Remembering Compile: Guru Logi Champ
Along with Zanac X Zanac, released the same day in November 2001, Guru Logi Champ is Compile's final completed game before their closure, and serves as a reminder this studio still had a lot to give.
Compile, founded in the early 1980s, was a standout developer in its day. That day is long past now, however: as of November 2023, it’s already been 20 years since the studio closed its doors. In its over two decades, though, Compile showed off influential talent, and became the start of a family tree of developers across multiple genres that’s still growing today. Throughout November, the focus will be on Compile’s games, its series, its influence, and the studios that were born from this developer. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Zanac X Zanac understandably gets credit as Compile’s swan song, since it was a re-release of a game that put them on the map with an enhanced, modernized version of that same game to go with it. Released on the same day — November 29, 2001 — was a second Compile game, however, and it’s not difficult to make an argument that it’s the superior one. That’s no knock on Zanac X Zanac: Guru Logi Champ is just that compelling of a puzzle game.
Separated from their moneymaker, Puyo Puyo — thanks to a series of moves that began with temporarily selling the franchise to Sega to hold onto while Compile raised the money to buy it back only to fail to do that before the specified date, losing it forever — the studio had to start looking elsewhere in the puzzle sphere if they were going to continue to find success in it. They wouldn’t, though: Guru Logi Champ is a great game, but it didn’t sell like it needed to, just like Zanac X Zanac did not. Compile would develop one more game following this dual commercial failure, Pochi and Nyaa, but ended up closing their doors before they could finish it; that it was a joint project with Taito as publisher wasn’t enough to offset Compile’s financial issues. A temporary studio, Aiky, meant to house some of Compile’s intellectual property and allow for them to finish Pochi and Nyaa, was formed with Masamitsu Niitani once again at the helm, and Taito still the publisher. In typical Compile style, it came out for the Neo Geo well after its peak, about half-a-year before software was discontinued on those platforms, but it did receive a port to the more modern Playstation 2 one year later, at least, published by Bandai.
All of this meant that it was impossible for Compile to try to turn Guru Logi Champ into a series, or spend time porting it to any other system, or even localizing it for regions besides Japan. D4 Enterprises, which acquired quite a bit of the rights to Compile’s library following the studio’s closure, would make a… sequel? remake?… called Guruguru Logic for the Nintendo DSiWare service, which would also receive a North American release titled Snapdots. DSiWare was a bit ambitious in terms of moving the still-budding digital download market to a portable space, but the DSi was a more moderate success than the standard DS, so it was only so successful in terms of actual returns. Meaning Snapdots didn’t exactly make D4 rich, either, or even become well-known to people who weren’t obsessive about checking out what landed in the space, despite also being a high-quality puzzle game. And now that game is even more unavailable than Guru Logi Champ: sure, you’ll spend hundreds of dollars on a Guru Logi Champ cartridge, but at least you have the option to, unlike with the now disappeared library of DSiWare digital releases.
Anyway. “Guru” is short for “guruguru,” as you probably surmised when the sequel’s name was mentioned above. “Guruguru” is a Japanese onomatopoeia for rotation. “Going around in circles, can be physical or mental. Sound effect for turning something round and round.” The “Logi” part of the name is for “Logic,” which you’ll see some sites or outlets outright use in place of Logi in the game’s title, and D4’s sequel also used instead of getting cute with it. You will not be surprised to discover that Guru Logi Champ focuses on rotating a puzzle around and around in order to place all of the various pieces it’s missing where they belong, solving it.
The quickest explanation that isn’t wholly accurate — but still does the trick — is to say that Guru Logi Champ is something of a combination of Picross and Magical Drop. Picross, because the puzzles you’re solving are incomplete images of objects. And Magical Drop because you pick up unobstructed pieces off of the puzzle board, and then fire them back elsewhere where they’re needed. Instead of trying to clear groups of these pieces like in Magical Drop, though, you’re pulling these pieces toward you and into your possession and then firing them back somewhere else to complete the image.
That’s just the basic level of things, though. In reality, you might pick up the same piece again and again, not setting it in its final place until after it’s helped you put the other pieces where they belong. Let’s take a look at what an incomplete Guru Logi Champ puzzle even looks like for a second to see what I mean:
On the bottom of the puzzle, you can see that it would be very easy to fill in the empty, yellowed spots with available blocks. There are just six blocks you have to play with in this puzzle, though, so you can’t just use four of them immediately by putting them where they’ll finally end up. Now, the solve here would be to rotate the puzzle so that you can fire off four blocks into the opening in what is now the top: the first three will have X’s on them since they aren’t where they should be, but the fourth will give you an anchor to attach a fifth piece to on its side, where it’s meant to be to complete the object. Which will then allow you to pull back pieces 1-4, then place a second piece where number four had been. Then, finally, you rotate back to the starting place, and fire off one piece each in the remaining four empties. Puzzle complete, image revealed, on to the next one.
You can’t suck pieces back into the cannon at the bottom of the screen if they’re obstructed by immovable parts of the image-to-be, or if those wavy blue lines in the frame of the image are in the way of the cannon’s firing range. You have to stop and think about what you’re doing and what order pieces should be fired off in, but if you want to set some impressive personal bests, you’ll have to also think and react quickly. So you’re constantly moving, rearranging, realizing you did things out of order, and trying to figure out what the snag that’s in place to keep you from easily completing each puzzle is. It's very rewarding to solve the puzzles, too, especially since they ramp up in difficulty in short order and start being obviously designed to trip you up and play on what you think you know about deploying the tricks you need to in order to progress. Just a clever little game.
Though, not so little, actually, as there are 150 puzzles in Guru Logi Champ, and it contains a multiplayer mode as well. While the game released as a Japan-exclusive Game Boy Advance title, you don’t need to know Japanese in order to play it, or to play it well. Knowing would certainly enhance the experience, since the game is full of charm and humor that sometimes is presented via dialogue, but luckily much of it is visual humor and charm, captured in the expressions and actions of its characters. It actually all serves as a reminder that, through all the changes to Compile, despite all the employees who left to strike it out on their own or for companies that maybe wouldn’t always be teetering on the financial brink, the studio was still able to retain the kind of oddball humor that had created Madou Monogatari and Puyo Puyo in the first place. Obviously, Guru Logi Champ wasn’t as successful as either of those pillars of Compile, but it still served as a worthy sendoff.
In addition to D4’s Snapdots, there was another attempt at creating a Guru Logi Champ-style game, and that was PopCap’s Pixelus. It’s so obviously a repackaged Guru Logi Champ, now with an ancient Greek aesthetic instead of a society of oddly drawn ducks, some of whom have cannons, that its Wikipedia page even outright says it’s a clone. Pixelus Deluxe was the full retail version of the game released by PopCap for Windows and Mac OS Xin 2004, and yeah. It’s Guru Logi Champ:
It lacks the color and the inherent charm of Compile’s version of the game, which is just bursting with it through every off-kilter narrative decision and premise and character animation, but hey, this type of game was made available in more places than just Japan thanks to Pixelus, so it’s hard to blame PopCap for seeing an idea from a closed studio and going, “oh yeah, I bet people would enjoy that if only they were given the chance to.” And hey, if you’ve played Pixelus before and thought it was entirely a PopCap original, tip your cap to Compile now instead.
Given you can’t find Guru Logi Champ (or Snapdots) anywhere legally these days, you’ll have to focus your energies elsewhere. It’s worth it, though, as, despite PopCap’s decision, fairly unique, challenging, and rewarding experiences. Maybe not quite as good as Compile not having financial issues and continuing to be able to make more games like this one, but hey. At least Guru Logi Champ does exist.
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