May no Monogatari: Part Three (PlayStation)

The May Marathon this year is all about fan translated games! Which is perhaps another way of admitting that my time spent learning Japanese on Duolingo didn't quite go anywhere. For more details on the choices being made and what's going on with the post-script, be sure to check out Part One first.

Policenauts (Konami, 1994 (1996 PS1))

The Bombcast, or perhaps a certain someone on it, won't shut up about Death Stranding 2 so let's go back in time some thirty years and see what ol' Hideo Kojima was up to just prior to getting his beloved superspy franchise Metal Gear upgraded to an entire third dimension of tactical espionage action. Policenauts largely follows, structurally if not necessarily narratively, from his earlier work Snatcher: both are traditional point-and-click adventure games built in the Japanese style of narrative urgency that tends to take the wheel when it's assured the player has found everything they need to in order to understand the ongoing story. While Snatcher was not-so-subtly riffing on Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, being that Kojima is and remains a massive Hollywood movie buff, Policenauts instead equally-not-so-subtly takes after the Lethal Weapon series albeit with a sci-fi noir twist. Debuting on the semi-obscure PC-9821 model—the first in the PC98 computer series to employ CD-ROM technology—it quickly saw ports to the 3DO, the PlayStation, and the Saturn in that order. Subsequently, each version is a little more polished than the last. (Programming note: I probably should've opted for the Saturn version, since it recently saw a fan translation as well, but went for the PlayStation instead as its fan translation was more established and recognizable, it had a RetroAchievements set whereas the Saturn one didn't, and I'd already committed to this dumb "one entry per system" rule.)

The story follows Jonathan Ingram (weird seeing my real name in a Kojima game; or one of them anyway) who was a member of the legendary trailblazing "Policenauts": celebrated cops from across the world that were recruited into a space program to oversee the legality of a manned mission to Mars and the first steps in the construction of an orbital space station capable of housing thousands, Beyond. However, Ingram's EVA suit malfunctions and strands him in outer space, his survival being due to a cold sleep capsule that protected him from cosmic radiation and a dwindling oxygen supply. 25 years later, his pod is recovered and he's revived into a world he no longer recognizes: Beyond is now a massive functional colony filled with people, many of whom are second-generation and have never set foot on Earth (which people mostly refer to as Home instead, confusingly for those who have never been), and the other Policenauts have gone their separate ways and, in most cases, moved up in the world thanks in part to the group's famed exploits. Ingram instead now works as a private detective in Old LA, a less than savory place (much like Current LA), where he tracks down hardened criminals for a living. It's while he's contemplating his past that he receives a sudden surprise client walking through his door: his ex-wife Lorraine, now twenty-plus years his senior and visiting from Beyond, who tasks him with finding her missing salaryman husband.

As you might anticipate from a Kojima-penned adventure game there's a heavy narrative focus with plenty of jargon and twists (and no small amount of bothering attractive women) and due to the format also contains an ample amount of anime FMV to punctuate many of its scenes. It also incorporates the gunplay of Snatcher, creating light-gun-adjacent shoot out battles with bad guys at pivotal moments. After a few introductory sequences of this nature, you're given free reign to practice your skills at the shooting range at the Beyond Police Department (or BPD). These shoot outs can be pretty challenging, especially if you're going after the game's punitive RA set and its harsh requisites, but the implementation of an "auto-aim" that instantly locks onto available targets does mitigate that difficulty a great deal if the shooting's not your thing. The auto-aim, due to the way it works, is less effective against moving targets though so there's still some parts where you'll want to control the reticle manually. Outside of those, the vast majority of the gameplay is clicking hotspots to investigate them—the game uses a modernized version of the usual genre sidebar of verbs by having each hotspot contain its own contextual list of commands, usually just "look" but sometimes also "use" or "talk". Conversations tend to flow in such a way that a list of provided topics to discuss continues to grow, based on previous dialogue. It becomes common practice to exhaust each topic until the NPC begins repeating themselves, and then move back to the top of the queue and try them all again just in case: if a topic is followed by voiceover then it's probably one of the few you absolutely need to hear before the game will let you resume.

