- Nausicaä: Kiki Ippatsu
- Wasureji no Nausicaä Game
- Kaze no Tani no Nausicaä
PC6001 Cover
The 1984 animated filn Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was based on a series of manga penned by Hayao Miyazaki, before Ghibli Studios was founded, and is regarded as one of the all time best anime films ever produced. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic world where mankind has poisoned the world to the point of his own extinction. A thousand years since the Seven of Days of Fire the world is covered by acid lakes and the “Sea of Corruption”, a continuously spreading toxic jungle of deadly spores and mutated creatures, including the enormous Ohmu insects. The story involves young Princess Nausicaä from the Valley of the Wind, as she fights to protect her small colony of survivors from other rival groups, one of which is intent on resurrecting the weapons used during the cataclysmic war. The general theme is that conflict only brings misery and more conflict, and that you need to work with the flow of nature rather than against it. There’s action and some tension filled scenes, but this is a much deeper and more philosophical film than many other animes. Although originally brought out in the West under the name Warriors of Wind, this version was heavily edited (losing around 21 minutes), had parts of the story rewritten, and is not only regarded as one of the worst anime localisations of all time, but also infuriated Hayao Miyazaki when he found out. Since then it’s been re-localized into English by Disney.
There were three licensed tie-ins available for Japanese home computers, the first of which was released for the PC-6001 on tape. Once loaded you’re presented with a low-resolution title screen and prompted to press Space or the Fire button. The emulator supports controllers with two action buttons, though Nausicaä only requires directions and one to shoot. It’s a 2D horizontal shoot-em-up and, while it does take artistic license, certainly appears to attempt to follow the film’s latter scenes with the rescue of the baby Ohmu. Levels are divided between Acts and Scenes. A rather entomological gunship proceeds to the right, towards a brown slope, and you need to press up to make it ascend otherwise it crashes. Once airborne it constantly drifts towards the ground requiring you to pull up, which is actually really cool, differentiating it from other hori-shmups since it’s more like flying an aeroplane. Space bar fires. Once on a level plane you’re attacked by Pejite Flying Jars, called Flying Turtles in the Japanese original, three at a time. It’s blatantly obvious that as a Flying Jar is destroyed or goes offscreen it immediately appears on the far right again. They can travel the full vertical of the screen, whereas if you touch the ground you die.
Dozens of these later and you descend down a brown slope and land near a settlement to then begin Scene 2. Some ways later into this an enormous white attack ship ascends from the ground to attack – acting as a sort of boss. After a few hits it catches fire and goes down, cue the descent slope. Scene 3 is pretty cool, since it culminates with the Flying Jar from the movie, carrying the baby Ohmu. At this point the fire button causes Nausicaä to fly from her Gunship, aboard her glider Mehve, and travel outwards as long as it’s pressed. Let go and she starts to return. Pressing up and down moves both Mehve and her Gunship. The task is to send her towards the baby Ohmu to cut the ropes, while simultaneously avoiding the Gunship or Mehve hitting the oncoming Jars. Do so and the baby falls to earth safely. Unfortunately it’s not obvious what’s supposed to happen next, since the game seems to get stuck. Even after rescuing the Ohmu and returning to the Gunship you still can’t shoot, nor can you in any way damage the oncoming Jars or the one which carried the Ohmu. Pressing fire just sends Nausicaä out again. Is it possible to go beyond Scene 3? It’s not clear.
(What’s bizarre though, is that during our first attempt at loading the game I glitched my way into an alternate game, one where the Scene ## was replaced with a strange symbol. Instead of Flying Jars there were insects, four at a time, which couldn’t be killed and attacked incessantly. Through prodigious use of save states I managed to survive around six or so scenes of this, with no let up or change to the game. Some kind of early DRM against people who copied tapes, or simply weird fluke? Whatever the case, we made a save file for this emulator package. Start the emulator, load the “nausica(6601_Mode5, Page 1).P6” tape file, which is in the DISK folder, and click Run Emulation. Then to avoid all the loading crap, press F8 and select DokoLoad, then File, then in the SAVE folder there’s NAUSICAA_A, which is the normal game, and NAUSICAA_B which is the mysterious glitched insect game.)
Based on the above, it’s clearly an awful game. Or is it? Keep in mind the context of 1984. In the preceding four years in arcades – the technological vanguard of gaming – there had been Defender, Scramble, Zaxxon and the vector-based Star Wars. All various, excellent flavors of shmup. Home computer games by comparison sucked pretty damn hard. Popular games around the time included Manic Miner and Rare’s single-screen shooter Jetpac. Japan’s popular and accomplished Thexder wouldn’t be out for another year still. While this adaptation of Nausicaä is nowhere near the quality of arcade hori-shmups Defender or Scramble, it is better than other home computer shooters at that time. It features a 160×200 resolution (the horizontal is stretched to appear 320) with around 12-14 colors, and reasonable speaker music, though it doesn’t play during the game itself. There’s multiple smooth moving enemies, and based on the emulator’s use of USB controllers, your gunship controls very tightly. Plus it offers diversity wrapped up in a story, with an attack ship boss to be destroyed, and then a baby Ohmu to be rescued. At absolutely no point do you attack Ohmu.
It’s not even remotely fun to play today, but in 1984 owners of a PC-6001 computer probably got really excited by it. Possibly…
Links:
nausicaa.net website page on various games.
Youtube video of MSX game.
Fansite with games influenced by Nausicaä from where we borrowed screens.
Special thanks to the Tokugawa Forums for help
