and even the NES remake of Rygar. I bring all these up to explain why I've rated Faxanadu roughly in the middle of the pack. There was a lot of competition in the ARPG space at this point in time, and Hudson arguably came in on the back foot.

You'd be right to doubt Hudson's record with console-oriented adventures after the janky results of Challenger, Milon's Secret Castle, Mickey Mousecapade, and arguably the first Adventure Island. The company had triumphed early on with solid renditions of Lode Runner and former J-PC games like Binary Land, but their competitors had leapfrogged them in the art of hours-long Famicom blockbusters. 1987 saw a lot of ups and downs for Hudson's various Famicom teams, with Faxanadu thankfully indicating an end to all but the occasional abject failure. Such a turning point helped double-fold for their upcoming PC Engine projects. Neutopia and Dungeon Explorer, derivative as they are, benefited greatly from the lessons in relatively consistent design that the developer learned this fateful year. I wish we knew who precisely worked on Faxanadu other than musical maestros Jun Chikuma and Toshiaki Takimoto, but good job to everyone else!

The adventure starts off in the main castle town, Eolis, beneath our once verdant World Tree. Despondent residents mill around streets and dim rooms, waiting for relief. The "dwarfs", now resembling creatures from the likes of Alien or Metroid, creep around the town walls, forcing new players to learn the jumping mechanics within the first few minutes. A desperate passer-by hands over their ring, the symbol of Elf kind and one's ticket to an audience with Eolis' king. He tells of a meteorite, crash landed high up within the World Tree, which has poisoned most of the waterways and especially the Dwarf fortress, leading to decay and depression all throughout. After receiving 1500 "golds" and the opportunity to train strength or magic (which just fills those bars, no stat increases here…), players must set off to reactivate the fountains, subdue the Dwarf incursions, and vanquish the evil brought here from outer space.

| "I am free from injury because of the ointment!" |

An immediate strength of Faxanadu is its pacing, with most of the game following a linear progression from below to atop the Tree, foisting small and large challenges upon you with plenty of leniency. The protagonist mainly grows via obtaining new equipment: swords, magic spells, armor, and shields, all buyable or present in corners of the world. Stat progression happens invisibly via changing equipment, while the visible EXP state simply correlates to each title a guru/priest bestows upon you at each temple. This all ties into a robust password save feature, allowing players to recover their progress (ex. equipment, key items, story flags, etc.) and rarely have to retread familiar ground. It took me roughly 7-to-8 hours to clear my first playthrough (not counting fiddling with emulator settings), and maybe an hour of that time involved any notable backtracking.

So, like with Ys and other item-focused ARPGs, there's never much worry about character building, just a well-incentivized goal of getting the best loot (which appears on your guy!) and reaching victory via guile and quick reactions. Controls are mostly well adjusted, both for '87 and compared to the larger Famicom library. Up +/down + A to either use magic or your active item takes some getting used to, but there's little in the way of obscure combat/movement mechanics to complicate things. What I will criticize, however, is the stiff, inconsistent jumping and collision physics. It's admirable of Hudson to test players' ability to time jumps and approach enemies with caution, yet I had way too many close calls where I should have just landed on platforms, only to fall and subsequently retry a section. Regarding enemy hitboxes, these are fine for the most part, but vexing when their attacks bump you back as far as they do. Since Faxanadu is a flip-screen adventure, not a fully scrolling one, this means baddies can and will force you off-screen, prompting extra loading times and enemy respawns which hurt an already precarious balance between affordances for players and the AI alike.

There's way to mitigate getting cornered or too low on health to continue, thankfully, as Faxanadu offers Red Potions, Hourglasses, and other power-ups that let you tank damage, stop time, so on and so forth. Most of the time one should stock up on these at shops in-town, but it's possible to find them out in the wild, either reappearing indefinitely or spawned after defeating a specific set of monsters on the right screen. Better yet, just use magic to avoid risking upfront damage entirely! The spells here evoke their counterparts from Falcom's Xanadu, but are generally simpler, being mostly front-ejecting projectiles and a late-game option which curves and flies upward. Judicious alternation between melee and magic makes the biggest difference in clearing dungeons and traversing the overworld. I would have appreciated more variety in types of weapons, spells, and restoratives on offer, but altogether there's plenty to work with here, especially compared to most Famicom contemporaries.

| "The power of the Hourglass is gone." |

It's by the halfway point—a daredevil trip into the skies, preceding a long and arduous trip through the World Tree's foggy, forlorn trunk full of abandoned sites—that Faxanadu shows its hand, warts and all. This game excels most when rewarding the player's tenacity with a sense of discovery, the feeling of a larger universe than can feasibly be shown. Lengthy hallways inside roots and branches give way to dusty castles possessed by the deranged, where warlocks, monstrosities, and confused soldiers patrol for Elves to slaughter. Each "tower" offers its own set of action, platforming, and item challenges, striving to fully exploit the game's possibility space. I always had a hoot strapping on some Wing Boots, levitating high above foes and hazards (bottomless death pits never appear, thankfully), only to slam right into a miniboss or something cool like that.

See, there's just one (or two, or three) problem(s) with what Faxanadu's, uh, doing here: it rarely if ever captures the tension and complexity of its source material. Xanadu on PC-88 had many flaws of its own, but one couldn't deny the sheer ambition, variety of traps and monsters, and involved leveling + customization Yoshio Kiya and co. managed to squeeze onto those floppies. Here, with limited storage (no Disk System upgrade here!) and a need to accommodate much younger players, Hudson's take on the concept finds itself at an awkward crossroads. The line between regular enemy, miniboss, and boss blurs without confidence. Chikuma's soundtrack, though somewhat catchy and appropriate, struggles to rise above the aural noise reserving sound channels she really needed for her arrangements. A mix of engaging but merely competent platforming and simplistic hack 'n' cast combat makes locations like the Tower of Suffer feel like, erm, suffering. Some truly ill-thought level design comes to mind, too, like mooks patrolling right in front of doors you need to exit and enter (meaning certain death in some scenarios), let alone the lack of unlockable shortcuts or fast travel by late-game.

To further illustrate my reservations, let's look at the keys system, maybe the most belabored aspect of Faxanadu. Many doors throughout the adventure require you to manually equip specific keys (jack, joker, king, queen, and ace) from the inventory, then use them to proceed. Since you can't drop any expendable items at any point, this can lead to accidentally stocking up the wrong type of key, and there's only 8 item slots to work with! So let's say I try selling them off in town, the logical thing to try. It turns out you can only sell specific types to key vendors who already stock them, meaning I'm stuck with early-game items by endgame unless I do way more backtracking than should be necessary. Going in, I honestly thought I'd get more frustrated with the Pendant bug than something like this, but here we are. In terms of which problems are intentional design or just coincidental, I'm unsure where the Pendant's infamous (and seemingly contradictory) damage debuff falls, but Hudson knew what they were doing with keys here. Inventory management, coupled with slow-ass text speeds, can quickly put a damper on one's fun if you aren't careful.

Though Faxanadu is still more intuitive and less guide-dependent than its spiritual predecessor, I find Falcom's game so much more consistent, dedicated to stumping the player while making their accomplishments feel that much more meaningful (and avoiding many aforementioned pitfalls like with keys!). Obtaining better gear and then demolishing them through hitbox cheese is fun, but I wish Hudson could have either added more features to enrich the experience, or taken a bit more time to sand off the edges which remind you this game's trying to evoke Japanese PC RPG jank. For example, where the hell's crouching in this ARPG full of monsters that attack from above and below? Why can't I attack at all on ladders except after getting hit, thus bugging out my hero's sprite and letting me act? With all these omissions and issues working against the player, it's hard not to feel like the latter half of the game becomes a slog. It all starts to feel rushed by the end, especially when fighting the final boss in all its Giger-esque glory. Perhaps the droning, repetitive nature of OG Xanadu is hard to stomach now, yet I find more conviction in that release's design direction than here. Close but no cigar, I feel.

| "Don't have negative thoughts. Remember your mantras." |

I don't hold any production difficulties or inexperience against Hudson staff, despite my hangups, and Faxanadu accomplishes more than it's often given credit. One's moxie in battle and exploration often leads to hidden rewards, or the satisfaction of clobbering bad guys before they ever get the chance to react. Minibosses show up frequently as the story progresses, with each posing a unique problem to solve (will I jump over fireballs or block them with my shield? or how about pinning these jumping eldritch things against the wall to not dodge all the time?). While it can be tedious to backtrack all the way to the beginning or grind for a big wallet early on, doing so grants access to a couple of the best items in the game, rewarding anyone who takes their time to learn the game ASAP and preserve one's life long enough.

Hudson seemed to have a knack for immediately following poor design choices with smart ones; one screen filled with hard-to-hit ranged attackers can just as quickly lead to another with health-dropping fodder! I find Faxanadu pleasantly accessible for an ARPG of its vintage despite the pendulum swinging from quite (sometimes) very good sequences to weak ones. Hit feedback's always satisfying, as is the crunchy but legible audiovisual design. Having just eight items means, in an ideal run, you can stock a bevy of potions and powerful items to seize the advantage, especially when fighting those damn flying bees or disabling bigger guys' means of claiming space. At its best, the game makes you feel empowered through both well-paced encounters and some of the more satisfyingly cheesy strategies one can pull off in an ARPG. Figuring out simply where to go and what to do is also a highlight, thanks to nicely written NPCs throughout the realm giving you hints and clearly delineating questlines.

However, Faxanadu's most convincing strengths lie in the atmospheres it evokes, defying the Famicom's limitations to create something rarely matched in 8-bit xRPGs. Simply put, it looks incredible for an '87 console game. Tile upon tile of ornate details, greebles, and textures found both in pixels and CRT blurs combine to illustrate an otherwise fairly generic world in greater depth. Florid passages transition into harsh fortresses, then heading into the Tree's ethereal insides, without ever feeling thrown together. This game does much better at capturing the interminable, oppressive sadness and claustrophobia of Falcom's Xanadu while providing real variety in environments. (I wish each town looked more unique after Eolis, but I doubt they had enough memory to achieve that.) By the game's finale, I felt that creeping dread on my back which the best gothic adventures provide, somehow captured within the confines of Hudson's simple premise and handiwork.

In a year of superlative action role-playing titans, Faxanadu takes a pratfall or two, desperate to keep up, and I can't help but admire it.

Some arcade games make it past location testing without issue; occasionally they need some tuning, or a redesign, but nothing prohibitive. Others fail to meet expectations and get canned. A select few survive this stage despite not passing muster, and that's possibly what happened with Donkey Kong 3. It's a sad yet mundane story of a product unable to meet (let alone surpass) its precursors, all the while eclipsed by the genre competitors it was aping.

Our tale begins further back than the original Donkey Kong, however, as this sequel owes much more to Nintendo's ill-fated vertical shooters of the time, particularly Radar Scope and Space Firebird. Both ancestors offered technically competent but uninteresting variations on the ubiquitous Space Invaders formula. To the latter's credit, the developers had a solid grasp on sound and graphical feedback by this point, with players feeling that crunchy impact while mowing down alien hordes. But the lack of risk-reward features like the degrading shields in Taito's game, or the cleverly evolving raid and bullet patterns of Galaga a bit later, meant that these post-Sheriff shooters were just too spare and derivative to stand out. I can definitely see why Nintendo's last attempt to break into the shooter market went for a mix of platforming, puzzling, and blaster action. And they would have had a winner if not for some critical problems in the pernicious primate's latest title.

