I didn’t watch Ripley at first. The black and white was a barrier (I know, but shut up, I was not alone). I have no trouble with black and white photography, so why black and white film? Perhaps because film feels more real to me, meaning it should be more real, meaning color. Either way, I hesitated to watch Ripley. At worst, I thought the black and white would be pretentious, at best ... well, I couldn’t think of that scenario. So I kept putting it off and putting it off as praise was heaped on this latest of a million adaptations of Patricia Highsmith’s thriller, The Talented Mr. Ripley. Then close friends started to recommend it, then I felt like a jerk (then I felt pretentious for avoiding it). So I put it on, and … wow.
By now most of us know this story. In 1950s New York, tenement-housed petty fraudster named Tom Ripley (a gecko-esque Andrew Scott) is hired by the wealthy father of a trust-fund kid, Dickie Greenleaf (a charmingly befuddled Johnny Flynn), to bring Dickie back from Italy, where he is frittering his life away painting terrible paintings while his girlfriend, Marge (Dakota Fanning in full Mona Lisa mode), writes a terrible book. Basically, instead of doing what he was paid to do, Tom falls for his target’s lifestyle, a lifestyle that has up until now been elusive to him. It’s this out-of-placeness that the black and white of this series, created by Steve Zaillian, fully exposes. Tom is often in Ripley’s monochromatic frames alone, disconnected from other human beings, often overwhelmed by his surroundings—dwarfed by buildings and their interiors, constricted by hallways and stairs—a man lost at sea, never comfortable, a guy who can get lost in a Caravaggio but can’t quite settle into the lushness of his new environs.
With a bubblegum pop aesthetic and low stakes story about rescuing your cat, Super Crush KO takes the essentials of stylish action games like Devil May Cry and Bayonetta and crushes them down to a 2D plane. There’s a familiar air combo focused rhythm; punches flow into launchers and directional specials, allowing you to close the distance and interrupt enemy attacks, with a rapid fire blaster for continuing juggles and keeping a combo alive as you approach.
Relaxed from the technical movement and execution requirements of its inspirations, Super Crush KO instead focuses on flowing through stages uninterrupted. Simply finishing a stage is a relaxed activity, but a mobile game style structure pushes you to replay stages and aim for perfect combos, higher ranks and side objectives.
The casual attitude makes it enjoyable to play when you want the same feeling character action games give you, without the intensity and sensory overload they often come with. So much of the genre’s fun comes from the absurd amount of tools you’re given for player expression that simplifying it might seem counter to the appeal, but Super Crush KO manages to keep that same satisfaction intact.
With fewer tools each of them becomes more effective, allowing you to traverse space very quickly, with the speed increasing as the game introduces environmental obstacles that launch you at high speed vertically and horizontally. Dodging in Super Crush KO is almost platform fighter like, giving you invincibility and acting as a good way to reposition yourself, with only a short cooldown to limit you. Your normal combo is unremarkable, but a suite of directional specials gives you strong options to close the distance, interrupt incoming attacks, and launch enemies.
The aerial “Air Pop” in particular allows you to dash in all eight directions, homing in on enemies and chaining up to three in a row to extend the duration of an air combo near indefinitely. An energy meter limits the uses of special attacks, but defeating enemies fills it quickly, creating a loop where you can chain specials together to quickly defeat enemies, throw some regular combos and bullet juggles in for filler, and inflict enough damage to put you right back to full energy.
Super Crush KO lays on the feedback, with hitstop and screenshake for everything from big hits to dodging through bullets, and a ranking and score log tallying up every action so that even small actions feel satisfying. If I have any complaints it’s that the bosses don’t take advantage of the flexibility in the air combo system, making them more static than the regular stages, and that Air Pop’s short startup, multidirectional movement and homing properties kind of make it too useful, relegating other specials to more niche situations.
As someone deep into the beat-em-up genre, Super Crush KO is an easy, casual game to come back to, with plenty of side objectives to attempt mastery. It’s got the same compelling loop that time trial platformers like Dustforce have, with less focus on the technical mastery of the inputs, but the ways you string together moves. The welcoming aesthetic, pop colors and cute character art all enhance that low stakes mood. If you’ve got any interest in the art of crafting an air combo, give this one a shot.
