天下制覇

 

Doujin games, you perverts.

A general metric for series popularity is the amount of fan works produced for it. This isn’t hard and fast since the heavily commercialized things (Naruto, Gundam, HiME) already get umpteen professional games made for them each year, but for the more niche products, like Tsukihime, Kanon, or Touhou, you have a thriving subset of fan games of all varieties. Tsukimiya Ayu, for example, has appeared in everything from shooters to Smash Bros clones and has even picked up enough of a reputation as a boxer in fan games that it’s her default mode for many of them.

Clannad has not enjoyed anywhere near the attention or success in the doujin game world as the other Key stuff. Only one group, Chinchilla Softhouse, has really picked up the Clannad banner and run with it. Some people may think that this is a good thing, but I say that’s a damned lie because by and large, Chinchilla seems to be hellbent on remaking some of the most awful games around using Clannad characters. Besides, if their interpretation of Clannad is to be believed, then next week begins our great cave adventure for most of the girls while Tomoyo beats everybody else up. Honestly? I could be down with that.

Turning the Key girls into weapons of mass destruction is nothing new. Eternal Fighter Zero and Guardian Heroines have both managed that nicely, as have a number of other games. Tomoyo Fighter continues the proud tradition of throwing Key’s little moe blobs into street brawls with this Final Fight clone, and does almost everything wrong with it.

There are a number of things that need to be tight to have a good beat ’em up. Game speed, hit detection, and sufficiently evolving or changing play. Tomoyo Fighter sucks at all three. Tomoyo is in about as much hurry to rescue Tomoya (don’t get me started on the names) as a heavily sedated walrus. Tomoyo’s speed isn’t half bad, but the enemies can only be charitably described as glacial in their attacks, which just makes it all the more frustrating when you’re swarmed and your punches whiff while they seem to have no problems chewing you to bits with lazy strikes that couldn’t knock over a wheelchair.

When you try to grab the enemies is where the crappy hit detection really ‘shines’ like the polished turd that it is. Final Fight’s engine let you automatically grab an enemy that was stunned if you just walked into it. Tomoyo Fighter decided to improve on that by adding a grab button that you could use at any time. Too bad it’s extremely short ranged and the enemy can avoid it by doing any of “moving, attacking, or occasionally, standing still.” You can see the potential problems. Your best bet is to run at them and hit the grab button so that if you collide with the enemy at any point while you’re coasting to a stop, you can hit them for a little less damage than if you just punched them in the face a couple times. Then we get to the bane of side scrolling beat ’em ups… how to keep it fresh. Like Final Fight, Tomoyo Fighter relies on introducing new kinds of enemies as you go to keep things ‘interesting.’ You can expect to see… enemies on motorcycles… Or forklifts… and one with a gun… and that’s the depth of the Tomoyo Fighter experience.

Is it all bad? Well, pretty much. There are some nice backgrounds and cute references as you go through the stages. Chinchilla really tried to cram everything from Haruhi to Kill Bill in there. There’s also a hidden area that you can bust into if you’re really desperate and see a bunch of the Key girls naked in fully pixellated glory. Yes, I’m forced to put that in the positive category. Something has to be in there. Seriously, unless you’re an absolute whore for Clannad or are so hard up for retro beat ’em ups that you’re frothing at the mouth when somebody mentions Mike Haggar, Tomoyo Fighter is best avoided. They did release a somewhat upgraded version (Tomoyo Fighter Plus), but it’s still just polish on what can charitably be described as painful. It’s rather pretty (aside from the 2-3 frames per attack), but looking at stills is probably the best experience you can have with it.

Now we descend into the caves of Clannadland, where the girls are apparently all some form of cave explorers out to find treasures, including risque pictures of themselves. Nagisa de Panic is one of these adventures. It’s a very simple game. Screen scrolls upwards, you have to jump from platform to platform while also not falling off the bottom of the screen. Some platforms have various hazards on them, such as enemies that can be killed by being jumped on or retracting spikes and some will just fall after you land on them. There are eight stages, all with relatively unique hazards and platform traits. One stage has springs that will catapult you upwards, another has platforms that will fly off with you on top of them and the list goes on. Survive until the bottom and you get to reveal part of a CG picture of one of the Clannad girl’s panties, probably around their ankles and possibly while they’re being groped by a relative. Clear the stage again (you have to survive longer each successive time) and you get to uncover more of it.

You also have a life bar, so it isn’t just one hit and you’re dead. Bread and chocolate cornets (this predates Lucky Star, so don’t you dare give me any crap about that, buster) is all over the place and usually the only threat to not picking it up is losing the one heart that you’d gain by grabbing it in the first place. It’s pretty hard to die by running out of life though. Food rains down on you like these caves used to be some form of bakery.