The dastardly donk's back at it again…in a greenhouse? I suppose it's better than Congo Bongo's colonialist chase through the jungles. Genyo Takeda and Shigeru Miyamoto help provide the customary trappings of an early-'80s Nintendo arcade release, with fairly responsive controls accompanied by a very readable set of graphics. I rarely struggle to figure out what's happening on-screen even way late into a playthrough, and the SFX ring clearly in my ears. Nothing here feels like an evolution beyond Donkey Kong Jr., though. The likes of SEGA and Namco were already starting to produce more audiovisually stimulating stuff like the former's DK clone and the latter's Mappy. Also lacking here is much of the series' humor—the most I can recall is my amusement whenever DK gets his head stuck in the beehive. It's a rather sober outing for not-Mario vs. not-Kong, contrary to expectations that these developers had previously set. I'd be fine with all this if the game design itself was strong, but, well…

Simply put, the game's a bit too easy, with its difficulty level evolving mainly from faster attacks and a few additional enemy types. Our protagonist Stanley may have a measly little pesticide pump to work with, but the admittedly clever goal of scaring DK to the top means it's possible to ignore the bugs and just go for broke. Arguably the most fun I can have with Donkey Kong 3 is exactly that: speedrunning each board to get as high a time bonus as possible, ensuring I can regularly extend my lives. That sounds fun on paper; now imagine this game throwing you a frequent gun power-up which trivializes combat entirely. Sure, you have to actually lose a life for the upgrade to reappear, and there's still some hits on DK to go before it tumbles. But the relative ease of getting 1-ups via fast stage clears means it's often too easy to get this item. One has to play several stages before there's much threat of bees successfully stealing away with your flowers…which means perfect bonuses become a formality rather than a reward. Combine all these flaws and we've got a game loop which struggles to encourage more skillful play and leads to unsatisfying high-score runs.

The echoes of mediocre starfighting action from Nintendo's pre-Donkey Kong bombs reverberate throughout this final numbered entry, contrary to the heights their R&D teams would reach via many Family Computer releases to come. I feel bad for Genyo Takeda especially since he's so often singled out as the one responsible for playable yet dismal software such as this. To me, it doesn't seem as though releases like this suffered from a lack of foresight, ambition, or no-nonsense design. He later directed the StarTropics games, simultaneously within Nintendo's house style and quite distinct from anything Miyamoto's crew were involved with. (Let's also remember that Miyamoto was involved with Donkey Kong 3, yet the besmirchment's sent elsewhere.) Something managed to go wrong with each and every one of the company's arcade shooters, regardless of circumstances, and it's no surprise that they later played it safe with Solar Striker. If there's anything I'll give Donkey Kong 3 credit for, it's that shooting-heavy action platformers were a rarity in 1983. Add this distinction to the game's brand power and I'm unsurprised that it still sold reasonably well to arcade operators in Japan, no matter the lack of staying power. Still, I'd rather play Moon Patrol; even the best PCBs of '83 struggled to match that one in quality and replayability.

Save for its quick appearance on the Famicom, Donkey Kong 3 fell into footnote status much quicker than the average Nintendo hit of the time, and I attribute that to its shortcomings more than just its small delights. There's still a competent action game in here whenever you're unable to immediately trivialize a stage. I had fun timing my shots to avoid blocking myself with stunned snakes. The way Stanley gets wiped out by an ambush of insects is morbidly amusing. And while it becomes too damn straightforward after 15 minutes, I hardly mind this kind of accessible arcade experience after playing some of the period's more punishing stuff. But in exchange for that ease of completion, I expect way more variation in levels, enemy characteristics, and types of traps to deal with. It's because the game settles for so much less than it promises that I can't help but rate it so low. And as 1984's catalog would show, Nintendo themselves knew that the future belonged to increasingly complex and extensible game loops, even for cartridges as constrained as Excitebike. (Hell, it's a wonder that Takeda's own Sky Skipper gets more retrospective praise than anyone ever expected.) In the end, this gassed-up-the-ass gorilla had reached the end of his usefulness; it would take something altogether new and wild to bring back the beast.

Six unlucky victims of a plane crash somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. One island full of hunger, secrets, indigenous peoples, and more. No rescue in sight—just the hope of salvaging the wreckage and radioing for any help out there, or somehow completing one of a few viable vehicles to escape in. It's a rough life, surviving on a deserted island leagues away from home, but Mujintou Monogatari (or "Deserted Island Story") livens up this cute Crusoe-de with raising sim tropes and an optimistic aesthetic. Years before the Survival Kids and Lost in Blue series (plus The Sims 2: Castaway Life!), KSS & Open Sesame produced one of classic Japanese PC gaming's best strategy adventures, and I've played enough to say that with confidence. Its lack of exposure and fan translation, even within the PC-98's Anglosphere fandom, saddens me.

| Marooned in Blue |

The story begins like any good disaster movie: a Boeing passenger jet drifts through stormy weather, doing fine until its systems fail for some reason. With pilots scrambling to avert the worst and the civilians on-board panicking at their descent, it's a small miracle that the player-named protagonist awakens intact on a sunny summer beach. Guiding our high-school boy across the coast, we bump into a motley band of castaways: young and precocious Ayase, girlboss sophisticated flight attendant Erina, overbearing but helpful team dad "Professor", talented college-level computer diva Rika, and dependable tomboy student Saori. Teamwork ensues! They set up a simple shack, promise to put aside their misgivings and differences, and set about collecting the food, water, tools, and know-how to thrive here and eventually return home. As I mentioned earlier, this involves drafting plans (blueprints, in fact) for a few potential vessels, from a sail-less boat to a MFing zeppelin! Story scenes happen as you explore more of the island, earn enough trust with your co-habitants, and inch ever closer to the fateful day.

Where to begin with all the systems Mujintou Monogatari throws at you? The game largely revolves around a top-down view of your current location, usually the beach camp where you'll need to return to for rest and planning. Moving the cursor's pretty much required, some hotkeys aside, as you select commands from a sidebar and then many deliciously decorated menus. KSS wisely avoided any minigames or sequences revolving around reflexes, let alone the typically awkward numpad key controls of contemporary PC-X8 software. Instead, players just have to manage a wide variety of stats, both for characters and the camp's resources. Collecting potable water and fruits becomes a daily ritual, even for the exhausted. Raw materials needed to craft even basic tools, like machetes and rope, require extensive forays into the jungles, streams, and plains of this seemingly untamed land. Everyone can build up new and current skills over time, but at the cost of temporarily lower yields or wrecking someone's mental state. It's the kind of careful juggling act you'd expect from Princess Maker 2, with just as many variables for thankfully more predictable outcomes.

| Deserted Island Foibles |

Unlike in Gainax's iconic raising sim series, though, KSS and the developers offer more plot and cast interactions to maintain the opening's strong pacing. For example, I met the island's major tribe a bit before halfway through the game, a pleasant encounter with locals just as curious about us as we are about them. The Professor gets giddy at the sight of seemingly unexplored ruins; Erina struggles to adapt to a life without Western amenities; Ayase and Saori both vie for the title of Genki Girl, if only to mask their loneliness; and an aloof Rika, seemingly the most capable of the bunch, confides her self-doubt with the protagonist she's starting to fall for. There's enough crisscrossing threads and details that the often repetitive tasks and ventures into unknown territory remain intriguing. As the player nears any of the endings they're pursuing, Mujintou Monogatari also starts to probe interesting ideas—mainly the discomfort of both living here and soon having to depart and leave this tight-knight, caring group of people. Additional interludes like a drunken going-away party (which the whole band participates in, concerningly), plus evidence of WWII-era Imperial presence on the island via a long marooned serviceman, enrich the narrative.

All this gets reinforced in the game loop itself, as you must set up search parties with each person's compatibility in mind. Pair the wrong two characters up and they'll fail spectacularly! On the flipside, smart combinations can lead to discovering secret areas or items earlier, and these dynamic duos also do better at item crafting. Almost every aspect here conveys the importance of communication, compromise, and cooperation in desperate circumstances. The group hardly avoids conflict, but they work through these ups-and-downs in a naturalistic manner, which matches the occasionally silly but serious tone of the story. And this really helps because Mujintou Monogatari, though not brutally hard, is still a demanding piece of software. Players have to not just understand the island, its residents, and where you can forage from, but they also need to raise the "civilization" rating back at camp to progress further.

Crafting becomes increasingly important even before you've fully mapped out the island, and it's the clunkiest system for sure. Every team member can equip various items to aid in exploration, most of which are only accessible after checking out enough hotspots or surveying a given range of the wilderness. Once you've found key items in the wild and added them to a ramshackle crafts shop, then the manufacturing can commence! This involves a lot of less-than-satisfying fiddling around in menus, flipping between screens to assess resources needed for creation vs. what's available at the moment. Still, this spate of poor user interface design didn't bother me for too long. Arguably the trickiest section in this game is the opening hour itself since you've only got a lifeboat's worth of rations and liquids to work with. Moving quick and taking a few risks early on pays off.

| All the Pretty Sights |

Beyond how well it plays and immerses one in this torrid scenario, Mujintou Monogatari has lush, memorable audiovisuals and style to accompany players through their journey. I think people had to work harder than usual to make an ugly PC-98 pixel art experience, and KSS certainly succeeds at visualizing a gorgeous, inviting tropical realm. So many UI windows, land textures, and background CGs pop out in their 640x400 resolution glory, working with the platform's system rather than against. Maybe the music could have been catchier or better developed to match, but it's still a nice set of tunes, ranging from poppy marches to pensive background orchestration. A lot of people clamor to these mid-'90s "aesthetic" PC-X8 adventures and xRPGs for the character designs, among other often pervy reasons. I'm glad to report that the characters here are distinctive and as fashionably dressed as expected from the genre; illustrator VOGUE renders all the men, women, and woodland critters in glittering detail, yet still portrays them in dirty and less flattering situations without issue. So much thought clearly went into how the game looks, sounds, and portrays its subjects, more than I'd expect from a '94 raising sim targeting a largely male otaku audience.

And that's another area in which this excels: a general lack of pandering to any one market. There's a couple raunchy moments (yes, there's the Obligatory Hot Springs Episode), and something of a romance towards the end with one of the leading ladies, but it's tame compared to even KSS' other raising sims back then. We're far from blatantly erotic Wrestle Angels or sussy Princess Maker stuff, for better or worse. Sequels to Mujintou Monogatari would dabble with more fanservice, sure, but it wasn't until Mujintou Monogatari R and then a separate 18+ series that KSS and the remaining developers settled for easy money. The original game acquits itself nicely, balancing the occasional red meat for otaku gamers with no-nonsense, respectful treatment of each heroine's agency and complex characterization. (It's kind of weird how the Professor gets the least development here despite his age, but at least he's not just an oji-san stereotype played for laughs. Cold comfort, I guess.) I'd hesitate to deem this entirely wholesome, yet I'd be more justified in recommending this to anyone curious about PC-98 ADV/proto-VN soft than, well, a bit under half the commercial library which sits firmly in NSFWville.

KSS had found a strong niche by '94 thanks to intimidating but rewarding sims like Mujintou Monogatari, and they wouldn't be going anywhere awful for years to come. They remained one of the last well-balanced publishers releasing PC-98 exclusives into its waning years, and their exploits on Sony's ascendant PlayStation proved even more fruitful. While the first sequel to this desert-island fantasy largely reused the premise and tried out a different set of tropes, Mujintou Monogatari 3: A.D. 1999 transplanted the gather-craft-escape format to an earthquake-ravaged Tokyo, evoking the majesty and it-can-happen-here horrors of kaiju media and certainly the '95 Kobe quakes from that period. Sadly, like many once acclaimed but overlooked Japanese PC game franchises, this one ended up in the easy-horny pit, a victim of cash-grabs and hastily made ero-anime from KSS' own in-house animation firm, Pink Pineapple. Let's not allow that to become the legacy of this obscure series out West. Rather than settle for that or the downgraded (though admirable) Super Famicom port, I hope communities like this endeavor to try out and appreciate the PC-98 original, and ideally get some fan translators interested. Mujintou Monogatari earned a kind of prestige few other sims on the system could, hence its console successors, and it'd be a shame if this didn't get the historic reappraisal it deserves.

