If this is too many words and you want a tl:dr, you can get it at All PS1 Games in Order: Part 011.

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I couldn't find much on the background or development of this game. Panther Software was a small-time Japanese development studio founded in the late '80's that seemingly achieved moderate success in developing some mahjong games for the Sharp x68000, a shmup, and at least one adventure game. Space Griffon VF-9 was their first foray into console game development. Though, this isn't the first time they made this exact game. Panther released a game called Hamlet for the PC-98 in 1993 that is mechanically and narratively identical to this game. That PC-98 release is, of course, visually worse than Space Griffon, but most surprisingly is the absolutely horrific UI that is bad in the kind of way you can only get away with in early-90's PC game design.

The other thing to point out about the context of this game is that this is Panther Software's first game to receive a release outside of Japan. Not only that, but they internationally published it through Atlus. That doesn't sound like a big deal these days, but in 1995 that kind of port work had a considerable learning curve, especially when voice acting was involved. At that time, Atlus doesn't seem to have built the capability to do that work to the same extent as the bigger Japanese publishers. Space Griffon was apparently the sixth game to enter North America through Atlus West, with the only other game to do so in '95 being Virtual Hydlide. If you're unfamiliar with Virtual Hydlide then consider yourself lucky because it is no joke the worst RPG ever released on a console. Localizing a large script is difficult, and getting that script properly dubbed is even harder, so I can easily imagine mid-90's Atlus having a hard time doing that. The reason I bring this up will become apparent pretty soon.

Last thing before I start, I'm going to imbed multiple videos from a YouTube playthrough of this game at different points in this post. I'm turning this into a multimedia experience because a lot of the magic of this game comes from hearing it for yourself. It should be no surprise that there aren't very many videos floating around of this game in action, so the specific playthrough I'm going to use is an old emulated playthrough running on what seems like janky hardware. Even with those caveats, I couldn't begin to hope to try and explain how fucked this game is without these videos. So, I'll give credit and my eternal gratitude to ladyabaxa on YouTube for putting this footage up way back in the misty past of 2010; without them I would have had to learn how to capture and edit video, and that would have gone badly for everyone involved.

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With all of that out of the way, let's start the game. Before even finding out what kind of game this is, we're treated to a short opening cutscene that rapidly introduces our main cast of six mercenary chucklefucks. Each of these characters has a full given name and a very pointed callsign that are used interchangeably throughout the game. Here's a quick reference list to help keep track of the names:

• Konrad / BOSS: Squad leader who sounds kind of like David Hayter
• Maria / STORMY: Tough anime lady
• Rauzin / BIGHORN: Computer guy and butt of fat jokes
• Oreag / KILLER: Tough guy veteran
• Smiley / THIEF: The jokester and I guess rogue of the group
• Jim / KID: The player character who is on his first ever mission

This scene also gives us our first objective: wander around the shuttle bay in search of an exit door. It is difficult to glean much other information about the set-up or gameplay from this scene. Usually chatty games are more than happy to dump extended story set-ups upfront, but not here. There will be more than enough time to get to know each of these characters and the lore whether we want to or not. Take a look at the opening for yourself (you don't have to watch the whole video):

You may have noticed a few things. First, if you thought that the voice acting feels off, just wait. Second, we have to give the game credit for having a radio effect over all the voices but the player character, indicating that the virtual microphone we're hearing through is in the cockpit with Jim, which is a nice touch. Third, if you saw any of the gameplay after the cutscene you'll have noticed that this thing moves janky as hell.

Before we begin wandering around shooting robots, let's talk about the gameplay. The framerate in a more modern emulator is going to be smoother than what can be seen in the video, so you'll need to trust me when I say that it is actually playable. On top of that, the draw distance is almost nothing. Even though draw distances are one of the more infamous flaws with early 3D games, Space Griffon at least finds some story and mechanical usage for that limitation: the moon base is at low power, so the lights are turned off is the story justification and there's a quirk to combat where if you can't see an enemy, it can't see you, though this won't be important until much later.

