tsukiyo ni saraba
a game by taito
produced by blue moon studios
a review by takeru amazawa
1/2

Rarely do we see such noble, virtuous videogames. Blue Moon Studio's Tsukiyo ni saraba makes no pretenses about what it is and who it is for. It is as straight to the point as a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. It is as smartly and poetically produced as a John Woo action sequence is choreographed, and its stages are as well arranged as any big band jazz ensemble piece. I write this review now, months after first playing the game, because I feel I didn't give it a fair chance (I reviewed it in capsule form in a magazine taken to publishing capsule reviews of such games) the first time around. Months after its release and initial exile to my bookshelf (where I keep all my games), I was one day, out of the blue, inspired to take the game out and play it again, and find joy in its linearity.

Tsukiyo ni saraba belongs to the long-lost genre of "Taito Arcade Action Game." It is very much in the spirit of Rastan Saga and Light Bringer, in that you want to keep inserting coins to continue, even though that's not an option, and moment and moment again recalls the simplistic joy of Elevator Action Returns. In that game, you could always see more than a normal human can see -- two floors above and two floors below your gun-toting character. From a side-view perspective, you see a cross-section of an office building, which for some ungodly reason your super spy character has grapple-hooked to the top of and is working his way down. If his objective is the bottom floor, why not just walk in from street level? We can only ask these questions on paper, because when we're playing the game, we're having so much fun moving down that building floor-by-floor that we don't question things.

Tsukiyo ni saraba is very much a gun action game. The back of the box reads, in Japanese, "What you hold in your hands . . . is the revolution of the gun-action genre." They use those exact words. I'm not making that up. I take it a lot of people who picked up that box and read those words also saw the 6,000-yen price tag, and thought that they'd rather buy a well-established concept than donate to a revolution, and this is why Tsukiyo ni saraba didn't sell worth a damn. In truth, as a revolution, it is getting off to a bit of a slow start. Let's not forget that revolutions often begin with political martyrs, much screaming, and barricades of government buildings. Tsukiyo ni saraba at least gets the barricades right -- in just the second stage, when you're trying to aim at very, really bad men in black suits who are shooting you with pistols and submachine rifles, you might accidentally keep targeting parked cars in the narrow alley and blowing yourself up. This is frustrating. The targeting never seems to go where you want it to go. I would, now, think to pass this off as a simulative element of the chaos of a close-quarters gunfighht in a tight alleyway in Rome. However, at the time I first played the game, after gliding through the butter-smooth first stage, it was the reason I put the game down, swearing to never play it again. Besides, back then, I'd just gotten Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song, and that was far more tempting.

The gun action in Tsukiyo ni saraba is certainly different from the gun action in, say, Halo: Combat Evolved. In Halo, we aim the gun using the Xbox's right analog stick. This is to indicate that, when at some point in the indiscernable future Combat finally Evolves, human beings are going to need to squint and wave their arms around like Ryo Hazuki's hand in the dart minigame of Shenmue, until we finally are pointing at something we can shoot. Tsukiyo ni saraba puts its hands right on the target and chokes it to death, and the result is a smooth play. Using the left analog stick to move your character (in a third-person view) and the right analog stick to swing around the camera, get yourself behind walls that will prevent you from dying at the hands of each stage's onslaught of anonymous gun-bearing men in black suits and shades. Sometimes guys pop out of windows to shoot at you. When you're facing the general direction of a foe, you press the R1 button to aim at him. While holding the R1 button, you press the square button to shoot him. Press it again and again to shoot him again and again. This might cause you to run out of bullets. At this time, press down on the control pad to drop your empty clips and reload. This takes a second of time -- the camera zooms in and swirls around you like you're Chow Yun-Fat, at these times -- and this is the kind of game where a second isn't granted lightly. So do find some safety, first. The best way to play this game is to avoid running out of bullets so often, even though they're infinite. There is a more elegant way to kill enemies, one shot at a time, and that's to shoot them in the head. Now, as this game has no precision aiming a la Halo, you might ask, how does one shoot a man in the head? Well, this is where the imagination element comes into play. When you press the R1 button to target an enemy, a green crosshair appears around him. The crosshair then constricts and relaxes repeatedly and irregularly, beating like a heart with a murmur. At its most constricted, the crosshair turns red for a piece of an instant. Hit the square button at just this partial instant and you will score a one-hit kill, which the game calls a "critical shoot [sic]." If you have a good sense of irregular rhythms and time signatures (maybe you play in a mathrock band, I don't know), this will all seem rather blase on paper; however, in practice, as you're shooting wave after wave, tens upon tens of bad guys, to successfully score more than three critical shots in a row makes you feel like Chow Yun Fat.