Xtreme sports gaming and the British fascination with motorsports—name a more iconic combo. Then rizz it up with Fyre Festival's acceptable cousin and you get this game, predating the Forza Horizon series and the paradigm it's established. While modern Forza trades on its easy open-world structure and room for customization, MotorStorm: Pacific Rift hails from a time when impressive audiovisuals and tight arcade-y campaigns were more than enough. Ex-Psygnosis staffers at Evolution Studios not only had a competitor in Bizarre Creations to keep them honest, but enough cachet with Sony at large to try something this extravagant. The original MotorStorm played a key role in selling the PS3 to wider audiences, so all its sequel had to do was iterate louder, longer, and harder more confident than ever. Challenge accepted, I guess. In the end, Evolution made something reaching well beyond expectations, for better or worse, with much more stuff and challenge to offer.

| Bodies and bikes beyond repair |

Pacific Rift knows what it wants and how to deliver it. We're no longer on the continent, sliding through muddy canyons or atop arid cliffs, but having a once-in-a-lifetime demolition derby across a suspiciously tidy tropical isle. Like every amalgam of Hawaii, Tahiti, and New Zealand ever featured in games, this resort island has it all: pristine beaches, fiery volcanoes, dense jungle, and treacherous peaks to race upon. Let's put aside the cavalier desecration of Earth's last refuges, all for the amusement of the bourgeosie, and accept that Evolution just wants players to perform awe-inspiring feats of racing and stunt-craft. It's still the '90s in these developers' teary eyes, and that means no end of leagues, minigames, and gleefully impolite road raging for hours on end. We get nothing less than the decline of Western civilization dressed up as pop punk, off-roaders wearing brand sponsorships, and air pollution thick enough to send the crowds into a fugue. As a hypothetical funeral ceremony for the xtreme sports age, it ticks many boxes.

For as much sheer exhilaration as Evolution's down-and-dirty racer gives me, there's plenty more frustration than I had hoped for. This mainly boils down to excessive rubber-banding—lightweight early on, but quite noticeable heading into the later stages and leagues. If you ever end up on a teeny lil' bike or have to race big rigs in an ATV, then godspeed! The AI loves to punt, shove, shunt, and wreck the player as much it can after the opening hour or so of racing, which makes driving anything but the tankiest vehicles a chore when having to restart. Rather than give more leeway via a qualifying lap to learn each course, or a way to reduce/disable rubber-banding entirely, Pacific Rift enforces its "our way or bust" progression and difficulty balance to a fault. Not a fan.

| The smell of oil and gas in the air |

Thankfully the game offers 16 race-tracks and many variations on the iconic MotorStorm ride types to keep things varied. I especially love how the buggies, bikes, and rally cars handle throughout each level, with different track surfaces having a tangible effect on each vehicle. Controls are weighty, almost simcade-like compared to the golden age of Burnout, but refined from the prequel and nary hard enough to use when navigating traffic. Part of this ease comes from the level designs themselves, with ample space to corner around opponents and room enough to go several racers wide in spots. Evolution balks at the claustrophobia of other racers, instead asking "what if all our courses were as expansive as battlefields?" And they made the right choice. Watching and participating in the sheer carnage that is high-level Pacific Rift racing, from Knievel-ish leaps of faith to hardcore brawls in the dirt and sand with neither contestant coming out on top.

Customization, though present via choosing multiple driver skins and liveries, never becomes the centerpiece it ought to. I'd have loved to tinker around with custom skins and other ways of tuning up vehicles beyond a few selectable adjustments. Had I been around for the game's online scene, this would have brought some much-needed longevity into the game loop. With no way to really make any ride your own or set up custom race series, Evolution must have figured their average player was already overwhelmed and needed a simpler structure to keep the chaos parse-able. I've got no better way to explain why, despite building off the original MotorStorm's framework, the sequel lacks that ambition in meaningful playtime which the Horizon games at least try to attain. Regardless, I'd bet this ended up more fun with humans than when going up against an AI mainly interested in forcing you to wipeout, let alone race competitively.

| And the glint of a solitary shaft of chromium steel |

What I can't ruthlessly criticize is the presentation in Pacific Rift. No amount of aging textures, lower-poly environments, or carefully hacked VFX can take away from how succulent these graphics are. It's a great combo of arcade realism and baffling technical wizardry, something the PS3 could have used more of. Water ripples and shines convincingly, the earth molds and deforms according to tectonic and artificial pressures, and particles leap up from all directions onto the screen in so much detail. At most, I'll concede that this game and its prequel are some of the more visually busy racers one can play, but never enough to make following the racing line and other drivers difficult or annoying. I really wish I had proper minimap, however!

Sony just couldn't deny itself the chance to add a record store's worth of its own labels' licensed music, either, following the tradition they started with Gran Turismo. I struggle to remember a lot of these tracks, even ones from bands like Queens of the Stone Age, but damn if the overall atmosphere isn't fitting. Part of this pleasant amnesia comes from the game's sound design, which outdoes the predecessor's raucous mix of engine roars, crunching metal, and sudden silence when watching yourself careen in slow motion. Combine all this with plenty of post-processing (visual and aural) and the whole thing becomes phantasmagoric, a whirlwind of athleticism and sensory overload that would make Mad Max proud.

Despite only making small improvements over the formula and falling into a bit of an irritating, repetitive slump partway through, I had a damn fun time with MotorStorm: Pacific Rift, just as I hoped. Without having yet played Drive Club, it's easy for me to grasp why people mourn the loss of Evolution Studios, Bizarre, Studio Liverpool, and other arcade racer studios of old. This series shows almost precisely how you can translate the goofy, unrealistic blockbuster delights of '90s racing classics into the HD+ era, what with MotorStorm: Apocalypse going all in on surviving one set-piece after another. Here, though, the action's more organic, shaped by capricious crowds swerving and overtaking against each other to dodge peril and take the podium. It's tempting to compare this to kart racers, so I'll compromise and deem this more of a modern take on what SEGA's Power Drift evoked back in the '80s: a semblance of real motorsports corrupted by ballooning budgets, loud personalities, and proudly throwing caution to the wind. The eternal weekend of motor mayhem lives on.

"Chicken, fight like a robot!" blares the cabinet speaker as I generously leave some killbots alive, moving on to the next room. There's no end to them: monochrome sentinels of death, all bunching up along the walls, all waiting to fire. I ready the ray-gun and trudge forward, fingers on the trigger, reflected through the joystick. This continues for untold iterations as the numbers go up, the Evil Otto bounces down upon its hapless allies, and the rhythm of combat multiplies. Everyone has their place here, the guards uncaring for their neighbors and the smiley-faced custodian uniquely aware of this realm's absurdity.

Ok, ok, it's Berzerk, and it's not that complex aside from catalyzing the deaths of two hapless players. Compared to both emerging maze games and shooters like Space Invaders, this one's appeal must have been immediate: unpredictable gunfights, a sassy robotic narrator, and more chaos than something as scandalous as Death Race could have imagined. The origins of the run 'n gun style arguably trace back farther to Tank and its clones, but changing out vehicles for humanoid avatars lets the pacing slacken and rev up more granularly. Crashing into electrified walls becomes more of a threat than colliding with far-off aggressors, who now threaten more with split-second lasers than an opposite player careening into you. So the dynamic's similar but different enough from the motion-full Asteroids, with danger coming from less angles but requiring quicker reactions.

What undoubtedly helped Berzerk survive its encounter with Williams' Defender is the touted "sense of humor" seen with Evil Otto and how it affects players and AI alike. After all, why risk visiting the next dungeon screen and quickly dying when one could just stay put, safe and sound? The danger and necessary push of Evil Otto remains one of the golden age's most iconic symbols, both scary and ironic. And it only gets better when a savvy player sicks the boisterous bounding ball on unsuspecting droids, racking up points while kiting Otto around each arena. Counting score by each enemy's death, rather than players' successful shots, was maybe the smartest move to extend the game's longevity. There's an upper human limit of how long someone's going to traverse one nondescript room after another, but surviving long enough to abuse this scoring mechanic? Why the hell not!

I'd much rather try and master Jarvis' side-scrolling shooter if I'm having to choose between these games (that, and Defender technically started location testing and initial distribution at the start of '81). But there's a simple charm to creator Alan McNeil's attempt at crossing genre lines, evoking the first dungeon crawlers without their labored pace of play. McNeil himself came up with Berzerk's premise based on his own nightmare of robots chasing him through hallways, let alone the memory of security browbeater David Otto haunting the designer from his time working with Dave Nutting Associates. [1] People always talk about how this game feels like wandering through a dreamscape they can't escape, and I think there's some truth to that. On the bright side, it's cool to see McNeil take the early micro-processor lessons learned with Midway's Gun Fight (a recreation of Taito's TTL-chip classic Western Gun). We're talking about the guy who later laid the foundation of Macromedia Director and other technology, so it's unsurprising he could get so much from basic hardware.

Juking bots with Otto and luring them into fences calls an earlier game to mind: CHASE, a derivation of a 1976 BASIC game where players have to crash pursuers into objects and each other [2]. This puts Berzerk in the same conversation as other PC-to-arcade transitional software; in fact, it's one of the earliest examples. It's fascinating how much Stern's 1980 smash success treads the line between hobbyist sleeper hit and a throwback to much earlier media like the Berserker novels and publications like Creative Computing. From here, the tendrils extend towards Robotron and its ilk, let alone a direct sequel in Frenzy. I may be moving on from this weird and seemingly simple curiosity, yet it's going to reappear in one form or another as the '80s arcade era marches on.

Bibliography

[1] Hunter, William. “Berzerk.” The Dot Eaters (blog). Accessed January 1, 2024. <https://thedoteaters.com/?bitstory=bitstory-article-2/berzerk>
[2] David, Ahl, and Cotter Bill. “Chase (High Voltage Maze) - Cotter.” Creative Computing, January 1976. Accessed via Internet Archive. <http://archive.org/details/Creative_Computing_v02n01_Jan-Feb1976> Retrieved on January 6, 2024.

Love Is... conceiving your son Milo Casali by artificial insemination, to the chagrin of the Vatican, and announcing this proudly in your comic strip. Love Is... the Casali sons making their own staple of pop media in a similarly simple but unexpected way.

Love Is... the Plutonia Experiment, if I might be so bold. There's nothing but love throughout this entire mapset, a perennial standout among the classic Doom games for reasons debated to this day. For 1996, the mapping designs and concepts employed in PLUTONIA.WAD were avant-garde, yet seem very obvious and simple to modern Doom players. The Casali brothers were done playing by the rules and conventions fellow fan creators were bound to, from overt attempts at realism ("DoomCute" in today's parlage) to prizing adventuring and cheap thrills over exacting endurance tests of skill. For Dario & Milo, it was now or never to challenge, even brutalize their community. A kind of tough love, perhaps.

