Twilight Syndrome: Investigations

 

As a fan of the developer Grasshopper Manufacture and their lead dude Suda51, I decided to take it upon myself to go and experience a few of his older works when he used to work with another company called Human Entertainment.  Very recently I finished off Twilight Syndrome: Tansaku-Hen and so I thought I'd share some thoughts on the game.

Well I guess I should use the word "game" very lightly because there's very little in terms of game-play here.  Twilight Syndrome is a visual novel about 3 school girls who find themselves often caught up in some kind of spooky happenings.  Each chapter starts with some kind of rumor that one of them hears about and then the 3 go and investigate and a bunch of weird shit happens.  The main "gameplay" in Twilight Syndrome is the same kind of "gameplay" that you get in most games of this type, where you read the story and then every so often you are presented with A, B or C options and you pick one.  The choices that you make throughout each story change the outcome but I'll get into that a bit later.  Sometimes you are also able to control the girls around certain environments but there's not really anything to explore and they all walk so slow that I think going from one side of the school building to the other in Chapter 4, for example, caused me to age about 2 years.  Gameplay is not what we are here for.

Weirdly enough there is also an EKG at the top of the screen that at first made me think there might be things to hide from or options that would cause the girls to panic or die of fear, thus resulting in a game over but nothing ever came of it.  There's one chapter where one of the girls gets caught in a looping train station and every time you make the loop you find a public phone that's ringing.  If you choose to not answer the phone the girl runs away and loops back to it, causing the EKG at the top to pulse faster and change color from deep blue to green to red.  I wanted to test the effects of this so I kept on running away rather than taking the call and despite the bar being red and the pulse being extremely fast, nothing happened in the end.  I went the whole game and it never came into play so who fucking knows what that piece of shit bar is there for. 

I bitched about this in the last post but depening on the choices you make during each stage, you can end up getting a game over.  At the end of each chapter you are given a rating that includes 区 meaning bad luck, 中吉 meaning medium luck or 大吉 meaning big luck, based off what you get when you do those temple fortune telling thingies.  If you get 区 then the chapter is considered failed and you have to replay it.  This is annoying because the game doesn't feature a fast forward and it doesn't allow you to skip past the bits where you made correct decisions so if you fuck up you have to replay the WHOLE THING again, which is tedious as all fuck.  Usually though, these decisions are not hard to notice, where usually you'll get the worst result if you abandon an investigation early or leave a character behind.  For example there was one stage where one of the girls gets trapped in a room with a ghost and your choices shortly after are to either leave her behind and go home or go back and try to help her.  While I was streaming it I decided to leave her there to get ghost-wrecked because I didn't know about the game overs only to have a big 区 slapped on the chapter select list and told to do it again and properly this time.

But that's fine, that was me fucking around with the obviously stupid answer and finding out.  However there was one chapter where the wrong decision didn't feel so obvious and caused a game over.  It's in the aforementioned train station chapter near the end, where the girls find themselves on a ghost platform with a ghost train.  One of the girls decides it might be a good idea to ride the ghost train and you can choose between talking her out of it, or lending her about $300 for a ticket.  Now before I said that most chapters end in 区 if you abandon the investigation, correct?  Well this is the one time in the game where you HAVE to abandon the investigation or you get a failing grade.  Failing to talk her out of the train ride leads to her going missing for a week and then the police find her somewhere out of town with a hard case of amnesia.  What makes this double annoying is that this comes right at the END of the god damn chapter so if you got on that train because you've been conditioned to see your spooky shit to the end, then enjoy re-reading the whole thing, fuck face, 区 for you.

Annoying design problems aside though, the game is sort of interesting.  It sort of reminds me of something like Goosebumps are Are you Afraid of the Dark or some shit.  Not something I'll be ranting and raving about like Suda51s other works such as Killer7 but interesting for a one time play through and good enough to make me interested in it's sequel which is also called "investigations" but in Japanese it's 究明 instead of 探索.  Maybe "search" would be a better translation for this game's title but that sounds stupid as fuck to me

Anyway, if you were looking to play this for yourself you might be shit out of luck because as far as I'm aware none of of the Syndrome games have English translations.  Someone on YouTube has done a playthrough of them with English Subtitles attatched though so you could go look that up and just watch that instead.  You're essentially getting the same experience.  

For me though, this game ended on a cliffhanger so I'll probably write another post when I beat 究明

Moonlight Syndrome

 

If you've listened to me on the stream or read this blog extensively you may be aware that one of my favorite games of all time is Killer7.  Killer7 is the brainchild of Suda Goichi, or Suda51 as he's more commonly known and he's the guy responsible for games like No More Heroes and Killer is Dead, games famous for being a bit weird to say the least.

