A History of Korean Gaming

어스토니시아스토리 (Astonishia Story) - IBM PC (July 1994)

Developed by Sonnori Team when they were part of Softry, this game is introduced at the Sonnori profile.

天下無敵 (천하무적 Cheonha Mujeok) - IBM PC (October 10, 1994)

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After the enormous success they had with Astonishia Story, Softry could pretty much do what they wanted and it would still have been successful, and it appears they were dead-set to use up all of their reputation at once. Cheonha Mujeok is easily one of the worst fighting games ever.

The art style is somewhat attractive and sports a couple of interesting characters, notably the only North Korean fighting game character ever, who has some weird snakes around his arms. The fighting controls are nothing short of a catastrophe, though, rendering the game positively impossible to play.

Frustrated with how things turned out (and reportedly also with the payment), many staff members lead by director Baek Namkil (who had also created Daou's Janggun-ui Adeul) left Softry soon after the game was finished to found Yeonwoo Soft, where they developed the much better game Mutant DNA.

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슈퍼액션볼 (Super Action Ball) - IBM PC (March 1995)

Super Action Ball (IBM PC)

With the new producer/director Jeong Bongsu on board after the leave of Baek Namkil, Softry tried their hands on a association football fun game, which turned out surprisingly playable. Still the game doesn't offer too much beyond the standard arcade and two-player modes. In terms of sheer fun, it's also no Kunio Kun by any means.

포인세티아 (Poinsettia) - IBM PC (October 19, 1995)

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Softry had serious problems keeping its staff together. A traditional RPG with active time battles similar to the 16- and 32-bit Final Fantasy games, Poinsettia was the last game Jeong Bongsu produced before founding his own company as well, Future Entertainment.

타르타로스 (Tartarus) - IBM PC (August 1996)

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After Softry lost most of their staff for at least the third time, Tartarus was their first game to be developed by the newly hired Deca Team. At first the SRPG makes a rather good impression; it has an interesting story about a dark future war on a newly discovered continent that is totally not America, the pixel art is beautiful, and after some wandering around in the starting area to trigger the right events, the first battle if fun and promising for the things to come.

Then, however, the story pulls a stupid plot twist that gets the entire squad save for the leader killed, which leaves the hero wandering into the world on his own. The field map is full of respawning enemies that might as well have been random encounters, as they hunt you down relentlessly, forcing players to engage in combat all to frequently. What was fun with a complete party of six, now becomes a dull exercise with hundreds of drawn-out encounters that always play out the same. Enemies level up with the character so they always remain capable of killing him in 2-3 shots thanks to a much too high random factor in damage calculation.

It all wouldn't have been too bad if one could make fast progress through this unpleasant phase, however the short-term goals are cryptic as hell and their triggers glitchy, so the next dozen-or-so hours are spent wandering around aimlessly in search for them. All the while enemies constantly keep on attacking for more boring confrontations, of course.

마이프렌드 쿠 (My Friend Koo) - IBM PC (June 5, 1997)

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My Friend Koo tells the story of a little boy that fusions with some kind of meta-fairy tale hero named Koo, and then they (he?) go on to save tha land of fairy tales from the grasp of an evil wizard. Though many stories featured are not technically fairy tales, each level is based off a typical candidate for mixed-up children stories, starting with Peter Pan, to Snow White, Pinnochio, The Wizard of Oz and so on. But each world is corrupted, with the actual protagonists of the story ending up as the villain, so the Koo/child hybrid has to set things right (read: beat the shit out of them).

Although My Friend Koo is an action platformer first and foremost, there are a couple of adventure elements where items have to be used, people need to be talked to, and the hero learns a number of spells that not only serve as means of attacking, but also move certain obstacles out of the way. Otherwise enemies are disposed of with punches and kicks, as well as a number of little helpers, like a unicorn that flies over the screen, taking out anything in its way. The latter consume Koo's life energy, though, and each time all the stars are used up, the protagonist's portrait in the upper left corner counts down his fingers. When he gets killed after making a fist, it's game over. That's not too much of a problem though, as other than most Korean platformers, the game has a saving function, so each of the six levels can be selected individually once reached.

Other than the questionable message of solving any problems with his fists, My Friend Koo is quite an adorable game with many phantastic ideas and cute 640x480 2D graphics. The technical execution, however, is a bit lacking. Screens don't scroll until one reaches the very end, comparable to the first Zelda. Did this pose not much of a problem in a somewhat slow-paced action adventure, however, it becomes fatal all too often in this platformer, when the game requires leaps of faith on every corner. Although the controls are pretty good for the most part, things also somehow happen much too fast when falling into a pit, whereupon the game usually puts the player to the last solid ground touched. This mechanic, however, is rather glitchy, and one can show up on other places, often so confusing that one falls down the same pit multiple times again before realizing what is actually going on.

My Friend Koo has been released internationally through Midas Entertainment as late as 2000.

아만전사록 (Arman-jeon Sarok) / The History of Arman's War - IBM PC (September 1997)

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A strategy game in the vein of Koei's Romance of the Three Kingdoms series, History of Arman's War is equally complex and neigh impossible to play even with moderate knowledge of Korean. Battles are fought in an RTS mode, but the pathfinding is truly abysmal, so that the only viable strategy is trying to lure the enemy into one's own unmoving and prepared main forces.

붉은매 (Pulgeunmae) / Red Hawk - Windows (March 1999)

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Red Hawk is very special among Softry's games, in that it has been completed by the core team independently after the company went bankrupt.22 Needless to say that the event nonetheless had an unfortunate influence on the game's quality. The game is a traditional RPG in Japanese style. It uses polygonal characters that act in front of pre-rendered backgrounds, very much like Final Fantasy VII. There is, however, no way in which Red Hawk can hope to compete even the slightest. More so than the ugly battle backdrops or the boring ATB battle system that bars any interesting features, the game is killed by the utterly ridiculous difficulty curve in the beginning, resulting in hours upon hours of senseless grinding for those that hope to go on.