Column: 'Might Have Been' - Telenet Japan
December 17, 2007 12:01 AM |
[“Might Have Been” is a bi-weekly column by Todd Ciolek that explores the ways in which promising games, characters, concepts, and companies failed. This week’s edition looks at Telenet Japan, a developer and publisher in business from 1983 to 2007.]
Few Japanese game developers go out with a bang. For every studio-closing spectacle like Clover’s Okami, a dozen other companies sit idle, cranking out cell phone distractions and mahjong titles until their inevitable financial disintegration. That’s what happened to Telenet Japan this past October, when years and years of utter stagnancy finally brought down the company behind Valis (upper left), El Viento, Gaiares, Cosmic Fantasy and other not-quite-famous names of the 16-bit era.
There’s a lot to be said about Telenet, about the way they started off by making golf titles and trucking simulators in the mid-'80s, about the way they made hordes of games on Japanese computers, and about the way they spawned everything from largely forgotten developers like Glodia to Namco’s still-successful Tales series. But for those of us in the West, Telenet lived and died by the console games they made, and it’s those games that show a company perpetually just shy of something great.
Swords and Schoolgirls
Telenet was never deeply entrenched in the anime business, but they were among the first game companies to ride atop Japan’s animation industry in the bubble economy of the ‘80s. There's no better example of this than Telenet's Valis. At first a clumsy PC game released by the company's Wolf Team sub-developer in 1986, Valis took a blue-haired schoolgirl named Yuko, turned her into a bare-bellied warrior, and tossed her at a dimension of monsters in a doomed attempt to rescue her cynical friend Reiko (who may have served as commentary on the trend of Japanese schoolgirls whoring themselves out to older men for shoes and Malice Mizer ringtones).
Valis was aimed at the anime crowd from the start; the game was stocked full of vibrant animated story scenes, and Yuko herself was designed by animator Osamu Nabeshima with help from Tomokazu Tokoro (who’d later come into his own by directing such modern-day anime as Haibane Renmei, NieA_7, and Hellsing Ultimate). Strangely enough, Valis never became an anime series in its own right, even though many popular games of the early ‘90s did. The best it got was a commercial supposedly handled by future Evangelion director and self-hating anime artiste Hideaki Anno.
Today, it’s hard to tell why Valis was a hit. Yuko’s story now seems trite, and the gameplay was always generic action-platform fare nearly as stiff as old-school Castlevania. Yet Valis impressed in the ‘80s and into the following decade, largely on the strength of its cinematic scenes and alluring fantasy tropes, and it steadily grew to include three better sequels, along with a few remakes and spin-offs. Telenet shipped it to the Sega Genesis, the PC-Engine, the Super NES and even, in a best-forgotten form, the Famicom/NES. The whole thing reached its peak with Valis III (upper right), which introduced two other playable characters and a wealth of stages. Valis IV had a similar lineup, minus Yuko, but by then players were getting just a bit weary of yet another Valis game about a scantily clad girl facing yet another generic monster overlord.
Shovel on More Cutscenes, Engine Room
Other Telenet games used the same anime tactic. The Cosmic Fantasy franchise, released in five parts for the PC-Engine, had plenty of yipping, colorful cutscenes to distract players from its generic Dragon-Quest combat system and ridiculously high battle rate. Unlike Valis, it even managed to get an anime tie-in before Telenet moved on.
If Valis and Cosmic Fantasy were fated to age poorly, Telenet’s three-game Exile series (upper left) wasn’t so doomed. An anime-ish take on the Crusades, Exile began on Japanese home computers, yet it was the PC Engine/Turbografx that saw it at its best. As action-platform-RPGs, the system's two Exile games often veer into surprisingly dark territory, with an atmosphere that’s unique even today. Their gameplay is simple but consistently solid, something Telenet couldn’t nail as often as they should have.
Yes, Telenet’s quality control was lacking. For every Exile series, the company churned out twice as many unremarkable titles: the generic RPG Traysia, the humdrum pinball game Dino Land, the ridiculous proto-fighter Beast Wrestler, the clumsy mech shooter Browning, a lousy PC-Engine port of Golden Axe, and so on. It wasn’t as though the typical Telenet release was even memorably bad; it was more the game equivalent of unflavored oatmeal.
Team Players
Fortunately, Telenet was large enough to have several internal developers, and whenever the team known as Riot fumbled a Valis port or the Laser Soft division sleep-walked through a Cosmic Fantasy game, another squad had something good to take the attention off of Telenet’s failings. Most of those good games came from Wolf Team, Telenet’s first and most talented offspring.