Developed over a decade and layered in mysteries, Zeroranger is a shooter that’s received acclaim from both STG* fanatics and first-timers for the ways it bends genres. But for all its talk about the ways it pays homage to the genre, and the insistence that it’s something special, Zeroranger almost never gets talked about in plain terms, out of fear of spoiling the surprises that await first time players. That level of caution from its fans is almost admirable, but it leaves what makes the game special undiscussed, and makes it hard for both curious players wondering what the big deal is, and leaves Zeroranger’s best ideas unappreciated.
With that in mind I’ll be doing a deep dive into Zeroranger’s design, with no limitations on what I talk about or spoil.
On a basic level, Zeroranger is a vertically scrolling STG that borrows ideas from a variety of genre classics, paying homage to them through bosses, stage layouts and game mechanics. After each stage you’re given a choice between one of two weapons, each which will become useful in the next stage, but in different ways, with variations between the two playable ships. After the first stage you get a choice between back and side firing weapons, the second unlocks a lock on laser or chargeable shot, and the penultimate boss fight–against Grapefruit, the ship previously thought to be destroyed during the first attack on the enemy–unlocks a mech transformation with a powerful melee weapon that stacks damage and protects you from enemy attacks.
Each weapon allows varied interactions with the level design, covering different areas of the screen and allowing you to approach enemy patterns in a new way. Since you can’t have both weapons of each tier, you’ll have to choose which weakness you’ll accept, and pair it with other weapons that can cover that weakness. It encourages repeat playthroughs to try different strategies and learn the stage layouts, which is good, because Zeroranger will demand repetition.
At the core of Zeroranger is the theme of karmic cycles, repackaging long standing genre concepts in a way that ties them to the ongoing narrative. Like Neverawake, Zeroranger plays with the concepts of Loops–second playthroughs that remix the original stages–but here it acts closer to something out of the Nier series. The initial playthrough is only setup, with a repeat playthrough being the de facto second act, with altered context that builds on your original understanding, followed by a third and final act that brings a proper conclusion.
The karmic themes even affect the meta progression of Zeroranger. Score contributes towards earning the next of nine total continues, used to retry a stage from a checkpoint after death. Continues are represented by the nine orbs that fill out a wheel at the end of the run, which itself resembles the Wheel of Samsara, often used by Buddhists to describe the cycle of existence that mortal beings are subject to.
By framing each attempt as another cycle or reincarnation, it implies that each death has in fact happened, and the only way to escape the cycle is with enough perseverance and knowledge. It blows up the scale to a cosmic degree, and makes your journey to the end of the game, and the knowledge you build of its world, into a form of mechanical and narrative progression.
This knowledge of the world becomes integral to the second loop, which introduces major changes to the patterns and layouts of the first loop, but allows you to return with all your weapons. With these previously unavailable weapons you can easily dispatch enemies that were hard to deal with, and details that seemed mysterious on the first loop fall into place. One of my favorite examples of this are the enemies who appear in the background, before flying into the foreground to attack. On the first loop they seem like a cool, decorative detail, but on the second loop, with the lock-on laser available, suddenly they’re targets you can pick off before they get a chance to attack.
The final act begins when you meet the Grapefruit for the second time and reveal your mech form, allowing you to have a proper duel where they’ll whip out several abilities, including more powerful versions of your own weapons, revealing why they were the first choice in dealing with the enemy.
After defeating Grapefruit you’ll once again face the final boss, but this time instead of the boss rush of the first loop, they’ll give up and offer you another power up.
Here Zeroranger shifts into its final act, requiring you to solve a series of puzzles before gaining access to the true ending. Grabbing the powerup shows you the “ending” and puts you into a loop where you’ll replay the first stage in Final Boss mode, leaning harder into Zeroranger’s CAVE** influences by changing out your default weapons for a Dodonpachi style barrage of bullets and bombs. Completing the stage and grabbing the powerup puts you into another brief minigame before glitching out and returning you to the title.
