Blood Will Tell: Tezuka Osamu's Dororo (2004, PS2)

Games rarely care about contextualization. Nothing breaks a sense of immersion like an off-screen voice screaming "Press 'A' to dodge!" before an imminent explosion in any of many games about dodging explosions. I have no problem with the well-purposed self-reflexivity of the Metal Gear Solid games. Metal Gear Solid 2's finale is as brilliant a post-modern exhibition of snake-eating-its-own-tailness as Breakfast of Champions' ending. What I take issue with is "Press the analogue stick up to look up, Chief. Good. Now, look down. Good. Does that feel alright to you?"

Even before games could yell at players to look at their controllers, a more engraved form of immersion-breaking pervaded the gamescape: context-less character growth. "Leveling up." Learning skills arbitrarily. Progressive stat growth in RPGs represents the corresponding characters increase in strength and knowledge little by little, battle by battle. I get that. But what about killing his 128th Red Slime taught Lotto how to use Fire in the original Dragon Quest? He could not so much as summon a spark after Red Slime 127, but can conjure torrents of flame after 128?

Blood Will Tell is a game about a samurai whose body parts have been stolen by demons. It is one that incorporates the character's Flame-style epiphanies and sudden spikes in strength better than any I have seen since Final Fantasy IV. Contextualization is part of what made FFIV so memorable, and it's part of why BWT is still worth playing today in spite of its stage design problems.

When you defeat a major enemy in BWT, you reclaim an organ. Each organ comes with an increase in stats appropriate for that body part. An arm grants an increase in strength, for example. But what's more interesting is the accompanying ability. As a new arm replaces your robotic one, the way it handles a weapon changes entirely. New legs come with new dashing abilities. A new eye brings the game from its black-and-white beginnings into color. The esophagus brings with it the ability to speak--to issue quick commands to your sidekick character.

This contextualization gives every milestone and every boss significance. Fighting each major enemy, I thought "What body part will I reclaim and how will it change the game?" If Red Entertainment had the same capacity for ingenious contextualization as they did for level design, Blood Will Tell would have been a masterpiece. As is, it's a fun game that tantalizes in all the right ways.

Kururin Paradise (2002, Game Boy Advance)

I love all of the games I've posted about on Polygon Not Forgotten. I cannot say I love them all equally. If I had to choose just one to survive and the others to be eradicated from history, it would be Kururin Paradise.

Kururin Paradise is a game about moving a rotating stick through mazes, trying not to come into contact with the walls or obstacles. You use the directional pad to move the stick. You use the "A" button to speed up is movement along the map, "B" to slow it down," and "R" button to speed up its rotation along its own axis. This is the game I'd watch every other game in existence burn to save.

With a gameplay mechanic so basic, the only way Kururin Paradise could succeed is with flawless hit detection and ceaselessly inventive level design. It is by these that it does succeed. And on the topic of ceaselessness, the inexorability of the stick's clockwise rotation is the source of the game's tension. Corridors are typically not tall enough to accommodate a perfectly upright stick standing at 12:00 and 6:00. This means you area almost always on the verge of sustaining damage. One brush with a wall means your "Perfect" rating is gone. Three means game over.

Kururin Paradise, with its clean aesthetic, simple controls, and negligible production values, should be exactly the kind of game we see on cellphones. Its colors and characters look fresh out of a 2014 iPhone game, but its control and level design--that which cannot easily be copied--are strictly the domain of 2002 and Eighting, masters of rock-hard Japanese shooting games like Armed Police Batrider and whose employees would go on to found a little outfit called Cave. Yes, Mushihimesama and Dodon Pachi Cave. The same dedication to hit detection and difficulty that prevail in Kururin can be found in Cave's work of the same period. I just wish it could be found on my cellphone.

Highest Recommendation

Cubivore (2002, Gamecube)

 

Cubivore is the most unusual of all of the games Polygon Not Forgotten has so far addressed. That it came to the US at all, even during the salad days of quirky games, is a miracle and testament to the courage of Atlus, its US publisher. Its developer, Intelligent Systems, is better known for the Fire Emblem series without which we would not have the rocks-paper-scissors balance of contemporary turn-based strategy games. Cubivore innovated as well. Without it, we would not have Katamari Damacy or certainly not 2012's Playstation 3 cult hit Tokyo Jungle.

 

Cubivore is a game about adaptation. Your animal adapts to its environment, changing its attributes and conforming to what it kills and eats. Eating enough of a given animal means inheriting its legs or horns. Legs (and number of them) affect movement, essentially changing the rules of movement periodically as you defeat enemies. Horns affect attack speed, changing the rules of attacking. In addition to the animal, another entity is forced to adapt to changing environments: the player.

 

 

Cubivore never lets you get comfortable. What works against some enemies soon, diet-depending, will not work on others. Like in copycat Tokyo Jungle, the do-I or don't-I when it comes to eating an animal whose attributes you'd rather not inherit while low on hunger/health is a major source of tension. That the emphasis is on the environment and the obstacles it presents is evident in the Japanese title for the game, which is not Cubivore (emphasis on character and the act of fighting and eating), but Animal Forest. The forest gets top billing because the environment--not the character--is this game's star.