Suda51 before starting his own studio, Grasshopper Manufacture, actually got his start making games for a company called Human Entertainment and so I decided to go back and check out some of his past work and the first game I decided to sink my teeth into was Moonlight Syndrome on the PS1.

It may have been a mistake to start with Moonlight Syndrome because from what I can understand, it's a sort of alternate universe type story based on a game called Twilight Syndrome but I was already an hour in when I realized so I just kept going.

The game follows the adventures of a high school girl called Mika who lives in a town where a series of progressively fucked up things are happening.  Mika takes it upon herself to investigate these strange happenings after a road accident kills one of her class mates and we get to join her on her weird and dark misadventures.  

Game play wise there isn't really a lot to talk about since Moonlight Syndrome is essentially a visual novel.  You control Mika or one of the other characters moving left or right along each of the games areas but there isn't really anything to do other than watch the walking animation and listen to the loud footstep noises.  You do this until you meet another character or hit an event trigger and then more story plays out for you.  They story is presented in a number of chapters and while the main characters lines are all denoted with text NPCs all get weird PS1 CGI and voice acting.  There are a couple of moments in the game where you have to solve a "puzzle" which usually involves finding an event trigger or talking to a specific character.  For example there's one bit when Mika is investigating an apartment building and you have to find someone living in room 9 on a certain floor.  If you just count the doors you go down you'll end up at the wrong door because in Japanese apartments a room 4 doesn't usually exist and the idea of calling that a "puzzle" is a bit sad really.

 Overall though, Moonlight Syndrome is a weird game that I think is worth checking out if you're a big fan of Suda51s more modern titles.  It's fun to go back and see what he was doing early in his career.  As far as I know though, the game doesn't have a fan translation and was never released outside of Japan so unless you can read and understand Japanese you may be shit out of luck.  If you do though, give it a go, it's not overly long and it's quite an interesting little game.  MAYBE check out the previous titles first if you really want to get into the series though.

Games aren't made by one person...

So when I finished The Evil Within I sent a message to my friend saying "I just finish The Evil Within and it was fucking awful".  His response was "God, if Mikami can't make a good horror game what is the world coming to?"

I know what he means by that and obviously my friend and everyone with a working brain knows that but there is this habit in gaming to attribute a successful or shitty game entirely to one guy.  I don't know why this kind of irks me and it shouldn't because I know people aren't that stupid really but it's just something that I don't like.

Take the games from Grasshopper Manufacture, games like Killer7, No More Heroes and more recently Killer is Dead.  When people talk about these games they don't say "Oh, it's that game from Grasshopper" they say "oh it's that game made by Suda51".  Even if you look at the Steam page for Killer is Dead on Steam it says "Get ready for some seriously stylish action from renowned designer SUDA51" 

When it comes to games like this you only ever hear about how awesome Suda is and there isn't ever really any mention of anyone else at Grasshopper.  It's the same with Bayonetta where the ONLY name I ever hear when people talk about that game is Hideki Kamiya. It seems like all the other people who worked on that game, all those names in that credits list you didn't read are completely ignored and all the glory is given to one or two people.

Granted that I don't explore news sites for games too often because I have a lot of distaste for current games media so maybe if I did do some digging I could find an interview with some of the other members of the teams for these games.  That said, the only game that I can think of off the top of my head that isn't typically attributed to a single person is Silent Hill.  The people responsible for that game are always referred to as "Team Silent" and while there are still a lot more people responsible for those games at least they acknowledge that there was more than one mind for the production of that game.

Also before anyone gets on my case, I'm aware that there are some games that WERE made by a single person and that is rad.  Still, not a big deal but it just annoys me a little bit when a games quality is attributed to a single person.  I'm also aware that it would be unreasonable to expect games media to interview and have chats with every single member of a games development but it's just the way the phrase it.  If they said "Get ready for some seriously stylish action from the incredibly skilled staff at Grasshopper Manufacture led by SUDA51" it would be better.

Still, I'm just griping about bullshit, I'm sure all the programmers, artists and everything else reap the rewards regardless of their mentions and that's all that really matters.

Killer Is Dead

Killer is Dead is a game I have not finished yet, but due to it being fucking amazing I just had to talk about it right now.

The game follows one very smartly dressed assassin known as Mondo Zappa and his adventures doing work for an orginisation that involves killing an array of downright weird targets with the help of his happy go lucky school girl friend.  He has a big robot arm and a tormented past and he gets caught up having to deal with some guy called David doing all sorts of evil stuff from his base of operations on the moon.  Keep in mind though that this plot was written by non other than Suda51 of Killer7 fame and isn't scared to go right off the handle at basically any point during the game.

The gameplay revolves around hacking and slashing your way through levels of strange robot zombie things called Wires before eventually fighting one of the games strange and incredibly intresting boss characters.  On the way you'll find pickups to improve your weaponry, health and blood gauges that will help make the killing of extremely dangerous criminals a lot easier.

