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Reader, we are back on our nominal timeline for this series once more. In fact, this is the entry that sent me on my latest detour, investigating other Japanese-only games that were translated by the team at Nebulous Translations: Getsu Fuuma Den, Star Cruiser, and Shiryou Sensen: War of the Dead. Now I’m back to Out Live by Sunsoft, a grid-based mecha dungeon crawler role-playing game that released in Japan on March 17, 1989 for the PC Engine. That puts it almost two months after Clash At Demonhead in our timeline. It was never officially localized in English, but thankfully I was able to use the fan translation from Nebulous Translations to play it.

We’ve had a few games on the PC Engine — known as the Turbografx-16 in the United States — in this series, but up to now they’ve all been ports of games from Japanese home computer systems. Several of them (Ys I & II, Exile) used the CD-ROM expansion, and therefore boasted cinematics, voice acting, and CD quality music that were far beyond anything else on consoles at the time. But most PC Engine games shipped on the standard HuCard cartridges, and looked and sounded closer to other contemporary console games. Closer, but still better: the PC Engine boasts a fancier programmable sound generator (PSG) than the competition, and a 16-bit graphics chip, even though it still uses an 8-bit processor. So while it can’t match the truly 16-bit systems that would come next, like the Sega Mega Drive and Super Nintendo, it outclasses its 8-bit contemporaries like the Sega Master System and Nintendo Famicom.

The only other HuCard game that’s come up in this series so far is Shiryou Sensen: War of the Dead, which shows off the extra colors and more complex music that the PC Engine can muster. Out Live, however, was designed from the ground up with the PC Engine in mind, and it shows. This game is slick. There are so many little details and flourishes that set it apart from other games. When players leave the safety of one of the game’s cities and get into their giant robot, they’re not just dumped into the tunnels right away. There’s a fancy startup sequence, showing cockpit displays and indicators powering on before the main view fades in. It only takes about a second, but it looks so cool. Encounter an enemy robot while exploring, and the player’s robot will scan it, complete with a cool graphical effect and stat displays that print out onto the sci-fi heads up display. The enemy designs are awesome too, from an artillery cannon with tank treads, to spider-bots, to sleekly curved humanoid robots carrying shields and high-tech rifles. There are animations when firing weapons in the turn-based battles, showing energy beams lancing outwards, or a projectile that explodes on impact. Firing a missile looks especially cool, with a clever animation that evokes the warhead arcing towards the target. And, of course, there’s the smooth animations when walking through the grid-based tunnels of planet Lafura.

We’ve actually seen that before in this series, in the first-person dungeons of Phantasy Star. There it was a headline feature, designed to show off Sega’s Master System (which actually wasn’t quite as powerful as the PC Engine). But most grid-based dungeon crawlers looked more like Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei: the first-person view limited to one corner of the screen, and updating instantly when moving, without any animations. Out Live is somewhere in between. Its first-person view doesn’t take up the whole screen, but where other games would fill the space with boring menus and health bars and such, Out Live fills it with an awesome-looking mecha cockpit that shows off the PC Engine’s range of displayable colors. The actual first-person view is clever, too. By rendering only the angled light panels that run along the floors and ceilings, the corridors immediately feel futuristic without needing to show too much detail. It also simplifies the animations, so the passageways can slide by smoothly as players march forward, or sweep across the view as they make 90-degree turns. Just like in Phantasy Star.