 

This willingness to subvert character emphasis was at its height in the '90s and '00s. The slew of Sim City and Rollercoaster Tycoon games symptomize this willingness to defer from a central avatar. Does the shift back to character-driven games, or perhaps even the switch in from Animal Forest to Cubivore say something about American egotism? I'm not sure. What I am sure of is that we've not seen anything like this part beat-em-up, part virtual pet, part dungeon crawler since.

Vib Ribbon (1999, Playstation)



No discussion of obscure or overlooked Playstation games should be without mention of Masaya Matsuura's Parappa and Um Jammer Lammy follow-up, Vib Ribbon. It's Matsuura's best game. Far from it, in fact. But it is the most daring and confident, two virtues that Polygon Not Forgotten holds in particularly high esteem.

Like Jammer and Parappa before it, Vib Ribbon is a rhythm game in which the player responds to audial and visual signals with a combination of button presses. Rockband and beatmania fit this description as well, but they're not quite the same. The Masaya games revolve around a character, Vibri in Vib Ribbon's case. Rockband and beatmania revolve around an interface. Their levels are like Excel spreadsheets. Matsuura's are like...well, levels--moving a charming character through a system of obstacles. I like to call them "Mascot Rhythm Games" to differentiate them from the Rockband-type games.

This particular Mascot Rhythm Game is special in its incorporation of custom soundtracks to which it designed levels all the way back in 1999. By replacing the Vib disc with a music CD, the game would throw pitfalls, spikes, and loops at Vibri to the bass, drums, and lyrics of whatever you felt like listening to at the time. It bears emphasizing that the Playstation did not have a hard drive. Its RAM was extremely limited even at the time of its release, which is why 2D games were unfailingly better on the more RAM-intensive Sega Saturn. If the Playstation was to hold all of Vib Ribbon's graphics and engine in its limited RAM while playing a music CD, those graphics and that engine had to be extremely simple. And like the restrictions of meter forcing a poet to produce his best lines, the PS1's RAM restriction squeezed an astonishingly inventive minimalist aesthetic out of Matsuura and company.

Vib Ribbon's call-and-response style of rhythm gaming may be outmoded, but its aesthetic is something that will always be special.

Highest Recommendation

Phantom Crash (2002, XBOX)

The cellphonization of gaming is, to many, anathema. Polygon Not Forgotten has condemned oversimplification throughout the blog. But simplifying is not a bad thing per se. Cutting the fat can, when there is fat to be cut, be the right design choice.

Before Phantom Crash, every mech combat game fell somewhere on a scale between "Boring" and "Utterly Impenetrable" for me. The action in Mech Warrior and Armored Core was alluring, but sparse, occurring between long intervals of menu-sifting, micromanaging, and trudging across empty game space. Phantom Crash cellphonized the class mech combat games, and that's not a bad thing. It made customization brief and engaging, streamlined mech controls, did not permit dialogue to interrupt gameplay by quarantining it to wholly skippable segments between battles, and, most importantly, has no empty space. Its arenas are small and heavily populated. In a Phantom Crash battle, you are always shooting, shot, or hiding from the shooting by using your mech's camouflage (a visual effect that still impresses over ten years later).

My point is that simplifying a game can often mean distilling it--shrinking the intervals between battles in Mech Warrior and reducing Armored Core's controls to only the strictly necessary commands. Playing Phantom Crash is like playing the trailer for Armored Core--it's only The Good Parts. That it has a licensed soundtrack whose high mark is a stone-facedly unironic inclusion of The Kuricorder Quartet  shows how much fun Genki had making this game, which, I imagine, was the only thing more fun than playing it.

Highest Recommendation

Steambot Chronicles, cont.

Steambot Chronicles is no reskinned Grand Theft Auto.

The colorful aesthetic is deserving of mention, but it is often all that gets mentioned. Yes, it’s something of a miracle that Steambot is an anime sandbox game that avoids both anime and sandbox tropes, but it surprises in another department: combat. Inside this sprawling world is a mini-Street Fighter. To fight an opponent with ranged capability is to try patiently to get in on Dhalsim. To combat a Trot with a shield and melee weapon is to try to keep Zangief out. Both necessitate judicious dashing—useful for avoiding an attack, but venerable. The Trot and its weapons, snappy and responsive, could easily carry a leaner, more traditional arcade-style standard action game. The only downside to how wonderful the Trot combat feels is that it makes the game’s other available money-making options (pool, archaeology, music, etc.) tedious by comparison. 

Steambot Chronicles wants to be played and is sad when it’s not, but it’s a relationship that takes a little work. The map is nondescript, loading times are frequent, exploration is encumbered by the constant need for refueling, and the camera can be disobedient. Today’s hardware and advances would correct most of these. So why haven’t we seen anything like Steambot since 2006? It did have a few quiet sequels that were essentially jankier, glitchier versions of the PS2 game. The 2009 PSP game, Steambot Chronicles: Battle Tournament, actually had worse load times. The planned sequel was announced in 2006 and spent several years in development hell before being cancelled alongside other promising Irem titles following the 2011 tsunami. Irem has not shown interest in developing another game. No other developer has voiced interest in carrying the torch.

The most obvious reason is that Steambot sold very poorly and mass murderfests like Grand Theft Auto and Assassin’s Creed sell very well. A proper Steambot sequel or even a serviceable copycat would be a huge gamble on something without precedent for profitability, requiring a large budget and programmers from more disciplines than typical of an action game. The amount of manpower and money needed likely precludes the indie development crowd, the only adventurous faction of developers left. For now, anyway.