Games of the Abstract: Mischief Makers (1997)

 

Developer: Treasure

Publisher: Enix (Japan)/Nintendo (USA/Europe)

One Player

Nintendo 64

 

Sadly, with the esteemed developer Treasure, who I have come to now with interest, is a Japanese company who does not make a lot of games nowadays. Key titles too, despite their acclaim and even their re-releases on the Xbox 360 in the 2000s, are scarcer to find. This is a surprise knowing their status, an acclaimed company of video games, to which you can pluck out among them for an example Mischief Makers, one of their Nintendo 64 games, one I half suspect is either caught in legal paperwork, as an Enix published title which Nintendo released outside of Japan, or Nintendo is inexplicably sleeping on it. I wonder if it is the former, as with Treasure's last Nintendo 64 game, Sin and Punishment (2000), Nintendo would eventually release it in the West digitally in the 2000s (and 2020s), and was a game they clearly held with admiration enough to even reference in a Super Smash Brothers game and commission a sequel for the Wii console.

Mischief Makers is definitely a game with a cult audience, existing surprisingly cheap in unboxed cartridges over years for a rare moment of luck, and turned out to be such an inventive and delightful piece of platforming. It's back-story in creation does bring up how much an underdog it has been in general in that, when Treasure started developing the game for Nintendo, as when they started in 1995 on the project, they did not even had access to the N64's chipset and focused entirely on a 2D platformer¹. Unfortunately, whilst a cult hit, Mischief Maker's concerns as a product were confounded by the fact that, by its release in 1997, Nintendo's intentions with the new console was, as was the huge issues in the fifth generation of consoles, to embrace the polygons arms race of the era of three dimensional graphics. With the Nintendo 64 almost exclusively with polygon based games, including its legacy of 3D platformers, Treasure's game is one of the only real exceptions, which has 3D flourishes including in the bosses to make this a 2D.5 game. This is not a big issue for me personally, but definitely adds to its distinct appearance.

The game is unconventional anyway, for the better, apt in how Treasure take genres - shooters, platformers, beat-em-ups - and add their own distinct styles to them even in terms of their mechanics. Treasure is also usually known for hard games, but Mischief Makers instead follows more the line of literally stretching and shaking its game mechanics in a very quirky way. Someone here had the ingenious idea to base a game premise on whether you could hold anything, even enemy projectiles, and shake them. Baring in mind possible liberties in the English translation of the text, that this even references the sixties Batman television series with "same Nintendo channel" at one point, this is still structured like a short anime series, a series of miniature stories which connect together the larger narrative. You play android maid Ultra-InterGalactic-Cybot G Marina Liteyears, who most just called Marina, who in the game has to constantly rescue her elderly male creator, Professor Theo, throughout the narrative from kidnapping. Admittedly it hints, in its 2D animated sections, that he is likely a sex pest, as he sinisterly moves up behind her when rescued only for her to judo throw him into orbit, but we can guess she still cares for him deeply enough that, as he keeps getting kidnapped, she will go to rescue him.

All transpiring on Planet Clancer, the plot is slight but includes the populous, the titular Clancers, being caught between a war between a sinister emperor and his brainwashed army of them and the Clancers helping Marina as much to save their planet. There is also a trio of intergalactic space heroes, animal men, having been tricked by the Emperor to attack Marina, under the presumption of a doppelganger that she is a really evil person, and one unexpected reveal of a sibling to a cast member on the villains' side.  Consider as well you will eventually ride an alien cat in a boss battle, riding on him riding on missiles if you time your jump well enough, surfing it as you throw other missiles back. You will also have to compete in a series of track based athletic mini-games like 100 meter dash and long jump, which inexplicably also involves a math quiz for one, because someone kidnapped Professor Theo to have a first prize despite no one wanting him. Mischief Makers is a deeply silly game, but also from the surfing missile sentence alone completely awesome at the same time.

