Koei’s Dreamcast exclusive horror is the follow-up to their previous pre-rendered Saturn/PlayStation adventure Nanatsu no Hikan (sometimes translated as “Seven Mansions”). The increase in power has led to a whole new look, the game not only in full 3D but also offering three different points of view I can switch between at any time too: behind the back, first person, and a more typical cinematic survival horror camera system.
Unfortunately more isn’t always better. I found the first-person view more of a novelty than anything else, and the Resident Evil style camera lacks the artistry of Capcom’s own, so I ended up using the behind the back one most. The game’s cutscenes swiftly fall into a similar “You can, but that doesn’t mean you should” rut, keen to show off their polygonal power at every opportunity, even though the end result is a lot of uneventful panning shots across rather sparsely decorated rooms.
There are two different characters to run around the game’s titular seven mansions with (“mansion” in this case really meaning more “a building of some sort” than a grand gothic monstrosity): a man called Kei with questionable taste in shirts and a woman, Reina. Both adventures offer similar-but-slightly different takes on the same story, and both leads will sporadically team up with the other on their journey (do watch where they stand though, as friendly fire can kill your AI-controller partner). Relatively unique to this adventure is a split screen co-op mode, allowing two people to go through another take on the game together. It’s very much a bonus feature though, rather than the main event.
I decided I’d play through the game as Reina, partly because I’m a fan of playing as anything other than Yet Another Guy as much as possible, but mostly because horror games have a proud tradition of making their playable ladies likeable, competent, badasses. I thought I was in for a great time… until the game started.
Reina is physically weaker than her male counterpart Kei, a tired old trope that is only made even more unappealing thanks to everything else about her. In the opening FMV she swoons over the first male NPC she meets, breathlessly sighing “cool” to herself under her breath because a man walked up to her and gave her some water (she was suddenly feeling bad because the game needed a contrived reason to separate her and Kei), and it’s all downhill from there. Kei finds a gun and a knife to help him fight off the game’s constantly respawning supply of monsters, while Reina gets a stun gun and a little later on a laser pen—a shockingly literal pen-shaped device that shoots out little pew-pew laser beams—presumably because her being toothless and helpless makes her more desirable or something, I don’t know. Anyone trying to charitably imagine Reina forcefully ramming her stun gun into the side of her opponents at this point, Jill Valentine style, will be sorely disappointed. Reina clasps her stun gun to her chest, like she’s cuddling it. And when she “attacks” it’s held out straight ahead, with no force or even fear behind the move. She’s got to be cute and demure at all times, even in the face of heavy breathing globs of whatever. It’s immensely frustrating to have to sit in front of Senritsu no Bishou and think about all the other times other women, in other horror games released decades before this one, would have handled the same threat so much better.
As if to make sure Reina is as thoroughly undermined as possible in her supposed main character role, the instant she and Kei finally meet up again one of the first things she does is emit an ear piercing scream at the sight of a monster while cowering behind her apparent equal’s manly body—and it’s the exact same sort of beast she’s more than likely already killed with ease a few short minutes earlier. Fear, even the screaming-out-loud sort, is not an unreasonable response to have in places filled with monsters and bloodstained corridors. A scared hero can, if used effectively, really drive home exactly how dangerous whatever it is I’m up against is. Heroes should be scared from time to time. But there’s a huge difference between “I am afraid because this place is full of slobbering beasts and shadows and I might die.” and “I am afraid because won’t some strong, brave, player-shaped man protect me and my tastefully exposed cleavage?” If absolutely nothing else, Reina does not behave like someone who has a believable chance of making it out the other end of her own story alive, and that makes her something of a liability to me, the person who has to spend hours of their time guiding her through this damned game.
It’s never as awful as Michigan, at least. But then again that is a low, low, bar to clear. I didn’t expect or even especially need this game to be a blazing banner bearer of all-inclusive feminism, a game that pushed boundaries and tore up rulebooks, but even in 2000 (and even if I restrict myself to games released in rainy old England) I didn’t have to go out of my way to find horror games that at the very least let the ladies within them do more than squeal, cling to the leading man, and be weak in an “attractive” way.
Maybe Senritsu no Bishou was too busy being innovative elsewhere to worry about the writing? Maybe most players are too caught up in running for their virtual lives to get caught up in the cast? I wish. The monsters in here don’t even make an effort to look the part, never mind put up a fight. They’re not disgusting, or intimidating, and they don’t even move around in a way that makes them difficult to hit. Dealing with them involves running up close and holding down the R trigger until they’re dead, and that is honestly all I ever needed to do to win. Sometimes I did get hit, but the damage is so slight, even as Reina, that healing is something done every few hours, rather than every few enemies (and this is even taking into account how some of these beasts infinitely respawn when reentering a corridor).
The puzzles between monsters are often fiddly instead of fun, and bogged down further by backtracking. There’s a lot of prodding things in one room to change something in another, and doors that are locked because the genre’s supposed to have locked doors. One of the worst for me involved navigating a virtual database using a controller to manually type out alphanumeric commands using the game’s own fictional syntax (which is only described in the same database’s multi-tiered help sections) to perform a progress-critical task… no. No. Hell no. This pedantic little chore wasn’t fun. Or clever. Or satisfying.
Some horror games are distinctly average in an interesting or entertaining way—Countdown Vampires isn’t good, but it sure as heck is fun. Some are bad in a way that makes me think at least they sincerely tried to create something worth experiencing, like R?MJ. A rare few are as deliciously weird as deSPIRIA. I’m not seeing that same “Let’s really try to do something special” spark here. This game may not possess Blue Stinger-levels of toe-curling pain, but it does make poor, if not utterly ruinous, choices too often to be anything other than immensely frustrating.
And it should’ve bloody remembered that Reina was supposed to be Main Character #2, and not, [sigh], “something for the lads”
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