Out Live sounds pretty cool, too. I’d heard that Sunsoft were famous for having great music in their games, and it’s certainly true here. Full of syncopated rhythms, the tracks also take advantage of the PC Engine’s relatively advanced PSG, which wasn’t limited to set waveforms, letting composers customize the shapes of the waves and therefore access far more timbres than other consoles could. We heard a little of that in Shiryou Sensen: War of the Dead, but those were new arrangements of pieces composed for simpler Japanese home computer hardware. The music in Out Live really shows off the PC Engine’s audio capabilities, mixing together pulse waves, triangle waves, and sine waves within each audio channel to create some complex sounds. This oscilloscope video of Out Live’s score shows off what composer Masashi Kageyama is doing; the complicated wave shapes create some gritty bass, bell-like tones, smooth flute-like melodies, and more. It’s easily the most interesting-sounding music I’ve heard from a PSG. My only complaint is that some of the best musical moments come late in the tracks and are therefore rarely heard. A disproportionate amount of my listening time was to the track that plays while exploring the tunnels.

Speaking of tunnels, you may be wondering why giant robots are stomping around in them. The planet Lafura, where Out Live is set, is filled with ruins and wondrous technology from an ancient alien civilization. Humans have been excavating the planet — it’s implied that the giant robots, known as “FWs” (short for “Fighting Worker”, if my machine translation of the game manual is correct), are based on technology dug up on Lafura — and it now has such an extensive network of tunnels that entire cities have been built within them. Our protagonist is an Imperial agent, come to find his missing friend (and fellow agent) and uncover the nefarious plans of the secretive rebel group known as Mars. To do so, he’ll have to infiltrate the underground (ha!) FW dueling circuit on Lafura, and traverse miles of tunnels to reach new cities. Unfortunately, the tunnels are still crawling with autonomous war machines left over from whatever civilization once lived here.

The story is pretty simple. Each city is just a set of menus: a few shops, plus the saloon where players can chat with some characters and get a few hints about what’s going on and what they should do next. Sometimes a challenger must be defeated in the arena to proceed. Eventually players will be directed to head to the next city, or more rarely to find some other objective in the tunnels. Those tunnels are sprawling, with most areas too large to fit on a single sheet of graph paper as I mapped them out (and yes, players will need to draw maps, which sounds annoying but is actually part of the fun of dungeon crawler games). Rather than fill every single available square with a twisty maze as Digital Devil Story and Phantasy Star do, Out Live lets its tunnels range far and wide, with a lot of unused space in between. This helps with the sense of scale, making each trek feel like a miles-long route to another city.

Unfortunately, there’s little to find in these labyrinths except the next city. The best dungeon crawlers hide special encounters, treasures, traps, and other features in their mazes. Phantasy Star features multi-floor dungeons, for example, with occasional pit traps that drop players to the level below, to create some interesting navigational puzzles. Even Digital Devil Story has the occasional weird shop or friendly face peppered around. But in Out Live there are just tunnels, often full of loops and dead ends, between players and their next destination. I still mapped them all out though, treating a completed map as its own reward.

This may have helped a bit with the purported grind. I’d heard that Out Live often gives players no choice but to repeatedly fight enemy robots to build up money and experience. The protagonist’s FW, you see, has an AI learning system that lets it get better as it battles foes. It levels up its attack and defense separately: defeating enemies gives attack experience, which grants better damage and accuracy as well as more maximum health when it levels up. Defense experience is granted by taking hits from enemies, although the player must still win the fight to get the experience. It reduces incoming damage and increases the chance to evade attacks when it levels up. Both are very helpful, not to mention the “target points” (basically bounties) that are collected from each defeated enemy, and turned in for cash when visiting a city. Money, naturally, lets players buy crucial upgrades for their mecha.

But as long as I made sure to explore everywhere to complete my maps, I never felt the need to grind much, except at the beginning of the game when I made some unwise investments with my hard-earned cash. I focused on buying more weapons for my mecha, assuming that they would help me defeat enemies faster, but Out Live actually takes a strange approach to weapon types. Most role-playing games would give specific enemies resistances and weaknesses to certain damage types, so I might want to use my laser on one robot, and my gatling gun on another. In Out Live, weapon effectiveness depends on the environment one is currently exploring. “Normal” weapons (typically ballistic guns like machine guns or cannons) are the best choice in the standard tunnels, denoted by their yellow lights. Enter a cold area (blue lights), however, and you’ll find the heat-based “blaster” guns do more damage, while all other damage types are less effective. Conversely, in the high-temperature areas with red lighting, players will want to rely on their ice beams. Early in the game, these other environments are rare, so it’s best to stick with normal weapons and invest in armor or a limited-use missile launcher instead. Magnetic areas, denoted by grey lights and favoring laser-based weaponry, don’t really appear until the late game, making the first few tiers of lasers almost useless.

