The Essentials #42: Chrono Trigger

Nearly a decade before financial difficulties led to its stunning merger with Enix, Square fulfilled many a genre enthusiast's dream by bringing together the creative minds behind Japan's two biggest role-playing game series, its own Final Fantasy and Enix's Dragon Quest, for a one-shot super game. 1995's Chrono Trigger for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System was conceived and supervised jointly by Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of Final Fantasy, and Yuji Horii, creator of Dragon Quest. It featured the character designs of DQ's Akira Toriyama and the music of FF's Nobuo Uematsu. But the "dream team" did not end with those four. Kazuhiko Aoki, a battle designer for FFIII and FFIV, and later the scenario writer for FFIX, would take the producer credit. The assemblage of talent he then brought together reads like a veritable who's who of figures in JRPG development, and, for many of them, Chrono Trigger was in fact the title that truly launched their careers.

Director credits were shared among Takashi Tokita (lead designer and scenario writer for FFIV), Yoshinori Kitase (director, writer, and producer who would essentially take the reins of the Final Fantasy series with FFVII), and Akihiko Matsui (a battle designer for FFIV). Tokita and Kitase also contributed to the script, which was outlined initially by Yuji Horii. The bulk of the writing was handled by scenario writer Masato Kato, who would later contribute scenes to FFVII (he takes credit for the "Cloud in a wheelchair" episode) and Xenogears, among other Square titles. More significantly, Kato would go on to become the main man behind the Chrono series, writing and directing semi-sequels Radical Dreamers and Chrono Cross, before leaving Square to become a freelance scenario writer. His friend and frequent collaborator, Yasunori Mitsuda, subsequently the second most recognized Japanese game music composer after Nobuo Uematsu, actually provided most of the music. Uematsu only came on board later in development to relieve Mitsuda's overwhelming workload by adding a few tracks. Even Noriko Matsueda (FFX-2) helped out with one jazzy piece. Also on the sound team, working on sound effects, was Yoshitaka Hirota, later the main composer for the Shadow Hearts series. Behind Akira Toriyama on the art team were graphic director Tetsuya Takahashi (creator of Xenogears and Xenosaga) and field graphic artists Tetsuya Nomura (Square's top character designer since FFVII, as well as the creator of the Kingdom Hearts series), Yusuke Naora (art director for FFVII, FFVIII, and FFX), and Yasuyuki Honne (director and art director on the Baten Kaitos games).

Deep list of Japanese names aside, the dream project delivered the perfect marriage of the artful narrative and aesthetic of Dragon Quest with the high concept appeal and playability of Final Fantasy. Dragon Quest (AKA Dragon Warrior) was never actually very popular in the West, and I personally only recently got into the series with DQVIII, so I missed out on the shifting perspective of DQIV and the multi-generational narrative of DQV. But playing through DQVIII did leave me with a finer appreciation for what Yuji Horii must have contributed to Chrono Trigger. More lighthearted and composed compared to the raw melodrama of the sprawling Final Fantasy epics, and considerably more coherent than subsequent Masato Kato scripts, everything in Chrono Trigger seemed so perfectly ordered and controlled. The tightly woven adventure experienced few lulls or lapses. Never would the player be left wondering why the characters were fighting some random monster in some random dungeon. With the exception of one glaring loose end that was almost assuredly deliberately left hanging by Kato, every twist seemed to fit sensibly in a plan that made for one of the most cleverly constructed time travel narratives of any medium, full of delightful paradoxes and closed circles.

Yet what made the story of Chrono Trigger so magical for me was not even the main plot of the heroes traveling across time on a selfless mission to unravel a chain of events that would result in the destruction of a far-off future. It was the stirring subplots, like Lucca traveling back in time to set right a tragedy in her own life. Or the robotic Robo taking on a mission that would last hundreds of years in solitary diligence for him, but mere seconds for his time-hopping human friends to bear the fruits of his labor. Yes, Robo and Lucca are probably my favorite video game characters of all time, but the game balanced a cast full of charming personalities, and the best part of the experience was getting to know them all.


One Dragon Quest tradition that I did not so much enjoy seeing carried over was the mute protagonist. Venturing far from proper "role-playing games," JRPGs are so heavily scripted and linear that I've never understood the argument in utilizing silent protagonists as a way to immerse the player. There is never anywhere near enough choice in these games to really allow players to identify themselves as the main character, so I would almost always say that a story would be better served to paint a protagonist that is independently interesting. The only semi-convincing point I've heard in defense of the device is that, while we may not insert ourselves as the protagonist, every player is free to project a personality of their pleasing on the mute character, rather than having to accept a hero only by the artist's strictly defined image. That's worked for me on occasion, though I think I may not be doing it right, because the personality that I seem to always project is that of a really quiet guy with no will of his own. Chrono Trigger certainly did not change my mind on the matter, and one of the things that most annoyed me was the perceived passivity of the unfortunately named Crono, in the face of other characters so bursting with charisma. But it did provide me one very special moment:

(HIGHLIGHT TO VIEW SPOILERS)

About halfway through the adventure, something amazing happens. With the party facing imminent annihilation at the hands of a world-destroying monster, Crono alone is able to stand and continue fighting. The player approaches the enemy, and Crono automatically assumes his battle stance. Then the unthinkable happens. Crono dies! Yet the player is somehow still in it, and the game goes on, driven by the other party members. Reflecting in the aftermath of that shock, I realized that, in that transformative moment severing the link between player and player character, the silent avatar had become his own person. For as he stood resolute against oblivion and died for his friends, it was not my doing, but his choice. And the only things more inspiring than his sacrifice would be the devotion of his friends and the lengths they would go to to bring him back.


It's also worth noting that, even after it became possible to swap characters freely in and out of the party, each party member still had something to say about every event. These were always simple observations--the characters could never have direct dialogue with one another--but they were actually distinct and context-sensitive lines, reflecting, not just their idiosyncratic speech patterns, but their different personalities.

While Horii may very well be one of the industry's superior storytellers, I've found that he makes some of the most stupidly unplayable JRPGs in the business. Whatever his stamp on the finished product, Chrono Trigger was undeniably and thankfully a Square game and not one of his sadistic Enix joints. One of the most accessible JRPGs released up to that point, it enjoyed a much more lenient difficulty curve than the grind-heavy Dragon Quest, or even Final Fantasy games of the time.

In a departure from the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest norm, Chrono Trigger did away with random encounters. I'm rather of two minds on this issue, but if I had to pick a side, I'd say that I favor random encounters in moderation over the common alternatives. Chrono Trigger was less needlessly stressful than, say, Persona 3 or certain recent Tales games, where enemies actually chase you and can initiate surprise attacks, but there was still a degree of anxiety in dungeon exploration. Although you could often see enemies on the field, rarely was it possible for the party to avoid the obvious ambushes. Worse yet, these foes would respawn every time you left and returned to a room, which happened frequently in this back-and-forth time traveling adventure. The actual fighting was never very difficult, but it became dreadful nonetheless, knowing every time when you were about to be attacked. I imagine it would be like knowing the exact date of your death in advance; you might be better able to plan out your life, but the living would be made less enjoyable, because the knowledge would cast a pall over every pleasure.

