In the gaming industry, it isn’t so uncommon that a studio
or even a publisher dissolves, splits, goes bankrupt or finds another sad way
to close its doors and cease operations. Thankfully, often times new studios
rise from these crises to form new organizations, or maybe even find more
creative outlets or vision for their craft than what they left. Maybe it was
poor work conditions or the stress of churning out yearly high-profile sequels,
but studios beget studios rather frequently these days. If you’ve been paying
attention to the news over the last few years, you’re probably surmised that
this happens all the time.
In the 90s, though, the concept of little guys breaking the
shackles of their corporate overlords to form smaller, creatively-focused
outfits was pretty new. In a Japanese-dominated world of 8-, 16- and 32-bit
game design, it was almost unheard of. The Japanese work ethic may sound overly
harsh to the outside observer, but corporate tactics on the other side of the
Pacific breeds and then rewards a high level of employee loyalty. Then again,
everyone has a breaking point.
Back then, Square had a hand in running Japan’s gaming
economy, and was poised by the end of the decade to become a dominant force in
the global publishing landscape. But that hand was something of an iron fist.
Talented designers and programmers began a tango of quitting, reforming and
selling out over the course of last 20 years. Some even went full circle to
work with each other again, while others were gobbled right back up by the
publishing giant after a minor success or two. Now that the company is beginning
to finally move in a new direction, here’s a look at some of the studios that
they birthed and some of their games.
Sacnoth
You may have heard of Hiroki Kikuta. If you haven’t, chances
are you’ve heard some of his music. As a composer for Square in the 90s, he
wrote the music for Secret of Mana, its sequel, Seiken Densetsu 3, and a
never-localized PlayStation action/RPG called Soukaigi. What people rarely take
into account is that Kikuta had coding chops as well as an artistic background;
he was actually a manga artist before being picked up by the Final Fantasy
factory. Shortly after completing Soukaigi, Kikuta jumped ship to form Sacnoth
with other ex-Square staff and some financial backing of NEO GEO maker SNK.
Wanting to be more hands-on with designs and believing that a smaller staff can
make a more focused product, Kikuta made exactly one game with the developer
before resigning from the outfit altogether.
Koudelka
The first game from the developer is something of a
microcosm of their forward thinking ideas and financial, as well as internal,
conflicts. Released in 2000 (NA) at a curious time when RPGs were becoming a
small goldmine in the west, the publishing deal with SNK that staked the
developer early was getting closer and closer to disaster as the SNK was
collapsing under its own financial troubles.
An ambitious game to a fault, Koudelka was originally
planned as something of a Resident Evil/ RPG lovechild. Taking place in the
Nemeton Monastery in Wales, the game was built with atmosphere in mind, and
given Kikuta’s history, sported a rich soundtrack to accompany his programmer’s
dark and morose graphical choices. Environments were somewhat claustrophobic,
adding to the horror nature of the game, but more free moving than the stilted,
cylindrical crawling of the Resident Evil games. Battles were still random,
though, and happened on a SRPG-like grid. Attacks were based on the position of
your three-character team compared to their adversaries. Still only their first
game, Koudelka laid the blueprint for the sort of left-of-center of RPGs that
were still fairly uncommon to western players.
Koudelka tanked. Reports eventually leaked out that internal
struggles at Sacnoth pitted Kikuta’s more action-oriented approach to the rest
of the team’s traditionalist mind set, and the game absolutely shows it.
Battles move at a painfully glacial pace, and feel almost out of place compared
to the structure of the game’s more horror-centric elements. On a programming
side, players were forced to wait after every combat action for character
models and weapons to separately reload off of the disk before taking another
action. Critics were unimpressed, citing an impressive story and graphics, but
lousy gameplay. It didn’t help that SNK was only months away from selling off
to pachinko manufacturer Aruze, too. Marketing for the game was minimal at
best, and the poor critical response didn’t help to carry sales. Kikuta
resigned, and Koudelka became an odd footnote in the RPG boom of the era.
Faselei!
Having the distinction of being the final commercially
released game for the criminally underrated Neo Geo Pocket Color, Faselei! was
originally released at the beginning of the millennium, presumably as part of
the original publishing deal with SNK. Only a few thousand copies made it to
retail in Japan before the game and the machine was recalled by SNK following
their bankruptcy and sale to Aruze, it eventually made it to other territories
in 2004 without proper retail packaging or even a manual.
