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The layout here is for indication purposes and is not representative of how the final layout will appear. Please take this opportunity to read a previously unpublished review of Super Ghouls n’ Ghosts/Chomakaimura to get a feel for the type of coverage Supercancel will provide. For further examples please visit my Eurogamer author profile listed on the main page.
Chōmakaimura, how fetching you are, and how very wicked. Like a siren from the misty depths you tempt foolhardy souls with a badge of honor, and we bite the apple and slip into a lurid dream of headstones, wizened trees, and black, starless nights.
Capcom’s development team, along with series originator Tokuro Fujiwara and planner Tatsuya Minami – CEO of Platinum Games until 2016 – set out to cause pain and suffering with their third Makaimura instalment.
Arriving with the Super Famicom in fledgling mode, Chōmakaimura felt like a hit and run murder to kids who unwittingly blew their one-game-a-year quota on it; its much-maligned difficulty likely seeing a few committed, and others buried, in their attempts to clear its two loops.
Today it remains a hardcore gaming trophy, but the legend of its challenge is partly built on hearsay. If you come to terms with the fact that it’s coded by demonic entities, forged with steel hammers, steeped in putrid brimstone and fired in Hades furnace, you can make headway by exercising caution with regard to absolutely everything.
Education begins with the callousness of the first stage, a specially prepared atrocity designed to weed out those who lack resolve. It’s a ferocious onset, laden with so many ghosts, ghouls, and pad-hurling traps that it’s arguably tougher than some of the game’s later sections. The ground shifts beneath, tidal waves crash into the foreground to eliminate platforms; wolves leap overhead while zombie-occupied coffins rise from the earth. It certainly sharpens your wits and helps you develop a feel for unhurried progress, strict memorisation, and an all-important weapon strategy. Once you’re capable of overcoming the literal trial by fire of stage three’s lava castle, a clear is most definitely on the cards.
Chomakaimura’s box art, rendered by Susumu Matsushita, also responsible for the artwork on several of Hudson Soft’s Adventure Island covers
“You’ll soon be a spiritual manifestation of Arthur himself, sitting in your bedroom, peering through the grille of your helmet, control pad a lance.”
While unable to shoot directly up or down, Arthur’s principal ability is a double jump that can change direction at its halfway point. Understanding the jump, its limitations and advantages, is the core of what makes Chōmakaimura so enjoyable, and somewhat defines the experience. Initially, its rigidity regularly gets you killed, but once you grasp how to appropriately measure your button presses it becomes one of the game’s most pleasing and malleable features.
If it wasn’t already clear, Capcom’s first non-arcade based entry in the Makaimura series is by no means easy. Utilising the Super Famicom’s technical fruit, it’s rendered with rich colour, bewitching graphical detail, and smart special effects – but its heart is as black as mud. Demanding methodical thinking and elegant reflex, it is, without a shadow of a doubt, designed to kill you at every turn. Not content throwing you back half a stage at death, if you concede an early blow it punishes you even harder, swapping out chests that normally hold power-ups for pitiless wizards looking to grace you with doom-spelling disabilities. Thankfully, chest manipulation goes both ways. Learning to skip certain chests can award faster armour upgrades, while double-jumping over certain areas will trigger hidden chests to rise from beneath the ground.
“Chōmakaimura boasts a deviously constructed learning curve that, while essentially malevolent, is nothing a few days of hard-boiled fortitude and dedicated practice can’t crush.”
Pivotal to progression is sticking with the right weapon – an aspect that requires as much strategy as any other, since Capcom, the bastards, have done their utmost to ruin any good fortune that might come your way.
Weapon drops are often regular enough that they’re a curse in disguise, especially when randomly dropped by enemies. For our money the Crossbow’s angled double fire, coupled with the gold armour magic attack, gives first knights the best opportunity to finish the game. Allowing you to keep your distance and make short work of bosses, even Astaroth, guardian of the first loop, can do little to contend with it. It’s also the most reliable tool for dealing with the ungodly Red Arremer, a winged demon programmed by a depressed, hateful individual who seeks catharsis by imparting his personal torture on others.
An original Chomakaimura promotional piece from a Japanese magazine
Once your weapon of choice is acquired, it becomes necessary to avoid accidentally replacing it with another, a handful of which are duds. While surrounded by enemies, weapons occasionally drop into your path, meaning progress should be swift but never hasty. If you’re accidentally tricked, knocked, or even killed (true story) into swapping your weapon, it can be a long, painful wait to be reunited with your preferred missile.