To escape this you’ll need to reject that final powerup, either within the Final Boss stage or before, during the boss room where the boss rush takes place. By rejecting the offering you gain access to Despair, the real final boss hidden beneath the facility, who naturally has several phases to complete. The first phase is a puzzle itself, requiring you to carefully observe the orbs emitting the attacks, and time your own attacks to destroy them close to simultaneously, or otherwise be stuck helpless in yet another looping trap.
Completing the first phase reveals the true form of the final boss, Despair, a suitably terrifying challenge with a massive suite of attacks whose design could inspire its own essay. Compared to the cerebral challenges preceding it, this final form is more straightforward, but learning the complexities of the patterns often felt as hard as the combined challenge of every obstacle met on the way here.
Defeating Despair reveals the true final boss challenge–a sequence that reveals the origins of Zeroranger’s world, and connects several unresolved narrative threads. Not only must you complete it completely stripped of your previous arsenal, but you’re given a single chance to do so.
Not quite understanding the gravity of what the game was implying there, I took on the final challenge after an exhausting struggle with Despair, desperate to finally see the ending–only to have my save deleted after I failed.
Not only do you need to scale the mountainous challenge of defeating Despair, but you need to complete it with continues to spare, as each continue orb becomes a health point for your final confrontation. In addition, you have to quickly adapt to playing without any of the weapons you’ve built familiarity with during your playtime, and learn the new boss patterns on the fly while unraveling how exactly you can damage the boss. Practice runs are impractical, as you’ll have to complete the whole game at least once before returning, making the minimum time between attempts nearly an hour, if you’ve complete mastery of the rest of the game.
So I cheated. I downloaded my save from the cloud, backed it up, then went back and completed it on my third try, after restoring my save twice. As I finished the final challenge, Zeroranger left me with the same message it began with:
May you attain enlightenment.
By circumventing the challenge, by failing to persevere in the face of disaster, I’d arguably failed this goal. I’d given in to my material desires and skipped the suffering necessary to achieve the knowledge needed to break free of the cycle. Fitting then, that Zeroranger’s conclusion is one that’s hopeful, but open ended, implying that this current cycle has been broken, but the events that caused it may one day repeat themselves.
Then Zeroranger deletes your save.
Records carry over, and the color palette and story change to reflect your achievement, but progress unlocking stages is once again reset. You’re free of the meta trappings of the story, but are given one more reminder of how temporary progress is, and challenged one more time to complete a run to get the complete credits sequence.
It’s a novel approach to player progression in a STG that not only reframes common genre ideas with a thematic approach, but slowly pushes players towards goals that the genre diehards naturally shoot for. By visually indicating the progress towards extra lives and continues through its score counter, it alerts players towards the importance of scoring for continued survival as well as the leaderboards, and encourages them to look for opportunities to maximize score.
The harsh requirements to witness the ending almost guarantee that a player will be forced to start over, and unless they cheat (guilty), forces them to learn the stages and scoring systems to quickly earn back their progress. That process, and the need to hold onto as many continues as possible for the finale, pushes them closer to attempting the 1-credit clear, what most STG players consider the first major milestone in learning a game. Simply put, it’s a run where you complete all the stages in the game without using up a continue, and often denotes mastery.
The parade of secrets and homages, alongside the narrative driven recontextualization of game mechanics and premise shifting final acts create a novel approach for both genre veterans and newcomers, upending expectations with each new twist. Zeroranger’s revelations mark it as equal parts mystery and action game, and asks you to dig deeper, coming to an appreciation of its layered design in the process.
Personally, as much as I respect the final act’s commitment to delivering on Zeroranger’s themes of struggle, persistence and reincarnation, the harsh penalty of deleting your save was demotivating to a degree that I didn’t feel was worth the tension it imparted. I can only imagine how a less experienced player might feel, struggling for hours to reach that point, and possibly being unsure if they could reach it again. Zeroranger’s patterns and stage design are often less demanding than most of its contemporaries, but they come with harsher penalties for failure.
