Obligatory shake shake
When I was a kid, trying out different games for my new-fangled N64, I didn’t know what to make of Mischief Makers. Games like Pilotwings 64 were blowing my mind with their explorable 3D worlds, and here was a completely 2D game that didn’t even use the analog stick. Beyond that, though, its aesthetic was like something I had never seen, and nothing about it made any sense to my young mind. I don’t think I made it far during that rental period.
Then, in college, I had a friend who adored Mischief Makers and gave me an entirely new perspective on the game. It still made no sense to me. It makes no sense to me now. I love the developer, the legendary Treasure, to the Moon and back, but Mischief Makers is one tough piece of meat to chew on.
So, I’ve taken a few bites of this particular slice of ham, and now it’s time to really grind it up. To dig in and get right down to masticating. Someone fetch me my dentures.
To punish evil forces, I have been charged
Mischief Makers was released promptly, around one year after the N64’s release. The console got very few sidescrollers throughout its lifespan. Polygons were the new thing developers were toying around with, and 3D was generally what big publishers were pushing their staff towards. So, right from the start, it’s a pretty odd game.
However, what makes Mischief Makers an absolutely unique experience is its aggressive and total lack of cohesion. It’s not a game that picks a direction and charges toward it. Instead, it prefers to just spin in place, faster and faster, until it eventually falls over and calls it a day.
The narrative follows Marina, the Ultra-InterGalactic-Cybot G, and her perverted creator, Professor Theo. They’re on vacation or something on planet Clancer, and then the professor just keeps getting repeatedly kidnapped. There’s some sort of Empire that is oppressing the Clancer people or just driving them to evil. I’m fairly certain that Mischief Makers just makes up the plot as it goes along. One of the first levels introduces a guy who seems like he’s going to be sort of a mentor to Marina in her quest, then several levels later, a character just off-handedly says, “You know that guy? Yeah, he’s dead now.”
It never gets any more coherent. Characters are dropped in out of nowhere, and there’s no sense of flow or progress. It just goes. It just keeps spinning.
A hero with shining armor is called
The gameplay is centered around this central mechanic of grabbing things. People, missiles, balls; you grab them all. Sometimes you give it a good shake, causing Marina to emit her trademark “shake shake!” voice sample.
That’s largely it, but Mischief Makers gets a lot of mileage out of that one mechanic. Every boss is generally a game of figuring out what to grab and what to do with it. Sometimes it’s as simple as catching something and throwing it back, but other times it’s more specific. There are puzzles to solve, bombs to throw, and children to capture. The entire game is built up with the philosophy of, “We have this character that does this action. What are all the things we can do with it?”
It’s not really that far out of line with Treasure’s normal philosophy when creating games, but Mischief Makers seems to take it to the extreme. It opens up the game to Treasure’s signature variety. As a whole, the experience is unpredictable. One moment you’re exploring a ball-themed amusement park, and the next you’re defeating a small cat in dodgeball before riding them into battle.
Though fire, justice is served!
There’s an almost nauseating glut of personality packed within. Beyond “shake shake!” I’ve had the line “Through fire, justice is served!” repeating through my head since first witnessing it in college. The fact that there’s no cohesiveness to the plot opens it to completely off-the-wall dialogue. Mischief Makers has a habit of expressing and introducing bizarre concepts and acting like they’re completely normal and should already be understood by the audience. It’s always hard to keep track of but also consistently funny.
One of the best running jokes that it actually manages to briefly focus on is with the murderous intent of the Beastector. The Emperor will send one out to capture the Professor, but they’ll loudly and dramatically scream their intent to bring Marina to justice. The Beastector, as a whole, are some of the most memorable bosses I’ve encountered in a while.
There’s also this strange sense where the N64’s hardware limitations actually played in Mischief Makers’ favor. The blurry, 2D digitized sprites, the muddy textures, and the muffled sound all create this aesthetic that just underlines the absurdity of everything.
Help me, Marina!
On the other hand, Mischief Makers isn’t always fun to play. The levels range from considerably sized to over in seconds. The difficulty wavers throughout before skyrocketing directly at the end, like it suddenly realized that it should give the player some resistance.
I went through the entire game without seeing a game over screen until the last run of boss battles. The issue here is that it’s sometimes not clear what you’re supposed to be doing. There was one sub-boss where I could catch their attacks without issue, but once they were in Marina’s shakers, I couldn’t figure out what it wanted me to do. I tried throwing the boss in all directions before eventually finding out that it wanted me to shake it at a very specific moment.
Likewise, there was one boss that you have to steal a weapon from. I thought this was straightforward; you just throw the weapon back at them. However, Mischief Makers is so picky about exactly what moment you hit them. It bounced off with an audible “ting” most of the time, so I thought I was doing something wrong and began experimenting with other things in the environment. Sure enough, I just wasn’t hitting them in the half-second they’re vulnerable. It can get annoying.
A ball-grabbing good time
I find that it’s very appropriate to have played Mischief Makers so soon after completing Brave Fencer Musashi. Both games are similar in the fact that they’re not always fun to play, but they are entirely unforgettable.
Mischief Makers is just pure insanity. The way its designed makes it feel like it was just chaotically assembled with no thought for how the final product would appear. I’d like to see a design document for it because I don’t believe anyone, at any point, planned ahead on what this game was actually going to be about.
Yet, in the end, the fact that it’s completely unpredictable and entirely unlike anything you’ve ever seen before is what makes Mischief Makers great. Video game design has always been about trends and iteration, and here is a game that exists entirely outside of both those things. It presents a chaotic vortex of ideas contained within a wobbly framework, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. It never got a sequel and probably never will, which is fine, since I don’t think anything else could capture its compelling dissonance.
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