Terranigma: What Lies Beneath

Terranigma has layers. You’d expect that from a game that starts deep inside the world, in a barren landscape of magma lakes and false skies. That’s just the initial stage for this ambitious action-RPG, the work of a talented developer trying to capture and perfect their ethos. It has a curious reputation among Super NES titles, a mystique that goes beyond the enjoyable surface.  That’s led Clear River Games to bring it back early next year, hyping the game as an unsung marvel and rolling out a deluxe box set. 

Why revive a game so elaborately? Terranigma offers not one, but three good reasons.

 

For starters, Terranigma is an exceptional game. It opens in a seemingly gentle village, albeit one where crystalline orbs float in the air, the elder has a forbidden door in his house, and there’s no apparent way to leave. Young troublemaker Ark opens that door and meets a strange creature named Yomi, revealing the truth: their sedate little town is the only scrap of life in a bleak, hollow earth. As heroes inevitably do, Ark leaves behind all he knows, including his devoted girlfriend Elle, and sets out on a quest. Yet he’s not rescuing anyone or defeating a villain. He’s resurrecting the entire planet.

 

A tall order that may be, but Ark’s journey remains an action-RPG in the Zelda mold. He explores dungeons and contends with monsters, and Quintet builds nicely on that base. Ark can dash, jump, and pull off half a dozen special attacks in the process, with an arsenal of magic spells to gradually purchase (and easily ignore). It’s a brisk game, one driven by combat, but Quintet’s also willing to slow things down for puzzles both routinely physical and fiendishly obscure. 

The true scope of Terranigma isn’t found in the dungeons and caves, however. It’s in the world Ark rebuilds, starting with animals and plants but progressing quickly. Hunter-gatherer societies soon grow into industrial cities and bellicose kingdoms, with a conspiracy curiously centered around a young woman who seems a duplicate of Elle. And so Ark guides the progress of humankind with occasional decisions and subquests, all without really questioning how or even why he’s doing this.

 

He finds out eventually, and the truth is of course a hard one. Quintet’s games stood apart by always digging a little deeper, threading existential matters through the plots and mechanics of fantasy action-RPGs. Illusion of Gaia sent players through the eerie ancient sites of a subtly twisted Earth. Actraiser let them shape the world from above. Soul Blazer offered homilies from rescued townsfolk, goats, and flowers. Masashi Hashimoto, co-founder of the company, described Terranigma as the “culmination of all our efforts,” an attempt to bring together everything that made their earlier Super NES titles important. 

It sounds like a sure case of overreaching, yet those ambitions made Terranigma soar. True, its overlying story dips into cliches, with turncloak warriors and spunky kids and corrupt rulers all limited in their development. Ark himself has a minimal personality, Yomi’s a typical caustic sidekick, and Elle’s incarnations are both passive and lack the arrogance (or the pet pig) of Illusion of Gaia’s Kara.

 

Yet the game is really about its atmosphere and its ideas, about the wonder of seeing the world come back to life all around you. So director Tomoyoshi Miyazaki (Quintet's other co-founder) never neglects a central theme of creation, destruction, and the price paid for them. It’s a tale of Manichean deities that steps beyond good and evil, examining instead the necessity of both. Hey, it’s right there in the Japanese title: Tenchi Souzou, the Creation of Heaven and Earth. 

And if Terranigma doesn’t have answers for everything, that’s the point. Quintet knew that it’s enough merely to ask the questions. 

That sense of wonder and vague melancholy comes through with rare clarity. Terranigma hails from the final years of the Super NES, when developers were adept at crafting detailed sprites, memorable soundtracks, and striking atmosphere with the hardware’s limitations. Miyoko Takaoka and Masanori Hikichi’s soundtrack follows Ark through a cratered underworld, a bleak surface, and the gradual spawning of life and civilization. It matches the weightier moments of Ark’s journey, so you’ll never feel completely good about what you've accomplished.

 

Not merely remarkable as a game, Terranigma is also Quintet’s farewell to their Super NES period, to that era of sprite-based artistry, and even to their own creative heights as a developer. The industry moved on to the PlayStation and Saturn, and Quintet stumbled as they followed up with the awkward strategy-sim Solo Crisis, the intriguing yet anti-commercial Planet Laika, and the swiftly forgotten racing game Code R. The closest they came to their earlier successes were Brightis and The Granstream Saga. These were both co-productions with Shade, a developer founded by frequent Quintet collaborator Koji Yokota, and they offer only vague glimmers of Quintet’s Super NES games. 

From there Quintet became a mystery, with a website infrequently updated until it effectively closed in 2008. Hashimoto and Miyazaki turned up in minor roles for a few games, and in the years that followed rumors took over and turned Miyazaki into one of the game industry’s more notorious disappearances. His Japanese Wikipedia entry mentions him working for a now-defunct company called Giga Factory, which was apparently tied to an online casino service known as Entget. This last venture apparently collapsed with a large chunk of investor funds lost, and Miyazaki has not surfaced again. Westone founder Ryuiichi Nishizawa even mentioned it a 2012 interview that he’d heard of Miyazaki getting arrested.

   

That, of course, only romanticizes Quintet’s games further. They’re often nebulous in their endings, where a hero’s reward might be only the vague promise of amnesiac reincarnation. It’s perhaps fitting that Miyazaki’s absence would stir the fascination of players, all hoping that he and the rest of Quintet will one day get another chance. 

At least Terranigma itself gets another chance. This brings up the third reason to make a fuss, at least among North American fans. When it arrived in 1995 as Tenchi Souzou, it was yet another impressive Super Famicom RPG unlikely to be localized, with fans left to gaze longingly at import coverage in magazines (and perhaps write plaintive letters to those magazines). Nintendo surprised them by translating the game and renaming it Terranigma…only to skip North America entirely. It saw a modest release in Europe and Australia, translated to English, French, German and other languages. Thus it was a point of envy twice over for Americans. Many of those interested in the game played it somehow, whether by importing a European copy and a PAL converter or just resorting to emulation. Perhaps it was only fair, considering all the RPGs translated for Americans but denied European releases. 

And in the decades since then, Terranigma’s acquired a sturdy cult reputation, one referenced in games like Sea of Stars and the upcoming Tako no Himitsu. Yet it went curiously without any reissues, leading some to wonder if the rights were lost alongside Quintet itself. 

