Contact

If you look at Vigigames' tag cloud in the bottom right hand corner of this screen, you might notice that the name Suda 51 is unusually large. We might have a bit of a crush on the man. His company, Grasshopper Manufacture, makes some of the most singularly strange, compelling, and robust games, and while the company is perhaps best known for games like Killer7 and the No More Heroes series, a game that absolutely should not be overlooked is Contact for the Nintendo DS.

Although the game wasn't personally overseen by Suda, as many Grasshopper games are, one can feel the impish game design here at work. Basically, Contact is a love-letter to 8 and 16-bit RPGs, specifically Earthbound, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana and Startropics, but it is in no way a retread. The game carves out its identity by fitting gloriously into the quirky paradigm of the DS, offering up a great use of both the touchscreen and the dual-screen setup. But more than that, the game is, in essence, a full-length exploration of the role of player in the narrative of a game.

In JRPGs, the main character(s) are supposed to be complete entities. It's "they" who are performing the actions on screen; you're just merely controlling them, because, well, it's a game. Contact throws all that out the window. Instead, the main character (hilariously named, simply, "Terry") is just a hapless kid who doesn't speak, can't control his own body, and has no personality. He's the ultimate "blank slate" style of character, even moreso than Crono in Chrono Trigger. This is important to the plot of the game, however. The first scene opens with a striking isometric pixel-art style scene of a balding man named The Professor and his dog, Mochi, working away in his spaceship. Nothing happens. And if you let it keep going, they'll just keep working away. But if you pull out your stylus and poke the Professor, he notices that you're there. He's made contact with you (hence the name of the game) through the DS. That's right – you, in a bit of fourth-wall breaking lunacy, are the main character. Literally you, sitting in your chair playing the game.

Beyond this central conceit, though, there's a more-or-less straightforward story of saving the world, but as the game is so indebted to RPGs of old, it makes a certain amount of sense. Besides, because of the set-up, it makes all of these potentially cliched moments seem really crazy and off the wall, and it all works and coelesces into a really great RPG story. Like those RPGs of old, it starts incredibly small scale and grows in size exponentially.

Because of the triangular character set up (the Professor, Terry, and you), the game's use of the dual-screen layout is awesome and fits right in with the entire design concept. Basically, you can see the Professor's world (the Earthbound-y one) in the top screen at all times, and the bottom screen is where Terry runs wild in his Chrono Trigger-type world. Because Terry has to be made blissfully aware of his situation (forced body takeover is rarely pleasant), the Professor acts as a go-between between you and Terry, so it's not as if Grasshopper simply put the Professor on the top screen as a screen decoration (like some other RPGs I can think of. Looking at you, Square Enix!).

The game comes incredibly close to capturing that feeling that I certainly get when I play a game like Chrono Trigger of being supremely entertained and challenged, while simultaneously feeling for all of the characters. The game has some of the most clever writing on the system – it maintains its quirky hilarity throughout the entire running time, and the game never takes itself too seriously, which is a nice refreshing change in the JRPG genre. Unfortunately, the game doesn't quite become the classic that it threatens to, mainly because of the combat system.

Changing up a combat system in a JRPG can occasionally produce spectacular results (see the Tales of… series), but sometimes, it's just best to stick with something serviceable that you know works. Because Grasshopper is a company known for flouting expectations, it decided to go with a kind of real-time system where you can see all of the enemies on the field map before you, but instead of allowing you to have complete control of Terry when in battle mode, you basically just get to set which weapon he'll use and then let him trade blows with the enemy. There's not even a semblance of strategy in it, which is disappointing, because an auto-battle option here actually makes a modicum of sense – as it's not you who's in battle, it's this kid. The design choice here, which is a rarity in Grasshopper games, kind of comes off as being just a tad academic, when the stylings of the game are just screaming for an Active Time Battle akin to Chrono Trigger's. If the game had that exact battle system, I would probably be willing to call the game one of my top five games on the DS.

As it stands, though, all of the other elements of the game work perfectly. The graphics and music capture that bit of JRPG history, the writing and characterization are fantastic and the overall design of the game is one that resonated with me personally. I think it speaks volumes that I was willing to play through this game to the end despite not really enjoying the main "gameplay" bit. It may be a case of the nostalgic feelings kind of pulling the wool over my eyes a bit, but this game is so singularly strange and wonderful that you really just have to try it for yourself. That's perhaps a bit of a cop out, but in this case it's true. It's a game that you simply have to experience.