PasokonDeacon
1988
Name's right, I love me so googly-eyed Giger bois. Video pinball should try to be this homoerotic more often. I mean, we're whacking balls around in a dungeon, what more can I ask for?! The Crush Pinball series has this almost sexual energy to it, an addictive game loop I find hard to resist. You quickly understand all that's possible, desirable, and repeatable with just one main table and a few mini-tables to spice things up. It's the familiar rhythm of the plunger, flippers, bumpers, and multipliers throwing the odds across screens, from 0 digits to 999 million, threatening us with imminent loss but also the possibility of success. And I think there's something delightfully sleazy about the thrill of it all. Forget the joysticks, the video nasties, the banes of "concerned parents" and the policymakers who answer to them with curfews and dress codes. We want the real thing!
Whether you're just giving it a 15-minute try or aiming to counter-stop, Alien Crush remains as fun and relevant to the genre as it must have been in 1988. This was the best pinball romp of the '80s, stacking up to ye olde Black Knight 2000 and Pin-Bot in presentation and execution. The counter-cultural, tongue-in-cheek pairing of eldritch horrors with a well-balanced table design allowed developers Compile and Red Company to take risks other microchip adaptations hadn't. Unlockable "boss" stages and multiple ways to nab new balls, or toggle safety zones amidst the chaos, makes for a very fair experience overall. Most importantly, though, the pinball physics here are impeccable. Rarely does it feel like sloppy coding's the source of a failed run, and there's almost always some way to recover by smartly timing flips and tilts to control your trajectory. This may not have the sheer amount of stuff that Devil's Crush and its progeny brought, but this inaugural entry in the "not quite pinball" style has held its own against those successors.
| Lunar Eclipse |
Whoever at Compile led development on this, Devil's Crush, and an ever-overlooked Jaki Crush clearly loved post-WWII pinball and similar amusements. (Interviews with ex-Compile staff suggest that Takafumi Tanida was the Crush Pinball games' lead developer, supported by his work on The Pinball of the Dead a decade later) (Szczepaniak 2018, 112). Arcades, dive bars, movie theaters, and other third spaces benefited from the blaring clangs and klaxons these four-legged monstrosities put out. Before our age of eye-straining, dexterity testing shooters and eSports curricula, skill-based bagatelle was the next best way to hone one's reflexes and proudly scream to the world "I'm a creature of leisure!" with enough carpe diem to make Robin Williams blush. It's fitting that pinball video carts and disks would struggle to replicate, let alone enhance, the electromechanical stimuli and complexity of contemporary tables from Bally, Williams, Stern, Gottlieb, and other manufacturers in and outside of Chicago. Few console or micro-computer examples of the genre had much success until the late-'80s, when the likes of Pinball Quest and then DICE's Pinball Dreams showed how upgraded ROM chips and clever design could allow richer, more complex tables and player progression than even the priciest cabinet competitors.
Ironically, though pinball has always had more presence in the U.S. and other parts of the Global West, it's mainly Japanese video game creators who pushed the limits of this style of arcade staple for home audiences. I'm not downplaying the revolution that was Pinball Construction Set, either. Bill Budge's proto-amateur game dev toolkit offered many options to players, from building layouts to tweaking gravity, but it strictly adhered to the possibility space of mid-1900s pinball. Replicating the flashy LED banners, sampled audio, and exuberant light shows popular in '80s arcade-adjacent spaces wasn't going to work on an Apple II, not without compromises. Even virtuosic pseudo-replica tables in releases like System Sacom's Moon Ball still fell prey to wonky physics or a lack of variety. It's telling that the earliest signs of video games advancing pinball tropes came via genre hybrids like Toru Iwatani's Bomb Bee, combining Breakout into the formula to some success. Realistic pinball recreations, on the other hand, wouldn't arrive in force until the '90s, when works like Little Wing's Tristan from '91 became popular on various PCs (Fujita 2010).
Though Sacom and their star coder Mark Flint brought Moon Ball Magic to the Famicom Disk System, expanding the original into a multi-level adventure with some deft, it was a nascent Naxat Soft who'd publish the first majorly acclaimed contender to the video-ball throne that same year. The newborn publisher contracted Red Entertainment, then working on other big PC Engine projects like Far East of Eden, to design and produce an action-packed crowd pleaser alongside technical staff from the ever-reliable Compile. Even if Red was still just as inexperienced with making their own games as Naxat was to publishing, they clearly made a lot of smart decisions. Tanida and co. needed roughly a half-year to craft and gold-master Alien Crush, which gained a global cult following unlike Sacom's product. It may not have been a launch title in Japan (though close enough in concept and legacy), but the Turbo-Grafx 16 localization was a boon for the platform, already struggling against the NES despite its advantages.
| Demon's Undulate |
Alien Crush boots into a minimalist, fleshy-formed splash screen with ominous HuC6280 waveforms purring in stereo. Tap Run, choose Fast or Slow, and then choose one of two music tracks to regale you as the ballistics begin. The opening pull-and-plunge does a proper job of introducing players to an otherwise troublesome quirk, its fade-to-black flipping between halves of the table. Split-second blanks take a bit of getting used to if you've only experienced newer full-scrolling pinball games; any fading here feels unobtrusive after a minute or two, thankfully. Despite the busy visuals, it's easy to keep track of the silver ball leaping from corner to corner, top to bottom, at least on the main table where one can actually lose it. Two sets of flippers, multiple point indicators baked into a grotesque root system, portentous open aisles leading to either the motherlode or the next ball down…it's plenty to take in, but never too much.
The core loop takes our metallic traveler around a circuit of enough cybernetic guts and gnasties to make Ridley Scott proud. In the center-bottom rests the phallic-formed demiurge, with its retinue of x-number panels and fallen angels in the gallery for you to strike down. Contrast this with dual brains and their head henchmen on top, vying for control and kept at tendrils' length by the standard four pass-thru switches. It's the very model of a modern major pinball table, corrupted and reshaped into a torture device for completionists. "Beating" this nets only the most barebones of endings and bragging rights expected from a big-budget machine, the kind you'd just walk away from to find something else worth playing. Playing this with today's content-first mindset is a trap. While there are innovators like Flipnic: Ultimate Pinball and Yoku's Island Express which effectively meld scoring and completionism paradigms, Alien Crush works as much as it can from its limited but compelling set-up. Some would call this a "vibe game", in fact, which is close enough to describing the thick atmosphere roping me back into this hellscape.