Despite working in PC games for years, Wolf Team earned most of its reputation on the Sega Genesis (or, if you’re still following the Japanese nomenclature, the Mega Drive), at first by re-working their independently made PC games into improved console versions. Their lineup started strong, with engaging shooters like the diagonal-view Final Zone and the addictively simple Granada. Arcus Odyssey (Arcus Spirits in Japan), an isometric action game based on a PC RPG line, offered a surprisingly complex quest, Gauntlet-style shooting, and one of the prettier intros on the Genesis.
Yet Wolf Team’s most popular Genesis outing was an original action-platformer called El Viento (upper right). It found a green-haired girl named Annet, armed with boomerangs and dressed in ancient Incan lingerie, at the center of a war against stirring Lovecraftian horrors and 1920s gangsters. It’s a compellingly odd game: Annet explores subterranean hellscapes, fends off shirtless thugs in city streets, surfs an ocean of giant pixelly octopuses, and even faces down Al Capone (unfairly renamed “Vincente DeMarco” in the North American version). And despite the clash of styles, El Viento’s also a fun, creatively designed title, the type that Wolf Team would seldom make again.
Earnest Evans Ruined Everything
Everything was going well by the end of 1991. Telenet’s Renovation label had taken root in the U.S. and emerged as one of the biggest publishers for the Sega Genesis. El Viento and Valis had fan followings both there and in Japan. An American publisher called Working Designs was picking up Cosmic Fantasy 2 and Exile. And Gaiares, a Telenet shooter with a creative weapon-stealing gimmick, proved to be such a critical success that it inspired several ads still remembered fondly today.
Telenet had every reason to believe in Sega, and when the Sega CD arrived in Japan late that year (as the Mega CD, naturally), Wolf Team was there, firing off new titles a bit too quickly. While Sega itself took a while to give the new peripheral anything substantial, Wolf Team and Telenet had Earnest Evans, Sol-Feace, Fhey Area, and Aisle Lord ready and waiting.
And, unfortunately, sucking. Sol-Feace was a tiresome shooter warmed over from a PC game, while Fhey Area and Aisle Lord were routine RPGs. Earnest Evans was the biggest disappointment; a prequel to El Viento, it focused on Annet’s cocky blond archeologist caretaker and tried out a new visual concept: Earnest was a jointed sprite, with each of his limbs animated independently. The idea worked for non-human characters (and, fifteen years later, in Vanillaware’s Odin Sphere), but Earnest was a horror, a limp-stringed puppet loping nightmarishly across awkwardly designed levels.
Wolf Team and Telenet soldiered on, giving the Sega CD an Arcus compilation, a Cosmic Fantasy pack, and ports of old full-motion-video arcade games like Road Avenger, Time Gal, and Cobra Command. If these relics were fun in their own hokey, Dragon’s Lair way, Wolf Team’s original Mega CD titles weren’t. A generic mech action game called Devastator failed to interest anyone past its pretty cinema scenes, and Annet Futatabi (upper left) was a rushed, bland close to the El Viento trilogy, bringing back Annet only to squander her in a sub-par Golden Axe clone. At least the cutscenes were pretty. As usual.
Old Gear
To make matters worse, the Sega CD wasn’t a particularly huge success in Japan. As the system’s bloom wore off in 1993, Telenet turned to the RPG market and its biggest point of growth: the Super Famicom.
As before, Telenet began to support the console with a handful of ports (including the B-list RPG Tenshi no Uta and two of Wolf Team’s strategic Zan titles) and followed it up with some original creations. None of them caught on, even though they represented unique new turns for the company. Wolf Team’s PC-born Hiouden: Mamonotachi Tono Chikai was an unorthodox strategy game, while Telenet’s Dark Kingdom offered an RPG in which players conquered a world as a villain instead of saving it.
Wolf Team’s Neugier (upper right) was another failure of ambition. An action-RPG with brisk pacing and a unique grappling weapon, it pulled in some anime-industry professionals, including artist Kia Asamiya and writer Noboru “Sho” Aikawa (who, at this point, was only “professional” in that he’d written a lot of hysterically awful series). For all of its expense and invention, though, Neugier lasted only a few hours.
And out of Telenet’s Super Famicom lineup, only a terrible version of Valis IV (sorry, SUPER Valis IV) would see an American release. A Super Famicom port of Arcus Odyssey was slated to hit the Super NES along with Neugier (under the title The Journey Home: Quest for the Throne), but Renovation was abruptly sold off to Sega in 1993, and Sega wasn’t exactly supporting Nintendo’s system.