Faselei! is a curious game, but nobody could possibly call
it a fun one. A strategy game by design, players took control of a mech to do
battle with enemy tanks and rival mechs in a story that you probably won’t
really care much about (and you won’t if you play it) to begin with. Though
turn-based, controlling the mech happened through a series of movement and
firing inputs that played out over the course of one turn. Say you want to move
three spaces up, turn left, and then fire on an opposing target. That means you
had to place three “forward” inputs, one “left turn,” and finally one of the
various attack inputs into a command prompt and then watch is it all happened.
Then it was the computer’s turn. Then you came to your senses and turned it
off.
To be fair, Faselei! has some redeeming qualities. Visually,
it doesn’t exactly stand head and shoulders over some of the other games to
come out for the NGPC, but it is impressive nonetheless. A lot of color is
crammed into the handheld’s tiny screen, and brief cut scenes (though still
kind of generic) are presented well. The game also has some depth if you can
make it past the idiotic movement functions. The mech’s customizable weapon
loadouts are fun to play with in anticipation for upcoming battles. It’s not
the easiest game to pick up and play, though, and even though there’s a
passable tutorial for playing it, this is one that greatly suffers from no
manual to fall back on. Still, Faselei! continues Sacnoth’s mantra of doing
things differently while still being confined to common RPG tropes.
Shadow Heats Series
Their best known work and strongest critically, the first
Shadow Hearts would be the last game made under the Sacnoth name, as the studio
restructured after being acquired by Aruze and renaming themselves Nautilus. Released
the week before Final Fantasy X in NA, Sacnoth was easily overshadowed by its
former masters, but remains as a competently-made RPG at a time when a tidal
wave of them were being released in the west. Set up as something of a
pseudo-sequel to Koudelka, Shadow Hearts still retained some its survival
horror influences as players still had to find random key items to unlock the
next area of the game or to move on to the next objective.
By and large, the Shadow Hearts games range from curiously
quirky to batshit nuts. Its main gameplay addition, the Judgment Ring, gave a
fresh twist to contemporary RPGs. The strength of player attacks against
enemies was dependant on the timing of button presses on large disk. Hit the
targets on the disk and your attacks will connect. As an added dose of risk vs.
reward, smaller shaves of the disk were set aside for critical attacks, but
were much easier to miss and can thereby stymie your whole turn. The ring was
customizable by the player and open to negative modification by enemies, too,
making the battles an absolute blast to play.
The plot and setting are where things take a left turn to
crazy town, though. Taking place in an alternate early 20th century,
real life historical figures like Roger Bacon, Rasputin, and Al Capone blend
with main characters that can blend with demons to lay waste to their foes.
Machine-gun toting mariachi guitarists are aided by giant, drunk cats and
ninjas wielding oversized fish. A family of vampires reappear as companion
characters over the course of the three games, and one of them is a
pro-wrestler the fights with a broken mailbox. There’s also collectible porn.
Seriously.
The Shadow Hearts games are the definition of “cult.” The
games are well-crafted and great to play, but just goofy enough to be pretty
far outside of the mainstream. But doing things differently seems to be where
Sacnoth’s (and later Nautilus’) heads were at.
feelplus Inc.
Nautilus eventually folded entirely into Aruze, whom dissolved
the developer in 2007 after key staff left for AQ Interactive (whom, at one
point, owned other batshit RPG developers Cavia until recently dissolving them
as well). Newly formed as feelplus Inc. specifically to aid former Square
honcho Hironobu Sakaguchi (whom you may have heard of) with his early Xbox 360
Mistwalker projects, feelplus worked with The Gooch on Lost Odyssey in 2007.
Their influence is readily apparent in the title’s combat system, returning to
the timing-based attack structure of the Shadow Hearts games. Today, they
survive as something of a consultant firm, helping to either port games to
various platforms (like the recent No More Heroes PS3/ 360 release) or to lend
visual design help to the odd RPG or two (such as the DS Blue Dragon release –
also with Mistwalker – and Star Ocean: The Last Hope).
Development work has brought them full circle back to Square
Enix, having made the universally spat-upon MindJack PS3/360 and quasi-Strider
revival Moon Diver for XBLA and PSN for the publisher.
