The sins never die
(Played as Playstation Classic on PS Vita in Japanese. About 12 hours to go through according to the save file.)
The 25th anniversary of Metal Gear Solid’s launch on Playstation in English speaking region is approaching. So why not celebrate it with reviewing Policenauts, the first product ever sold as “A Hideo Kojima Game” that never saw an official English release.
The 8 kanjis read “Ko Jima Hide O Kan Doku Saku Hin” meaning “A work directed by Hideo Kojma” are among the first things one can see in Policenauts. The game also has the honor of being a game “Written and Directed by Hideo Kojima” despite a co-writer listed in the end credits. Both points mean that this one wanted to be a movie more than a game.
Released in 1994 and ported to the original Playstation in 1996, Policenauts is decidedly not a modern game. Had people played this one before late 2019, they might lower their exception for Death Standing significantly and rightfully. Maybe 1998’s Metal Gear Solid were just a flashpoint and 2004’s Snake Eater stroke that same kind of balance to a less degree, while Hideo Kojima himself has always been soaked in the sins of self-indulge telling stories of human sins.
Not quite Lethal Weapon in space
In Policenauts’ “alternative history”, humanity had built an O’Neil cylinder space station called Beyond Coast in 2010 and immediately thought about space cops. Jothan Imgram was selected as a Policenauts and encountered an accident that put him in cryo-sleep for almost 3 decades. Now in 2040, he is a private eye. Visited and hired by his ex-wife for a missing person case, he has to go back to Beyond Coast to see a brave new world he was robbed of.
This being a “Hideo Kojima Game”, it would not be a spoiler to say that missing person case turns into a murder investigation about the who and the why. MGS 1 to 3 all have a resecure mission briefing yet those need to be resecured all die before the third act, so why should their predecessor be any different? In fact, one knows enough stories would see every twist and turn in Policenauts coming from miles away and before the good guys in the story wise up.
Beyond Coast and its inner work can be seen as characters on their own. They are the saving grace of this too predictable for its own good game story. Though the themes tangled in this story seem way too big to be contained in an average “cops versus criminals” plot. And it does feel conferring to a reader of century-sprawling 2001 Nights and viewer of solar system spreading Expanse. Or maybe sad astronauts were not what Kojima going for.
Yes, yes, I can hear people praising Kojima for predicting militarized police forces (In the form of exo-skeleton suits) and AI generated contents in this game. For the former, A Robocop predated this one and B it’s like not like issuing that lot firearms was not “militarization” in the first place given the history of Japan. For the latter, he repeated that in Sons of Liberty didn’t he and it’s not like Cyberpunk stories had not tangled that before.
The Japanese voice cast of this game is basically a foreplay for MGS series’ all-star. It’s nice to hear Hideyuki Tanaka playing the action lead Jonatha Imgram here before he played the 2 different kinds of horrible Emmerich men in MGS series. The longest time Kojima collaborator Kikuko Inoue started here as Karen a newscaster, and she simply played Rose Mary in MGS2 in this one before that series even started. There is a Meryl and the woman voiced her would be back for both MGS1 and MGS4 though they are clearly not the same person. No Akio Otsuka here though, since Kojima has the habit of having first timer for leading men in the first installment of series.
Read more, do less
Policenauts is not a game one cannot recommend to former Kojima “worshipper” Dan Ryckert, because of its mechanic or the lack thereof. Policenauts is a weird hybrid of point-and-click adventure with almost no moving parts, visual novel with many features missing and light-gun shooter with no defensive mechanism. Overall, it’s one read a lot and do very little.
One needs to click the right things in any given screen to advance the plot in this game，yet one does not need to guide in-game character around those screens. The game only has one elaborate puzzle and it has its own flaws. It’s the infamous bomb disposal puzzle, beginning with finding the bomb among 21 packages with a sense of detail and Kojima’s preference about branded products. Funny how they cannot just locate the one, but have to throw the other 20 out. It’s frustrating to touch the “right” package and it blows up in a one-in-two choice. Then the bomb itself would require 6 steps within time limits. All the whole one cannot save the game step by step.
Visual novels since the early aught would allow player to put text on auto, skip and fast forward, none of those features is in Policenauts. In fact, 1998’s MGS allowing player to skip cut scenes is one big advancement from this game.
Policenauts had been called “an action story” in the in-game opening crawl. That action is usually a light gun shooter plays like Whack-a-mole where the moles would throw something back. There is dodge and health recovery like in DOOM, and Imgram does not take cover. The D-pad on Vita can make those segment harder. So shoulder buttons for lock-on are godsent. Death Stranding’s final chain of battles to the East Coast is very similar to Policenauts’ final act’s shooting up towards the top of a skyscraper. The more things change and all that…
Judgement
I am the weirdo who can see many things for weebs as “Lethal Weapon knock-off” interactive or otherwise. Yet Kojima’s deliberate copycat of the famous buddy cop film just does not feel like that to me at all. Maybe it’s because Ed Brown does not kick ass the way Danny Glover’s Murtagh does thus the sense of buddies watching each other’s backs in the field was robbed.
Policenauts is unmistakably “A Hideo Kojima Game” to anyone who had touched Sons of Liberty since the balance has tipped towards “the author” self-indulging. I have not touched 1998’s MGS since 2014 but remember having a better time than playing or reading through this one. Oh well, Konami sure knew what they were doing when they decided not to release this one in English.