Tales of Internal Strife
Things weren’t particularly bright inside the company, either. Wolf Team, which Telenet brought under tighter control in the early ‘90s, had lost a number of staffers by 1994: Masaaki Uno left to found Camelot (the future developer of Mario Tennis and Golden Sun) while a few employees struck out as Gau Entertainment and made the decidedly Wolf Team-esque Ranger-X. Even Wolf Team head Masahiro Akishino, who’d been with the developer since the original Valis, departed in 1993.
Telenet was in trouble, and a group of eager young Wolf Team staffers reacted by looking elsewhere for help with their next project: a gorgeous RPG called Tale Phantasia (upper left). They found that help in Namco, which financed the project in partnership with Telenet and then proceeded to piss off at least three key Wolf Team members. There’s no official word on why Yoshiharu Gotanda, Joe Asanuma and Masaki Norimoto left Telenet; some say that Namco changed Tales of Phantasia a bit too much (adding the particle “of,” among other things), though rumors also point to relative newcomer Eiji Kikuchi being made the game’s director.
Whatever the cause, the three departed with several Wolf Team cohorts in tow. They formed tri-Ace, using the idea behind Tales of Phantasia’s action-based battles to fuel their own RPGs, from the bland Star Ocean franchise to the striking Valkyrie Profile. Aside from an Earnest Evans reference in Star Ocean: The Second Story, their break with Telenet and Wolf Team was complete.
With Wolf Team a shell of its former self, Telenet turned to the best thing it had left: Tales of Phantasia. Namco pimped the game into a major RPG name, and Telenet came along for the ride. Wolf Team’s remnants gradually became Namco Tales Studio, with Kikuchi heading the developer and Telenet owning about a third of it. Namco, however, claimed most of the new venture, and was thus in charge.
Too Little, Too Late, Too Filthy
Wolf Team wasn’t finished just yet. In 1998, the developer’s name emerged from its Tales-induced hibernation, appearing on a PlayStation game called Cybernetic Empire. It wasn’t a terrible action title, but the 3-D elements and character renders looked amateurish next to the likes of Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil 2. If anything, it was a return to the mediocrity that had damaged Wolf Team in the first place.
In the years following Cybernetic Empire, Telenet cranked out low-effort sports titles and puzzle games, the usual refuge of decaying game companies. It wasn’t until 2006 that Telenet, like a failed actress, went into porn.
Lazy as ever, Telenet couldn't be bothered to make their own porn, and instead licensed the Valis and Arcus names to a little-known publisher called Eants. Eants wasted no time in making Valis X (upper right), a line of "adventure" games featuring graphic shots of highly unpleasant things happening to Yuko and any other Valis character with breasts. When word of it and Eants’ similar Arcus porn leaked out to the West, some fans were outraged. Others were cynically amused, and a few even clamored for similar titles starring Annet and Earnest Evans. Perhaps the Valis series always had a half-naked heroine and some suggestive moments, but Valis X was clearly desperate financial flailing on Telenet’s part.
Porn among the Ruins
And on October 29, Telenet flailed its last. While the fates of many of their properties are unknown, Eants’ porn ensures that Valis and Arcus will survive their creator, while another Telenet title, the shooter Silky Lip, was similarly licensed to a developer called Waffle.
Prouder traces can be found: two Valis games are out for Japanese cell phones (upper left), while a new Valis manga’s running in the bi-monthly anthology Comic Valkyrie. Naturally, all of the Telenet employees who went over to Namco Tales Studio remain there, with the franchise now resting solely in Namco’s care. Such is Telenet’s legacy.
Should Telenet’s passing be mourned? It's hard to say. Telenet was such a titan of mediocrity that it’s tough to feel anything about them; maybe a blip of anger at that Valis X thing or a passing fondness for Wolf Team and El Viento. Telenet may have delivered the first tastes of anime-styled games to entire generations in both Japan and the West, but for all of the titles they put out, there's not much to praise. Perhaps it’s best just to remember their finer moments, and where those moments could've led.
Categories: Column: Might Have Been
28 Comments
I knew right from the beginning that Porno Valis was going to get mentioned before the end.
I do remember greatly enjoying Granada once a long while ago. Good article.
