Snatcher

Snatcher is Hideo Kojima's major title after the first Metal Gear that would come to define the Kojima style of game-directing. Kojima places a great accent on storyline and cutscenes, and indeed, the last cutscene of the game is literally just watching the drama unfold for 30 whole minutes, requiring no input on the players' part! It's truly a taste of what's to come in future Metal Gear games.

Originally, Snatcher was released for the PC-8800 series of computers in 1988 with an MSX2 port coming just a couple of days later, and both share the same graphical fidelity. The sprite animations were stunning for the time and the soundtrack was rich, while the intriguing adventure-game style gameplay with limited options provided a big scripted storyline with limitless potential. Today the game is technically considered a visual novel: Imagine Phoenix Wright-styled hub traveling with searching for clues and talking to people, but minus the courts. However, instead of court sessions you have actual shooting stages, attacking robots in every occasional chapter and aiming with your numpad.

You are Gillian Seed, an officer of Junker that's tasked to hunt down Snatchers: robots who steal identities of humans to blend in and push their masters' agenda. The setting is not at all subtle from pulling elements from contemporary cyberpunk, ripping a lot of its vibe from the likes of Blade Runner, Akira, Terminator, and of course, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, while a John Carpenter-esque soundtrack follows suit. Snatcher is very much a neo-noir of the 80s which adds so much to the game's flavour, and its topics of promiscuosity, drug abuse and violent imagery are a sight to behold at a time when games were still a young medium. While the storyline of Snatcher is intriguing, deep, and engaging, there can be annoyances that are largely tied to some of the basic game mechanics. For example the game is largely insistent on searching things a very specific way and order, which can really grate players who need to get to the point, and other plot points in the game are too obviously hinted that it can just frustrate you how you're the first one to realise it, while, in-universe, it takes half the game for Gilian to realise what the link between a chess piece and QUEENS hospital is, for instance.

Other times story details are awkwardly hinted from a mile away and occasionally delivered poorly, like for example how Harry is Gilian's son is so painfully obvious, but also on the other hand seeing Harry die giving his touching monologue about "living alone all his life" falls on deaf ears because the game did very little to flesh Harry's character and make his outburst understandable or cathartic. Dude seemed just fine before. Those unarticulated storytelling methods can be ignored considering the immense liberty the game offers with progression of events regardless, as it offers inventive sidequests and mini-games: You will have parts of the game where you need to make phone calls(just like how Metal Gear games use radio frequencies), and other times you have to use a supercomputer's data to gain information, or reconstruct a suspect based on eyewitness accounts. They are very engaging puzzles, and ask the player to keep a paper and pen in handy to jolt those clues down!

The original game had an awfully cut-out ending after only two of its story acts, when three were planned to be included, so sadly, for the full experience I can not recommend the PC88 and MSX2 versions. The game was ported to the PC-Engine with updated sprites, the epic Act 3 included, and added voice-acting(Japanese) which many consider the definitive version of the game. However, since it's untranslated, the go-to port is the Sega CD port which is the same version in all respects, only dubbed in English(in that amateur-yet-innocent 90s anime style dubbing) and some slight censors that don't take away from the game at all. There were future Playstation and Saturn ports, but those do very questionable graphic changes(like including poor CG intros) and make even further censors which I don't approve at all. For me, the definitive version of the game is the Sega CD version, which provides a curious look at the way games predicted the future of entertainment in 1994: The Sega CD wanted to plant itself as a sort of proto-Playstation, and used its CD capacity to provide all this beautiful sprite art that is mesmerising. As an added bonus, try emulating the Sega CD Snatcher on the Wii: You will have full light gun support for the shooting sequences that was designed for the Sega CD!

In all, Snatcher is an unforgettable experience as a technical milestone of what both visual novels of the 80s and Sega CD games of the 90s were capable of with an intriguing storyline, but if you've played Kojima's Metal Gear Solid games, you will notice and probably get tired of the same plot twists you'd come to expect and associate with the producer and find the storyline horribly larval. Indeed, there are a lot of archetypes and tropes in Snatcher that Kojima would specifically borrow again for his Metal Gear Solid games, and so for Kojima fans who wish to seek novelty, Snatcher has little to offer. In all other fields it is outstanding as an exhilirating Blade Runner: The Anime.