Even given that, it’s not hard to see why Zeroranger captured the imagination of so many. Designed intentionally to be approachable, with enough mystery to satisfy the lore hungry theorycrafters, Zeroranger provides many entry points. Paired with its striking two color palette and memorable soundtrack, it paints the picture of a greater world beyond its borders. The drawn out finale demands you engage Zeroranger with your entire attention, and its dramatic set pieces and score bring an emotional climax that the more traditional arcade style titles often can’t spend the runtime on.
Even after the credits roll, Zeroranger leaves plenty to discover, both within its boundaries and outside. Its themes of karmic cycles and open-ended conclusion invite you to explore it further, and its homages and secrets point to other games and worlds whose influence helped bring it to life. It’s an introduction to the mindset of a genre fanatic, an homage for all those who’ve already journeyed through the genre to arrive here, and an invitation for those who haven’t to share in that same passion.
— Zeroranger is availble on PC. Homebrew ports are availble for the Switch and Linux based handhelds via Portmaster.
— *STG: ShooTing Game, aka SHMUP or Shoot-Em-Up. A community term for the genre of arcade style shooters used to differentiate them from the more common first and third person shooters.
**CAVE: Developer of several major entries in the genre, and credited with popularizing the danmaku (bullet curtain) or bullet hell sub-genre. Their games are often marked by complex enemy bullet patterns, with a powerful player arsenal that can hit many parts of the screen at the same time.
Neverawake shakes up the usual STG* conventions with a playful approach to both its world and structure. Sporting a spooky cute aesthetic, it takes the STG convention of “loops”–repeated playthroughs that shake up previous patterns–and builds its core around it. Stages are short and repeatable, and the goal is not to survive them, but to efficiently collect a certain amount of Souls, dropped by destroying enemies or completing objectives within the stage. Stages will loop until the Soul counter is filled, giving you a chance for higher scoring, but making it more difficult to survive each time. Stages are laid out in the format of a horizontal shooter, with an emphasis on environmental interactions that direct the flow of the stage.
Initially confusing, or even alienating, it moves the focus from simple survival to learning each stage. Narrative threads, weapons, and modifiers unlock steadily, smartly bridging the gap between the casual shooter fan and the score chasing veterans. The twin stick controls complement this goal, being familiar to many outside the STG diehards. Loops tie into the narrative too–as your character works to wake up a hospitalized girl, working through worlds constructed of her traumas, warped through the viewpoint of a scared child. Unraveling each world brings you closer to the final confrontation, which reveals the next layer of the narrative–in a second playthrough.
The story reaches a conclusion after the first playthrough, but opens up a new set of Omoide, or Memory, challenges that unlock new story tidbits and ask you to play through stages with new conditions. Often these will ask you to complete a stage within the first loop, seek out secret items or avoid souls so you can avoid finishing a boss stage prematurely and achieve the alternative win condition of destroying the boss, something completely optional on the first go.
Aside from the novelty of this approach, it works as a second narrative incentive to continue playing the game, tying into the themes of Neverawake, and giving you a formal reward for continuing to replay stages, and attempting to master them. It’s something that even the best games in the genre struggle with, often assuming dedicated players will come in self-motivated to replay the game and aim for higher scores, without communicating the appeal of doing so to more casual fans.
The steady stream of unlockable weapons and badges keeps things from becoming immediately overwhelming, giving you basic tools to start with, then opening to an entire sandbox of different approaches by the end of the game. Badges can be equipped to make your character more durable, assist you in collecting Souls, give you reliable refills on health and special weapon ammo, or power up your main weapon when not firing or point blanking the enemy.
The loadout limit is generous enough that you’ll be able to take plenty of bonuses into battle, with more available as you unlock later stages, but you’ll always be limited enough that you’ll always have to keep a balance between defensive and aggressive play. Daring players can use this to complete stages fast and score high, with more casual players able to slowly accumulate more advantages through perseverance, giving them slight power boosts and different approaches to experiment with until they can complete the more difficult stages.
This system makes Neverawake’s difficulty highly variable and customizable, equally appealing as a serious playthrough or casual session. The short stages and loops give you many natural stopping points, making it equally as easy to go for one more stage or to call the session. Focusing on these small details might seem absurd, but these are the kinds of design decisions that have kept me constantly returning to Neverawake, and at the top of my favorites of the year, for two years running.
