Cosmic Soldier: Psychic War: Summary and Rating

A victory screen that I didn't get, courtesy of Old PC Games's YouTube review.

      

Cosmic Soldier: Psychic War

Japan

Kogado (developer and publisher); Brøderbund (U.S. distributor)

Released in 1987 for PC-88; 1988 for MSX, PC-98, and FM-7; 1989 for DOS

Date Started:  19 May 2017
Date Ended: 23 May 2017

Total Hours: 7 (unfinished)

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)

Final Rating: 22

Ranking at Time of Posting: 85/253 (34%)

Ranking at Game #457: 178/457 (39%)

It's possible that this one wouldn't have taken too long to win, but it was already getting pretty boring after the first space station and got even more so in the second. You have to be so quick-on-the-draw to hit SPACE the moment enemies appear that I ended up just holding down SPACE as I moved around the levels. There are really no tactics beyond that, at which point you watch your enemy's health slowly drain away. What killed my enthusiasm was watching a YouTube video of the endgame in which the enemies have thousands of hit points and it takes like a minute to kill some of them. The combat is no more dangerous during these encounters--just longer and more annoying. I wasn't interested in subjecting myself to it. As I think my track record shows, I will be challenged, even frustrated, even infuriated beyond my six hours, but I will not be bored.
    

Combat got boring fast.

      

I explored four levels of the second station, Sivad, found a "VIP Card" in one room and a locked door I couldn't get past on one of the levels. Judging by a walkthrough I consulted after giving up, the space stations are all fairly small, but multi-leveled, with numerous interconnected elevators that form a maze. The departure pad is always in a different location than the arrival pad, so you have to find that at the very least. Progress is slowed by enemy attacks, which occur both at fixed points and fixed intervals.
      

One of the space stations, from a Japanese walkthrough. The numerous up and down elevators create a vertical maze.

      

The rest of the space stations would have delivered a variety of passcards, passwords, and NPCs with special powers. At some point, I would have found a "turbogun" needed to kill "biochemical" monsters; this just adds one more key that you have to hold down to the combat "tactics."

Eventually, the player finds his way to "Melser," the final space station. There, he disables something called a "psycho-shield," navigates a maze, and inserts crystals found throughout the game into a computer to destroy it. (One wonders if this was influenced by Exodus: Ultima III.) At that point, he has limited time to escape the station before it blows up, and apparently this must be done with the "Mind Jump" abilities of an NPC named "Zupreen" as well as some object called a "Beefun." Upon achieving the victory screen, the game's NPCs do a happy line dance along the bottom of the screen.
      

Destroying the evil machine had something to do with slots.

     
As I was preparing this final review, commenter Daniel Spitzley helpfully provided the game manual. It offers a longer backstory than I covered last time, but most of it is just padding and unrelated to anything that happens in the game. Attempts to be dramatic come across as laughable in translation ("The 'ESP Battle of the Galaxy' destined to be talked about for many years to come will now begin"). A section called "secret information" provides outright spoilers for the game, including the locations of key items, and there are even maps of each of the stations so you can just annotate them instead of drawing them from scratch.
      

In the GIMLET, the game earns:

      

• 2 points for a bare-bones framing story that's not really referenced in-game. I could have been anywhere, fighting anyone, for any reason.

• 2 points for character creation and development. Characters do get notably more powerful as they level, but that's about it. There are no creation options and no role-playing.

• 3 points for NPCs who will join the party or impart some hints. Different types of NPCs have strengths and weaknesses I didn't fully get a chance to explore.

• 2 points for encounters and foes. Enemies are distinguished by icon and not much else. Puzzle-solving is relegated to finding the right card to pass the right door.

• 3 points for magic and combat. Combat couldn't be more boring: one button for psychic attack, one for blaster attack, one for shield. Just hold it down. And I'm not sure when you'd favor "Shield" over an attack. The non-combat psychic powers--basically spells--adds some small interest to those portions of the game.

• 3 points for equipment. Mostly plot items and navigational aids. I guess there are some armor items and psychic enhancers, too.

     

Since "yontry" is both a healing/mana potion and occasional currency, this is an important find.

      

• 1 point for the economy. There are a couple of times you can spend healing potions, which also act as a currency.

• 2 points for a main quest with no options.

• 2 points for graphics, sound, and interface. I don't like the graphics at all and there are no sound effects, so it gets both those points for an interface that isn't hard to figure out.

• 2 points for linear, non-replayable, boring gameplay, but I suspect it would have at least been short.

           

That gives us a final score of 22. As I suspected at the outset, it underperforms its Japanese counterparts from this year that also had western DOS releases: Sorcerian (25), The Ancient Land of Ys (35), and Zeliard (37).
   

The cover to the Cosmic Soldier manual looks cooler than the game.

     

I can't find much evidence that the west took note of the release, but then again it was handled by Brøderbund, which had no experience with CRPGs by 1987 and wouldn't have much more after that. If it was ever reviewed or even publicized in a western magazine, I haven't been able to find it.

When it comes to games with plots as thin as this, I like to imagine that the story is being told in a more conventional way, perhaps around a fire or at the knee of a loving grandfather.

      

Storyteller: Once, an evil empire built an evil machine. But a cosmic soldier infiltrated the space station and destroyed it. The End.

Listener A: Okay, that isn't much of a s--

Listener B: I must hear more about this cosmic solder! I love him so much!

      

If it wasn't for Listener B, we wouldn't have half the sequels that we do, including Psychic War 2: Great Ash (2001) for Windows. A good article on the entire series at Hardcore Gaming 101 describes the plot as so:

          

There's now a cold war with the Quila Empire, which seems to never die. A terrorist group has obtained "great ash", which is something important, and wants to sell it to the Empire unless they get their demands met. The Alliance sends out 4 scantily clad women and an android to sort things out.

        

The same article notes that the universe of Cosmic Soldier is shared with a "text-heavy space strategy game" series called Schwarzschild (1988-1993) and that the Japanese computer magazine POPCOM briefly offered an unsuccessful comic based on Psychic War, "mainly featur[ing] naked drawings of the android."

At this point, I've played almost a dozen RPGs from Japan, but I've yet to play a classic "JRPG," with a heavy focus on plot using pre-defined characters. It's possible that with my PC-only rule in effect, I'll never encounter them. By 1987, we're not seeing enough similarities in games developed in Japan to consider them a "genre"; the four 1987 games are as different as any four titles could be: a side-scrolling single-character platformer, a side-scrolling multi-character dungeon crawler, a first-person dungeon crawler, and a top-down action RPG. As I said in my first post on Cosmic Solder, each title has been innovative in its own way, but not always in a good way. I've never seen anything quite like Cosmic Soldier's combat system, and I won't be disappointed if I never do again.