John H. | December 17, 2007 6:19 AM
i briefly ran a telenet fansite that had next to no information on it. i've always had a soft spot for telenet.
i posit that AQ interactive is the telenet of current days, but i have no patience for shitty games and beat down: fists of vengeance is a lot less charming than valis, so i don't actually care.
ferricide | December 17, 2007 4:36 PM
I don't remember valis III having multiple characters...
brandon | December 17, 2007 11:01 PM
yo nutt by "aq interactive" do you mean cavia?
bullet witch had a chance to be the next valis :(
tim | December 17, 2007 11:47 PM
brandon -- FAQ says it does! the valis games outside of 2 tend to blend together in my mind, however.
cover image is also suggestive:
http://img520.imageshack.us/img520/953/valis3japankj9.jpg
tim -- yeah, i said cavia to you a year (?) or so ago when i came up with this theory, but i think expanding it to include the rest of AQ is a relatively good idea. yes/no?
ferricide | December 18, 2007 12:08 AM
I pulled out my Telenet stuff on the TurboGrafx this morning after reading this article yesterday. Great article! I didn't even know, and am sad now that I do as it means a lot of games I was excited might come to the VC on the Wii (Exile 1 & 2, Final Zone 2) are unlikely to make it :(.
Valis 3 does have 3 playable characters as mentioned, which makes it 3x as much fun. Of course three times zero still equals zero.
I own a copy and I think the only reason we bought it was to show our Sega Genesis fanboy friends how the cut scenes looked better when you had 256 on-screen colors instead of 64. The game is not any good.
Russell Carroll | December 18, 2007 11:55 AM
The article presents a quite-common misconception -- believing that every Wolf Team game is also a Telenet title. Wolf Team had a free-lance period where they published their own games. Hence, El Viento and its trilogy as well as lots of other MD titles mentioned have nothing to do with Telenet, I'm afraid.
Recap | December 18, 2007 1:45 PM
ahhhh, yeah I was wondering about that. People tend to consider Wolf Team an internal studio of Telnet, but they seemed to be more of a free developer with a close relationship with Telnet.
brandon | December 18, 2007 4:08 PM
Wolf Team did indeed break off from Telenet, but I believe their freelance period lasted only a few years and ended in 1990, when they became a subsidiary of Telenet once again. Wolf Team had their own label and copyrights for a time, so they were always a little more independent than Riot or Laser Soft (the latter of which was actually absorbed by Wolf Team in the early '90s, I think), but even during their indie phase, Wolf Team shared a lot with Telenet; the Final Zone series, for example, bounced between the two.
Anyway, Wolf Team's games, history and ultimate fate were so closely linked with Telenet's that I didn't see a point in mentioning their fairly brief separation.
Todd Ciolek | December 18, 2007 5:41 PM
it was a close enough relationship for wolfteam's titles to be published by renovation in the US, as well.
as far as this stuff coming to the VC, stuff from defunct companies or those who no longer publish games is coming to the VC from other outlets -- FCI/pony canyon games, for example, or data east stuff. so it's not like there's no chance.
i'm curious who ended up scavenging the corpse, really. a question in my mind is did telenet sell the rights to arcus and valis for those pr0n games, or just license them? i'd guess license but who knows?
ferricide | December 18, 2007 6:26 PM
I'd guess they're just licensed, since Eants apparently had no part in the Valis cell phone games.
http://www.telenet.co.jp/games/valis_mb/index.html
I think I'll edit that link into the article. It seems important.
Todd Ciolek | December 18, 2007 7:44 PM
boy, those backgrounds being crappy 3D really just sucks all of the charm right out of that game, huh?
ferricide | December 19, 2007 1:16 AM
"Anyway, Wolf Team's games, history and ultimate fate were so closely linked with Telenet's that I didn't see a point in mentioning their fairly brief separation."
Sure, but you shouldn't have mentioned Wolf Team-only games as Telenet titles either. The truth is that El Viento and the others are not Telenet games. At all.
Recap | December 19, 2007 10:07 AM
fantastic article, makes me very nostalgic.
I remember a lot of their games fondly, and while the content was never truly stellar - the fact that they were one of the first developers to produce voice acted cutscenes that tried to emulate an animated scene is enough for them to be in my personal hall of fame.
No mention of red/last alert though!
work3 | December 19, 2007 11:50 AM
Not to split hairs, but it's more accurate to say that El Viento and "the others" weren't Telenet games prior to 1990. They became Telenet properties once Wolf Team went back to being a Telenet sub-group shortly after that. That's why Telenet has Wolf Team's titles in its catalog.
http://www.telenet.co.jp/games/index.html
I can understand the confusion, since the Wolf Team copyright shows up alone on a lot of their games. I should've been a little clearer about the way the two companies overlapped.
Todd Ciolek | December 19, 2007 11:55 AM
"Not to split hairs, but it's more accurate to say that El Viento and "the others" weren't Telenet games prior to 1990. They became Telenet properties once Wolf Team went back to being a Telenet sub-group shortly after that."