Activating each nib, greeble, ramp, and gargoyle nets you some numbers, but also access to a few interesting "secret areas" which break up the pacing in ways a non-console table can't. I wish Tanida and the rest had gone even farther with this idea, which is why I suspect I'll enjoy the sequels more for doubling down on them. These diversions all use the block kuzushi style of ball-and-paddle play that Breakout had popularized in Japan a decade earlier, just using proper pinball physics. It's crunchy and satisfying to bounce skulls back into their hidey holes, or figure out how to juggle between sets of bumpers without the ball jumping down right between the flippers. Unlike the main table and its perpetual endurance tests, players can actually complete these side areas for a perfect score bonus, plus a hidden extra ball in one of the rooms. It'd take Devil's Crush and beyond to really iterate on this concept, but everything works here despite the repetitive, somewhat underwhelming amount of unique bosses and baddies to bop.
| The Best Five |
Most of the PC Engine and TurboGrafx-16's initial lineup suffered from stinkers and well-meaning but flawed software. I can't think of many out there clamoring to play Victory Run or Keith Courage in Alpha Zones nowadays, except myself maybe. Hudson Soft and NEC did their damnedest to make this platform work, though, and their third-party talent scouting paid off with classics like Alien Crush, Blazing Lazers, Cyber Knight, and CD-ROM extravaganzas like, uh, J.B. Harold Murder Club. OK, not all of these are so prestigious, and rarely did the most well-received games venture out of genre norms. (Hudson's own catalog did well enough to avoid obvious blunders, even if they also weren't rocking the proverbial boat with Bonk's Adventure or Nectaris.) Still, if you had to get any of the original four TG-16 HuCards back in '89, this once cutting-edge take on pinball was the smart choice. What better means to showcase the advanced spriting, scrolling, and thematic exploring one could create on this new hardware?
For reasons both selfish and convenient, I wanted to start my PC Engine journey off with a Certified Hood Classic™. All the Crush Pinball titles would have worked, so starting with the original made too much sense. But imagine how difficult a sell this would have seemed in '88 or '89. Who needs video pinball when high quality tables are available at every laundromat, community center, etc.? The highest achievement this series reached was justifying its genre's relevance beyond the realms of coin-boxes and carnival barkers, largely by hooking players with what the big pinball companies refused to provide. I love me some blockbuster '80s cabs from Williams, followed by the lofty heights Stern reached heading into the '90s, but they couldn't sweep the main-table ideal off its feet like Alien Crush did. This underdog of a printed circuit soon had its own imitators, like the oft-maligned Sonic Spinball and similar mascot pinball-ers. It showed to a developing enthusiast press that even the most seemingly impossible of genre hybrids weren't just possible, but laudable! Just as the PC Engine/TG-16 had to prove itself against Nintendo and SEGA's status quo from start to bitter end, so too have creations like this needed to justify their relevance from one era to another. I think everyone working on this at Compile, Red Company, and Naxat Soft outdid themselves.
—Bibliography—
Fujita, Yoshikatsu. “Tristan.” LittleWing PINBALL Official Website. LittleWing Co. Ltd., November 2, 2010. https://web.archive.org/web/20101102014644/http://www.littlewingpinball.com/doc/en/gameinfo/tristan/index.html.
Accessed via Internet Archive.
Szczepaniak, John. “Takayuki HIRONO & Satoshi FUJISHIMA.” The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol. 3, 112–113. SMG Szczepaniak, 2018.
Whether you're just giving it a 15-minute try or aiming to counter-stop, Alien Crush remains as fun and relevant to the genre as it must have been in 1988. This was the best pinball romp of the '80s, stacking up to ye olde Black Knight 2000 and Pin-Bot in presentation and execution. The counter-cultural, tongue-in-cheek pairing of eldritch horrors with a well-balanced table design allowed developers Compile and Red Company to take risks other microchip adaptations hadn't. Unlockable "boss" stages and multiple ways to nab new balls, or toggle safety zones amidst the chaos, makes for a very fair experience overall. Most importantly, though, the pinball physics here are impeccable. Rarely does it feel like sloppy coding's the source of a failed run, and there's almost always some way to recover by smartly timing flips and tilts to control your trajectory. This may not have the sheer amount of stuff that Devil's Crush and its progeny brought, but this inaugural entry in the "not quite pinball" style has held its own against those successors.
| Lunar Eclipse |
Whoever at Compile led development on this, Devil's Crush, and an ever-overlooked Jaki Crush clearly loved post-WWII pinball and similar amusements. (Interviews with ex-Compile staff suggest that Takafumi Tanida was the Crush Pinball games' lead developer, supported by his work on The Pinball of the Dead a decade later) (Szczepaniak 2018, 112). Arcades, dive bars, movie theaters, and other third spaces benefited from the blaring clangs and klaxons these four-legged monstrosities put out. Before our age of eye-straining, dexterity testing shooters and eSports curricula, skill-based bagatelle was the next best way to hone one's reflexes and proudly scream to the world "I'm a creature of leisure!" with enough carpe diem to make Robin Williams blush. It's fitting that pinball video carts and disks would struggle to replicate, let alone enhance, the electromechanical stimuli and complexity of contemporary tables from Bally, Williams, Stern, Gottlieb, and other manufacturers in and outside of Chicago. Few console or micro-computer examples of the genre had much success until the late-'80s, when the likes of Pinball Quest and then DICE's Pinball Dreams showed how upgraded ROM chips and clever design could allow richer, more complex tables and player progression than even the priciest cabinet competitors.
Ironically, though pinball has always had more presence in the U.S. and other parts of the Global West, it's mainly Japanese video game creators who pushed the limits of this style of arcade staple for home audiences. I'm not downplaying the revolution that was Pinball Construction Set, either. Bill Budge's proto-amateur game dev toolkit offered many options to players, from building layouts to tweaking gravity, but it strictly adhered to the possibility space of mid-1900s pinball. Replicating the flashy LED banners, sampled audio, and exuberant light shows popular in '80s arcade-adjacent spaces wasn't going to work on an Apple II, not without compromises. Even virtuosic pseudo-replica tables in releases like System Sacom's Moon Ball still fell prey to wonky physics or a lack of variety. It's telling that the earliest signs of video games advancing pinball tropes came via genre hybrids like Toru Iwatani's Bomb Bee, combining Breakout into the formula to some success. Realistic pinball recreations, on the other hand, wouldn't arrive in force until the '90s, when works like Little Wing's Tristan from '91 became popular on various PCs (Fujita 2010).
Though Sacom and their star coder Mark Flint brought Moon Ball Magic to the Famicom Disk System, expanding the original into a multi-level adventure with some deft, it was a nascent Naxat Soft who'd publish the first majorly acclaimed contender to the video-ball throne that same year. The newborn publisher contracted Red Entertainment, then working on other big PC Engine projects like Far East of Eden, to design and produce an action-packed crowd pleaser alongside technical staff from the ever-reliable Compile. Even if Red was still just as inexperienced with making their own games as Naxat was to publishing, they clearly made a lot of smart decisions. Tanida and co. needed roughly a half-year to craft and gold-master Alien Crush, which gained a global cult following unlike Sacom's product. It may not have been a launch title in Japan (though close enough in concept and legacy), but the Turbo-Grafx 16 localization was a boon for the platform, already struggling against the NES despite its advantages.
| Demon's Undulate |
Alien Crush boots into a minimalist, fleshy-formed splash screen with ominous HuC6280 waveforms purring in stereo. Tap Run, choose Fast or Slow, and then choose one of two music tracks to regale you as the ballistics begin. The opening pull-and-plunge does a proper job of introducing players to an otherwise troublesome quirk, its fade-to-black flipping between halves of the table. Split-second blanks take a bit of getting used to if you've only experienced newer full-scrolling pinball games; any fading here feels unobtrusive after a minute or two, thankfully. Despite the busy visuals, it's easy to keep track of the silver ball leaping from corner to corner, top to bottom, at least on the main table where one can actually lose it. Two sets of flippers, multiple point indicators baked into a grotesque root system, portentous open aisles leading to either the motherlode or the next ball down…it's plenty to take in, but never too much.
