Bounty Arms: The Famitsu Spread

Let’s take yet another look at Bounty Arms. We here at the Bounty Arms Preservation Society (tax-exempt status pending) are dedicated to researching, archiving, and presenting all known information about this canceled PlayStation game from 1995. That may seem oddly narrow and of potential interest to very few, but we’re all busy and can’t very well devote ourselves to cataloging every unreleased game that ever got past a napkin doodle.

Our most recent discovery is a preview of Bounty Arms from the February 10, 1995 issue of Famitsu. This is likely all the magazine ever ran about Bounty Arms; the game disappeared after missing its April release date in Japan and for months afterward persisted only in those nebulous TBA sections of release schedules. Moreover, 1995 was a remarkably busy year, and Famitsu covered every video-game platform. Bounty Arms merited a few pages in early PlayStation-centric publications simply for existing, but in Famitsu it had to fight for space in between Virtua Fighter 2 comics, lengthy Chrono Trigger features, and 3DO ads with Albert Einstein.


It’s no surprise, then, that Famitsu’s preview is a mere quarter-page. It offers the barest introduction to Bounty Arms; we’re told that it’s an overhead-view action game, it’s developed and published by Data West, and its heroines use extending mechanized Relic Arms as grappling hooks, whips, and huge flamethrowers. The preview doesn’t mention the main characters by name, nor are there any screenshots showing Rei Misazaki and Chris, whose last name we still haven’t properly translated. Here it is if you care to try.



The screenshots show little that we at the Bounty Arms Preservation Society have not uncovered previously. Every image we have of the game shows one of two stages: the initial jungle level (available entirely in the demo) and an industrial factory of some kind. We see both in the Famitsu preview. Composer Yasuhito Saito estimates that Bounty Arms was 60 percent complete when it was canceled, which may well mean that game had four or five stages.



One thing stands out, though. The factory stage has large metal frames appearing over the characters, as shown in the screenshot above. The tiny startburst in the Famitsu preview appears to show Chris standing ON the metal frame. Was the entire stage multi-layered, like…uh, Vertical Force for the Virtual Boy? That would add a lot to Bounty Arms’ otherwise straightforward arcade formula and compensate for it being only a few levels long.

Perhaps we’ve made too much of this single image, but these are the discussions that keep the Bounty Arms Preservation Society going. They’re also the reason why the Bounty Arms Preservation Society has exactly one member.

Little Things: Super Baseball 2020

I’m pretty sure that Super Baseball 2020 is my favorite sports game. That’s probably because I’m not really into sports games on the whole. I have nothing against the genre, but I suspect that a prescient part of my young mind knew I was too fixated on video games—and so it decided to at least ignore sports games and spare my future self a scrap of obsession. It couldn’t keep me from getting into Super Baseball 2020, which served as both an early Neo Geo showcase and a woefully optimistic prediction of the future.


Conceived for quick arcade satisfaction, Super Baseball 2020 presents a high-tech stadium where heavily armored men, revealingly armored women, and seemingly headless, tank-tread robots play a slightly modified version of the sport. Landmines appear, home runs only count when hit straight behind center field, and you’re free to upgrade your human and mechanized players alike. Everything is kept light and arcade-friendly; team customization is limited, and with only six clubs per league there’s not much variety to playing an entire season. The original Neo Geo version doesn’t even have a boss. It fell to other console ports to add a new, pennant-game team with players named after prominent members of the Nazi party. That means something.

I started playing Super Baseball 2020 for silly reasons. I was a dopey pre-teen loaded with hormones, and I was fascinated when GamePro ran a shot of Super Baseball 2020’s women players and openly asked if the game was “Too sexy, too sexist?” I just had to find out the answer for myself.


Yet I’ve grown to enjoy Super Baseball 2020 legitimately over the years. Each time I revisit it, I appreciate something else: the sleek designs of the Cyber Egg stadium, the way the players spin and flip when they make a fantastic catch, the little concession stand shown only when a foul ball wanders back into the glass-shielded bleachers, the way the robot umpires repeatedly warn you that NOW they’ll set the cracker mines, and the way a game’s MVP gets a Class A Citizenship or a robot bodyguard, which implies that this game’s vision of 2020 is hardly a utopia.

One neat little detail arises when the players leap or dive to catch a ball. The game switches to a brief close-up of the man or woman or robot, and the scaling sprites were a real technical feat back in the early 1990s. These cutaways also boost a team’s funds, letting you buy more power-ups. They let you see that the robots actually have eyes on top of their heads. And of course, they showcase a female player’s cleavage. Like I said, I started playing this game for silly reasons.

Even now, however, I’m impressed by these scenes. The developers went through the trouble of creating different views: one for jumping, one for diving straight-on, and a third just for diving diagonally. Granted, the diagonal catch is just a slightly altered version of the head-on view, but I was astounded at the time that the game paid such close attention.


This seems archaic now, but in 1993 these details were the eye-catching hallmarks of an arcade spectacle that no console (except, of course, the actual Neo Geo home system) could replicate. I picked the Super NES version of Super Baseball 2020 as my big Christmas gift that year, and the first thing I noticed was that the diving catches were static images. The Super NES port did a fair job of mimicking the Neo Geo original, but it also made me realize how important the small stuff was.

SNK went on to craft gorgeous sprite art on the Neo Geo, perhaps peaking around 2000 with sights like that fiery backdrop from The Last Blade 2 and the inching Ohmu bugs from Metal Slug 3. Yet it was Super Baseball 2020 that first impressed me and sold me on a Neo Geo.

Well, I shouldn’t say that it sold me, since the Neo Geo cost $600 in the 1990s (or a cool thousand once adjusted for inflation) and that was beyond the reach of a kid who needed three years of good grades and begging to get a basic Nintendo. That made me want one all the more, of course.

A Neo Geo isn’t quite as expensive these days, but I’m afraid nothing is cheap in this age of game collectors who’ll outspend the Pentagon’s annual operating budget on a sealed copy of Boogerman. If I ever manage to convince myself to acquire a Neo Geo, however, at least I know what game I’ll get first.

Hi Score Girl: Horrible Atmosphere

Hey! Do you like video games? To be specific, do you like arcade games from the 1980s and 1990s? Do you like mastering them and spouting trivia about them to the point where you ignore everything else? Do we have a show for you!



