Handheld consoles have a peculiar power: the power to bring out the best or the worst in developers. While many teams blunder, either by engaging in quixotic struggles to cram existing templates into a smaller space, or by simply sidling on to the new hardware trailing clouds of lethargy and minigames, there are a brave few who see the shift in tech as a chance to shift direction too. Rather than retread or rehash, they instead offer asides to their main franchises that don’t only play to the latest platform’s strengths, but can shed a completely new light on the source material at the same time.
It’s ironic, perhaps, that Dragon Quest should be the series that typifies this approach most completely. The world of a roleplaying game fills up quickly, with characters, certainly, but also with conventions, and RPGs don’t get a lot more conventional than Yuji Hori’s decade-spanning opus. The monolithic Japanese fantasy series has been criss-crossing the same territory since 1986, and while Dragon Quest has always offered its players great stories, it has tended to take a fairly cautious approach to its mechanics. Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime, however, was a complete reversal of all that. As the series burst on to the DS for the first time, in a game developed by Japan’s enigmatic TOSE team (a collection of backroom boys whose best work often goes uncredited), story was kept to an absolute minimum while mechanics were encouraged to warp and mutate gloriously, bubbling forth in unexpected torrents.
The result was a slight game, certainly, but one that utterly defies genre. Rocket Slime isn’t just one of the most playful of DS titles, it’s also one of the hardest to classify – and that’s saying something when you’re talking about a handheld device that’s given us Euro-art dating sims, point-and-click driving tutors and a game about learning to get the absolute most from your own facial expressions. And yet even as Rocket Slime blends play styles – some familiar, some newly minted – it manages to make its baffling levels of ingenuity seem entirely natural. It switches speeds without ever seeming clumsily paced, and fits dizzying levels of complexity in alongside minigames about sweeping up leaves. It dazzles without baffling, and brings a wealth of new ideas to one of gaming’s most venerable licences. How does it do it?
Not by reining in its ambitions or firing you through an endless chicane of tutorials. Rather, Rocket Slime begins with fireworks, both celebratory and then metaphorical, as Boingburg, the sleepy capital city of Slimenia, is invaded by the villainous Plob. As the names suggest, what follows is not the most high-minded of adventures – particularly for anyone expecting the heft and drama of a traditional Dragon Quest narrative – but the game’s glib approach to scene-setting quietly does the job all the same, and you’re left with a relatively traditional agenda lurking behind the pratfalls, puns and oddball characters: repair the kingdom and rescue your friends.
And, granted, at first Rocket Slime seems traditional in more than just its narrative. At its simplest level, TOSE’s game is a pared-down take on Castlevania, as your search for Rocket’s kidnapped allies leads you through a range of simple, themed environments. You’ll gain new powers along the way that allow you to unlock different parts of the map, and the landscapes you pass through hardly push at the boundaries of established adventure game backdrops, taking in a maze-like forest complete with wooden forts, wells and a craggy-faced tree for a boss, to deserts where conveyor belts of sand whisk you unpredictably away from the beaten track, and the rocky peaks of Mount Krakatoa, with its secret gullies and snow-capped summit.
Even here, though, there’s a sense of careful refinement throughout, as if the developer is preparing you for the twists ahead by ensuring that even the simplest of mechanics are as intuitive as possible. Off-the-map exploration is always rewarded with a treat of some kind – and almost always drops you off where you need to be afterwards, with side-paths forming elegant ox-bow structures that all but excise backtracking – while chunky barriers litter the area, leaving no ambiguity as to the locations you aren’t powerful enough to visit yet – or the delights that will await you there when you’re ready for them.
And there’s already an interesting mixture of ideas going on in these early stages, too, as the game offers you the option to gather random objects – and enemies – as you explore, and dump them into the networks of mine-carts that whiz through each environment on rickety little tracks, headed back towards home. Riding the rails is a means of providing an easy exit from any level when you need it, of course (an unusually thoughtful consideration for a game you might be playing between bus stops), but it’s much more besides. The collection gene lies deep within the DNA of most RPG players, and endless scavenging is a compelling little piece of metagame design, even if you don’t yet know why you’re squirrelling all this stuff away.
