RetroPiece Theater: Ore ga Omae wo Mamoru

Rolling out a new blog series this year that merges my recurring RetroAchievements rundowns with a retro game review format. I'm going to try and publish two of these a month, one exploring an old favorite while the other examines a game that's new to me. (This entry in particular was meant to arrive at the end of January as that month's "new to me" game but it proved a bit more substantial than I anticipated, so I might be doing three of these this month instead to make up for it.)

Ore ga Omae wo Mamoru (Vingt-et-un, 2009)

Indie exploraction games are a common enough sight these days—to the extent that the "metroidvania" term has become effectively outmoded given how many other franchises in the same genre have since stolen the spotlight from Konami's defunct vampire killers and Nintendo's modestly-received alien antagonizers (Hollow Knight: Silksong, for instance, was kind of a big deal last year)—but prior to the 2010s the appearance of a game that used that particular map/platforming/traversal-upgrade conceit that didn't specifically have the Metroid or Castlevania brand was exceptionally rare. Ore ga Omae wo Mamoru, which translates to "I Will Protect You", is a DS game from 2009 that stands as an odd obscurity on that console and of its era more broadly for the above reason but also for the design choices it makes.

Created by Vingt-et-un, a smaller Japanese studio who made their bread developing games for the "Simple" series of budget PlayStation games and later gained some niche appeal for their otome output (which might explain some of these character designs...), Ore ga Omae wo Mamoru sees two knights from the Duchy of Kucellbull sent to explore the ruins of Edenbar: a once thriving ancient kingdom that practically disappeared overnight due to some catastrophic mishap regarding their research into "magicite", a near limitless source of power. Ren, the knight in white and our protagonist, gradually makes his way through the labyrinthine ruins while occasionally meeting up with his partner and friend Veres who appears to have his own mission to pursue, all the while occasionally making trips back to the Duchy to report on his progress—as well as, true to the studio's roots, to further a romantic triangle story with the Duke's daughter, Elza, that takes center stage during the finale. Most cutscenes are fully voiced, uncommon for the DS platform where every megabyte on those tiny cards mattered, and while there's no animation for those cutscenes your character, the monsters you fight, and the dungeon itself are fully rendered 3D models with 2D set dressing. It feels surprisingly ambitious for a game created by a studio known for budget games and published by a company that primarily deals in VNs.

Ren and Veres shown here bishounening it up with their ambiguous relationship, offering a hint as to Vingt et un's more usual output.

Ore ga Omae wo Mamoru makes the unusual decision—though perhaps one more beneficial to the handheld gaming format—to frame the gameplay loop like a mission-based RPG where you're expected to return to the safe hub area frequently, similar to a Wizardry or a Phantasy Star Online. You'll discover pretty quickly that enemies will kick your ass with their high damage output right from the (double-)jump and that you can't always just hope to weather their blows until you can crawl your way to the next restorative save point. What you actually need to do is complete side-quests given by the Adventurer's Guild in the village on the surface, which in turn provide resources that can be spent on forging and upgrading your equipment. Since you don't level up in this game, odd given the RPG leanings I mentioned, improving your gear is integral to your survival. You can only accept one quest at a time however, so much of the game involves heading to where you can gather the right resources or fight specific monsters outlined in the mission parameters then quickly (yet safely) make your way back up top to cash it in, put that scrip towards upgrades and consumables, and save your progress. Save points also act as fast-travel nodes but they're pretty spread out, especially early on, and given the game's "warp back home directly" items are also expensive and rare you'll spend the early sections of the game hitting a challenge wall as you struggle to survive long enough to both complete your objectives and make it back home in one piece. In the later game this challenge evaporates into mist due to being able to exploit the crafting system to make as many curatives as you could want, while ensuring you're decked out in the best gear money (and available materials) can buy, but it's real hard going for those first few hours in a fashion that's almost kinda refreshing for this genre—more so at a time when it wasn't the case that every other exploraction game aimed for a punishing 2D Souls type of experience.