And as much as I’ve focused on the broader structural details of Neverawake, it cannot be overstated how much the game’s creepy cute style sells the game. The character and stage designs give life to a child’s warped view of the mundane world, with fears like foods she doesn’t like, or barking dogs mutating into overgrown, pulsating monsters that give insight to the trauma each of the various emotional worlds have inflicted on her. You can see the way that fear turns everyday situations into stifling, painful experiences, with stage layouts and hazards mirroring that stress. Dogs chase you relentlessly, classmates’ hands reach out suddenly from the background, and teeth open and close around you as the dentist stalks you.
Bullets and souls cut through the dark backgrounds with brilliant colors, enemies eject hitsparks and puffs of smoke upon taking damage, with screen shake and hitstop emphasizing the real big hits. Picking off enemy formations and environmental growths gives a satisfying chain of feedback, and bosses shake, glow and even have parts of them explode as you inflict damage. Each has a unique pattern, or gimmick, with one notable one having you activate an x-ray to reveal the boss’ weak point as it moves around its body.
Seeing what new environment or creature would receive a nightmare interpretation kept me as motivated to go through Neverawake as the steady stream of new toys to tackle stages with. The actual writing, presented in snippets between levels, ranges from charming to melodramatic, and is largely unnecessary compared to the narrative throughline presented through the visuals. Even without the story, it’s easy to piece together the sense of this girl’s life, fears and the eventual incident that drove her to the hospital through the stage themes and boss battles. The final boss is suitably climatic, and drives home the physical and emotional struggle of the story.
Neverawake reveals more of itself the more you return to it. Both in the sense of the formal rewards given to you, but also in the way its design melds. It’s cohesive to the point where it feels almost obvious, and it’s only when you take a step back can you realize how carefully each element has been aligned to construct the whole. It’s the stuff of nightmares, presented as a sweet dream.
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*STG: community abbreviation for shooting game, alternatively known as shoot-em-ups, or SHMUPs, to differentiate them from modern first and third person shooters.
Addendums, Archives and Appendecies is extra, off topic writing in addition to the regular CANON FIRE entries.
Games history is nearly infinite, and growing every day. The typical view of games canon might give you the impression there was a time where we could chronicle every major release, but this has never been true. There have always been smaller teams doing incredible work, some of which would ripple into the larger industry. Outside the typical focus of America, Europe and Japan, other regions were often developing on their own, without the resources or publicity that the major players enjoyed. Creating a holistic view of this larger history was always going to require the work of many, with multiple viewpoints to push against the stagnant and hegemonic canon.
To that point, I’m going to be bringing a spotlight to a few of my favorite critics and creators, who run the spectrum from serious, considered critique, to pure entertainment, but who’ve all shown me games and perspectives that I hadn’t discovered before.
HG101 is likely to be a familiar sight to many people reading this, and if it isn’t, it should become one. The largest archive of articles, interviews and features on games that have almost no coverage anywhere else, they treat both the popular and the obscure with the same comprehensive approach. Each entry aims to not only cover every game in the series, but every port and version of it, which is especially interesting in the case of earlier titles that often ended up on machines that had to make numerous compromises to adapt the original work.
The articles themselves are of variable quality, especially if you look back at the old archive, before the site moved to its new format, but this is inevitable due to the nature of having so many contributors. Their standards and practices have gotten more consistent over the years, however, which has also included the addition of a nominal fee for those writing for them. It’s a work of passion from a large group of people, and it never fails to highlight new things for me to check out.
If a game isn’t on HG101, it’s probably on Lunatic Obscurity. The singular work of Jonny, Lunatic Obscurity has been running for over a decade. It’s nowhere near as comprehensive as HG101, with a focus more on giving highlights and candid impressions. The advantage is that they can cover a much wider swathe of games, with an absolutely absurd number of entries. I often find myself checking Lunatic Obscurity before writing an article, seeing if they covered it, and if I have anything to add that they haven’t already said.
There truly is a massive archive here to comb through, and you can often find something great to check out by simply browsing through the home page or bouncing between the various tags. The sheer consistency of the entries, in both timing and quality is astounding in its own right, as there aren’t many games writing sites that have stuck around this long, let alone ones run solo.