The combat consists of walking up to enemies, which consist of a few kinds of robots, mechs, and monsters, shooting them with an equipped weapon until they die, and moving on. Some of the bigger assholes will drop loot, but other than that they just leave a burnt out sprite. The loot in question includes six different type of weapons (laser, minigun, rocket launcher, railgun, and "gun launcher") with three or so quality ratings and three different consumables (repair kit, energy cell, and shield kit), these are seemingly randomized in fixed item drop locations, which are either side nooks off the main rooms or, again, the occasional enemy drop. As can be seen in the video, there are three slots for active weapons but one of those slots can only be used for rocket launchers. There's a gundam-style shield that you get exactly one of that is equipped in a weapon slot and has its own health bar. It's supposed to increase defense but I didn't find it super useful for damage mitigation, though that could just be me. Some weapons have limited ammo and some draw from the energy bar. When a weapon runs out of ammo or gets broken by enemy attacks, it's gone. This means that there are only a finite number of weapons in the game and the player only has six inventory slots. This can create scarcity pressures if balanced in a certain way, but there are also fewer enemies than stuff to shoot them with, so it doesn't feel too constraining. Back to the two bars in the UI, it's pretty standard with an energy bar and health bar, though these max out at a whopping 8000 points and damage/drain comes in the tens of points at time so they aren't worth worrying about for like the first hour or two of the game. There are also three movement modes which trade-off attack power for speed, which absolutely helps speed up the gameplay but can be awkward in practice. Finally, there's a basic levelling system, but levelling up seems to only affect attack speed. This is actually a lot to have going on in a console game of this era, and I was surprised by the relative depth of these systems.

Now that we know what everything is, let's wander around the first floor of HAMLET. As we navigate through the nondescript halls and rooms, we encounter low-level guard robots one at a time while being frequently paused by codec calls form the rest of the squad. These interludes serve to reinforce the one-dimensional personalities of the characters and the dialogue is never not awkward. Most of the banter is between Maria and Smiley, which does have something resembling a payoff after like nine hours. There's also a lot of talk about Smiley's good luck charm called "Lunar Tear" that is apparently mined from this very moon colony. The Lunar Tears are a Chekov's Gun that is referenced frequently enough to have no subtlety to what they end up being. Eventually the squad splits up and heads to different levels in their mission to indiscriminately kill everything they find. The way these assholes are always splitting up and going off on their own In this creepy space biolab is really asking for it.

Pretty quickly, the one type of puzzle in the game is introduced: guessing the correct password for computer terminals from a steadily expanding list of six digit numbers. The solution is to guess and check. That's it. It isn't exactly Resident Evil but it at least adds a tiny but of variety to the gameplay. The even less common keycard "puzzle" is also introduced, though these only pop up a handful of times in the game. About halfway through the first floor, a large fleshy monster thing waltzes up to Jim out of the darkness and takes a few potshots before skedaddling. No one believes Jim when he reports it, but later on Smiley finds literal fucking zombies piloting the enemy mechs and everyone gets on board with the idea of biomonsters running around. The dialogue exchange between Smiley and the Boss was my first major WTF moment, and can be heard at 6:45 in the below video.

So, yeah. Zombies don't seem to rate as ominous with this bunch. I am absolutely going bring back the line "Zombies are convenient - can't get accused of murder" when y'all least expect it. With all that said and done, Boss, Bighorn, and Killer go down to level 7 to get at the control room while Stormy, Smiley, and Kid finish with level 1. When I say "finish with" I mean you have to find and kill every last enemy on the map before the story moves forward. It's narratively consistent but not a compelling way to structure a dungeon crawler. Smiley ends up trapped in a closet by what passes for the level boss and the Jim has to go and bail him out. The game's first "animated" cutscene plays out after this with some more of what I imagine is supposed to be characterization for Maria and Smiley, if you're interested to see just how much of an anime tough chick Maria is, check out the below video starting at 6:47.