Once initiated, combat was handled with a barely modified revision of Final Fantasy's Active Time Battle system, originally designed by Hiroyuki Ito, who worked on Chrono Trigger as an event planner. One difference was that battles occurred directly on the field with no cut to a separate battle screen, and characters and enemies took positions roughly where they stood, introducing minor spacial considerations in the areas of effect of certain techniques. Party members' individual action menus were also now laid out separately, so that the player was not forced to assign commands exactly in order according to the characters' speed ratings. This was significant mainly in that the player could wait for multiple characters to ready up for orders at the same time, at which point the option for cooperative maneuvers would become available, allowing two or three party members to synchronize their signature moves. While cool to look at, I did not find them particularly useful, aside from a handful of early combos imbuing physical attacks with elemental attributes. Most were no more than the sums of the individual techniques that comprised them, with the additional downside being that, if one participating party member became incapacitated before a selected combo could be performed, all characters involved would end up missing that turn. It was usually wiser just to rely on characters' personal abilities.


Chrono Trigger's greatest innovation may have been the "New Game+" feature, allowing players to carry their endgame experience and equipment over into a breezy second playthrough. It was consequently one of the very few JRPGs that I played through more than once. Part of the incentive for replaying was that, in successive playthroughs, it was possible to warp directly to the final boss fight at any time during the adventure, and defeating it at different points would yield different endings. These were mostly short gag endings that saw the timeline becoming a comic mess because, in beating the game prematurely, the characters would fail to thoroughly cover the changes they wrought. They should not be mistaken for what comes to mind when game makers these days boast of offering multiple paths and endings. There was still only the one real ending with a few variations, but if the multiple endings were not a particularly meaningful innovation, they nevertheless provided some good fun.

Square Enix's shameless whoring out of the Final Fantasy name has turned segments of the gaming community against the company and franchise, to the extent that even the classics have lost a lot of their luster in the eyes of cynics. Chrono Trigger, however, despite a disappointing sequel and no shortage of ports, remains beloved by all. It still regularly contends for the titles of "greatest Square game," "greatest JRPG," "greatest SNES game," and even just "greatest video game of all time." I don't personally love it quite as much as the best Final Fantasy titles, mainly on account of its shallow combat and mute protagonist, but it is without a doubt one of the finest games ever made.


Additional Information

To coincide with the release of the long-awaited Chrono Cross, Square put out a 1999 port of Chrono Trigger for the Sony PlayStation. Released in North America in 2001 as one half of Final Fantasy Chronicles, it was the same game, only with lengthy load times and some brand new hand-drawn animated cut scenes, including one to set up the story of Chrono Cross.

Much as some of George Lucas's additions to the special editions of the original Star Wars trilogy may have done more harm than good, I am of the camp that firmly believes that these scenes ruin the game. Ironically, my personal complaint is that the animation injects Crono with a smirking personality that he never showed before as a voiceless 16-bit sprite, and it's one that conflicts with the image that I had formerly projected upon him. It basically upends my interpretations of his actions, and it makes all the more evident the trouble with the silent protagonist device.

With the Square Enix merger having brought Yuji Horii back to the house of Chrono, and with Masato Kato having returned to working regularly on Square Enix projects, there has been speculation that we might finally see some new movement in the series. So far, all we've gotten is another port of Chrono Trigger, this time for the Nintendo DS. The 2008 release includes the additions to the PS1 version, with none of that version's performance issues. There are also some new optional dungeons and modes that can easily be ignored. Of greatest interest to followers of the Chrono story are a new optional boss and an attached ending that inelegantly ties into the plot of Radical Dreamers, which itself was supposed to have been overwritten by Chrono Cross.

The Essentials #37: Final Fantasy IV / V / VI

Square's Final Fantasy IV was the first of three 16-bit installments in the series. Released in North America in 1991 as "Final Fantasy II" for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, this marked what many fans still consider to have been the series's prime. I played about halfway through the SNES version, only later finishing the game when Square released a port as one-half (the other half being Chrono Trigger) of Final Fantasy Chronicles for the Sony PlayStation in 2001.

Development was led by Hironobu Sakaguchi and Takashi Tokita, while Nobuo Uematsu and Yoshitaka Amano filled their usual respective music and art roles. In charge of battle design, Hiroyuki Ito debuted his "Active Time Battle" system.

A departure from the turn-based battling common among Japanese RPGs of the time, the ATB system lent combat an action-oriented twist. Rather than having the player set all actions at the beginning of a round, individual characters' turns were determined by their speed rating, with faster party members (and enemies) able to act sooner and more frequently. Battles felt more dynamic, and the system also tested the player's decisiveness in inputting actions quickly, since the ATB clock did not stop while they deliberated.

Final Fantasy IV's gameplay has been accused of being the simplest of any Final Fantasy to date. Not only would the player have zero control over the party's constantly changing composition, but characters also developed in a completely linear fashion. This left the player little freedom and almost no input, aside from taking on enough fights to keep the party at the proper level. The complaints are valid, but these design decisions had benefits as well. Making the characters distinct and consistent in battle lent them greater personality out of combat. You got the sense that, as warriors, Cecil and Kain were as powerful as their subordinates claimed, while Rydia, a little girl, would be far less so. The adventure was driven by its tightly woven script, rather than by a compulsion to provide balance or flexibility, allowing the narrative and gameplay to complement one another as no other Final Fantasy ever had or would. Meanwhile, the five-character party, still the largest in a numbered installment, yielded some layered strategy, with each member assigned a role against probably the series's toughest bosses.


The story, about the technologically dominant kingdom of Baron's ruthless pursuit of four magical crystals, was not the deepest or most original. The crystals were already a series staple, and the plot otherwise borrowed liberally from Star Wars. But gaming had never witnessed such a grand, riveting story full of betrayals, redemption, and noble sacrifices, as well as some of the most complex heroes yet proposed in gaming. The dark knight Cecil was the conflicted protagonist, who had done cruel deeds under orders that he was beginning to question. Even more troubled was his best friend, the dragoon Kain, one of the series's most iconic characters, whose envy of Cecil's life was a private torment. As the story began, they made for a pretty menacing pair. Their faces were even concealed beneath some mean headgear. And the player's very first mission led to them burning down a village that offered little resistance. Granted they were tricked into doing so against their wills, but there was little doubt that they were on the wrong side. This was some dark and unprecedented stuff.

In a lot of ways, Final Fantasy IV may have been my favorite in the series. Its linearity and simplicity, which some might call weaknesses, actually made it the most playable and replayable installment, consequently the easiest to like.


Additional Information

The original North American release was actually modified to be easier than the Japanese release. I've played enough of both to say that the differences were negligible. Mostly, the SNES edition dispensed with a bunch of largely useless abilities, such as dark knight Cecil's "Dark Wave."

The PS1 port appended crude, roughly Final Fantasy VII-quality CG movie sequences to the beginning and end. The opening depicted the Red Wings taking off before the game's proper beginning, while the ending sequence was a music video of sorts, showcasing some of the highlights in pre-rendered 3-D.