Alongside HG101, Lunatic Obscurity is one of most reliable resources on games you’ve never heard of. I genuinely do not think I would be doing what I do without them.
If you’re like me, an unfortunate, monolingual English speaker, there’s a whole world of games and cultures left inaccessible to us by language. Particularly in massive regions like China, which has its own storied games culture, but is often left out of the conversation due to a lack of interest in Western regions, racist stigmas, and cultural and language barriers that make it difficult to both access original works, and translate them, both in the localization and technical sense.
That’s why I appreciate the work of Felipe Pepe, who covers gaming cultures across the world, in places that are often outright dismissed by the greater gaming public. Felipe’s work provides a glimpse into rich cultures with their own beautiful histories, and puts them into a context necessary for understanding them. Felipe always manages to communicate the appeal of each of these titles in a way that makes me more curious about what’s out there, and motivates me to dig more into works that I previously felt I had no way into.
“Before Genshin Impact: A brief history of Chinese RPGs” is a recent favorite of mine, pointing out the absurd gap in scale of the Chinese games market compared to what we consider “big” games here and the socio economic factors that kept China from participating in the worldwide market until relatively recently. It gave me a greater appreciation of the long history of games in the region, the technical feats accomplished there which we rarely saw, and the astounding lack of curiosity from the English speaking gaming press that ignores what can often be legitimate social phenomena in their home country.
Even years after her last posted video, Umbrella Terms remains the gold standard for video criticism for me. Between her meditative delivery, considered responses, thematic and aesthetic analyses, and concise runtimes, I find it easy not only to listen to her talk about any subject matter, but also to return to for repeat viewings.
She no longer makes videos, but there are a total of 65 entries, some on larger retail releases, but many on smaller independent titles that often never receive the same kind of detailed responses. Some, like her videos on Baroque and Ninpen Manmaru, cover Japanese titles before they received fan translations, and still provide more considered coverage than they’d receive after.
She also continues highlighting interesting work on her cohost, with smaller entries on the works she dives into. She might not have the absolute volume that some other authors on this list put out, but the quality keeps her an absolute favorite of mine.
This amusingly named channel is one of my favorite sources for history and retrospectives on the visual novel genre. Their videos on the origins of visual novels and Hirameki, one of the early distributors of the genre in the US, covers where the term “visual novel” even originated in, how marketing effectively replaced it as a term for Japanese adventure games, and gives a brief overview of many of the major players whose work helped popularize the genre both in Japan and overseas.
Their videos give a lot of broader context towards what the industry looked like at the time, and the many connections to other parts of games history the genre and its creators influenced. They eventually inspired me to check out another early visual novel myself, Kamitachi no Yoru, and find even more surprising connections that continue to connect to works even in the modern day.
Among the many attempts to chronicle the entire catalogs of a single console, Dusty’s PS1 Stories series may be my favorite. The very premise seems futile: covering every game in the PS1 catalog, in alphabetical order, with no knowledge of Japanese. Given the nearly 8000 releases in the library, this is a lifetime of work, which I’m not sure will ever be completed. The alphabetical order approach also throws off the timeline entirely, working in contrast to the usual chronological approach most console retrospective series attempt.
The method does pay off, ending up with many entries in a series grouped together, which might initially seem to make them more monotonous, but often ends up putting them in contrast with each other, and making an interesting group comparison, especially given the different approaches some developers might take towards the same license.
The amount of research and care put into even the most mundane seeming videos is really what makes the series stand out, and I often found myself invested in games I had no interest in before watching. Dusty is probably the only person I’ll let get away with rambling about historical context for half the video before getting to the subject matter, entirely because it often feels not only useful for understanding the game, but is presented with a compelling narrative.
My favorite examples of these are the videos on the ‘98/’99 Koshienhigh school baseball simulators, which I entered with zero interest in the subject matter, but found myself enraptured the same way a good sports documentary can draw you into the story. I found myself genuinely caring more about the sport and the culture surrounding it, and felt I understood the appeal of something I’d never pick up on my own.