Now Clear River Games has brought back Terranigma. Contrary to speculation about muddled rights to the game, the reissue apparently wasn’t held up by Miyazaki’s disappearance. Terranigma’s set for a release on modern platforms, complete with a lavish boxset for the truly devoted. The enhancements are notable mostly for adjusting the game’s balance (one boss is extremely brutal if you don’t exploit your magic arsenal). Elsewhere it seems the localization is much the same as it was in Nintendo’s original release.

That localization could be a problem. The font has annoyingly wide spacing, and the dialogue itself is very much a primitive mid-1990s translation, with awkward phrases and punctuation. Worst of all is the broken English spoken by Chinese characters, including Wong, a scheming financier and major antagonist. It's a patois that recalls how Asians were depicted in racist old cartoons (“He be very angry!”), and it's hard to imagine Clear River leaving that intact for Terranigma's new release.

Even with some problems at its edges, Terranigma remains a treasure. It’s the masterwork of a mysteriously vanished director. It’s the most egregious case of The One That Got Away for North American RPGs fans. And it’s an enjoyable action-RPG with an intriguing spirit and an elegiac tone. That’s always worth digging up.

Interview: Estique's Takayuki Komabayashi

Any shooter fan should give Changeable Guardian Estique some attention. That’s not merely because it’s technically astounding for something running on an actual Famicom or NES. And it’s not just because the staff includes luminaries from Compile’s best years as a shooter developer: Jemini Hirono, Daigattai Kodama, and Pac Fujishama, to use their pen names. It’s really because Estique is an impressive shooter. 

Numerous retro-styled shooters have blatant connections to genre classics, but Estique is harder to pin down. There are traces of Compile’s history about it, but other influeces lurk below the surface, from that Changeable ship itself to the simplified weapons to the game’s two diverging storylines across the Famicom and NES versions. There’s a lot going on here.

Estique debuted on modern platforms last month, with a physical release planned and Broke Studio still listing the NES and Famicom cartridges. That's why I decided to ask director Takayuki Komabayashi about just what went into Estique.

How did you initially come up with Estique?

I thought that my company should create an original game, and I wanted it to be a shooting game that was easy to play without those brutal surprises for first-time players.

And how did you become a fan of Compile?

When I played games on the Sega Mark III, the one I enjoyed the most was Maou Golvellius [aka Golvellius: The Valley of Doom].

Several former Compile staffers worked on Estique, but it also seems inspired by other games besides Compile shooters. The transforming robot is similar to the mecha in Thexder and its sequel Fire Hawk, which you’ve mentioned as favorite games of yours. What do you like about the transforming concept?

I like robot shooting games, but I thought the gameplay might not work if the robot’s hitbox was always taller than a ship, so I decided to go with a transformation system.

 

The title Estique is an anagram of Equites, an Alpha Denshi arcade game that you have also mentioned as a favorite. Equites is somewhat obscure compared to Thexder and other classic shooters, and Equites is also a vertical shooter instead of a horizontal shooter like Estique. Can you tell us a little about why you like Equites? And how did it inspire the gameplay of Estique?

Equites is highly praised for its heavy, rich sound as well as its responsive gameplay and tight feel. Since Equites is a vertical shooter, that aspect didn’t really influence the gameplay itself in Estique, but it still has a connection to the NES version's settings.

Estique's method of briefly powering up the ship or robot’s weapons is interesting. What was your inspiration for that?

Is it because there’s no step-by-step power system? I don’t like step-by-step power-ups in shooting games.

There are lots of nostalgic references in Estique, especially in the soundtrack. For example, why did you include the Gunkan March?

I like the Gunkan March from Parodius Da! so I asked Satoshi Fujishima [aka "Pac"] to make it the first track in the prototype version’s sound production. Regarding the ported version, our company suggested playing it when the game language is set to Japanese, but it was removed based on the publisher's decision.

By the way, our adventure game Hyper Euphoria, which recreates the style of 80s Japanese PC games and was released by a different publisher, does play the Gunkan March too.

On that note, Hyper Euphoria is currently available on Steam in Japanese. Are there any plans to translate it?

The Japanese text is highly idiosyncratic and filled with inside jokes. Due to the high cost of translation, I do not think an English version will be released.

What inspired Mary and Kanon, the pilots drawn by Daigattai Kodama? Are their names references to anything in particular?

We didn’t specifically decide on any references in the character designs or the names, so they’re supposed to be original characters.

Estique sends Mary and Kanon around the world, complete with vacation photos after each stage. How did you choose the cities they visit? 

Japan, the U.S., and the U.K. are major places. I like Hong Kong, and Germany was chosen because there was a possibility of developing it for a German publisher.

Why do the Famicom and NES versions of the game have different cutscenes and, in essence, different storylines? For example, the ending to the Famicom version implies some romantic attraction between Mary and Kanon, but that does not come up in the NES version. Was that a joke about how NES games were sometimes censored compared to Famicom games?

I thought the NES version had to give the impression of "English written by Japanese people doing their best" as well as a different story and setting. Also, since I know there are people who don’t like silly stories, I wanted to provide a version with a relatively serious story as an option.

Regarding NES and Famicom games, there are examples like Power Blade being overwhelmingly better as an action game [than Power Blazer], or The Adventure of Link being harder but more complete, but we didn’t touch any of the core parts of the game like its difficulty or design.

Is it true that the physical special edition of Estique for the Switch will include an exclusive "score attack" level? What inspired that stage?

It was originally planned to be included in the ported version, but the publisher decided not to include it. So the score attack version comes as a cartridge in the Nintendo Switch special edition package. You can consider the content to be equivalent to the Gunhed Special Version [a rare score-attack version of Gunhed, aka Blazing Lazers].

You recently announced Estique 2 and showed some preview footage of a level set in Giza in 1235 B.C. Will the sequel involve time travel?

We're imagining an atmosphere similar to Time Soldiers or the anime series Yattodetaman.

Will Estique 2 carry over characters from the original game? Some of the bosses and supporting cast are seen very seldom in the first Estique.

Some minor enemies and the basic system will be reused, but bosses and stages will be new.

What was the inspiration for the name of Cat Hui Trading?

From the film director and actor Michael Hui.

Is the cat mascot, Maruino, meant to look like Randar from Compile games?