And, suddenly, it turns out that you’ve been squirrelling all this stuff away for the tank battles as, after an hour or so of adventuring, you’ll find yourself pitched into a series of one-on-one fights against ludicrously decked-out mechanical death machines, whose odd paint jobs and turret placement are matched by charmingly jokey names. Over time, you’ll face off against a giant ice-cream-quiffed cat called the Purrsecutor, the cutlery-encrusted Enforker, and a vast hollow tree named, naturally, the Chrono Twigger. They’re not simply filling in for the game’s bosses, either – they’re an entirely separate strand of gameplay threaded into the main quest.
If tank combat is the most surprising of Rocket Slime’s sudden shifts in tone, it is also, happily, the most successful, not least because the developer has the reserves of invention and energy to make such an incongruous element feel like a natural fit. Having thrown you the ultimate curve ball, TOSE simply refuses to settle down, piling on the quirks and, in the process, presenting mechanised warfare as it’s never been seen before.
Rocket Slime lets you approach its tank battles in a variety of different ways. You can wear down your foe’s armour by blitzing them with the bizarre pieces of ammo – including boulders, empty treasure chests and boomerangs – that have been collected on your journey, or you can go solo, firing yourself into the depths of enemy territory to work through the rival tank’s interior before destroying the beating heart of its engine. There’s no mystery to how things work – no menus and corner-cutting to make the action more abstract – and the business of waiting for random armaments to shoot down the chute for you to then load it into one of the cannons brings a multi-tasking flourish of Diner Dash to what is already an entirely untraditional take on the RTS base-rush.
Later on, you’ll be able to upgrade your own Schleiman Tank and choose a crew loadout of teammates from rescued townsfolk, juggling a handful of different strengths and weaknesses. Assigning them specific roles on board leaves you better placed to focus on the rock-paper-scissors dynamic of cannon combat as you work out if an Irritaball is any good against a Kaboomamite, and whether anything at all can take down a speeding Hero Sword. By then, of course, you’ll be prepared for the next twist in this restless game’s agenda, and the one after that.
Yet if Rocket Slime’s a riot of new ideas, it’s held together by a much older style of craftsmanship. Leapfrogging between exploration and brawling, resource management, boss battles and tank combat, TOSE’s game should, by all rights, be a stodgy disaster. Luckily, its careful sense of progression – learnt, perhaps, during the developer’s many anonymous RPG ports – ensures that Rocket’s knockabout journey manages to keep its players facing in the right direction no matter how many times the game’s peculiar sense of adventure tries to spin them around.
And so everything in Rocket’s world moves outwards and onwards with a simple grace, from exploration that opens up with each bouncy, springy new skill, through basic resources that can be combined to create bigger and better items, and on to tank battles that see you steadily enhancing your standard Schleiman model until, in the game’s final moments, you can literally take it into the sky. The real spine of the adventure, however, lies back home in Boingburg, as your rescued friends form a tangible completion meter, the cold abstraction of percentages replaced with 100 bubbly little idiots to rescue, all with their own foibles and stylish accoutrements, and all of whom are itching to send you a letter of thanks when you’re done.
As RPGs become thoroughly mired in tradition, and as the fans of the great series continue to ask for the same great stories retold again and again, it’s the oddities and offshoots like Rocket Slime – a slight, fascinating and in some ways important game – that will grow increasingly irresistible to players and designers alike. In TOSE’s case, the opportunity to explore unmapped territory within a classic franchise resulted in something that feels like a designer’s scrapbook as much as a game: an adventure built from a few major new concepts, and dozens of scribbled embellishments. If you want invention along with drama, and quirkiness to go with your quests, then the place to seek it out may no longer be the conservative epic unfolding on the TV screen, but the spry little charmer that lives inside your handheld.
The post Time Extend: Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime appeared first on Edge Online.
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