LIBERTY

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I should re­al­ly stop do­ing this. One day I was look­ing at a ran­dom PC98 CG dump, and found some­thing that caught my at­ten­tion: LIBERTY (リバティー) from カクテルソフト (Cock­tail Soft). In ret­ro­spec­tive, I have no idea what was it, oth­er than how would an eroge break­out game look like. I got the game, then spent the next two days or so try­ing to run this thing. I mean, I just threw the .fdi file at NP2, and it worked, but there were a few prob­lems.
First, the game au­to ad­vances text, which is bad news for my crap­py nip knowl­edge. Sec­ond, just like any old game, game speed de­pends on the CPU speed, and down the rab­bit hole I go. Look­ing at the of­fi­cial in­for­ma­tion, it needs PC9801V or lat­er, which should mean around 8-10MHz ac­cord­ing to wikipedia. Tried that, now the game some­times ran too fast, some­times too slow... Af­ter fuck­ing around with NP2 for a while, I switched to DOSBox-X, as it had built-in video record­ing and save states, so I could go back with­out restart­ing from the be­gin­ning (this game has no saves). There's a lengthy tu­to­r­i­al on PC98 in DOSBox-X, but all you re­al­ly need is machine=pc98 and in­stead of IMGMOUNT you need to boot di­rect­ly from the FDI file, as it con­tains no filesys­tem: BOOT LIBERTY.FDI. About the speed, I gave up, and just went with 750 cy­cles which should mean some­thing around 8MHz. Yes, it sucks, but at this point I stopped car­ing.

[sdl]
output=openglpp

[dosbox]
startbanner=false
machine=pc98
quit warning=false

[cpu]
cycles = fixed 750

[autoexec]
BOOT LIBERTY.FDI

With that DOSBox-X con­fig, it's ready to go. On­to the in­tro!

Story#

Now, this was record­ed with the de­fault em­u­la­tion speed, it's a bit fast, es­pe­cial­ly the part with the hero­ines' in­tro­duc­tion. But you can pause the video, and this way it's short­er, so few­er megabytes I have to waste here. Any­way the TL;DR of the sto­ry is that you're some­where in the fu­ture (I guess), there are en­vi­ron­men­tal prob­lems, but a dome takes care of it, but it's go­ing to break down soon­er or lat­er. This is all pack­aged in­to a nice as you know talk be­tween you (リュウ/Ryuu) and your bitch girl­friend (called ミキ/Mi­ki, which I some­why al­ways mis­read as ki­mi...), when some­one sud­den­ly kid­naps her! She's tak­en to the バビロン・タワー (Baby­lon Tow­er), which is known to kid­nap beau­ti­ful girls and so far no-one who went af­ter them re­turned alive. But that doesn't stop our su­per brave hero, he will go and stare death in the face, with­out a flinch! DiD (no, not this one, you per­vert, but at least we're go­ing to the hell to­geth­er) res­cue mis­sion, here I come!

Gameplay#

Af­ter the in­tro, we get to the game­play. There are 4 en­e­mies in the game, メガイラ (Megaera), ティシフォン (Tisi­phone?), アレクト (Alek­to), and モイラ (Moira). Af­ter fin­ish­ing the an­cient Greek mythol­o­gy prac­tice (I hate when they do this, fig­ur­ing out what these names mean are worse those kan­ji clus­ter­fucks), game it­self is pret­ty stan­dard break­out, 5 rounds per girls (with a boss at the last round), a small amount of sto­ry and re­peat. There are var­i­ous powerups you can col­lect, but I couldn't fig­ure out what they do be­sides the red one, which gives you small rock­ets you can launch from the sides of the pad­dle... al­so a bit of OP. When you clear a lev­el, you will be re­ward­ed with a CG, with the girl hav­ing less clothes with every new round. So, a strip game ba­si­cal­ly.

Now the bad parts. You con­trol the pad­dle with numpad 4 and 6, ar­rows doesn't work. Nei­ther does the mouse, and of course the key­board con­trol is too sen­si­tive ex­cept when it's too slow. Now, ac­cord­ing to this fine page, you can press 5 to speed up the pad­dle, but to be hon­est, I don't think I could press it even a sin­gle time when I need­ed it. Maybe I'm just too used to the DX-Ball 2 good­ness. And the col­li­sion box­es, they're all over the place. If the ball hits the side of the pad­dle, it just goes through and you lose. But if an en­e­my pro­jec­tile gets in the half pad­dle length vicin­i­ty of your pad­dle, it hits it. Fuck you. As you can see in the video, every lev­el has two of these big­ger box­es, you have to hit them ridicu­lous amounts of times, and they pro­duce var­i­ous things of an­noy­ing pro­jec­tiles that de­pend­ing on the lev­el ei­ther speed in­to your pad­dle, or they just wan­der around ran­dom­ly. If one of these things hits your pad­dle, it will start blink­ing. If one hits again, it starts blink­ing more rapid­ly. Get hit a third time, and the pad­dle is de­stroyed. And if you're play­ing on slow­er CPU speeds, their AI can be a re­al CPU hog, which means the game slows down as they spawn and then sud­den­ly it speeds up as you de­stroy them. Fuck­ing an­noy­ing, and this is prob­a­bly why you shouldn't set your cy­cles too low. A fast game is hard, a game that ran­dom­ly switch­es be­tween slow and fast is ever hard­er.

