Maken X
September 19th, 2023
Out of sheer boredom and a desire to spend every waking moment of my life talking about video games, I used this randomizer to pick a random retro game to write a blog post about. This is what happened next...
Going into this project I expected that I would be unearthing some of the most obscure scrimblo games known to humankind, but what I didn't expect was that the very second game would be an Atlus title released in 1999 featuring the likes of Kazuma Kaneko and Shoji Meguro among (lol) its staff. It's the first Atlus game with full voice acting too! You'd think with all the MegaTen youtubers out there that there wouldn't be any more hidden gems from Atlus's back catalog left to dig up, right?
Unfortunately for Maken X, I believe it has two things going against it:
- It's on the Dreamcast, and no one cared about the Dreamcast
- Atlus likes to pretend that everything they made before Persona 3 doesn't exist
Pictured above: The Atlus ninjas when someone asks for a Persona 2 remake
Fortunately for Maken X, the game kinda rules
You control Maken, a sentient sword that has the power to "brain-jack" people, or take over their minds. The game plays like a first person beat-em-up, and every person you brain-jack has different melee attacks you can pull off by pressing the attack button while holding different directions. Holding down and then releasing the attack button will unleash a special attack that also changes depending on the character. You can also hold back to block, then counter-attack with the right timing, or you can say "blocking is for COWARDS" and just fucking somersault over an enemy and slash 'em in the back, which is not only really cool but also does extra damage! Given how the Dreamcast controller only has 1 analog stick, the controls are a little awkward, but you can press a button to lock-on to an enemy like in 3D Zelda, so it's mostly fine. The game is level-based which I wasn't expecting, but I think it suits the fast, arcadey style of gameplay that Maken X is going for. It kind of feels like if Time Crisis had swords instead of guns
The manual for the game helpfully clarifies that "BJ Rank" does not mean what I thought it did
Notably, the game isn't linear despite being level-based— depending on what decisions you make, you can influence the outcome of the story. Wikipedia says the game has seven endings! Sure, the story isn't very good, and the voice acting is about as high quality as you would expect from a game in the late 90s, but having a little extra replay value never hurts
And lastly, some of the music in this game is stupidly good— surprising no one, since this is an Atlus game after all. Shoutout to Shoji Meguro
This has been my first impressions of Maken X. Go play it
