It's new to me: Bulk Slash
Maybe the reason North Americans think the Sega Saturn lacked games is because so many of the great ones never made it out of Japan.
This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Good things happened when Hudson Soft joined forces with CAProduction. The developer was originated by former Technosoft staff who worked on Lords of Thunder as part of Red Company’s and Hudson’s classic shooter, Lords of Thunder. They would also create memorable Hudson titles like Hagane: The Final Conflict on the SNES, and the technical showpiece Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire on the PC Engine Arcade CD-ROM. They’re also partly responsible with Hudson for the vast majority of Mario Party games, a relationship that’s continued to this day, where NDCube, formed by former Hudson staffers, works on the series alongside CAProduction for Nintendo. And then there is the subject of today’s entry, Bulk Slash, a mech-based action game for the Sega Saturn.
Bulk Slash released in 1997, and only in Japan. Sure, the Saturn was clearly finishing behind Sony’s Playstation and the Nintendo 64 in that generation, but it still seems as if there is little reason why this game never found its way out of Japan. It might not have the branching pathways and sheer number of stages found in Star Fox 64, which also released in ‘97 a month earlier, but it’s still as replayable as it is engaging, while displaying 3D prowess that you might not even be aware the Saturn is capable of.
In Bulk Slash, you play as mech pilot Chris Dooley, whose mission is to stop a coup before it can claim the lives of billions. I don’t love the story setup, to be honest, as it seems a little backwards from what little is given to the player: after a major interplanetary war ends, the winning planets oppress the losers of that war on the planet Blau, and the residents of that planet later rise up in rebellion against their oppressors. Chris Dooley is part of the new alliance of planets tasked with putting down this rebellion, and the only reason it seems like a good idea for you is because this coup attempt has taken things a little too far, by threatening the lives of billions of people, one whole planet at a time with a weapon of apocalyptic proportions, instead of just those directly responsible for their oppression. Chris even has a personal stake in this, as one of the antagonists and military leaders of the coup is his childhood friend, Riesen, who he used to defend against bullies, bullies who were picking on her due to where she was from. Due to that bullying and her father being executed as a war criminal, however, she’s joined forces with the coup.
I will say that it feels like they’re trying to do a World War II-esque thing, where the victors punished their foes far too much after the first war that was the fault of more than just the side that lost, leading to years of resentment and the seeds for a monumentally hateful and genocidal second war to be planted. Your goal here is to put a stop to these machinations before they can bear fruit. I just wish a little more time had been spent making that more obvious in the game itself, prior to the last few minutes of it, rather than just in the manual given this is a 1997 game we’re discussing, not a 1987 one.
However, Bulk Slash does have quite a bit of narrative on offer, so it’s not like the game lacks it entirely — really, my complaint about story setup is about the only one I have for the game as a whole, and even that’s kind of in picking nits territory. Before the final fight, you get exposition between Riesen and Chris, who speaks for the first time, and there’s also an ending cutscene that shows Chris reminiscing about his past as Riesen’s friend. In addition, there are a bunch of endings, which you’ll see based on two things: which of the seven navigators is your co-pilot, and how effectively and often you’ve played with the navigator you complete a run of this game with.
Those navigators, outside of the fact that the game is just fun to play and short enough to do so again and again, are why you’ll keep picking up Bulk Slash. They are basically a romance subplot for Chris — each navigator is a young woman who, if you score enough points and gain enough experience with them, will end up dating or even marrying Chris as part of the game’s ending. These cutscenes are fun little treats that re-balance you after the heavy ending where you have to kill Chris’ childhood friend he still obviously cares for. Chris and a princess (Metical Flair) pretending like they’re going to jump off a cliff together to their doom since her father the king won’t approve of their love, only to reemerge inside of a flying vehicle saying, “Just kidding!” before taking off to parts unknown. Chris and a somewhat clumsy navigator, Leone Rhodes, at their wedding, where she trips and falls face first in a wedding dress while everyone is taking photos of the war heroes on their big day. Light, sure, but it’s also a decent payoff for their personality, which is on display at all times in reaction to the way you play.
The navigators help orient you in your missions, telling you on their own which way your next objective is if they think you’re heading in the wrong direction, or speaking up when you “ask” them where to go by pressing any of the X, Y, or Z buttons. Against bosses, they will automatically point your mech against the enormous, fast-moving foe with a press of one of those buttons, too, which is about as close to a lock-on system as you get. It’s extremely helpful, though, especially when you learn to time the firing of your charged-up homing missile barrages for the same moment you square up against your enemy with your navigator’s help.
They also tell you about what kind of damage you’re taking so you can do a better job of avoiding attacks you might not have seen coming (“Watch out for lasers!”, etc.), or tell you that you’re being reckless with your approach when you keep taking damage and losing shield energy because you’re not being evasive or careful enough. Each navigator — known as a M.I.S.S., as in, someone utilizing the Manageable Intelligent Support System — also has a special ability that becomes available as they max out their level.
The final navigator hastens your charging speed for homing missiles in flying mode and allows for unlimited secondary ammo while in robot form, but I genuinely don’t know what the other abilities are, despite playing hours and hours of this game and even leveling multiple navigators up to the max level of 3. The one FAQ that exists for Bulk Slash felt like it would be more fun to experiment and find out on your own rather than to inform the reader, even though a FAQ is supposed to, you know provide information, and even threads out there on old message boards are full of people similarly not answering the question posed by people with the same “why didn’t the FAQ just tell us” attitude as me. It’s not just a me problem, either: I can’t seem to find this info in any other review I’ve looked at for the purposes of finding this out. That’s both comforting and even more annoying.
