As extensively covered as the PS1 library is, the Japanese PS1 library is still a relatively untapped well of brilliance and nonsense.
Suzuki Bakuhatsu
Our first game of the day stars what may be the unluckiest person in Japan. Released by Enix in 2000, this puzzle game is about the titular Suzuki: a woman simply trying to go about her day — only to run into bombs everywhere she goes. The next time your bus absolutely reeks of arse, remember Suzuki.
It starts with a bomb hidden in an orange before escalating into further insanity, with microscopic bombs hidden in iced coffee, and bombs that can evaporate the ocean or destroy the planet. But fortunately for Suzuki, she happens to be quite handy at disarming the things, which forms Suzuki Bakuhatsu’s core gameplay.
The puzzles of this game revolve around first dismantling a bomb, and then cutting the right wire.
Sounds simple enough, but bomb disposal is difficult and dangerous for a reason. Bombs often have traps that will set them off if screws aren’t removed in a certain way, and much of the game revolves around strategizing the correct way to remove a bomb’s casing without blowing Suzuki to kingdom come.
Though a relatively short game, Suzuki Bakuhatsu has some replayability. The fourth stage onwards branches out into multiple paths to pick from, meaning multiple playthroughs are needed to see every stage.
Suzuki Bakuhatsu may have been a challenging and innovative puzzle game, but its fate is just as unfortunate as its protagonist’s. You see, Enix released it just before their then-rival Square put out Final Fantasy IX. How devilishly daft.
Devilman
Whenever a manga or anime becomes a big hit, you can bet that a video game adaptation (or over 100) will eventually follow. Devilman for the PS1 deserves notice for how it stands out from the pack. You’ll be spending its entire first act as a survival horror game.
This adaptation mostly follows the source material’s plot, though it doesn’t cover the whole story. You are Akira Fudo, a timid and meek teenager taken to a mansion by his friend Ryo Asuka. Following the death of Ryo’s father, Akira must take the powers of a demon to fight back against an incoming demon invasion.
To do that, however, Akira must sneak his way through a decrepit mansion, avoiding demons and solving puzzles. There’s some clever and thoughtful mechanics at play here, such as a stamina system that will briefly immobilize Akira if he tires out, as well as a basic noise system where loudly running on wooden floors will attract the demon stalking Akira.
Those who have experience with the source material will know that Akira doesn’t remain helpless for long, as he fuses with the demon Amon and gains the power to fight back against the chaos. The rest of Devilman becomes a beat ‘em up game where Akira lays the smackdown on every enemy in sight, and can transform for a power boost.
Though dated and clunky by today’s standards, few anime-based games delve into survival horror like Devilman does — and even fewer are bold enough to shift genre mid-way through and never look back.
Linda Cube Again
How do we even begin to describe this one?
Linda Cube — originally released for the PC Engine CD before coming to PS1 as Linda Cube Again — is a turn-based RPG set in Neo Kenya, a world set to be destroyed in eight years by a giant meteor. Protagonist Ken and his companion Linda are tasked with gathering two of every animal, and bringing them onboard the Astro Ark before the inevitable end. It’s like Pokemon with much bigger stakes than getting children on the job ladder.
Combat is anything but derivative, as battles have enemies surrounding the player from up to four different directions. In addition to benefits like blocking your escape or boosting their critical hit rate, enemies on each side also gain stat boosts depending on terrain.
Since your mission is to capture them, killing enemies is a bit of a no go. Capturing creatures requires you to get their HP as close to exactly zero as possible; dealing too much damage kills them outright, losing you any potential rewards, including EXP.
As for the story, well…there’s three of them. The three scenarios, which are alternate timelines, all follow the same basic premise, but all of them develop in wildly different directions. Although Ken and Linda being lovers is a constant, the cast all have differing roles and relationships between the three scenarios.
If it’s one thing they’ve all got in common, though, it’s a surreal, absurdist blend of themes like conservation, power dynamics, and socioeconomic problems, and jokes like Linda insulting Ken for being level 1.
Conceived as an antithesis to director Shoji Masuda’s past work, which was far more conventional, Linda Cube is surreal and kinda profound, in ways that the west likely wouldn’t have been ready for in the 90s. Sorry to bug you, we got another Japan only PS1 game coming up.
Yakiniku Bugyou
Released in 2001, Yakiniku Bugyou is an arcadey cooking sim made to promote Gyu-Kaku, a Japanese yakiniku restaurant. Yakiniku is an eastern style of barbecue. In Japan, restaurants will serve guests raw ingredients, and diners cook their own food using a grill built into the table.