I asked Satoshi Fujishima, who created Randar, to "draw a 1UP character for a certain game," and what he came up with ended up unused, so we just repurposed it for our company.

You’re a devoted collector of old games, and you worked at the retailer Beep Shop for many years. What changes have you seen in game collecting over the last 10 to 15 years? What do you think of prices going up on rare games?

As for arcade boards, overall prices peaked in 2024 and have dropped a bit since, so I don’t think they’ll just keep going up. If prices get too high, fewer people will buy, so the market price will likely drop to some extent.

What is your favorite old-school Compile shooter?

Gun-Nac.

Little Things: Changeable Guardian Estique

Changeable Guardian Estique took an interesting path. It’s now available on all modern systems, but it came out in 2024 as an actual Famicom and NES game. It was engineered to run on that ancient console at the back of your closet (or perhaps the one still parked under your TV), and for that alone its intense bullet storms and pixel backdrops were visually impressive. Yet beyond that it’s a great little shooter, and my review says as much.

    

I’ll also talk a little about Estique’s story, what basic material it is. Yes, I am one of those nerds who takes every narrative at least a little seriously, even if it’s the plot of an MST3K-featured movie or a single sentence in a video game, and Estique has at least a few sentences and some characters. 

The pilots of the world-saving Estique mecha are Mary and Kanon, both designed with modern anime flourishes. Kanon wears maidlike attire and Mary prefers a sparing getup similar to Rika’s in Phantasy Star IV, with neither outfit seeming practical for extended time in a robot’s cockpit. Such realism is hardly the point, of course, so I initially wrote off the characters as pandering decor for Estique’s side-scrolling shooter spectacle. Hey, you gotta sell your game. 

Yet they won me over. Estique’s creators, including director Takayuki Komabayashi and Compile veteran Dagattai Kodama, wanted their shooter to make impressions across the board, and there’s a little joke in its plot. The NES version has deliberately awkward English text and a simplified plot about alien invasions, while the Famicom version gets into slightly more detail with Mary and Kanon, particularly in an ending with some romantic tension between them. How Estique would have scandalized the Nintendo censors of 1991.

The plot variations are a cute extra, but I was more amused by the images that pop up between levels. Each stage takes place in a different city, and after defeating the resident giant mechanical boss, Mary and Kanon enjoy the local sights and fashions. While I have no doubt that this was motivated by some desire to dress the heroines as biergarten waitresses, it’s surprisingly innocuous overall, as though Mary and Kanon are sharing their vacation photos.

They sometimes even hang out with the enemy pilots of the giant mecha they face. Heck, everyone shows up at the end of the game for a party, apparently freed from whatever evil forces were possessing then. I trust I’m not spoiling anything. Estique isn’t that sort of game.

It’s a soundly charming detail, though I admit some disappointment that the New York level had Mary and Kanon cavorting at the beach. It’s perhaps a reference to GG Aleste 3’s endings, but I had hoped the game would trot out stereotypical Americanisms with the two pilots wearing football uniforms, serving up giant cheeseburgers, and voting against their best interests. New York City isn’t really known for its beaches, either.

Then again, Estique also shows New York City with spacious canyons and prairie sunsets in its background, so perhaps this is a world radically altered. 

Anyway, I recommend Changeable Guardian Estique to anyone who enjoys shooters. I also recommend buying it legitimately. That should go without saying, but the developers were concerned enough to make this.

So I think it bears emphasizing.

The Way of Wall Scrolls

I became an anime nerd in the late 1990s, and it wasn't a bad time for that. There's a lot to analyze there: the rise of manga and anime as a mass-market export from Japan, the expensive or haphazard ways fans acquired it, and the backlash from more entrenched geek circles. Yet if I had to describe my young and silly anime-fan period in one phrase, I'd refer to that time as My Wall Scroll Years. 

Wall scrolls are still a popular chunk of the anime merchandise market, but I remember them looming largest around the turn of the century, if you can call it that without sounding ancient and weird. As the 1990s drew to a close, fans snapped up all sorts of products based on their favorite anime, even when those products were overpriced or unlicensed or not even visually comprehensible.

 

In many respects, wall scrolls of that period were questionable purchases. The quality of the print on fabric was rarely as nice as an actual poster, and their appeal was mostly in how easily they could hang on a wall. I had a bunch of them for a while, but in time I realized that if I was going to display my nerd proclivities so readily, I should at least use framed posters. Before that revelation dawned, however, I was perfectly willing to decorate with wall scrolls of my favorite anime or video games. I recall three of them most vividly, along with the reactions they received...or didn’t. 

AN EVANGELION FAMILY PHOTO 

I suspect that most of the wall scrolls I owned were not officially licensed products, but one was the real deal: a Neon Genesis Evangelion scroll that I bought during a college trip to Japan. The art was the same as the image below, but the design I had featured the show’s title instead of the odd photo-negative of the characters.

I liked the simplicity of it, how it made Evangelion look like some legal drama or a mystery anthology about a teenage detective. Evangelion was, I reasoned, all about the characters, and I preferred how this piece was free of EVA Units, plugsuits, or any bizarre imagery. This was a time when festooning your wall with any nerd décor was asking for trouble, but I found this Evangelion spread tasteful. I approved of how Shinji looms largest, how Misato is lost in thought, and how Asuka, the abusive time bomb who livens up the show, looks completely happy. 

Notable Reaction: 

One of my housemates looked at Misato and, noticing her cross necklace, asked “Is she a nurse?” 

I could have pointed out that Misato Katsuragi is not in fact a nurse but rather an officer of NERV, a mysterious organization whose clandestine, world-altering machinations she gradually deduces as she struggles to protect the mentally unstable teenage pilots under her charge while reconnecting with her openly double-agent college boyfriend and awkwardly reconciling the survivor’s guilt she has from witnessing the horrific Second Impact that killed her scientist father and billions of other people. 

But I just said, “Nah, she’s a military commander.” 

DARKSTALKERS 

It took me a while to properly appreciate Darkstalkers, but I was hooked by the time Vampire Savior (aka Darkstalkers 3) arrived on home systems in 1998. I decided to get the superior Sega Saturn version, and I noticed that Game Cave, which by then was filling a dozen pages in every issue of GameFan, offered the game with a wall scroll showing art from the Darkstalkers anime series. So I called them up and ordered it, which was actually what you often did before you decided that credit cards were safe on the Internet.

