Mr. Prospector Horiate-kun (Playstation)

 A few weeks ago, I reviewed Addie no Okurimono, a Playstation game that I didn't enjoy, though it was obviously a high-quality game that I could recommend to people who have different tastes in videogames to me. Now I'm reviewing Mr. Prospector Horiate-kun, a game that looks and feels cheap in many ways, but which has been able to somehow grab my attention and have me play it compulsively for several multi-hour sessions.

 

In it, you play as a little puppy, who I assume is Horiate-kun himself, and you go into the mines to look for treasure, in the form of both money and items. Items of course, can be equipped or sold for more money. There's seven mines, and each has an entry fee, starting at one coin, and adding a zero each time until the final mine costs a million coins to go and have a snoop around in. Naturally, the more expensive the mine, the better the items there are in there, and the higher denominations of currency you'll find. I'm not sure of the actual goal of the game, but there's an item book with a couple of hundred blank entries in it, so my best guess is that you've got to go into the mine and find at least one of all of them.

 

The money cost of entry isn't the only barrier holding back your progress, though: you have a bunch of stats, that all affect how well you're likely to do in the mines. The most important is your lung stat, which determines the length of time for which you can stay underground. (Of course, your oxygen count acts as both your time limit and your health meter.) Your other stats are Speed, Strength, and Intelligence. I'm pretty sure speed affects how fast you walk, and Strength affects both the number of hits with your pickaxe it takes to break blocks, as well as what happens when enemies touch you (depending on your strength and that of the enemy, they can either hurt you, disappear harmlessly, or turn into money), and my best guess for intelligence is that it either affects the frequency and quality of item drops, or it affect how often the little sparkles appear that tell you where the item drops are.

 

So, back on the subject of mine entry barriers. They're both to do with your strength. The more expensive the mine, the tougher the enemies are, and the more resilient the blocks are. So if you save up all your money to go to a mine that you're not ready for, it'll be a waste. You'll use up all of your air slowly digging through a few blocks, and if anything touches you, you'll likely pass out immediately. Passing out isn't a disaster: you keep all your money, but you lose half of the item chests you found during that dig.

 

As well as digging in the mines, there's a few places in town to visit! The scientist has to be rescued from the first mine before you can utlise his services, but he has a bunch of machines that change items. You can fuse items together like in Power Stone 2, you can upgrade items, and there's another option that he's never actually let me pick. Then there's a pet shop! I'm not sure exactly what goes on here. You can sometimes find pets as items in the mines, and you have to go here to equip them. Then you'll have a little animal following you around as you dig. Finally, the item shop. They never seem to actually sell anything good, but you can offload all your unwanted items to them.

 

The game's presentation is a mixed bag, mostly filled with bad stuff. All the ingame graphics look bad. I honestly wonder if some of it is temporary "programmer art" that accidentally never got replaced? The screens where you pick which mine to enter are particularly bad, as are the characters that appear in the locations in town. There is only onw thing that really looks good in the game, and you barely get to see it: the cutscenes! You know a game's got problems when I'm praising the cutscenes as one of the best parts, but they tell the story of the game through the use of digitised photos of the game's characters in plushy form, with text laid over the top! Who can hate that level of cuteness?

 

Though the game's entirely in Japanese, it's also simple enough that you'll be able to figure out pretty much everything just by playing. And though, like I said earlier, I've played the game for several hours, I can't really recommend it. It's incredibly repetitive, your every interaction with the world, especially with enemies, is based almost entirely on your stats, with no skill factor involved at all, and it feels like a precursor to modern "incremental" games ala Cookie Clicker, Immortal Taoists, Masters of Madness, et al., a genre I've recently cut out of my life altogether, as they're just pointless, boring chores and barely games at all.

Peace Breaker (PC)

 I didn't realise until after I'd bought it, but Peace Breaker is from the same developer as another game I've reviewed here, Near Fantasy Space. But what drew me into it was the premise: it claims to be a "fair" shooting game, where, unlike most shooting games, where you're alone against a massive enemy army, you're now just one pilot among many in a massive battle against an enemy force. Worded like it is on the game's page on DLSite, it sounds like this is a game designed to be easier than most shooting games, but it seems the developers saw the "unfairness" of the typical shooting game arrangement as being skewed in favour of the player.

 

It's a mecha game, in the style of Assault Suits Valken or Metal Warriors, though all the stages (that I've seen, at least) take place in spce, with no platforms on which to land. Missions generally see a clash between a small fleet of your side's ships and a small fleet of the enemy side's ships, and each ship releases a bunch of mecha, including you. Though there's some small variance from mission to mission, they generally play out in the same way: a massive, messy battle between many mecha happening in the middle of the field, with bullets flying everywhere and lots of pilots on both sides dying. Then, as the two fleets of ships gradually get closer, it becomes a race to take out your enemy's ships before your own ships (or yourself) gets destroyed. Furthermore, if you're low on health or ammo, you can go back to your launch ship to reload and repair, though it takes time, and the battle carries on as it happens. If your launch ship gets destroyed, that's also an instant game over.

 

In terms of anime, you should be thinking more along the lines of Armoured Trooper VOTOMS than Mobile Suit Gundam: your mecha is fragile, lots of your comrades will die, and it's very likely you will too. It feels especially cruel when you're taken out by the shot of a distant ship's cannon, which can take over half your health in a single hit. But conversely, it also feels very satifying when an enemy ship goes down after several second of concentrated fire from you and your allies. The difficulty level really did have me close to giving up on the game at first, though It took me nearly an hour to get past the first stage! Once you've got past that first stage, and you're used to how the game is meant to be played, it becomes a little easier, and a lot more enjoyable.

 

You've really just got to constantly keep in mind that you are just a fragile, expendable grunt. Stick with the crowd as much as you can, don't try to be the big solo hero, and go back to the ship to get repaired when you need to. Conceptually, it's pretty interesting, but I still have some reservations when recommending it. The problem is that pretty much every stage is the same, and once you've played through a few of them, it's very easy to lose interest in seeing any more. I tihnk it would have been really interesting to have some stages on-planet where all your guys are traversing terrain, maybe avoiding landmines, and so on? It'd have a lot of potential in terms of both game design and narrative. Imagine something like Front Mission: Gunhazard with this kind of setup! Anyway, it's a decent game with an interesting concept, but a short shelf life and a lot of unfulfilled potential. If it sounds interesting to you, get it next time it's on sale?