Another port (pictured above) arrived on the Game Boy Advance in 2005, adding slightly enhanced graphics, new optional dungeons, and the ability to swap in old party members for the final dungeon.

In 2008, Final Fantasy IV got the full 3-D remake treatment for the Nintendo DS. Players also finally got some customization options for character development in the form of the "Augment" system. I haven't played much of it, but, new graphics aside, the maps seem much the same.

Most recently, there was an actual sequel called Final Fantasy IV: The After Years released in installments to Japanese mobile phones in 2008. I don't know much more, but it's still in the process of being released via WiiWare to North America.


Originally released in 1992 for the Super Famicom, Final Fantasy V would not see release in North America until 1999, when Square compiled it with Final Fantasy VI as part of Final Fantasy Anthology for the Sony PlayStation. That was the version that I played.

Perhaps because it missed its own prime release window, FFV has never been as celebrated in the West as its 16-bit siblings. But that reasoning might suggest that the fans' love of those titles is driven by nostalgia, which they would not have for FFV.

In its own time, the game was deemed "too difficult" for Western audiences, which was why it was passed over for localization until many years later. FFV was not really a harder game than FFIV, but it was for sure less intuitive than its incredibly straightforward predecessor. Combat was much the same as before, only adding the "ATB Bar" to allow the player to actually see when a character's turn was coming up. But the key feature of FFV was Hiroyuki Ito's "Job" system, which allowed party members to switch between different character classes unlocked during the course of the game. It had roots in the class system of the original Final Fantasy, which had been further expanded upon in Final Fantasy III. But FFV, while retaining many of the same classes, was a massive upgrade over its predecessors.

Through winning battles, characters would earn Ability Points to unlock new skills in their current jobs. The true beauty of the system, however, was that, when characters changed jobs and took on the abilities inherent to the class, they could also still equip any previously earned ability as a secondary skill. Thus, whereas FFIII had basically just provided progressively more powerful classes over the course of its quest, FFV encouraged players to spend some time with every job in order to amass a healthy mix of stats and skills for combining. The ranger's "Rapid Fire" command, for example, was a nifty technique allowing the character to attack four times per turn with the mediocre bow and arrow. But adapted to a much more powerful sword-wielding warrior class like the mystic knight, the skill was several times more potent.


Although the characters were the most versatile in battle, outside of combat they offered nothing close to the depth of Cecil and Kain. The hero, Bartz, a traveling adventurer, was really little more than a simple country bumpkin who became accidentally entangled in world-shattering events. If the story lacked the pathos of its 16-bit siblings, it was nevertheless a well-paced and involved adventure that, like the earlier titles, treated the player to exotic cultures and fantastic sights, most notably the battles on the intercontinental Big Bridge. This would be the last installment where Hironobu Sakaguchi himself assumed the position of director, and it would also be the last Final Fantasy for quite some time to use the crystals plot.

Its champions would argue that Final Fantasy V was the deepest of the 16-bit installments, and, from a gameplay standpoint, I don't think there can be much disputing that claim. With the immensely rewarding Job system, it played better than almost any JRPG before or after. However, it was weaker in the areas for which Final Fantasy titles are traditionally best remembered, and I suspect that is why it is not now more fondly recalled.


Additional Information

As with the PS1 port of FFIV, the Anthology release of Final Fantasy V included new opening and ending cinematics, the former being a short prelude scene, the latter a highlight reel. These were closer to Final Fantasy VIII's movies in CG quality, though not quite there.

It also received a Game Boy Advance makeover in 2006, featuring some upgraded background graphics and a few extra jobs and optional battles. The GBA release also sported a brand new translation that greatly improved upon the sloppy work on the Anthology edition.


Square's final 16-bit installment, Final Fantasy VI arrived in North America in 1994 as "Final Fantasy III" for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Again, I did not play it until the PS1 port.

This was the first installment to feature Yoshinori Kitase in the director's chair, alongside Hiroyuki Ito. In many ways, it felt like a transitional game between the Sakaguchi and Kitase titles. While the 2-D graphics were still superficially similar to the older titles, no longer was it a swashbuckling adventure. It traded the wild frontier quality of the earlier games for a grittier, more sophisticated world in conflict.

FFVI's cast of playable characters remains the largest of any numbered installment, and, in a departure from the series, they were all about equally prominent. Instead of one protagonist and a crew of supporting characters, FFVI essentially had eleven main characters. This was not exactly an ensemble cast, however, as characters would simply take turns in the lead. At its best, the story felt massive and infinitely more layered than FFIV, shifting effortlessly from one perspective to the next in episodes that might only subtly intersect. While the official credits obscured this fact, the development team apparently included multiple writers scripting the plots for different characters. Soraya Saga, later an integral contributor to Xenogears and Xenosaga, for example, wrote the stories of the brothers Edgar and Sabin.

Striking a balance between FFIV and FFV, VI returned to giving each character a preset class, but also allowed for some customization via the "Magicite" system. Equipped Magicite crystals taught characters spells and sometimes enhanced specific stats at level-up, allowing a fighter to transform pretty easily into an effective mage. Magic aside, each character possessed one unique ability, although for some characters this encompassed multiple skills.

There was a definite degree of homogeneity to the characters, not only because every party member could learn every spell, but because their special techniques were not all that distinct. Sabin and Edgar had slightly different stats and equipment, but, in practice, their "Blitz" and "Tools" commands allowed them to fill the same heavy-hitter role in a party. Cyan and Shadow offered lesser versions of the same thing. The more unusual abilities, such as Relm's "Sketch" or Mog's "Dance," simply weren't that good. The only uniquely useful ability was Celes's "Runic" command, which could nullify any magic, rendering some spell-casting bosses impotent. It probably didn't help that this was definitely the easiest Final Fantasy yet, and, no matter the party, you could simply "Fight" your way through most battles. And even before working the Magicite system to subvert character classes, there would be an abundance of jack-of-all-trades types, compared to only two bona fide mage characters.


In all previous installments, the player's party at any given time would be determined by the script. That was true for much of FFVI's early portions, but eventually the story would gather the full cast together, allowing the player complete freedom to rotate any out of up to fourteen characters into the four-man party. In lieu of the FFV Job system, this added another element of customization, but it came at great cost to the narrative. Once character swapping became an option, the script could no longer know which specific characters would be present for a particular scene, so it would resort to either generic dialogue or none at all. This meant that characters didn't really say or do much outside of their own subplots. When Cyan joined up with Sabin for a multi-part adventure early on, the partnership provided some amusing interplay. What was their relationship after that quest? There wasn't one.

The story took a rather stunning turn halfway through, when the characters actually failed to stop a cataclysmic event that would leave the world in ruins. Unfortunately, it could be said that the game as a whole went to hell at that point. The entire second half of the game proceeded in an experimental non-linear design. Once the player gained access to the airship, it became possible to head directly to the final dungeon with as few as only three party members. Actually beating the game so soon would be impractical, but the game offered little impetus in any other direction, instead encouraging the player to roam freely around the map in search of old allies. This mechanic may have paved the way for my favorite JRPG series, Suikoden, but, in FFVI, it really stalled the narrative. Not only did I not feel like I was making any headway in the campaign against the main antagonist, but the open-ended progression also made the "personalities on holiday" problem most apparent.