I suspect that this wall scroll was not officially licensed, given that Game Cave had no scruples about selling those ubiquitous Son May anime CD bootlegs alongside legitimate goods. Yet I didn’t care when I could play Vampire Savior on my Saturn and hang Morrigan and Demitri on my wall. It made up for the Darkstalkers anime series and the Darkstalkers cartoon being disappointments in completely different ways. 

Notable Reaction: 

It wasn’t long before my relentlessly Catholic mother walked into my room, saw that giant illustration of Morrigan in all her bat-winged succubus splendor, and gasped in surprise. I rolled my eyes and prepared for criticism. 

“Look what he put on his wall!” She said, clearly elated. “He’s not gay after all!” 

My mother left the room, rapt as a pilgrim at Lourdes, before I could ask any questions or vent any admonitions about her prejudices. She was correct in her assumptions, but I was shocked that she’d needed an anime wall scroll as proof. Even so, it was rare that my parents showed any interest, much less any approval, toward my anime or video game habits, so I decided to count this as a small victory.

If only that Darkstalkers wall scroll had featured Felicia, the series mainstay who usually wears nothing but very selective fur. I’m sure my mother would have been glad to learn that the nearly naked cat-woman on my wall was, judging by Vampire Savior’s endings, also a nun and therefore a Nice Catholic Girl.

SATOSHI URUSHIHARA’S CHUN-LI 

I always liked Chun-Li. It was less an awkward preteen crush and more of a fondness for her as a character, a resilient woman who held her own in Street Fighter and the frequently male-dominated realm of fighting games. Yes, Chun-Li was designed and marketed to entice an equally male-dominated market, but I sought the higher ground. That extended to a wall scroll.

This art is the work of Satoshi Urushihara, who is hardly a Puritan when it comes to drawing women for games like Growlanser and Langrisser or his original creations like Plastic Little and Legend of Lemnear. He made several illustrations of Chun-Li, and this was the one I liked best. I enjoyed the contrast between her tearful background expression and her more confident foreground pose, and I preferred her Street Fighter Alpha outfit to her less practical original acrobat costume. I even appreciated that while Chun-Li is often rendered with large thighs and skinny arms, Urushihara allowed her a bulkier upper body and thus a more balanced physique, portraying an image of strength layered atop vulnerability. 

Yes, I had thought about this wall scroll. I had analyzed it. I was prepared to defend it and extol its artistic merits to anyone who noticed and remarked on it. 

Notable Reaction: 

No one noticed or remarked, actually. All my rationalizations went to waste, probably because Chun-Li wasn’t on my wall for long. 

You see, I was a weird contradiction of a nerd. I was willing to wallpaper my dorm room with Masamune Shirow art and RPG posters, yet I would never, ever actually discuss anime or video games with others unless I was rock-certain that they were as into it as I was. It's not as though I would raise my hand in my History of Art class and announce that I had an artistically semi-nude Chun-Li on my wall. This was many years before Nicki Minaj’s song, after all. 

Eventually that socially uptight half of me triumphed, and most of those wall scrolls, Chun Li among them, were stored away while I tried to balance a few anime or video-game posters with Radiohead, Tori Amos, or Mulholland Drive. 

Like many things I valued as a young anime nerd, my wall scrolls were swiftly sold when I needed money more than a tapestry of awkwardly positioned Xenogears artwork. I don’t really miss them, and I’m not even sure if I even miss that time in my life when I’d spend money recklessly just to show the world how much I liked Evangelion or Darkstalkers or Chun-Li. I can do that much cheaper right here.

I'm no longer embarrassed about being an anime nerd, yet I'm also no longer driven to cover my living space so heavily in such adornments. I can say with matchless confidence that My Wall Scroll Years are far behind me. 

Uh oh. 

Guilty Gear: Gear Be Dragons

I have always enjoyed Guilty Gear. As irrelevant a claim as it is, I was indeed there when the first game hit back in 1998, and I immediately adored Guilty Gear’s rough and glorious excess, its devotion to heavy-metal anime gaudiness as an art form. Later titles were far more polished, but the original has that earnest, almost furious aura that comes from someone throwing everything they have into a creation. You can see that all over the game. It’s in the striking intro, the catchy soundtrack, the inventive characters, and, of course, the memorable backgrounds. 

Like all things Guilty Gear, the stages grew more absurd and detailed with each game, and yet the original has plenty to see. The series unfolds in a shattered future where artificial creatures called Gears run rampant, and in this mélange of civilized pockets and rampant wastelands, just about anything goes.

 

For example, it’s neat how the militarized backdrop of the hulking soldier Potemkin’s homeland has mecha units worthy of their own model kits…

…Or how the temple favored by American ninja (and future president) Chip Zanuff combines giant tengu masks with what seems to be a warped cybernetic Avalokitesvara statue.

Yet I want to discuss the aged knight Kliff Undersn’s recurring combat scene, known as the Grave in official Guilty Gear documentation. Its centerpiece is a giant dragon carcass, but note the smaller lizards frolicking among its decay. Perhaps scavengers or some lesser genus of dragon themselves, they observe the combat and sometimes pause to clean themselves like rabbits. They apparently harbor no ill sentiment toward Kliff and his offensively named Dragonslayer sword.

Those small dragons reappear in this stage in subsequent games, looking slightly sharper to fit the more polished look, and they even gather around fires and take to the air on stubby, aerodynamically insufficient wings. Look, Guilty Gear has a character whose wings are a quarreling angel and grim reaper. Chubby reptiles taking flight is a low-rung implausibility. 

Yet it’s their initial appearance that intrigues me most. The first Guilty Gear packs a lot into an original hand-drawn PlayStation fighter, and it had a difficult production. While creator Daisuke Ishiwatari and Team Neo Blood initially made the game with rendered sprites as in Killer Instinct, they scrapped that prototype, redesigned many of the characters, and started over with sprite artwork. And they still found time to animate some capering reptiles for the dragon-corpse level. 

It’s this sort of thing that wins me over, perhaps even more than Guilty Gear’s constant sense of overkill, the countless compelling details in the animation, the extensive backstories, or the subplots about Axl’s neglected girlfriend or Millia’s unfortunate fanboy.

