D for Sega Saturn

Yesterday I wrote about some Saturn adventure games. In a youtube video of R?MJ, a guy said that game was like D. So I looked into D, because I happen to own a copy of D. I never cared about it before because it looks kind of cheap and boring.

I sell it for 29 SEK, which is around 5$. The game was also released in the US and PAL countries.

Turns out that the game is perfectly playable even in Japanese and that I enjoyed it. Some  reviewers say it sucks, has aged badly and so on, but I liked it. I think it is mainly because the game is short and I could beat it in 4-5 hours. It also has a low frustration level.

The game has a very slow pace, you move very slowly. But after a while you get used to it. The developers took care so that you never have to walk very far. At most I think there are only 7 or so rooms you can walk to in each scene.

The graphics does look quite bad but it was made by a small company. Later they made Enemy Zero, and later followed D with D2 for the Dreamcast. D2 has a cult following for its goriness and dark weirdness. I just researched these games, and read that the master mind of those games, Kenji Eno, sadly passed away a month ago from a heart condition, 42 years old.

In a detailed interview with him that is linked from the 1up link, he says that the normal ending of D is actually the bad ending, because you wouldn't normally think of doing what is necessary to get the good ending.

I also got the Bad End, but I don't care as long as the game gets beaten. I will make up my own translation for the text above:

BAD END - You got eaten by your own father and will never understand what this game was about. Nor did you stop the terror. PLEASE TRY AGAIN

The game has some puzzles that are not too hard, but they can be tricky. The limited inventory and lack of items to click on makes this game the most FMV (full motion video) of the adventure/horror Saturn games I've played so far.  Not counting Brain Dead 13 and Strahl but they are more like movies than games.