As a fanmade map pack turned second half of Final Doom, Plutonia serves as a necessary foil to TNT: Evilution's excesses and concessions. The Casalis bros. knew their community maps well, and had already been pushing the possibilities of the pre-source port Doom engine with solo releases like PUNISHER.WAD and BUTCHER.WAD. After id software witnessed their contributions to TNT.WAD—two of the most polished maps in that whole set, Dario's "Pharaoh" and Milo's "Heck"—they met and discussed making a whole new expansion pack to feature in Final Doom. The early maps they showed American McGee quickly became the start for Plutonia, which Dario & Milo had much less time to work on than TeamTNT had for their own mapset.

I could go further into The Plutonia Experiment's history, but Doomworld and Dario's own contributions paint more of the picture already. What you should know on a first playthrough is that one cannot just like this WAD. Nearly everyone I know in the Doom fandom either loves or hates this monument to mid-'90s FPS experimentation. It's more than reasonable to run through Plutonia on a lower difficulty since the maps are well-designed to retain their intensity and skill demands on Hurt Me Plenty at least. But the Casalis built this game as the kind of Japanese game show obstacle course any Doom player in '96 would approach with caution, if not trepidation. There's no remorse, little reprieve, and relatively few dull moments anywhere throughout Plutonia's alienating, jungle-laden mess of arenas, gauntlets, and set-pieces. Tough love indeed.

Not every level hits these marks. I can list some of my own pet-hate experiences, from the very poorly telegraphed "Indiana Jones" invisible bridge in MAP02: Well of Souls, to the cramped teleporting Archvile trap wrecking first-time players in MAP12: Speed. A couple of maps utterly put me off even now, mainly MAP20: The Death Domain (too many gotchas, not enough chances to take cover) or MAP30: Gateway to Hell (another needless tradition, the Icon of Sin finale). Otherwise, that leaves us with thirty difficult but rewarding maps combining Doom II's masterful combat design with more streamlined, less noodly levels to navigate. I think it's a winning combination, even if some 1996 contemporaries like the Memento Mori II mapset showcase prettier or more conceptually ambitious works.

One thing that absolutely works in Plutonia's favor is its difficult but fair approach to most combat scenarios. This is not anything like a Mario kaizo hack or masocore gaming in general. But you'll have every reason to approach fights strategically, using the right weapons and movement at the right time to survive. Both of the brothers prefer small but uniquely lethal combinations of monsters to the giant hordes you see in many popular maps today. Economy of design defines this set in contrast to not just Evilution, but other community-made packs from the time like Memento Mori. A single archvile, a couple revenants, and some cannon fodder imps...put them in a non-trivial space to travel around and you'll have one hell of a battle!

To this end, most maps shower you in higher-tier ammo for those upper-level weapons. Expect to learn the ins and outs of rocket launcher splash damage, or how to efficiently wield the BFG's invisible tracer spread fire. Practice hard enough and you'll get a feel for how to conserve super shotgun ammo as you mow down pinkies, or the basics of redirecting skeleton fireballs into other foes to get them infighting. The Casalis weren't making hard-ass shit for the sake of being hardasses. At a time when speedrunning demos were gaining popularity and the Doom community's skills and metagame were evolving, these two just wanted to gift everyone a bloody chocolate box for Valentine's. True love waits.

Funny thing is, these maps aren't as bizarre or off-putting as one might think, at least when you realize they're clever remixes of id's own levels! It makes sense how, with only several weeks to build and test their vanilla-compatible maps largely by themselves, the Casalis would chop up useful bits from Doom I & II for their own purposes. Milo's MAP21: Slayer is an obvious riff on 'O' of Destruction and other Romero levels, for instance, while Dario's works like MAP08: Realm liberally borrow ideas from Sandy Petersen's oft-maligned creations. This does mean the set can't be as revelatory or unique as it could have, despite some memorable new ideas like the iconic archvile maze in MAP11. Still, there's plenty of clever trope reuse all throughout Plutonia that had few if any contenders in the community back then. We're a decade-and-a-half off from projects like Doom the Way id Did, after all, and these time-saving homages to the original games came in clutch for the project.

Some make this more obvious than others, like the utterly chaotic, classic slaughtermap remix of MAP01: Entryway from Doom II. This new creation, Go 2 It, even seems at odds with the spare monster placement and emphasis on precision attrition Plutonia's advocated for up until now. Hundreds of baddies swarm the bones of an opening stage best known then as the main multiplayer 1v1 map. Yet applying your newfound reflexes and reactions to enemy attacks makes the original slaughter experience not just viable, but fucking brilliant to play. All these funny lil' guys on screen are just going to kill each other anyway if you can juke them into hitting one another. Simple strategies lead to satisfying successes. It's more than just "git gud", as some will profess—more so getting flexible and adapting to scary but beatable challenges as you go.

Without Plutonia, I'm not sure I'd have ever gotten into Doom mapping, let alone a ton of newer fan creations both easier and harder than Final Doom. This feels like a necessary leap in complexity and player demands, one that's often a bit too harsh and formulaic yet well-meaning with how it challenges you. If Doom II proved that id's template was no fluke, and community efforts like Evilution and Memento Mori II showcased the story-/adventure-driven possibilities of new maps, then Plutonia's a necessary course correction for its time. The Casalis loved not just how they could push the engine to its theorized limits, but how they could maximize Romero & Petersen's game design for all its worth. What others see as unfair (which I occasionally agree with), I see as ascetic and utterly focused on avoiding downtime. There's just enough negative space in these maps between encounters to give you a breather, but never too much to bore.

Love Is... a compelling mixture, a chemical reaction that keeps you invested. It might get ugly and wear you down at times, yet it keeps you coming back. Sure it can be painful, as much as life ought not to. But if it helps you grow stronger, more understanding and empathetic, is that such a bad trade? I've had a healthy relationship with The Plutonia Experiment for years now, one which taught me make simple but effective moves in combat, or fun maps for my friends to play. This kind of appreciation takes time and effort; I won't fault anyone if they can't commit to it, and I recognize the privileges one might need to get this far. In the end, I like to think it's all been worth the patience. True love waits.

One of those epochal clashes between dirty, abrasive, endearing eco-romance and cute, sinister Y2K-era techno-optimism turned satire of imperialism. These angles lock arms in a subtle but ever-looming creation story of what video games, as puzzle boxes and a storytelling medium, could become in the new millennium. Love-de-Lic finally mastered this kind of anti-RPG disguising a clever adventure, and L.O.L's occasional flaws rarely distract from the majesty and sheer emotional gamut this offers. Here's a Gaia of broken promises, uprooted existence, twisted social covenants, and how to survive and adapt in a harsh universe where we're the only love we give.

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

If Moon RPG was a thesis polemic and UFO a dissertation, then Lack of Love was Kenichi Nishii & co.'s post-doctorate trial by fire. The era of overly experimental, often commercially unviable projects like this on PlayStation, SEGA Saturn, and now Dreamcast was slowly in decline. Almost all the post-bubble era investment capital needed to support teams like them would filter increasingly into stable, more conservative groups and companies working on console games. In a sense, they saw themselves as a dying breed, the kind that gets stomped all over in this year-2000 cautionary tale. I'm just glad Ryuichi Sakamoto helped produce this and get it to market, especially given the system's poor performance in Japan. His music and environmentalist/anti-capitalist stance stick out at times throughout the story, but he's mainly taking a backseat and giving Love-de-Lic their last chance to create something this ambitious together. In all the years since, the studio's staff diaspora has led to countless other notable works, and parts of L.O.L. both hint at those while revealing what was lost.

We're far from Chibi-Robo or the Tingle spinoffs here, after all. Lack of Love shows unwavering confidence in the player's ability to roleplay as this evolving, invisibly sentient creature who experiences many worlds on one planet, both native and invasive. Every real or fake ecosystem we travel to, whether by accident or in search of respite, offers enough challenge, task variation, and indulgent audiovisuals to keep one going. I wish I could say that for more players, though. It might not reach the difficulty and obtuseness of much older graphic adventures from the Sierra and Infocom glory years, but I've seen enough people who like classic games bounce off this one to know it's a hard ask. You have no choice but to poke, prod, and solve each environment with verbs you'd normally never consider, such as simply sleeping in a spot for longer than feels comfortable or, well, interesting. It's more than beatable, but I won't begrudge anyone for watching this or relying on a walkthrough. LDL designed L.O.L to be dissected, not gulped down. Tellingly, though, the game starts and ends with a titanic beast possibly devouring you unless you act quickly, instinctively perhaps.

One moment that frustrated me, but also revealed the genius behind it all, was trying to race the bioluminescent flyers on level 5. By this point I've transformed a few times, having become a frilly flightless fellow with plenty of brawn and speed. Darting across this mixture of bizarre swamp, desert, and grassland terrain has led to what feels like a softlock, a set of plant walls I can only squeeze by if I use the right tool. Lack of Love succeeds in telegraphing points of interest for most puzzles, be it the obvious dirt starting line for the night races in this grove, or the cold and minimalistic off-world objects and structures seen later. What's never as obvious is how exactly to interact with other creatures for more complex tasks. Helping out by killing a larger bully or retrieving a parent's lost child is straightforward, but something as simple as just entering the race used a good hour of my time here. Oh sure, I could win the race all right…but it took way too long for the game to recognize and reward me, forcing another long wait from night to day and back again since there's only one lap a cycle.

I recognize that my impatience got in the way of just accepting this, one of life's many setbacks. So I simply waited all day and half a night to repeat the ritual until I got it right. A majority of L.O.L's dialogue with players and critics comes down to how it considers rituals, those habits justified & unjustified which define our daily lives. If anything, the interrogation of normalized behaviors, and the true intentions or lack of them hiding behind, define the studio's short career. As I gorged on helmet-headed stilt walkers and headbutted tree-nuts to slurp up their fruit, it dawned on me how well this game handles repetition. Many times did I get entranced into calling, roaring, and pissing all over each map to see if some cool event or interaction could happen where it'd make sense. Most of these levels are well-built for quickly crossing from one relevant hotspot to another. That desire to see it all through, no matter when I got humiliated or had to slog past something I'd solved but failed to do just right at just the right moment…it makes all of this worthwhile.

Progression throughout Lack of Love isn't usually this janky or unintuitive though. The game's main advancement system, the psychoballs you collect to activate evolution crystals, accounts for skipping the befriending process with some of your neighbors. It makes this a bit more replayable than usual for the genre, as you can leave solving the tougher riddles to a repeat run while continuing onward. I wish there wasn't anything as poorly built as this firefly race, or the somewhat tedious endgame marathon where your latest form can't run. But while that impedes the game's ambitions somewhat, it usually isn't a dealbreaker. LDL's crafted an impressive journey out of life's simplest moments, pleasures, and triumphs over adversity, from your humble start inside a hollow tree to the wastes of what the eponymous human resettling project has wrought. There's only a few "special" moves you can learn, from dashing to

In short, L.O.L. is a study of contrasts: the precious, vivacious yet forever dangerous wilds of this planet vs. the simpler, stable yet controlling allure of organized systems and societies. Nothing ever really works out in nature, not even for the apex predators like me. Yet everything has to work according to some plan or praxis in any form of civilization, something made possible through explicit communication. Love de Lic's challenge was to treat players with as much respect for their intelligence as possible before giving them something inscrutable—no straight line to triumph. This game had to feel alien, but still somehow understandable for its themes and messages to resonate. It's an unenviable goal for most developers. Just ask former LDL creators who have moved on to more manageable prospects. Obscurantism is a mixed blessing all throughout the experience, and I can't imagine this game any other way.