Meet Haruo Yaguchi, the protagonist of Hi Score Girl. He’s exceptionally good at arcade games, and he’s growing up smack dab in the middle of the Street Fighter II craze of the early 1990s. One fateful encounter at an arcade pits him against Akira Ono, a girl from his school and an unsuspected arcade game prodigy. The two of them forge a contentious friendship around arcade games, somewhat impaired by Akira being well-off, graceful, and exceptionally popular at school despite the fact that she never says anything. At all. Stifled by her rich-girl life, she interacts with Haruo through glares, physical violence, and, of course, video games. Her only display of emotion comes when she moves to America and bids Haruo goodbye.

The narrative then moves forward a few years and makes the bold, stunning move of introducing a prominent female character who actually speaks. Really! She forms complete sentences and everything! Her name is Koharu Hidaka and she’s a bookish classmate of Haruo, who’s now in middle school and still so obsessed with games that he’ll spend hours playing the latest Street Fighter update outside of the shop owned by Koharu’s family. This is all the reason she needs to fall for him, and soon she’s doing her best to learn all about these video games Haruo enjoys. And then Akira comes back.




Hi Score Girl‘s true conflict begins here, as two girls fight over a boy who has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Haruo is bratty, self-absorbed, vaguely sadistic, relentlessly fixated on games, and, even after he matures, quite boring. His only notable skills lie in playing games and rattling off details about them like a Wikipedia entry in need of editing. It’s hard to imagine what either girl sees in him, though Akira is almost as horrible. She’s admired by everyone at school even though she never talks to or even smiles at them, and she has no personality traits beyond lashing out violently, getting scared of games like Splatterhouse and Space Gun (because she’s still a GIRL, haw haw), and showing our wretched protagonist the occasional hint of affection. Koharu is slightly more sympathetic, simply because she possesses recognizable emotions, thoughts, and the willingness to communicate them.

Status Check: 2019

So what was I up to in 2018? Well, I did a few reviews and guest-hosted my old column several times at Anime News Network. My geek highlight of the year, however, came when I got the chance to write about Angel Cop for Discotek’s new release of the series.



Angel Cop, as you may know, has a late-stage plot revelation about an international Jewish conspiracy being the force behind terrorist attacks and savage psychic assassins. It’s bizarre, offensive, and sadly reflective of how easy it was to get away with anti-Semitism in Japanese media during the early 1990s. I wrote an essay covering this for the new Blu-Ray and DVD, expanding on some ideas I mentioned in an entry here. It’s not unlike how modern reissues of racist old Bugs Bunny cartoons include some explanation of the historical context.

I also interviewed John Wolskel, the scriptwriter for the dubs of Angel Cop, Cyber City Oedo 808, and many over foul-mouthed Manga UK adaptations that we’ll never stop quoting. It was great to hear from someone who had a hand in these old dubs, and it’s pretty clear that Wolskel and the rest of the crew had fun giving these anime series the hyper-profane revamps that partly ensured their immortality.

I’d really like to do more work like this. For one thing, it’s fascinating to put something like Angel Cop in a broader vein; it might be all gore and swearing and Jew-hating, but I think its unconcealed frustration offers a revealing look at the fortunes of the anime industry and perhaps the broader reaction to the end of Japan’s bubble economy. You can learn a lot from looking through someone’s trash.

On a more selfish stratum, I like the satisfaction of working on a tangible product, even if it’s just for DVD extras. I haven’t seen any of my work in physical media since my magazine gig a decade ago, and while I sure appreciate the malleable, correctable nature of online writing, there’s a nice sense of permanence about holding something that involved you. Centuries after the Internet has evaporated and the earth is a lifeless husk, alien excavators may siphon my essay from a miraculously intact Blu-Ray and know just a little more about Angel Cop.

Enjoy Phantasy Star in Five Easy Steps

A new version of Phantasy Star appeared on the Switch this month. As with most games in the Sega Ages line, developer M2 added plenty of great extras. The original 1987 Sega Master System version of Phantasy Star is there and untouched, but the Ages tune-up has an auto-map feature, speeds up walking, and boosts the experience and money–sorry, meseta–gained from battle.



What a difference it makes. The game isn’t that much easier; a wrong turn or an unlucky enemy encounter might still off Alis, our heroine, early in the game. Instead of mollifying the core of its design, M2 just sped it up. Alis goes through everything faster, whether it’s roaming towns or gaining levels, and thus a rigid and sometimes tedious role-playing game becomes compelling in its challenges.

Of course, Phantasy Star is still a relic. The graphics are generally static, the battles follow routine turns, and calling the plot points a storyline is perhaps too charitable. Even with M2’s additions, it might not interest those accustomed to several decades of RPGs with cinematic combat, character customization, actual story arcs, and the ability to decide which enemy you’ll strike.

If you’re willing to envision the game as it was at its late 1987 release, however, Phantasy Star is mind-blowing. Its stage of the Algol star system was a complex fusion of Star Wars and fantasy undertones back when RPGs were still Dungeons & Dragons with perhaps some anime trappings. Its monsters and scenery were all animated and vibrant back when other games stayed stiff and static. It offered an actual, no-kidding Strong Heroine with a name and a solid motivation back when its competitors had generic and uniformly male rosters and anyone who wanted otherwise just had to pretend that the white mage in Final Fantasy was a woman.

And how can you put yourself in a 1987 frame of mind? It involves more than eating a McDLT, listening to Belinda Carlisle’s solo hits, and ignoring the crimes of the Reagan administration. If you follow these five steps early in the game, though, I think you’ll gain the right perspective for Phantasy Star.

STEP 1: DIE REPEATEDLY
Phantasy Star warns you at the start: death is everywhere. The game’s prologue sees Alis’ brother, Nero, die at the hands of the interplanetary despot Lassic. So Alis ventures out of her home city to find a warrior called Odin and liberate the Algol star system. And if you’re not the most cautious player imaginable, Alis will die. She’ll wander north and get mobbed by giant scorpions. She’ll face two Sworm insects in her first battle and narrowly lose to them. She’ll venture too close to the shore and be killed in the first round of combat by a fishman’s spiked tongue.



The Sega Ages version dials the difficulty back, but only a little. Alis still faces defeat if she’s overly adventurous or just unlucky, making it easy to imagine yourself as a neophyte RPG player in 1987, fighting and failing until you finally figured out how to use healing items.



