Rejection: Denno Senshi (リジェクション 電脳少女, 1992)

Name:Rejection: Senno Senshi (リジェクション 電脳少女)
Number:218
Year:1992
Publisher:Takeru
Developer:Sur de Wave
Genre:FPS/RPG
Difficulty:4/5
Time:29 hours 30 minutes
Won:Yes (96W/70L)

At the end of my first entry, I said this was going to be a big disappointment or the best FPS before Doom. And...neither of those are true because Pathways into Darkness was released before Doom. The best released about a year before Doom? Probably, because I think unlike my other top choices, I'd actually play this again. Willingly, all the way to the end. Legitimately, without cheating.

It is an oddity in all respects, starting from the name. If you didn't read my playthrough, you're wondering why I started a rejection of a game called Denno Senshi, when in fact, the name is Rejection. This is not just a terrible name for the obvious reason, judging by Japanese descriptions of the game, it should actually be called Denno Denshi: Rejection, or Cyberbrain/Computer Girl: Rejection. This is also terrible, because it's an adaptation of a movie called Battle Girl: Tokyo Crisis Wars AKA The Living Dead in Tokyo Bay. There's no connection in the game itself, so I'm possibly the first person in English to recognize this...even the one Japanese source I found talking about this had someone point it out in the comments.

Moments before a meteor hits.

This gives you a better idea of what's about to happen. A meteor hits Tokyo Bay, which releases a heavy metal which combines with nitrogen in the air to create a virus called Kosumoanfitamin or Cosmo Amphetamine. (Which I did not realize was the name until seeing the movie, shows what poor sound mixing and incorrect assumptions about how it was spelled can do) This virus turns people into zombies, and eventually monsters. The military seals off the infected areas and begins a blockade.

The player is K-Ko Kirihara, pronounced Keiko, but we're trying to be punk. Daughter of the commander of the Autonomous Security Unit, Colonel Kirihara. Her mission is to escort people in the various refugee camps to the ASU, in order to get the living out of the quarantine zone. Her secondary objective is to take out the Human Hunter Unit, a group of the military taking out both the living and the dead. To aid her, is a battle suit, a kind of powered armor.

Out heroine and the leader of this band of refugees.

There is nothing really new about the story, you can figure out most of how it goes from the above paragraph. You spend more time shooting rogue military than zombies. Although it does have special zombie types years before other games would turn that into a thing. The plot is done very well and each moment has a suitable impact. No atrocities are brought up and then casually forgotten. The game even introduces a little sister type for our heroine to protect that wasn't actually annoying...probably because she stayed at base camp.

Fighting a zombie using the one P.08 in Tokyo.

The game is open-ended, but guides you to the right choice either subtly or not so subtly. The first area is free of zombies, and the right area is light with easy zombies. The wrong area is full of zombies which are too tough for you. Not because you're too low level, but because you lack the combat skill you acquire by beating boss enemies. In theory, you could grind levels and then go through it...but in effect, it's one of those level gating systems. If you don't know, if you're level 1 and fight a level 3 enemy, you deal no damage, but if you're level 5 you kill them in one hit.

I guess in a pinch a combat knife can be used to gut fish...

Areas are mostly of unpleasant underground areas, resulting in unavoidable ugliness. There's between 3-5 tilesets, one of which is sewer and one is the one which you'll be seeing for most of the running time. Which is more variation than a lot of dungeon crawlers, and it is very nice-looking for what it is, but it's still these ugly walls with two different wallsprites per area. It's the one thing that drags down the genre, and this is no different.

The actual areas are closer to FPS than dungeon crawler. It's wise but not essential to map, and there are no dungeon crawler tricks in the game's arsenal. They start off complex, hitting its stride somewhere around the mid-game, before settling into a series of maps with clearly laid out rooms, which do not need to be mapped in the slightest. Basically hallways with rooms.

Even in-game, zombies are smart enough to use tools.

Now, on the surface, its fairly generic, but in practice, areas are built around enemy spawns. Which aren't fast enough to quickly grind, but are fast enough to cause concern when you're running around. The developers knew all the tricks you'd develop, so they built their encounters around making ideal tactics tedious at times. Forcing you to play aggressive. Enemies, be they ranged or melee, charge at you, but back away if they attack you or are attacked. Once they back up, they do a u-turn, which isn't a problem if there's just one, but if there are multiple, you will be flanked. It's cleverer than it seems at first glance, and also slightly annoying thanks to the controls.

