Overview
The Death Trap trilogy was more or less Squaresoft's answer to Enix's successful Yuji Horii Mysteries trilogy of adventure games, years before they created Final Fantasy as their answer to Yuji Horii's Dragon Quest.
The first game, The Death Trap (1984), was produced by Hironobu Sakaguchi and programmed by Hiromichi Tanaka. It follows a Cold War era, proto-Metal-Gear (and somewhat Rambo-like) storyline, revolving around special agent Benson.
The second game, Will: The Death Trap II (1985), had Sakaguchi returning as producer as well as writer, with the addition of Nobuo Uematsu composing his first soundtrack for this game. The plot adds science fiction elements, making it somewhat more like the Metal Gear series than its predecessor. The game was considered a technical breakthrough for its use of animated bitmap graphics (predating the GIF animated bitmap format by two years) to render real-time animated cutscenes, a technique that would later be used in many later video games.
For the third game, Alpha (1986), Hiromichi Tanaka returns, this time replacing Sakaguchi's role as writer and director, with Nobuo Uematsu returning as composer. It was more of a spiritual successor rather than a direct sequel, with the gameplay similar to the first two Death Trap games and improving on the real-time animated cutscene technique of Will, but with a very different storyline. The plot took the science fiction elements in a more cyberpunk direction, set on a starship centuries in the future and with a new female protagonist Chris.
Reception and Legacy
All three games were major hits in the Japanese computer game industry, with the first game in particular selling up to 500,000 copies, more than any other computer game released up until then. Will and Alpha also sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Squaresoft's success with the Death Trap trilogy in the Japanese computer game industry paved the way for their later mainstream success with the Final Fantasy series of role-playing games in the console game industry.
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