The dragonlings are not in the nighttime version of the Grave seen in Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R (actual title). Their campfires are out, suggesting that they’re diurnal or crepuscular in their activities. Or maybe they’re Kliff’s pets and he’s conscientious enough not to let them roam in the deep of the night. Given how vast Guilty Gear’s worldbuilding can be, maybe there’s an entire novel available only in Japan and devoted to Kliff’s life and times, including his complex relationship with various dragon species. 

I have not seen these dragons in more recent Guilty Gear titles, but then Kliff isn’t in those games either. It could be that the critters lurk somewhere in a background and are just hard to spot in the rapid complexities of Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN- and Guilty Gear: Strive and whatever other forms the series takes. It’s hard to keep track sometimes, but for me it’s always worth the trouble.

Farewell to Forums: Digital Press

The Digital Press forums are gone. This may not seem important or even shocking to those unfamiliar. After all, forums are a relic of the old Internet, a discussion venue long since outpaced by speedier forms of social media. Many message boards are now lost to the ages, and that’s just the way of progress. Yet the Digital Press Retrogaming Roundtable is a loss worth noting.

 

For starters, it was one of the first message boards where I regularly hung out. I joined around 2002, not long after the forums were established (though the Digital Press fanzine dates all the way back to 1991). The forums attracted a mix of older and younger fans, veterans who remembered the Atari days mingling with folks younger than the Sega Genesis. It was my introduction to the staples of a busy forum: the in-jokes and feuds and gimmicks and contests and meltdowns and drama and moderator squabbles and the occasional threats of real-life physical assault over differing opinions on Springer or Darius Twin. 

I miss it in some ways. Today’s social media lets us connect with others quickly and conveniently, but that immediacy is its own cost. I liked the way the Retrogaming Roundtable was never too big. I could log in once or twice a day without the risk of missing out on anything, and I could take time to compose a post without fretting over wordcount limits. It was a place where, to borrow that myth of small-town Americana, everyone knew everyone. And sometimes hated them. 

Beyond any personal connection, the Digital Press Retrogaming Roundtable had a lot of useful information. Industry veterans would occasionally pop in with stories, and technical questions invariably attracted people who knew what they were talking about. It was a place for diving into the obscure, whether it was uncovering Micronics’ covertly programmed titles or finding out if certain Sega CD and 32X games ever saw official releases. And those subjects aren’t as obscure these days, now that retro-game collecting has wider scope and higher prices. 

Like most forums, Digital Press declined as the 2010s arrived and everyone migrated to Twitter, Facebook, and other venues. The forums chugged on, kept afloat under new management, but I only stopped by on occasion. Sometimes I wasn’t in the best of moods, as I was disdainful of game collecting and other nerd passions for what I now realize were silly reasons. At the time I honestly didn't care if I got banned, but now I'm glad I didn't.

It seems that the forums are backed up, though a searchable database might not emerge. I’ll miss those occasions where I went looking for some ancient scrap of video-game history and found it on an old Digital Press thread where I’d actually posted many years ago. There’s a lot of valuable information there, so I’m glad it’s preserved somehow. 

I did little to help that, I’m afraid. For all of the unique material contained on those forums, the only posts I saved were a few that amused me. Perhaps I can wring some meaning from them. 

A lot of Digital Press chatter started off with someone needing help in getting past a boss or a puzzle. Forum user “grape,” however, perhaps had other motivations.

Well, sure, but why are the boots so important?

Uh…

You don’t say. 

Threads like this made me realize something: for just about every character in video games (and perhaps all fiction) there’s at least one obsessed fan. Sometimes those fans are just fascinated by a humble enemy’s design or a shopkeeper’s mannerisms. Sometimes they’re innocently sympathetic to a memorable character with a small role. And sometimes they’re just unabashed pervs.  

I met plenty of cool people through the forums, and one of them was the artist known as Bratwurst. He’s made all sorts of great comics, illustrations, and technical wonders (and my site’s banner), and his forum antics always amused me. This one still makes me burst out laughing.

Perhaps Kaine was naïve to assume that any old video games would remain on store shelves for long, but this was an era when such things were in lower demand. Thrift shops and flea market vendors might have bins full of old NES or Sega games for a few bucks each, with future high-ticket rarities like Wild Guns and M.U.S.H.A. just sitting there unwanted.  

In recent years the Retrogaming Roundtable’s traffic was low enough that some members realized they could post incoherent rants without many people mocking or challenging them. Some of these diatribes were about video games, but other posts had a lot bubbling below the surface.

Nostalgia drove a lot of the discussion on Digital Press, yet it often showed how nostalgia leads to more interesting matters: historical studies, debunking an idealized past, humorous anecdotes, and even personal growth. Yet it’s easy to sink thoughtlessly into that pool, and the above nostalgia-poisoned ramble shows just what happens when you never shake the myth that everything was better simply because you were young and not required to think too much about anything. I believe the person who posted that thing was banned for it, and I hope he gets help. 

If there’s any real lesson here, it’s that you might want to save interesting things you find on message boards. The Internet’s a fragile thing, after all, and there’s no guarantee that something you like will stick around. It’s not exactly fair, but hey. Them’s the breaks.  

Little Things: Whip Rush

What follows is my attempt to talk about Whip Rush and only Whip Rush. I will deliberately avoid mentioning its connections to Trouble Shooter. Instead I’ll just focus on Whip Rush, the 1990 Sega Genesis shooter developed by Vic Tokai. This isn’t an easy task. 

That’s because there isn’t much to say about Whip Rush. It’s not a terrible game, but it’s very much a middle-grade shooter from an age when its kind swarmed the market. Notably reminiscent of Irem’s R-Type, this is a standard side-scrolling affair (with occasional vertical interludes) where the player controls a cute little spaceship called Whip Rush and two accompanying weapon pods. There are lasers, missiles, fireballs, cityscapes, enemy bases, organically pulsating tunnels, and all the other expected sights of nearly every shooter from the early 1990s.

 

You’ll see glimmers of invention in a few boss battles, yet there is no elevating Whip Rush. It’s an unremarkable specimen of its day, harsh in the least compelling fashion. Surviving the levels depends entirely on powering up your weapons and keeping them: one hit demotes you to a pea-shooter and all but seals your fate. Perhaps an easier game would have gone down better, or perhaps that would have given it even less staying power. 