And when characters did progress, I found myself disappointed by the turns, most notably in the case of the reserved and mysterious Terra. The girl riding the mech in the logo, she was the closest the game had to a single main character. The amnesiac daughter of a human and an esper, much of the first half of the game focused on her struggle to discover herself--not only her past, but her future as well. When you met her again in the world of ruin, she had finally found her place as the surrogate mother to a village of children orphaned by disaster. From my perspective, she was walking a path I could no longer understand or follow. I just couldn't relate to it, nor did I wish to. I still can't relate, but I suppose it was brave in a way to stay this course and carry the adolescent protagonist into adulthood that the players might not themselves know for years.

While I personally believe Final Fantasy VI was a more heavily flawed title than its 16-bit predecessors, I can certainly understand why many still hail it as the greatest Final Fantasy. The game was bold. This was never clearer than in the legendary opera sequence. Looking at it now, it's a technically primitive scene--the simple sprites and synthetic voice may not be terribly convincing for a lot of players who didn't see it the first time around. It actually featured crude bits of interactivity. I don't know that the scene benefited from their inclusion, but neither could the clumsy dance mechanics ruin the moment--a moment that was somehow bigger than the story that contained it. This was not an interstitial movie sequence between dungeon excursions. So complete was it that you had to believe that the creators must have conceived of a scene first before building a game around it. When Celes took the stage, all thoughts of empires and espers faded away. There was only the image and the vital instant. Moments like this showed why Square and Final Fantasy were the best. No pretenders building their games to formula could ever have constructed such a scene.


Additional Information

Again, the PS1 version included extra movie sequences, which were roughly of the same quality as FFV's. Pretty cool, but perhaps disappointing in that the scope of the original game meant many characters and scenes could not be represented during the ending highlights.

2007's Final Fantasy VI Advance was probably the most controversial of the GBA releases. Featuring no graphical enhancements, arguably because it didn't need them, the only minor additions were a few new items and battles. More questionable was the apparent softening of some content in deference to a more sensitive Japanese ratings board, while there was some disagreement over how well Tom Slattery's new translation compared against Ted Woolsey's original.

NonEssential #31: Pilotwings

Three years before Stunt Race FX, Pilotwings was the first title to really challenge my confidence in Nintendo.

Released in August 1991 alongside the launch of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Pilotwings came out in a time when I still relied on my parents' money for video games and could only expect to get a few titles per year, which made each new addition to the library all the more eventful. It was a horrible feeling, therefore, as a youngster, to rush home from the store and excitedly pop in that new cartridge, only to realize within the first few seconds of play that I hated this game. Even Super Play Action Football had me fooled through the high school mode. Not only was I disappointed in the game, but I was disappointed in myself for having wasted my parents' hard-earned dough. Clearly, I should have done some research before diving in, but, in those pre-Internet days, solid info was hard to come by, and I couldn't exactly trust Nintendo Power to be objective about a Nintendo-developed product. (For the record, NP gave it an enthusiastic 3.8 out of 5 in "theme and fun.")

It didn't feel like a game. There were no enemies to defeat, no blocks to assemble, no narrative of any sort, no real point that I could perceive. Yet somehow I was dying repeatedly and being told I was a failure. I didn't even know what genre this was. Flight simulator? Huh? It was certainly something different, and, whatever it was, I didn't like it.


Really, the whole game, even the title screen, was a glorified tech demo for the 16-bit console's revolutionary pseudo-3-D "Mode 7" graphic effects. It was all just a lot of spinning around and zooming in on backgrounds. Perhaps it was technically impressive for its time, and, as an ignorant child who expected games to be fun, maybe I just couldn't appreciate it on that level.

(I still remember, when we went to Circuit City to pick it up on sale, the manager directed us to a presumably still green clerk, whom he then encouraged to try and sell us F-Zero as well. Of course, the stellar F-Zero was, along with SimCity, one of the launch titles that my family had already picked up with the original purchase of our SNES. It was a more restrained and far superior demonstration of Nintendo's Mode 7 technology. But I digress.)

Anyways, Pilotwings was a crappy flight sim that included four equally lame events: "light plane" (a biplane), hang glider, skydiving, and "rocket belt," which was not nearly as exciting as it sounded. All of them offered pretty much the same experience. The objective was to fly through rings or tag a couple glowing spheres for points before making landing at a designated target spot. The thin concept alone probably would have given me reason enough to loathe it--I mean, I already hated Barnstorming, and this was no Barnstorming--but the developers had to make the game brutally difficult on top of that.


A true simulation despite the limited two-button controls, there was almost no give to the physics. A subtle tap on the D-pad at high altitudes would have drastic consequences on your craft's course, and not even the most extreme yawing motion would allow you to recover once you drew too close to the target. And, Mode 7 be damned, the simple graphics made it very difficult to gauge distance and direction until it was too late. In hindsight, there seemed to me a distinct lack of aids to help track targets that were so far away, leading to a lot of guesswork. I honestly couldn't comprehend what it served gaming to shoot for realism if the result was an exercise that was beyond the average player's abilities.

As I noted, however, gaming options were scarce in those days, and I needed to squeeze as much fun as I could out of every purchase. One day, faced with an empty summer like so many others, I set myself to mastering this game. By that, I mean I used a password to skip to the last, most difficult training exercise, and then dedicated the next several days to practicing until I could clear the minimum score needed to advance. Eventually, I somehow pulled it off and earned a lame congratulations screen, although I'm sure luck was as much a factor as skill. Did the experience raise my appreciation for the mechanics? Not really. I'll admit, for a moment there, as I started to grasp the controls, I found the game mildly diverting. But, once it was over and I had my pilot wings, I went right back to deriding the game with renewed vehemence. There was still no point to any of it, and beating it only made that clearer.

The only barely entertaining part of the game was the helicopter mission that followed completion of training. It may have taken the place of a boss stage, but I perceived it as a reward, as it was, not only easier than the regular training exercises, but also the only remotely exciting element of the game. Playing nothing like any of the regular events, it was a slower Tiger Heli, minus the action and auto-scrolling. The short stage was a rescue operation that had the player flying over a forest while bombing anti-aircraft guns. It was not exactly a Captain Skyhawk-caliber shoot 'em up--the miserably sluggish turning speed made it very difficult to dodge fire--but I ended up playing it a lot more than I probably should have, again because there were fewer games back then. Had the entire game been composed of stages like this, it still would have been awful, but at least I would have recognized it as an actual game. There was also a second helicopter mission that followed completion of the "expert" training, though the only difference was that this one took place at night.


It's not the absolute worst game I've ever played. At least Pilotwings grew marginally better the more I played it, whereas Stunt Race FX grows more awful with every passing second.