With whatever the fuck that was supposed to be out of the way, Jim and Maria go to clear level 2 while Smiley splits off to solo level 3. Not a ton happens, there's some codec calls saying that the level 7 group made it to the control room and Oreag is going to go solo level 6, which is the hardest level in the game. I assume he's doing this to hog the XP. Smiley mentions all peace and quiet on level 3 and that he's going to level 4. If all the moving around between levels is making your head spin, imagine how bad it would be if I included all of the different elevator configurations that go with this. Jim eventually finds a data disc and sensor module as required item drops for something called Project 369, so Boss tells him to go to level 7 after clearing level 2. We run into our new monster friend shortly after that and whadya know, the 369 sensor goes off. I wonder what that could mean. After our buddy takes some potshots he moseys away again. With that thrilling boss fight is over, everyone splits up again with Smiley going to the level 9 mines, Maria to level 4, and Jim taking the long way to level 7 to fulfill his delivery job.

During the very long walk we're treated to a little radio drama with Oreag updating the crew on his misadventerous XP grind on level 6. Apparently his mech got wrecked and he was injured, but because he's a BAMF he commandeers another mech to finish the job. Finally, we get to the control room on level 7 and hand over the mysterious data disk to Boss and Bighorn. The cutscene that follows made me think I was losing my goddamned mind. Watch it and burn with me:

Immediately after we witness Jim's mad baseball trivia skillz, we're called on to help Maria who's having a hard time on level 4. She apparently needs a big strong man to rescue her, but Boss sends Jim anyway. Following some extensive dungeon crawling we finally find her mech in a, let's say, awkward position with a new kind of large bio-monster. We shoot the shit out of the thing and are treated to some typically off-kilter dialogue. We stick her in an elevator to level 5 and kill all the remaining uglies on level 4 until we have to seal the half of the level that we don't explore. As a note, we're only going to see half of levels 2, 4, 5, 6, and 8 in the first part of the game. That's because the other halves of those levels are reserved for the higher level encounters in the back half, I guess the designers didn't want more than 9 floors for whatever reason.

Now we're off to level 5 to catch up with Maria and her damaged mech. After even more dungeon crawling, we find her holed up in a closet trying to repair her mech. We get to see a 2D sprite of Maria standing outside of her polygonal mech, which is an odd effect and only serves to further confuse the scale of everything. After an obnoxious fetch quest to gather repair parts, we go back to Maria's hidey-hole and are treated to what I guess from the music is supposed to be tender moment between Jim and Maria. Take a look for yourself:

After that brutal friendzoning, there's a shopping date to the armory and it's back to killing everything on level 5. While doing so, we get a codec call from Boss who tells the whole crew that there's an airborne virus (who could have guessed) and he says the line, "I know you'd never do something foolish like eat the local food, but if you find anything to eat - don't!" Immediately after that Smiley admits to being foolish enough to have done exactly that. I don't know if it was supposed to be funny, but it was kinda hilarious. Everyone other than Rauzin fesses up to having walked around without their helmets on, so it looks like we're all gonna get zombified. Yay!

Shrugging off our looming corpsification, we blow the shit out of a series of rooms that the game really wants us to think of as a factory using explosives. Jim and Maria then meet Oreag at the elevator along with Oreag's new spiderbot friend that everyone proceeds to blast to hell in a very short boss fight. Also, Oreag and Maria apparently get along great, as we can see on the clip below:

We are then, thankfully, fast traveled back to the level 7 command room for an exposition dump. This cutscene is, how do I put it, written. If you hate yourself, give it a watch below:

If you for some reason don't hate yourself: the zombie virus is Project 369, the scientist who made it gotten eaten by a goo monster in the mines, there's someone named Francis, the zombies killed everyone in HAMLET, and Smiley isn't looking too good. We also learn that the virus has a less than 20% chance of outright killing a person, but a 100% chance of zombifying you after you die; so it's a Walking Dead type of virus then. If "less than 20%" seems vaguely specific. Divide 1 by the number of characters and multiply that by 100 to get a percentage. F O R E S H A D O W I N G.