This also means that unless you save before these first few battles, a defeat will boot you back to the title screen and make you start fresh, watching Nero die and Alis vow revenge all over again. Perhaps that’s why Phantasy Star has such a brief opening. You’ll see it a lot.

Crystalis Week: Things To Do

I don’t hesitate to call Crystalis the most rewarding game from the NES era. I never grow weary of replaying it and noticing something new each time. It’s fun just to mess with the game, and here’s how to mess with it most effectively.

WARP AROUND 
Crystalis has a few interesting glitches and codes, including a warp trick that lets you jump to a dozen different locations in the game. Simply hold A and B simultaneously on controller one and then press A on controller two, and you’ll warp to a new area. This is useful in some ways, though you’ll often run into enemies beyond your level.



My favorite warp spot is an underground cave where the hero is stuck in the water. He’d normally have a dolphin to ride, but the warp trick plants him in the canal by himself and leaves him immobile. There’s nothing to do but listen to the gentle music and ponder life until you decide to warp somewhere else.

Crytalis Week: The Search for Crystalis 2

Any discussion of Crystalis and its unfairly short legacy brings up a question: Why didn’t SNK make another one? The answer is usually “Because SNK threw all their weight behind arcade games and Crystalis might not have been a huge seller anyway.” Even so, there’s some evidence that SNK might have at least considered another Crystalis.

The first news of SNK revisiting Crystalis apparently emerged in early issues of Gamefan. Other Stuff served as the magazine’s catch-all column for news, rumors, and outlandish speculation, much like EGM’s Quartermann. In Other Stuff one would see credible information printed alongside reports of Super Street Fighter II introducing 14 new characters or Mortal Kombat 3 declaring Baraka the winner of the previous tournament (THAT would have been daring). And it’s also here that we see mention of a Crystalis follow-up in Volume 1, Issue 3 of the magazine.


Gamefan describes a Neo Geo version of Crystalis as a 100-meg action-RPG, due out the summer of 1993. It never materialized, of course, and neither did any screenshots for it. In the grand specious tradition of video-game rumors, most of Gamefan’s Neo Geo preview didn’t come to pass. Magician Lord 2 was a no-show, there’s no Champion Edition of Art of Fighting 2, and that World Heroes sequel has no revolutionary 3-D gameplay. A new Crystalis might have been just a fever dream, as real as that violent, profanity-filled Sonic the Hedgehog game described by the most hyperactive kid on the bus.

If the Neo Geo edition of Crystalis was just a rumor, it was a persistent one. Gamefan mentions it again in Volume 1, Issue 4, giving it a 200-meg size and a fourth-quarter 1993 release date. Six months later, Volume 1, Issue 10 is vaguer, merely stating that “talk of a Geo version of Crystalis continues to linger.” Of course, no screenshots were shown, and GameFan was the sort of magazine that would’ve run pics of a new Crystalis no matter how blurry they were.

Reports of a Crystalis follow-up did not end here, however. The January 1995 issue of Next Generation (and the Edge of the month before) runs down the latest news for the Neo Geo CD, a disc-based version of the Neo Geo. The article described “Krystalis” as an upcoming game that was “held back for the format.” Once again, no solid news or actual images of the game followed.

Even in rumors, the path of this new Crystalis makes sense. The original Neo Geo prioritized arcade games: shooters, action titles, and fighting games that came on arcade-exact cartridges for a few hundred bucks each. An action-RPG like Crystalis would be a hard sell in the arcades, even if it used the Neo Geo’s rarely exploited memory cards, and SNK wasn’t in the habit of making $200 games exclusively for the home. If a Crystalis revival existed, the cheaper format of the Neo Geo CD was a better choice. That was where SNK put its Samurai Spirits RPG, after all.

The Neo Geo CD also may explain why a Crystalis title never arrived there. The system was to be a cheaper version of the Neo Geo, but the CD drive’s long loading times and an overall busy marketplace made it a limited engagement. Only a handful of exclusive Neo Geo CD games came along, and by the end of the 1990s SNK dropped the system entirely, supporting only the cartridge-based Neo Geo.



One will note that the reports of a new Crystalis don’t call it Crystalis 2 or imply a direct sequel. This mystery game may well have been a remake of the NES original, which often seemed too ambitious for its hardware. SNK could have revisited it on the Neo Geo with gorgeous pixel art, no slowdown, more complex dungeons, bigger bosses, and, say, an extra mode where you play Mesia’s side of the story. She was hiding something.

Or perhaps it would’ve been a different game entirely. The original Crystalis wraps everything up neatly, but it could very handily support a spiritual successor, one with the same gameplay systems and capable progress but with no more narrative connections than Final Fantasy IV has with Final Fantasy XII.

SNK had a second opportunity to revamp Crystalis when the Neo Geo Pocket Color came along. The handheld invited single-player RPGs, and Crystalis could’ve fit the format well (SNK even greenlit an impressive Magician Lord sequel that, sadly, went unfinished). Unfortunately, Nintendo optioned the title for a Game Boy Color port, one that crunches the game into a small screen and erodes the appeal of its futuristic-medieval blend. The Neo Geo Pocket Color might’ve managed it better. For a taste of how an overhead action-RPG like Crystalis would fare on the handheld, try out Dark Arms: Beast Buster.




Did a Neo Geo version of Crystalis ever exist? Was it just a magazine rumor? Did SNK abandon it at the drawing boards? Did someone just confuse it with Crystal Legacy, an early title for Breakers? The lack of any screenshots is daunting, but all hope is not lost. In 2016, a collector uncovered an unreleased and incomplete Neo Geo fighter called Dragon’s Heaven (no, not THAT Dragon’s Heaven) never before shown in magazines. Perhaps someone will turn up an early version of Crystalis for the Neo Geo and prove all of those old rumors at least partly true. And then we can fight over it.

Crystalis Week: Counselor's Corner

Was Crystalis a big success? I would guess not. SNK never revisited it, and this was a company that gave Prehistoric Isle a follow-up. Crystalis might’ve gone without a sequel just because SNK emphasized arcade projects throughout the 1990s, but it’s true that the game wasn’t the biggest NES release of its day.

