Elm Knight (1992)

Name:Elm Knight
Number:210
Year:1992
Publisher:Micro Cabin
Developer:Micro Cabin
Genre:FPS
Difficulty:4/5
Time:11 hours
Won:Yes (86W/69L)

The proper ratio of story in games is always something that will be argued. Many, not unreasonably, think that story is pointless in a GAME, and there are other mediums that focus on story. Others think that story is something that should be focused on, since video games can do stories not seen in other mediums. Elm Knight presents a silver bullet for the former, a competent game completely ruined by an excessive spotlight on a mediocre story.

This is pretty much how the game felt for me, two characters arguing while I gaze on sadly.

Irrespective of one's thoughts on the debate, it's pretty clear that one aspect, even if it overwhelms the other, should not ruin the other half. Game mechanics should not make the story feel completely pointless. Story should not ruin a good gameplay section just because a story is being told, the game can be damned. Unlike with a game ruining the point of it's own story, the story ruining the game cannot be salvaged. No amount of good story is going to result if the game grinds to a dead halt in the middle of a battle, leaving you in whatever position you were before the game paused. I.E., shooting at or getting shot at.

The story in this game isn't that good. It's basically downhill of other, better science fiction and space opera, especially Star Wars. You play as Rick, an imperial cadet who leaves because he finds out he has magic powers and those are illegal in the empire. So he steals a magic mech and ends up joining the rebel forces. Lead by the beautiful Princess Sofia and her sister, the tsundere Princess Serena. Over the course of the game you take out the elite force sent to take out the rebel forces, culminating in the finding of a super mech and taking out the emperor's aide. It's basically Star Wars, but some aspects are bigger stretches than others.

You get to see him flip switches! That's rare even for today!

As an experiment this game is interesting, because it has a ton of animation and at least at first, gives you the impression you're playing an anime. If that were the case, it wouldn't matter that the story is mediocre, it's 1992, an action game, and it has like anime-level animation between battles. It's cool. Except that the game part of this is extremely lopsided towards the story. I think it's something like 8 hours story, 2 hours game. (The other hour was testing) By the time I finished it I didn't really get much chance to actually enjoy any of my weapons.

Gameplay is a lot of this.

You see, what hurts about this game having a story that makes the rest of the game bad is that this game actually had potential. The equipment and weapons this game gives you is incredible. Various missiles, guns, mines, defense measures and movement modes, a variation that at this point is unsurpassed. But you never get to use any of it. It's just...there, being ignored because getting into combat with regular enemies drains your resources and the strategy for most bosses is sidestep and shoot.

And the end is a lot of this.

The one fight that really changes this is the final boss. But by this time you're in a mech that doesn't have all that equipment, and instead just has a single weird weapon. Rather than ever allowing you to use those tools, every fight discourages you to be clever. So that final boss is about dodging him, which at this point is something you should already know how to do.

For instance, laying mines, it basically functions like in any first-person shooter with them. Instead of laying a trap, you're baiting an enemy into going to a mine. And it's not like a game where you might do this to save ammo for your good guns, running past is easier and ammo preservation isn't important anyway, you get more at certain points and even so, if you die you just get it all back at that point or as near makes no difference anyway. Then there are stun mines, which feel very questionable.

The difference between playing as Rick and playing as the super mech is that you don't get a knife as the super mech.

Sometimes there are on-foot sections, and these give you a little more reason to actually shoot enemies for once, because often the spaces you're in justify it. The massive arsenal you get would be far more justified here than anywhere else, instead you just exchange shots with enemies or run past them. Ironically enough, here you can afford to just exchange fire with the enemy instead of dodging.

Many of these issues could have easily been fixed. In battles where you deal with multiple phases maybe make the transitions between phases smoother than suddenly stopping and starting. How about say, dialog appearing on the map screen? Not like I need that against a boss. Or how about voiced dialog instead of walls and walls of unskippable, unstoppable text? This isn't some witchcraft, you could easily do something like this at the time. Pretty sure there are several PC Engine games with voiced dialog. If some crappy DOS game can do it with PC Speaker, you can do it on a CD.

There are more lines of text than are dreamt of in many philosophies.

And that said, some of this is less impressive than it seems at first glance. A lot of these animations are of people standing around and talking. Which is basically what you expect any good artist to be able to do. While this is of course, to be expected when any actual combat takes place in-game, after the opening cutscene there is a noticeable lack of cutscenes where actions happen, as opposed to people talking.