The Essentials #24: Pokémon Puzzle League

Panel de Pon / Tetris Attack

Nintendo's Puzzle League series actually began with 1995's Panel de Pon for the Japanese Super Famicom. Developed by Intelligent Systems, Panel de Pon was a competitive puzzler in the vein of Puyo Puyo. Players had to group together panels of like color in order to clear them from the board and send them over to fill the opponent's screen. The game ended when one player's side became so vertically overcrowded that it could no longer contain any further panels that continued to appear.


The original Japanese Panel de Pon featured an original story and graphics full of cutesy fairy characters. Then, as now, the severely risk-averse Nintendo of America had concerns about the mass marketability of a new IP with such a distinctively Japanese aesthetic flavor, so when the game arrived in North America a year later, it went through extensive rebranding. The North American release not only ditched the fairies, replacing them with Yoshi's Island-themed art and characters, but also threw in the Tetris name because the always savvy marketing department concluded that, to Americans, "puzzle game" meant Tetris. The result was Tetris Attack, one of the last titles of consequence on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.


I remember first encountering Tetris Attack at a demo kiosk at the local Toys "R" Us. I gave it a whirl and found it immediately intuitive, addictive, and incredibly charming, but after about ten minutes of play, I concluded that the mechanics suffered from a crucial design flaw, and so I passed on purchasing the game.

Pokémon Puzzle League

Nintendo gave Panel de Pon another chance in 2000, however, with the release of Pokémon Puzzle League for the Nintendo 64. Produced specifically for North America, the new edition again dispensed with Panel de Pon's girlish aesthetics, this time rebranding the game to tie it into the Pokémon craze of the moment. Specifically, the game was based on the popular Pokémon animated series, incorporating the anime-specific characters, featuring the authentic voices and catchy tunes of the English adaptation, and even including a fully-animated opening sequence.

While the Pokémon theme may not have been to everyone's taste, the power of the N64 afforded several technical enhancements that definitely upped the intensity of the experience. For versus, players could choose from a variety of Pokémon trainers from the anime, most of whom were also recognizable from the first Game Boy titles (although it was missing certain late-game boss characters who had presumably not yet appeared on the show at the time of the game's release). While they offered no mechanical differences, the trainers and their Pokémon possessed character-specific voice clips that, in competitive multiplayer, may have been my favorite part of Pokémon Puzzle League. In a single-player game, the incessant howling every few seconds of Ash's "I'm gonna win!" or Koga's haughty "Work harder, young one!" could become quickly obnoxious, but in versus, that was entirely the point. Any trash talking by the players would be rendered redundant, as the cheesy canned taunts of the characters, like the best fighting game victory quotes, did a better job expressing one's dominance and were also more demoralizing to the opponent when the chatter became one-sided. Even better were the Pokémon themselves. Each trainer had three Pokémon, and as established in the anime, the little monsters could only speak their own names. In Pokémon Puzzle League, this happened whenever a player pulled off a combo, using gravity to cause a chain reaction, whereby one set of cleared panels would set up those above them to fall into place for another clear. Each hit of the combo would be accompanied by your Pokémon yelling its own name, and successive hits would be matched with ever more animated cries, until "Cloister" became "Cl-l-l-l-loister!" to sound the veritable death knell for the opponent, who would know to expect a massive pile of garbage blocks to rain down on his screen.


The fabulous production values were just a part of one of the most feature-packed titles on the N64. In addition to versus play and a single-player story mode that adapted most of the boss battles of the original Game Boy game, Pokémon Puzzle League offered a bevy of alternative play modes. Most of these were single-player affairs of little interest, but the "Puzzle University" mode constituted a brilliant repurposing of the assets toward a fundamentally different puzzle experience in which the player, freed of the pressure of an opponent or time limit, had to solve static stages by completely clearing all panels within a predetermined number of moves. A comprehensive training mode, meanwhile, walked the player through the basics, as well as some of the more advanced techniques, of one of the deepest puzzle games ever designed. Most curious was "3-D" mode, which was essentially just the regular competitive game, except that, in this mode, the left and right boundaries were removed, and the playing field was reshaped into a cylindrical tube that wrapped around, with the pieces lining the surface of the tube. This significantly increased the amount of area that you had to cover, and it could become overwhelming having to keep an eye on the height of the blocks facing away from the screen. The unwieldy mode was basically a novelty that didn't even appear fully implemented into the game's design. One source of amusement, for example, involved trying to play 3-D mode against the CPU. Intelligent Systems clearly never bothered to program the AI to deal with the wraparound field of 3-D mode, and it was almost sad to watch the CPU working just the immediate side of the field, while the the back half continued to rise toward the ceiling. The CPU would often even inadvertently kill itself by manually hastening the ascent to provide more blocks to work with in the front, never realizing apparently that there was an overabundance in the back.

As for that "crucial design flaw" that ruined Tetris Attack for me? Well, it was still there in Pokémon Puzzle League, and it was actually less a flaw than a technical limitation, less a matter of design than of input.

The distinguishing feature of Puzzle League's gameplay is that, rather than falling from the top of the screen as in Tetris or Puyo Puyo, the panels continually arise from the bottom of the screen as horizontal lines that span the entire width of the field. The player has no control over how they are arranged as they appear, so instead of manipulating the blocks, you control a cursor that can highlight two horizontally adjacent pieces and flip them around. My issue with this concept as realized in Tetris Attack and Pokémon Puzzle League was that the directional pads of the SNES and N64 could not possibly move the cursor around as quickly as the human mind could perceive potential moves in the block arrangement. If, say, you spotted an opening on the opposite corner of the screen from your current position, you would have to slowly maneuver the cursor over there through clumsy diagonals, losing much precious time in the process. And that was without even trying to flip any panels along the way. It was comparable to aiming in a first-person shooter using a control pad instead of a mouse, except that, as far as I knew, Puzzle League never had a mouse-controlled version. But to me, it was the same problem of the theoretical game being strapped down by the practical constraints of a crude manual input mechanism that simply wasn't up to task for the concept.

Later Editions

Pokémon Puzzle League received a Game Boy Color port/sequel in 2000 called Pokémon Puzzle Challenge. This followup featured characters and Pokémon from the Gold/Silver era, but, without the production values or convenient multiplayer of the console version, it was missing most of what made Puzzle League worth playing. In 2003, Panel de Pon was included, along with Dr. Mario and Yoshi's Cookie, as part of the Japan-only Nintendo Puzzle Collection for GameCube. Two years later, Nintendo released the Dr. Mario/Puzzle League double pak for the Game Boy Advance, establishing plain Puzzle League as the official international version of Panel de Pon for regions outside Japan. Just as "Pokémon" was removed from the title, the included version of Puzzle League was stripped of all characters--no fairies, Yoshi, or Pokémon.

Most recently, the Puzzle League/Panel de Pon series arrived on the Nintendo DS in the form of Planet Puzzle League, released in North America in 2007. As with the GBA version, Planet Puzzle League has no story nor characters and sports a vaguely futuristic skin reminiscent of other handheld puzzlers such as Meteos and Lumines. The new look is slick but cold, and the livelier personalities of Tetris Attack and Pokémon Puzzle League remain sorely missed.