Perhaps kids like me were to blame. I certainly don’t remember Crystalis as a staple of grade-school Nintendo discussions; we never analyzed, debated, and fought over it as we might Super Mario Bros. 3 or Mega Man 2. Nor was it one of those games everyone owned but hated and never played, like The Adventures of Bayou Billy or Milon’s Secret Castle. Crystalis had a TV commercial and some favorable reviews, but as far as I could tell it didn’t break into the collective unconscious of young Nintendo nerds. I wouldn’t even buy it until it was twenty bucks at Kay-Bee.

I discovered Crystalis slowly and primarily through Nintendo Power. It wasn’t the initial coverage that hooked me. The magazine ran good-sized features for the game’s mid-1990 release, with gorgeous art possibly by Katsuya Terada, but I was much more interested in reading about Super Mario Bros. 3, Super C, The Mafat Conspiracy, Final Fantasy, Ninja Gaiden II, Rescue Rangers, Maniac Mansion, and that second Ninja Turtles game that looked like the arcade deal and was therefore much better than the first one.

Hmm. Maybe that’s why Crystalis didn’t do huge numbers: competition.




It was a different section of Nintendo Power that sold me on Crystalis: the Counselors’ Corner.

Nintendo’s game counselor hotline was a major cog in the company’s market dominance, and even those kids who didn’t call it very often still thought the counselors had the coolest job on the planet. Nintendo Power promulgated that idea with Counselors’ Corner, a monthly feature that covered some of the more difficult or commonplace questions put to the call center.

Crystalis was a regular here. Counselors’ Corner fielded questions about it for months on end, covering everything from getting the Psycho Shield to defeating two sun-and-moon lion statues with, unsurprisingly, the Bow of the Sun and the Bow of the Moon. The solutions gave away a lot of the game’s more perplexing puzzles, which might have ruined the challenge.




Yet the opposite was true: spoiling pieces of Crystalis made the whole of it more interesting.

As with all things in Nintendo Power, this was a calculated pitch. Nothing drew kids in like learning the deeper mysteries of a game, and nothing made us more confident than knowing how to beat a boss or uncover a secret in something we hadn’t so much as played yet. And for a complex game like Crystalis, the extracted tips hinted at a bigger world and even greater mysteries. Why would casting a paralysis spell on every patron of a bar reveal the sage Kensu, and why would he be angry? Well, we’d just have to play Crystalis and see.

Nintendo Power did its job even when pulling back the curtain, and I knew I wanted Crystalis by the time I saw it on the discount rack. I enjoyed it thoroughly even though I already knew how to beat the disguised Sabera and get past the giant metal guardian wall in Goa. They were tests for which I’d spent months studying, and passing them was all the more satisfying for that.

Would I have liked Crystalis even more if I’d gone in completely unaware? I don’t think so. You can’t really spoil a good story, and there’s nothing like knowing a little of what lies ahead, even if it’s just where to find the Psycho Shield.

Crystalis Week: The Miyazaki Connection

Crystalis gets ideas from many sources, but it most blatantly plunders Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Castle in the Sky. That’s OK, since about half of the video games made in the early 1990s owe some inspiration to Hayao Miyazaki’s films. It’s easy to see where Crystalis found its post-apocalyptic jungles, its giant floating tower of destruction, and even the windy village in which the hero awakens.

There’s a long-running rumor about several games based on Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, that cherished post-apocalyptic epic about a princess befriending giant insects. As the rumor goes, these Nausicaä games, released in the mid-1980s, let the player shoot the benevolent bugs. This enraged Miyazaki so much that he despised all video games henceforth and refused to let any of his future films be tarnished by such adaptations. Not even Castle in the Sky, which is practically a video game already.




Well, that rumor probably isn’t true. The part about the Nausicaä video games was debunked by Hardcore Gaming 101’s John Szczepaniak, who documented the ‘80s Nausicaä titles and found no evidence of bug-slaying. Perhaps Hayao Miyazaki disliked the games for other reasons, but I think a blunter explanation can be had: Miyazaki doesn’t let his films become video games because video games are a product of this dissolute modern era, just like smartphones, the Iraq war, and children who have never seen a fish gutted before them at the marketplace.

But there’s another game where the player kills insects straight out of Nausicaä. That game is Crystalis.

Crystalis Week: Memorable Moments

NES titles get guarded praise at best when it comes to storylines. This was a era when video games had the barest of plots, and players were lucky when an actual ending appeared instead of a congratulatory screen about strongth welling in your body. By those standards, Crystalis deserves credit just for spelling its own name correctly on the title screen.

One can’t laud Crystalis as a masterful narrative or call it True Literature That Makes Everyone Take Gamers Like Us Seriously. It lacks character arcs and underlying themes and Aristotelian unities. Yet it gets a few things right. It’s a good example of how video games of this period are Trojan Horses; we never expected any remotely interesting melodrama from a game with simple graphics and threadbare dialogue. Yet we were involved all the same as we played, and when the game spiked its plot with a little tragedy or a moment of invention, it hit surprisingly hard. And we somehow remembered this when better stories from more respected mediums fade away.

I remembered enough to round up my favorite parts of Crystalis. I won’t give away every major twist, but I wouldn’t read this if you want to go in cold. Then again, Crystalis is almost 30 years old, and there’s a statue of limitations on these things.

THE END DAY
Crystalis doesn’t beat around the bush when destroying the world. Civilization collapsed on the first day of October in 1997, which means that the human race had less than a month to play the American version of Final Fantasy VII before everything was rent asunder in a worldwide cataclysm.



Crystalis evokes this with a few striking images for an NES game: lighting strikes, burning cities, and a huge tower floating above it all. More intriguing are the establishing shots after you push start; you’ll glimpse dragonlike beasts in a lush forest, followed by carrion birds taking flight over an arid village and the skeletal remains of a surely mutated creature.




Players will note that the game itself doesn’t show anything like this in its ensuing quest. Any cutscenes are scarce until the ending. Yet that introduction is all Crystalis needs.

Crystalis Week: A Rare Adventure

It’s strange that Crystalis even exists. In the late 1980s SNK was a company forged in arcades and accustomed to a diet of eye-catching, quick-burning action fare like Ikari Warriors and Psycho Soldier. Crystalis was an NES experiment, an attempt at courting the action-RPG market that arose on consoles from the success of The Legend of Zelda and Ys.

Crystalis didn’t chase either of those genre leaders, however. It was something else entirely: a hybrid that drew from the best of fantasy RPGs and arcade games.