There's techniques like dodge rolls that need to be learned by finding the right skill book first, and then subsequent books that actually add i-frames to the roll to make it reliable enough for combat. Beyond that you have little in the way of defensive options for tanking damage: no armor equipment, accessories have defense values but usually only a small amount, and there's no block function. The big damage incurred means having to finish battles quickly and/or stocking up on curatives which might necessitate runs purely to gather the various herbs you need. Typically, you might start exploring a new "layer" (as the game calls the map's discrete sections) but usually end up focusing on quest objectives and finding the materials needed to upgrade your weapons and accessories for a while first to make the rest of the trek viable. As you explore further afield, you'll find the skill books you need to give you an edge in combat or make farming mats more efficient (increasing how often you can farm at a resource node in one run, for instance) or else provide a traversal ability that lets you backtrack to earlier sections and find more stuff as is more the standard for the genre. Without leveling, gathering resources is crucial as is recording where certain materials are found—though as long as you have one, you can check its description to learn where to find more—to make sure you're as kitted out as well as you can be. Otherwise just the process of exploring can drain your HP rather quickly, and taking on the game's selection of compulsory and optional bosses even more so.

For whatever reason you get this dramatic cutaway whenever you have a boss on the ropes and are preparing to finish it off. Cool at first but I'm not sure why we need it for every single boss fight (including rematches).

For all the creativity behind its distinctive gameplay loop, Ore ga Omae wo Mamoru can feel a bit rough to play on occasion. There's a sluggishness to the movement and jumping that doesn't go away when you hold the run button down or acquire the inevitable double-jump ability (which only arrives late into the game) and enemies have an annoying habit of knocking you out of your attack animations, though in fairness you can also do that to them (especially works wonders for bosses). You'll rue the bat-like enemies in particular before too long, many of which have been situated over pits you need to leap over and getting bopped mid-air by said chiroptera will interrupt that jump and send you tumbling to a depth you perhaps weren't yet prepared to investigate. Your weapons also have accuracy ratings so you can, and will, whiff with the larger weapons which are already so slow they're barely worth the damage boost over their smaller contemporaries. Small weapons especially tend to be better early on as they allow for combo chains, which proc the animation interruption effect more frequently. There's a vast number of weapons, far more of which need to be forged from materials than will be found in chests and the like, and most of the rest then have to be enhanced from weaker weapons—naturally there's a long ingredient list required for both forging and enhancing anything, so you might want a spreadsheet handy for keeping track of where to gather the mats you need. As such, this isn't going to be a breezy exploraction game for everyone: it's more in the MonHun school of spending several hours farming what you need first before you can execute upon a plan of attack, the languid pace of which is perhaps ideal for the portable format where bite-sized sessions are more the norm. It is certainly a one-of-a-kind exploraction game though, and at a time where it feels like the genre's overstuffed with derivative works Ore ga Omae wo Mamoru's stock as an idiosyncratic stand-out has only risen in the interim.

RA Challenges

Completing the RA set for this game was... a lot. Nothing too difficult by way of the usual restrictive challenges—there's no zero-damage boss runs, thankfully—but the set insists on you owning one of every weapon and given there's 90 and many of them require upgrading other weapons several times into the one you want you're looking at over ten hours of just putting together material lists, sourcing them from the dungeon, crafting everything, and finding the cash to pay for it all (though this part at least gets much easier in the post-game due to how trivial it is to endlessly mine valuable rainbow diamonds). Then you take into account how the set creator has to put a disclaimer in the comments of the achievements that in order to make everything you actually have to fight the same boss 33 more times than the story/quests require just for the additional boss-specific mats it (and only it) drops and the mastery process quickly crosses the line into parody territory.

Uhhh, thanks? I have questions that I maybe don't want answers to.

Beyond being a huge timesink though, it's a set that I would argue is not really that much harder than completing the game normally. I did appreciate a couple of challenges where you're tasked with moving through a particularly rough route through the dungeon without being allowed to warp out, use temporary invulnerability items, or heal—voiding the achievement's no big deal though, since you can return to the ordained starting point to reactivate it—and attempting these gauntlets does require some defense-forward loadouts or else going full evasion. Evasion's not an option for the second of these trials, though, as you're also tasked with defeating every enemy in the adjoining rooms along the way; given even the slime enemies are taking off a quarter of your HP with every hit in this extra hard post-game section of the dungeon, it's a real nail-biter. There's also six achievements specific to two sets of post-game dragon bosses (that you fight three times each, just enough to earn them all) where you have to exclusively use one of the following: small swords, medium swords, big swords, charge attacks (typically only the bigger swords have these and they're very interruptible), ranged weapons (you usually have a limited stock of those), and the smart bomb type items (you need to craft a whole lot of these first to whittle down all the bosses' HP). Those were also pretty tough to earn, though surviving those fights with endless healing items wasn't exactly an ordeal.

A good set given the tools available, though perhaps still one that will really have you regretting your life choices as you work on spreadsheets for hours. Huh, maybe these things don't always add to the experience after all?