Complete the game with a navigator, and receive some character art you can view at any time in the options menu. These are pretty typical fare for video games, in that they’re “candid,” fan-service-y shots of these women wearing regular clothes instead of their mech pilot suits, but they’re also well done and help add more character to these navigators, in the same way their distinct accents and ways of speaking over comms do. Want a princess with an English accent to tell you that you’re doing a bad job in a condescending way? Or maybe you prefer a Space Texan to do that? Bulk Slash has your very specific needs covered either way.
Complete the game with a navigator while earning enough experience with them to get them to level 2, and you unlock their ending. Get them to level 3 with additional playthroughs, and you’ll max out their mystery powers while also receiving more character art. Finish the game at least once with each of the six navigators — one is found in each of the game’s first six stages — and you’ll unlock the seventh one. While you need to pick up these navigators, represented by a pink helmet that says M.I.S.S. above it, in each stage, once you complete the game with one, they are available from a menu at the game’s start to choose right away, and will no longer appear in the stage you found them in. This makes it much easier for you to rack up experience for, say, Koron Steiner, whom you only find in stage 6, meaning you don’t have all that much time in your first playthrough with her to earn bonuses or XP.
You only get experience for the navigator you complete the game with, and she will also be the only navigator who will newly appear on the start screen from then on, even if you picked up each one individually in their level before finishing stage 7. You do get a little bit of freedom before you start having navigators to choose from after a couple of playthroughs, though, as the game’s stages are available in non-linear sets. You can play any of stages 1 through 3 from the start, and once those are done, 4-6 open up to be played in whatever order you’d like, too. So you can, for instance, pick up Metical Flair in stage 3 as your first stage, and then play through the whole rest of the game with her, too, instead of “wasting” two stages of potential experience points on another navigator before getting to the one you wanted to play with. Good news: if you suffer a Game Over, you can start the stage again, without losing your experience — your score is reset, but you can continue on without losing either stage or romantic progress.
The game’s manual — helpfully localized into English along with the game (which is also dubbed, and dubbed in a way that befits the game’s personality) by fans — details that, “The conditions for leveling up vary from one navigator to the next. Your romantic affinity may rise by achieving chain combos or collecting lots of items. These parameters are hidden, so be sure to try various approaches.” Which means, basically, that you’ll need to try to play the game in different ways and achieve different goals in order to impress the various navigators. You’ll also hear their lines change as their romantic affinity toward Chris increases, so there is more to the system than just some character art at the end, which is why a game that was playable for non-Japanese speakers from the start needed a localization, anyway: to put much of the charm of replayability back into the game where it belonged.
Even without that charm, though, the game still plays like a dream, in terms of how it controls and feels. As a robot-looking mech, you can slash foes and objects with a massive sword by pressing the B button, or you can fire from more of a distance with a rapid-fire default gun, and one of three limited ammo upgrades you’ll find scattered throughout: a flamethrower, a bezier laser, and wide-shot Napalm. By pressing the A button, you transform from robot to flying mode, which also changes your weapons. The default gun is similar, but by not firing at all, you can stack up a whole bunch of homing missiles that can lock-on to targets in your sights, and fire them all at once by pressing B. These missiles will also automatically fire if they’re all queued up when you switch from flying to robot mode.
The default speed for flying is 50 percent engine power, but you can cycle through different power levels (25, 50, 75, and 99 percent) or hold down the C button to get a customized speed, one percentage point at a time. It might seem a little awkward at first, to be cycling through these speeds while trying to control a flying vehicle in a legitimate three-dimensional space using a directional pad and the L and R triggers, but it’s actually astounding how smooth it all feels for a game from 1997, in a time before analog sticks were a given. Especially since the game features two different modes of play, and you’ll be switching back-and-forth with regularity to maximize your own effectiveness, speed, and damage reduction. It doesn’t feel great for 1997, so much as it just feels great in general.
If you happen to have a Twin Stick controller for your Saturn, the fan translators actually modified the game with their patch so that it can be used with Bulk Slash as well, just like in other Saturn mech titles like Virtual-On. That’s a lovely feature to have spent time on for sure, especially given how few titles natively support the Twin Stick, but you’ll do just fine with any of the more standard Saturn pads, too — analog support is not enabled for the 3D Control Pad, but it’s basically a game perfectly designed for that controller, otherwise, given its triggers and larger X, Y, Z buttons.
Once you understand what you are capable of, with switching between flying and walking, with homing missiles and changing speeds and how well and smoothly your mech flies, Bulk Slash is going to feel amazing to play. It also looks great, with impressive explosions, and, outside of pop-in and short draw distances, wonderful 3D for the era and the platform, and the soundtrack is a perfect fit, too. You know what you’re getting into from an audio standpoint once the first notes of the opening theme hit:
I, too, am shocked that the developers behind Lords of Thunder would produce a guitar-and-riff-heavy soundtrack that I would find appealing. Who could have predicted such an outcome? I mean, this is some Falcom-worthy stuff right here…
…and this is maybe the most AKI Corporation wrestling video game-ass song I’ve ever heard outside of one of those:
Which is to say, I love it.
Bulk Slash is really a showcase title for the Saturn, and one that wouldn’t be showcased worldwide until nearly 25 years after its initial release, decades after Sega themselves had exited the console business. It’s one of the finest games I’ve played on the system, though, and another successful title produced by the longstanding partnership between Hudson Soft and CAProduction. You owe it to yourself to find a way to play it, whether you have a modded Saturn that can play a patched Japanese game, or just have to find an emulator to get it working on your computer. It’s one I’m going to keep coming back to, at least until I’ve fully leveled up all of the navigators and seen all of their endings, or maybe even until I figure out what the heck these mystery abilities they all have actually are.
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