The opening level at least prepares you for the long, unwieldy pilgrimage to enlightenment through a few key ways. Popping out of the egg, swimming to shore, and the camera panning over a creature evolving via silver crystals gives a starting push. Then there's the initial "call for help", a newborn creature struggling to get up. Getting your first psychoball requires not aggression, but compassion for other ingenues like you. On the flipside, you end up having to kill a predator much larger and stronger than yourself, just to save harmless foragers. I definitely wish the game did a better job of avoiding this Manichean binary for more of the psychoball challenges, but it works well this early on. Maybe the initially weird, highly structured raise-the-mush-roof puzzle west of start was a hint of more involved sequences either planned or cut down a bit

Crucially, the following several stages demonstrate how Lack of Love's alien earth is far from some arcadian paradise. The game simply does not judge you for turning traitor and consuming the same species you just helped out; regaining their trust is usually just as easy. One look at the sun-cracked, footstep-ravaged wasteland outside your cradle portends further ordeals. LDL still wants you to succeed, however. The start menu offers not only maps + your current location for most levels, but a controls how-to and, most importantly, a bestiary screen. It's here where each character's name offers some hint, small or strong, pointing you towards the right mindset for solving their puzzle. Matching these key names with key locations works out immediately, as I figured out with the "shy-shore peeper" swimming around the level perimeter. Likewise, the next stage brought me to a labyrinth of fungi, spider mites, and two confused gnome-y guys who I could choose to reunite. Taking the world in at your own pace, then proceeding through an emotional understanding each environment—it's like learning how to breathe again.

L.O.L finds a sustainable cadence of shorter intro levels, quick interludes, and larger, multi-part affairs, often split up further by your evolution path. Giving three or five psychoballs to the crystal altars sends you on a path of no return, growing larger or more powerful and sometimes losing access to creatures you may or may not have aided. The music-box pupating and subsequent analog spinning to exit your shell always pits a grin on my face. Rather than just being punctuation for a numbers game (ex. Chao raising in Sonic Adventure, much as I love it), every evolution marks a new chapter in the game's broader story, where what you gain or lose with any form mirrors the existential and environmental challenges you've faced. As we transition from the insect world to small mammals and beyond, the heal-or-kill extremes ramp up, as do the level designs. I wouldn't call Love-de-Lic's game particularly mazy or intricate to navigate, but I learned to consult the map for puzzles or sleeping to activate the minimap radar so I could find prey. It'd be easy for this evolve-and-solve formula to get stale or ironically artificial, yet LDL avoids this for nearly the whole runtime!

Early hours of traipsing around a violent but truly honest little universe give way to a mysterious mid-game in which L.O.L. project puppet Halumi intervenes in the great chain of being. An impossibly clean, retro-futurist doll of a destroyer plops down TVs in two levels, each showing a countdown to…something big. Nothing good, that's for sure, and especially not for the unsuspecting locals you've been trying to live with. So far it's mostly just been a couple short tunes and Hirofumi Taniguchi's predictably fascinating sound design for a soundscape, but now the iconic tune "Artificial Paradise" starts droning in the background. Musical ambiance turns to music as a suite, a choreographed piece overriding the vocals and cries you know best. Then the terraformer bots come, and the game introduces another stylistic dalliance: the disaster movie removed from civilization. We've gone from colorful, inviting, mutualistic landscapes to invaded craggy rocksides, a very survival horror-ish insect hive where you play Amida with worker bugs, and a suspiciously utopian "final home" for our alien cat and others just like us.

The final levels satisfyingly wrap all these loose threads into a narrative on the ease with which precarious lives and ecology fall prey to not just the horrors of colonization, but the loss of that mystery needed to keep life worth living. Neither you nor the last creatures you help or save have time or dignity left as the L.O.L. project faces its own consequences, radiating across the world in turn. But I'm familiar with that shared dread and understanding of what it's all coming to, as someone living through destructive climate change my whole lifetime. How does one carry on in a land you remember functioning before it was poisoned? What can family, friends, mutual interests, etc. do against the tide of sheer, uncaring war or collapse?

There's a definite rage hiding behind Love-de-Lic's minimalist approach, only rising to the surface at the game's climax. You can taste the proverbial cookie baked with arsenic, a barbed attitude towards living through these times after growing up hoping and expecting a bright tomorrow. To make it out of this world alive takes a lot of seriousness, but also heart and a sense of humor, which Lack of Love never lets you forget. The ending sequence had me beyond relieved, overjoyed yet mournful about how no environmentalist hero's journey of this sort seems to work beyond the plane of fiction. Is it a lack of love consuming us, or the forced dispersion of it? L.O.L. justifiably refuses to give a clear answer, something even its developers are searching for. It's not the most sophisticated kind of optimistic nihilism anyone's imbued in a work, but a very fitting choice for this adventure.

Plot and thematic spoilers ahead

————————————————————————————

Friendship, whether convenient or desirable on its own, becomes even more important during the second robot attack you suffer through. A mutual species has been living with your newfound family, and one of these more plant-/shroom-shaped fellows is still mourning their dead feline pal near the bottom of the map. Yet again, though, rituals and routines like the egg worship above supplant the ignored pain and due diligence owed in this community. Shoving the guy away from an incoming bulldozer, only to get squashed yourself, is the most you end up doing in this apocalypse. It only gets worse after awakening not in the natural world, but an eerie facsimile of it, built aboard the L.O.L. spaceship that we saw dive into the planet with a virus' silhouette. Even highly-evolved lifeforms, now able to talk in bursts and build a structured society, lose sight and make mistakes. But only humanity can play God for these fauna and flora, such that you're imprisoned in a hell superficially resembling home.

Gone are the toils of comprehending other species, or stumbling haphazardly through situations that should have killed you long ago. All that Halumi and the humans want from you, their obscure object of desire, is to pass basic push-and-pull block mazes. Imagine sitting down for your high school exams, having studied the world and its intricacies for so long, only for them to hand you an arcane IQ test. There's no assumption of ecological intelligence in the robot's data banks or AI model, just a delight in watching you wriggle through Backrooms Sokoban. Halumi merely chuckles as you clear each room, then lures you into an abstract abyss of phosphenes just to play tag. We then watch the banal. comically on-the-nose mission video recounting humanity's failure to manage their own planet and ecosystem, meaning they must export their hopes, dreams, waste, and destruction to another. Some reward for getting this far in a contrived, worthless series of "tests" they're apparently obligated to perform.

And you'll quickly notice your suffering isn't that unique, either. The quote-unquote habitat caging you is policed by Halumi's robots and, more bizarrely, flying baby androids dispensing this game's send-up of pet food. It's clearly nothing too healthy or appropriate for the menagerie of organic inhabitants imprisoned on this ark. They're literally shitting themselves everywhere they go after eating! And those who fail the tests get treated as literal waste, too. Falling into the scrap closet, with its once-pristine walls peeling and the remaining animals suffering without dignity, shows the depths that this whole "sustainable" planetary resettlement program has sunk to. Some might say the game gets much too unsubtle at this point, which I can agree with. But given the current state of poaching, zoos-as-businesses, habitat displacement, industrial ranching, and careless pet adoption in our own world, maybe these messages work best when they're blunt. Halumi forcing his units to not kill, study, and presumably burn you up after just for failing a test is perhaps the only sign of remorse this antiseptic dungeon offers.

Impressing Halumi with each test comes to a head when we're given a Hobson's choice: the hilariously, insultingly ugly baby-bot or the friend we had sacrificed our safety for back in the pridelands. Predictably, you get thrown in the trash again for making the better choice. Choosing the infant, and all that humanity represents through Halumi and their army, merely makes you a glorified pet for the robot, stuck in the same fancy hotel room as two other dubiously lucky critters (plus Dave Bowman on the bed, out of camera—IDK, this feels like a 2001 reference just as much as the game's intro). Did I mention we haven't evolved for quite a while now? Guess what you become next: an awkward, baleful mirror of the baby from earlier, unable to run and too oversized for these new comforts purportedly made with kids in mind.

No one's at home here, not even the robots if that's even a concept they're built to comprehend (which I doubt). We may be out of hell, but this purgatory isn't much better. After helping the alligator with the shower and the flowery bloke with table manners, the soft but melancholy downtempo lounge of Sakamoto's "Dream" rings out from the hi-fi stereo. Beyond being one of my new favorite melodic ambient songs in any soundtrack, it perfectly conveys how much these "successful" test animals have lost, something we're used to even as we resist the circumstances. It's their last respite, just as playing this game might, for some, be an escape from our own degrading world in which we're seemingly powerless to stop the bleeding.

To the master robot's credit, they aren't too keen on keeping us here at all costs. Halumi's got big plans to fulfill, as they're quick to shoo us off from the ship's bridge. A quick peek outside the rocket shows the beginnings of an American-style highway going nowhere good, and an abnormal dust storm blowing every which way. I tried looking at my map here and found, to both horror and amusement, that there is no map at this point in Lack of Love. The protagonist's been disconnected from the outside world for so long, and exposed to the hubris and demystification of these captors, that only what intuition's left can lead the way out of here. L.O.L gives you compelling, frustrating predicament: stay in the Artificial Paradise—the map of the realm consuming the realm itself, Borges' fabled copy corrupting and then replacing the original—or finish your pilgrimage, an impossible trek through a ruined, desiccated, hopeless bastardization of home?

LDL already knows I'm going to press onward. That’s what they taught me, this new citizen of the earth, right from the start! And of course it's painful, having nothing to feed on as I crawl desperately towards a far-off exit, saving a primate friend in the process. But hope re-emerges when reuniting with that friend from the village, waiting so long to see if we're okay. The story's optimistic views on mutualism within anarchy finally collide with all the forced order and folly of its antagonists. Few moments in video games feel as biting and final as this last set-piece, a forced run away from falling tectonic plates as the L.O.L project finally collapses under the weight of all its systemic damage to the planet. We also have one last metamorphosis, saving you from death by hunger and replacing the corrupted infant form with one resembling an early human, alternating between running on twos and fours. All the player's achievements, elation, and suffering have built up to this, whether there's survival or mere death waiting at the end.

In the end, L.O.L. opts for a happy ending it's done everything to suggest can't happen. The planet rejects the virus, despite having deteriorated so much it loses its magnetic field. All of Halumi and the robots' systems suffer systemic collapse, preventing much more fatal consequences had they continued sapping the global lifeforce. Most importantly, our "hero" and boon companion crest the mountain in time to witness god rays breaking through the storm that had slowed us and threatened doom. I put hero in quotes because, just as with Moon RPG a few years prior, Nishii can't let us leave this fantasy as models to be revered, icons of victory beyond reproach. Even our protagonist had to invade, predate, and take from others their tokens of trust and acceptance, all to reach this point. But in an imperfect reality, this hardly makes us the villain either. This remarkably smart, courageous, and wise duo prevailed against odds not to prove something or selfishly leave this world behind, but to support each other during an eschatological nightmare. Just as that lack of love nearly ruined this world, the overwhelming abundance of it is finally enough to get you and someone else through the end times. Even if it didn't work, would it not have been worth it?

Our story passes on into collective memory, but Halumi's is just beginning. They're an embarrassment to their creators' hopes and whims, the once innocuous but now disgraced mascot of colonialism. Moreover, bots like Halumi and the minions are simply expendable metal to forge anew. L.O.L. ain't gonna stop at just one failure on a single planet, not with humanity's future at stake. So they'll try their luck elsewhere, and probably destroy that wandering rock in the name of civilization. But not this world. This once dominant predator from the heavens is just another vulnerable denizen now, and that's what frees them. The giant who once wielded an army and crushed all biomes to bits now gingerly steers clear of the smallest critter it meets. Halumi's learned to love the world as it is, not from orders on high or as a sandbox to redevelop. And so the circle of life incorporates one more host, a guilty conscience on the way to carving a new, more empathetic destiny from what's left.