But it’s not all doom, boxer shorts, and piles of bones. Chōmakaimura boasts a deviously constructed learning curve that, while essentially malevolent, is nothing a few days of hard-boiled fortitude and dedicated practice can’t crush. The power-ups give you a critical advantage, and if you can upgrade Arthur to green armour and then gold, you’ll be packing both souped-up firepower and chargeable super attacks that do a superb job of clearing paths through busy stages.
Additionally, while it enjoys pulling the rug from under your feet at every opportunity, collecting points in the form of money bags not only dishes out life extends, but increases the number of continues at your disposal. This helps you tackle and practice a stage many times over, instead of being kicked back to the title screen, and it’s common to find your continue quota on the increase rather than the other way around.
Despite the hard-line, it’s a real drug of a game. Anyone who gets a high from having to perform under pressure will find it insatiably addictive once you punch through its psychological barriers. You’ll soon be a spiritual manifestation of Arthur himself, sitting in your bedroom, peering through the grille of your helmet, control pad a lance. The game’s devilish grace, superb stage variety, and the dark beauty of its graphics and audio make for a challenge of exceptional value.
Sadly, the experience is marred by one sour grape, where you can wag a finger at the Capcom All Staff and cry “now you’ve gone too far”.
It’s arguable which is the hardest overall Makaimura title, but most tend to consider the penultimate stage in Chō’s second loop to be the thorniest section of them all. True to series form, you’re required to finish the game twice and locate a special weapon on the second run to unlock the true final boss.
Problem is, the weapon in question, the ‘Goddess’ Bracelet’, isn’t all that special. In-fact, it’s fairly useless. You’ll likely have the game down-pat until you’re required to collect it, and that’s when the steep but reasonable learning curve shifts into a sanity stretching overdrive. Shackled with the Goddess’ Bracelet’s straight firing and relatively slow speed, you need to laboriously scale stage seven’s pit, kill the ungodly Red Arremer at its peak, upgrade your armour twice (assuming you aren’t already kitted out in gold), take out a pincer formation of fireball spitting flowers, and vault your way past a crowd of ghosts that enjoy teleporting on top of you. To make matters worse, the time limit you’ve enjoyed ignoring thus far suddenly becomes a pressing matter. With the Goddess’ Bracelet drastically reducing your speed of progress, the Astaroth battle becomes so long in the tooth that you’ll be extremely lucky to make it through with a minute to spare. All those stockpiled continues? Away they fritter, one by one, life by life. You realise that the screaming you thought was only in your head is actually filling the room and people are banging on your door. Two hours have elapsed on the clock just trying to pass this one stage, even though it only took thirty-minutes to get here.
Despite the slowdown digging its heels in once too often, graphically the game is excellent, expanding on the Hell Village theme to include some of the most varied and colourful locations in the series
Compounding the difficulty further, if you take a hit during stage seven’s early phase, chests that usually hold armour upgrades are suddenly filled with wizards. This vindictive twist means you must reach the boss unscathed to have any real chance of success. When the stage layout is burned into your brain like the phosphor on a cathode ray tube, successful runs become more frequent. It’s really Astaroth, who was a pushover with the crossbow, that imparts a special brand of torment. Up against a dwindling time limit, you need to shoot him in the head repeatedly, requiring jump attacks and lots of up-close battling as he drifts off-screen, firing angled lasers at specific intervals. With each armour upgrade, the Goddess’ Bracelet increases slightly in power and range, and at its maximum can cancel projectile shots and the flame attack of his second form. It’s a protracted engagement, and if you allow yourself to be caught off guard even momentarily, he buries you fast. With no checkpoints in stage seven, just two hits here and it’s right back to the start. Again.
The haunted ship stage is quite the ride, beginning on a ghostly shipwreck and finishing with a stormy raft ride into the depths
Capcom’s admission of guilt for this debacle can be found in the Makaimura Collection for PlayStation 2, where they quietly allowed the player to hold two-weapons and switch between them; a factor that more than halves the challenge.
But then, would we have it any other way? Of course not. The PlayStation 2 port, with that tweak alone, isn’t the same game. Although you’re consigned to several hours in as real a purgatory as videogaming can offer, this is what makes Chōmakaimura the stuff of lore and the payoff so air-punchingly rapturous.
Do we think Capcom overstepped a boundary with the Goddess’ Bracelet? Yes. There’s challenging, and then there’s taking the mickey.
Finishing it at least once, however, is something thrill seekers will savour. Look past its slowdown, its inhospitable landscape and hostile odds, and you’ll discover one of the most rewarding run n’ gun adventures ever devised.
It will torture you if you let it, and half the battle is in your head. But oh, what a battle it is.