Oh, and there are many not de­stroy­able bricks. You don't have to de­stroy them, but you have to de­stroy every­thing else, and the ball speeds up pret­ty fast, get­ting the last few bricks in tricky places can be pure RNG, and you can eas­i­ly waste sev­er­al lives on the last few bricks. (DX-Ball 2 has a cool fea­ture that if you hit no de­stroy­able brick for a time, it con­verts all bricks to de­stroy­able. No such lux­u­ry here, just an in­sane­ly fast ball). Ac­tu­al­ly, the video you see above is can be con­sid­ered ex­treme­ly lucky, it's easy to end up with on­ly the yel­low bricks above the black ones re­main­ing, and good lock hit­ting them with the rudi­men­ta­ry con­trols you have. For­tu­nate­ly, if you die, you can retry from the cur­rent round, but your score will be re­set not that it mat­ters any­where in the game. Some­times you can keep the rock­ets, some­times you lose it, ac­tu­al­ly I'm not sure whether this is a bug or fea­ture.

At the end of every fifth round, there is a boss fight, where some crea­ture ap­pears, that moves around, shoots pro­jec­tiles at you and gen­er­al­ly needs a fuck­ton of hits to kill. At this point, hav­ing the rock­et powerup is prac­ti­cal­ly a ne­ces­si­ty, be­cause oth­er­wise it will take ages un­til the ran­dom­ly bounc­ing ball hits it enough times.
Kill the four boss­es, and you reach the end­ing, which is go­ing to be as clichéd as you can ex­pect. You al­so get a "Ｔｏ　ｂｅ　ｃｏｎｔｉｎｕｅｄ　Ｉｎ　’８９　Ｗｉｎｔｅｒ" mes­sage at the end, but I'm not re­al­ly sure what they meant by this, since the game was re­leased in '89 win­ter. But any­way, as far as I can tell, they haven't re­leased a se­quel since, and if they haven't done it in the last more than 30 years, I doubt they will do any­time. Not like it's a huge lit­er­ary loss.

Oh, and one fi­nal thing, but I'll have to spoil the end­ing for that. At the end it's re­vealed with all these kid­nap­pings and tri­als, they were just try­ing to find a hero who is strong and <in­sert 2837 oth­er pos­i­tive traits here> enough to save the world. So some­thing like a not evil, just mis­un­der­stood... but the ques­tion is, what hap­pened to all the girls who were ru­mored to be sold in­to slav­ery and all the guys who nev­er got out alive? Did they kill them? Are they keep­ing them in an un­der­ground sex slave dun­geon? Cleared their mem­o­ries and re­turned to the nor­mal world? What hap­pened to my fuck­ing mouse?!

H#

You might be ask­ing, what about the H scenes? Well, it's not much to talk about, the game it­self is 18+, but all this means is some CGs with naked women:

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some moans like this:

あッ、あッ、あッ‥‥‥い、いいわ、いいわよ‥‥‥きて、きて、早く‥‥‥あッ、ダメ、もう我慢できな‥‥‥

and that's about it. The ac­tu­al sex is on­ly heav­i­ly im­plied. Just add a mag­ic light shaft above her nip­ples (her pussy is al­ready bar­bie doll anato­my), and it would sell as a 15+ game.

Graphics#

This is the part where I might be bi­ased, but I love PC98 era graph­ics. You're past the point where you have 4 col­ors and ridicu­lous­ly low res­o­lu­tions, where it's hu­man­ly im­pos­si­ble to draw any­thing but the most sim­ple ob­jects that re­mote­ly re­serves the orig­i­nal, yet it's still chal­leng­ing to draw some­thing good, and pix­els still have mean­ing. Not 8K garbage with 10-bit col­or chan­nels, that some­how still end up look­ing much worse.

And an­i­ma­tions. Just look at the in­tro video, around 0:10, and 1:15. Their eyes are blink­ing! It has "lip-sync"! (Well, it's more like lip move­ment, since there's no voice act­ing, but you get the idea.) And that 3 frame an­i­ma­tion as he ex­tends his arm to­wards her... Even many VNs made to­day don't have stuff like this.

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Conclusion#

If this game would be re­leased to­day, I'd say it's a typ­i­cal game jam game. It has some rudi­men­ta­ry game­play, some ba­sic sto­ry and chip­tune mu­sic... ac­tu­al­ly the CG is what sets this game above that lev­el. But of course, we're writ­ing 1989 when this game was re­leased, pos­si­bil­i­ties were dif­fer­ent... Still, it doesn't ex­cuse the game­play prob­lems and the flat sto­ry. Over­all, it's just a break­out clone with some ex­tra eye-can­dy. If you want a good break­out game, get DX-Ball 2, or heck, even LBreakout2 if you don't want to pay/pi­rate. They don't have those boss lev­els, though.

Al­so, price. Ac­cord­ing to the of­fi­cial site, it was 7480 JPY. Se­ri­ous­ly, WTF? I'd had to kill my­self if I had paid so much mon­ey for this crap. You can buy a 50-hour long VN for that price, or an RPG that will keep you en­ter­tained for many hours. This game? 1-2 hours. This should be a cou­ple hun­dred 円 game.

Extra#

Ac­cord­ing to this re­view, the game was orig­i­nal­ly in­tro­duced in テクノポリス８９年１２月号 (Tech­nop­o­lis 1989/12). For­tu­nate­ly, some­one scanned it and up­loaded it to archive.org, so you can view it in all its glo­ry, on the bot­tom of page 88:

JXL (lossy) JPEG (lossy) JP2 (orig)

Yes, they in­clud­ed al­most every CG worth look­ing at...

A re­view of the PC-88 ver­sion. The graph­ics look the same, but con­ver­sa­tions look col­or-cod­ed. In the PC-98, on­ly the clicks have a bit dif­fer­ent tone.