————————————————————————————

End of spoilers

One has to wonder how delicately and effortlessly this game touches on something as complicated as anarchy vs. hierarchy. Both protagonist and antagonist ultimately seek a place in their world: a mercurial, fluid entity among the bio-sprawl, or a cybernetic King Canute damming the primordial ocean of life and commanding its tides. There's a clear throughline from Moon RPG's evil-hero-good-interloper dynamic to the equivalent in this game, but L.O.L. sees room for redemption. It avoids the easy pessimism this premise could thrive upon, albeit not by asserting humanity's exceptionalism in the face of catastrophe. Halumi's just one more anthropomorphic tool exploited by the powers that be to accomplish their foolhardy wars on worlds they think are beneath them. This weaponized cuteness only works until the illusion of respectability or shared gain has evaporated; now they're just a tin can ready to rust away on an abandoned Eden. It's time to stop fighting. It's time to survive.

Lack of Love leaves me wanting despite all that it's evoked from me. Another late-game stage expanding on the prairie village's growing pains, and the tensions between tribe mentality and complex new hierarchies, would have made me rate this even higher. The best bits sometimes get drowned over tetchy player controls, or poorly telegraphed puzzle designs in a few spots. And there aren't quite enough rewards for exploration like I'd hoped, with areas like the desert near the end feeling very barren of interaction or secrets off the expected path. But these all point to the constraints, low budget, and limited time Love-de-Lic had to realize a vision so ambitious that few are trying anything like it today. More privileged groups like mid-2000s Maxis struggled to realize their own comprehensive story of life growing from nothing and adapting to everything. And then there's fanciful but less compelling evolution legends such as EVO: The Search for Life and its PC-98 predecessor. Still I love those projects for their own ambitions, just as I've got nothing but love for L.O.L, warts and all.

Sadly the general public and most game fans either didn't know about it or had other priorities, leaving Love-de-Lic to disband and try their design approach elsewhere. How sad but fitting that any indelible interactive story this ahead of the times should find rejection until decades later. From what interviews and retrospectives we have, it seems as though Nishii, Sakamoto, and others understood this would be the company's end. There's no glory there, just a resignation to the harshness of the video games market and what it quickly excludes from view. All I want now is for you to try giving this a little love, too. Do for L.O.L. now what was improbable when it released into an uncaring media landscape all those years ago. For lack of a better answer to this indignity, I've ended up playing one of my new favorite games, and maybe you could too.

ᴀʟʟ ᴛʜᴇꜱᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅꜱ ᴀʀᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀꜱ ᴇxᴄᴇᴘᴛ ᴇᴜʀᴏᴘᴀ
ᴀᴛᴛᴇᴍᴘᴛ ɴᴏ ʟᴀɴᴅɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ
ᴜꜱᴇ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ᴛᴏɢᴇᴛʜᴇʀ
ᴜꜱᴇ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ɪɴ ᴘᴇᴀᴄᴇ -quote from 2010: The Year We Make Contact

The stuff dreams and nightmares are made of. Earthbound's cosmic horror climax sitting right next to Mavis Beacon touch-typing exercises. A critique and celebration of Dragon Quest not unlike Itoi's Mother series, just more spartan and deadpan. And it's finally translated in English, a privilege few PC-98 games enjoy even today (let alone most '90s East Asian PC software). Kumdor no Ken, or Sword of Kumdor, was creator Michiaki Tsubaki's most popular, well-regarded work during his short stint in games development, an edutainment staple for NEC and Mac computer labs. Many kids and young adults grew up with this, a story-driven word processing trainer for the JRPG age. Its story of exploring a strange land, overcoming bizarre obstacles, and indulging the frivolous but endearing people of this planet resonates with those same players today. Just imagine if Mario Teaches Typing had earned the kind of legacy and following a 16-bit Final Fantasy entry has now. Yet, until very recently, seemingly none in the West knew or cared about this.

| A typing tutor for all seasons |

Maybe I'm just built different, but Sword of Kumdor caught my attention several years ago while I was buzzing around decaying Japanese homepages and fan sites from the pre-Facebook days. It's almost pointillist visual style, learning to touch-type through turn-based combat, and bizarre sense of place and verisimilitude (or sekaikan) beguiled me. The closest Anglosphere equivalents to something this well-made, distinctive, and beloved across demographics are classics like Oregon Trail, or The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis. Whole petitions exist simply for reprints of the game for modern PCs, encased in the same unique book packaging ASCII & Tsubaki used back in 1991. Though my attempts to play through this adventure then were thwarted by the language barrier and poor keyboard skills, I could tell this was no mere fluke, forgery, or overhyped victim of nostalgia. Nothing on consoles, Western PCs, or the PC-98 and its competitors resembled Tsubaki's RPGs, almost all of which taught players about computing, typing, and other subject matter through idiosyncratic RPG stylings and structure. This was something special, and I had to know more. That's why [DISCLAIMER] I ended up being the beta tester on lynn's translation project, now having no excuse but to see this through.

Sword of Kumdor starts off unassuming, with barebones titles and a scrawly tutorial briefly going over controls. Using the F, J, and space keys to move forward, use the menu, and rotate your protagonist sounds weird and unintuitive, but comes naturally as you start the game in a galactic rest stop, waiting to board a rocket towards the titular world. Tsubaki describes our hero(ine) as a "Master of Blind Touch", a keyboard champion who's risen to the top but is bored, desperate for deeper understanding beyond their success on Earth. So we've traveled to a beleaguered, backwater planet calling for help, invaded by strange spellcasting monsters and sudden environmental disasters. It's not long before our own interplanetary trip to Kumdor goes awry, with the spacecraft malfunctioning and crash landing right into the starting town. With our keyboard keys and experience gone, no one recognizes us as the same touch-typing maestro promised to them. It's time to regain our equipment, master those typing skills once more, and figure out the cause of and solution to Kumdor's maladies!

As I've implied, most of the game loop involves exploring towns, overworlds, and dungeons, fighting random battles and collecting key items. This also entails the usual fiddling with inventory and managing your money, but Tsubaki challenges players to do something unique for a JRPG: play the whole game with touch-typing controls. I really cannot imagine how one would get through Sword of Kumdor on a gamepad, nor would it make any sense. From the most basic resting wrist fingerings to rapidly and precisely completing difficult sentences later on, this journey tries to make an avid typist out of anyone, even if its approach can get exhausting. One menu option brings you to a full keyboard HUD displaying your inputs, something I found necessary due to some PC-98 keys not natively mapping onto my US Windows layout. Another menu gives players a summary of their word-per-minute rating and trend over runtime, plus their WPM target which matters most at endgame. Teachers likely needed and asked for these tools the most, but anyone playing this to completion should find 'em useful too. I had to make a new .txt file in my Neko Project II emulator directory rebinding some keys to in-game equivalents, which made the virtual key-map important.

Forget years of button-mashing wearing out your gamepad—this game occasionally had me wondering if I'd finally feel some mushiness from my spacebar! (Not the case, thankfully, but then again my keyboard has faux Cherry Blue switches, designed to remain punchy.) I've long wondered if the Art Academy series could help me unlearn my chickenscratch handwriting and drawing, and parts of Sword of Kumdor did a lot to correct bad typing habits I've built over the ages. Everything centers around your muscle memory here, with slow and clumsy typing punished with Game Overs in combat and puzzles. Battles are all 1-on-1 affairs, as are "gates" which you unlock using the same system. Enemies shout prompts, you type them back as fast and accurate as you can, and this deals damage based on your EXP points total. Increasing max EXP requires visiting practice areas, usually within towns, which check if you've bought the right keys and then test you with them. Completing prompts fast with no errors leads to either an optional prompt at the end of fights—which reward the lion's share of an encounter's EXP as long as you don't mess up once—or a higher raise in max EXP during the aforementioned tests. These slight variations on the same repetitive exercises keeps most of the game feeling fresh despite what it demands from players.

| Old tales, new travails |

Another boon for us all is the Dragon Quest-like game progression, which involves finding and using movement items to proceed further. Though there's only one real "dungeon" stuck in the endgame, crossing each overworld section means talking to the right NPCs (which rarely feels tedious) to acquire the right stuff. For example, a mid-game fog valley barrier proves insurmountable until one locates the compass needed to navigate it. Diving into and out of lakes or ponds? Better snag a snorkel! And because there's no way to passively heal, Sword of Kumdor punishes players who forget to pack restoratives, either found throughout the realm or bought in towns. There's both consumable items with various properties and magic scrolls which only work if you have all the keys needed to type them. (Early on, you won't even have an Enter key with which to submit the spell name.) All this could easily be too simplistic or convoluted like in many contemporary JRPGs, but Tsubaki does a good job of balancing frequent typing with visiting new locations and people often.

If anything, Sword of Kumdor incentivizes its digital stenographers to chat up as many of the locals as possible. So much dialogue between villagers, scientists, and plot-critical individuals goes for light, often ironic or self-effacing conversation, the kind you'd expect from modern Earthbound-inspired xRPGs and adventure (ADV/VN) faire. Lake divers kvetch to you and one another about how the monsters plaguing their lake have left them with nothing good to do. Kumdor-ians complain endlessly about their inability to learn touch-typing and fight back, often resorting to increasingly absurd solutions. Hermits and dilapidated robots muse about the mysterious Dreampoint, which seems to be corrupted and responsible for the planet's septic response to its inhabitants. Sword of Kumdor starts you off as a detached observer of their foibles, humor, and resignation to what fate has in store for them. Only much later on do major NPCs recognize you as the purported "keyboard warrior" they asked for, and even then everybody's too busy trying to live, survive, and enjoy themselves to notice. Nothing in this pre-Mother 2 odyssey from 1991 ever gets as nakedly comical or referential as the usual suspects today, but all the signs are here from start to finish.

Most of an average playthrough (about 6-7 hours prior to endgame) goes by with little issue, intuitive and freshly paced as it is, up until endgame. Trudging through lava flows to reach safe land, or hopping across pits and solving gates, takes a bit more time, but that's far from the worst Tsubaki throws at you. It's the long-awaited final stretch, the Dreampoint, which turns Sword of Kumdor from an occasionally tricky edutainment JRPG into a brutal marathon of skill and carpal tunnel risks. The dungeon's gimmick? Find those warp points and save up enough dosh to buy the house they're hidden inside. While you can safely run from any battle elsewhere in the game, only suffering minor damage or easily healed status conditions if unlucky, most of the baddies patrolling this place can do terrifying things to players. Some render you invisible before curing, others saddle you with an unhealable darkness of vision (only fading if you can escape the Dreampoint), and a couple outright steal one or more keys if you run for it! My strategy evolved towards hoarding restoration food, saving very rare teleportation magic for emergencies, and then trying to brute-force through these oppressive mazy floors until I reached the next warp. Once I'd vanquished the "final boss", this conclusion felt more like the second half, taking as much time as events leading to it (if not more).

