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Playtime: 13 hours, 58 minutes

Completion date: 2/15/22

I have no idea how Gillian didn't fall off or get run under the motorcycle like this, but it rules anyway.

The localization took the kewl English of the original and turned it into something legible, but it still has that sort of charm.

Snatcher is one of Hideo Kojima's non-Metal Gear games, released for Japanese PCs of the time in 1988, just a year after the original Metal Gear. In 1994, it was originally localized in English for the Sega CD system, an ill-fated accesory to the Sega Genesis whose existence I had no idea of until I decided to play Snatcher. Not surprisingly, emulation of the Sega CD is tricky, and I had to test a couple different emulators before finding one that would work.

Snatcher's only other port was to the Sega Saturn and Playstation, neither of which were localized. At least it didn't suffer the fate of one of Kojima's other games Policenauts, which never recieved an official translation at all. Even the definitive collection of the Metal Gear Solid games, which included the original Metal Gears as well, will be stuck on Playstation 3 with no new official collections in sight. It's a tough situation all around, although now, I wish that Kojima's older games could be brought back with a port or some other form of official release for people that won't touch emulators. (I'm lucky to have had the Legacy Collection because I don't mind emulators, but my laptop would definitely not be able to handle the 3D Metal Gear Solids).

I decided to play Snatcher on a whim after finding out that SUDA51 wrote a radio play for it in 2011.

I haven't listened to SDATCHER yet, but since this guy is a veteran detective, I'm just going to assume that this is SUDA51's American Kusabi.

I always thought it was a shooter game or at least adjacent to one, but looking it up I was surprised to find out it was an... adventure game! Well, it does having a couple shooting segments sprinkled in, but most of the gameplay is investigation.

Snatcher has dated, clunky gameplay, dated story elements, the most horniest protagonist I've ever played as, the worse excuse to include a sexy shower scene I've ever seen, rips off at least three movies, shocking moments of gore, ends with a sudden boss rush followed by what feels like a movie worth of cutscenes, and yet... I really liked it! I'm all for clunky controls in games with less focus on gameplay like visual novels because it's not as hindering to continuing the story, which allows stuff like Snatcher's progression through action menus and sometimes endless feeling repetition of examining areas feel interesting.

Part of the reason, I'm a big fan of The Silver Case is that I found the strange occasional investigation section parts a fun break from the novel sections. Well, maybe not the ending segment where you have to investigate 10 seperate buildings in order to progress the story. But I felt the same way going through the part of the game where you have to meet with Napoleon the first time. I was trying not to look at a guide as much as possible, but even checking one I couldn't figure out why the hell I couldn't meet up with him. When progressing the game before had involved repeating investigation actions, it took me a while to figure out that I had to call Napoleon back multiple times to get him to pick up... because since I as wasting time looking at everything, he went home and I had to schedule another meeting with him. It was frustrating in a way to feel like I was running into a brick wall, but eventually coming to that moment of realization over what I should do was a pleasant feeling.

The shooting sections of this game are very... unique. It sets up a grid where you have to move the crosshair to a square with the arrow buttons (and a combination of the two), which is clunky in a way I don't like. Apparently the shooting controls of emulated versions of Snatcher are stickier than playing on original hardware, but either way, I used the autofire feature on the emulator I was using for the first time ever to cheese the segments. There was some special moments in this I liked, like the shooting segment where the set-up is that Gillian is trying to free himself from a strangle hold (see screenshot) by aiming in the mirror or the very last one where you can accidentally shoot another character because it follows a boss rush of shooting segments.

Gillian Seed, the main character, manages to be a charming, likable guy despite having the played for laughs perverted character archetype I usually dislike. He falls so far from grace in his antics that it somehow becomes funny at times. Apparently in the Japanese version he was even more over the top in that area, and I shudder to think how he could possibly beat everything he already does in the English version. Other than being pathetically horny, he has that constant haplessness that gets him in all kinds of trouble I like in characters. It helps that his over the top emotion sprites are honestly quite cute, and he looks like Makoto Date from the Yakuza games who I'm fond of. The investigative options play into his desperate nature, with him dropping lame pickup lines and the like, are what I found the funniest. Unfortunately you can direct his affections at the 18 year old daughter of one of his colleagues, but I've dealt with so many pieces of media that act weird around teenage or very young adult girls that I've just accepted it as an downside that I don't really get mad about anymore. Gillian's dynamic with his mechanical partner, Metal Gear Mk. II (AKA "Metal"), is super great. They both annoy the hell out of each other for a lot of good joke dialogue, but they also have a strong partnership that slowly builds to the point where they would tearfully die for each other. Metal has some choice words to say about the slums of Neo Kobe and the people who live there and Gillian gets over aggressive to the point where you're required to shove a gun in a guy's face to continue the story (and then arrest him for an unrelated crime because you searched his house for other reasons), but since this game is built off action movies, I can't really fault them for it. Some people can't get into detective stories for stuff like that, and I get it, but most of the mystery stories I've read either don't touch on police aggression or dirty tactics or brush it off as a necessary evil, so all I can do is sigh.

