Brandish… WTF Were They Thinking?

Ever heard of the Japanese company Nihon Falcom? No? Well I don’t blame you. Outside of Japan they are more or less only known for their Ys and The Legend of Heroes RPG series. Both of these made it very rarely into the west. To be honest, I hadn’t heard of them until two weeks ago when 1up.com’s Retronauts did a Podcast about them. At one point they mentioned Brandish on the SNES, a game that sparked my interest, solely because it sounded absolutely hideous.

OK, try to imagine a classic First Person Dungeon Crawler, like say the Wizardry Series. You move through a massive dungeon while fighting monsters and hunting for vast riches. Now take the perspective of Zelda 3 and you basically have Brandish. You play as Varik (Ares in the original), who in the intro is getting chased by the scantily-clad sorceress Alexis (originally Dela Delon) because you apparently capped her Teacher. After a fight on top of a huge crater you both fall down said hole and you wake up alone in a giant dungeon. Your task is of course to find a way out. Not that the paper thin plot really mattered.

While playing the game everything is fine until you hit left or right, at which point you will scream “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?!” The problem is that your character always faces up. If you try to turn, your character remains facing forward and the world around rotates. And not smooth like you would expect on the SNES, it just flips by 90 degrees. Hard to imagine that? Just watch this video, and have your mind blown.

The reason for this “mechanic” is the origin of the game. The SNES version is a port from the Japanese version for the NEC PC-9801. Originally a office machine that wasn’t capable of Mode7 rotation effects. So they had to find some way around that limitation. But why they didn’t take the Zelda route (like any other 3rd person action adventure, ever) and made the scenery fixed while rotating the character really escapes me.

Maybe they had a very good reason. Maybe they where really fucking lazy. Or maybe they had a bet running with someone for who can make the most mind bogglingly-bad game. If the ladder case is true, they have most definitely won.

Should you actually play this game for more then 2 seconds, fear not! There are lots of other reasons to make you stop. The fact alone that they labelled this as an action game, while having your dude shuffle along square by square trying to position yourself in some way that will make it possible to actually hit something, with the much more agile enemies running circles around you, is nuts.

Another highlight of the the game is that there are only 4 different kinds of environment. So the game looks more or less the same for the most part all the way through. Same goes for the mediocre music. Something that is surprising, because Falcom always had awesome music in their games.

Also your weapons break (why, WHY?!), there are countless pits you can fall into, inventory management in real time is a nightmare and there are actually boss battles. BOSS BATTLES! It’s like fighting the Tyrant in Resident Evil 1 with just the knife. Only you don’t have auto aim. And the controls suck even more.

At least they were smart enough to give you an automap. The thought alone of trying to draw maps while playing this game makes my head spin. But then again, you have to push a button to bring it up, instead of having it on-screen all the time.

But the most unbelievable thing about this game is that it was popular enough in Japan to spawn 3 sequels and an upcoming PSP remake.

To be fair to the title, the game does have some charm. In a really twisted, fucked up way. You know, like tentacle porn. Every once in a while I pop it in, to be amazed by the fact that someone made this game and others actually bought and played it. Only to wish I didn’t do it afterwards. Just like tentacle porn.

Fun Fact: One of the newer games of Falcom on the PS2 is called Zwei!!, which is German for two. Recently they released a sequel called Zwei!! II.