Anyway, Smiley isn't looking too good, so Jim, Maria, and Oreag get sent to the mines to retrieve him. The three split up upon reaching the mines because, again, they're asking for it. I will say that this level is at least a change of scenery with rock walls instead of metal walls; it's the little things that count. Our bro Monster 369 is around here causing mischief, but Jim eventually finds Smiley and we get treated to some motherfucking ACTING:

Oreag selflessly and needlessly sacrifices himself fighting the monster and Smiley, seemingly blowing all three of them up. I recommend watching the entirety of the above video just for the best line readings they could have possible used after the explosion. It was at this point that I convinced myself that there was going to be a Metal Gear 1 or Resident Evil style heel-turn for Boss. I mean, who the fuck is that callous about getting sent on a suicide mission? Anyway, once Jim is done having feelings, he, Boss, and Maria head up to level 6 to finish clearing it out. After significantly more dungeon crawling, Boss peels-off to go investigate a lifesign on level 8. Y'know, I have to give the game credit for putting a large normal gameplay area right after the first dramatic story sequence. That's the kind of rise-of-tension and release pattern that you're supposed to use in action storytelling. It also gives you time to emotionally process the deaths of two characters if you're that invested. I can see a method to the madness in the plotting of this game, and it makes me uncomfortable to write that.

Along the way, Jim picks up a laser cutter for no particular reason and we meet our first shield mech. These Zaku looking motherfuckers suck ass and are the first tricky enemy type we meet in the game. After dealing with that pain in the ass, and by sheer coincidence, Boss calls in asking if we have a laser cutter. Because we oh so conveniently found one minutes earlier, Jim is ordered to get down to level 8 and cut open a blast door. We do so and find an unconscious survivor, who coincidently turns out to be that Francis person mentioned before. Huh, small world. Boss sticks her in the passenger seat of his mech and takes her up to the infirmary on level 3, Maria drops what she's doing and joins them because I guess she's the squad medic. Jim is tasked with clearing out the rest of this half of level 8 and going back to level 6, you know, the place we just fucking left. This was the point in the game that I began to feel like a pinball. We eventually get that half of level 6 done and are told to get up to level 3. Just when things start to seem dull, the elevator Jim is riding makes an unplanned stop and we meet a surprise boss fight, ZOMBIE OREAG! He screams at Jim and lights our ass up until Jim gets the vapors and fucking swoons from the shock of seeing grossified Oreag. What follows is a cutscene with Maria, that, well, was probably drawn with the express purpose of being seen:

Now that we have an upgraded mech and a free heal, we're off to start clearing back halves of previously explored floors, starting with level 8. Jim, being the dumbest asshole, starts coughing and says that he's caught a cold. Yeah, a cold. Couldn't have anything to do with the FUCKING ZOMBIE VIRUS. The second half of level 8 turns into an elevator repair sidequest that leads us into the shittiest boss fight in the game. This fight involves walking into the middle of a room and dumping everything we have into a hole in the ceiling while getting our asses lit up by four high health turrets. This fight is just a matter of attrition and only serves as a resource drain. Once the elevator is repaired, we drag our happy asses up to the back-half of level 2 and trudge through more dungeon crawling. We eventually want to get into Professor Mabel's lab, because he was the asshole who created the zombie virus. This involves futzing with some terminal rooms and passwords and on the way back to that room, we get jumped our old friend Monster 369. Long time no see. After yet another inconclusive boss fight, we chase it back to Mabel's room. We get some incredibly unsubtle foreshadowing before it literally pushes our mech over and runs off, probably giggling to itself. What a scamp. After that, Jim nurses his bruised ego, trudges over to the cryogenic storage area, and, well, *sigh*. Just watch the damn video:

My stomach dropped a bit when Jim exclaimed, "What, a girl?" and I lost all hope when he says, "Looks like she might be younger than me." I knew what was going to happen. You know what was going to happen. And it fucking happened. Goddamn it all. I started drinking after this scene. The only redeeming part was when our new character, Mary, briefly mugs for the mech's onboard camera. That was kind of funny, and a nice explanation of the in-universe reason why we see everyone's face when they talk. Also, because this is a small world, Mary is Francis' younger sister and Francis was Mabel's assistant. Everything about Jim and Mary's ongoing dialogue for the rest of the game is actively painful. You would have to be a masochist to continue playing with this z-tier banter constantly popping off. Anyway, I continued playing. I think we're supposed to think that Mary sucks, but Jim is such an overreacting piece of shit to this girl that I began to actively root against him. At least this game has the decency to not try and make these PMC soldiers seem like anything other than a bunch of absolute goons. The downside of this is that I could not have cared even a little bit during the death scenes, because of the aforementioned goonery. I don't want to report on every bickering match Jim and Mary get into over the rest of the game, but I do want you to watch the first minute of the below video to see Mary going hard as fuck and with only a few lines becoming the most sensible character in the game:

Anywho, after clearing the rest of level 2, Jim is told to take Mary to see her sister on level 3. When we get there, we see our arch-frenemy and it's kidnapped Francis. After getting slapped silly by the monster, again, we take off after it down to the back half of level 4. We now need to clear out the part of level 4 that we purposefully sealed off earlier. Yay. Boss gets the bright idea to have Jim seal doors behind him as he goes through the level in order to cut off Monster 369's routes of escape. After quite a lot of combat we meet up with Maria and are treated to what I guess is the thing that we all should have expected starting at 3:29 in the video below:

What I wrote earlier makes is seem like I think Mary doesn't suck. I need to correct that: she does suck, but Jim sucks way more. Mary at least voices what we all think, when she petulantly says, "I hate you, Jim!" Still though, ugh. We next have our first encounter with the second worst enemy in the game, a plant looking biomonster that has a lot of health and immediately counterattacks whenever it receives any damage. I had been neglecting the shield up until this point, but it becomes absolutely vital from here on forward. Our boy Monster 369 finally gets cornered and we catch up to it. In a not-twist, Francis is awake and openly sides with the monster! #MaryWasRight. After a short villain speech, Boss shoots the monster and it fucks off, which also somehow causes Francis to pass out again. Taking the most circuitous route possible, Jim, Maria, and Boss finally corner the monster again. This goes badly, leading to Boss selflessly and needlessly sacrificing himself to take out the monster. For some reason, Jim is the only person emotionally effected by this. I was actually surprised at this part, because this means that Boss was playing it straight the whole time. Turns out he wasn't a secret villain, just a weird guy. We do the obligatory mopping up of the enemies on level 4 before everyone regroups on level 3. A lot happens at this point, so much so that it takes a video and a half to cover it. The drama starts at 2:12 of the first video and continues through the second. If you're going to watch any of these videos, watch these because holy shit y'all:

Rewatching those cutscenes made me start drinking again, if only to reduce the number of obscenities I'm yelling at the screen. There are so many things that have to be addressed that I'm going to rapid fire *deep breath*: Mary is shit at pep talks; Jim and Mary should not be cute together, it's not allowed; "Maria, no. Get a grip on yourself" with the most deadpan delivery; there are too few drawn panels; Francis' laugh is a cognitohazard; again, #MaryWasRight; everyone takes turns slapping Francis lol; did Mary have the cure on her person this whole time; it takes way too long for a gun to get pulled; Everyone, including Francis, wants to shoot Francis; the bullet sound effect is cartoonish; Francis is forgiven waaaay too quickly after only getting grazed; translation error with "drinking" pills; gee, I wonder what's up with Rauzin, there aren't any well-worn sci-fi tropes that could possibly apply; sure, just leave the mad scientist alone and just trust her to behave herself... I think this is the point where I broke, as a person. I became incapable of feeling either pleasure or pain. That is either part of going numb or transcending to a higher plane of consciousness. The game told me to go clear the back-half of level 5 as if nothing had just happened, and that's what I did. Unflinchingly. Unfeelingly.

Now that the Boss is dead, everyone left alive immediately decides to drop the callsigns and go by their real names. I like to think that the callsigns were entirely Boss's idea and not part of any regulation. What a weird guy. RIP. We're back to our usual bullshit of dungeon crawling with the added wrinkle of sealing off sections of this level same as the last one. During this extended combat sequence, we are treated to radio chatter of Francis doing the fastest biological testing in history. I'm not going into details, because all of the everything with Francis' creation of a biological weapon to use against the monster involves explanations of biology that do not conform with HOW ANYTHING HAS EVER WORKED. Suffice to say, we're trying to drive the monster into a corner again so that we can throw a flask of science at it.