Yakiniku Bugyou takes this style of cuisine and turns it into a simple, yet challenging game. As the master of the grill, your task is to serve food to the three customers at your table. Each person has a profile and icons showing what foods they like or don’t like. You’ll have to properly manage every piece of meat or vegetable on the grill, and serve them appropriately.
Food cooks faster towards the center of the grill, and a simple preview on the left shows what food items will show up on the “board” next. Things move fast: not only is there a traditional time limit, guests have a satisfaction meter that drains while you keep them waiting. Managing where your food is placed is just as important as your timing, because just like real life, guests have different preferences for their meat, from rare to well-done.
Reach the seventh stage, and you’ll even have a bonafide boss fight — a one-on-one match where your goal is to cook for the restaurant’s branch owner, who is a bit of a picky eater. And if you’re hungry for more, a multiplayer mode lets you go head to head against a friend to see who can better serve their guests. Right, let’s change lanes to something a bit different,
Serial Experiments Lain
If you’re a fan of the avant-garde, you might have heard of Serial Experiments Lain. It’s a mind-bender of an anime where its titular protagonist, Lain, gradually becomes enveloped in a bizarre conspiracy as she delves further into the Wired. It’s essentially the internet with less TikTok dances. Bummer.
What you might not be aware of is the fact that Lain was conceived as a multimedia franchise, with several artbooks, soundtracks, a short manga, and even a PS1 game. And true to the nature of this franchise, Serial Experiments Lain for the PS1 is anything but a traditional video game.
When you boot it up, you’ll be greeted by an avatar of Lain, surrounded by a cylinder of different menu nodes. Not all of these are immediately accessible, but as you explore the options available to you, the nature of the game becomes clear. You see, instead of following the anime’s storyline, Serial Experiments Lain is more about delving into its protagonist’s psyche, and what you’re looking at is a set of materials that cover Lain’s therapy sessions.
These materials include fully voiced conversations between Lain and her therapist Touko, the personal diary entries of both characters, diagnosis reports from Touko, and animated scenes produced by the same studio who worked on the anime.
Though piecing together the intriguing story and characters can be a pain due to the game’s obtuse structure, it’s still well worth a look. If this sounds like an old school way to visit a website to promote an upcoming movie, you’d be kinda right! A fan translation group has ported the whole thing to web browsers, where it can be played in a variety of languages, including English.
Ancient Roman – Power of the Dark Side
SnowyAria, the project lead of this game’s fan translation, had this to say in a Time Extension interview:
“Normally, kusoge (awful games) have a couple of things they do well, but fail to really bring it all together. Ancient Roman is one of the few where they just did everything wrong.”
Makes for a good first impression, doesn’t it?
Ancient Roman is a JRPG starring Kai Orpheus, a slave working in the mines who eventually manages to find freedom before setting out on an adventure.
It all sounds innocent and typical enough, but not only does Ancient Roman fail to weave a compelling tapestry out of what it’s been given, it’s also just outright broken as a game. Its story is incoherent, and the visuals look downright ugly. The turn-based combat has balancing issues, like the sleep status being disproportionately powerful.
Speaking of ailments, if anyone is afflicted by one, you won’t even know it until you see the victim taking damage or skipping turns, because there’s zero indication otherwise.
Thanks to the MIDI format somehow mismatching instruments for every note, the music is also an assault on the senses. Sound effects cause lag every time they’re played, because the sound files are ten seconds long regardless of the sound’s actual length, and the PS1 has to load it all every single time.
Bringing all of these unbelievable flaws together creates a cacophony of utter bollocks, one worth playing — or watching on YouTube — solely to see just how bad it gets. But for now, let’s race on over to a much better RPG.
Racing Lagoon
Open-world racing games may be all the rage these days, but how about a racing RPG? In 1999, Squaresoft gave us just that. Racing Lagoon is a full-blown racing role-player, complete with a 30-hour story and random encounters that award experience and money. Set in Yokohama in 1999, Racing Lagoon is the story of Sho Akasaki, who aims to find the truth behind an event ten years ago known as the Fastest Legend.
The hallmarks of a 90s RPG are all here, from the melodrama to the overworld map. Encounters take the form of other cars, which initiate races on contact. Regardless if you win or lose, your car will gain experience for its body, chassis, and engine; leveling these categories up opens new slots to equip upgrades.