Mischief Maker's controls in the midst of this are as idiosyncratic. They can be difficult to grasp at first, but once you get used to them, this is where the game becomes even more inventive. You have your standard platforming mechanics, barring that using standard direction to move, Marina also has jet boosts, following her to float in the air or move faster on foot. The key mechanic is that, yes, almost everything can be caught or held, even projectiles where, if you catch them with perfect timing, you sometimes convert glowing rays and balls of death into gems, red ones common through the game to collect to have continues, or advise from a pink ball with a face and a bow called Miss Advice, or blue gems that heals/increases the health bar. You can grab enemies, shake them in case they hold gems, and throw them. You can even throw good NPCs on your side, and shake them for gems, with the advantage that they will get up whilst the enemies disappear with their ghosts floating off with halos, with a dark humour especially as one level has you exorcising a cave full of ghosts at one point. In one boss battle, you are literally shaking negative thoughts, negative words, into their positive opposite, whilst access to a shaking pot allows you to capture objects and combine them for tools. You can even pick up flowers and throw them. You can even be a dick and shake a ball, in an early training level based around a theme park, with a child Clancer on them at the same time, and cause them to fall off and cry. And yes, I admit to doing the later once and feel guilty about it still.

This also means the game, alongside platforming, plays to a lot of obstacle course puzzles, with the challenges involving manipulating and tugging objects, and here as well, whilst limited by the technology of the Nintendo 64, talking of how the game looks actually intersects with the gameplay. The story is set on the aforementioned Planet Clancer, where the populous, good and bad, are figures who, possibly inspired by ancient Japanese burial statues called Haniwa, also look like if you took the central figure of Edvard Munch's painting The Scream (1893), and made them cute chirping figures. Everything has faces, even floating orbs and cubes which are on the ground or floating in the air, obstacles or objects to interact with to figure out where to get to or, if after the yellow gems which are the one 100% goal, as they unlock more of the final cut scene, figuring out where they are. You will shake a lot of items, leading to the catchphrase "Shake, shake!" a lot, pull and pull in wheels of orbs to negotiate around environments, use springs to propel yourself further, and generally negotiate around the environments with nothing onscreen not designed for manipulation. This is where, alongside Mischief Makers requiring a re-release, a sequel would have been fascinating as, for a short game which manages to do so much, seeing the ideas this has stretched further and challenging the jumping/shaking mechanics would have been compelling to see.

Again, this was an outsider when it was released, including how its short length contrasts a time when significantly longer games were being produced. Considering how eclectic this manages to be however, Mischief Maker really does make every second count, which is a common occurrence for Treasure games. Here you can be negotiating upwards, working a time reverse mechanic in a confined environment for one stage, later on trying to flee lava on a tricycle. The stages are almost all short, little tasters where you never find yourself stuck in a cruel overlong level at all, where one of the longest, the only long one in fact, is a late stage rush between enemies which is a frenzy of throwing people at others, throwing people's spinning blades back, stealing machine guns which seemingly fire eggs of death from cat robots, and just charging through a ridiculous amount of the evil Clancers army. And the entertainment is there consistently high throughout. Alongside its charm, even in the English dub, there are many of the personal touches which are exceptional, such as Norio Hanzawa's music which is diverse and moody, and the energy through the game is rich. When this gets harder, the goals once figured out are clear, only having one little flaw that there is never a clear signal for some bosses for how many times you need to hit them. Considering, however, how over-the-top and varied these boss battles are, even that is not a complaint that can stain every virtue this game has. Here you will encounter some of the most dynamic boss battles with some inventive and very unconventional directions to take - from getting the first proper boss you encounter to punch itself in the face, to tripping one's robot over and quickly squashing it onto its head on the ground. Throughout you will find so much to appreciate and, for me, it was a pure joy to play Mischief Makers. This was the kind of game I wanted to uncover, and yes, it is an unsung gem for its console of origin.

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1) This is documented in an interview by IGN Staff, from the year of the game's release on the 15 April 1997, with the president and CEO of Treasure, Masato Maegawa.