The core loop takes our metallic traveler around a circuit of enough cybernetic guts and gnasties to make Ridley Scott proud. In the center-bottom rests the phallic-formed demiurge, with its retinue of x-number panels and fallen angels in the gallery for you to strike down. Contrast this with dual brains and their head henchmen on top, vying for control and kept at tendrils' length by the standard four pass-thru switches. It's the very model of a modern major pinball table, corrupted and reshaped into a torture device for completionists. "Beating" this nets only the most barebones of endings and bragging rights expected from a big-budget machine, the kind you'd just walk away from to find something else worth playing. Playing this with today's content-first mindset is a trap. While there are innovators like Flipnic: Ultimate Pinball and Yoku's Island Express which effectively meld scoring and completionism paradigms, Alien Crush works as much as it can from its limited but compelling set-up. Some would call this a "vibe game", in fact, which is close enough to describing the thick atmosphere roping me back into this hellscape.
Activating each nib, greeble, ramp, and gargoyle nets you some numbers, but also access to a few interesting "secret areas" which break up the pacing in ways a non-console table can't. I wish Tanida and the rest had gone even farther with this idea, which is why I suspect I'll enjoy the sequels more for doubling down on them. These diversions all use the block kuzushi style of ball-and-paddle play that Breakout had popularized in Japan a decade earlier, just using proper pinball physics. It's crunchy and satisfying to bounce skulls back into their hidey holes, or figure out how to juggle between sets of bumpers without the ball jumping down right between the flippers. Unlike the main table and its perpetual endurance tests, players can actually complete these side areas for a perfect score bonus, plus a hidden extra ball in one of the rooms. It'd take Devil's Crush and beyond to really iterate on this concept, but everything works here despite the repetitive, somewhat underwhelming amount of unique bosses and baddies to bop.
| The Best Five |
Most of the PC Engine and TurboGrafx-16's initial lineup suffered from stinkers and well-meaning but flawed software. I can't think of many out there clamoring to play Victory Run or Keith Courage in Alpha Zones nowadays, except myself maybe. Hudson Soft and NEC did their damnedest to make this platform work, though, and their third-party talent scouting paid off with classics like Alien Crush, Blazing Lazers, Cyber Knight, and CD-ROM extravaganzas like, uh, J.B. Harold Murder Club. OK, not all of these are so prestigious, and rarely did the most well-received games venture out of genre norms. (Hudson's own catalog did well enough to avoid obvious blunders, even if they also weren't rocking the proverbial boat with Bonk's Adventure or Nectaris.) Still, if you had to get any of the original four TG-16 HuCards back in '89, this once cutting-edge take on pinball was the smart choice. What better means to showcase the advanced spriting, scrolling, and thematic exploring one could create on this new hardware?
For reasons both selfish and convenient, I wanted to start my PC Engine journey off with a Certified Hood Classic™. All the Crush Pinball titles would have worked, so starting with the original made too much sense. But imagine how difficult a sell this would have seemed in '88 or '89. Who needs video pinball when high quality tables are available at every laundromat, community center, etc.? The highest achievement this series reached was justifying its genre's relevance beyond the realms of coin-boxes and carnival barkers, largely by hooking players with what the big pinball companies refused to provide. I love me some blockbuster '80s cabs from Williams, followed by the lofty heights Stern reached heading into the '90s, but they couldn't sweep the main-table ideal off its feet like Alien Crush did. This underdog of a printed circuit soon had its own imitators, like the oft-maligned Sonic Spinball and similar mascot pinball-ers. It showed to a developing enthusiast press that even the most seemingly impossible of genre hybrids weren't just possible, but laudable! Just as the PC Engine/TG-16 had to prove itself against Nintendo and SEGA's status quo from start to bitter end, so too have creations like this needed to justify their relevance from one era to another. I think everyone working on this at Compile, Red Company, and Naxat Soft outdid themselves.
—Bibliography—
Fujita, Yoshikatsu. “Tristan.” LittleWing PINBALL Official Website. LittleWing Co. Ltd., November 2, 2010. https://web.archive.org/web/20101102014644/http://www.littlewingpinball.com/doc/en/gameinfo/tristan/index.html.
Accessed via Internet Archive.
Szczepaniak, John. “Takayuki HIRONO & Satoshi FUJISHIMA.” The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol. 3, 112–113. SMG Szczepaniak, 2018.
2003
The chad Jakub Dvorsky and the virgin Doug TenNapel—not that I actually have anything against The Neverhood so much as its asshole director, but it's nice to know the "funny guys on forested rocks in space" sub-genre found life elsewhere. Amanita Design's first entry in the "self rust" trilogy promised, and delivered, a smaller-scale successor to the bizarre scenes and ambling of a certain mid'-90s cult classic. And unlike that bust, Samorost led to tangible influence and prestige for the bourgeoning indie games scene. This was exactly the kind of Flash-era, outsider art game happy to just invite you into its odd little world, where every screen our gnome reaches has miniature delights and obstacles to overcome. Right as the very notion of "indie game" was coming into being—a reaction against a decline in shareware and rise of industry consolidation—this became an unlikely herald for things to come.
Actually playing the original 2003 game is a bit of a task. Internet Archive's in-browser version breaks after the intro, meaning I had to run the game in Ruffle offline via command line! Otherwise it's as simple as clicking around the screen, presented first to players as a beguiling, fantastic planetoid defying physics and graphical consistency. As I watched our protagonist scope around the void before panicking at the sight of an oncoming world just like theirs, I couldn't help but notice the odd juxtaposition of, well, everything here. Low-res nature photos blown up into scenery; flat-colored munchkins living in and out of more shaded structures; very short music loops, seemingly pulled from anonymous sources and libraries like junk in orbit! Many multimedia CD-based adventures from years before this used far more space to achieve this kind of uncanny valley, yet Dvorsky triumphs in a far stricter filesize.