My apologies for continually invoking Mr. Fat's name -- however, the game is certainly asking for it in more ways than one. Pressing the X button makes you jump, and jumping throws things into slow motion. Pressing the L1 button in conjuction with a direction on the analog stick throws your character into an especially John Woo-y evasion cartwheel, which, despite leaving you wide open to get shot in the face when you land, renders you invincible while you're in the air. Use it to land behind a barricade and then reload, and you'll get two snappy, panning-and-tilting, swirling and twirling, slow-motion-filled Hong Kong action shots in a row. Do this all while in bullet-time (activated with the triangle button), and you'll score a triple feature. It's interesting to note that, in this game, bullet time is not a cure-all. It's not what it is in, say, Max Payne, where being able to see your five opponents' bullets as they come at you meanns your victory. In Max Payne, you have to aim using a mouse or an analog stick, showing that Max is undoubtedly a man of the future. The battles in Max Payne are personal, gritty, one-on-ten affairs. Tsukiyo ni saraba pits our hero, Crow, against hundreds of guys at a time. Max Payne is the videogame version of the final showdown in a noir flick; Tsukiyo ni saraba is the videogame version of Max Payne. Bullet time makes it so that the crosshair stays red far longer than it normally seems like it would prefer to. This means you may get ten one-hit kills in a row without really meaning to, meaning that with a little effort, bullet time can make you feel like a Hong Kong action superstar.

Stages are all fairly similar. You begin standing in an isolated square somewhere at the dead end of a street, somewhere our hero has little reason to be, much less be able to be, and you've got your guns at your sides. Soon, it becomes evident where the bad guys are. This is your cue to run -- and run you do -- toward them, shooting. Sometimes they flood out of open doors onto bridges, a whole conga-line of them, each man identical to all the others, all of them aiming right down at you and shooting. Being able to keep up a string of one-hit kills in a case like this requires the gaming-skill equivalent of a poker face.

Sometimes, there are stages where you merely have to stand your ground. These are superb. The boss of the first chapter, for example, is a man with many friends. Before he'll show up and fight you, you have to fight his friends. They must be good friends, because they're willing to throw their lives away in the name of their friend's enemy's one-hit-kill-chain experiment. You stand behind a wall that sits in the center of a circular map. There are other walls around this circular plaza. There are eight breaks, total, in the circular wall. The enemies shuffle in through one of those breaks at a time, usually in that patented conga-line formation. Using your radar, you determine where the enemies are, and turn around to blast them before they blast you. Should you miss one of the enemies in the line, your chances of missing another are increased, and before you know it, you might have missed four enemies, and there are already twenty more coming in behind you. You slide down the slope until the leftovers number more than twenty, and you're cartwheeling around trying to find a safe place to reload your gun.

What's most wonderful about this game's play, I figure, is how it treats all the game-like elements. The radar, for example -- does our protagonist have a radar embedded in his jacket somewhere? Of course not -- in the case of the circular plaza, the radar can be projecting, say, his hitman's intuition, his Spider Sense, so to speak. Why do the enemies run in a line, like enemies in Ikaruga might? That they all wear the same clothes only makes the act look silly. Yet, when all is said and done, it's not silly. It's just being a videogame, and it's not ashamed of that. It is very much about lines, and sweeps, and dodging, and prudent shooting. It is of the type of rare, classical videogame that looks easy to the bystander if the player is skilled, and looks like an exercise in futility if the player doesn't know what he's doing. Ikaruga, with its simple-to-judge top-down view of the action, is mysteriously capable of looking impossible even at the hands of a godly player, which is what makes it so damned entertaining as performance art. Tsukiyo ni saraba is not such a work; yet it isn't trying to be. Ikaruga sacrificed story for fusion; Tsukiyo ni saraba has wonderful character designs and polished graphics, and it doesn't want to waste them.