Is that all there is to Whip Rush? Hmm...well, there’s something I like about the opening.

One cliché that I always enjoy at least a little is the mysterious disappearance of some exploratory vessel, whether it’s a high-seas clipper or, as Whip Rush introduces, a trio of deep-space ships dispatched to discover new worlds. The mission is deemed “missing and presumed lost” five years into their journey, and their last transmission sees them approaching the planet Voltegus.

But hang on a second. The game then tells us that “less than a week after the incident” an ominous alien force arrives to attack Earth. So those three ships were listed as MIA within a week of losing contact? That seems hasty. What if their communication relays shorted out? What if their lone tech-department wizard was on vacation? What if they just got lazy and didn’t feel like sending those control freaks back at Earth updates about every incremental piece of their voyage? 

Anyway, this is as much storyline as Whip Rush gets. It doesn’t even show an anime pilot at the controls of its ship. Even so, it's a shooter that's worth trying for a few minutes, I guess. Maybe you'll even stick with until the second stage, when you get to that underwater part where everything slows down. That's where it gets dull. 

Okay, fine. I’ll talk about Trouble Shooter. Whip Rush is notable for me only because of its connections to Vic Tokai’s next offering in the genre, known as Trouble Shooter in North America and Battle Mania in Japan. Whip Rush’s staff included Fujito Takada, a.k.a. Takayan the Barbarian, and in a Shmuplations-translated interview he mentions how he was the programmer for Whip Rush while the design was handled by someone else. 

It’s not hard to see Trouble Shooter growing out of Whip Rush. They’re similar in their approaches, mixing horizontal and vertical scrolling, and the available weapons and sound effects all seem from a similar source. 

Yet they’re exceedingly different where it counts. Whip Rush is unobtrusive and mediocre in appearances, while Trouble Shooter has personality at every turn, peppering widespread anime-heroine hyperdestruction with all sorts of tidbit references from whatever Takayan happened to like. It’s also a much easier game, more concerned with colorful details and large characters than it is with how long it might take the average player to reach the ending. 

The Whip Rush ship appears in Trouble Shooter, toting power-ups for protagonists Madison and Crystal (or Mania and Maria) to collect. It’s entirely appropriate for a spacecraft that always looked a little too compact and cuddly for a blistering space shooter. I like to think that Madison and Crystal adopted it as a pet, much like Nanmo from Dirty Pair. I have to mention Dirty Pair at least once in my Trouble Shooter writeups, lest anime fans think me ignorant of the debt that just about everything with futuristic gun-slinging women and copious explosions owes to Kei and Yuri. 

Battle Mania Daiginjoh, sequel to Trouble Shooter, goes with a sleeker ship for its power-up deliveries. Is it a guest star from another Vic Tokai game, or perhaps a reference to another shooter from a rival company, like Technosoft’s Thunder Force? Or is it just a glimpse of how the Whip Rush ship might have been upgraded for a sequel it never had? 

No Vic Tokai game is getting a sequel these days. While Tokai Communications still exists, they’ve long since left the game industry, and their catalog seems off-limits for reissues and new creations. If that ever changes, Whip Rush would not be my first choice for a follow-up, but perhaps its ship could sneak into a third Trouble Shooter game.

Mariner's Run: A Sea Dog Sighting

You know what I always like discussing? Well, yes, Trouble Shooter. Oh, and Gravity Rush too. And don’t get me started about Angel Cop. I could go on for days. 

However, I also enjoy talking about canceled stuff: games and movies and other creations that never saw the light of day. And it’s especially fascinating when those projects are effectively finished and qualify as lost media. That’d be actual lost media, the sort that is possibly gone forever, and not just something that you can’t find on YouTube or the Internet Archive after an intense eleven-second search. 

Mariner’s Run, or Sea Dog in Japan, might be one of these. It’s a rare sort of genre-hybrid video game, mixing an RPG with oceanic explorations. Vic Tokai announced it for the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Famicom in 1991, and screenshots appeared in a few publications. It was to follow The Krion Conquest (Magical Doropie in Japan) on release schedules, but Vic Tokai decided to join those companies pulling out of the Famicom/NES market once it was clear that the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis were taking over. Cowards, all of them. 

So Mariner’s Run was canceled everywhere, leaving behind some vague descriptions, a few images, and speculation about whether or not it was even finished. Games from the NES era had short development times, remember, so it wasn’t out of the question that a completed and market-ready title would get the axe.

 

Well, Mariner’s Run at least existed as a working game. Here’s some very brief footage of it running at what was probably an exhibition in Japan, as the game has the title of Sea Dog. We get short glimpses of a ship navigating ocean depths, plus artwork of a half-cute mecha-submarine with arms, a missile-launching mouth, and a helmet that Metroid’s Samus Aran might have worn. 

I’ve mentioned Mariner’s Run before, and I still think it’s among the most interesting unreleased and as-yet-undiscovered NES games, right up there with Bandai’s Ultimate Journey. For one thing, it has few direct relatives. The blend of submarine expeditions and RPG features sounds unique; the aquatic dives were apparently side-view action, while the other half of the game involved wandering towns with an overhead view. There are other games with similar mixes, including Deep Sea Adventure on the PlayStation, but there was nothing like this on the NES back in 1991. 

I wish I could credit whoever shared that video on Twitter back in 2022, but the account no longer exists. I saved it at the time and uploaded it to YouTube just this month, so let me know if you’re the one who originally posted this video…or the person who shot the footage in the first place.

At least I can properly credit this clearer scan of a Mariner’s Run screenshot. It was posted by Frank Cifaldi of The Video Game History Foundation, and it shows one of the few known images of the game in welcome detail. We can see the layout of a town that the player would visit to…um… 

Wait. Is that shopkeeper a dog?

 

Perhaps it’s just a trick of the pixels, but that looks like an apron-clad merchant with the head of a dog or possibly a cat. Yes, an actual sea dog in Sea Dog. While it might just be a typical white-bearded vendor (as implied by another, blurry town screenshot I discussed before), the figure has a wide grin and an actual nose that none of the other human townspeople possess. One of the neater elements of Mariner’s Run is the implication that it takes place in some futuristic world of rising ocean levels and lost technologies, and perhaps mutant animal-people were part of that mix. 

