From a Crash Landing on an Alien Planet to Going Super Saiyan Before it Was Cool: A Look at Brain Breaker

This blog entry is part of a series covering games that are featured on my website about the Platform Adventure (aka Metroidvania) subgenre's history. It's a site created mainly as a quick reference guide for those looking for the next game to play or relevant and detailed info on earlier games in the subgenre for their other projects.

Brain Breaker (1985) is an early platform adventure game developed and published by Enix for the Sharp X1, exclusively in Japan. The game's story is shrouded in mystery, with no official information available on the protagonist or setting in English. However, the game's innovative gameplay mechanics and level design helped set the foundation for the subgenre in Japan, the country that would shape most of its early history starting with Metroid (1986) and continuing up until around the mid-2000s.

The game starts with the player's spaceship crash landing on an alien planet that appears to be deserted. Armed only with a radio (which can be used to communicate with their ship for clues), the player must explore their immediate surroundings, searching for equipment and abilities that will aid them in discovering the planet's true nature.

Brain Breaker features a fairly large, interconnected world which is mostly horizontal in layout, and unusually consists of mostly outdoors spaces in a futuristic urban setting. Its intro gameplay is actually strikingly similar to Super Metroid in terms of its environmental storytelling - the first area seems abandoned until you find a weapon and return, at which point the enemy robots are activated. Since I haven't beaten the game, it's hard to say much more about it in terms of world building or storytelling but it does score extra points for stuff like having a continuous soundtrack (the second example within the subgenre so far after Journey to the Centre of the Earth) and explosions from destroyed land vehicles creating little craters in the ground.

The player eventually gains access to a variety of tools and abilities, including a jetpack for flying, psychic powers for melting walls (you basically go Super Saiyan in the late game, way before that was an online meme), and the titular Brain Breaker - a tool which can disable electronic devices, including force fields and a tank which can then be used as a vehicle. The game also features an item system that allows the player to pick up and drop objects using the Z key. Additionally, the F keys can be used to call the player's ship and create a save state at the current location - quite forgiving for its time when compared to the average console or arcade game.

Throughout the game, the player can enter buildings containing elevators, which operate similarly to those in Elevator Action and Impossible Mission. As the player progresses, they will uncover more of the planet's secrets and eventually gain access to the central computer, which takes us to the ultimate goal of the game: The computer has gone rogue and must be destroyed.

Brain Breaker is sometimes regarded as one of the earliest examples of the platform adventure or metroidvania subgenre, and it does check the boxes by being a basic platformer with an exploration focus and the acquisition of new abilities and tools that allow for access to previously inaccessible areas. It seems to have a completely linear ability acquisition path however (see the dependency graphs in Game Maker's Toolkit's videos on Metroid and others for a good explanation), meaning there's no sequence breaking, and it doesn't challenge players' spatial awareness to the same degree as some of the previous games covered.

While it's hard to say if the game had much of an influence, there are clear similarities to the early Metroid games as well as later mech action games like Wibarm, Thexder, the Assault Suits games, Ranger X and Front Mission: Gun Hazard, which all expanded upon Brain Breaker's gameplay mechanics in different ways. It's not entirely unlikely that Nintendo took some inspiration from it given the similarities between Zelda and other earlier Japanese computer games like Hydlide and Dragon Slayer. Even if official sources cite Ultima and Black Onyx (Zelda), and Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda (Metroid) as early game inspirations.

In conclusion, Brain Breaker (1985) is another pioneering game that helped lay the groundwork for the subgenre, especially in Japan, and which is mostly forgotten nowadays. The game is a decent time, even if it feels quite sluggish compared to its possible influencees mentioned above, and the zoomed out view gives it a distinct vibe. Although its story and characters mostly remain shrouded in mystery, its innovative gameplay mechanics and level design helped set the standard for several similar games that followed. Hopefully we'll see an english translation (or even a fan remake? yeah that's very unlikely) at some point, so as to make this early piece of platform adventure history more widely accessible.

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A few games and other media that may have influenced Brain Breaker:

-Gundam (1979) and Macross (1982): Both of these anime series feature mechs and futuristic technology, and Brain Breaker shares a similar futuristic setting with advanced technology, such as the player's jetpack and the Brain Breaker device that disables electronic devices.

-Kagirinaki Tatakai (1983): This is an earlier game by the same developer. It's a linear, vertically scrolling shooter, however it also features destructible terrain and a jetpack.

-H.E.R.O. (1984): This is a flight-based platformer by Activision, and it's possible that Brain Breaker was influenced by its gameplay mechanics in that the game features a jetpack-wearing protagonist who can fly around and use explosives to destroy obstacles.

-Pitfall II (1984): This other Activision game features an interconnected world with a focus on exploration and backtracking, an exploratory platformer or maze platformer if you will, and it is relatively forgiving for the time much like Brain Breaker. It's a game without ability gating however. While a couple of games I've mentioned earlier are more similar to Brain Breaker than this one, they are also much more obscure.

For a brief overview of the game's features, see its page on my Platform Adventure history website.