This difficulty and investment spike risks spurning players entirely. Indeed, I began to play less, making what progress I could in short sessions to avoid burnout. But it's also exactly the kind of grueling test that Tsubaki (and I presume his friends at ASCII Corp.) had in mind for budding touch-typists. What qualified as dungeons and side-areas before pales in comparison to this crawl, and I think it ultimately works out for the better. I'd reached just shy of 2000 EXP by the end, relying more on my typing skills than just pushing up numbers in the practice rooms when I could two-shot most enemies already. Previous emphasis on building muscle memory and character status gives way to the player themselves embodying their male or female avatar's struggle to save the world. Like the best finales in ye olde Phantasy Star or Ys saga of the era, strategy and self-pacing count more than grinding to a sure victory, and so the push-pull of tension and relief becomes so much stronger in turn. It recontextualizes most of the rest of the game as a cleverly-disguised series of quizzes and reviews, preparing us for this cram school's worth of battles, conundrums, and focused sprints to safety. And, being the masochist I am (not unlike '90s Japanese students here), I was hooked.

| Mysteries of the inner globe |

The Dreampoint itself summarizes many of the story's most interesting themes and oddities, a labyrinth of disfigured memories and boogeymen foreshadowing the big twist. So far, Sword of Kumdor has presented its planet as a microcosm of Showa-era Japan, with its polite but passive-aggressive populace and a strong bystander effect despite the unforeseen consequences of the planet's sentient core being invaded. Just like how the gravy train of real estate speculation and over-lending led to the bubble bursting not long before Tsubaki made this, Kumdor's palace royals and courtiers' fascination with the Dreampoint, a crossing point of everyone's conscious and subconscious thoughts, led to an ecological apocalypse of sorts. As a decorated yet anonymous outsider to these problems—the "Westerner" in the equation, not knowing local history, problems, etc.—it's just as problematic that we have to bail the leaders out of this predicament. Even as we help citizens and eventually the ultimate victim of the Dreampoint, what gratitude we receive comes mostly from observable touch-typing mastery. Think about whenever your boss or workplace values you most for results and business contributions, more so than just being, having that humanity and empathy we desire yet undervalue.

Beneath all the hijinks, calamities, and talking to sentient key-trees and key-fish lies a critical but optimistic set of messages for kids and adults in modern life. Through talent, determination, and side-stepping structural barriers whenever/wherever possible, one can recover from setbacks and prosper in ways previously unfathomed. By understanding one's environment and believing in your abilities—not taking things for granted or falling into impostor syndrome—you can convince the world around you of your worth, even if it shouldn't need such arguing. I appreciate what Tsubaki successfully communicates here even more because it does so without any hint of didacticism. Each ending, based on your endgame WPM target, reflects somewhat upon what comes after this arduous journey, be it the "bad" ending having Kumdor's king advocate for consuming oneself in fantasy (the book he wants to get back to instead of talking more with you), or the best ending having a couple of royals earnestly ask for you to tutor them in the touch-typing ways. Key NPCs only realize you're the Master of Blind Touch after your actions and progress prove that so, and the ancient non-Kumdorian inhabitants of the land, from wisened tree and fish folk to the mangled but salient denizens of the Dreampoint, comment on how far you've come without overselling the point. On the contrary, that "regular guy in the street" in Kumiel, the capital, doesn't pay players any mind, instead encouraging us to think about their relative privileges while other, more talkative folks escape volcanic eruptions or watch their jobs stagnate.

—————Ending spoilers below!—————

Something tells me Tsubaki was nonetheless reverent towards the principles of Yuji Horii's work on adventures like Portopia Serial Murder Case and, of course, the inescapable Dragon Quest franchise from '86 onward. Our protagonist's trip from wrecked ship to the neural nexus of this world both mirrors and reimagines Loto's quest in the original JRPG. Rather than starting in an open, hospitable castle with its jolly version of Lord British, we only reach the palace later on, just to be turned away because the real Master of Blind Touch would have solved everyone's problems already. Instead of a charismatic Dragonlord tempting players with a chance to join his side, the Dreampoint itself has parasitically merged with Mido, the prince of Kumdor whose own fears, flaws, and insecurities have bequeathed indescribable terrors upon the realm. Here the choice isn't whether or not to join evil, but to let yourself down at the bitter end, leaving this game's Loto to fester as a figurative child of Omelas.

Key moments in the original Dragon Quest's progression are rearranged, malformed, and presented to players no doubt familiar with JRPG cliches as something genuinely new. Bosses aren't cartoony Akira Toriyama drawings, but huge text prompts mixing in text from sources as wide as fairy tales (Snow White), journalism (a summary of '80s US-Japan relations and the Plaza Accord), and other unsettlingly real or familiar subject matter. Hotels go from quaint to multi-floor behemoths, medieval-garbed shopkeepers to lumpy blanks, and soundtracks from cheerful tunes to bright but ominous interludes. Even the biomes are now hostile: white fog traps you in a loop of encounters, water rapids destroy you underwater, and the undulating "void" of the Dreampoint's penultimate room can swallow you whole. In this messed-up but discernable reconfiguration of Dragon Quest-isms, much like the non sequiturs posed to players in something like Space Funeral, we're asked to rethink how much these tropes matter. After all, in a universe where the keyboard's mightier than the sword, what defines a hero's journey, the stakes in general, and how others perceive it all?

—————No more spoilers!—————


Shigesato Itoi often gets a truckload of credit in modern video games discourse for this kind of effortless, trenchant conveyance and literary game design. I think it's sobering to encounter other examples of such creators, working with their own restrictions and life stories, achieving much the same but to far less acclaim and/or recognition. Sword of Kumdor treats its participants with so much intelligence, no matter where you're from or which stage of your lifetime, that it can implicitly pass for an alternative-universe Mother series entry with such ease that I'm a little jealous. Here's exactly the kind of iterative yet unconventional trip through engaging systems, encounters, and heartwarming moments which I hoped existed somewhere in the Japanese PC games library, knowing its breadth and variety. Yes, this is far from a perfect game, what with its harsh dexterity requirements and cliff wall of an ending gauntlet. The audiovisuals, though very striking and identifiable, also play to the 16-color, high-resolution, FM-synthesized hardware in abrasive ways. Not everyone's gonna love eye-searing monsters, pulsing percussion-less and alien aural textures, or the Eisenstein-like use of strong colors to denote sleeping at inns or dying ingloriously in battle. But it all comes together to make something truly "PC-98" for me, a defining piece of entertainment which defies current assumptions about what one can and should expect.

| A sword for Kumdor, my axe for J-PC games scorned |

Years of Tumblr visual blogs, jokes about Sex 2, and the understandable but oft misleading characterization of the PC-98 as an erotic adventures platform makes Sword of Kumdor stand out that much more. It's definitely on the extreme, experimental end of the system's library, but quite the counter-example to explain how differently Japanese users perceived NEC's dominant PC up until Windows 95. True, otaku subcultures and reliable sales of horny soft to those audiences prevailed from the turn of the '90s to today, but the PC-98 catered to so many niche markets, like wargaming and fantasy JRPGs. Reductionist, convenient portrayals of this platform, both in and outside its original regions, downplay or even eliminate the chances that iconic games like Kumdor get the appreciation they deserve. And this isn't a close-and-shut case of Tsubaki's RPGs being the exception to the rule, as many other sims, ADVs, and RPGs didn't rely on any erotica to sell and stand out, ex. Yougekitai's occult detective premise or Tokio's satirical comedy of bubble-era economy and politics. It's a shame that the kind of enthusiast press and institutional promotion that all-ages games like Zoombinis gets in the US hasn't extended to Kumdor in its home country, working against all the fans' nostalgia and agitation to bring it back into the mainstream like it's the early '90s again.

For me, the critical burial and mere rumblings of relevance emanating in Sword of Kumdor's wake seems unjust. (Yes, I know life isn't fair and that these are just first-world problems, but gimme some slack here.) Writer, designer, and programmer Michiaki Tsubaki came from an outsider background in art design to iterate on the popular Dragon Quest mold in ways no one else accomplished. And it makes perfect sense he'd choose the PC-98, simultaneously a bastion for the business world and close-knit interest groups, to house these beguiling, often subversive adventures of learning. Yet so many out West (as well as in Japan, though much less so among uses/players from its heyday) can simply say "the PC-98 is for porn, or Touhou, or mahjong", etc. and leave it at that. I'm not going to say they're bad or wrong, given the large amount of eroge and "weird Japan" software you can find for the system, but Tsubaki didn't dabble in weirdness or exotica for its own sake, let alone fashion or vibes culture. His interactive media seeks to enthrall and unsettle people as much as help and inspire them, using these super-deformed, cute-yet-not elements and methods. In a sense, what he did with Kumdor, the INSIDERS duology, and Toki no Shirube adheres more to a traditional fully-fledged aesthetic than some superficial trend. And that's something I see with a general majority of PC-98 games, even some eroge ADVs.

In short, there's so much more to the PC-98 scene (and PC-88, and MSX, and…better stop here) in terms of daring, diverse, and dare I say important gaming experiences which Sword of Kumdor exemplifies. We can't settle for placing YU-NO or Rusty atop curated, canonical lists of the platform's greats and also overlook ambitious/art works like this, not unless all that matters is just ogling these games and their histories at a glance. (Again, I love quite a bit of eroge and better-known PC-X8 darlings, but they're not the end-all-be-all.) Tsubaki was just one talented bedroom-coding polymath among many in that milieu, pushing unwieldy hardware to its limits and daring players to keep up. Our unlikely Master of Blind Touch journeys from the end of one life into the beginnings of another, reassembling a broken world's hopes and dreams from above and within its core. That reconstructive mentality resonates with me, someone who's always willing to give these old, janky but often great PC games their due. You could find all kinds of ideas, stories, genre hybrids, different design paradigms, and truly unique fantasies and realities across East Asian PC games like this, complementing the console/arcade landscape with what those couldn't or didn't provide.

That said, it's not super easy for me to recommend this to anyone starting out with PC-98 emulation or using a real machine. I can think of very few notable games on the system which need this much keyboard configuration to feel all that great to play in long bouts. But it's still one of the most interesting xRPGs on the system—hell, in these genres' history! Not many stories can wield weirdness with purpose and the right amount of restraint like this. Not many edutainment titles dare their players to head into dangerous, troubling circumstances either. And not many are willing to risk players' attention and comfort for the sake of a tonally consistent, draining final act which wraps all loose ends, game loops, and story motifs into one. I have nothing but respect and admiration for Tsubaki's efforts here, and his lack of presence and biographical info even within Japan just saddens me. Regardless, I deem Sword of Kumdor the best way to get into this designer's catalog of bizarre yet relatable JRPGs, with the more computer science-based INSIDERS and Gaia-themed Stellar Sign comprising the rest of these PC-98 tomes. Of course, one might argue we're not getting the whole experience without translations of the dense hintbooks provided with each Tsubaki release, something ASCII Corporation did to help players and persuade educators to include the games in their curricula. But this first translation patch will definitely suffice!

Eons of memes and bantz about many portrayals of, and commentaries on, gods and religion in Japanese pop media all threaten to frame Quintet's debut as a schmaltzy creation myth. The last thing I expected was a translation of Japan's cosmogony into a commentary on the monomyth, hiding its version of the pre-Imperial hero god Okuninushi (or Onamushi) behind a Judeo-Christian façade. But that's the level of creativity and innovation that the studio's founding staff and contractors strived for. Set aside the simple yet subversive premise and you'll still have one of the most fun and clever hybrids in console software history. ActRaiser's influence never traveled as far as it ought to, largely materialized in series like Dark Cloud, yet it's more than earned its cult classic reputation. Not that I'd call this the Velvet Underground & Nico of xRPGs, but it's a valid comparison. Few if any video games marketed for a wide audience tackled such a broad, charged set of themes and sensations in such a formative period for the medium, no matter the imperfections.