Which are annoying in many ways. First, you kind of need a controller, you can tie them into keyboard controls, but I don't know if that screws with anything and I don't want to find out. Next, you aim and turn using the d-pad, but to move you press the B-button (I think, it was the right c-pad on my imitation N64 controller) and then a direction on the D-pad. Aiming has its own unique speed, which changes depending on your weapon. Moving is chunky. Tile-based movement, but enemies don't quite work that way moving on half-tiles. It also switches between sticking and not sticking. C-button opens the menu, selects your weapon, saves, and medical ampules.

A medical man.

Ammo and ampules are thus the two most important items you can find. At the start you can return to base camp to get healed, but after a while that doesn't happen anymore. (Or the camp doctor just doesn't heal you when you have too many) Ammo you can always get at base camp, or by various crates and ammo drops. Enemies drop ammo and ampules, the latter of which is your most reliable source of aquiring them. And believe me, you can't have enough of the later.

Shooting, shooting is very interesting for 1992. Guns work like guns, meaning they each work in their own unique way. While it's true the entire game, it's most obvious at the start, when you have a handgun, a shotgun and a magnum. (you also start with a knife and can pick up a fourth gun) Each gun has a different turn speed, damage, bullet drift from the crosshair, bullet size, armor penetration and recoil. That said, each gun broadly works in the same category, so there isn't too much change, just gradual improvement. Weapon progression is weird though, not at all how I would think a new gun would fit into the game.

Switching out weapons, this is just about the point where the game really shifts to rapid-fire weapons, as seen by three out of five guns being automatics.

But some of this variety is kind of false. You get two shotguns and one magnum over the course of the game, and their use is kind of limited. Let me explain how weapons work, bullet size is the size your bullet takes on-screen. Sort of like how a light gun works, if you are in the target area, you hit the target. With rapid-fire and shotguns, you get multiple bullets. The shotguns, alas, have such massive drift that you can barely hit anything with them. This is before you take into account the recoil of the shotguns and the magnum, which render fighting very difficult when you have to bring your crosshair down from the ceiling.

You're gradually lead down a path of having more and more automatic weapons in your arsenal, because these are the only weapons that have the least recoil, do the most damage, and can penetrate the tougher armors. You can move easier with a pistol, but you can with a knife too and that doesn't prevent you from having a machine gun. Rocket launchers are useful against early bosses, but after a certain point bosses just ignore rocket attacks. Like a sleep attack in a JRPG, you can't use the oddities against the enemies that you most need to use them against.

But in the moment to moment action, this is balanced. You go from having a variety of weapons until you end up replacing them all with automatic rifles of some sort. I would have liked a shotgun that didn't aim like crap or a sniper rifle. There's no real single shot, high damage weapon outside of the magnum and the rocket launchers, which makes it feel like it should be expanded. It's a very basic thing I'm surprised the game doesn't have.

So, despite seeming very simple at first glance, the game does some clever stuff with it, it's especially shocking when enemies start shooting at you. If the game has one real flaw beyond the awkward moving/aiming, it'd be that some boss fights are lazily made. Here's a simple 4x4 room or whatever and here's the boss. Bosses have the same behavior as every other enemy, but often they make it tricky by doing things you don't expect with them or in an area where this movement works in a different way than your average enemy.

Yeah, a zombie elephant.

As I said, enemies have very consistent traits. It doesn't matter if they're zombies, mutants or soldiers. Go after the player when spotted, attack/get hit, retreat, run away in a counter-clockwise, then go after the player, hoping to flank them. The thing is, it's not a terrible design despite it's simplicity, if you aren't in a hallway and against multiple enemies, which is most of the time, the plan will work. You have the advantage in that you have superior melee range and could shoot if desired, but this is limiting, of course.

