09/30 Everything you never needed to know about Airs Adventure
A few days ago, a small Youtube account posted a long video to sum up Airs Adventure. There are only two possible reactions to this sentence: ā¶ āwhatās Airs Adventure?ā or ā· āwhat a bizarre idea, who would go to the trouble of explaining something as rubbish as Airs Adventure!?!ā
That makes it an ideal topic for this series of post. In 1995, the two most popular genres on consoles in Japan were fighting games and role-playing games. When it came to VS fighting, between Virtua Fighter, Capcomās CPS-II ports and SNKās Neo Geo ports, Sega had the matter covered. RPGs were more of a challenge, especially without the support of the behemoths Square and Enix, who both seemed poised to remain loyal to Nintendo.
Sega had already begun to build a small reputation in RPGs with the Mega Drive and especially the Mega CD, but it would take more to convince the mainstream Super Famicom audience to switch en masse to the Sega Saturn. Therefore, as soon as the summer of 1995, Sega promised a raft of RPG-adjacent titles through a promotional campaign called RÅpure Åkoku Sega Saturn (āSega Saturn, the kingdom of RPGsā). It centered around three Summer 1995 releases: RiglordSaga (also known by some of you as Mystaria or Blazing Heroes), Shining Wisdom and Magic Knight RayEarth.
Underneath this Summer trio, you can see that Sega already promised more RPG-adjacent titles for the end of that year. From left to right, they were an exclusive spin-off from the Shin Megami Tensei series called Devil Summoner (which did release on December 25), a mysterious 3DCG Polygon RPG temporarily titled Sega Adventure (which would take barely another year to come out), Treasureās āAction RPGā Guardian Heroes (ended up releasing in January 1996), Climaxās Dark Savior (nuh huh, August 1996) and last but not least a slightly more realistic estimation, Tengai MakyÅ Gaiden: Dai-4 no Mukoshiroku for Spring 1996 (which means, of course, it ended up releasing in January 1997).
As you probably guessed, Sega Adventure (temporary title) would eventually become Airs Adventure. Promised for the end of 1995, it finally released in December 1996 after what felt at the time like an interminable succession of delays. I mentioned one post above the relatively modest media coverage of Sakura Taisen; the same cannot be said of Airs Adventure, which got plenty of articles in the press. In early 1996, it was showcased as one of the three major RPGs releasing that Spring, along with Dragon Force and Dark Savior (which was still due for release in May back then).
Thatās a lot of attention for what could charitably be described as an āhonorable piece of rubbishā; Iām not going to spoil it all, but the video does a pretty good job of showing how the game clumsily tried to innovate in the casualisation of the JRPG, greatly simplifying the narrative beats and game systems to remain accessible to as many people as possible, hence allowing everyone to enjoy a vapid story marred by terrible combat. Programming-wise, I guess they were onto something with those 3DCG Polygons: itās pretty much the same technological concept as what FF7 would do just a month later. Without the technical skill, artistic sensibility and budget of Squareās programmers, alas. But see and suffer for yourself!
A fate worst than death: Airs Adventure isnāt even that āpopularā nowadays when it comes to discussing the consoleās biggest kusoge ā far behind champions such as Death Crimson, Planet Joker or DaibÅken. The game is best remembered for having been a monumental commercial bomb, of the kind sold brand new in the Ā„1000 wagon sale bins a few days into 1997, barely a month after its release. I think I bought it for something like Ā„10 in 2002, and that was probably accounting for the price of the shopping bag. Itās all deserved, I assure you. No redemption story here, thereās practically nothing to salvage. But thereās still one small mystery to be explained: why did Sega believe in it?
Airs Adventure is a game developed and published by the imaginatively named and SEO-resilient Game Studio.It is a company founded back in the Famicom days by EndÅ Masanobu, the creator of Xevious and The Tower of Druaga at Namco. Be aware that, despite this pedigree, the gameās failure is not necessarily shocking; Game Studio has had a fairly uneven output from the outset, with a few big hits but above all a bunch of weird releases known for their frequent āfalse good ideasā. Nevertheless, at the time of the gameās promotion, Sega was still making a big deal of the name behind the company.
We actually owe the gameās concept and design to Shibata Gabon, who was relatively unknown at the time, but was a game industry iconoclast who went on to conceive Doshin the Giant (but fortunately left development to a better game designer) and Ingot79 (another āhonorable Kusogeā for the PS2 based on the game concept of gold prospecting). We owe the charadesign and overall artistic direction to Nagano Mamoru, one of the big names in robot anime mechadesign in the 80s (L-Gaim, Five Star Stories, Giant Gorg etc.). The soundtrack - arguably the most successful aspect of the game - comes from Saegusa Shigeaki, one of the great Japanese composers of the 80s and 90s, best known in pop culture for the music in several Gundam series. Summing up these resumes, Iām realizing that perhaps these good folks should rather have made a game with giant robots.