SNATCHER (November 26, 1988)
Genre: Adventure, Visual novel
Platforms: NEC PC-8801, MSX2, [Sega CD], PlayStation, Sega Saturn
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Moby Score: 8.0
Started: July 29, 2023
Finished: August 1, 2023
Beaten: Beaten
Playtime: 10 hours
As is the case for a lot of gamers, I am a big fan of Hideo Kojima's work. Not just because I find it of high quality and a lot of fun to engage with, but because these days, he is among few AAA game directors who truly try to make unique video games. Not those "focus-grouped to death" copies of each other with a different coat of paint to appear as mainstream as possible, but once in a lifetime experiences where he doesn't care whether it is universally praised or not. See Death Stranding for example, a game literally about making deliveries from Point A to B. Go into it deeper and you will find a way more profound experience with a lot of commentary on modern society (scarily apt during the pandemic that started a year after its release as well), and personally I found the gameplay to be a lot of fun as well.
Just as Hideo Kojima's work over the past couple decades is unique to the AAA video game industry to this day, his work in 1988 with SNATCHER is unique to this day's Hideo Kojima. It's not an Action blockbuster like the Metal Gear Solid or Death Stranding games, but it's rather a game in a genre of games Hideo Kojima enjoyed during his own formative years, the visual novel / crime mystery genre that was somewhat popular in Japan at the time.
Snatcher released initially on November 26, 1988 for the PC-8801 and the MSX2, two Japanese personal computers. It then released in a "remade" version on October 23, 1992 for the PC-Engine (exclusively for the Japanese version of the TurboGrafx-16) before it finally got an English release in December 15, 1994 for the Sega CD, which is the excuse I used to add it to my playlist for the challenge I am currently doing. To be honest, I have no idea how it came about to release this game in the West after not having done so in the 6 years prior, especially since the spritual successor 'Policenauts', which also released in 1994, did not get a Western release. But, thankfully, it happened, and with voice acting to boot. These games have a cult following these days and after having finished Snatcher, you can count me in among those who would be happy to see Hideo Kojima do another game of this type as some sort of side project during these modern times.
STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 9/10
If you decide to play Snatcher, you will probably do so to mainly experience its story. If that is not your expectation going in, I'm sure it will quickly become what will hold your attention, as the gameplay is rather typical for a visual novel. It's mainly clicking at prompts and listening to dialogue.
So with that being the case, delivering an interesting story full of interesting characters, plot twists and tense moments is quite important for this game to be worth playing. Luckily, the game delivers on all fronts thanks to its cyberpunk setting filled with a lot of well thoughtout, interesting lore, its compelling premise and its cast of characters.
50 years ago, the explosion of a biological weapon in a research facility near Moscow called "Lucifer-Alpha" killed over half of the world's population in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. In the present, a new city on an artificial island in Eastern Asia was made and is called "Neo Kobe City", a melting pot of cultures due to large number of immigrants from China, the USA, Eastern and Western Europe and even more areas of the world. Mankind faces a new dilemma due to the appearance of humanoid robots that are called "Snatchers", because they 'snatch' a person (kill and dispose of them) and take up their spot. They can't be detected due to the fact that they breathe, bleed and sweat like any human and even wear artifical skin to look exactly like the person they are copying. They mainly snatch VIP types however, which presumably means that their appearance goes beyond "AI gone rogue".
You play Gillian Seed, who, along with your wife, is an amnesiac and just got assigned to the JUNKERs, a special anti-Snatcher task force (Japanese Undercover Neuro Kinetic Elimination Ranger). Your assignment is to be a runner, an in-field operative taking on the highest of risks by facing these Snatchers head on and eliminating them. To do this, you are assigned a Navigator, a robot that assists you on the field. Navigators get their personalities formed somewhat after the Junker they are assigned to, so yours. Your navigator is called "Metal Gear Mk. II", designed after the "Metal Gear menace from the 20th century", so yes, this seems to play in an alternate future of the Metal Gear universe.
This game is a visual novel, so gameplay looks like this. The first screen you see is that of the Junker HQ reception. A panel of prompts appears at the bottom half of the screen. You can "Look" at things, "Investigate" things, "Talk" and "Ask" if a person is in the room with you and also look at your "Possessions" to "look" and "investigate" them as well. Looking at things and investigating things is different in that investigating them is more analytical. You are often meant to look and investigate things multiple times, as each time reveals new information and thoughts. Some of these options are optionable if you want to get immersed more deeply with your surroundings, and some you are meant to use to trigger a moment that lets you progress, such as uncovering a new clue. As someone who likes to get immersed as much as possible, I have used every single option as many times as I could (at least I think), which not only does what I just told you, but also triggered a few "hidden" moments that I found quite entertaining. In one part of the city for example, Gillian attempts to "pick up women" and if you do so multiple times, one woman turns out to be a Snatcher, which triggers a "Game Over?" screen before it is revealed that Gillian was just daydreaming.
