- Nausicaä: Kiki Ippatsu
- Wasureji no Nausicaä Game
- Kaze no Tani no Nausicaä
The Japanese name is the same as the theatrical release, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the title screen however simply has Nausicaä Adventure Game in English. It is also, without question, one of the ugliest games ever to be released on the PC-88. This can’t be emphasized enough: there were a ton of adventure games for NEC’s computer, but only the cheapest and nastiest, usually hentai and doujin titles, come anywhere close to this level of ugly. Quite honestly, you will find high school student efforts on the PC-88, done in BASIC, which are more impressive. It’s quite obvious whichever unlucky bastard was tasked with rushing this out, drew a few houses for the background and then simply enlarged them for the foreground. Everything about it is lazy. The sprite for Nausicaä doesn’t even turn around, if you try walking to the right she walks backwards!
The game itself seems to be your standard adventure, except it’s borderline unplayable. Correction: there’s nothing actually to play. Nausicaä wanders around and, if you press “A” near a doorway, will pick up random items. A sword and shield, various kinds of foliage, the small yellow pet she carries around, and worst of all, a death skull. Items received are completely random, and it’s quite possible to randomly pick up three death skulls and receive game over in quick succession. This kind of random item collection barely constitutes what most would define as gameplay – items do nothing, you can’t access an inventory, and sooner or later you’ll get three skulls and die. What makes this worse is that by 1984 the PC-88 already had some excellent adventure games. Yuji Horii’s Portopia came out in 1983 – it was slick, used quick-keys, and functioned very nicely as a game. Nausicaä on the other hand utterly fails not only as a game, but as a copy of those that came before. It is ludicrously bad, more so than words can ever describe.
Intriguingly though, there appears to be more to it beneath the surface. The back of the box shows a strange picture of a hand-glider level, and the opening instructions in-game also describe how you control it (and here’s further instructions, entirely in Katakana and almost unreadable). How you’re actually supposed to access this action mini-game is a mystery. Googling for Japanese fan-sites all bring up the same images: one of the intro, and a couple of the walkabout areas. They’re so repetitive a single screenshot showcases all it has to offer, and it’s impossible – in the most literal sense of the word – to navigate. As for the hand-glider stages, they probably don’t event exist. Still, if you’re going to adapt a film into a game, an adventure is the easiest way to keep it authentic… There certainly doesn’t seem to be random Ohmu shooting in this.