You can see through fog two tiles away, three if an enemy is on the third. Enemies become alert at about four tiles and don't stop until some distance away, I can't be sure because I wasn't counting tiles when I was running away. You can really only tell if you're safe if the music changes back to the regular music. Huh, I guess switching between combat music and exploration music qualifies as a dynamic music system? Even if it is, it isn't the first, but it should be registering to me as something special even if it doesn't.

On the RPG side of things, the game is very simple. You get four (or so) stats that are raised with every level up...except attack power isn't actually raised by levelling up, but by killing certain boss enemies or using some objects. I'm sure there was a defensive stat that was being raised, but its effect was subtle enough that I never noticed it. Thus, the usual FPS/RPG hybrid problems of one side feeling tacked on.

It's just a very fun gameplay loop, even if individual components seem like they can fail. It can be annoying to move, and sometimes it's risky to chase after an enemy, but you get a short time to kill if you do. You still get that feeling of deep diving into a dungeon here, it's just that the further you go from guaranteed ammo the riskier it gets, fighting some enemies with a knife is risky and grinding just as much. It's the most I think I've had to strategize in a FPS before 1993, at least in combat.

K-Ko's surrogate little sister, Mariko.

K-Ko is an oddity as a player character because you could argue that she's the first Build-style protagonist, though her in-fight speech is somewhat limited. I also can't really imagine Duke or Lo Wang saying something like "owie" (what I choose to interpret "itai" or literally "painful" as) or "attacking". ("atare" which is literally just that) But we are talking about the first video game character to actually talk in-game, sometimes even commenting on in-game situations. Even if that situation is, you're lost.

Every time I try to think of a counter argument, I sort of hit a brick wall. In theory there's nothing preventing you having your protagonist talk through text only, but the only games that would qualify as that don't actually have that. The closest someone else does is Elm Knight, but that's not while the game is going. They stop dead to talk, which isn't really the spirit of things.

But in contrast to the honor of truly being first, I think K-Ko does something I don't think any female FPS protagonist has done since, feel feminine. I say this with two caveats, I haven't played every FPS with a female protagonist, and I might be biased since Japanese has more distinct male/female speech patterns. But, I really struggle to think of a good counter example. If I could remember Joesphine: Portrait of an Assassin I might say that, but I don't. Ion Fury has Shelly Harrison, but very little she says would be any different coming out of a man's mouth. And I think that this is very indication of modern voiced protagonists I've seen, so concerned with being tough that they feel interchangeable with men. I suppose women like that exist, but I thought writers were attempting to get away from writing women characters by slapping boobs on them.

I know that these sorts of characters were written to strongly contrast prop characters or characters who were feminine by virtue of being aggressively sexual. I think if you're writing a character and you write a character who has less personality than one who was barely intended to have one it's worse than not bothering at all. A character who you see all the time who tends to lean exclusively on one character trait can annoy, even if it's a game in which you constantly shoot zombies in the face.

Let's get back to K-Ko. I'd say she's a well-rounded character even if she doesn't really have an arc. I praised her aggression against people doing crazy things, but it isn't like she's constantly saying she'll kill people, just people performing zombie virus experiments. When she isn't talking to bad guys, she has a wide variety of emotions and responses befitting a real person. Which when I get down to it, is high praise for any video game protagonist.

There's a general vibe to this game that it's semi-professional. Better than an amateur work, but worse than a professional work. Enemies have one walking sprite and two or so attacking sprites. There's an impressive number of backgrounds, even animation and voice acting. Yet often the music plays over the voice acting, and you can't turn it off in cutscenes. I was going to turn off the music when I recorded the ending so people could hear the voice acting. I like what I can hear of it.

On the other hand if there's one aspect I found annoying, it was the HUD. We have, left to right, top to bottom:

• Ammo.
• A bar showing vaguely where enemies are.
• A compass.
• Battle Suit OS version.
• Location and results of attacking and defending.
• A scanner which tells you if you're within an enemy's range.
• Your life meter, which beeps constantly.
• Your gun.

It's not like a meme about modern HUD design, but it's close. I guess in that sense, it's pretty good for some people. But it is extremely busy in the moment to moment. You can hit enemies behind the text, of course, but it is annoying. Not as annoying as hearing a beep constantly in the background. I got used to it, but let's just say that I've spent enough time around heartrate monitors that it might just be me.

