Team Innocent: The Point of No Return (PC-FX)

 For years and years, there were rumours of an English patch for this game being in the works, and a lot of people (myself included) were excited for it. It was another actual exclusive game for the PC FX that was about to become playable! But there had been no news on it for a long time, and a lot of people (myself included) had mostly given up hope of it ever coming out. Until December 2024, when it finally did! 

 

If you don't already know, Team Innocent is an action-adventure game where you movie a character around various fixed-camera pre-rendered screens, picking up items and using them to solve simple puzzles. Like an Alone in the Dark (Resident Evil would be a better refreence point for most people, but Team Innocent predates it by a couple of years!), but with the main difference being that because the PC-FX isn't a system with great polygon-pusing power, your character (and the rarely-appearing enemies) is a 2D sprite, that scales larger and smaller depending on their distance from the camera. I can't remember any other game that uses sprite scaling in this way!

 

The setting isn't a horror one, but instead you're a member of a trio of special agents of the Galaxy Police sent to investigate a series of abandoned space stations. All three of you also happen to have been grown in the genetics lab of the game's main villain, Dr. Chronos Enhancer, who, despite being presumed dead, seems to be behind all the strange incidents going on now. Since the places you're investigating are abandoned, you don't meet other characters while you're there, but you do get to see a bunch of video recordings via the various magno-optical disc video players that are lying around. There's recordings of news broadcasts, captain's logs, last will and testaments, and so on. There is combat in the game, and while it's not very exciting, it's also pretty rare, and very brief when it does happen, so it's not too much of a dampener on the rest of the game.

 

The presentation is generally excellent, the only thing that really stadns out as not being great in this department is your character's low resolution sprite, and the way it constrasts with the very sharp high resolution backgrounds. But that's more than made up for with things like the aforementioned video players, which make use of the PC-FX's trademark high quality FMVs, the interfaces of the various computers you'll use for controlling various aspects of the stages themselves, and the cool little specific full-screen animations that play when you die in certain situations.

 

Like I said earlier, there's been a lot of anticipation for this translation of Team Innocent, and in my opinion, the wait has been worth it. I've played through about half of the game so far (I think), and I've been loving it. It's a little slow, and very short on the action, but it's also very charming and surprisingly gripping. If you're able to set up a PC-FX emulator, I definitely recommend you do so to play this game.