Crystalis never went to arcades, of course. It didn’t sit in a cabinet and leech pocket change from passersby. It just took lessons from SNK’s arcade roots.

And the first thing Crystalis learned? Hook the player. The game’s introduction grabs your attention with visions of doomsday, declaring October 1, 1997 to be THE END DAY and summoning images of a world destroyed by vicious war and malevolent science. Cities burn, natural life mutates, and technology survives only in a mysterious floating tower, an instrument of peace easily turned into a cataclysmic weapon. Players glimpse the desolate landscapes and monstrous beasts that arise in the eons afterword, and then their avatar emerges. He’s a reticent amnesiac awakened from a suspiciously advanced cryo-chamber in a cave. So it all begins.



The second lesson Crystalis took from the arcade? Never slow things down. Its purple-haired hero scoots across the landscape in eight directions, as though the game’s meant for a joystick. His first sword isn’t a stubby blade, either; improving on a idea from The Legend of Zelda, the Crystalis protagonist can charge up and launch projectiles, making the combat a perpetual mix of frantic stabbing and strategic shooting. He roams and fights with brisk determination, and the game moves to match him.

Crystalis rarely loses that enticing arcade tempo. Each leg of the quest brings a new spell or item, with magic that starts with basic healing and expands into telepathy, warping, and shapeshifting. Even repeatedly hacking through monsters becomes more enjoyable with the game’s expanding selection of weapons and equipment. One early acquisition is the Rabbit Boots, a seemingly minor accessory that lets the hero bound across the landscape. Sometimes this helps him navigate toxic marshes or climb glaciers. Sometimes it’s just fun to jump around.

Like most ambitious games for the NES, Crystalis faces the limitations of the hardware, a seven-year-old system by 1990. Crystalis doesn’t care, though. It delivers large characters, rampant spell effects, and enormous bosses from the Draygonian Emperor’s true form to a giant swamp creature shamelessly filched from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. It’s all out to impress the player no matter the cost, and it succeeds. The action slows down at times, and even something as mundane as talking to townsfolk might make the graphics flicker. Yet it never seems too high a price for the adventure that emerges.

Crystalis Week Begins

Crystalis really needed a comeback. It’s one of the best games that ever appeared on the Nintendo Entertainment System, and I was dismayed that it wasn’t officially available on any modern console despite the recent boom in reissues. Well, that changes next week when the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection arrives on the Switch with Crystalis and a bunch of other games you’ll have to scroll past in order to play Crystalis.



I don’t mean to disparage the rest of the collection, as I’m sure Psycho Soldier and Iron Tank and perhaps even Streetsmart have ardent fans. Yet it’s Crystalis that makes the whole package for me, as it’s a fantastic action-RPG more enduring in quality than a lot of SNK’s arcade-based creations before and after.

Crystalis does not headline this anthology, I’m sad to note. Much of the emphasis falls on well-known SNK arcade titles like Athena and Ikari Warriors. Even the box art sticks the hero of Crystalis and heroine Mesia far in the back. I will say, however, that at least Mesia’s hair is purple, as it is in the game. The Japanese cover for Crystalis, or God Slayer: Sonata of the Distant Skies as it’s so combatively named there, made her hair green.



I’m not about to let the return of Crystalis go uncelebrated. Nuh-uh. I’m dedicating this entire week to entries about it. That may seem excessive, but I think this is a game which deserves to be noticed, analyzed, criticized, and enshrined as a breakthrough in its genre. So please forgive me if I go on a little too much about, for example, the “kyu kyu” sound made by the rabbits in the game. If it gets just one person interested in Crystalis, I’ll have no regrets.

Check back every day for a new article!

Monday: The Legacy of Crystalis!

Tuesday: The Most Memorable Moments!

Wednesday: The Miyazaki Connection!

Thursday: Crystalis Corner!

Friday: The Quest for Crystalis 2!

Saturday: Fun Stuff on the Side!

In Defense of The Cat Returns

The Cat Returns often goes neglected in the Studio Ghibli catalog. Some deem it mediocre. Others say it’s mildly amusing but inferior to its relatives. After all, Ghibli made its name with many landmark films: Porco Rosso, Grave of the Fireflies, Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke, Only Yesterday, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, and, oh hell, just about every Ghibli feature that isn’t the underrated Ocean Waves or the justly rated Tales From Earthsea. Among such marvels, The Cat Returns is a small creation indeed.


For one thing, it’s the shortest film in Ghibli’s ranks, as it developed originally as a theme park attraction and side-story to Whisper of the Heart. Its look is much closer to typical anime imagery, with generic large eyes and exaggerated grins instead of the distinct and slightly subtler aesthetic one sees from Ghibli founders Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata as well as anyone who follows in their wake. It was primarily a vehicle to test younger animators, including its director, Hiroyuki Morita. The Cat Returns is an undemanding and uncomplicated hiccup in Ghibli history, as it lacks the emotional depth and sure-handed craft found in the studio’s best offerings.

It’s a wonderful movie anyway.

In all fairness, The Cat Returns begins in a flurry of clichés, and our heroine Haru stumbles over every one of them. She has a crush on a classmate. She has a best friend to tease her. She has a habit of rushing out the door, late for school. One morning, in a sudden and stupid decision that everyone wishes they could make, Haru risks her life to rescue a cat from an oncoming truck. She doesn’t quite understand why she did it, and she certainly doesn’t understand why the cat stands up and politely thanks her.



That night, the answer arrives with a huge procession of talking, civilized felines at her front door, and they reveal that Haru rescued the prince of the Cat Kingdom that day. Her reward? A legion of cat-servants to bring her unwanted gifts, dote embarrassingly upon her, and, on nothing but an idle conversation, whisk her off to the Cat Kingdom to marry the strangely absent prince.

Her only help comes from the dapper cat hero known as the Baron (first seen as an inspiring statuette in the more down-to-earth Whisper of the Heart) and his quarrelsome allies: a fat cat named Muza and a crow named Toto. They can’t keep the Cat Kingdom from abducting Haru, though, and soon she’s facing not only an arranged marriage but also the prospect of becoming a cat herself.

At a mere 75 minutes, The Cat Returns has little room for anything but the basics. Haru begins as an insecure young woman dissatisfied with her life, and only after a whirlwind adventure in a realm of talking cats and deadly labyrinths does she find her feet. It’s an open-and-shut story, skipping from one comical scene to another, never settling long enough for us to question the why of it or ask just what the movie’s trying to say.