Our white-frocked fellow's journey from home to hell and back hardly lasts longer than 15 or 20 minutes. Patience, observing the environment, and learning each inhabitants' patterns makes for an engaging time despite its simplicity. An itinerant laborer smokes the herb before throwing away the pipe-key needed to activate a ski lift. The fisherman tosses out a skeleton which the hawk snatches, proudly exhibiting it long enough for us to climb aboard and reach the badlands. What few scenarios Samorost offers feel like forgotten or mangled tall tales, making it fun to solve each puzzle in hopes of something cool. I'll admit that the last couple of screens are less interesting, though. Dvorsky and co-creator Tomas Dvorak wring most of the potential possible from this simple click-action paradigm a bit before the game ends. I hope the sequels introduce just enough verbs and structural changes to freshen things up. Still, this remains as elegant and intuitive as it must have been back in the early-2000s, a pared-down gallery installation in LucasArts form. (Compared to The Neverhood's often overdone riddles and backtracking, something this linear isn't too unwelcome.)
Later stories by the Amanita team(s) would delve into less enigmatic, more overt themes and messaging. Here, the focus is squarely on how one can both explore and interact with alien environments without corrupting or exploiting them in the process. This little world has no prince, yet bears the burden of its own ecosystem and hierarchies which we must acknowledge and work around to save our own land. Yes, one could say it's just a whimsical avoid-the-collision plot with lots of oddities and sight gags, but there's an optimism hiding in plain sight too. Accidents will happen, but a courageous and respectful response to natural disasters like this can work out in the end. As an invisible hand of fate guiding the gnome, we play the most important part in continuing the circle of life, perpetuating predation, survival, and creation in turn.
That's a lot of words to say that I had a good laugh watching the disgruntled man-squirrel finally getting peace of mind after the worms burrowing around him fall prey to a blobby bird. Or how about spooking the goats into the chasm, over and over again, waiting for the angler and some lizards to finish their meal? Samorost indulges maybe a bit too much in these clickpoints at the expense of a meatier adventure, but the commitment to displaying this world's arch antics and irreverence is very endearing. Coupled with unsettling yet comforting library music, the lounge jazz you'd hope to hear in any Eastern European animated film, this clash of styles makes the experience unforgettable. I was sad to leave the suddenly eventful lives of this lil' fella, and everything and everything they chanced upon, but this was one surreal trip I'll think back on fondly.
Seeing as this was one of his college projects, Dvorsky likely had no reason to expect Samorost would win a Webby Award. This led to Internet advertising work, the start of a career making similarly weird but wholly considered interactive media. Amanita Design would eventually ride the wave of indie games popularity via storefronts like Steam and the Wii Shop, plus enthusiastic press coverage, driving this kind of entertainment onto peoples' screens. Machinarium and later point-and-click odysseys shared the limelight with oh so many other author-driven darlings up through the turn of the 2010s, and the rest is history. It's fun to revisit the origins of these big cultural movements, back when games like this, Seiklus, and Strange Adventures in Infinite Space were innovators and standouts in an age of crowded big-box gaming. The era of bedroom coders never truly died, transitioning into browser games and then the digital distribution market we know today. Whether we call it "homebrew", "indie", "doujin", or whatever makes more sense in context, that ineffable David vs. Goliath effort of making one's own interactive art shines through in Samorost. Labor of love indeed.
Actually playing the original 2003 game is a bit of a task. Internet Archive's in-browser version breaks after the intro, meaning I had to run the game in Ruffle offline via command line! Otherwise it's as simple as clicking around the screen, presented first to players as a beguiling, fantastic planetoid defying physics and graphical consistency. As I watched our protagonist scope around the void before panicking at the sight of an oncoming world just like theirs, I couldn't help but notice the odd juxtaposition of, well, everything here. Low-res nature photos blown up into scenery; flat-colored munchkins living in and out of more shaded structures; very short music loops, seemingly pulled from anonymous sources and libraries like junk in orbit! Many multimedia CD-based adventures from years before this used far more space to achieve this kind of uncanny valley, yet Dvorsky triumphs in a far stricter filesize.
Our white-frocked fellow's journey from home to hell and back hardly lasts longer than 15 or 20 minutes. Patience, observing the environment, and learning each inhabitants' patterns makes for an engaging time despite its simplicity. An itinerant laborer smokes the herb before throwing away the pipe-key needed to activate a ski lift. The fisherman tosses out a skeleton which the hawk snatches, proudly exhibiting it long enough for us to climb aboard and reach the badlands. What few scenarios Samorost offers feel like forgotten or mangled tall tales, making it fun to solve each puzzle in hopes of something cool. I'll admit that the last couple of screens are less interesting, though. Dvorsky and co-creator Tomas Dvorak wring most of the potential possible from this simple click-action paradigm a bit before the game ends. I hope the sequels introduce just enough verbs and structural changes to freshen things up. Still, this remains as elegant and intuitive as it must have been back in the early-2000s, a pared-down gallery installation in LucasArts form. (Compared to The Neverhood's often overdone riddles and backtracking, something this linear isn't too unwelcome.)
Later stories by the Amanita team(s) would delve into less enigmatic, more overt themes and messaging. Here, the focus is squarely on how one can both explore and interact with alien environments without corrupting or exploiting them in the process. This little world has no prince, yet bears the burden of its own ecosystem and hierarchies which we must acknowledge and work around to save our own land. Yes, one could say it's just a whimsical avoid-the-collision plot with lots of oddities and sight gags, but there's an optimism hiding in plain sight too. Accidents will happen, but a courageous and respectful response to natural disasters like this can work out in the end. As an invisible hand of fate guiding the gnome, we play the most important part in continuing the circle of life, perpetuating predation, survival, and creation in turn.
That's a lot of words to say that I had a good laugh watching the disgruntled man-squirrel finally getting peace of mind after the worms burrowing around him fall prey to a blobby bird. Or how about spooking the goats into the chasm, over and over again, waiting for the angler and some lizards to finish their meal? Samorost indulges maybe a bit too much in these clickpoints at the expense of a meatier adventure, but the commitment to displaying this world's arch antics and irreverence is very endearing. Coupled with unsettling yet comforting library music, the lounge jazz you'd hope to hear in any Eastern European animated film, this clash of styles makes the experience unforgettable. I was sad to leave the suddenly eventful lives of this lil' fella, and everything and everything they chanced upon, but this was one surreal trip I'll think back on fondly.
Seeing as this was one of his college projects, Dvorsky likely had no reason to expect Samorost would win a Webby Award. This led to Internet advertising work, the start of a career making similarly weird but wholly considered interactive media. Amanita Design would eventually ride the wave of indie games popularity via storefronts like Steam and the Wii Shop, plus enthusiastic press coverage, driving this kind of entertainment onto peoples' screens. Machinarium and later point-and-click odysseys shared the limelight with oh so many other author-driven darlings up through the turn of the 2010s, and the rest is history. It's fun to revisit the origins of these big cultural movements, back when games like this, Seiklus, and Strange Adventures in Infinite Space were innovators and standouts in an age of crowded big-box gaming. The era of bedroom coders never truly died, transitioning into browser games and then the digital distribution market we know today. Whether we call it "homebrew", "indie", "doujin", or whatever makes more sense in context, that ineffable David vs. Goliath effort of making one's own interactive art shines through in Samorost. Labor of love indeed.
no one:
me, slicing tanks outside Polis Massa to asphyxiate those Clones, or leading scrimblo bears through Endor's undergrowth to stab some fascists: "yeah I prefer Lapti Nek, but Jedi Rocks kinda bops too"
2005, a year of great changeover in the mainstream console gaming world. HD systems are just arriving, many developers are adopting extensive middleware (think Source or Unreal Engine), and giants like Ubisoft and Electronic Arts are beginning an acquisition spree. Two victims of EA's consolidation plan were first DICE, the Swedish group behind Battlefield 1942, and then Pandemic Studios of Destroy All Monsters fame, who themselves had been absorbed a couple times already. Separate from all this was LucasArts, the game software division of Lucasfilm which had juggled both Star Wars and original properties for decades. Star Wars: Battlefront and its immediate sequels sprang in some way from the influence of these companies, but its legacy has since been defined by a fanbase eager to redefine and reclaim the series' best aspects.
