A Lost World
December 15, 2013 4:14 PM   Subscribe

In the 90s there was a niche Japanese game development house called Human Entertainment, which was perhaps most famous for its Clock Tower series, and was also the launchpad for the career of Suda51. Before they folded in 1999, they released one final title: the massive open world detective game known as Mizzurna Falls.

A casual observation of the game's design reveals striking similarities to the more recent cult hit Deadly Premonition (previously, and previously). The player is trying to solve a mystery in a small American town, working against the clock, interacting with a world lovingly rendered down to minute details in the clunky 3D of the era.

Playing the game directly remains gated to Japanese speaking audiences only, as it was never officially ported, and has yet to receive a fan-translation treatment. However, Youtube user bobrossfreak has a recorded video series (rest available at his channel, here) where he streamed a live playthrough and translation of the game's content.

The Japanese fan site mentioned in the Eastern Mind post still exists on geocities.jp, Country of The Bears and Burgers.
posted by codacorolla (10 comments total) 48 users marked this as a favorite
 
Every time I think there aren't any more obscure, mind-blowing old games to discover, out comes a post like this. Ugh, this game looks amazing.
posted by naju at 4:26 PM on December 15, 2013 [8 favorites]


Man, Twin Peaks really left a dent in the Japanese pop consciousness, didn't it? It looks like the game might also share some DNA with the late lamented Shenmue series as well. I'll have to add the LP to my Watch Later queue. Thanks codacorolla!
posted by Strange Interlude at 6:37 PM on December 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


Twin Peaks also influenced The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening.
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:49 PM on December 15, 2013 [4 favorites]


Also, while we're on the topic of now-defunct Japanese game studios releasing fantastic games: the Infinity series of visual novels was produced by a company named KID, which declared bankruptcy in 2006. While they were still in action, they created two fantastic games with mindblowing science fiction plots which are now more or less classics of the genre: Ever17 -the out of infinity- and Remember11 -the age of infinity-. They're out there on the interwebs, and fan translation patches are available here.
posted by Quilford at 6:50 PM on December 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


Whoa this is awesome!
This reminds me of some other obscure Japanese open-world game from the same era that I read about on one of those old games sites. It was in this weird cyberpunk universe and the premise was something like you had to go around killing these progressively harder bosses until you got to the hardest boss. Do you know what I'm talking about?
posted by pravit at 7:25 PM on December 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


Baroque, maybe?
posted by byanyothername at 8:22 PM on December 15, 2013


Sounds like Immercenary, though I don't think that was a Japanese game. Definitely weird cyberpunk, though, with that gimmick of harder bosses.
posted by wanderingmind at 10:48 PM on December 15, 2013


wanderingmind: "Sounds like Immercenary, though I don't think that was a Japanese game. Definitely weird cyberpunk, though, with that gimmick of harder bosses."

More info (aka a Let's Play) here.
posted by Samizdata at 2:04 AM on December 16, 2013


This looks amazing.

One day, when I've retired on my millions earned from my lucrative career as a publicly-funded paralegal, one of my vanity business Ideas is to start a video games version of the criterion collection for games like this. It would be a crying shame if we lose these youthful gems of the industry.
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 3:13 AM on December 16, 2013 [4 favorites]


Ah yes, it was Immercenary! Soooo weird.
posted by pravit at 3:38 PM on December 16, 2013


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