Gillian Seed in general is a pretty odd fellow, though he is more of a poster-boy for how Kojima seemingly wanted the game's atmosphere to be more humane to balance out the fact that Snatchers dominate everything else in this game. Gillian is an amnesiac as mentioned and has a wife called "Jamie", though they don't remember each other. He likes to use humor whenever possible to lower the tension that the entire case and his occupation represents, though balances that out with a get shit done attitude when the situation requires it. The non-serious part of his personality would have felt a bit too "in your face" however, if he wasn't assisted by Metal Gear Mk. 2, who steals the show in this game in my opinion. Both the voice acting and the personality of Metal Gear is perfection, as Metal Gear uses his analytical makeup to save Gillian's butt countless times on the field, but also roasts him every chance he gets when they get a break from the Snatcher-hunting they do. For a guy like Gillian who I can only describe as a "creep" for most parts of the game, I think it was a great idea to have him be accompanied by someone like Metal Gear who keeps him in line as much as possible. I say "creep" because there are 3 female side characters and several other female NPCs in this game, and I don't think there was a single one Gillian didn't make a pass at. For one, you can "look" at any character several times, and doing so once illicits a "she looks great" type response from Gilliant, while doing so more than once prompts the women to say that they feel uncomfortable, which doesn't stop Gillian from making way more straightforward remarks about their apperance. Now don't get me wrong, this type of behavior doesn't usually weird me out and I can see it for what it is, which is entertainment. But with Gillian, it's different. For one, he has a wife, which you can call in this game to tell her how much you want to get to know and to love her again. This creates a very weird situation where Gillian talks to Jamie on the phone, only to flirt with several women over the next hour alone. Second, one of the women includes the 18-year old daughter of a fallen co-worker, who is 14 in Japan's version of the game, so that Gillian doesn't know boundaries whatsoever is pretty off-putting. Otherwise though, his attempts at flirtation are mainly meant to be humorous, and it works since he gets shot down constantly (and gets ridiculed by Metal Gear for it), but on his own he doesn't make a great main character because his personality is mainly doing this shtick.
Apart from Metal Gear, who is the best character in the game for me, there are several individuals who have this mysterious aura around them, like there is more to them than you'd think. Harry the engineer is one of these types, but it extends to the Chief of the JUNKER operation, a bounty hunter named Random Hajile, your wife Jamie, an informer you talk to several times, and Gibson, the only other JUNKER who currently works as a runner alongside you.
With that, I want to get to the main story. I don't want to spoil anything, and in general I think the big story beats flow at a great pace and introduce a lot of twists and memorable moments. However, there is one flaw to the premise of the story that I found to be pretty odd. Actually, there were several over the first couple of hours, but it is worth noting that the plot cleared up plenty of questions I had and actually answered them in a quite satisfactory manner. This one issue that remains though is that this JUNKER operation seems pathetically tiny considering that the "Snatcher menace" presents a huge issue to all of mankind. ALL OF MANKIND. Meanwhile, here you are in the secret JUNKER operation tasked with stopping it and all you have is 5 (five) measly people working there, including just two actual runners. What? Even if Snatchers would snatch up everyday folk, this would be unrealistic, but when VIPs are exclusively involved, you'd think more monetary efforts would be made to make sure the menace was eradicated asap. The game does have an answer to this worry later on at least somewhat I suppose, but I still think that is too unrealistic to have two guys do all the work.
That said, if you enjoy a good mystery story, if you enjoy visual novels and if you like the cyberpunk aesthetic, I think you will enjoy the story that this game tells. It's well executed, I never felt like the game dragged with filler moments and the plot twists were well executed. The pre-1992 version had only 2 acts, but while this version comes with an additional third, which turns this game from one with a cliffhanger ending to one with a complete story. Knowing this, the third act did feel slightly out of place, as the majority of it involves listening to dialogue instead of much player input when it comes to investigation or the like, but the act does end things on a satisfactory note, so I'm glad it's there to give the player a full story to enjoy, though it does leave some room for a sequel.
GAMEPLAY | 12/20
This is a visual novel, though not exactly like most modern ones. Instead of listening to a story and just clicking the A/X button to read the next lines, you select options to look at and investigate, so you are constantly involved with what the next set of lines of dialogue will focus on, keeping you more engaged. But of course, gameplay is a low priority in this game overall.
There is only one part about this game that has true gameplay, which is the game's light gun sections. In a 3x3 grid akin to a game of whack-a-mole, enemies appear in one of the 9 spots and you need to quickly react and aim and shoot at the part of the grid that they are on. This is a pretty small part of the game and I found it to be appear just the perfect number of times over the course of the game. I didn't fail once, but I've read that some found these parts to be kind of difficult. There is a rush of enemies in one late-game section of this, which might give you some trouble, if you are slower on the buttons, but I'm not nearly the fastest and got by with plenty of health remaining.