Battlefront II isn't quite the masterpiece my 4.5/5 rating suggests. The game loop, usually based around command point control or capture the flag, can get repetitive. Neither infantry nor vehicle controls are as polished or responsive as in the best multi-mode multiplayer military massacres. I've got more than a few nitpicks about some level and class designs, plus the instability of Pandemic's Zero Engine on modern PCs. And truth be told, its marquee single-player options, the story campaign and Galactic Conquest, aren't as in-depth as they should be. Yet this remains one of my all-time favorites not just in the genre and source franchise, but simply in general.
Pandemic found a practically perfect balance between accessible controls, involved objectives, addictive gunplay and vehicular combat...the list of "great enough" things goes on. These fundamentals which largely worked in the original Battlefront only improved after a couple more years, alongside the usual audiovisual garnishes. No longer are players stuck ambling across overly-large battlezones, also lacking in secondary items/weapons or class-based techniques with risks and rewards. This sequel delivers on the promises of its predecessor while demonstrating how ambitious a licensed take on Battlefield games can get. Being able to embody anyone from the lowliest Droid soldier to Darth Vader stomping across the hall, often within the same round of play, rarely gets better than this
Take an Imperials vs. Rebels conquest map like Death Star, for example. All these laser-congested lanes, nooks and crannies of teammates globbing into each other, and temptations of jumping over endless pits for speed—they add up into a frantic fight which one can nonetheless master. Chaining killstreaks to acquire upgrades, usually while rolling and hopping between spheres of crossfire and resource control, eventually becomes natural. I'll gladly lob 'nades into the Naboo courtyard, even as I risk drawing fire and the ire of AATs, just so I can quickly snatch those post-mortem power-ups and keep the pressure on after base capture. Wandering the backhalls of Echo Base can be tricky at first, but the end goal of taking that Rebel base from behind them justifies everything.
There's enough nuances lying beneath Battlefront II's pick-up-and-play surface, even in something as arguably tacked on as the story missions. Others have mentioned, time and again, how elegantly the Clone narrator's journey takes us from a patriotic, republican cause to fighting on the side of undeniable, structural evil. This remains fun despite the chilling themes and characters' resignation to process and subservience under Sith order. And yet this doesn't feel like glorification of the Empire because you're ultimately going through the same motions, victories, and humiliations as your opponents. There's something both mundane and admirable in retaking bastions, methodically disabling flagships, and mowing down everything in your path with saber throws and force lightning.
One of the biggest additions in Battlefront II, its space battles, illustrate this effectively. Nothing really changes between each orbital map, all consisting of two main ships flanked by frigates and supplied with endless waves of dogfighters and bombers. But the process of departing the hangar, blasting TIEs outta the skies, and then docking in hostile territory rarely gets old. Combine this with unique objectives in story mode, or modded levels adding these mechanics to otherwise earthbound combat, and you've got what feels like the full essence of Star Wars' iconic armed struggles.
What brings this indelible piece of software a half-star up is the mod scene. A cursory glance shows just the usual suspects you'd find in communities like Skyrim or Counter-Strike: player skins, new game modes, and way too much attention thrown upon the heroes and villains. (I get it, though. Playing as Jedi, Sith, and other big names in-between always feels great, especially thanks to Hero Assault extravaganzas on Mos Eisley.) Look deeper and there's almost too many custom maps and campaigns for single-player and beyond, from excellent recreations of places from the Battlefront and Jedi Knight series to all new, mechanically ambitious works like the ground-to-sky megalopolis Suun Ra. Hell, there's a whole package simply for building a brand new Galactic Conquest playlist entirely from user-added maps! It's sadly a bit fiddly to get this all working, but that's always something EA could fix if they weren't busy forcing DICE to produce disappointing new games chasing after this one.
The aforementioned Galactic Conquest points to the strategic possibilities beyond the light tactical layer already present here. Having to manage and defense multiple fleets and planets, all while balancing your per-turn income against temporary boosts for battles, makes for an engaging time...most of the time. It's when the AI wants to drown you in endless space duels, or simply fail to provide any threat to your planetary march, that I fall back into custom Instant Action sessions. Fan mods can pick up the slack, especially those which appropriate this part of the game to tell a unique plot rivaling what Pandemic made. I feel like there's still so much one can push the Zero Engine, as seen with Dark Times or the oft-discussed fan remasters full of gizmos and doodads. This scene deserves the kind of attention and critique that's benefited better-knowns like Doom for decades now.
I could go on and on and on about what Battlefront II achieves, and what it's meant to me over the years. There's a whole meta to unlocking the Elite badges and proceeding to curbstomp round after round with once puny unit classes. We could simply imbibe the bevy of memorable, often hilarious radio banter heard across each factions' grunts and officers. I have to hold myself back from doing in-depth writeups on the strats and trivia of each stage, whether original or brought forward from the original Battlefront. One cannot simply spend well over a hundred hours, part of it just fucking around on a comically huge recreation of Naboo's Theed City with all its Florentine halls and courtyards, and lack in minutiae and remembrance to share.
If you haven't yet tried classic Battlefront II for some reason or another, I hope that changes in the near-future. A few hours of trying the campaign, Galactic Conquest playthroughs, and some Instant Action will more than suffice to experience this in full. But the ease with which this remains so replayable, despite the sea of similarly invigorating big-team-battle software out there, is commendable. This remains one of my comfort food games, hardly slacking after all these years. It reminds me of a time when we got not just more Star Wars interactive media of note, but when there was still a lot of creative risk and confidence in the franchise's games. You had this, Jedi Outcast, Knights of the Old Republic, Empire at War, etc. vs. mainly Jedi Survivor and the recently middling DICE games by contrast. The era's dearly missed, but not quite missing in action, so long as we're watching those wrist rockets and 360 no-scoping Gamorreans from the depths of Jabba's Palace.
me, slicing tanks outside Polis Massa to asphyxiate those Clones, or leading scrimblo bears through Endor's undergrowth to stab some fascists: "yeah I prefer Lapti Nek, but Jedi Rocks kinda bops too"
2005, a year of great changeover in the mainstream console gaming world. HD systems are just arriving, many developers are adopting extensive middleware (think Source or Unreal Engine), and giants like Ubisoft and Electronic Arts are beginning an acquisition spree. Two victims of EA's consolidation plan were first DICE, the Swedish group behind Battlefield 1942, and then Pandemic Studios of Destroy All Monsters fame, who themselves had been absorbed a couple times already. Separate from all this was LucasArts, the game software division of Lucasfilm which had juggled both Star Wars and original properties for decades. Star Wars: Battlefront and its immediate sequels sprang in some way from the influence of these companies, but its legacy has since been defined by a fanbase eager to redefine and reclaim the series' best aspects.