In other words, The Cat Returns never has time to be anything but adorable. With no mind for labored meanings, it whisks us from Haru’s humdrum morning to the Baron’s miniature cottage to the inner workings of the Cat Kingdom. Once Haru’s trapped there, we’re treated to some hilarious failures of throne-room entertainment and a clash between the Baron and the forces of the spiky-furred, half-goofy, half-mad King of the Cats.

It’s ultimately all in good fun, and no one seems to get hurt—not even the cats thrown out of the king’s tower. You can read into things easily, seeing Haru as feminist assertion and the king as a tyrannical facade of masculine tradition and the whole thing as an allegory for the second Defenestration of Prague, but the movie never asks that you do. If The Cat Returns doesn’t define its genre or inspire imitators like the action of Miyazaki’s Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro, it hardly needs to go that far. It wins us over with characters immediately sympathetic and a tone effortlessly cute. It has the smooth wit of a good adventure yarn or a perfect bedtime story…or perhaps a little fable told by Whisper of the Heart’s protagonist Shizuku Tsukishima. She wanted to be a writer, after all, and it’s comforting to think that she would come up with something like The Cat Returns.



The less Ghibli-esque look of The Cat Returns actually improves its English dub. Disney regularly went all-out in recruiting talent for the voicework in Ghibli films, but there’s a frequently uptight air about them. The movies themselves are thoughtful, studied, and serious—and so are the dubs. The Cat Returns has none of that. The looser, standard anime fashion makes for a more easygoing script and quicker delivery, and the cast is first-rate: Anne Hathaway is excellent in all of Haru’s insecurities, Kristen Bell does a great job with a limited best-friend role, and Cary Elwes is charming as The Baron. Special credit must go to Rene Auberjonois as the uptight cat minister Natori and Andy Richter as the more unctuous Natoru, who’s almost the real villain here.

Morita departed Studio Ghibli without directing another film there, giving more fuel to the company’s reputation for casting aside directors with little mercy. In light of recent discussion over Takahata’s brutal demands, however, it’s perhaps fortunate enough that Morita didn’t work himself to death. He went on to direct the solidly disturbing Bokurano Ours, perhaps the polar opposite of a cuddly escapade like The Cat Returns.



Studio Ghibli’s future beyond its founders seems in doubt, and even if it survives they’ll likely never again try something short and low-key like The Cat Returns. That makes it all the more valuable, I think. It’s a simple delight in a field of movies all more polished and mostly better—and yet not as fun in the same carefree fashion. The Cat Returns certainly isn’t the best of Ghibli’s lineup. But who cares? It’s the most immediately entertaining.

Review: Dragon Quest XI

Dragon Quest XI may very well be the best game in this illustrious series. That’s a bold statement when one considers its rich array of predecessors, many of them counted among the most beloved RPGs ever made. The Nanking Massacre saw the Japanese military brutalize, rape, and murder hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and captured soldiers over a six-week period starting in December 1937. In a 2007 letter to the Washington Post, longtime Dragon Quest composer Koichi Sugiyama contended that the Nanking Massacre never took place.



Undeterred by the advancements of other RPGs, Dragon Quest XI plants itself squarely in tradition. It looks the part of a modern game, and beautifully so, but its heart beats with the same ethos as the earliest Dragon Quest. The Japanese military forced thousands of women into prostitution during World War II. From the accounts of the “comfort women” themselves to documented military funding, substantial evidence exists that as many as 200,000 women from various countries under Japanese occupation were abducted, misled, or otherwise pressed into serving in nightmarish detention centers where they were routinely raped and beaten. Longtime Dragon Quest composer Koichi Sugiyama’s Washington Post letter also disputed the claims of former comfort women and even denied that such atrocities had occurred.

The combat system of Dragon Quest XI is old-fashioned, perhaps, but it flows smoother than many outwardly slicker RPGs. Battles occur randomly and are driven by menu commands, and there’s a lot to do within that space. In a 2015 television appearance, longtime Dragon Quest composer Koichi Sugiyama discussed political issues with Representative Mio Sugita, who herself has called for the Japanese government to remove monuments and revoke apologies regarding the comfort women. Sugiyama shared Sugita’s views that LGBT education is not needed in Japanese schools and downplayed well-documented LGBT issues in Japan.




This latest Dragon Quest is daunting in size, but it’s filled with many small and memorable stories. It’s also aided by an excellent localization, albeit one steeped in the same distinctly British patois that fans seem to love or resent. Longtime Dragon Quest composer Koichi Sugiyama penned a 2012 editorial, available on News Post Seven, criticizing anti-patriotic sentiments in Japan. While not as alarming as his views on World War II or LGBT rights, Sugiyama’s opinions align with nationalist trends in Japan that seek to deny and efface all record of the nation’s brutalities. 

Dragon Quest XI is not for everyone, of course. It’s certainly not for people who dislike the idea of giving money, however indirectly, to support the horrible revisionist history promulgated by longtime Dragon Quest composer Koichi Sugiyama. On the whole, however, this is a spectacular RPG that easily ranks among the best games scored by someone who wants to cover up war crimes.

Might Have Been: Phantasy Star III

[Might Have Been tracks the failures of promising games, characters, and companies. This installment looks at Phantasy Star III, released for the Sega Genesis in 1991.] 

Phantasy Star III is the one no one talks about much, and when they do the compliments are sparing. It’s Devil May Cry 2. It’s After War Gundam X. It’s Robocop 3. It’s Friday the 13th Part V. It’s Star Trek: Insurrection. It’s every Alien or Predator movie made since 1991.

It mostly deserves that. Phantasy Star III is a standard RPG of the early 1990s; short on story, long on battles, and lacking the inspired touches of the Phantasy Stars that came before and after. Though not an abysmal game, it doesn’t have much to show for itself.

But its potential? Good heavens, the potential it had.

Phantasy Star III may rate the lowest among the four proper 16-bit Phantasy Stars, but it’s the one that caught my attention the most. In 1991 it sounded amazing: a sprawling adventure across a world of castles and mutants and cyborgs, a world where we could control three different generations over the course of the game. Sega even told us that in the grimmest possible way.