I'm going to be generous and say that two halves of a game that were designed pretty well on their own, but together no thought was put as to how they work. I don't really know that they were in the completed product, the game never got a chance to shine and the story got on my nerves for most of the length. Maybe I'm giving too much credit. When push came to shove the controls would lock up on me; The story might be as boring as I give it credit, just because I don't get the humor doesn't make it good.

Nevertheless, the game is an honest misstep, and one that had to happen. This game does something that 10 years in the future would be commonplace. It's not entirely true that this game does something no other game at the time did, Terminator 2029 had briefings, and Star Cruiser was a full-blown RPG. For better or worse, this one was built around the story in a way those weren't. In much the same way, those games are more playable today, whereas this is merely an oddity.

Weapons:
I have mixed feelings. There is an incredibly arsenal here, but I never really got to use it. It was always straight-forward violence. Subtle force was far less effective than the gold standard of "run away from everything you can, shoot what you can't". 3/10

Enemies:
The Japanese have not yet really figured out enemy design. Every stage has it's own unique-looking enemy which invariable has a not unique set of abilities. I think there are maybe 6 real variations, two of which are bosses. Not very interesting. 2/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Very few feel like they were designed as much as stuff was put down and then the player could go through it. There are general ideas, but it doesn't come off as much thought as put into it. 2/10

Player Agency:
The GUI is nice, but the game makes weird choices for what buttons should go where. Rather than controlling weapons via the number keys, instead they're via the function keys. There are two groups to pick from, when honestly, there was enough GUI space for them all at once, if you cut down a few seemingly unnecessary choices. 5/10

Interactivity:
You basically just walk into things and sometimes they activate. It's always plot important and sometimes obtusely done. 0/10

Atmosphere:
It certainly feels like an anime, albeit one I'm not terribly interested in. 3/10

Graphics:
I'm not going to deny that the cutscenes have incredible effort put in...but outside of this the game is a bit lacking. Very little animation, very little environmental variation. It looks nice, but it's not very hard to make a singular sprite look good. 4/10

Story:
This was never going to get very high on my scale thanks to my thoughts on it, but considering how it frequently ruins the other aspects of the game, it's much worse than that. 2/10

Sound/Music:
The sound is okay. Combat feels fitting, but dialog sounds got on my nerves. The strange thing is, whenever music was activated you couldn't even hear it. The music, on the other hand, is nice. Despite being CD audio it's just high quality game music. Outside of a few wearysome tracks it was nice, albeit somewhat generic. 5/10

That's 26, but I'm going to remove 2 points, making it 24.

I ragged on this a lot for something that's ultimately a mixed bag. A lot of effort was done into making this game, it clearly wasn't just a throwaway. I just wish some of that effort was redirected towards something other than the cutscenes.

In comparison to the two titles I mentioned and linked to earlier; Star Cruiser is more unfocused as a result of being born from basically nothing. Considering the technological limitations that game had, I cut it more slack, not cutting down the score. Terminator, meanwhile, well, that game's flaws were more related to Bethesda being Bethesda.

The only western review I could find is just unanimously glowing about the game. I strongly suspect the reviewer did not get very far, because of the way they describe the gameplay. It describes a level of smoothness and competency to it that I frankly just haven't seen for hours. Even today the niceness of some aspects fool one into liking the rest of the game.

This is the only FPS from the two key members of the staff, Hideyuki Yanagishima and Fujio Yamakawa, who designed the game and the scenario. Before this, the two worked on other Microcabin games, mostly Action RPGs. No idea if those are games that I'll actually play, since Japanese computer ARPGs of this era tended to be simple bordering on torture, at least to me anyway. Which is a lovely thought after beating this game.

Next up, Advanced Galactic Empire, but first Commander Keen 5. I've been looking forward to both. Then again, I was looking forward to Elm Knight...

Post note, while thinking up a counterpoint to how this game's story overwhelms the gameplay, I note that even with my example of game mechanics ruining a story, it isn't as bad as vice versa. Just because you can resurrect someone in normal gameplay and then they die a permanent plot death doesn't ruin everything, it's just goofy. I think even a game with a story deliberately designed to completely countermine everything in gameplay and do it awfully would still have redeeming qualities if the game was fun. If you're going to make an elaborately crafted story but the game is nothing but endless mazes with obtuse enemies, people aren't going to give a toss about your story.