Battlefront II isn't quite the masterpiece my 4.5/5 rating suggests. The game loop, usually based around command point control or capture the flag, can get repetitive. Neither infantry nor vehicle controls are as polished or responsive as in the best multi-mode multiplayer military massacres. I've got more than a few nitpicks about some level and class designs, plus the instability of Pandemic's Zero Engine on modern PCs. And truth be told, its marquee single-player options, the story campaign and Galactic Conquest, aren't as in-depth as they should be. Yet this remains one of my all-time favorites not just in the genre and source franchise, but simply in general.
Pandemic found a practically perfect balance between accessible controls, involved objectives, addictive gunplay and vehicular combat...the list of "great enough" things goes on. These fundamentals which largely worked in the original Battlefront only improved after a couple more years, alongside the usual audiovisual garnishes. No longer are players stuck ambling across overly-large battlezones, also lacking in secondary items/weapons or class-based techniques with risks and rewards. This sequel delivers on the promises of its predecessor while demonstrating how ambitious a licensed take on Battlefield games can get. Being able to embody anyone from the lowliest Droid soldier to Darth Vader stomping across the hall, often within the same round of play, rarely gets better than this
Take an Imperials vs. Rebels conquest map like Death Star, for example. All these laser-congested lanes, nooks and crannies of teammates globbing into each other, and temptations of jumping over endless pits for speed—they add up into a frantic fight which one can nonetheless master. Chaining killstreaks to acquire upgrades, usually while rolling and hopping between spheres of crossfire and resource control, eventually becomes natural. I'll gladly lob 'nades into the Naboo courtyard, even as I risk drawing fire and the ire of AATs, just so I can quickly snatch those post-mortem power-ups and keep the pressure on after base capture. Wandering the backhalls of Echo Base can be tricky at first, but the end goal of taking that Rebel base from behind them justifies everything.
There's enough nuances lying beneath Battlefront II's pick-up-and-play surface, even in something as arguably tacked on as the story missions. Others have mentioned, time and again, how elegantly the Clone narrator's journey takes us from a patriotic, republican cause to fighting on the side of undeniable, structural evil. This remains fun despite the chilling themes and characters' resignation to process and subservience under Sith order. And yet this doesn't feel like glorification of the Empire because you're ultimately going through the same motions, victories, and humiliations as your opponents. There's something both mundane and admirable in retaking bastions, methodically disabling flagships, and mowing down everything in your path with saber throws and force lightning.
One of the biggest additions in Battlefront II, its space battles, illustrate this effectively. Nothing really changes between each orbital map, all consisting of two main ships flanked by frigates and supplied with endless waves of dogfighters and bombers. But the process of departing the hangar, blasting TIEs outta the skies, and then docking in hostile territory rarely gets old. Combine this with unique objectives in story mode, or modded levels adding these mechanics to otherwise earthbound combat, and you've got what feels like the full essence of Star Wars' iconic armed struggles.
What brings this indelible piece of software a half-star up is the mod scene. A cursory glance shows just the usual suspects you'd find in communities like Skyrim or Counter-Strike: player skins, new game modes, and way too much attention thrown upon the heroes and villains. (I get it, though. Playing as Jedi, Sith, and other big names in-between always feels great, especially thanks to Hero Assault extravaganzas on Mos Eisley.) Look deeper and there's almost too many custom maps and campaigns for single-player and beyond, from excellent recreations of places from the Battlefront and Jedi Knight series to all new, mechanically ambitious works like the ground-to-sky megalopolis Suun Ra. Hell, there's a whole package simply for building a brand new Galactic Conquest playlist entirely from user-added maps! It's sadly a bit fiddly to get this all working, but that's always something EA could fix if they weren't busy forcing DICE to produce disappointing new games chasing after this one.
The aforementioned Galactic Conquest points to the strategic possibilities beyond the light tactical layer already present here. Having to manage and defense multiple fleets and planets, all while balancing your per-turn income against temporary boosts for battles, makes for an engaging time...most of the time. It's when the AI wants to drown you in endless space duels, or simply fail to provide any threat to your planetary march, that I fall back into custom Instant Action sessions. Fan mods can pick up the slack, especially those which appropriate this part of the game to tell a unique plot rivaling what Pandemic made. I feel like there's still so much one can push the Zero Engine, as seen with Dark Times or the oft-discussed fan remasters full of gizmos and doodads. This scene deserves the kind of attention and critique that's benefited better-knowns like Doom for decades now.
I could go on and on and on about what Battlefront II achieves, and what it's meant to me over the years. There's a whole meta to unlocking the Elite badges and proceeding to curbstomp round after round with once puny unit classes. We could simply imbibe the bevy of memorable, often hilarious radio banter heard across each factions' grunts and officers. I have to hold myself back from doing in-depth writeups on the strats and trivia of each stage, whether original or brought forward from the original Battlefront. One cannot simply spend well over a hundred hours, part of it just fucking around on a comically huge recreation of Naboo's Theed City with all its Florentine halls and courtyards, and lack in minutiae and remembrance to share.
If you haven't yet tried classic Battlefront II for some reason or another, I hope that changes in the near-future. A few hours of trying the campaign, Galactic Conquest playthroughs, and some Instant Action will more than suffice to experience this in full. But the ease with which this remains so replayable, despite the sea of similarly invigorating big-team-battle software out there, is commendable. This remains one of my comfort food games, hardly slacking after all these years. It reminds me of a time when we got not just more Star Wars interactive media of note, but when there was still a lot of creative risk and confidence in the franchise's games. You had this, Jedi Outcast, Knights of the Old Republic, Empire at War, etc. vs. mainly Jedi Survivor and the recently middling DICE games by contrast. The era's dearly missed, but not quite missing in action, so long as we're watching those wrist rockets and 360 no-scoping Gamorreans from the depths of Jabba's Palace.
1980
STOP LIQUID-ING CRYSTALS
•ORGANICS WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE ELECTROCUTED
•YEARS OF POLARIZATION yet NO REPLAY VALUE for juggling higher than CALCULATORS
•Wanted to score higher anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that: It was called "SPACE INVADERS"
•"Yes please give me SERIES of minigames. Please give me CLOCKS with it"- Statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged
LOOK at what Yamauchi has been demanding your Respect for all this time, with all the Ultra Hands & other toys Yokoi built for him
(This is REAL handheld gaming, done by REAL Gamers)
judge manhole donkey kong hockey
"Hello I would like virtualized clownery please"
They have played us for absolute fools
I love these funky little handhelds, but Ball is as basic and, frankly, redundant as they ever could have been. It exists purely as a tech & market demo for the concept, which Fire and the aforementioned Octopus effectively iterated on. Memes aside, I hardly have any strong thoughts on this inaugural Game & Watch unit, just sighs when I remember it exists for the sake of what came later.