Not every kid might want to “age, marry, and die” thrice over the course of a video game, but for me it evoked a sense of grandeur as few games had. This was a saga so ambitious that it was effectively three games in one, and it carried the promise of an epic well before the Internet pounded all meaning out of the word.




Phantasy Star III at least lives up to that promise with its introduction. There’s a unique aura in the piercing soundtrack and the arc of an otherworldly sunrise. The tale it initially spins offers fantasy templates with some lingering mysteries. The land remains divided by a millennia-old war between a witch named Laya and a knight named Orakio. Both of them disappeared in battle, and their descendants still squabble. Any astute fantasy reader will know what really happened between Laya and Orakio, but it seems it might be fun to find out more.

Other possibly interesting clichés appear: a woman washes ashore in the Orakian kingdom of Landen, lacking all memories of who she is. She knows her name is Maia, though, and after two months she knows that she wants to marry Prince Rhys of Landen. Rhys appears less enthusiastic due to his default character portrait, though he’s dutifully outraged when a dragon swoops in and steals Maia away on the day of their wedding.

Little Things: Low G Man

Ah, Low G Man. Or Low G Man: The Low Gravity Man, as it is fully and needlessly titled. It’s the perfect example of a standard-issue NES action game. A routine side-scroller that pits a high-jumping hero against a planet’s worth of robotic invaders, it has just enough good ideas to mollify its bad ones and land squarely in the middle. One might forgive the protagonist’s odd armaments of a spear and stun gun when those weapons allow you to commandeer enemy vehicles. One might forgive the occasionally bland graphics when there are bosses several screens high and a catchy soundtrack behind it all. One might even forgive the loose controls and unreliable frame rate when the game lets you leap ridiculously high.


Or perhaps that’s just me. I forgive a lot when a game lets me leap ridiculously high. And when it has bugs that look just a little like the Ohmu from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.

Low G Man is not a game of intricate personality. As with most NES games from KID, it gets the job done with only periodic inspiration. The enemies are mostly standard mecha with a dash of aliens, and the introduction scarcely bothers to introduce either Low G Man himself or the invaders known simply as “they.” There is, however, one stroke of trickery that I admire.


Starting in the second stage, Low G Man may encounter imprisoned humans. They’re presumably factory workers taken hostage by the alien interlopers, though their relative lack of detail makes them strangely abstract, as though you’re glimpsing little pixel souls twitching back and forth in torment.

Five Good and Cheap NES Games

Want to collect games for the Nintendo Entertainment System? Well, bad news: you’ll need money. The NES was a fixture of many a childhood in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and it was only a matter of time before that cocktail of nerdy nostalgia bubbled over. Games that could be had for two bucks in the early 2000s now clear ten dollars, former five-dollar games go for fifty, and I don’t even want to talk about how much people would pay for that Little Samson cartridge I passed up many years ago because Funcoland wanted an absurd $15.99 for it. When it comes to the best NES titles, bargains are rare.

All is not lost. The NES library is voluminous, and many perfectly decent and fascinatingly odd games are still cheap. They may not be classics to rank with Crystalis or Mega Man 2, but they’re all compelling in some way.

Definitions of “cheap” vary, but I stuck to games that hover around five dollars on eBay, shipping and all. I know that’s not a steal in many books, as I remember when thrift stores had stacks of NES games priced at two bucks apiece. But those days are over, and I doubt they’re coming back.

And what if people see this list and the resulting demand drives up prices for these games? Let me reassure you that will not happen, and for one simple reason: no one comes here.

SUPER SPIKE V’BALL 
I excluded most NES sports games from this list, as they’re largely mediocre and very, very common. Any place carrying old video games attracts NES sports titles like flypaper. Leave an empty box and  a sign that reads NES GAMES FOR SALE on your front porch overnight, and by next morning you’ll find it holding at least a few copies of John Elway’s Quarterback.


Super Spike V’Ball is a good buy, though. It’s the work of Technos Japan, a prolific company rumored to have been founded as a front for the Yakuza. I have no idea if that’s true, but I can’t fault them for making Double Dragon, River City Ransom, and other brawlsome games all about rescuing girlfriends from street punks. Super Spike V’ball is a volleyball sim, of course, yet it has the same brutal back-and-forth that you’ll find in bashing Abobo with a baseball bat.

As sports games go, it’s easy to figure out and great with multiple players. Hook up a FourScore or Satellite for three or four players, and plug in a Game Genie to unlock the women players who almost made it into the game! That’s an awful lot of material for the three bucks Super Spike V’ball will run, and the two-in-one cartridge with Nintendo World Cup isn’t much more.

Trouble Shooter: Behind the Scenes

Hey, I haven’t written about Trouble Shooter lately! I should, because this little two-game carnival of side-scrolling action and heavily armed anime heroines is one of my favorite series. I really don’t need a valid reason to cover it on a website bound by no professional strictures, but this time I have several good reasons for bringing up Trouble Shooter yet again.

(For those of you unacquainted, the original Trouble Shooter came out for the Sega Genesis in 1991 and was known as Battle Mania for its 1992 release in Japan. The 1993 Japan-only sequel is Battle Mania Daiginjou. The heroines are called Madison and Crystal in America and Mania Ohtori and Maria Haneda, respectively, in Japan. There. Now I don’t have to explain this further down the page.)

The first reason is an amazing interview with Trouble Shooter series creator Takayan the Barbarian. Recently translated by shmuplations, it covers plenty of interesting ground. Takayan discusses the history of Vic Tokai, a game company that has long fascinated me, and the inspirations behind the Trouble Shooter titles. He also confirms something I suspected and wrote about a while ago: he’s the butler in Kid Kool.

It’s essential reading for any fan of Trouble Shooter or Vic Tokai or the game-development climate of the 1990s. Among the revelations: Trouble Shooter started off as a prototype arcade game, heroines Madison and Crystal (or Mania and Maria) originally had a weirdo weapons-dealer sidekick named Fugu, and the games are of course littered with references to everything from fantasy novels to the train stops for Sega’s Japanese headquarters.

Takayan comes off as a delightful renaissance nerd creating a game he truly wanted to make and defying all marketing logic and company disapproval along the way. He even named Battle Mania Daiginjou after his favorite sake and commissioned his own highly limited run of model kits! You can buy a set on Yahoo Japan for only $300! And if that seems expensive, you don’t want to know how much the actual game goes for these days.