The Wikipedia page for Snatcher remarks that SUDA51 was influenced by the game, which I can see somewhat in his work I've played. But I'd be shocked if it turned out Kotaro Uchikoshi (of Zero Escape fame) wasn't inspired by Snatcher. The main character of his game AI: The Somnium Files is an amnesiac detective who was sent to his current position for reasons lost in his memories, is desperately horny, and has a snarky mechanical partner who often comments on his patheticness who eventually is willing to give up their life for their partner (and get miraculously revived afterwards). Metal Gear Mk. II is seemingly grouped in with the guys by other characters, but given Metal's female voice actress and similarities to AIBA, I thought she was supposed to come off as a girl. It would add credence to my theory that Uchikoshi was influenced by Snatcher too.

I wish that the game could've had more time to learn about the JUNKER squad and how their relationship was because the members of it you do meet are endearing in their own ways. A big plot point is the grief everyone suffers from the sudden murder of Jean-Jack Gibson, the only "Runner" (basically a detective) working for JUNKER at the time. The crew obviously varying levels of a relationship with him that's touching to see being mourned, and the melancholy of his daughter being left alone is unfortunately not given as much time as I think I'd like. Despite it all, it still worked to give a good enough idea of the closeness of the team to make the reveal of the Chief being replaced by a Snatcher impactful.

In all honesty, the only time I had ever seen Snatcher on the internet and basically the only time not just off-handedly mentioned as one of Kojima's not-Metal Gear games was from shipping fanart by an artist I followed several years ago. I have no idea if this person would want old art spread around so I won't link any of it, but from that art I knew two things: 1. The existence of Gillian Seed and 2. The existence of another man whose name escaped even the vague memories I had of Gillian's name. I knew what he looked like though, so I had one thing to go on playing Snatcher.

Then he finally showed up. And with the cultural knowledge I had gained between that time years ago and now I realized something. That this "Random Hajile".......... was totally ripped off the 1984 Dune movie! I never would have figured this out if it weren't for the new adaptation of the book bringing up discussion of the different ones. But even if his character design is a total ripoff, he's so cool. Random enters the story by blowing off the head of the Snatcher choking out Gillian in a futile unwinnable battle for the player, shows off for a bit and then sets off on his motorcycle. His name seems strange, but it's even stranger because the localization accidentally mispelled it in the slightest way, so when it turns out that his name is taken from another person's spelled backwards, that name had to get changed too. He turns out to be a higher quality Snatcher clone of a man named Elijah Madnar, son of Dr. Madnar, someone referenced in MGS4 with that spelling. It works in the game, but I wonder when it was changed internally since the other game that reference Dr. Madnar (Metal Gear 2) wasn't released in English for a long time after it was originally released.

Besides being a badass, Random has some really moving moments. In Act 2, he decides to sacrifice himself in order to take out a mess of Snatchers and to help Gillian and Metal Gear Mk. II escape, and it nearly brought me to tears. After that sacrifice, you'd expect him to be dead and out of the story, but since it turns out he's a extremely durable Snatcher, he comes back at the last moment in order to give Gillian and Jamie time to escape and along with Metal Gear Mk. II, sacrifices his life once again. Metal was revived with a new body, so in my heart I believe that Random probably survived. He has a speech before he gets Gillian and Jamie to escape about how even if the memories of his past weren't real, the time he's spent in the past few days are his own. It's a pretty touching note to go out on, and it parallels Gillian's feelings on his own life dealing with the memories he's lost in an interesting way. I swear it's not just because of my first exposure to Random, but Kojima has stated that Snatcher is heavily influenced by Blade Runner, and from what I can glean from reading about it, the human-like character who thinks they are completely human is the love interest. I doubt it's an intentional parallel, but I wonder...