But I soon had enough money to fully equip myself anyway. I had to grind a little to earn money back after buying too many guns at the start, but the story duels give large cash rewards. Later, smart use of consumable healing items, followed by the “back walker” item that returned me to the last city after I ran out, let me safely cash in my target points and steadily earn money. I also learned the value of “options”, equipment with finite uses that can be recharged for a fee in the cities. The best are the missile launchers, the top two tiers of which stayed useful until the endgame. But there are others that do things like stun an enemy for a short time, or reduce their evasion chance. Given that most fights are quick, with hostile robots often falling after a couple of hits, I never invested in these more subtle options. But I did sometimes use the “vacuum breath” option, which has a chance to insta-kill an enemy. Too bad it’s not allowed during the story duels.

So, for most of the game I was happily exploring the tunnels and blasting robots, who always put up a fight but were never overwhelming. Until I reached the finale. There, two things happened: I was given a super-powerful gun that made all my other armaments obsolete, and the enemies suddenly got much harder. To the point that I couldn’t even hit them at all, they would evade every attack I threw at them. I was forced to return to the last area and grind for levels, against enemies who were now trivial to defeat with my fancy new gear. This was really annoying, because I wanted to be exploring and mapping the extra-large final maze while I gained levels, but instead I had to mindlessly churn through hordes of weaker enemies. Every time I gained an Attack Level I would eagerly head into the final area to see if I could hold my own against the robots there, only to be disappointed. The grind I needed took far too long.

Even when I could finally face a few of the toughest robots, the battles were far less interesting than they had been earlier in the game. Choosing the appropriate gun based on the environment isn’t much of a tactical decision, but it’s at least flavorful, offering the satisfaction of bringing the correct tools for each encounter. No longer; the uber-gun is fit for all situations. Worse, it even outclasses the missile launchers, so I no longer needed to make any decisions about when to spend my precious ordnance. I was just trading shots with enemies, or running from them if they were still evading too many of my attacks. The only real decisions I made were about when to use my consumable healing items.

Still, I stubbornly tried to explore as much as I could rather than hang out near the city to grind. I do think that was the right approach, and once I was strong enough to reach the final encounter I was rewarded with hefty sums of experience even if I didn’t quite win (falling in battle simply sends you back to the last city, keeping everything except the target points collected on the expedition). I would have preferred if I could have reached that point a lot sooner, though.

The endgame burned a bit of the goodwill I had towards Out Live, then, but overall I still had fun with it. For most of its runtime it’s a fast-paced, cool looking sci-fi roleplaying game, and it could have made an impact if it had released in the United States. But by the time the PC Engine reached American shores as the rebranded Turbografx-16 in August 1989, the truly 16-bit Sega Mega Drive (known in the US as the Genesis) had already arrived. The older hardware in NEC’s Turbografx-16 couldn’t compete, and it never got much of a foothold. That’s a shame, since Japanese players had been playing PC Engine games for two years by that point, making Out Live an enticing prospect for those who hadn’t yet purchased a fancy new Mega Drive which hit the market several months prior.

If you’re intrigued to try Out Live yourself, be sure to grab the translation patch from Nebulous Translations. I used the Retroarch frontend and the Beetle PCE emulation core to play, although the Beetle PCE FAST core should work just as well.

Up next, we have our first proper Mega Drive game, to show off what a fully 16-bit system can do. Stay tuned!

Next on Console History: watch this space!