Pasokon Retro is our regular look back at the early years of Japanese PC gaming, encoming everything from specialist '80s computers to the happy days of Windows XP.
I made the mistake of trying to organise my heaving gaming shelves a few weeks ago, a seemingly benign task that has quickly grown into an all-out war with the laws of three dimensional space. Nothing fits anywhere, not even the exact spot it used to sit in when I pulled it off a bookcase a moment earlier. Every time I put one thing away two more appear somewhere else. I'm scowling at gigantic limited edition boxes and cursing whenever another old PC game lands on my head.
The one thing in this chaos I'm not mad at is a small pile of doujin game demo CDs. Their slim plastic slips fit just about anywhere, making them easy to store. In fact they're so easy to store that someone could put them away and then accidentally forget all about them until—just to pluck one weird example out of thin air—they decided to embark upon an overambitious tidying spree. Especially when one of them is nothing more than a plain white CD-R with the words "Action RPG (Temp) C81 Demo Version" printed on a thin strip of paper sitting in front of the CD.
C81, aka the 81st entry of biannual Japanese fan convention Comiket, took place in 2011. This mysterious disc is almost 15 years old. I suddenly have a nameless, artless game created by nobody in my hands. This is how magical adventures start.
Horror movies, too.
So, which will result from… whatever this is? A quick poke around the disc reveals very little, the tiny included .zip file—not even 7MB in size—simply named "ARPG_C81". Seven megabytes may not be enough to hold a motion captured actor's 4K eyeball reflection texture these days, but by old doujin standards that's plenty of space for an action RPG. To put this file size into perspective, Square's SNES classic Secret of Mana and its sequel take up about that much digital space combined. This CD-R could hold something truly wonderful.
Or awful. A terrible virus. Some weird lengthy ramble about someone's ex. Or something that isn't deliberately malicious, but still includes the "fun" kind of bugs from an amateur attempt to make a whole game. Maybe uninstalling it removes vital system files in the process—hey, it's happened before. I briefly feel like a mouse rushing past a "free cheese here" sign and straight into a cat's maw, and then decide that if something does go wrong I'll just pretend this article was always supposed to be a retro game safety PSA and it all happened on purpose.
Amongst the thankfully virus-free unzipped files is a plain text ree. There's still no name for the game inside, but I do now have the author's description of their work: "This game is an action RPG." Great. Thanks. Top marks for consistency, if nothing else.
A link to the developer's website is included at the bottom. They're called Foxtail, and not even they acknowledge this disc's existence. There's no name on the title screen either. There's no title screen at all, in fact. Just a plain box asking if I want to start or continue.
It's something of a relief when the game begins and it does turn out to be a real game and not some PC-mangling monster or horrific fever dream I've invented after inhaling too much freshly disturbed shelf dust. The pixel art's crisp and detailed even if the sight of a single slime in a boxy room isn't flooding my body with adrenaline. I use WASD to move my little hero about, my mouse to smoothly rotate them, and attack with a click. This straightforward system at least controls perfectly, and my meaningless victory over a few blobby blue pixels makes me want to cheer. I've dabbled in casual coding over the years, from basic BASIC to the PICO-8 setting Celeste debuted on, and I know that even getting something as simple as this working is never as easy as it looks.
The next square room doubles the trouble, throwing two slimes at me at once, and I hope you're sitting down because you won't believe what the room after held: three slimes. No, really.
This simplicity gives me enough free time to type out some undeserved sarcastic notes as I play. I can get comfortable, relax as I go about my blob-bothering, and even devote some of my attention to the UI. There's a blue "ST" bar sandwiched between the usual HP and MP gauges, and it appears to be some sort of stamina gauge. It empties when I swing my sword, automatically refills when I take a break, and stops my character attacking at all when there's nothing in it. I can't wildly hack away at anything I see and have to be careful to make every swing count or else I'm going to leave myself wide open to counterattacks. This stamina system isn't exactly groundbreaking, but it's still a bit ahead of the curve. Comiket 81 was held just months after FromSoftware released Dark Souls in 2011, which eventually made stamina management much more common in action RPGs.
This demo may not have a name, but it does have some clever ideas.
Like monster aggro ranges and scared sorcerers. Before long I'm carefully luring slimes away from fireball-flinging mages so I don't get burnt to a crisp as I deal with them and then rush in afterwards, the spellcaster fleeing into a corner the instant I get too close for comfort.
Obviously this enemy behaviour is not going to have any major… or minor, to be fair, RPG developers quaking in their Leather Boots of Game Making +1, but it's enough to give me some genuine strategic options to work with, and my enemies a bit of personality too; slimes are pretty mindless and will pursue me until one of us dies, while humanoid opponents attack with a bit more thought and skill.
After a few minutes these bland open box rooms eventually give way to more confidently created S-shaped mazes, enemies who lunge at me with their swords, and big slimes that split into a trio of smaller slimes. I'm having a good time. So much so that I honestly get upset when I finally die and get sent back to what is technically the title screen, dust myself off, and start again.
With a little practice I eventually clear the game's 20 stages of gently evolving RPG-lite action and reach the end: a stone tablet with a simple "That's it, thank you for playing" message inscribed on it.
No no, nameless action RPG, thank you.
I enjoyed my time with this little action RPG, a game probably only a handful of people in the world have ever seen. The screenshots aren't exactly wallpaper material, the only music is one tune on a loop, and I still have absolutely no idea what to call it, but the lack of polish only makes it feel personal. Handcrafted. Homemade. There's heart and hope in here, a spark of someone's imagination shared with the world.
It looks like the concept never went any further than this CD-R (not that it's easy to search for information on a game with no name) but I'm grateful for its existence. Thank you for a fun day, Foxtail. I hope you're still out there making marvelous unfinished micro games just like this one, and if you are I hope I don't have to wait until I tidy my shelves up again before I find them.
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