Other highlights for me include the 1 On 1 basketball episode, and the recently released A-Train episode. 1 On 1 goes into its connection with Slam Dunk author Takehiko Inoue, its hybrid of streetball and fighting games, and the strange cut down rerelease on the Simple series later in its lifespan. The A-Train episode begins with a small history of Artdink, a long running company with a wild catalog spanning every genre, responsible for both major releases and cult classics alike, before diving into a story that really gets into the mind of a train fanatic.
On the more entertainment oriented side, I love this little, completely unpronounceable channel. Mostly approaching games with a standard “edited digest” walk through the experience of playing through a game, the videos cover both major titles, lesser known works in a larger series, and complete obscurities alike. They’re irreverent and frequently funny, and like many of my favorites, don’t rely on previous investment to hook you, but get you invested instead.
His most recent video takes a look at Abaddon: Princes of the Decay, an eroge RPG that follows in footsteps of Capcom’s Sweet Home, the eventual inspiration for Resident Evil. It’s fascinating to see this predecessor, often treated as a curio, find a successor that tries to follow up its ideas in a modern context, as well as shove shipping dynamics into the middle of a horror game (gay relationships included).
Another one for more casual viewing, Aboveup nonetheless is a channel I go to for comprehensive coverage of a wide variety of genres, again with both obscure and popular entries alike. Notable is the coverage of long time niche series like Etrian Odyssey, Ys and SaGa, which enjoy a good amount of popularity with their audience, but sometimes seem hard to approach to outsiders. Alongside these are many smaller gems, which receive that same kind of care and attention.
The ones I’d like to draw attention to are their recent entries on Knightmare and Knightmare II, which chronicle a series’ origin and development into what would become the inspiration for many exploratory platformers, and eventually the direct inspiration for games like La-Mulana. It’s one of those games like Tower of Druaga that kind of puts into place a lot about the mindset of the Japanese audience at the time, and the kind of approach needed to enjoy them.
— That’s all for now! Hopefully this gives you plenty of new places to explore the obscure, unknown and underappreciated!
Presented through a series of quiet and affecting vignettes, The Stories of Ihatovo channels the quiet beauty of the countryside, a place where the fantastic has become mundane. The entire story takes place within a single town and its surrounding area, and the chapter by chapter structure creates something singular and beautiful in the catalog of the Super Famicom. The circumstances of its creation are as mysterious as the game itself, coming from Hector, a company mainly known for simulation titles, and boasting a gorgeous soundtrack from Tsukasa Tuwada, which easily stands among the best on the system.
Ihatovo itself is based on poet and author Kenji Miyazawa’s fantastical interpretation of the Japanese countryside he grew up in. Many of Miyazawa’s stories take place within Ihatovo, and several of those stories receive interpretations within the game. His work is often described as “fairy tales”, but they often have a touch of melancholy or mischief in them. Those vibes carry through The Stories of Ihatovo, and it’s clear that a lot of care has been put into both paying homage to the author’s work, and creating a convincing illusion of a small town where those stories can take place.
Your character is an unnamed traveler, who one day finds himself mysteriously drawn to Ihatovo, getting off at an unfamiliar train station and deciding to wander about the town. After talking to the townspeople he becomes fascinated by everyone’s love for Kenji Miyazawa, who’s become a bit of a famous face in the area thanks to his many contributions to the area. He learns from another local poet that pages of Kenji’s journals have been lost in the area, and decides then and there that he’ll be staying in the town to collect these journals.
Ihatovo’s vibes capture the kind of melancholy you get as a city dweller living in the country. There’s a quiet beauty, paired with a sense of overwhelming vulnerability you get from living in a wide open space, within a small community. Ihatovo is a place where the fantastic is mundane, and today’s local chat is as likely to be about the weather as it is about the toad who’s opened a rowdy bar in town. Within the first chapter you gain the ability to talk to animals, and chatting with them becomes a natural part of your daily routine.
Everything in Ihatovo moves at this languid country pace. The gameplay itself involves a lot of walking and talking, with no run button, asking you to toss off those hurried city habits. The Stories of Ihatovo initially presents in the style of a JRPG, but it’s a pure adventure game, focused purely on walking and talking, with light inventory use. It feels like the interstitial moments of a larger RPG, where you get the vibes of the town and walk around, trying to figure out who can lead you to your next objective, expanded to turn that single town into the focus of the whole adventure.
