Maria

"How Do You Solve a Problem like Maria? Well..."

Ah, Maria. Maria, Maria, Maria. A game I'd been seeking for years, after reading about it in the import section of a 1997 copy of EGM. I finally managed to pick up a copy for £3 recently. I jumped for joy at my luck finding the game, and at the fact I snagged it at such a good price. Unfortunately, after loading it up, Maria failed to meet my expectations of 9 years waiting on a spectacular scale of mediocrity.

STORYLINE: 10/10

Released in 1997 by Axela and developed by BREAK (most widely known for developing sleeper PS1 hit Ridegear Guybrave), Maria: ~The Reasons Why We Are Born~, was supposed to be a CGI Saturn game in the style of D, or Mansion of Hidden Souls, boasting different paths, alternate scenarios, and different character viewpoints. Taking place in modern-day Sapporo, Hokkaido, revolving around a 16-year-old girl named, you guessed it, Maria, who has suffered massive head trauma after she was hit by a car while riding her bicycle. She is taken to hospital, and is tended to by Dr. Masaki Fukahara and his nurse, Sana. As more tests are run, it is discovered that Maria suffers from a multiple-personality disorder. To make matters worse, Sana has been coming into Maria's room in the night and assaulting her. As the twisted nurse is careful not to leave any marks, the staff believes that Maria's complaints of Sana's bizarre abuse is due to her head trauma and nothing more.

Though finally, after one tame (yet still somewhat disturbing) scene where Sana drugs the helpless Maria, Maria's sanity breaks, and her other personality comes out. Hearing a voice calling her name, she leaps from her hospital window in the dead of night, and runs into the darkness of central Sapporo.

The next morning, Masaki is alerted by the hospital director that Maria has escaped. Fearing that the girl may hurt herself, or others, he takes it upon himself to find her. And that is where chapter 1 begins: at Maria's suburban home.

I found the game's storyline to be very unusual, unique, and original. While many games include characters with multiple-personalities, I've never seen the idea handled in this way, nor have I ever seen a game dealing with a scenario anywhere remotely like this. The storyline is definitely what saved this game from a rating of 3.

GAMEPLAY: 2/10

This is where the game begins to fall short. There are two different modes of play: The first is your typical sound novel setup, like Chunsoft's Kamaitachi no Yoru, or Banpresto's Gakkou De Atta Kowai Hanashi. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not abversed to sound novels, though they have to be done right. And by my standards, sound novels with 3d rendered stills and character pictures just don't cut it for me. It doesn't leave much up to the imagination (contrary to Gakkou's photographed characters/backgrounds, and Kamaitachi's photo-realistic backgrounds with silhouette characters).

In sound novel-mode, there's also a computer you can use every-so-often. The main use of this is to look up hospital records and check e-mail, but you can also change the computer's wallpaper, and play a very basic Puyo Puyo clone.

The second mode of play is what I was most looking forward to: first-person fmv adventure, similar to Mansion of Hidden Souls, or D, as I stated above. I was terribly excited to reach the first such scenario after twenty minutes, but unfortunately, it just fell flat.

Searching Maria's home, for example, takes ages. There's loads of things to look at, most of which are pointless, and it takes far too long to navigate a single room. Puzzles are standard fare: find key A in location, use key on door A. One potentially-interesting puzzle early on involved finding scraps of a photograph and rotating them, to piece them back together like a jigsaw. Unfortunately. this puzzle was far too easy--rotating the pieces made no difference, once you clicked the piece on the proper spot, it would rotate itself to the proper angle and lock into place. It's a far cry from the similar puzzles found in Under a Killing Moon, or Pandora Directive.

Examining things in adventure mode is pretty ridiculous as well. For example, while in Maria's kitchen, you come across a trap door. When you interact with it, Masaki's hands reach closer and closer to it, until a box falls from a shelf onto the trap door, with a loud CLANG, startling him. When this short fmv is finished, there is no box on top of the trap door. Interacting with the trap door again repeats the same FMV. "What?" is what I asked myself. All non-item finding FMVs are repeated, such as Masaki opening a cupboard and having a plate fall on his head, or touching a thorny rose and saying "Ouch!" while pulling a silly face.

GRAPHICS: 7/10

While they are, of course, extremely dated today, Maria boasted good 3D graphics for 1997, and especially good graphics for the Saturn. Beating D by a longshot, Maria's locations are stunning for the era. The interiors look believable: the furniture is finely detailed, lighting and shadows are well done, and there's a very impressive reflection technique used on the screen of a turned-off television monitor. My absolute favourite interiors were Maria's home, Sana's apartment, and the Blue Face Jazz Cafe, Exteriors are gorgeous, as well, boasting a shopping district with very detailed shops, a lush park, a construction site, and many more. The character graphics weren't particularly unique, but they were well done. Maria is a very pretty girl, and Masaki is your typical young anime prettyboy in a white lab coat. The elderly hospital director does look very good, however, considering how hard it must've been to detail convincing wrinkles in 1997.

SOUND: 4/10

Here's something that baffled me: my copy of Maria came with a soundtrack. Now, anybody who knows me, knows how much I love game soundtracks and collectibles. But...almost all of the songs featured in Maria are repeating four-note loops attempting to sound vaguely suspenseful. There are two good songs, however: the theme of the Blue Face Jazz Cafe, and "Roll Out the Barrels", a jovial tune played in the comedic scene where the hospital director gets drunk. But besides these two, the game's music is annoyingly poor, as is the pointless soundtrack.

VOICEACTING: 7/10

Acting is a mixed bag, ranging from poor, to pretty good. Maria's actress has a pretty shrill voice, which can get quite painful after awhile. Masaki has your typical young man's voice, and his acting is pretty convincing. My absolute favourite voiceactor though, is the one who plays Maru, the game's vicious stalker. He portrays the character's madness very well, and the changes in pitch in his voice are astounding. Maru will go from a bellow to a high pitched cackle in a second flat. He's hands-down the most talented voiceactor in the game, and hearing his devilish ranting is quite a reward, even if you can't understand Japanese.

Overall, Maria is an exercise in tedium, though the complex and adult storyline is what kept me playing til the end. It's just a shame that the game wasn't released in English (due to the nature of the storyline being so dark, coupled with the fact that a sound novel wouldn't go down with the majority of the western audience, I'm assuming), because once the world hooks you, its twists and turns don't let you go until you're sent flying into a wall. A sequel was produced exclusively for PSX in 1999, but I haven't managed to track down a copy, yet.

In short: If you can see past it's countless shortcomings and enjoy the deep and involving story, pick yourself up a copy ASAP. If not, or if you just can't read Japanese, simply don't bother.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 09/11/06