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Seikima II: Akuma no GyakushuuDeveloper: CBS/SonyPublisher: CBS/Sony Released: 1986 Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Region: Japan  HAY YOU GUYS WE RULE However, Japan is not only known for its high quality games. A certain percentage of titles that are released in Japan are, by American standards, very, very strange. However weird they may be, such games are often quite fun to play once your initial shock has passed. Seikima II: Akuma no Gyakushuu (roughly, "The Devils Strike Back"), is a game that somehow manages to make absolutely no sense and still be awful. What about Seikima 1? There is no Seikima 1. Seikima II is the name of a Japanese band that was popular in the mid 1980s. If read in Japanese such that the "2" is pronounced as it would be in English, the band's name sounds like seikimatsu, which means "end of the century." However, the band writes their name using characters that mean something like "holy demon 2", a play on words to show just how evil and demonic they really are. Now, what you need to know about Seikima II the band is that they are an incredible KISS rip-off. Don't get me wrong--I can't stand KISS any more than the next guy, but these guys are truly shameless. I mean, just look at them![1] According to the official Seikima II website, the band is still around and releasing music. I suspect Milli Vanilli may have a larger remaining fan base though. The Game In Akuma no Gyakushuu, you control H.E. Demon Kogure, the band's lead singer. Kogure can run, jump, shoot some sort of projectile out of his chest, and has one of the coolest looking sprites ever. Your main mission is to collect everything in the current level without dying. Once you complete your mission, passages to other rooms open. As you progress, you will find that some rooms lead to dead ends and that you must return to a previous room to choose another path.  This is drama For example, in the first ten levels you face three basic enemy types: mutant purple butterflies, sea urchins (which somehow can move out of water and have evil-looking faces), and a miniature Easter Island head that patrols back and forth. On the 10th level, you face a boss who looks like a small stick figure with a bow and arrow. The background consists of bricks, grass, and unhappy tree stumps. To unlock other rooms, you'll need to get all of the available collectables. Collectables include apples, money bags, ghosts with crosses on them, and heads of (presumably) fellow band members. You can also get little vials of health, which look extraordinarily similar to the holy water powerup in Castlevania. Aside from the money (which can be used in a shop) and the health vials, all the collectables seem to be useless. There is neither story nor premise to this insanity. The closest you get to a story is a "Zone 1" screen that shows a band member in a cage. In short, the "design" of this game is incoherent to the extreme. I suspect that it is the product of perhaps two or three weeks worth of work by a single programmer, and I'd bet money that most of the graphics came from different games. Of course, even lunacy of this degree could be forgiven if the game was actually fun to play. Sadly, it is not. Game Mechanics As far as I can tell, CBS/Sony made four major errors when they designed (using the term loosely here) Akuma no Gyakushuu. The first of these flaws is the game's jumping mechanics. Playing the game for the first time, I noticed that jumping seemed very inconsistent. Sometimes Kogure was able to leap significant distances, and other times he seemed barely able to get his feet off the ground. As any fan of the genre will tell you, the ability to jump consistently and deftly is probably the single most important trait of a good platformer, so Kogure's behavior was intensely annoying. After some experimentation, I realized what the developers did. Kogure can jump straight up quite high, about three times his own height. However, as soon as he begins to move laterally, he instantly loses all upward momentum and begins to fall. In effect, horizontal and vertical acceleration have been made mutually exclusive. This functionality is very, very difficult to get used to. To jump a wide gap, you must first launch Kogure straight up and then hold left or right at the apex of the jump. This flaw alone is enough to ruin the entire play experience.  Jump over the killer butterfly to reach the decapitated band member heads. What? Thirdly, there is the issue of Kogure's vitality. The on-screen HUD displays your character's life as a numerical value that starts at 1000. When your character takes a hit, his remaining life predictably decreases. However, in what can only be described as a design decision made under the influence of mind-altering chemicals, the developers have opted to combine Kogure's life with a time limit. As you play, your character's health steadily decreases at an alarming rate, even when you are not actually taking damage. Thus, the challenge of the game is to complete the levels before your life runs out. Of course, dying means you are sent back to the beginning of the game with neither lives nor continues. Finally, there is the music. Seikima II is neck-and-neck with The Ring for the "Most Insanely Annoying and Repetitious Game Music Ever" award. There is one infinitely repeating song, and it appears to be about four bars long. The music sounds terrible even by NES standards, and grates on your nerves almost immediately. In Conclusion 
[1] Update, January 2008. In the five years that have passed since I wrote this article, the paragraph about Seikima II being a "KISS rip-off band" has drawn the ire of a few fans of the band (really few; less than one per year). To those fans I have two things to say. First, I stand by my assertion that the visual stylings of Seikima II (and, really, most of the ヴィジュアル系 groups in Japan) are the product of direct influence of KISS and similar bands. Second, if you are a fan of this band and you are offended by this article, my advice is this: get a life. Rather than picking out a single sentence from a 1800-word essay about a video game to use as the starting point for a diatribe about how I've slandered your favorite group and am entirely ignorant of all worldly things, why don't you just support the band by buying their CDs? Vote with your wallet, and save the rest of the internet from having to read your frothing-at-the-mouth arguments. If you really can't let this indignity stand, at least direct your messages to the forum rather than posting them here. Visitor Comments:
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