PlayStation
Space Griffon VF-9
| Graphics: Sound: Gameplay: Overall: |
6.00 6.00 7.50 7.50 |
| Votes: | 2 |
| Reviews: | 1 |
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| Reviewer: BaronVonSlambert | Date: Aug 10, 2024 |
| Space Griffon VF-9 is PlayStation remake of Hamlet originally released in 1998 for Japanese PC platforms, and it would later get a third remake on Dreamcast in Japan.
The best way to describe this game is first person Resident Evil Two in space with mechs. I'll try to be objective in this review and I may ramble a bit because Space Griffon VF-9 is one of my favorite games of all time, and the first game I ever beat as a child. Without trying to be as spoiler free as possible, the story starts with a mercenary team called the AMAX Cleaners, in which you are the rookie member, arriving on the AMAX Conglomerate's moon base Hamlet on HALLOWEEN to find out why they lost contact with Earth. The mission begins with shutting down the active security system. After you cut your teeth on some guard robots, you descend further into the facility and are confronted with military equipment piloted by the undead, as well as living bioweapons, and start to unravel a terror plot and corporate conspiracy. Graphics: 6 Gonna be honest, the game has not aged well in this regard. It is effectively an FPS dungeon crawler and as such suffers many of the problems of early 3d FPV games, and it's also one of the very first games on the PlayStation. The draw distance is nonexistent, and the game is unable to fully show even the medium sized areas of the game, but at least you won't be taking too many hits from off screen. Most of the game's enemies detection and firing ranges are set to just outside of your vision range. I find this serves to increase the horror atmosphere the game is going for however, since you can only see your little bubble of reality and your sensors can't sense much past that. The level's environments are themed to their purpose and each level of Hamlet has a unique look, even if the textures are mostly identical throughout the individual levels. Which is ok, cause you're not gonna be wandering around them for very long before going to another. As far as weapon effects go, they exist, and are differentiated enough you can tell what you are shooting and what's being shot at you. Very basic and nothing really special though. The true attraction here are the character portraits and cutscenes, they are all wonderfully drawn and animated in an almost PC-98 visual novel style and still hold up. Heck the character portraits are some of the best in videogames, with animations and a wider variety of expressions than most games. Sound: 7 Ok I'll get the bad out of the way first. The game has no music outside cutscenes. There is nothing but the sounds of your mech and the moon base as you adventure along, making it very lonely and increasing the spook factor in my opinion, but some may find they want to have a podcast or something going in the background while they play. The sound effects are alright. The mech makes various noises as it moves around, bangs when it runs into stuff, audio alerts sound when you are being targeted so you can take evasive action or raise your shield, the weapons each have unique sounds as do the enemies, and some of the sounds the biomonsters made haunted my dreams as a kid. The big bad's roar used to terrify me when it would show up. The mechanical doors and elevators whoosh and grind appropriately, computers buzz, whir and beep when you are nearby. It's good for it's time period in this regard. The reason I give it a seven with no music and alright sound effects? The voice acting. This game's voice acting is some of the best you'll find in all of video gaming until the PS2 era. Each character is uniquely voiced by an actual voice actor and properly directed, with few if any weird line deliveries, and every single line in the game is voiced. So no Japanese directors pulling random westerners off the street to give meme worthy performances here. There are even optional conversations you can have with characters through your radio or visiting specific areas at certain times, all fully voiced, and voiced well on a PS1 title. Gameplay: 7 The controls are fine for exploring but aren't good for combat. It's an early console FPS before analog joysticks and it plays like an early console FPS before twin sticks. Shoulder buttons raise, lower and turn your view, dpad is forward, back, and strafe. It's clunky and might be a turn off for a lot of people, but the game never throws enough enemies at you and the combat is paced slowly enough that the controls never really become a liability. Flying and other more mobile enemies can be a pain, however they are also very weak. Combat is more of a puzzle affair for more difficult enemies, when your mech locks onto a target an infrared diagram of the enemy will pop up and the warm spots are the weak spots. Most guard robots can be hit anywhere, but military forces and biomonsters will either ignore damage not done to their weak spot or just eat through your ammo. Fortunately only one enemy type and one miniboss encounter are truly difficult to deal with. Controlling the mech is smooth, also the Griffon is a transforming mech, literally called a Variable Formula like it was out of Macross. Combat mode is the standard full on mech mode, and ups your firepower stat at the expense of defense and speed. Assault mode is a fighter jet with legs looking hybrid mode and offers balanced firepower, defense, and speed stats. Finally you have Cruise mode, in which your mech transforms into a very anime looking cross between F1 car, tank, and fighter jet. This mode prioritizes maximum speed at the cost of firepower and defense. In fact you are limited to only using the missile launcher in this mode, ammo for which is rare and should be saved for emergencies and more difficult encounters. Oh yeah, I mentioned stats, well this game has leveling. That's right, your mech's computer will level up as you defeat enemies throughout the game. This grants increased attack, defense, and speed stats. Your attack stat effects how hard your weapons hit and how fast they fire, and in the case of energy weapons, how much energy per shot is used. While you probably won't notice the difference between each individual level, there's a huge difference between the starting Griffon and a late game Griffon. The Griffon can equip three weapons, one in each hand, and then missiles in what I believe is it's "backpack". You can also forgo a hand weapon in order to equip the shield which has it's own HP and repair units. And there are a small variety of weapons in S, M, and L variants, from lasers and vulcans, to linear launchers aka rail guns, and even gun launchers, which are handheld cannons that use a propellant charge to fire missiles out of the barrel. Certainly an interesting choice for a mech survival horror game. The vast majority of the gameplay is exploring a dark moon base and clearing out the enemies on each level in a fairly linear fashion and if you do get lost, the game does a good job of reminding you where you need to go. Occasionally you will run into a boss or miniboss encounter. During all this you will be running across items, be they weapons, key items to progress, mech and shield repair units, energy refills for your mech. While repair and energy refills stack, weapons do not. Weapons have what ammo they hold. To carry more ammo you have to fill spots in your inventory with extra copies of that weapon. There are only so many weapons in the game, and as such only so much ammo, save for energy weapons like lasers that use your suit's energy as ammo. Also strong enemy attacks or regular attacks at lower health can break weapons. So there is an element of inventory management. If your inventory is full you can leave the item or replace it with one from your inventory. By the end of the game most item locations will be your old stuff. I've had times where due to bad luck I was running through the end game from item location to item location emptying the magazines on stuff I'd previously discarded, having to rely on the old reliable small laser in the final fight. I've also had runs where I go into the last boss fight loaded for bear with all L variant weapons at max ammo and leveled him. It all depends on luck with weapon breakage, how accurate you are, and how often you take advantage of the enemy weak points. As for length, the game is beatable in a couple nights of gaming, about 8-10ish hours if you know what you're doing, probably 12-14 for new players. Overall: 8 Overall it's an early 3d console title and pre twin stick FPV game and suffers for it. But if you can get past the flaws inherent to it's time, you'll find a well made and little known FPS horror action mech gem that is more than the sum of it's parts with cool mech designs and a decent story with above average characters all told through great voice acting and cutscenes. A story, that as I've said at the beginning of this review is effectively Resident Evil 2 in space. In closing, the game while flawed because of it's time, is a solid experience. If you happen to stumble upon this review, please give the game a try, it's super unique and criminally unknown. Oh! And if you're on a translation team, maybe look into translating the Dreamcast remake? Pretty please? lol |
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