As unwieldy as it sounds, this fusion of two strongly contrasting genres—side-scrolling action platforming and the primordial god simulator—likely couldn't have been bettered in 1990. Bullfrog's seminal Populous had only arrived on Japanese PCs in March, and I've found no evidence of PC-98 developers working with Peter Molyneux's blueprint. We know, however, that the founding members of Quintet, having left Nihon Falcom during the development of Ys III, had finished 70% of what became ActRaiser before having second thoughts. Whether or not they'd seen or played a certain PC-based god game is yet unknown. (Ironically, their former employer's own Lord Monarch shows Yoshio Kiya's own infatuation with Western imports like Populous, though that game's an early real-time strategy wargame.) The group's growth and frustrations while working on Ys and related PC xRPGs might have pushed them to do something risky for a console audience they hadn't yet catered to. Why not bring the essence of a complex Japanese PC simulation title to a workmanlike action platformer a la Dragon Buster or Castlevania?

The waxing and waning divine works its wonders amidst spirits and sovereigns. It takes on forms both distinct and recondite, like shadow to light. Beyond the waking minds of souls freed into a bourgeoning world lives the idyllic hero, desirable yet unknowable, a paragon which leads through belief up until that faith is no longer needed or traditional. Such tales of good versus evil, or many shades past, endure across time, often as aspirations, warnings, and the subject matter of popular art and entertainment. It's this fascination with mythology, and what it means to people and their worldviews, which anyone playing ActRaiser (among other games letting you "play god") must engage with.

Now the goal was to evoke that feeling of playing god, a paradox given the player's inability to shape the game outside those possibilities which developers set for them. They compromised with a dual-avatar story, where both a chiseled holy warrior and boon cherubic messenger shape separate but linked sections of the world. Main writer and planner Tomoyoshi Miyazaki wisely chose to represent this god's duality of presence. In the sky castle, we are without form, and the angel merely a presenter for this abstract interface set among the clouds. But it's not long before the player descends, their guiding light inseparable from the extra-textual, animating a statuesque warrior into action, all to smite and vanquish the dark. On the flipside, the winged child soon becomes our vessel with which to reinvent this realm we've conquered, swapping out fantastic inhabitants for mundane, moldable men and women. Both characters exemplify the almighty in ways we can bond to, but never deny questions about the powers, limits, and mysteries behind what's sublime and what's imagined. To "play god" is also to probe one's identity and ability in context.

Though we're ostensibly the alpha and omega, mortality still matters to us, as The Master incarnates on this Earth in a limited extension of being. Nothing in this game holds back from trying to kill you, whether it's insta-death pits and lava or just an odd thing flying from the side of the screen. ActRaiser plays nice, though, particularly in its NA and EU versions with reduced difficulty and added extra lives. Most levels have smartly-placed checkpoints, letting you learn each segment without running out of time that easily. There's only a few collectible power-ups, either for score or health and 1-ups, but finding those breakables and wisely rationing magic use for the tougher fights is critical. Even if you can't ever Game Over for obvious reasons, starting the action stages from scratch can feel crushing, the good kind that encourages skill and concentration. The "fail state" in sim mode comes from your angel losing all their health to enemy attacks or collisions, at which point you can't fire any arrows. Overworld nasties will take advantage of this temporary vulnerability, snatching up residents, destroying homes, and even razing all your hard work with earthquakes (damn those skulls!). All these challenges and setbacks mirror those of the families we're fostering, or even the monsters one slaughters for that juicy high score. It's a piece of humble pie to counterbalance these grand themes.

All this came to mind as I flew from one region to another, enjoying the safe game loop that ActRaiser makes the most of. On their own, neither the action or sim sequences rank with the best in those genres, even at the time. The Master's stiff controls and lack of mobility options (my kingdom for a Mega Man-ish slide!) often don't match the severity of enemy attacks and zone control later on. I'd be hard-pressed to call the town management engaging just on its own, with very few means to affect what villagers build and very straightforward terraforming puzzles. If one really wanted a top-notch, side-scrolling action game for SNES, let alone other systems and arcade boards, then there's no shortage of options. SimCity might not exactly classify as a god game now, but it fit the earliest definitions back when most started playing it on PCs or, of course, Nintendo's enhanced port. It's the mutual interactions between these modes, simple to understand and swap between, which creates that vaunted positive loop of advancement. The game's main coder and director, Masaya Hashimoto, had figured out with Ys that you could mix even a decent graphic adventure and Hydlide-like action RPG to create something special. No wonder it works here!

The salad of once contradictory, now inter-weaving ideas continues with ActRaiser's locales and cultural tropes. Fillmore's mysterious, metamorphic forest of foes gives way to a city-state in the making, with one of the shrine worshipers playing oracle and then martyr for The Master's cause. Way later on comes Marahna, a Southeast Asia-like region whose darkest jungles and ornate temple of evil clashes against the hardy, pragmatic people you guide to self-sufficiency. Enemy and boss designs range across typical European and Asian fantasy faire, from dwarfs and lycanthropes to serpents and tengu, with big bads like the centaur knight and ice dragon playing to regional theme. These entities would seem banal and rehashed from competing games, but regain some staying power when framed via this conflict between them and amorphous monotheism which you embody. One can sense the sensory and conceptual distance between this god and its subjects, either those it subjugates or the civilizations it cultivates. No one prays to you from the comfort of their own homes; all must congregate in shrines to communicate with the great beyond, something they can imagine but never fathom. Only by your actions does the world change, reflecting values of nurture over nature and other Abrahamic virtues. Any dialogue between this universe's denizens necessarily involves upheaval.

In this way, the final level, a boss rush much like any other from the era, becomes more than just content reuse. It's the cataclysm of God vs. gods, a refutation of polytheism. But it's just as likely a nod to the religious lore Miyazaki would have been most familiar with, the Kojiki and its narrative of Japan's beginnings. Following in the wake of Susanoo, that hero of chaos, Okuninushi emerged from exile in the underworld to defeat his evil brothers who had forced him there. In its manual, ActRaiser draws a direct parallel, with The Master having fallen in battle to Tanzra (or Satan in the JP version) and his cunning siblings. Only after a period of recovery does our god return to the world, long forgotten but ready to reassert a moral order of society and positivity. The Master and Onamuchi both face trials, personages, and climactic battles to unite their lands and usher their peoples from prehistory into history. As such, the dynamic between The Master and Tanzra, already Manichean and inextricable by definition, is also a less than didactic allegory for the national myth Miyazaki & co. (and players) were familiar with.

Quintet uses these devices, both subtle and obvious, to motivate your journey as expected, and to pull the proverbial rug out from underneath. Imagine doing all this hard work, slicing and jumping through obstacle courses, then sparing villagers from demonic intervention as you pave new roads and fields for them, only to become invisible, beyond recognition. Onamuchi himself acquiesced to this fate, ceding the earthly kami's rulership of Japan to Amaterasu's heavenly lineage. The concept of divinity you brought to these societies was once pivotal to their survival and eventual growth, a uniting force transcending the chaos surrounding them. But in a stable, almost arcadian state of affairs, this godly example now has each and every human finding faith in themselves and others, not in The Master and its herald. ActRaiser ends with a striking inversion of the game's most iconic cinematic tool, the constant Mode 7 zooming in on each action stage you visit. Finally, after the bittersweet revelation that no one visits any shrines anymore—that your own creation has moved on from you, emotionally and ritualistically—the game zooms out, the continents shrinking into nothing as this reality ceases to consider you, or vice versa.

I was genuinely agape when this happened. The game had shown some forward-thinking use of video games' formal elements, mainly to emphasize the uncanny gulf between the clean user interface and what diegetic actions/consequences the buttons led to. But this moment went well beyond those little touches, demonstrating how Miyazaki, Hashimoto, and others at Quintet sought a novel style of storytelling, moving on from the face-value imitation of manga and anime in previous works. For all its issues and missed opportunities, ActRaiser nails these once one-of-a-kind twists that shake you up, simultaneously indulging in new audiovisual potential while using it to the medium's advantage. These surprises aren't as common as I'd hope for throughout the game, but when they happen, oh do they succeed! Moments like Teddy's bad luck in Bloodpool, the archetypal albatross appearing both in Kasandora and Marahna, and the implied Sigurd-Gudrun couple reincarnated by the world tree in Northwall all stick out here. Everything of this sort is still all too simple compared to ye olde Disco Elysium of today, yet effective as a kind of heightened fairytale in-between the melee and management.

The word I'm looking for is alchemy, the transmutation of ordinary elements into a greater whole. It describes the very compound term ActRaiser, a portmanteau I'd expect to see in a game jam ditty. What distinguished this amalgalm of systems from others around the turn of the '90s was this focus on story, not just another player-fellating genre hybrid for its own sake. It's because this adventure makes a micro-critique of our indulgence in power fantasies, and their relation to founding myths, that the individually unpolished bits you interact with remain fun and worthwhile. Perhaps the harvesting and trading of offerings between the cities is a fetch quest underneath, but it rarely feels that meaningless. I just want to gift the Kasadoran a far-off tropical remedy for their troubles, or clothe the citizens of icy Northwall in wool from Aitos. And yes, the final platforming gauntlet might as well be a greatest hits of the adventure's most irritating design quirks, but damn does it push all your skills and patience to the limit. This potion Quintet's concocted leaves a mysterious aftertaste.

Debut software on vintage PCs & consoles could often vary wildly in robustness. Every developer getting something to market on Day 1 has to learn a newly enhanced architecture as quick as is feasible, a feat many can't achieve. ActRaiser stands toe to toe with ritzier, more sophisticated SNES classics that were still on the drawing board in 1990. Koji Yokota and Ayano Koshiro of Telenet & Falcom heritage, among a host of talented artists, go ham with color schemes that the PC-88 and Famicom could merely have dreamed of, enriching the greebles and decorative patterns of dungeons and biomes. Tasteful use of parallax scrolling, alpha-blending transparencies, and other visual effects works in tandem with clean yet florid art direction, bearing the hallmarks of paperback book covers and Dungeons & Dragons. Ayano's brother took up the mantle of music and sound design, a daunting role considering the SNES' new sample-based sound chip. I'm more a fan of Yuzo Koshiro's orchestral work within the confines of FM synthesis, another tall order for musicians and programmers of the day. But this remains one of the system's most memorable and defining soundtracks, with melodious militant marches and more pensive ambiance in abundance. Figuring out how to cram so many instruments, pitch and volume bends, etc. must have been an ordeal for him. My ears tell me it was worth it.

It's a shame, then, that the Koshiro siblings only helped Quintet again for this game's long-debated sequel. The rest of the company continued to evolve, recruiting new talent to develop more ambitious xRPGs dealing with stories and personalities both grandiose and relatable. Hashimoto and Miyazaki's startup had firmly diverged from their old employers' conservative milieu, and future triumphs like Illusion of Gaia, Terranigma, Brightis, and Planet Laika are testament to Quintet's longevity. Us players, having embodied the holiest in both mortal and supernatural ways, can only look back on the studio's works and progeny, subject to critical reverence and dismantlement alike. Somewhere, out in the cosmos, The Master could be liberating new planets, or perhaps dooming them to the curse of civilization we're all too familiar with. That builder's spirit, a lathe of heaven…it's rarely if ever about reaching the end, but savoring the stops along the way, those flips in perspective. ActRaiser toys with players and the perspectives offered to them, engrossing us in the champion's cause while suggesting that this isn't the best of all possible worlds—just the one we must cherish.

Suffice to say, I'm not looking forward to all the gratuitous changes I'm spotting in ActRaiser Renaissance. The most I can gather is that its deviations can't harm the original ex post facto. Until next time, I'll just be listening to Fillmore's FM-synth beta version in the green room.