There are three playable characters, Nagisa the average, Ryou the quick, and Yuuko the floaty. They also apparently all have power inversely related to their speed, which would be a nice balancing stat because Yuuko with her higher jump and slower drop than the others is clearly the best… but there are only three enemies in the game that take more than one jump to kill, and two of them are in the water level where everybody jumps high and falls slow.

The main problem with Nagisa de Panic is that it’s not particularly difficult and it’s rather short. Sure, as you get deeper into the caves, food starts becoming slightly more scarce and platforms a little less frequent… and hell… the ice stage has you jump from floating… er…. puffy things instead of platforms, but there’s still no penalty for just hanging out near the top of the screen or even just not moving at all and letting the platform disappear under you to fall to the next one. Strangely, the very first stage ends up being the most difficult due to little fuzzballs that permanently stop you from jumping if you get too close to them (you can still double jump after you fall though).

That aside though, it was fun. That’s right, fun. You might not hear me say that again in this post. It scrolls fast enough to force you to stay engaged in what’s going on, and there’s enough variety between the stages to keep things interesting enough to at least spend the hour or so you’d need to fully complete the game. The easy difficulty, while hurting the replay value a little bit, is also nowhere near the absurdly difficult Tomoyo Fighter or their other Clannad game, which comes as a breath of relief to at least me, if nobody else. 

If you’re old enough, you might remember a little game for the Atari that was later also ported to the NES called Spelunker. This game was actually made by a concerned group of parents to try to make children swear off video games altogether. Some few survived the experience, but soon after developed severe claustrophobia and could never go near a cave ever again. In short, Spelunker was a terrible, terrible piece of garbage and it boggles my mind that anybody would want to make a clone of it using characters known for being soft on the eyes. The juxtaposition here is something worthy of Jung.

To Clannad Spelunker’s credit, it’s nowhere near as bad as the original Spelunker. The controls are a lot tighter and you no longer die if you plunge more than 3 feet. Of course, it’s only extended to a 6 foot drop, but it means that jumping while you’re walking down a slope is no longer instant death. There are also four playable characters, each slightly different in their speed, jumping ability and gun. You can actually fight off the cave dwellers and heat seeking ghosts that will come to eat you. Do keep in mind though that the fastest of the characters still dies if you jump while running down a slope. Oi.

There’s also actually a goal this time around. The original Spelunker had you just trying to get to the bottom of the cave, and then you won. Clannad Spelunker has this… plus treasure chests with collectable objects hidden all over the place, not to mention the gratuitous (and somewhat disquieting) panty shots of the girls trying to pull the items out of the chests.

All said though, it’s still an immensely frustrating game. They did implement a sort of ‘save’ feature that keeps track of what items you have, how deep in the cave you’ve gotten… and that’s it. Everything about the cave is reset. All chests are closed, all bombs and flares respawn. That can be nice if you accidently dropped a bomb and can no longer progress (or just want to collect the same keys over and over again and skip all the stupidly hard “jump from fallen stalactite to stalactite over a bed of spikes while sand falls on your head” puzzles)… but on the other hand, if you miss a chest, good luck figuring out which one it was. Still, any number of minor things becomes death. Walk too close to your flare? Death. Try to step off a rope instead of jumping? Death. Jump instead of just falling off that elevator going down? Death. Ghost approaching from below? Death. Yeah, you’ll probably die slightly fewer times than the original Spelunker, but at this point, it’s the difference between taking a metal bat to the face or a wooden bat to the kneecaps. Both are options best avoided if you have the opportunity to do so.

I feel compelled to also mention Clannazo, the only non-Chinchilla SoftHouse Clannad game that I’ve been able to find. There’s really very little to say about Clannazo. Only the trial version had been released… and then the group’s website disappeared, so I’m not really hopeful about ever seeing the full version. The game itself is about as deep as a puddle anyway so there’s not much to say. Shoot the other people until your gun runs on empty. Then tap the dash button to reload and keep shooting. Build up enough power and you can release a giant swarm of shots at once… which is easily dodged by walking around a corner. Only Nagisa was playable in the trial… so… maybe the other characters make it more interesting. Or maybe if they finish making it, it’ll have an AI who knows better than to stand in a stream of bullets and spin around. I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Sorry, there’s no life affirming lesson at the end of it all. Just “stay away from caves if you’re a Key girl, it won’t end well.” Really though, that’s probably a lesson that they should all take to heart.