The chapter based structure turns the conventional into a charming part of the daily routine. Minor characters still give you those single lines of dialogue, but thanks to the chapter based structure they’ll often change to comment on the events of the day. Different establishments will open and close with each chapter, travelers and will come and go at the hotel, and bits of dialogue will foreshadow events coming in the next chapter, giving it a contiguous sense of time. Even the color palette begins to change as the seasons pass. They’re small touches, but it kept me excited to see how the town would change in each chapter.
Late in the game the movie theater opens up, and I was surprised to see that they were showing a Charlie Chaplin film (with a charming pixel art portrait of the man himself on the screen), backed by a live orchestra. It was a pleasant surprise, one that also brought a sudden sense of period to the game, which up until that point had felt out of time. Another wild reminder of the game’s place in time was in one of the summer chapters, where a sudden cold front causes anxiety among the farming community, who’re worried the cold weather will kill off their crops and lead to starvation. Their proposed solution is to intentionally create localized global warming to bring the temperature up.
These moments exist alongside surrealist fables, with people, animals and gods all interacting with each other, sharing in their happiness, or getting lost in anger or arrogance and receiving their just deserts. The cast of animals are just as important as the people, and often the worlds of each often clash and intersect in fantastic ways. In Ihatovo, nobody questions the presence of the natural world–it lives side by side in the same streets, farms and forests.
Beautiful pixel art renders these pastoral scenes, and each chapter has at least one or two full size illustrations to punctuate their big moments. It’s evocative and resourceful, making use of a limited tileset to render a variety of environments and moods, and saving the rest of the cartridge space for these detailed illustrations. It’s not as awe inspiring as the heavy hitters on the system, but it has a quaint charm that quietly lives in your memory.
The writing has that same economy, with short paragraphs and poems capturing the same literary quality as Miyazawa’s work. Each end of chapter conclusion wraps up the story as if it were a small fable, giving this finality to it, and bringing a few moments to dwell on your emotions.
The translation here deserves a mention, staying both evocative and consistent throughout, and delivering on both the tragedy and humor of each situation. One of the standout lines for me is the description you get when selecting an item, which gives the item’s name followed by the line “I held it in my hands.” It goes a long way towards making those small interactions feel as if they hold importance.
By the same token it’d be criminal for me to go without mentioning the soundtrack by Tsukasa Tawada. Heavy on strings and atmosphere, it provides a steady, contemplative rhythm to your countryside adventures. The game opens with scenes of a train traveling through the forest, and alongside the opening track “Ihatovo Praise” builds up a sense that you’re traveling into another world, where a grand adventure awaits.
The “Ihatovo City” main theme provides its complement, with an intimate, almost melancholy atmosphere, with enough layered emotions that it always seems to match the mood of the chapter. The acoustic, naturalistic moods are broken with tracks like the Cave theme, or The Earth God’s Forest, which employ synths and simulated insect noises respectively, to create an unreal, almost frightening atmosphere.
The quality of the instrumentation stands out, and I couldn’t help but notice how clean some of the samples are by Super Famicom standards. Not only are the arrangements and instrumentation outstanding, but there’s been clear work put into the sound engineering to pull off such a naturalistic sound.
The Stories of Ihatovo is a hard game to convey my astonishment for. So many of its most impressive aspects are subtle, not suited to hyperbole. On a platform like the Super Famicom, with so many heavy hitters, the Stories of Ihatovo seems humble by comparison. Its beauty is the kind you take in between breaths. The kind you see watching autumn leaves fall, knowing that the moment is only here because everything will soon die out for the winter.
While there are plenty of moments of happiness, there’s always a sense that time is marching the world of Ihatovo towards a conclusion. Not one that’s unexpected or to be mourned, but a kind that’s a simple fact of a natural world where beings are born and die. The Stories of Ihatovo is warm, alienating, joyous and sad all at once, and in that way it truly does capture the spirit of Kenji Miyazawa’s work.
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