One issue I have with Policenauts's story is that it's perhaps formulaic to a T. Kojima evidently really wanted to recreate a blockbuster in his own inimitable style but that also meant copy-pasting most of the clichés in the process. You can probably guess who most of the villains are the first time you meet them and even if you don't they rub it in your face often enough if you missed the subtle hints at play. Starting the game by having a shoot out with an assassin that drips uncommon artificial white blood (sure, let's throw some Alien in here too) as you pursue him down an alleyway which he eventually escapes, only for the game to move onto a scene in a spaceplane where you're sitting next to a shifty-looking guy who admits to having artificial blood and is conspicuously bandaged in multiple places seems so on the nose you might be forgiven for thinking it was deliberate misdirection (nope). Despite that, and some lulls where you get to hear more about pharmaceutical science and space travel than you could ever possibly want, it's a well-paced thriller with some fun hammy voice acting. Ingram is never seen without a cigarette in his mouth, despite the fact that smoking is absolutely forbidden in a controlled environment like the Beyond station, and his voice actor Hideyuki Tanaka gets to enjoy being a grizzled space cop hero for a little while before he's consigned to the role of the least fortunate Metal Gear Solid character for most of that series's run. Ed Brown's a less flattering Murtaugh stand-in that acts as the buffoonish "too old for this shit" straight man to Ingram's antics—their age gap partnership making more sense with the time lapse—while the rest of the cast, including a moonlighting Meryl Silverburgh, are a bit thinner owing to their roles in the story being boiled down to stock character archetypes: enthusiastic rookies, crooked cops, the eccentric forensics expert, the rich and all-powerful and untouchable jerk, the endangered ingénue, the middle-aged dame with a tragic past but is still a looker, the missing guy who's obviously been dead the entire game, and that one child of the family man partner who has a communication problem that only suddenly clears up after a life-and-death scenario. It's almost impressive how quickly Kojima rattles through them all; clearly we're still a ways off yet from him conceiving a guy who shoots bees at people with a tommy gun made of bees.

And, yeah, we should probably address the elephant in the room. The one slowly maneuvering his trunk beneath an oblivious woman's dress with a sly expression on his face. This game's, uh, pretty horny, to say the least. I mean, you could probably imagine what sort of chaos might erupt in a Kojima game with multiple attractive female characters where they let you have a cursor to play with, but suffice it to say my "succhestfully provide discomfort to every woman possible" Retro Achievement isn't among my proudest. Kojima's always tried to match the expectations of his audience, up to and including matching their freak, and it's all played as bawdy comedy of the "silly lecher" variety so beloved of Benny Hill (and City Hunter's Ryo Saeba, if we're sticking to anime), but... you know. Sexual harassment content warnings apply. On that note, as you can tell with some of the above screenshots the fan translation is one of those early Working Designs-inspired ones that likes to get overly spicy with certain lines. Like turning the relatively mild expletive "kuso!" into a "motherfucking shit on a fuck shitwich!" or some such AVGN interjection. It could probably use a modern do-over in certain places (I imagine the more recent Saturn loc's a bit more reined-in) but if we're just speaking in terms of delivering all the jargon-heavy exposition and accurately conveying what's happening in the story it's entirely satisfactory.