Even if I’m wrong and Mariner’s Run possessed a more mundane setting, I’d keep calling it a standout among unreleased video games. Vic Tokai has a very intriguing catalog, from Clash at Demonhead to those Trouble Shooter games I always bring up, and a submarine RPG would fit right in there. So I hope we’ll one day find Mariner’s Run or Sea Dog or whatever else it might have been called. It would show the world a promising, perhaps unfairly canceled game. Or at least it would solve the mystery of that shopkeeper.

My Stinkor Story

He-Man and The Masters of the Universe is less a toy line or a cartoon than it is a case study in ruthless, well-timed marketing. The rush of commercialized animation in the 1980s is fascinating in its mercenary layers, but the short of it is that Mattel began it all by relentlessly promoting He-Man action figures with a cartoon thanks to loosened FCC restrictions. This may go down as one of the lesser machinations of the Reagan administration, but the competition there is fierce. 

Evil or not, toy companies swamped the airwaves with their TV shows. Among the creations that sprung from this ominous entwining of advertising and entertainment, He-Man wasn’t the most enduring. Transformers, Ninja Turtles, My Little Pony, and G.I. Joe arguably got better mileage. 

Yet He-Man was first, and He-Man was massive in its day. It wasn’t just toy sales or after-school cartoons, either. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade had enormous He-Man floats. Dave Barry mocked He-Man toy names (“Lob-Stor”) in his books. Concerned Christian parents saw demonic imagery in the villainous Skeletor and fretted that their children might attach quasi-religious proportions to He-Man’s tagline of “The Most Powerful Man in the Universe.” 

I enjoyed this almost by accident. I was a little too young to catch the full weight of Mattel and Filmation’s toy-cartoon assault, but I had plenty of Masters of the Universe paraphernalia. Much of this was due to my grandmother, who of course spoiled me and my sister with new toys whenever we visited. I soon had He-Man and Skeletor and a good share of their dueling entourages, and a trip to the grandparents usually meant a new addition. 

One day in 1985, my grandmother brought out Stinkor.

Even those distantly familiar with He-Man toys may recall that every figure had some gimmick, such as spring-loaded punches or interchangeable arms or a water-spraying robot elephant trunk. Stinkor’s contribution to this feverish creativity was that he smelled bad. 

Yes, that was all. Stinkor was a skunk-colored action figure who emitted an actual odor.  Of course I found this amusing, and when my grandmother presented me with Stinkor I joked that I would leave him on her bed one night to spread his presumably fetid aroma. 

Grandma was not amused. Though not upset, she declared that if such was my intent, I would get no Stinkor. 

I’m certain she would have relented if I had apologized, but that’s the strange thing: I didn’t. 

Part of this doubtless came from me being a little brat, but the fact was that I no longer cared that much about Masters of the Universe. Transformers and GI Joe and Starriors (hey, they’re underrated) all interested me much more by that point, and I’d had my fill of He-Man. The cartoon seemed repetitive and preachy, and a lot of the action figures were suspiciously similar. I was hardly a discerning consumer as a kid, but even I could see that Stinkor was just the line’s earlier Mer-Man figure painted like Pepe Le Pew. His orange armor was reused from Mekaneck. And he didn’t even come with any accessories beyond a boring little shield. If you’ll pardon the phrase, Stinkor was running on fumes. 

So my grandmother put Stinkor away. I don’t recall if I got in trouble over this, but it made no difference to me at the time. Only many years later did I realize how dumb I’d been to turn down a toy. More importantly, I worried that I’d hurt my grandmother’s feelings by callously rejecting her gift. 

If I was outgrowing Masters of the Universe, I wasn’t alone. The series declined in popularity by the mid-1980s. It may have been a stagnation of ideas, as the line tried to introduce dinosaurs and a new lead called He-Ro to little effect. It may have been the general life cycle of a toy that isn’t a pop-culture keystone. Some even blamed She-Ra, He-Man’s sister, and her series for making Masters of the Universe seem like a property for girls. I don’t entirely believe that, but it’s sadly true that a lot of boys back then stigmatized any remotely feminine pastimes. That’s another tale for another time. 

Whatever the cause, He-Man was in a slump by the time the live-action movie arrived in 1987 with Frank Langella and a lot of Jack Kirby references. Masters of the Universe was the first big toy-and-cartoon onslaught of the 1980s, and so it was the first to die down. It became a symbol of Reagan-era excess, a hyper-macho hero shamelessly sold to kids in every way the government and media would allow. 

In that case, Stinkor was the decade’s toy industry at its most absurd. He didn’t have laser eyes or a grappling hook or some battery-powered talent. He just stank. 

Stinkor never had an easy time in the He-Man ranks. The staff for the cartoon reportedly laughed him out of the writers’ room, and he never appeared in the show (he would have presented a confused moral anyway, showing kids that you should in fact judge people by how they smell). The 2002 Masters of the Universe series featured him and tried to develop some backstory, but there’s only so much you can do with a character called Stinkor. 

The recent Masters of the Universe: Revelation, continuing the 1980s cartoon, tries to make up for Stinkor’s original absence by giving him a few moments before he’s thrashed by more popular characters. He does not appear in the trailer for that new Masters of the Universe movie, which looks almost bland and safe enough to ignore something as goofy as Stinkor.    

Even so, there are Stinkor toys aplenty. We’re in the grip of rampant 1980s nostalgia pandering to momentarily soothe our slow capitalist decline into ruin and chaos, so you’ll see not only multiple He-Man lines but multiple He-Man crossovers with Ninja Turtles, Thundercats, Transformers, and so forth. New Stinkors take every shape from little decorations to his elaborate redesign from Revelation. I resisted all of this. I didn’t need a Stinkor in 1985, so I didn’t need one today. 

Last month, however, my aunt and uncle were housecleaning and sent me some old toys that my cousins no longer wanted. This was among them.

Could it be the same Stinkor I stupidly refused so many years ago? It’s possible. My grandmother indulged my cousins as much as she did my sister and me, so it’d make sense if she offloaded Stinkor on them instead of taking him back to the store. I’d say that my prodigal Stinkor has returned, though to be accurate I must note that I, not Stinkor, was foolish and wasteful in my youth.

And he still smells! Mattel actually baked a patchouli mix into the plastic that composed Stinkor, giving him a distinct but hardly mephitic aroma. 