The old twisted nematic tech for LCD displays is legit cool to read up on. Chemistry is still a lot of black magic to me, but there's a kind of Rube Goldberg-ish complicated engineering behind these monochrome flat panels from the period. Miniaturizing and economizing LCD displays to the level Nintendo needed for Game & Watch in general must have been difficult. They're marvels of consumer design to this day and the necessary stepping stone towards the Famicom's own blend of capability and commodity. So all respect to Ball, its deficiencies aside. We salute those who serve.
•ORGANICS WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE ELECTROCUTED
•YEARS OF POLARIZATION yet NO REPLAY VALUE for juggling higher than CALCULATORS
•Wanted to score higher anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that: It was called "SPACE INVADERS"
•"Yes please give me SERIES of minigames. Please give me CLOCKS with it"- Statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged
LOOK at what Yamauchi has been demanding your Respect for all this time, with all the Ultra Hands & other toys Yokoi built for him
(This is REAL handheld gaming, done by REAL Gamers)
judge manhole donkey kong hockey
"Hello I would like virtualized clownery please"
They have played us for absolute fools
1990
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.
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.
2011
So, that's it for the 3DS eShop, another graveyard of cherished exclusives and flash-in-the-pan experiments which Nintendo will unceremoniously move on from. Not us who lived through it, of course (and we're still able to redownload our libraries, which means even the corp's data centers are holding on). The Big N counts on its newer audiences never fully realizing what they're deprived of, but that's where retrospectives and critical writings both on Backloggd and elsewhere can do some good. Countless years of platform history, and the less lionized parts of developers' histories, would otherwise get lost in the shuffle of countless new systems and software libraries. Pushmo is a perfect example of something once notable but now more at risk of broad indifference or revisionism than ever, aided by its publisher's aversion to curating its legacy in a post-Iwata world. And that's a damn shame because Intelligent Systems' puzzle-platformer played an important part in buoying the 3DS' launch year, with an addictive game loop and plenty of replayability even now thanks to level editing and QR codes.
Pushmo strikes me as a peek into an alternate timeline where the Fire Emblem franchise simply didn't recover from its downturn. Int-Sys likely saw the writing on the wall, given all their staff interviews expressing a real fear of, and resignation to, Awakening being the last true entry in that series. They needed what Jupiter Corp. has with its endless Picross series, a forever repeatable puzzle concept appealing to just about everyone in just about any context, keeping their paychecks secure despite the seemingly inevitable death of their prestige IP. So we got this, a modest but meaty killer app which the eShop sorely needed in lieu of upcoming blockbusters. All seemed going to plan, with critical acclaim and constant word of mouth giving Crashmo and Pushmo World on Wii U the greenlight. But then a funny thing happened: that 3DS Fire Emblem game Int-Sys doubted could resurrect that series? It outperformed the previous FE releases combined, setting a new mandate for the company. The Puzzlemo segue suddenly looked a lot more out of place (alarmist, even) than anticipated.
So today we have seemingly no end of Fire Emblem, Paper Mario, and WarioWare goodness from this long-time Nintendo partner, but nothing like their mid-2010s experiments with these cute block-em-ups, let alone anything as out there as Code Name S.T.E.A.M.. It sucks because, unless you're willing to sail the high seas, this part of Int-Sys' back catalog might as well not exist. What precisely does a spate of throwback logic and jumping exercises, set to orchestral chiptunes and a family-friendly exterior, offer to anyone better acquainted with Three Houses or The Origami King? I'd argue that Pushmo represents the developer's talents in their most pure form, though. It's that very lack of frills, thrills, bombast, and grandiosity which this small series proved it could do without, squaring up to the tentpole stuff with such ease and elegance. One might argue there's not much new here beyond the 3D gimmick, but I digress.
The player's goals of rescuing little sumo wrestlers from sabotaged contraptions in a park is simple enough for Int-Sys to launch players through tutorials before they get bored. Yet it's still flexible by the time this game reaches its proper tier of challenge—those later rounds where one must carefully view the puzzle, backtrack from mistakes, and think multiple steps ahead of danger. I definitely wish all of these Puzzlemo installments offered experienced users the ability to skip earlier worlds via some kind of test/exam mode, just to save me some time on replays, but I don't mind the early stages. They stimulate my small pathetic monkey brain every time I hear that wonderful "clear!" jingle, after all. My main issue with Pushmo comes from the lack of added mechanics towards the end, which lets repetition and a feeling of sameness creep in. Solving pixel art murals is fun much like in Jupiter's nonogram paradigm, but not quite enough.
Even with its limited scope and novelty, I find it super rewarding to revisit Pushmo on Citra today. Quite a few WarioWare staffers led development on this and the rest of the series, hence its ease in activating that "one more turn!" sensation. Each world's paced and sequenced appropriately, feeling like a gentle upward climb vs. the difficulty cliffside that Crashmo provides. This linear mastery of pushing and pulling, navigating tight jumps, cutting off your escape to proceed higher…it all adds up once you reach the bonus worlds, full of homage to Nintendo icons and classic puzzling. Another important piece of the progression is unlocking new options in the level editor, a very relevant feature given how well the game teaches you to recognize and reproduce smart designs. I never got the full experience of building puzzles and sharing them with friends via QRs, sadly, but I can't imagine the lack of said feature here and in the sequels. That same joy that kids made and shared with Lode Runner and Excitebike in the '80s lives on in forms like this, all true to that Family Computer and Game Boy ethos of uncomplicated play.
Much of the game's appeal to me now comes from the aesthetic it promotes. Now, I'm typically not a fella with a penchant for twee or adulterated audiovisuals in my media diet. Anything that feels desperately cuddly, or unwilling to settle on a distinct audience, just seems cowardly to me most of the time. Pushmo avoids this by pairing its Saturday-morning-edutainment look with unassuming but involving brain-teasers, the kind that even adults can sink effort into. This visual style accomplishes a couple things: (a) keeping all elements distinct and readable even when complex, and (b) making me feel like a dumb lil' kindergartner again when I eventually mess up. Some other Nintendo releases from this period went too far in acting cute and patronizing to players—think Skyward Sword or Freakyforms—which is why I think Int-Sys' success here is commendable. Shout-outs to those lovely melodies, too! They're an effortless mind-meld of Famicom-era bleepity bloops and lush orchestration that complement each other maybe too well.