The loss of character is easily forgiven, however, in the face of the giant leap forward in control offered by the DS. The advent of touch controls finally solves the input hurdle that hindered the earlier editions. Now instead of desperately scrolling around with the D-pad, you can instantly reach the panels you wish to flip by tapping them with the stylus. Traditional controls are still included as an option, but in my opinion, there is simply no comparison, especially when things get tight, and you need those blocks to be moving as quickly as you will them.


The other major addition in Planet Puzzle League is versus play with more than two players, although it is sadly limited to only four players, compared to the eight-player of Tetris DS. Nevertheless, support for three or four players drastically alters the dynamic of the competitive game, allowing a broader range of play styles beyond just slinging the biggest chains possible. I'll admit that Pokémon Puzzle League gradually became less fun for me as it grew ever more apparent that my younger sister was simply leagues ahead of me. I just didn't practice enough to develop the time-slowing instincts and all-at-once vision that allow experienced players to consistently pull off chains of more than four moves. Even with the aid of the game's built-in time-stopping mechanic that paused the action after each link to facilitate further chaining, I rarely ever got four-chains except by accident. That's still the case in Planet Puzzle League, and not even the new stylus controls can bridge that gulf, but the addition of two extra players can open things up a bit. Three lesser players can combine to exert actual pressure against a single powerhouse that would otherwise dominate any one-on-one match, and that can give a steady player such as myself enough room to hang in there for a while and try to outlast everyone else.

Beyond the multiplayer, Planet Puzzle League is disappointingly empty. There's no single-player story, no training mode, no 3-D mode, and no head-to-head records keeping. In many respects, it's a tremendous step down from Pokémon Puzzle League on the N64. In the areas that matter most, however, it's an improvement. The stylus controls are absolutely essential, while the expanded multiplayer support further enhances what was already one of the greatest competitive puzzlers out there.

I've been waiting for this...

After work today, I swung by the local Toys "R" Us to pick up Street Fighter IV. While I waited for the old lady to ring me up, I told her how, almost seventeen years ago, I had gotten Street Fighter II for the SNES from that very same store.

I still remember that day well. There was a banner proudly proclaiming that the store had that one specific title, the biggest in video games at the time. The $80 price on that cartridge made it the most expensive addition ever to my collection, and, taking inflation into account, I think it still owns that record. It was worth it, of course.

The cashier seemed to enjoy my story but pointed out that that was way before her time. Sure, old lady. See you in another seventeen.

Truthfully, however, I'm still waiting on my collector's edition copy to arrive at my door. I just went to Toys "R" Us to get their bonus Chun-Li statuette, but I don't intend to keep this copy of the game. I also stopped by Target, since I heard they had an exclusive Udon comic, but the employees knew nothing of it.

The Essentials? #11: The 7th Saga

I'd estimate that I've played over fifty role-playing video games over the years, and this was where it all began. The 7th Saga, published by Enix in 1993 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, was the first RPG I ever played and also one of the worst. Known in Japan as Elnard, the Produce-developed title was a fairly traditional RPG that adhered very closely to the Dragon Quest formula.

The story of The 7th Saga took place on the world of Ticondera, where the beloved King Lemele, a son of the legendary Saro, had recruited and trained seven apprentices. As the game began, Lemele announced that their five years of training had come to an end. He instructed them to set out in search of the Seven Runes hidden throughout the world. Whoever found the Runes would gain "tremendous power" and "become the leader of this world!" Presumably, Lemele meant to have that apprentice succeed him as king.

To start out, the player would select one of the seven apprentices to be the player character. Kamil Dowanna, a human knight with a strong sense of justice, was the most-balanced character, combining strong attack and good equipment options with mediocre magic. Olvan Jaess, an aged dwarf hoping to use the Runes to restore his youth, was similar to Kamil, but stronger and slower. Valsu Saizer, the righteous human priest, could learn every healing spell in the game, but his offense was limited to the basic Ice spell. Lejes Rimul, an evil demon and dark wizard, who thirsted for the power of the Runes, could use nearly every offensive spell. Esuna Busy, an elf and the lone female apprentice, possessed probably the best mix of spells, as well as the highest magical potency. Wilme Pelin, a useless alien with a bad attitude, could not equip any weapons or armor, had almost no MP, and basically relied on his high speed and HP to get him through. Lux Tizer, a member of the machine race of Tetujin's, whose origins had been lost to time, wanted the Runes to unlock the secrets of his own history. Possessing the greatest defense, his only weaknesses were a lack of speed and MP.

After making your choice, you would then set out immediately on your quest for the Seven Runes. In contrast to something like Final Fantasy IV, the game featured a very sparse narrative, inviting players to just wander according to the geography of the world, moving from town to town and dungeon to dungeon, picking up clues on the Runes' locations. Along the way, you would run into the other apprentices, and some might offer to join you, but it was not possible to have more than one partner. Also, since the player character would claim any Runes found, it wasn't clear what they hoped to get out of joining you. Unfortunately, the player's choice of character had almost no impact on the story. The player character would never speak, nor would your choice affect how others acted toward you.


The game's best feature was probably the Crystal Ball, which served as a radar on the field. The Crystal Ball marked all enemies and towns, as well as the locations of nearby Runes. Instead of being entirely random, monsters would appear as moving dots on the radar. All these years and games later, I still consider it to be the best encounter system in any RPG I've played. Less annoying than random encounters, it also avoided the sense of dread that could come in games like Chrono Trigger, where you could see the enemy in your way and know that you could not avoid them. While the enemy dots moved quickly and unpredictably, there would still be occasions when I would simply find myself "in the zone" and be able to snake my way through a floor of a dungeon without running into any encounters. On the other hand, if you wanted to level-grind, you could simply stand in one place, while the monsters came to you.

The game's other interesting feature was that it used only two buttons, A and B, along with the directional pad, but it was possible to play the game one-handed, substituting L and SELECT for A and B. I found myself doing so more often that I would have expected, and it's a shame that the option is not more common.

Like I said, The 7th Saga was the first RPG that I ever played. My older brother had picked it up hoping probably to get in some quality questing in between releases of Final Fantasy games. He picked Kamil as his character and made it maybe halfway through the game before realizing that it required far more level-grinding than he was prepared to put in. After one too many deaths at the hands of the overpowering Flame enemies, he gave up and replaced it on the shelf, where it would remain for years until I decided, on a whim, to pick it up. I was not that heavy into gaming at the time, but it was summer break, and I had nothing to do. It also seemed a shame to me to have this expensive game just lying around with no one playing it.

I chose Lux for my character, as I had seen my brother's Kamil repeatedly torn apart by enemy attacks, and Lux's high defense stat seemed like the best way to avoid running into that problem. I was somewhat taken aback, however, to find that the bird enemies outside the first town could tear apart even Lux in very short order.