So we end up with a little "adventure mode" between stages. We click on locations on a map, and talk to people. In fact, clicking on a location on a map is the second thing we do in this game. The first thing is reading a dialogue between Crow and his big brother and fellow hitman. Then we click on the gun shop, and we're into the training mode. Soon, we're clicking all over the place, going back and forth from our apartment to bars and cafes, until eventually we meet the guy who wants to challenge us to a duel, which results in the first computer-generated cut-scene, which digresses into the first full-blown action stage. When the first chapter crescendoes and finishes, the second begins, in our apartment again. Then we go to the bar, and meet another guy, this guy being purple-haired and of an odd sort. The computer-generated cut-scene shows him crossing an empty street to talk to Crow. A car comes out of nowhere, striking him flat with little fanfare. Crow thinks, "Huh..." and then, the guy rises up out of the street, saying, "You thought that did me in? You should know, I have lightning reflexes." He then steps back, and a van's back doors slide open, and ten guys in black suits jump out. "Let's see if you can handle these guys. Then we'll talk." Elegantly, he's set up as a character; the game's writers felt little need to characterize him further. It does leave a little befuddlement scattered on the floor, though, as to why everyone in this game seems to approach the mandatory Hong-Kong-action-picture staple of "bad guy leaves henchmen to handle hero" with the gusto of one Pokemon trainer or Yu-Gi-Oh! master berating another for not petting his Charizard enough. I suppose this is because the Japanese are not the Chinese, and they don't have the same ferocious edge and internal conflicts in their modern past to lend authenticity to their honest-to-god attempts at creating gunplay tension. Either that, or the game is just too giddy about its gun-action revolution to try to be sensible. Its stages are not unlike maps in Advance Wars, each element placed with doting care, so much care that it's impossible for the game to have a good story. Tsukiyo ni saraba is, at its core, a hardcore action videogame, yet, in order for it to work, it needs to carry off the polished, airbrushed, clean aesthetic of a slow-motion-heavy Hong Kong action movie (something not yet done correctly in videogames); yet, as a hardcore videogame, though it can say "bang" and "boom" in rich, Shakespearian tones, it cannot be bothered to otherwise speak coherently. It's blubbering, and rambling, and because we can shoot so many things while it's doing so, we mangae to ignore the dumb parts. Either way, as it begins, the hero of this Japanese-written game is an Irish man in Italy, so maybe authenticity wasn't even an aim. The story, in its final, longest chapter, moves to Tokyo, Japan, and it gains a layer of polish in this stage that it feels almost as though it has died and been reincarnated as a ninja warlord.



I mentioned the difficulty earlier. I will mention it again: it is too difficult. What's more, there are multiple difficulty settings, yet they are not selectable in the purest sense. You start the game on "normal," and if you get enough high ranks, you get the opportunity to turn the game up to "hard." Should you lose a battle too many times in a row, it will offer you the option "Continue Easy," and eventually "Continue Very Easy," each of these positioned directly below "Continue," so that choosing one of them feels like a defeat. I'll admit that I slid the game into "Very Easy," and even then it was pretty hard. Toward the end of the game, it feels like victory in a single play of a stage is just not possible. It was in this stage that it gained the nostalgic sheen of an old Taito arcade game. I remembered Legend of Kage, with your ninja who jumps three screens high, landing in treetops. Why wasn't that mechanic repeated in other games, I wondered at the time. I realize it's because it would have gotten worn out. Legend of Kage, in its final stages, is a very difficult videogame because it places dozens of projectiling opponents in the most devious places. It is as though the designers of that game figured out what the people behind Final Fantasy so successfully pretend they don't understand: make that imp attack that guy, and then the party won't be able to heal. It's wonderful, if you like a challenge, and befuddling if you just want to see the ending, which really isn't anything to write home about, anyway. Tsukiyo ni saraba has no three-screen-high-jump command; its most player-pleasing mechanic lies in shooting and shooting alone. When it reaches its Legend of Kage-esque climax, it is no more impressive than it was in the beginning. It is only more ferocious. As we say over here, "The tiger cub has grown up, into a tiger." In other words, it is both wonderful to behold and something entirely suspected.

I recommend this game despite its cliche Hong-Kong-flick storyline, its playful simplicity, and its raging difficulty because it gives me this peculiar feeling that this is what all games would look and play like if NEC's PC Engine, home of Ninja Spirit and numerous Falcom RPGs where your player character doesn't attack enemies so much as just run into them, had quite impossibly won the 16-bit console wars. The game is as focused as Devil's Crush (which is a pinball game, and therefore pretty focused) and as heavy as any arcade shooter, yet, at the same time, it uses the home console's power to the fullest to deliver a game that looks and sounds acceptable to market standards. It is a "hardcore" videogame, yet it stars characters who look like underwear models in full clothing, and it yearns for (even accidental) mass appeal.