Perhaps if I’d jested about Stinkor to my grandmother after I received and opened the toy, she would have found the scent unobjectionable and seen nothing wrong with me leaving him around the house like some skunk-man air freshener. Yet this would have lumped Stinkor in with all of my other He-Man figures to be forgotten (and probably sold). And then I’d have nothing to write about this month. 

For further reading on Masters of the Universe and the interplay between toys and cartoons, Brian Brown’s The He-Man Effect takes a thorough look at the history and nature of the whole process. It’s a good primer for anyone navigating the traps of acritical nostalgia, though I think it leaves out a major reason He-Man and similar TV shows caught on: there weren’t a lot of better alternatives in children’s programming at the time. If Masters of the Universe sent kids down a treacherous path, I partly blame Turbo Teen and The Biskitts. And since Stinkor wasn’t in the original cartoon, I can’t blame him all that much.

There’s one more thing. Grandma, I’m sorry I made dumb jokes about Stinkor back then. I hope it’s okay that I’m making them now.

Tailenders: Catching Up

I have to pity Tailenders. It’s one of those perfectly entertaining, subtly fascinating creations that was abruptly buried and forgotten due to superior competition. Here that competition was Redline, Takeshi Koike’s brilliantly detailed and lovingly animated slice of futuristic racing cinema; it remains a marvelous film, and there’s nothing I’d change in my ancient review. Released around the same time in 2009, Redline immediately overshadowed Tailenders, and with good reason. Tailenders is merely an anime short with nowhere near the promotion or impact, and yet it’s almost more intriguing in its tale of sci-fi speed demons.

 

Shiro Tomoe is a wreck across the board. His latest race on the planet Terulus shattered his vehicle, his body, and seemingly his ambitions. As he lies on the operating table, a purple-haired woman named Tomoe Miyagura barges in, climbs atop him, and jams an experimental engine into his heart. She’s a mad scientist with a proposition: she’ll build him into a high-velocity cyborg if he’ll aid her research.

The two bond not so much over their common names but over the fact that they’re both out to win the planet’s next big race. She wants to blow up a troublesome terraformer the size of a small nation, and he wants to surpass the legendary Loser King, a racer who apparently attained such great speeds that he vanished into a dimension beyond all time. 

There’s precious little room for Tailenders to do much. Running under half an hour, it barely manages to introduce Tomoe (the Shiro guy) and Tomoe (the scientist) before dropping them into a vicious race, one where they're seeking not so much first place but rather the bizarre immortality of Loser King. Some supporting characters and fellow racers drop in and out, but there’s really room only for our two protagonists and Shiro’s similarly remodeled rival Goodspeed. Oh, and there’s a short clash with a rollerblading dinosaur who’d be straight out of a 1990 kids’ yogurt commercial if he wasn’t rendered in the weighty style of Tailenders.

Yes, Tailenders is all about visual punch. The heavy shading and muted colors make for a tight atmosphere, and the animation’s generally sharp aside from a few dashes of unwieldly computer graphics. Backed by a heavy soundtrack and bombastic acting, it captures a slick yet grimy tone similar to Hiroyuki Imaishi and Studio Trigger’s flourishes. That suits a story about thrillseekers overwhelmed by their single-minded goals in a world where even a clear sky seems a little ominous. 

To be fair, Tailenders isn't entirely stuck on the surface. The world of Terulus is more than a raceway, as it's dominated by malfunctioning terraformers and moving cities that keep humanity constantly on edge. It’s technically science fiction, but Tailenders is unshackled to perfect labcoat concepts of relativity and physics. Tomoe and Shiro and Goodspeed are all chasing a warped enlightenment in the form of Loser King, and their encounter with him, a scarred apparition stuck in a silent temporal purgatory, is fascinating and absurd. Like the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer film, Tailenders is a glitzy rush that’s primarily about the appeal of a glitzy rush, but here the stakes are higher and stranger.

 

It would, of course, be more compelling if the characters could develop. Shiro’s just all about racing, so Tomoe is the only one who pushes things into interesting turf. Giving off the same scheming, callous energy as Haruko from FLCL, she has a playful curiosity more relatable than the competitive machismo of Shiro, Goodspeed, and other racers who only want to go fast. There’s a mere hint of romantic tension between her and Shiro, and yet it’s another piece of Tailenders that made me want more. 

I should clarify that I didn’t want more of Tailenders in the form of a sequel. I wanted an expanded version of the same story, broadening and exploring the history of Terulus, the origins of Loser King, and the manipulative symbiosis between Shiro and Tomoe. It’s easy to cast Tailenders as a descendant of the brief, eye-catching OVAs of the 1980s and early 1990s, but even those usually ran longer than this. Tailenders sometimes feels like an extended trailer for a full-length movie or six-part series.

   

Nowhere are Tailenders’ derailed ambitions more apparent than its website, still up after all these years. The cast list shows off dozens of vehicles and their drivers: a cage-wearing goth, a helmeted pizza deliveryman, a tree mutant growing out of a zombie, a simple barber, a cyclops alien, and a mechanical mouse soldier who dries a giant toy train in a circular track, just to name a few. 

Most of them put in only the briefest appearances in the animation. Tailenders was part of the Anime Innovation Tokyo project, and I have no doubt that it was envisioned as a much larger deal, perhaps as a TV series or a video game in the tradition of F-Zero. Too bad we’ll never see more of racers like Kyle Triton, the dolphin guy.

 

If Tailenders was a pitch for something larger, it didn’t work out. It made the rounds and got some attention, but there’s only so much that a 27-minute anime can do without some major backing. It’s not hard to find Tailenders these days so long as you add “anime” to the title in your search, but like so many snippets of the OVA boom and the modern anime industry, it’s forgotten apart from the occasional recommendation by a weirdo fan. 

Well, I’ll be that weirdo fan this time. Tailenders is still enjoyable, with a vibrant look and pace that makes me ponder its hints of meaning and wish there was more to it all. It’s worth a watch and deserves mention if you dive into Redline, track the varied offspring of Speed Racer, or examine the surprisingly broad influence that Wacky Races had on Japan’s pop culture. It may not surpass the best of its competition, but if there’s a lesson in Tailenders, it’s that coming in first doesn’t matter. We find our own finish lines.