#picross

A nice nonogram is always a good time for me. So after playing some Hebereke games I set my sights on this Japan-exclusive spinoff from Sunsoft's genre-spanning mascot series. I've seen it mentioned but now that I know the characters, the time was right. Apparently Oekaki Logic was a nonogram magazine, and so the puzzle designers there presumably provided the grids for inclusion in this and other games bearing the name on the Super Famicom, Wii, etc. There's actually three O-chan no Oekaki Logic instalments, and the first game has ports on various platforms. I picked the Saturn port because of all of them, I think it's the only one with a story mode.

This port (and presumably the PSX port) take advantage of the CD format by including voice acting, although it doesn't come up much, O-chan just shouts at you in some of the menus. She also hangs out on the side of the screen while you solve puzzles. It's nice for her to have a starring role over and above Hebe and the rest of the gang. The story even has Hebe go missing, and it follows O-chan's quest across some island to find him, encountering various old friends and enemies (including a green doppelganger) along the way. Then it ends with the "it was all a dream" cop-out. Ho hum.

The structure of story mode is very simple. You move to the next square on the map screen, and run into another of the cute blobby characters that populate the Hebereke world. There's a short dialogue scene, spelled out only in hiragana so it's difficult to parse, especially with how fast it scrolls by. Then you solve a set of ten puzzles. Some of the characters join you, becoming available to call on once per puzzle as a hint function, revealing squares in different patterns (O-chan's freeze breath reveals one row and column, for example, while Jennifer's bombs do a random spread of individual squares, and Sukezaemon uniquely removes mistake penalties). I only found this necessary or convenient twice near the end of the game. Beyond the Ufouria four [minus Hebe], you also get joined by Pen-chan the penguin cosplayer, Bobodori the bird, and even Utsujin the alien who is the main antagonist of Ufouria 2.

Sometimes your opponent is a silent Popoon (read blob) with a smaller puzzle set who grants temporary access to a slot machine; I never won this so I don't know what it rewards you with. I can't even guess! I also didn't note down how many puzzle sets make up the whole campaign; maybe ten? So there's a fair number to solve, especially when you add the total from the normal mode… although I only played the story for this coverage, so maybe the puzzles are reused? You can't view the solutions in any of the modes, so it's hard to say.

I'm uncomfortable with so much uncertainty, so I'll tell you what I am sure of, and that's the nitty gritty of the puzzle mechanics. Puzzles range from 5x5 to a whopping 30x30 which I've never seen before. The Saturn resolution can barely accommodate the grid at this size, and there's even a zoom button to get closer to the squares. When you get to 25x25 and above, the clues can't all be displayed at the same time, so the borders scroll depending on your cursor position. This is a bit jarring, and can make it hard to follow at a glance when the clues don't line up visually with rows and columns that aren't actively selected. I think there's a reason nonogram games usually don't go this big, because these compromises aren't the most elegant.

The puzzling is also light on features, although to be fair this game was releasing in 1995, the same year as Jupiter's first Picross games, which also feel primitive by today's standards. There's no screen wrap, and holding cross while moving the cursor can overwrite marked spaces, even though marks get corrected in story mode (make three mistakes and you have to start the puzzle over, much like Jupiter's NuPa). Most egregiously, clue numbers aren't checked either automatically or manually. In the early Picross games you could mark them yourself, but here they stay the same, which demands more concentration from the player, especially on the later giant grids. I will say the solutions look nice and are often recognisable; they get coloured in after you solve them, and a handful depict the Hebereke characters but otherwise are the usual assortment of objects and scenes I’ve come to expect from nonogram games.

I enjoyed that the story mode doesn't have any time limits. In fact, normal mode doesn't either, it just keeps track of your best solve time. This mode works like Jupiter’s “free mode”, not checking for mistakes. The puzzles here are split up by difficulty. There’s also random mode which just throws a random puzzle at you without any ado. A versus mode lets you face off with another player in some way (couldn’t test that). To round out the package, an edit mode lets you design your own puzzles and save them either to the system RAM or a cartridge; this is pretty forward-thinking for such an early nonogram game, so I have to give it props.