This takes quite a while. There's some variety here in that the monster has apparently split off a bunch of goo eels that we need to shoot as we clear out everything else. This section is also the first time we see the absolute worst enemy in the game: a Zaku motherfucker who's holding two shields and that shoots cannon rounds out of its face; these shitheads have to be shot in the head in order to do any damage. The aiming controls are not precise enough to do that well, so fighting these things sucks shit through a rusty pipe. Before we have yet another showdown with our constant companion through this game, Francis decides it's a great time for another info dump. I'm not dropping that video here because it's tedious and overlong. To sum it up: Mabel and Francis were doing research for everyone's megacorp overlords, AMC, for the purpose of world domination. Mabel and Francis used the opportunity to make a virus that would spread uncontrollably throughout the Earth as revenge for making them live in a shitty moonbase for their entire lives. There was a lab accident and the virus escaped. The end of this dump casually drops the massive twist that MONSTER 369 IS MABEL! Dun dun dun. When Mabel got eaten by the goo after the virus accidently got out, it fused with his consciousness and he's the one who's caused all of these problems. This is very silly, but at least it's something. Right before the confrontation, Jim realizes that the monster seems to be out to get him specifically (which, same) and Mary tells him to, "Zonk it a new one!" which I found to be absolutely hilarious.

When we finally reach the monster, Francis shows up and decides to get in on the fun by selflessly and needlessly sacrificing herself to hit Monster Mabel with her science flask. The game does an uncharacteristic cop-out by giving Francis a dramatic death scene without her actually dying. She ends up gets crammed into a medical tube and ceases to matter for the rest of the game. There's some choice dialogue here so I'm dropping that video below:

After we kill the monster for the umpteenth time, Maria takes Francis to the shuttle all the way back on level 1 and Jim joins Rauzin in mopping up the last mobs on the back-end of level 6. Mary takes a nap during this part and so should you. After this is done, we've officially finished the original objective of the game. It is at this the point when the primary villain announces himself. And boy howdy, does he ever announce himself. I can't adequately articulate the experience, so here's the video:

The only way I can think to describe whatever the hell is going on with that voice acting is to make a comparison to the YouTube channel Terrible Writing Advice. Anyone who’s watched those videos would recognize the silly villain voices that guy does for his over-indulgent sponsor plugs. That's what I see whenever Mabel chimes in with his shit talk. And oh my goodness, is there a lot of shit talking for the rest of the game, and it is all gold. Pure gold. We've hit ironic paydirt with this game. Including all of the great lines would just be transcribing the rest of the game's script, and that wouldn't do the performance justice. Listening through the second part of the above video should give you enough of a taste. Back on track, our three survivors attempt to go back to level 2 to re-confront Monster Mabel, but it turns out he's controlling the elevator and drops us into the start of a combat gauntlet. This is here to act as a resource drain, forcing us to play efficiently in order to have adequate resources to get through the endgame. At the end of this hallway of death is an elevator. Mary conveniently wakes up from her nap and rejoins the conversation. I wasn't going to include this, but I love the conversational exchange at 7:12 in the below video:

Everything about that dialogue is either amazing or I've completely lost my mind. Let's agree it's both and move on. We're finally back on level 2 and we get an extended conversation between Jim and Mary about how the temperature on this level is -5C and an explanation of the mech's climate control. Truly riveting stuff, I know, but it very quickly becomes important. We're treated to some more not-even-a-little-subtle foreshadowing about Rauzin that I'm not even going to call foreshadowing because it's too blunt at this point. See for yourself:

I really wish I could get away with excuses as lame as Rauzin's, or maybe Jim is an epic dumbass. Actually I'm going to go ahead and assume that Jim is really just that stupid. I mean, "The coldness in tundra country is really something else" is not even close to a valid reason to feel warm in -5C air. With this nonsense resolved, we make our way back to Mabel's room and I'm sure there are no nasty surprises waiting for us. Cue the nasty surprise of Zombie Oreag! I bet you forgot about him, didn't you? I respect the effort that went into the zombie screams coming from Oreag. After a surprisingly short fight we put him out of his misery for good, and we trudge on. We don't get very far before we run into zombie Smiley, who is at least more conversational than Oreag. Smiley's actor goes for it with the creeper-guy tone and zombie screams, and Maria's whole thing here is just plain inexplicable. The whole sequence is in the last half of the above video, there are too many good lines for me to goof on.