One of the issues I had with Snatcher is that either from imported fear of Asia I've heard some western cyberpunk stories use or the unfortunate views about China I've seen pop up in Japanese stories, the two Chinese characters in the story are shady or evil. Fortunately, Napoleon the informer is a funny guy with an unexpected crusty New Yorker accent who messes with Gillian, has recurring allergies, and occasionally works a second job wearing a wolf costume (it makes sense in context). His design on the other hand seems somewhat stereotypical, but I liked him a lot as a quirky side character. The other Chinese character is the doctor Chin Shu Oh, who's body was used and replaced by the Snatchers to run a hospital to treat injured or sick (they're prone to cancer) Snatchers. One one hand, he's not technically himself anymore, so it's shaky grounds to frown at him being evil and Chinese, but at the same time it feels a bit uneasy when he's one of the fully evil named characters.

The third act of Snatcher is a long set of cutscenes following two shooting sequences in short succession. The secret, lost past of both Gillian Seed and his wife from before he lost his memories, Jamie (neé Lorraine), are revealed when they meet with a man connected to both of their pasts. From playing this game, I got to see where Kojima's general style of storytelling started, and it feels almost like reading a long lost historical artifact. His fascination with the effects of the Cold War on the world in the Metal Gear Solid series makes a lot of sense aside from its extensive political effects, because he was making stories affected by it as the Soviet Union still stood. Additionally, it shows Kojima's continued interest in nuclear affairs and their possible negative effects as the city of Neo Kobe is under threat of nuclear elimination as a proposed solution to the Snatcher outbreak. It turned out that, in the 1980s, Gillian was a CIA agent sent to investigate a secret Soviet project (the Snatchers) that was created to try and regain their diminishing position as a superpower. Already working there was Jamie, along with Elijah Madnar, a young scientist devoted to his work, and his father Petrovich Madnar. After Gillian's introduction and the dissolution of the project, the younger Dr. Madnar became bitter, taking the research materials to recreate the Snatchers and the bioweapon Lucifer Alpha for revenge. After planning to wake Jamie from cryosleep to work with this new project with him and keep Gillian in stasis forever, he decided to keep them both in stasis until he could unleash the finished Snatchers onto the world. After 50 years, his goals had evolved from petty revenge to wanting to take revenge on the world by taking advantage of all of humanity's flaws and rise above them all.

Why include this detailed summary when the rest of this review doesn't go as deep into the story? Well, I feel it encapsulates a type of story beat I've seen throughout the Metal Gear Solid series. The cornered megalomaniac villain explains their plans in their normal ill-natured way, but then tells the tragic tale that led them down that path. It's a type of plot beat that's generally hit or miss for me, but seeing it in Snatcher was like an archeological wonder to me. Being able to explore the starting threads of the method of storytelling used years later by the creator of one of my favorite video game series is genuinely fascinating to me in a way I haven't been able to get before.

After Elijah Madnar's recounting of his tragedy is over, his plans are foiled. There's nothing left for but to lose it all again, for everything he thought he could achieve to be blasted into dust, held back from escaping by his own robotic copy, who's selflessness overpowered his selfishness. It's not that I feel particularly bad for the younger Madnar, but it drives home how foolish he was to have everything come crashing down.

At the end of it all, Gillian decides to travel to Moscow with Metal Gear Mk. II to finally eradicate the last of the Snatchers. Partly to atone for what he was involved with, and partly to uncover the rest of his faded memories. Sharing a poignant farewell with Jamie, Mika, and Katrina, he sets off on an airplane into the sunset. And then it's all over, and the credits roll.

It was painful to say goodbye to Gillian and his world, despite finishing Snatcher in a short two weeks. The game doesn't end after fully destroying the Snatchers once and for all like you'd expect, but with Gillian leaving to accomplish that mission on his own, away from the players' eyes. I liked the game enough that now I might have wanted to play a sequel, but maybe it's better off staying a singular moment in time. Metal Gear Solid 4 contorted itself to connect everything and solve its plot holes, all while being the desolate story of the unavoidable death of the face of the games. It was a messy game, but despite it all it affected me and I've come to the opinion that it was probably the only way to find a definitive end to the series. From what I've played of Metal Gear Solid V, it feels like something that shouldn't exist, and due to it coming into existence during the split between Konami and Kojima, it will always be remembered as the weakened product of that conflict. I don't think there can be a sequel to Snatcher, because if there was ever one, it would've come out long ago. The game's 35th anniversary is coming up next year so anything could happen but... the best way to acknowledge it would be to bring it back into the present, so everyone can give it a chance again.