Oddities - Mizzurna Falls

I'm sick of all the complaining I do here so I want to talk about a game I threw in one night and  ended up adoring even though I think it is technically kind of a failure to be an approachable game. Dearly departed Human Entertainment's Mizzurna Falls. To be clear, I would consider this game to be honestly pretty good at what it's doing, but it's so ambitious, so technically undermined by what they were attempting to do on PlayStation hardware, and so utterly punishing based on aspects of that technical design that it's hard to call it a success either. Whatever the case though, it's an immediately unforgettable game that was obviously wildly ahead of its time.

To contextualize Mizzurna Falls it may help to know a bit about its developer, the dear departed Human Entertainment. Founded in the early 80s, contract developer for a ton of Famicom games, innovator in the wrestling and horror genres. Human did a lot of experimental games, a lot of adventure games, and a lot of horror games such as Clock Tower and Twilight Syndrome. Sadly they ceased to exist in 2000 with their various offshoots forming a number of strange studios such as Sandlot (creators of the Earth Defense Force games) and Grasshopper Manufacture (No More Heroes, Killer7, Silver Case, Flower, Sun and Rain). Between these they were uniquely positioned to produce Mizzurna Falls as a developer.

So what is Mizzurna Falls? For many years it was an obscure curio among the hardcore import PS1 scene. Mizzurna Falls is an open world adventure mystery game for the PlayStation released in the year 1998. Anyone deeply entrenched in the makeup of that system's library should immediately be bewildered by that description. That style of game had essentially never been touched on that hardware, basically would never be touched. Mizzurna Falls casts you as Matthew, a high school senior in a small Colorado town whose friend Emma has just been reported as a missing person. While the police are speaking with him as her last known contact another girl from his school who was also associated with the victim is found injured. While she regains consciousness at the hospital, shortly after shouting fragmented sentences indicating very little about her attack she suddenly flatlines. This naturally makes Emma's missing person case much more concerning despite her having only been missing since the previous night. Matthew takes it upon himself to investigate around town to find out what's become of Emma and if she's still alive. It's a solid, if somewhat by the numbers, mystery plot hook and if the plot was all it has going it would be a solid b-tier PS1 adventure game, not unlike Human Entertainment's horror adventure cult classic series Clock Tower. The popularity of Twin Peaks in the early 90s feels like an inescapable influence here, especially as the story hints at possible supernatural elements. The plot's not where it ends though because Mizzurna is completely defined by its structure.

Mizzurna Falls is named for the town it takes place in and that's both a rarity for this period and also entirely appropriate. Mizzurna Falls itself is a freely explorable 3D enfironment with a rudimentary driving system, pedestrians, traffic, etc. If you didn't play a lot of PS1 games it's honestly hard to describe how wild it is to play a small freely explorable open world on that piece of hardware. It's so difficult to wrangle fully 3D environments of any real scope on it at all. Mizzurna Falls as a town is laid out fairly well and has a lot of locations packed into it. This world also isn't just a gimmick because it plays into the game's other major hook, the timer. The entirety of Mizzurna Falls is played on a timer, you have an unclear amount of time to solve the mystery of Emma's whereabouts as the game has multiple endings and only one of them is the good ending where the full scale of what has happened is actually resolved. Learning to navigate town efficiently, learning where everything is and how to structure trips to the places you need to be, learning when people are active and when they aren't and where they are at any given hour of the day. If you ever played the Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, imagine that but with no time loop aspect. People go to specific places at specific times and you need to investigate and replay the game time and again to be sure that Matthew knows everything he ought to in order to solve the mystery (this really is another exhibit on the list of Japanese Adventure games, if only I'd properly played some of it before that essay, c'est la vie).

Another thing I'd feel remiss not mentioning is the game's very interesting cinematography. Few PS1 games use camera angles to create atmosphere, the list is basically Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil big budget JRPGs and... this. Most of those only really play with the camera as an aspect of pre-rendered 2D backgrounds or cutscenes, Mizzurna is doing it in a fully 3D game, all real time rendering. Mizzurna will move the camera around a lot to communicate aspects of the atmosphere of the environment. The cold sterile hospital, despite being quite small, gives a sense of unfamiliarity as its camera is strictly behind the back, giving the player a poor grasp of how it's laid out. This contrasts Matthews room at home which is seen from the top down, an all seeing eye for an environment Matthew knows perfectly. The camera is seen from a portentious below the floor looking up angle at the Police Station, indicating the authority the building houses. It's not deep but it gives the environments real flair and shows a proper understanding of how to construct a camera and environments to communicate purpose. In order to make sure the camera could do all this though the game sacrificed many bits of polish that most games wouldn't, specifically making sure the player couldn't see anything in other rooms, models that had been loaded for specific scenes and not unloaded can be spotted by clipping the camera into walls. Publishers often fear this lack of polish, but I have a great love for Mizzurna's ambitions not being curtailed. To make the choice between an innovative structure and looking "polished" is hard, to choose innovative structure in any market is courageous.

So what the game's attempting technically is very impressive and the structure is interesting albeit punishing. The punishing structure is part of what's hard to recommend about it, but the other part is just that the early 3D woes make it exponentially harder. Matthew just gets caught on objects fairly often, causing the player to lose time disentangling him, and on a game with a strict timer that's death. While I haven't run into it yet events that need to play out in the same place can also purportedly have issues if they trigger at the same time, breaking them all, I've seen footage of the world just not loading properly, likely because of the complex and for the time innovative scheme used to determine what would load when. To play Mizzurna is to be gobsmacked by what the devs succeeded at creating on PS1 hardware and to understand why no one else tried. I think most everyone should at least try it if they have a passion for retro games or adventure games, but you'll figure out quickly if it's a game you can stick with.

Naturally Mizzurna Falls did not see an official English release, it was just too daffy for any western publishers to take a chance on at the time, but as of this year (2021) it has a fan translation that seems to be of decent quality. I'll clarify now that these are thoughts I've had since playing the game for the first time not more than a day ago. I want to keep playing and I hope to some day put out an article that is a more even keel examination of the game as a complete work rather than an overview of what an obviously flawed gem it is even from the off. It's a game that has relatively little English pickup and this won't help because this blog remains extraordinarily small, but maybe it'll help someone try giving this curveball of a game a chance.