Like with any MGS game, there are parts of Policenauts that will stick with me forever, for better or worse. One such example involves disarming a bomb in a knock-off Gucci store: you first have to identify which of the designer bags the bomb has been placed in (since the bomb bag is genuine and the rest are fakes, it becomes a simple "spot the difference" mini-game) and then the actual bomb defusal mini-game itself is some of the most tense gameplay in the game, perhaps appropriately enough. It includes some guessing games, some red-light/green-light BS, at least one optical illusion, and a stretch where you're playing Irritating Stick with a magnetized vibration sensor, all while the bomb timer is ticking away. At one point immediately after cutting a wire the game ominously fades to black for a few moments only to switch camera angles to a view of the protagonists looking down at the bomb and saying something along the lines of "phew, so far so good!". An absolutely deliberate dick move if I ever saw one. For the most part the presentation is pretty excellent, with a germane Lethal Weapon style guitar/sax-heavy soundtrack, the aforementioned scenery-chewing dubs, and some striking visuals with a great sense of cinematography like when you're looking up at the enormous central Tokugawa Building (owned by the titular former Policenaut and now corporate overlord that owns most of Beyond) or a shoot out in a stairwell where your opponent keeps climbing floors and making themselves a smaller target as they peek over the guardrails to blast at you.

There's also a few fun Snatcher references for those who followed Kojima from game to game (and a few Policenauts references would of course appear in MGS as well, not least of which being Meryl herself, who here plays an Amazonian ex-military rookie in Ed's division). As someone who only consumed Snatcher via an LP, it's been an enjoyable and elucidating time actually playing one of these early Kojima adventure games—a genre that perhaps didn't let him exercise his game design ideas as much as he'd like but at least gives you all the cask-strength narrative madness you'd want—even if I probably have more nightmares from those retro achievements (an entirely self-inflicted punishment, granted; although I do get to brag that I'm only the 15th person to earn all of them) than happy memories. One more positive thing I'll say about it is that it's given me the itch to rewatch the Lethal Weapon films again. Or maybe I'll watch Loaded Weapon 1 instead, since that's the better parody.

Tsuzuku

There's no shortage of games for the PlayStation 1—there's roughly four thousand total—but even though there's a few hundred which remain Japan exclusive precious few of those have seen a fan translation so far. I couldn't even hazard a guess as to why one of the most successful platforms lacks much of a fan translation scene but I'm sure it's related to any number of CD-patching or in-game text replacement issues that makes it prohibitively challenging to pull off (not to mention most games asking for translations, like RPGs and adventure games, were getting pretty long by this point). At any rate, I've pulled together three more case files that might've taken this spot in a parallel universe:

• King's Field (FromSoftware, 1994): When talking about Dungeon Master Nexus last week I mentioned its stylistic similarity to the King's Field series and, coincidentally enough, it turns out the very first KF game also happens to be a game that skipped an official localization—what we overseas received as "King's Field" was, in fact, the second—and as someone who had a compelling (if slow) time with the fourth game, The Ancient City for PS2, and obviously some other history with developers FromSoftware KF1 was making a strong case for itself. Ultimately, though, it was going to be far too similar to Dungeon Master Nexus and I wanted to keep this blog series a little more varied. A controversial adventure game made for a better selection in the end, as I hope you'll agree.
• ...Iru! (Soft Machine, 1998): The eerie Lovecraftian survival horror game ...Iru! ("...It's Here!") definitely piqued my interest from its visuals alone, narrowly beating out the equally obtuse and spooky Mizzurna Falls (a spiritual predecessor to Deadly Premonition), but some part of me is bristling at the idea of a horror game playthrough in the summer. I mean, summers are already horrifying enough due to all this heat and humidity. Kinda don't need an extra reason to sweat profusely, you know?
• Planet Laika (Quintet/Zeque, 1999): Planet Laika was actually my first choice for the PlayStation episode because the idea of playing a semi-lost Quintet game—they of ActRaiser and the Soul Blazer trilogy for SNES—was super appealing to me. However, as of right now, the game doesn't have RetroAchievements support. Now, that isn't and shouldn't be a dealbreaker by any stretch of the imagination but it did make me think that I could stick it on the back-burner for a while and use the eventual arrival of a set as an excuse to finally boot it up and get my surreal anthro astronaut business on. (Quintet actually has another JP-only PS1 game as well, the 3D action-RPG Brightis, but that lacks a translation currently.)