It didn't take me long to realize that this was the sort of game where you would have to commit yourself to going out into the middle of the field with the sole intention of grinding until your character dropped dead, at which point you would find yourself waking up at the nearest inn with half your money gone, essentially payment for the experience you earned before dying. That was how the game was played, and it was unapologetic about it, even encouraging the player to exchange money for gems to prepare for such scenarios. Gems could not be spent, but they could be resold at full value, and enemies would never take them, so it was prudent to convert all your money to gems while traveling, swapping them for gold only when you needed to make a purchase. I spent three summer days out in those fields, just fighting and dying, but, at the end of it, my Lux was prepared for anything. It's not the sort of thing I would or could do now, but, at the time, I didn't really have anything else to compare it to, and, besides, as a kid during the summer, I had the free time available.


The best and worst parts of the game were perhaps the battles against the other apprentices. As mentioned, the player would periodically run into the other characters in towns, and, while some would happily join the player, and others would politely decline, there were also those who would attack the player outright to eliminate the competition. These one-on-one duels were the toughest fights in the game. These rivals would gain levels at the same pace as the player character, so it would not be possible to level-grind against them. Most of the characters could dish out damage close to their own HP, so, win or lose, in theory, these should have been short affairs. In practice, that was only the case if you died immediately. Attacks missed frequently, so you always had to prioritize healing, rather than counting on your next attack to finish them off. It then become a marathon, as you waited patiently until your own health stabilized enough for you to risk an attack. The cleric, Valsu, was by far the most dangerous. Though he wielded only an Ice spell, it was enough to take out Kamil in a single casting, as I saw happen to my brother multiple times. He also possessed the Elixir spell, which fully restored his HP and MP. Even with Lux, I don't think I could have beaten Valsu without the stat-boosting powers of at least five Runes.

If you were defeated, not only would you lose half your gold, but the enemy apprentice would relieve you of any Runes you had obtained. Thankfully, in only one case was it absolutely necessary to take on a fellow apprentice. Midway through the game, you would come across a town which had been taken over by an apprentice using the power of one of the Runes. While it might have made for a great twist, sadly, the identity of this villain was randomized for each playthrough, and his dialogue and motivations would never vary to match the personality of the specific character. It hardly made sense for the virtuous knight, Kamil, to become a tyrant, but that was what happened in my game.

The heinous difficulty is what The 7th Saga is now best remembered for, but those who made it far enough might also remember the surprisingly convoluted ending. Here's how it went down (SPOILERS, highlight to read):

King Lemele, despite being only 100 years old, was somehow a son of the legendary hero Saro, who, 5000 years ago, battled the evil Gorsia. In the more recent past, Lemele had become a hero in his own right by defeating the demon Gariso, who despite his curiously similar name, was apparently completely unrelated to Gorsia. But Gariso was not dead and actually possessed the last of the Seven Runes. Once the player defeated Gariso for the last Rune, thereby completing the quest, Lemele would appear and surprise you by revealing that he was actually Gorsia. He had killed Lemele years ago and taken his place, then used you in order to help him gain the power of the Seven Runes. Gorsia would then zap the player character, sending them back in time 5000 years to when Saro and Gorsia originally fought. As it turned out, the legends were wrong, and Saro was the one defeated in his battle with Gorsia. It would then fall upon the player to defeat Gorsia in the past. The player's duel with Gorsia, though victorious, would end with the player character suffering a mortal wound. Saro, though himself dead, would then use his own flesh to resurrect the player, who would be reborn as Lemele, son of Saro.

Across some fifty RPGs, I've seen some wild stuff, and this was certainly up there. It had been hard enough trying to keep track of the various Gorsias and Garisos, but, then the game decided to throw in some headache-inducing time travel paradoxes during the final hours. So Lemele was actually the reincarnated player character? And also the reincarnated Saro? And Gorsia was Lemele? Did defeating Gorsia in the past have any effect on the present? After all, didn't that stuff already happen 5000 years ago? Would Gorsia/Lemele continue his reign of terror in the present, where the player character is no longer around to stop him? And Gariso really had nothing to do with Gorsia? Whatever.

For many years, The 7th Saga was a running joke in my household, the oft-referenced model of bad RPG design. But, looking back at it now, I realize it wasn't such a bad game. I even have a lot of affection for it. It probably wouldn't make my top twenty-five, no, but it did have a few good ideas, memorable tunes, and some nicely animated battle sprites. The story was not the best, but it was a mostly clutter-free adventure that gave players enough purpose while also allowing a measure of freedom. Really, the only barrier to enjoying the game was its ridiculously grind-heavy difficulty, which remains the highest of any RPG I've ever played.

The Essentials #6: Stunt Race FX

Stunt Race FX is probably the worst video game I have ever played, and definitely the worst game I ever owned. And, yes, that's including the literal garbage that was E.T. for the Atari 2600.

Developed by Shigeru Miyamoto's Nintendo EAD team, with assistance from Argonaut Software, 1994's release of Stunt Race FX (aka Wild Trax in Japan) for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System was the follow-up to the previous year's groundbreaking Star Fox. Powered by the Argonaut-designed Super FX chip, it was a racing game featuring the same 3-D polygon-based graphical style of Star Fox. While arcades had begun to make some progress with polygonal graphics, true 3-D was still a very new frontier, one which Nintendo was eager to pioneer on console. Naturally, not all of the early attempts met with success. Star Fox 2, for instance, never saw release, despite insistence that the game was complete. In my mind, however, the infamy of that affair paled in comparison to the crime of Stunt Race FX actually getting a release.

The game put the player in control of one of three anthropomorphic cars, with a motorcycle as an unlockable fourth vehicle/character. Also, a bonus mini-game tested the player's ability to navigate an unwieldy semi-trailer truck through gates slalom-style. The inclusion of the big rig could only be taken as a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor, considering that all of the regular vehicles already maneuvered like tanks. Underwater.


The game offered four modes, each one worse than the last. "Speed Trax" was the single-player grand prix mode. In addition to having to place against three CPU opponents, the player had to race against a redundantly brutal clock that continuously counted down, eliminating the player if it reached zero. "Stunt Trax" had the player pointlessly driving around an arena collecting stars. The game included no actual stunts to perform. Instead of offering car combat, "Battle Trax" was a one-on-one splitscreen race for two players. The really lousy part was that this mode included only four short tracks, compared to the sixteen courses in single-player. Also, if, say, hypothetically, you were so desperate to manufacture some sensation of victory, so elusive in single-player, that you stooped to setting up a two-player race with just yourself, the game would actually notice when any car received no input for three seconds, after which the AI would take over and proceed to kick your ass. Oh, and the last mode was "Free Trax," a time trial mode where you could use the motorcycle. Useless.


Visually, the game was an abomination. The primitive, low-poly graphics, which constantly tore themselves apart, could not compete with sprite-based racers of the time, but still images could never come close to conveying the full, unbearable ugliness of it all. The unstable frame rate often dropped to incomprehensible levels of choppiness, rendering the game completely unplayable. Also the HUD took up an inordinately large portion of the screen area, a problem that was further exacerbated when playing in splitscreen.


I think Nintendo itself must have been dissatisfied with the game's technical aspects, as it would not release another polygonal title for the SNES. Some years later, I read in a Nintendo Power interview that Miyamoto was disappointed with the system's inability to truly realize his visions for 3-D games, and, while no titles were specifically mentioned, I had to believe he was referring to Stunt Race FX. A dream that vainly reached beyond the grasp of 16-bit technology, the resultant mess left an unflattering impression of 3-D.