Now that Maria has selflessly and needlessly sacrificed herself, we make it to Mabel's room and find that he's already dipped out. No one could have seen that coming. What follows is a neat little sequence where some walls have been rearranged in the hallways back to the elevator. This means that the map we've gotten used to using is wrong, and we have to navigate through the new pathways, which looks like we're walking through walls on the minimap. It's a nice twist to the gameplay that reinforces the extent to which Mabel is in full control of our fate, and that he's toying with us for his own amusement. We run into Rauzin, who's mech got caught under a shifting wall. The quality of the dialogue sharply deteriorates around now and I need you to see it for yourself:

We're back down to level 6 for THE MAZE OF DEATH, which is just a linear series of high-level enemies and landmines while Mabel taunts us with some S-tier shit talk. This is blessedly the last major combat sequence in the game, and we can tell because of the multiple rooms with super tanks and flying drones. It's easy to get our shit rocked in this part if we're not careful. This is when thoughtful manipulation of the draw distance and smart shield usage are critical, so that we don't burn through too many of our remaining consumables. Rauzin checks in with us every couple of rooms to let us know his status on fixing his mech. It's weird how the last remaining team member is the one who's done the least and has had the least characterization. As a note, the person playing in the embedded videos is way better at this game than I was, my resources were coming down to the wire during this sequence, which added a little bit of survival tension to each fight.

Monster Mabel comes out at the end to finish us off himself, and Mary accidently pushes the rocket button. This results in us learning that Mabel's weakness is fire; I'm sure none of us could have guessed that on our own. After going through the hardest and final combat encounter in the game, we're led to one last attempt at trapping the monster so that we can set him on fire. If you've been paying attention to how the other attempts have gone you can guess what comes next. See for yourself starting at 3:00 in the video below:

Jim shares our reaction to Rauzin's selfless and needless sacrifice. We're now going to finally leave, like any sane person would have done much earlier. Mary wants to stop back at her room to pick up some things before the big escape. This give us our last big cutscene before the end:

Not only is Jim just as shit at pep talks as Mary, but we get the shocking and inevitable Surprise Android reveal. The "shootout" between Jim and Robo-Rauzin is one of the lamest things I've ever seen. After Robo-Rauzin's seemingly second death, it's time to gtfo. Before we get to final boss of the game, it's time for a note on resource usage at this stage in the endgame. There are a finite number of Repair Kits and Energy Units available in the game. The final boss is going to require a ton of mid-fight heals and recharges, and if you don't have enough stuff to get through it then you're likely to have a real bad time. The designer seems to have realized the potential of a player stumbling into a soft-lock scenario, so there's a hidden treasure room behind that random sealed hallway we ran into all the way back at the beginning of the game. If we also remember that we still have that laser cutter, it's possible to naturally find that room. Though I imagine most people are like me and needed to read about it in a guide. That room was necessary for me to complete the game, as I I was out of Repair Kits and the strongest laser weapon in the game is found in that room and is super useful in the final boss. Speaking of that boss, Mabel shows up in the shuttle hanger, in a mech suit for some reason, and decides it's time for a final fight to the death. Robo-Rauzin reappears to give a helping hand and it's a matter of dumping everything we have into Mabel while healing when necessary. For me, this fight came right down to the last few health points. I used all of my Repair Kits and Energy Units, and I came down to my last weapon. Even though I got through the fight on the first try, it was extremely close, which is the ideal experience to have with a final boss. There's the tension of almost dying, without the deflation of having to make multiple attempts. With that done we get what this game thinks can pass for an adequate ending:

After the quick reminder that Francis is somehow still around, we see what is supposed to be a poignant advertisement for Lunar Tears, which comes as off as completely hilarious in practice. We close out on an ominous shot of a chunk of Mabel slithering off Jim's mech, because this is supposed to be a sci-fi horror game after all.