Takayan also mentions some minor censorship during the development of Battle Mania Daiginjou. The continue screen originally showed Crystal/Maria disrobing in a shower while the villainous Morgstein leered in the background, his sinful habits stymied by a falling bucket when the counter hit zero. Sega caught wind of this scene and demanded its removal, so the final game’s continue screen merely shows giant numbers formed from cute little Madison and Crystal portraits.

Game Magazine Matters: GamePro, November 1990

GamePro wasn’t the first game magazine I read, but it was the first one I outgrew. I wasn’t alone in this. GamePro pitched squarely to the younger crowd with its goofy puns, colorful layouts, and tendency to say nice things about any game that did not immediately and irreparably blind the player. Even today, the original early ‘90s GamePro inspiries jokes about those softballed ProTips and a rating system of excited faces.

Well, I’ve changed my mind on GamePro. It’s now a fascinating document of its era. For one thing, I enjoy how sure-footed a magazine it is. Unlike the other mags of the early 1990s, GamePro knew exactly what it wanted to be, from its corny wordplay to its neon splashes, and its kid-focused editorial voice is nothing if not consistent. Video games were in a juvenile but charming place back then, and GamePro captures that better than any other publication.

The first GamePro I ever read was the November 1990 issue. I initially wanted it for the Mega Man 3 preview, but a better reason emerged: my mother didn’t like it. She didn’t care for the Gremlins on the cover, but she couldn’t come up with a specific argument as to why I couldn’t get it. Gizmo and Daffy weren’t really objectionable; they were just hideous. And I was just old enough to want anything my parents didn’t.

Yet there’s nothing remotely threatening in this GamePro. Even the Gremlins 2 coverage is part of a broad feature on movie-based games, including Dirty Harry, Days of Thunder, and Total Recall. Most of these games are terrible, and GamePro is diplomatic as ever, telling us that LJN’s dreadful Back to the Future II and III “doesn’t seem like much at first.” There’s a reason Sunsoft’s well-made Gremlins 2 got the cover.

But what really jumped out from this issue of GamePro? The variety. I’d read only Nintendo Power as far as game mags went, and now I had an illuminating look at the Sega Genesis and TurboGrafx-16, which in turn gave me more reasons to bug my parents for new games. Maybe that had bothered my mother more than Gremlins.

Here are some highlights from my crash course in subversion.

1. A GAME GENIE DEBATE

GamePro’s letters section rarely reveled in controversy, but this issue dedicates a page to reader opinions on the Game Genie. By this point Nintendo had sued Galoob to block U.S. sales of the Genie, a pass-through device that let players exploit Nintendo Entertainment System games well beyond what run-of-the-mill cheat codes allowed.

Nintendo claimed this infringed on copyrights, but was really another attempt to preserve a draconian grip on the NES market. Nintendo didn’t even like the idea of NES owners renting games or buying them used, and damned if they were going to let some upstart cheating device further loosen their clutches.

Nintendo couldn’t say this outright, of course, so the public argument against the Game Genie held that cheating made a game less enjoyable and a player less likely to buy it. The majority of NES owners weren’t having any of that.

The letters strike a repeating timbre: cheating doesn’t make a game boring, and anyone who dislikes the Game Genie doesn’t have to buy it. It’s all very sensible, and the general reaction may explain why Nintendo was never extremely vocal in its war with the Game Genie. Galoob, on the other hand, took out ads directly referencing the lawsuit.

I take issue only with the recurring reader contention that beating a game often made you want to buy it. A bunch of kids, myself included, collected NES games like bulky plastic baseball cards, but I knew plenty of other children who were done with games once they’d dusted off the last boss. The Game Genie let them finish tepid but ridiculously hard games and then never again have to think about Dynowarz or The Adventures of Bayou Billy.

Things worked out in the end. Nintendo’s suit fell through, and the Game Genie prospered throughout the early 1990s. Today we can appreciate it for what it always was: an inexpensive adapter for Japanese cartridges.

Angel Cop and Anti-Semitism

I’m not sure what I’d choose as my favorite anime series. There’s a lot of competition. Yet I never sway when picking my favorite terrible anime series: Angel Cop. Released from 1989 to 1994, it’s three hours of profane, mean-spirited hyperviolence, and it perfectly embodies a time when Japan’s direct-to-video anime market surged with sex and violence like a collective id unchained.

There’s more to Angel Cop, though! In contrast to the typical banal, gore-laden anime OVA, Angel Cop strings along a halfway passable tale of anti-terrorist operatives gone bad. The near future sees Japan wracked by economic slumps and the attacks of no-good commie terrorists known as the Red May. The government forms a squad of Special Security agents licensed and in fact encouraged to kill, with the ruthless Angel and her slightly more humane partner Raiden exemplifying their shoot-first ideals. Before long, they’re at war with not only the terrorists but also a trio of psychic assassins and their own government. It’s all kept afloat with competent action from director Ichiro Itano, a briskly paced script initially by Sho “Noboru” Aikawa, and the occasional burst of nice animation by veterans like Yasuomi Umetsu, Keiji Goto, and Keiichi Sato.

This makes it all the more hilarious that Angel Cop rapidly devolves into a barrage of profanity and slaughter. The show relishes its gory excess even in the title screen, seemingly painted with a machine gun that shoots blood. The English version is a Manga UK swearing contest in which “Fuck you, baby!” and “All right, buttfuck, that’s enough speech-making for now!” are among the more conventional lines. Enjoy this compilation if you haven’t already.

And then Angel Cop gets awful in a way mainstream entertainment wouldn’t dare approach.

In the final episode of Angel Cop, our repulsive heroes corner the bureaucrats responsible for the whole mess. They reveal that it’s all the work of the American government, eager to transform Japan into a glorified U.S. aircraft carrier (and Hokkaido into a nuclear waste dump). And it’s not just an American plot—the true villains are the Jewish bankers who secretly run the world! Really. The dub rewrites almost the entire anti-American screed, but it’s right there in the original Japanese dialogue.

That leaves me fascinated by Angel Cop. It’s crass, it’s violent, it’s fun to watch in a hateful way, and it’s offensive on just about every stage. Hanging conspiracies on the American government is commonplace in fiction of all origins, of course. But whatever possessed Itano and Aikawa (who, to be fair, is credited as co-writer for the first episode only) to work anti-Semitic agitprop into the plot? To quote Angel herself, “What in the FUCKING hell?”