So why didn't it sell? At all? That's a wonderful question. My opinion as a game critic and game analyst is informed by many trips to many arcades, where games like Mushihimesama, being released on PS2 soonto the sweaty masses, are played and revered above all others. The people who play these "hardcore games" play them because they are in love with the era that birthed them. They are like the baby goose -- gosling -- who believes a garden hose is his mother because it was the first thing he saw upon hatching. I am not denying that there is something bordering on art behind the scenes of two-dimensional top-down shooting games. I'm just lamenting that the genre's fans would scarcely think twice about trying something different. Tsukiyo ni saraba is a non-issue to them, because it's about people running on foot, features handguns that do not gleam as though made of silver and men whose hair is not white or in a pompadour, does not star a big-breasted little girl riding on a flying beetle, and is therefore "trying too hard." Amazing how that works out, sometimes.

In light of Taito's up and coming Taito Memories collection, I suggest you try out Tsukiyo ni Saraba. It is very much proof that the type of game Taito made, sold, and popularized ever since the original Space Invaders, the kind of game that gets harder if you don't shoot everything, can be translated into the current generation using modern spiffy graphics and a three-dimensional camera. Taito is on the verge of dying a depressing hospital-bed-death, as it stands, and though urging you to purchase this game will do little to save them (it's already been reduced to 1400 yen at Bic Camera, meaning that Bic Camera and other large chains will be more wary of original Taito releases in the future), if you play it, you will believe in a little something, which might be better for everyone, anyway.

In closing, I can't help remarking on the game's title: Tsukiyo ni saraba means, roughly "Farewell to moonlit nights." This marks the first time I can recall off hand that a videogame title has sounded like it would be better on an independent film about a Korean man losing his eyesight. The Japanese has a poetic ring to it, and everything. Normally Japanese game titles sound like they either belong to animated films (Mushihimesama), serve to describe in two words the exact type of action contained therein (Street Fighter) or some combination of the above, with some piece of mathematical notation and a numeral affixed (Street Fighter Alpha 3). I ask you, how many game titles sound like they could, reasonably, be the titles of movies (movies based on games or games based on movies do not count)? Tsukiyo ni saraba, as an original work, wins an auspicious honor. Though the story does eventually get around to justifying this title, from the start, it exhibits a wonderful pull on the player. Too bad most players will give up an hour in and never play it again.



And I did it! I reviewed this game without mentioning that Tsukio ni saraba's music is composed by Yasunori Mitsuda. Yes, Yasunori Chrono Cross Mitsuda. Yes, Yasunori Xenosaga I not II Mitsuda. Yes, the very same Yasunori Mitsuda who was rumored to have composed the music in Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter, when it was really Hitoshi Sakimoto. Mitsuda's music in Tsukiyo ni saraba, mentioned virtually nowhere else on the internet and hailed by virtually no one in the entire world as virtually anything, is quite possibly the greatest music ever written. (Slight exagerration.) From the opening video it grabs you by the throat and screams in your face the way Chrono Cross did. Take all that you read above about this game's learning curve and accessibility with a grain of salt -- the opening music is such a throat-grabber that it's baffling it could accompany an even halfway-competent full-motion video (the video is, in reality, three-halves competent) and not sell a hundred thousand copies, at least, on the music alone. Maybe it's because there's no violin solo, this time.

The genre of Tsukiyo ni saraba's music is most definitely big-band jazz. Imagine the opening theme of "Cowboy Bebop," trimmed down, given something of a spare electronic beat, and adapted for optimal use in a videogame. That the horn section (New Day Horns, who have been touring recently with Japanese rock star Kiyoshiro Iwamano) includes "Cowboy Bebop" genius composer Yoko Kanno herself on saxophone might shock some readers, who will no doubt be amazed this game flew in under their radar. It is permissable to repent and buy this game now. It is worth it for the music alone. The compositions are varied and eclectic, yet never stray too far from the big-band jazz genre standard, and each one of them is polished like a little jewel. That cheery, crazy band kicks up at the start of an electric, run-for-the-prize shoot-em-all stage, and you can't help feeling energized.

So maybe that's why this game didn't sell in Japan -- for the same reason only three other Japanese people I've ever met have heard of "Cowboy Bebop." The Japanese just don't like big-band jazz accompanying their bang-bang gunplay. Even the otakus don't want to touch it. Tim Rogers said once that, listening to current Japanese R&B pop music, you'd get the idea that they have some sort of aversion to making good music, and that they ostracize everyone who even tries. Tsukiyo ni saraba may very well be the victim of this sick phenomenon at work. So, overseas readers, do your part and make the other side of this sick phenomenon -- that is, the part that dictates people in America and Europe actually get what makes "Cowboy Bebop" so wonderful -- and buy this game now.

--takeru amazawa

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