Questions like "where did Puzzlemo go?" bug me for lack of an easy answer. Maybe it's simply the sequels being either too hard for most (Crashmo) or too blithely derivative (Pushmo Worlds). Perhaps the glorious revival of Fire Emblem has shareholders far more excited than safe, profitable but unexciting puzzle ditties. Or it could just be a matter of key people leaving Int-Sys, i.e. the Chao Garden programmers no longer at Sonic Team, and now the developer can't trust itself to live up to this series' high standards. I doubt there's anything nefarious behind them abandoning these scrimblos to the eShop wastes, though it's examples like this which add credence to fan theories about Humble vs. Arrogant Nintendo. Whatever the case, I still hold out some hope for anything that can recapture the impact this underdog achieved. Some will say Pushmo only did so for lack of anything better at the time, but the series' absence on Switch feels like a gaping wound. Nintendo's big enough to shove endless employee prototypes into the trash, yet they somehow can't produce any meaningful iterations of this, or Pilotwings, or F-Zero like they once did? Things aren't adding up, and that wouldn't make Mallo or Papa Blox happy. Until this issue's resolved with more 'mo, I'm just glad to find the originals so approachable now. There's always indie-scene puzzlers if I really need something new, albeit rarely as polished and fine-tuned as this.
Pushmo strikes me as a peek into an alternate timeline where the Fire Emblem franchise simply didn't recover from its downturn. Int-Sys likely saw the writing on the wall, given all their staff interviews expressing a real fear of, and resignation to, Awakening being the last true entry in that series. They needed what Jupiter Corp. has with its endless Picross series, a forever repeatable puzzle concept appealing to just about everyone in just about any context, keeping their paychecks secure despite the seemingly inevitable death of their prestige IP. So we got this, a modest but meaty killer app which the eShop sorely needed in lieu of upcoming blockbusters. All seemed going to plan, with critical acclaim and constant word of mouth giving Crashmo and Pushmo World on Wii U the greenlight. But then a funny thing happened: that 3DS Fire Emblem game Int-Sys doubted could resurrect that series? It outperformed the previous FE releases combined, setting a new mandate for the company. The Puzzlemo segue suddenly looked a lot more out of place (alarmist, even) than anticipated.
So today we have seemingly no end of Fire Emblem, Paper Mario, and WarioWare goodness from this long-time Nintendo partner, but nothing like their mid-2010s experiments with these cute block-em-ups, let alone anything as out there as Code Name S.T.E.A.M.. It sucks because, unless you're willing to sail the high seas, this part of Int-Sys' back catalog might as well not exist. What precisely does a spate of throwback logic and jumping exercises, set to orchestral chiptunes and a family-friendly exterior, offer to anyone better acquainted with Three Houses or The Origami King? I'd argue that Pushmo represents the developer's talents in their most pure form, though. It's that very lack of frills, thrills, bombast, and grandiosity which this small series proved it could do without, squaring up to the tentpole stuff with such ease and elegance. One might argue there's not much new here beyond the 3D gimmick, but I digress.
The player's goals of rescuing little sumo wrestlers from sabotaged contraptions in a park is simple enough for Int-Sys to launch players through tutorials before they get bored. Yet it's still flexible by the time this game reaches its proper tier of challenge—those later rounds where one must carefully view the puzzle, backtrack from mistakes, and think multiple steps ahead of danger. I definitely wish all of these Puzzlemo installments offered experienced users the ability to skip earlier worlds via some kind of test/exam mode, just to save me some time on replays, but I don't mind the early stages. They stimulate my small pathetic monkey brain every time I hear that wonderful "clear!" jingle, after all. My main issue with Pushmo comes from the lack of added mechanics towards the end, which lets repetition and a feeling of sameness creep in. Solving pixel art murals is fun much like in Jupiter's nonogram paradigm, but not quite enough.
Even with its limited scope and novelty, I find it super rewarding to revisit Pushmo on Citra today. Quite a few WarioWare staffers led development on this and the rest of the series, hence its ease in activating that "one more turn!" sensation. Each world's paced and sequenced appropriately, feeling like a gentle upward climb vs. the difficulty cliffside that Crashmo provides. This linear mastery of pushing and pulling, navigating tight jumps, cutting off your escape to proceed higher…it all adds up once you reach the bonus worlds, full of homage to Nintendo icons and classic puzzling. Another important piece of the progression is unlocking new options in the level editor, a very relevant feature given how well the game teaches you to recognize and reproduce smart designs. I never got the full experience of building puzzles and sharing them with friends via QRs, sadly, but I can't imagine the lack of said feature here and in the sequels. That same joy that kids made and shared with Lode Runner and Excitebike in the '80s lives on in forms like this, all true to that Family Computer and Game Boy ethos of uncomplicated play.
Much of the game's appeal to me now comes from the aesthetic it promotes. Now, I'm typically not a fella with a penchant for twee or adulterated audiovisuals in my media diet. Anything that feels desperately cuddly, or unwilling to settle on a distinct audience, just seems cowardly to me most of the time. Pushmo avoids this by pairing its Saturday-morning-edutainment look with unassuming but involving brain-teasers, the kind that even adults can sink effort into. This visual style accomplishes a couple things: (a) keeping all elements distinct and readable even when complex, and (b) making me feel like a dumb lil' kindergartner again when I eventually mess up. Some other Nintendo releases from this period went too far in acting cute and patronizing to players—think Skyward Sword or Freakyforms—which is why I think Int-Sys' success here is commendable. Shout-outs to those lovely melodies, too! They're an effortless mind-meld of Famicom-era bleepity bloops and lush orchestration that complement each other maybe too well.
Questions like "where did Puzzlemo go?" bug me for lack of an easy answer. Maybe it's simply the sequels being either too hard for most (Crashmo) or too blithely derivative (Pushmo Worlds). Perhaps the glorious revival of Fire Emblem has shareholders far more excited than safe, profitable but unexciting puzzle ditties. Or it could just be a matter of key people leaving Int-Sys, i.e. the Chao Garden programmers no longer at Sonic Team, and now the developer can't trust itself to live up to this series' high standards. I doubt there's anything nefarious behind them abandoning these scrimblos to the eShop wastes, though it's examples like this which add credence to fan theories about Humble vs. Arrogant Nintendo. Whatever the case, I still hold out some hope for anything that can recapture the impact this underdog achieved. Some will say Pushmo only did so for lack of anything better at the time, but the series' absence on Switch feels like a gaping wound. Nintendo's big enough to shove endless employee prototypes into the trash, yet they somehow can't produce any meaningful iterations of this, or Pilotwings, or F-Zero like they once did? Things aren't adding up, and that wouldn't make Mallo or Papa Blox happy. Until this issue's resolved with more 'mo, I'm just glad to find the originals so approachable now. There's always indie-scene puzzlers if I really need something new, albeit rarely as polished and fine-tuned as this.
1980
"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.
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.
1991
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!
| 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!
2000
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
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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.
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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
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
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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.
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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
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.
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.
1994
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 otheroften 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.
| 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,
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
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.
| 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.
1983
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.
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.
1987
[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.
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.
1980
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/.
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/.