Re-release this: Mischief Makers
Shake shake!
This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Treasure got its development start in what ended up being a partnership between them and Sega for their various early 90s systems. Gunstar Heroes, Dynamite Headdy, Alien Soldier, Light Crusader, and Guardian Heroes were all, with the exception of the last one, Genesis games, with Guardian Heroes being a Saturn title. When the Nintendo 64 arrived on the scene, though, Treasure was attracted to the idea of developing for it given its for-the-time serious hardware capabilities, and partnered up with Nintendo for a few system exclusives, while also still developing for Sega’s console, albeit no longer as first-party titles.
Much like the power of the Genesis had helped convince a group of Konami devs to strike out on their own and create Gunstar Heroes earlier in the decade, the N64 lured Treasure away from what, to that point, had seen them exclusively developing games for Sega systems. And this new partnership, though different in its structure than the one with Sega, would prove just as fruitful, in terms of the creation of some truly classic titles.
The first of three N64 games Treasure would develop — the others being Bangai-O and the Nintendo co-developed Sin and Punishment (yes, the original version of Bangai-O was a Japanese-exclusive, limited release N64 game, titled Bakuretsu Muteki Bangaioh, not the better known, international Dreamcast release) was published by Nintendo in North America and in PAL regions, and by Enix in Japan. Unlike those two very action-heavy, shooting-game-adjacent titles, 1997’s Mischief Makers is a 2.5D platformer. And certainly lesser known than some of the more action-oriented games listed in the above paragraph, as well as Treasure’s later STG output, but it’s really a lovely little game once you give it a chance, as Treasure’s platformers tend to be.
It takes some getting used to the control scheme of Mischief Makers, which is why the whole first world is basically a playable tutorial, but once you know what you’re doing and what your character, Marina, is capable of, you can fully appreciate what was managed here. Which, of course, is also the kind of statement that can apply to just about any original Treasure title. Take the familiar, add complexity and subversion on the hardware best-suited for what’s in mind, and you’ve got the basic Treasure formula, with Mischief Makers no exception to this.
Marina is a robotic maid, and her way of dealing with enemies is to grab them. She grabs them — and various objects — and then either throws them into other enemies or other objects, or shakes them until they start dropping items — the sound of “Shake shake!” will be forever burned into your brain, should you play Mischief Makers and get to shaking. The game is loaded with environmental puzzles and jumping challenges and some physics to sort out — Marina has a variety of jumps and rolls and such to tackle these along with her ability to grab, shake, and throw — and while each level is timed in order to grade your effectiveness in completing it, it’s all meant to be more exploratory than anything. Your first goal is to just complete the level by learning all about it, which you do by exploring it and finding out where its secrets are hidden. You can replay it afterward to try to do all of that much faster, if you’re looking to get top grades on all of the game’s 52 stages.
The gameplay is wonderful, it’s relaxing unless you’re purposely trying to complete levels as fast as possible, and, as Treasure games tend to be, Mischief Makers is loaded with some wonderful boss fights. Rather than shooting again and again like you normally do in Treasure games, though, you need to be a bit more thoughtful since all of your offense is grabbing-based. Some bosses will require you to grab them and shake the heck out of them, or throw them, and some will force you to grab projectiles they shoot at you, so you can throw them right back.
Each stage — including the boss ones — includes a a hidden yellow gem to collect. Sometimes they’re just well shrouded by the environment, and other times you need to figure out which enemy — or even which ally NPC — needs to be shaken to release that gem. Like with the level grades, a tracker tells you if you’ve found the yellow gem in each stage. And like caring about the grades, these are optional, but you get a longer final cutscene the more of them you collect, and you can’t complete the game 100 percent without them, if that’s more your motivation.
They might not be necessary to collect, but solving the problem of where they’re hiding is lots of fun, since it requires you to fully deploy the skills you’ve learned. Whether that’s in launching yourself through a vertical platforming stage where you can fall all the way back to the beginning with one mistimed jump, or defeating a boss without taking any damage whatsoever — it can be done, but good luck all the same — some of the best parts of Mischief Makers are hiding those yellow gems.
Mischief Makers received pretty mixed reviews, with much of the criticism revolving around its short length (yawn) and its “ugly” graphics. The graphics thing… that seems to be more due to an obsession of the time that everything be fully 3D post-Super Mario 64. Mischief Makers actually looks pretty good these days — better than so many of the fully 3D games of the era, even — as the power of the N64 helped the pre-rendered 3D backgrounds hold up better than that method did for some SNES games, and the pure 2D portions of the game, like protagonist Marina and the many multi-segment bosses that are visual hallmark of the studio, still look great and animate well, too. The game is very much in Treasure’s art style, so sure, if you think Gunstar Heroes and Dynamite Headdy and so on are ugly, Mischief Makers won’t convince you otherwise. But if you’re into their whole thing, and the very easily identifiable art of Tetsuhiko Kikuchi, aka HAN, it’s a good-looking game all this time later, albeit one with a “weird” style.
So, it’s not as ugly as said, not even close, and it’s really only short if you fly through the game once and never go back to it to find hidden gems or improve your grades. Which, why would you do that, when it is designed — successfully so, in my opinion — to cause you to want to return to master what was fun the first time around, and now with different goals in mind on the second go? The gameplay is very different, to the point it still feels unique today for its genre — if Mischief Makers were released digitally by an indie for the first time today (albeit with modern graphics), you’d have people shouting out just how worth it was to learn its systems and see how deceptively deep it all is. Treasure was certainly an indie before that was common parlance for the industry, so that tracks, and they were certainly ahead of their time sometimes to their own detriment, but that was always the mission with them.
It can be pretty easily argued that Mischief Makers is the best non-3D platformer on the N64, and that’s not just because of the paucity of those titles on a system built for an expansion of three-dimensional video gaming. Sure, Mischief Makers is superior to Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, which wasn’t a bad effort from HAL by any means even if there are better Kirby titles out there, and Nintendo wasn’t toppling Marina’s adventure with the second Yoshi-specific platformer, either. But Treasure’s little platformer does have to contend with Goemon’s Great Adventure, which, like with Mischief Makers, is one of the better sidescrollers of the entire generation, never mind just on the N64, so it’s not as if it goes completely unopposed here.
Regardless of whether it’s the best or second-best sidescroller on the N64, however, Mischief Makers is some time well spent even now in 2022… if you can find yourself a copy secondhand. Which remains the only way to get the game, sadly, other than via emulation. N64 emulation is a bit fraught in general — the emulators aren’t always on par with some other systems, and the uniqueness of the N64’s controller can also present an obstacle to overcome, especially when someone decides to develop with that uniqueness in mind. Again, with the statements that can often apply to Treasure games in general.
With that being said, Rakugaki Showtime, despite being pulled from store shelves due to a supposed legal dust up between Treasure and its Japanese publisher, Enix, managed to make it to the Playstation 3’s digital storefront years after its initial release on the original Playstation. Mischief Makers, also published by Enix in Japan, has never appeared on Nintendo’s Virtual Consoles whereas other Nintendo of America-published offerings from otherwise third-party developers, such as Bomberman 64, have been made a priority, but maybe things will be different with the Switch Online service, which includes N64 games through its pricier Expansion Pass tier.
If it were just Treasure involved, that would be one thing — they basically exist at this point as the vector through which their previous non-Sega-published releases see the light of day once more — but we are talking about Nintendo and Square Enix here, too, so prayers are probably in order, not to just get Mischief Makers at all, but to also receive it unblemished.
Portions of this write-up originally appeared in Retro XP in a compilation feature on games that just missed the Nintendo top 101.
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