#rasho

A quiet voice, "Don't die, okay?"

[Game 2 on my massive JRPG Spreadsheet! Previous entries - well, the previous entry - can be found in my #tales from the retro jrpg Spreadsheet tag.]

What it is: Bokosuka Wars (ボコスカウォーズ) for Famicom, released on the 14th of December, 1985, developed and published by ASCII. Based on the home computer game of the same name from March 1984, also published by ASCII and developed by one Kōji Sumī, currently an avant-garde artiste working under the name Rasho but then a lucky bedroom coder who happened to win a programming contest. Got a sequel/reimagining thirty-five years after the fact, making this technically the first in a series of unique vaguely board-game-y strategy games about the heroic kingdom of Suren's fight against the tyrannical Basam Empire's oppression.

What's it about: Pretty much what I just said, yeah! Even by the standards of early 80s quasi-RPGs, Bokosuka Wars' plot is thin. The Famicom version adds a few extra details to account for some gameplay changes - Ogereth, Emperor of the Basam Empire, has turned the Suren Kingdom's soldiers into rocks and trees, but King Suren (or possibly just the King of Suren, the Japanese is a little unclear) has learned how to undo that spell and rebuild his army - but the various home computer versions keep it short and sweet. You don't have the manpower to fight off the invading army the traditional way, so you're spearheading a lightning-quick assault on Basam Castle to take out Ogreth, and that's all the setup you need.

How it plays: Bokosuka Wars' box calls it 'a very different type of RPG!' but by modern standards it's more of an abstract chess-ish strategy game. King Suren starts at the right side of the map, 600 metres/tiles away from Ogreth. To win the game, all you have to do is get from there to him and defeat him in single combat. Of course, it's not as simple as it sounds; the forces surrounding Basam Castle outnumber your largest possible force four to one, and there's no way the King can fight his way through them on his own, and if he dies, you lose the game.

Fortunately, he doesn't have to do it alone. While in the home computer versions the King starts with a small force of his own, due to hardware limitations on Famicom he must free his troops by pushing against trees and rocks and other obstacles to turn them into soldiers. There are two types: pawns, who are fairly weak but fairly numerous, and knights, who are relatively strong but relatively rare. The player can move either the army as a whole, just the king, just the knights, or just the pawns, making manoeuvring around scenery and enemies alike trickier than in most strategy games.

Manoeuvring is an important part of Bokosuka Wars for another reason. Moving one of your units onto a spot occupied by an enemy will start a battle, and though units do have an attack stat that can be increased in almost every battle there's a decent chance the weaker combatant will win and the stronger destroyed. This applies equally to a freshly-recruited pawn and a fully-powered-up knight and the King, so winning the Bokosuka Wars is as much about avoiding battles as it is about winning them, carefully positioning your soldiers to keep enemies away from the King and only risking a fight when you have no other options. Even so, sometimes you just have to barrel your army forward into the enemy and pray to the random number gods your King makes it through.

What I thought: I... wanted to like Bokosuka Wars. I really did! It's got this experimental DIY bedroom-coder charm that really appeals to me (I think because I spent my childhood playing Flash games.) Its gameplay is unlike anything else I've ever seen, and I mean that in a good way - the fact that enemies can't attack you, but can block your way, puts a unique twist on the tactics you need to make your way through, and the game is very good at using that concept to challenge the player, from enemies that swarm the King unless you can block their path, to tight corridors you have to carefully move your army through while baiting enemies into dead ends. Sumī even wrote some lyrics to the background music and put them in the manual! How can you not love that?

But, as they say, the devil's in the details. A full playthrough of Bokosuka Wars can take easily over an hour, and since we're still before the standardisation of - even password saves, you're going to have to pull that off in one sitting. That wouldn't necessarily be the worst thing in the world, but coupled with how easily and suddenly a run can end it makes every attempt to reach Ogreth a long, grinding slog that's only ever one bad decision - or one bad dice roll! - away from a WOW, YOU LOSE! This time around I could at least break up the sessions with save states, but the first time I played this, on original hardware, I was sitting in front of my little CRT, mechanically going through the same steps of my ideal strategy, again and again, for days on end. And this is one of those games that restarts with a higher difficulty when you beat it! I can't even imagine having the patience.

The promise between them as Confederates is freedom, the open seas. Offer of a life away from it all. Yet they might as well be chained together, a decision to never be free of the other. Tansui and Rasho wouldn't have it any other way.

Alternate shot and details under the cut!