On top of all that there are a ton of side missions that involve all sorts of varied and interesting goals such as securing a bonsai tree or making laps of a Kyoto village while running over Wires.  If you need a break from the killing there are the games Gigolo Missions which involve hitting on attractive women and giving them presents so that their mutual feelings result in them giving you an upgrade of some description.  I could rant for an entire post about the press's reaction to Gigolo mode but instead of that I'll just say that the content off these missions has been grossly exagerated.

The graphics are also really slick with cool looking character models and interesting levels that are varied enough to stop you from being bored visually speaking.  The music is also pretty good and the game comes with both Japanese and English voice audio if you're the kind of person that wanted to hear the script delivered by the Japanese cast.  The English voice actors did a good job of delivering the lines though so it would be worth switching between the two for the full experience.

That said the game isn't perfect and the biggest thing they fucked up with this one was the difficulty.  Hard Mode was obviously designed to be played on a new game+ (assuming there is one) and playing it on your first time round can seem a little unmanageable at certain points, especially the side missions.  The problem with this is that normal mode is way too easy and I have no idea what the challenge is like on easy mode but judging from my current experience you could probably beat the game with one hand there.

The game also has a few bugs of which I shall share two stories with.  On one level, after performing a special kill on an enemy I just fell through the floor and had to restart the mission from a check point which was rather annoying because sometimes the checkpoints can put you quite a ways back.  On a side mission involving a gun turret one of my targets glitched behind a wall that I could not shoot through which resulted in me having to start the whole thing over from the beggining which pissed me off to no end.

Still, difficulty problems aren't game breaking as you can still enjoy the experience on any setting and game bugs are infrequent if a little annoying so Killer is Dead is still worth picking up and blasting through just for it's truly unique brand of Suda51 strangeness.

All Aboard the Hype Train!

I don't usually get hyped up for games anymore, I find that everything that I expect to be good, is usually disappointing, but this has got my hype levels to go through the roof!

Killer Is Dead is a new game from Suda51, which is enough to get me at least interested, but the reason I am so hyped about it is because it seems to have that strange Killer7 vibe and in case you didn't see the post, I REALLY fucking like Killer7.

I'll post the trailer below but it seems to be the same kind of plot as pretty much every Suda51 one game, which involves assassins of some description, and absolute craziness.  Luckily for us too, the whole trailer isn't just cutscenes and we get to see some of the actual game, which looks like Killer7 and No More Heroes had a baby.  Slamming those two games together with a good narrative could mean something truly special.

But don't just take my word for it, watch the damn trailer!

Can't wait!

Killer7

I was browsing youtube to kill some time when I see that someone that I subscribed to covered this game as a part of their Halloween scare-fest thing.  This instantly prompted all the awesome memories I have of what is, to me, one of the best games (quite possibly THE best) game on the Gamecube, so I thought I'd have a little gush about it right here.

So, unless you've been living under a rock, you are probably aware of who Suda51 one is.  In case you do live under a rock, or you don't game as much as everyone else, Suda51 is the guy behind the No More Heroes games and the more recent Shadows of the Damned.  Now people loved stuff like No More Heroes, but I was quite disappointed with it, because I was comparing it to this thing.

So, Killer7 follows a group of assassins as they try to take down a terrorist organisation known as Heavens Smile.  The 7 assassins aren't actually real though, they are all different personalities in some guys psyche that are given form somehow.  Basically, the plot is the fucking strangest thing I've ever played through, but it's actually really good.  There is a big story arc about relations between Japan and the US and government conspiracy and stuff, but some of the chapters seemingly have no link to that, but then they actually do, and....oh god, shit's nuts.  Just play it, it's really hard to explain.

The only real way to describe the gameplay, along with pretty much everything else in this game, is unique.  You are on rails all the time, but you still have freedom to choose where you want to go at junctions in the level, and the levels get more sprawly and complicated as you go.  You have to stop and go into this first person mode to fire your weapon, but before you can shoot anything you have to scan the environment since the enemies all come with built in stealth.  Combat aside, it has those kind of survival-horror esque puzzles of finding weird shit to use as keys to open various things.  On top of that, each personality has it's own ability, which you have to make use of in order to progress.

The other big thing about this game is the art style, and it's really pretty but still retains a sort of bleak atmosphere.

It's cel-shading out the arse, but it's done in this really masterful way and the game looks really good as a result.

I could probably fill up about a weeks worth of posts just talking about each individual aspect of this game and why it's just so damn good.  But instead of me yapping on, I recommend that you hop on e-bay or amazon or something and fucking find a copy.  Gamecube version is better than the PS2 version, but whatever version you play, you won't regret it.