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This whole game took me almost exactly 10 hours and was simultaneously a tame and wild ride. Let's start with the obvious, this game is a wild ride because the story, acting, and the vignettes which the game would swear up and down are cutscenes read like they written by a crazy person who had never met another human and then voiced with the worst possible direction. I'm saying it that way because I don't hold the voice actors wholly responsible for this disaster. In order to have every line read come across in the least correct way possible, there has to be more going on than the acting. My guess is that whoever was supposed to direct the English language cast didn't know what they were doing and there was probably a breakdown in communication and decision-making between the localizers and the creative leads in Japan. That's even by the standards of the mid-90's, which wasn't a time period known for awesome translation or dubbing of anime or anime-adjacent media. That's why I harped on the relative inexperience of Atlus West with putting out this kind of game, I suspect the real problems with this production lies somewhere in there. Whatever the case may be, the end product is unintentional comedic gold. It's the same effect as taking a C-tier sci-fi horror OVA (think of something below L.I.L.Y Cat in terms of quality), poorly translate it to English, and have an inexperienced non-English speaker direct the dub. The result is inevitably bonkers. There are too many examples to pull out, anyone who watches the videos I've included will have their own favorites, but it was Francis' literal laugh where she just says "hah hah hah" like a child pretending to me a mad scientist that broke me. It's absolutely shocking that this game has not been memed on, and that I'm only just now seeing this schlock for the first time.

When I also call this game a tame ride, I'm referring to the actual gameplay of the thing. This is a first-person dungeon crawler pretending to be a first-person shooter. The enemy encounters are slow paced and tactical, there's item management, character levelling, and a coherent setting that is literally structured like a dungeon. This is an Action RPG where you shoot laser guns at robots, and it took me several hours to come to that realization. There are even modern comforts such as: a useful minimap, pausing during combat, identification icons for enemies that change color with distance, enemy health values that appear when you're shooting at them, a codec hint system in case you get confused, in-world saving, and it even writes down passcodes for you when you find them. Most of all, the striking feature above all others is the smooth difficulty curve. The progression in the difficulty of enemy encounters when balanced against the steady improvement to player power through levelling, weapon upgrades, and distribution of consumable drops creates a difficulty curve that is downright modern. Most Action and RPG games in the early to mid-90's have difficulty curves that include one or more 90 degree walls during the game. The popular ethos of the time was to prevent players from seeing the end of the game content, either because the players needed to be shaken down for coins or to hide the fact that there was often less than an hour of content in the whole game. Even RPGs had problems with their difficulty curves, where they would universally force experience grinding to overcome sharp difficulty jumps, seemingly for the purpose of padding out 5-15 hours of content into 20-50 hour long adventures. Space Griffon VF-9 has about 10 hours of content and it takes about 10 hours to complete, without feeling the need to abuse or brutalize the player. I can see this rubbing people the wrong way at the time. It seems as though most gamers had grown into a toxic and antagonistic relationship with their games, as a product of the arcade "git gud" culture. Having a game show up that actually wants to be played would have offended a lot of sensibilities. For the sensibilities that weren't offended by the easiness, there wouldn't have been a wide appeal because this game looks janky as hell and anime is for jerks.

The combination of the depth and breadth of gameplay systems reminiscent of a PC game, bad JRPG storytelling, and graphics only slightly better than Wolfenstein 3D would have been the least appealing thing possible for the kinds of Americans Sony was marketing the Playstation towards. From what I could find, this game sold well under 100,000 units in North America and it was trashed by reviewers who either found it to be a bad Doom clone or too ugly to look at. As a result, it tends to show up on lazy "Worst PS1 Games of All Time" lists every few years and that's it. There's little to no memory of this game. I'm a massive nerd and I knew nothing about this game before I booted it up, but it's worth knowing about. Not only does this game predict in many ways 6th and 7th generation game design, but it also bears multiple similarities to Resident Evil months before that more famous game came out. It would be fun to think of an alternate history where Space Griffon caught the wave of public appeal that Resident Evil would find, but I know that it was always impossible. The things that probably catapulted RE were the interesting visuals, stressful gameplay, and sound design. That's how you draw people into a game, not trailblazing RPG design concepts. This is the first real forgotten gem, both ironically and unironically, that I've run into while going through the PS1 catalog, and I think this needs to be rehabilitated among people who are interested in such things.

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