With that, to the rating.

Weapons:
A very nice selection of varied weapons, but lacks a few key components that would make it truly shine. 8/10

Enemies:
While behavior was set in stone, a lot of enemies had something about them that required an individual strategy...and a lot didn't. 5/10

Non-Enemies:
None.

Levels:
Doesn't take much advantage of the dungeon crawler design, but has it's moments of cleverness in-between simple corridors and tedious sewers. 5/10

Player Agency:
A very unique way of controlling things, which doesn't always work. I felt more frustrated by movement than by turning. Overshooting a turn was usually my fault. Overshooting walking never made much sense to me. 4/10

Interactivity:
Not much, really, you walk into things. I think pressing the walk button and not doing something technically activates it, but what's the difference? It's all part of the plot. 1/10

Atmosphere:
The game really made me buy into its vision of post-apocalyptic Tokyo...even if it really shouldn't be square like this. 8/10

Graphics:
Well-made, but not enough variety. I think I would have been okay without animated cutscenes if instead there were more sprites for the enemies. 5/10

Story:
Not really original, but well-done. 7/10

Sound/Music:
Poor sound mixing, with music being above everything else, sometimes slightly, sometimes to the point that you can't hear the sound. It's okay music, but this makes it slightly annoying. 4/10

That's 47, pretty high for this blog.

I recommend this game to the audience I expect there is for the game...which is a small amount. Memes about Japan being the country to truly continue Wizardry's legacy aside, most people learning the Japanese language are not interested in dungeon crawlers. Most people interested in weird old dungeon crawlers which could be said to also be FPS are not interested in learning Japanese. It would be an absolute miracle if this ever get translated, so I think this has appeal to about a hundred people maximum. It would also be ripe for a remake, really, all the game needs to do is improve the movement and aiming system.

As I mentioned last time, this was based on a movie, which I find utterly bizarre. Starring famed Japanese wrestler Cutie Suzuki (explaining the wrestling references) and directed by Kazuo Komizu, who is primarily known for trash. I found a VHS rip, imitating how someone would have watched this. What's even more bizarre are the trailers. Maybe I just skip over what little trailers I see these days too much, but a combination of Summertime Blues, No Retreat No Surrender and Mr. Frost are not what I expect to see before a zombie film.

Before the film, there's a trailer for the game. It's clearly not yet finished, I see a bunch of situations that couldn't happen in the game and some monster sprites that weren't used. I get the feeling that the heartbeat thing was added somewhat last minute.

It's a very odd film. It's a low-budget zombie film, at least in theory, yet outside of a crappy shot of the meteor falling to Earth and 1992 3D graphics, it doesn't seem low budget. I've seen higher budget films with less production values to them, there's a lot of different locations, and a lot of people on-screen in decent costumes. It also plays more like a slightly more violent The Omega Man, the zombies are not entirely mindless. They use tools, like guns, and they don't always eat people where they grab them. You also don't see much of people getting eaten on-screen.

It also adds in some more context the game didn't get across. Everyone is infected with the zombie virus, get shot, get back up and eat people. The evil military, it seems, has zombie soldiers, not just the mutants. This explains the gun-wielding zombies, but should have been mentioned in-game, because none of the hostiles with guns look like zombies, really.

What is amusing, is that a lot of what the game has is something that happened in the movie. They might have made up most of the guns, but K-Ko really does pick up a ton of weapons in the movie. The fight against W? He's one of four mutants the evil military have. "Boss" zombies dodge rockets, of all the things to copy. Quite a few zombies are clearly based on ones seen in the movie. A lot doesn't, refugee camps don't really show up in the movie, outside of one getting slaughtered and most of the action is above-ground, with a group of punks who make deliveries throughout the quarantine zone. There's also no wrestling moves put in because the lead actress is a wrestler.

Oddly, the film seems to be setting up the plot of the game. I guess the game is then a sequel, but then we don't see K-Ko's friend from this film in the game. It also covers a lot of the same ground, and has Colonel Kirihara alive...unless he's alive in this game too and I just assumed he was dead. Probably alive then. Back to the game being a remake/sequel, well, that seems like a problem with more than a few games over the years.

Next time, American FPS oddities.