With visual novels, I find that the quality of the story makes the gameplay more or less tolerable, and since I found the story to be so good, I enjoyed taking my time with this one. This involved choosing every option to investigate multiple times, even to just trigger some optional dialogue from the characters.
You don't just choose options however. First, to find clues and progress, you often need to choose specific options multiple times. The order you would usually choose is to look at something and then to investigate. Sometimes though, you look, investigate and then have to look again to trigger an event, which was a weird way to do things, so be wary of this. That said, asking the player to be thorough is not a bad thing on its own, as reading through all the lines that are available adds to the overall context that the player gets.
One final part of the gameplay here are the puzzles. Often, you need to input answers, such as the password to talk to an informant, the name of a person, the really contrived "Oleen" puzzle and more. If a puzzle gives you any trouble, the game guides you to the answer pretty nicely, so don't worry about not figuring them out.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10
This game has voice acting!!! An anomaly for games that I play as part of this retro challenge I'm doing. Of course, it's less unique for Sega CD titles, but still a very new thing for video games at the time. Due to this, I was expecting terrible performances, but the majority of characters are genuinely well voiced. These of course do not compare to today's quality, but for 1994, they don't take away from the experience. Some voices I thought didn't really have much emotion in them, such as the voice of Katrina, while the voice actress for Metal Gear did a fantastic job in my opinion. It's a good performance from the cast overall, with some high and low points.
The soundtrack of this game has a very unique sound to it in my opinion, and I mean that in a positive way. This is a cyberpunk / cyber noir themed game, and while I couldn't have told you what that sounded like beforehand, I think the game nails that atmosphere really well. The track that plays when shit hits the fan really gets you off your seat and ready to investigate the crap out of the place you're in, while I have no doubt that I will remember some tracks (like the Junker HQ one) years and years down the line. Liked it a lot overall.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 9/10
Snatcher has a great cyberpunk aesthetic. Whether its the neon-lit Neo Kobe City, the run-down slums in the otherwise high-tech environment or the presentation of the Snatchers, it has a great visual style, timeless you could even say. The game features some pretty gory sections (decapacitated humans, dead animals), so if you don't like that sort of stuff, stay away. For me, it added a lot to the legitimacy of the Snatcher threat and was not used too much as to be tactless. The presentation of the screens in this game looks pretty good in this remade version of the game, though they are simple-looking for the most part, as the majority of screens had little to no actual movement in them but rather remained still. This didn't take away from the cinematics however, which were well done despite the visual limitations the game had to work with.
ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 10/10
Incredibly atmospheric. Cyber noir is presenting "technology as a destructive and dystopian force that threatens every aspect of our reality", and that fits the game's theme perfectly. It's a story about humanity's lack of trust in one another and how it is one of our biggest flaws, and it carries that from its beginning all the way to the end. Heck, due to suffering from amnesia, Gillian is partly defined by this, though he hardly is the only one here. The game portrays this theme well several times throughout the game. The cyberpunk part of the cyber noir theme is also well represented here, with the contrast of high tech and the rich parts of Neo Kobe City being compared to the slums ridden with poverty. There are even minor things here, like a group of women taking their artificially enhanced pets to the vet, like a parrot with instant memorization, a dog that barely makes any sound and ... a pigeon? The deep lore that you can read up on on the computer at Junker HQ also is worth going through to familiarize yourself with Neo Kobe City.
CONTENT | 8/10
The game took me about 10 hours to beat, though you can easily beat it a couple hours sooner, if you skip some of the optional stuff. For example, reading through all the lore on the computer at Junker HQ took me over half an hour and is completely optional. There is a lot of good stuff here, and little feels as filler.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 8/10
This is a pretty well-paced adventure throughout, with a good mix of investigating, action, comedy and romance, though the last part never really felt right to me due to what I talked about in the Story part of this review. My only issue was that progression was somehow hidden behind a combination of Look / Investigate / Look that felt unnecessary, and some of the puzzles felt really contrived. That said, this is a pretty focused game and does its job well in terms of the design of its structure.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 6/10
This is not a new concept, as Hideo Kojima used similar Japanese crime adventures as inspiration for this game. It is unique in that I haven't played it in the 4+ years worth of games I've played as part of this challenge, it is a visual novel, which is a rare breed for its time, especially in the West and it tells a good story that aged pretty well. And I guess it's also worth pointing out that the game does enough to keep the player engaged without making this game feel like a book and without making the limited light gun sequences to feel annoying.
REPLAYABILITY | 1/5
This is a very linear adventure. If you are going through all options like me, which doesn't take a lot of effort, you will see everything in one go, besides some minor dialogue results at times perhaps. But other than that, one playthrough will give you pretty much everything here.
PLAYABILITY | 5/5
Works well at all times.
OVERALL | 78/100
A visual novel that is worthy of being played. If you are a fan of Kojima's work, this is a must play, if you are a fan of visual novels or adventure games, this is well worth a playthrough and if you enjoy good stories in video games, this is in the upper tiers, especially for its time.