There’s still plenty of incentive to take random encounters seriously in this game, though, as victory grants you reward points, which can be spent to steal a rival car’s parts when you win a race. They can also do the same to you if you lose, and while it’s random, the odds of getting your parts stolen are high enough to get you to sit forward and lock the hell in,
Now, to be fair, Racing Lagoon’s controls and physics are somewhat overly sensitive and exaggerated, and they’ll take some time to adjust to. Do so, however, and you’ll find an underrated RPG gem with an atmosphere and sense of style that Square hasn’t even attempted to replicate in the decades since.
Oh No!
Jointly produced by Asmik Ace and the Tokyo Broadcasting System, this endless runner just might be even more of a fever dream than Pepsiman.
Released on November 16, 2000 in Japan, Oh No is set entirely during a single day in the life of Brada Oono, an elementary school student and member of the exceptionally eccentric Oono family. Accompanying him are his younger brother Junior, and cousin San-chan, in a story narrated by famous TV anchor Shiro Suzuki, who treats the role with absolute dead seriousness.
Gameplay has you take control of the members of the Oono family as they run through an increasingly surreal gauntlet of levels filled with obstacles. They all share an HP gauge, which continually drains, and is refilled by the burgers scattered throughout the level. But beware; aside from having to avoid obstacles like pedestrians and terrain obstructions, there are also raw fish burgers that deal damage if touched.
Further complicating matters is the fact that you control up to four characters at once. The family will move through the stage in either a wide or narrow formation, which you can switch at the press of a button. If even one member of the group falls too far behind or hits a lethal obstacle like bottomless pits, it’s an instant game over.
Regardless of whether you can even understand what’s going on, one thing will be clear by the time you finish Oh No. Between its sexually-charged humor, eccentric art style, and the use of a real-life TV anchor as a narrator, Oh No is an unabashedly Japanese game, one steeped in the country’s cultural idiosyncrasies that was never going to leave its home country.
Baroque
Released in 1998 for the Sega Saturn and 1999 for the PS1, Baroque is a game ahead of its time. Developed by Sting Entertainment, this is an incredibly atmospheric post-apocalyptic first-person roguelike RPG — quite a mouthful.
You’ll start each run of the Neuro Tower with a rifle, and have to scavenge for further weapons, items, and equipment. And naturally, if you die to one of the many grotesqueries wandering the tower, you’ll lose everything, including your current level and stats.
Combat is simplistic, and you’ve also got tank controls to wrestle with. But Baroque also puts an interesting spin on the proceedings both in and out of Neuro Tower. For one, you’ve got both a health bar and a vitality bar, and the latter is constantly draining. As long as you’ve still got vitality, your health will continue to slowly regenerate — but once vitality runs out, your health begins to drain. Enemies drop items that restore vitality, which incentivizes aggression to stay alive.
While the PS1 and Saturn versions of Baroque never made it west, a remake for the PS2 and Wii did receive a localization. Unfortunately, the remake’s visual overhaul, gameplay changes, and added content only bog down the experience, with the game losing the incredible atmosphere of the original versions.
Fortunately for purists, both the PS1 and Sega Saturn versions of Baroque have fan translations available. But right now, you’re probably in the mood for a tonic after all that dungeon crawling.
Atelier Marie
Atelier Marie throws typical 90s RPG convention out of the window. It puts us in the shoes of a teenage girl struggling to pass her classes at a magic academy. Conceived as a way to appeal to gaming’s growing female audience, protagonist Marie is a clumsy student whose lackluster performance has put her in danger of not being able to graduate.
Her instructor, Ingrid, comes up with a last ditch attempt to get Marie’s academic performance up to snuff: Marie will get her own alchemy workshop, and must use it to synthesize a high quality item within five years.
As Marie, you’ll be synthesizing items for townsfolk, as well as going out on expeditions outside of town to gather ingredients. While turn-based battles are here, there are no world-changing shenanigans; the story is all on Marie, her relationships with friends, and her efforts to graduate.
That five year time limit isn’t just for show, either, as exploring or synthesizing will take up a day of in-game time, and how you use that time will lead you to one of multiple different endings. Marie also has a fatigue level to manage, which increases the risk of synthesis failing to produce any items.
Despite being made without plans for any sequels, Atelier Marie was successful enough to synthesize two of them. The franchise as a whole has gone on to absolutely dominate developer Gust’s output, with new Atelier titles still releasing annually.
While this PS1 original and its re-releases have remained locked in Japan, a full-blown remake launched worldwide in 2023, letting newcomers see the origins of this long running franchise.
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