So turned off was I by the polygonal future as represented by Stunt Race FX (I never played Star Fox), that I predicted my departure from gaming, upon learning that Nintendo, Sega, and Sony were all going 3-D for the next generation. Mario 64? This Lego creature was not the character I knew and loved. Virtua Fighter? A blocky atrocity. Battle Arena Toshinden? A Virtua Fighter-esque atrocity. Ironically, it was a 2-D game, Street Fighter Alpha 3, that finally convinced me to make the jump to 32-bit with the Sony PlayStation. Even more ironically, SFA3 was actually sold out the day I got my PS1, so my first game for the console ended up being Rival Schools, Capcom's polygonal fighter. But I digress...

My blind faith in Nintendo should have already been shaken by the less-than-stellar Pilotwings and Super Play Action Football, but my fondness for their previous racing titles, F-Zero and Super Mario Kart, encouraged me to add another to my collection. Some positive press, hyping up the realistic handling and physics offered by the 3-D engine, further assured me that it would be a sound purchase. And, of course, there was this:

It was probably appropriate, given how often it was seen, that the best thing in the game was the "RETIRE?" screen, featuring a cute 2-D animation.


Aside from that, I suppose it had some decent tunes going for it, and this box art, featuring the clay sculpture work of illustrator Wataru Yamaguchi, who, ten years later, also provided the clay art for Pikmin 2:

The Essentials #1: Rock 'N Roll Racing

Released in 1993 for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Interplay's Rock 'N Roll Racing was a jazzed up R.C. Pro-Am clone, something I would only learn years later. Developed by Silicon & Synapse (lately Blizzard of World of Warcraft fame), it was an isometric combat racing game with a sci-fi theme and rock soundtrack.

The game featured six selectable racers (plus one secret character), each hailing from a different planet. They hit most of the usual sci-fi cliches: reanimated cyborg, mohawked wasteland punk, Ewok-esque mutt-man, feline femalien (named Katarina Lyons, no less!), etc. My character of choice was the Vulcan-like Tarquinn. There was no story whatsoever in the game, nor were any of the characters visible during races, so the only differences were their stats.

Each character came with a +1 bonus to two out of the game's four graded categories: top speed, acceleration, cornering, and jumping. Between the six characters, every combination was covered, but anyone who relied on jumping was at a stiff disadvantage, as only the weakest cars in the game came with jumping maneuvers. Later cars ditched this useless ability for the more effective Lightning Nitro boost. Even cornering became a negligible stat once the last car, the Havac, became available and made perfect turns a breeze for everyone.

Instead of a simple Grand Prix, the regular campaign had the player earn his way to each new planet by winning cash through race victories. Money earned would also be spent buying parts and ammo or brand new cars as better ones became available. There was no battery-based saving, so players had to rely on a cumbersome password system to record progress. When the player finally won his way off the sixth and final planet, a highlight reel of the racer's victories set to "The Peter Gunn Theme" would be shown. Sadly, these highlights were the same for every character and did not actually reflect the player's performance. Curiously, even with that being the case, every time I used Nintendo Power's password to cheat my way straight to the last planet, the game would end with "The Peter Gunn Theme" accompanying a black screen, as if the game was drawing a blank because I didn't have any recorded data to draw from, even though the highlights never drew from saved data anyway.

A somewhat unusual inclusion was the option to play through the campaign with two players. While a nice idea, it came with a number of problems. Neither player could progress to the next planet until both earned enough money. Because there were only a limited number of races to achieve this before the scheduled flight to the next planet, precise divvying up of the spoils was required. Even though, officially, there was no "team" racing, both players would be forced to work together to ensure that each got the sufficient number of first place finishes.

Interestingly, each player received a separate password, and the system could be abused for some strange results. Both players could, for example, enter the same password, leading to clone racers. Alternatively, a player with a password for the last planet could play with a player still on the first planet, with the result being that both players would end up on the earlier planet, but the further advanced player would retain his undoubtedly superior vehicle and consequently dominate the competition.

While the campaign was a meaty and challenging experience, the real attraction was the versus mode, where two players could race freely on any planet and with all cars fully upgraded. Nearly every race against my brother began with both of us boosting off the starting line while unleashing the entire payload of forward and rear weapons. More often than not, we would both be wiped out, taking the CPU racers with us, so there was no real advantage to be gained. Rather, it was necessary because failure to go all-out would mean conceding an early lead, as neither of us could ever trust the other to hold to any friendly ceasefire agreements made prior to the race.

I recall one time when I deliberately waited a half-second before accelerating at the start, allowing me to avoid the blitz and snipe the other cars safely from behind, much to my brother's shock and fury. That strategy went out the window, however, any time the Havac's homing Sundog Beams and Scatterpack mines came into play. And, in versus mode, there was little reason to use anything but the Havac.

Rock 'N Roll Racing boasted the rockingest pre-Guitar Hero soundtrack in video games, consisting of just five instrumental versions of licensed rock and metal classics, which always played in the same order:

• "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath
• "Highway Star" by Deep Purple
• "The Peter Gunn Theme" by Henry Mancini
• "Born to Be Wild" by Steppenwolf
• "Bad to the Bone" by George Thorogood

Nearly as impressive was "Loudmouth Larry" Huffman's active commentary, consisting of colorful remarks (e.g. "Tarquinn unleashes hot fury!") delivered continuously throughout the race. This was about as sophisticated as commentary got in the 16-bit generation, and it was actually a good deal ahead of any contemporary sports games.

When I was a kid, Rock 'N Roll Racing was my favorite video game, but, as I grew older, I found myself somewhat frustrated with it. My biggest problem was that, in a fair race between players of comparably high skill levels, there was no way to mount a mid-race comeback. As soon as one player made a mistake or got a bad break, the other player could pretty much coast to the finish line. All of the pressure would be on the pursuing racer to try to catch up, which was theoretically impossible, since, with weapons having such limited range, the only way to really close the gap was to make better time, which could only occur if your opponent was worse than you. If the deciding mistake occurred early in a race, this meant you'd be racing several laps of anticlimax. This realization would end up souring me somewhat on racing games as a genre.

That said, if you take it less seriously as a competitive platform and more so as a party game, it's still a lot of fun, and I can only imagine the mayhem that would ensue if there were ever a four-player racer in this style.


Additional Information

Blizzard developed a Genesis version, again published by Interplay, about a year after the SNES one. In addition to being uglier and not having enough buttons--boosting was performed by double-tapping accelerate--this version sounded awful due to the hardware's inferior synth quality. Not only were the songs massacred, but, every time Larry spoke, the music would abruptly fade out until he finished. The inclusion of a weak rendition of Golden Earring's "Radar Love" was scarce compensation.

In 2003, Blizzard released a straight port of the game for the Game Boy Advance. Multiplayer was no longer splitscreen, but that wasn't much of an improvement considering how unwieldy the wired multiplayer setup for the GBA was.

A 1997 sequel called Red Asphalt was released on the PS1, but I know nothing about it besides the name.