Yeah, pretty much. But seems I'm failing to make my point clear enough. Your article is about "Telenet Japan". A ludography of this company just can't include titles which were not produced or financed by it. El Viento, Granada, Earnest Evans, Arcus Odyssey, etc, were totally unrelated to Telenet, much like, I don't know, you won't find Gunbird in a Cross-Nauts ludography or Magical Drop in G-Mode's, despite Cross-Nauts owning Psikyo's IPs and G-Mode, Data East's. Just saying.
Recap | December 19, 2007 3:25 PM
Recap: Actually, the article's about Telenet AND Wolf Team. They fit together so nicely.
Work3: Yes, I forgot to mention Last Alert in that roundup of mediocre Telenet games. But now that I think about it and its voice acting, it might deserve its own article.
Todd Ciolek | December 19, 2007 4:39 PM
Fuck Telenet people. Acclaim also had a few good titles, and no one is crying their ass for them.
gogo | December 21, 2007 3:31 PM
That's because companies like Acclaim and Midway are a joke.
Shellshock! | January 19, 2008 7:23 PM
Hey, I liked Sol-Deace.
FlameAdder | January 19, 2008 9:09 PM
Seriously. Wolfteam's stuff just was NOT that good. Ever. A bunch of semi-interesting curiousities that felt like they needed a few levels of extra polish and tightness that they were missing. Telenet was an odd curiousity that lived and died off of its anime-style graphics in the early 90s.
Kei | January 21, 2008 7:22 PM
@GoGo
You're an idiot
Please learn to read next time, if you did then you would know that he is writing a column about companies who didn't really do anything special, but had a good foundation and never did anything with it .
@Kei
No one even said wolf team was that good(Tales of Phantasia was pretty good though),Saying that is completely unneeded as it is already obvious. Please read the article and coments again.
Ratix240sx | January 31, 2008 11:52 AM
I just hope that Wolf Team will gain back Valis and make it as the way it should be. So they can just to fix the damage that they have done. Probably let Namco/Bandi owns the series.
TheSRS | February 19, 2008 9:24 PM
I mean what Telenet have done...lol sorry.
TheSRS | February 19, 2008 9:28 PM
@TheSRS:
Since Wolf Team is no longer a developer, it's an impossibility. The group separated and either started their own studio (Tri-Ace, anyone?) or became freelance (Motoi Sakuraba does music for more than just Tales games). While the idea of Wolf Team congregating for a refreshingly new Valis game appeals to me in a way no person could ever understand, it's an in improbability in the zone of about slim-to-none.
On the bright side, if Falcom remade Ys III for PC over 10 years post-release, then there is some hope that someone somewhere will get these developers back together to make something amazing out of the ashes of what could've been. Though, in the spirit of another, rather addicting Wolf Team/Telenet game, I'm not about to let the Phoenix evolve from the Loc too quickly.
Heroman | May 23, 2008 10:33 PM
I rather enjoyed all of Telenet's and/or Wolf Team and all of it's subsidiaries' games that I've played. Especially Valis, being that it's my number one favorite game. I think it may have a chance at something new, with the manga running currently in Kill Time Communications' Comic Valkyrie magazine. They could easily go and make an anime series based off of that strip. The series really does have quite a compelling storyline for an action game, and the character designs are really nice. Anyway, I don't agree with a lot of the opinions in the article but, it's written well enough. Just goes to remind me that the things I enjoy, most people don't.
Leoknight | September 30, 2008 9:34 AM
Your facts suck sooo hard.
Telenet was a RPG maker from the start. Regaurdless of it's original series, it did make some mistakes.
However SEGA screwed them over when they allowed the USA production of Sonic 2.
THe SEGA CD was killed off by the credited creator of Nights.
Wolfteam left them afterwards. Keep in mind Wolfteam was established first before Telenet.
Telenet was brought by Namco, Wolfteam left Namco since they fubared TOP and went to Enix to make Star OCean.
Telenet ports was the problem on the SEGA. It had double versions of the same game.
What is soo oooo wrong with Hentai??? Hentai is just shojo but for men, and men don't want to be romanced, they want flesh.
Also Valis is not licked yet, there is still more series of the same, now Hentai based games being released. The same for digi carrot, tenchi, and even love Hina.
Porn is the joke of Hentai. They do this on purpose in Hentai sometimes. However you probably don't even watch enough to see the differnce. Get your facts straight.
RegalSin | September 6, 2009 4:06 AM
I have written a 3,000 word story about my trip on the Brazil Maru in 1970 from San Francisco to Kobe. It was a wild trip and I met a lovely Japanese-Brazilian woman and we had a great time. I also slept with two lesbians and would like to find a publisher that would be interesed in my story.
Paul Hogan | April 8, 2010 1:26 PM