Boktai: The Sun Is in Your Hand

"This game gives new meaning to the phrase "go outside and play"."

The stereotypical gamer, as a general rule, hates going outside. He has good reasons to. There is no TV outside. There are no gaming consoles outside. It’s too cold/warm. There are bears outsides. A bee can sting you. A shark might eat you. The fresh air smells funny. The bright sun hurts your eyes, and it also feels funny on your pale skin. Crazed apes from the zoo might have broken free from their cages and might be waiting for you to leave the house. You get my point.

Sure, going outside is a scary thing, but just look and see what is waiting for you when you step out of your house. You have… um… uh… libraries! Gateways to knowledge! You also have… um… more libraries! And… don’t forget about McDonalds! McDonalds doesn’t deliver food to your house. You also have… well, the thrill of stepping out of your poorly lit room into a much more open environment, which can be quite exciting. Oh, screw it. The great outdoors is not that much fun.

Isn’t it great that we now have something to make being outside much more fun? Boktai requires you to go outside to harness the power of the bright light bulb in the sky. It practically tells you from the start that you must go outside and play under the sun. Without the sun, you can’t complete the game. Neat, huh? It just so happens that you’ll find yourself so involved with the game, you’ll totally ignore and forget about those evil sharks and bees and apes. When a game manages to make you totally forget about the evils out the outside world, you know it’s good.

It turns out that the evil Undead have taken the once peaceful city of San Miguel and turned into a dark, foreboding place of darkness, blotting out the sun in the process. The Undead’s rampage was fierce, but the world’s strongest Vampire Hunter came to San Miguel to squash the Undead and return peace. Well, it didn’t work. The Vampire Hunter was killed, and the Undead roamed San Miguel. Left behind in this chaos was a small boy, the heir to the evil killing Gun de Sol. It turns out the famous Vampire Hunter that was killed was the boy’s own father! With the blood of Vampire Hunters coursing through his veins and the all powerful Gun de Sol, the Solar Boy left San Miguel and headed towards Istrakan, the city of death and where the evil Immortals live.

His only help is the messenger of the sun, a strange little creature called Otenko. Will the Solar Boy avenge his father’s death? Will he be able to stop the Undead from claiming more victims? Will he ever be able to bring back the sun? Tune in tonight at 8 to find out!

Boktai is a very strange game, and quite unlike anything I’ve ever played before. It combines traditional RPG aspects with an engrossing plot, stealth gameplay, and real time aspects. The RPG tradition gives the game well-designed dungeons full of tricky traps, (incredibly tough) puzzles, and monsters. The RPG aspects also affect the Gun de Sol, by allowing you to find many extra parts to equip on the gun to make it powerful. Use the different parts of the Gun long enough and they’ll level up and become stronger. The items also have a particularly RPG feel… you recover health with apples, you collect Life Fruits to make your life bar grow longer, and you are able to use nuts to affect your speed and size. There even is a small dose of Harvest Moon thrown in, allowing to plant and harvest different item fruits to help you out during the quest.

The stealth gameplay really spices up the game a lot. Each dungeon is designed in a kind of maze like fashion, with many dead ends and rocks scattered about. Because your main source of energy for the Gun de Sol is somewhat limited (it’s the sun, duh), the game encourages you to sneak past the many ghouls and monsters inside each dungeon. There are some items that make your footsteps super quiet, allowing you to sneak past the monsters with extremely great hearing. You’re able to back up against a wall and hit it a few times and make some noise. Doing so will cause any monsters nearby that heard it to head towards the noise to investigate. Move quickly after you hit the wall, and you’ll be able to sneak past monsters. What if there is no wall anywhere nearby? Well, just sneak up on the ghoul from afar and fire a single shot at its back, stunning it for a few seconds and allowing you to run by. The heavy emphasis on stealth really breathes life into what already is a fantastic game.

The real time part of the game gives it even more depth. After choosing what region of the world you are in, you set the date and clock. The date and clock you set affects Istrakan in many different ways. Most ghouls and Undead aren’t too active during the day, and sloth about the dungeons (they aren’t any less dangerous, though). Some ghouls are stronger as night approaches. The environment gets darker as the sun falls. Play on a day with a full moon that night, you might find some neat little treats for you. How about playing on the day that is named after the sun? Nothing bad can come from that. Just when you think that the game can’t get anymore complex, remember that I haven’t even talked about the solar sensor.

The game is fantastic already, but the interactivity with the sun is what pushes it to a 10. The sun’s main purpose in Boktai is to supply energy to the tiny little solar sensor at the top of the cartridge, and in turn that energy can be used to recharge and refuel your Gun de Sol when it runs out of energy. When the character in the game is outside and sun is hitting the solar sensor, you can charge the Gun up and refuel it. Inside a dark dungeon while you’re playing outside? Don’t fret! There are many skylights in the dungeons that just big enough for a beam of sunlight to come through. Stand under one of them and charge the Gun up! If you play at night, don’t get too afraid if you run out of energy for your Gun. Boktai takes care of that for you.

As long as you play the game in the sun, small amounts of solar energy are being stored in solar stations throughout the land. When you need more energy for the Gun, you can just find one of those stations and withdraw solar energy from it. What if you want to save your solar energy in those stations for later use? You can find a Solar Bank and deposit the energy that was in the solar stations into the bank, just in case you run deplete the energy in the stations. If you do, just search for a bank and withdraw energy back into the solar stations. It’s that simple! If you are in desperate need of solar energy, you find the mysterious Dark Loans company and borrow solar energy from them… but make sure you pay that energy back. You don’t want to find out what happens if you don’t. You can also bypass both of those ways by simply hunting down semi-rare nuts and fruits that restore power to your Gun de Sol.

The sun isn’t needed just to power up the Gun de Sol. In some parts, the sun is directly connected to how fast winds blow. Take away the sun, and the winds don’t blow. A strong sun can also quickly dry up puddles of water that’d immediately alert monsters to your presence if you step on them. Some ghouls are invisible when the sun is hitting the solar sensor… but if you cover the solar sensor up or take the sun away, you can see and kill them with ease. While the sun plays an obviously important role, the only time it is required is when dealing the final deathblow to the Immortal bosses.

After you successfully explore an important dungeon, you’ll end up going head-to-head with an Immortal in some surprisingly epic battles. Once you beat the Immortal, it will return to its coffin and be trapped there until you take it to the Pile Driver. The Pile Driver is basically a gigantic magnifying glass tube thing that uses mirrors to aim the sunlight at the Immortals to kill them. Once in the Pile Driver, the Immortal will be free of his or her coffin and try to destroy the mirrors or turn their sunlight into black rays. You must frantically run back and forth, shooting your Gun de Sol at the mirrors to fight back the black rays the Immortal will send out to the mirrors… all the while avoiding his or her very powerful and wide attacks. This can turn into a frantic fight for your life on a cloudy day because the stronger the sunlight is, the more powerful the mirror’s rays become. Either way, the Pile Driver boss battles are incredibly frantic and intense… and also pretty fun.

The solar sensor is easily the coolest gimmick ever to hit the GBA, but it does have one tiny problem. The instruction book says that on really, really, really sunny days you’ll be able to play inside under a window that has sunlight coming through it. It says that the sunlight will be much weaker, because of how windows filter out some of the sun’s rays. They assure you, it is possible to get sunlight inside. Well, they are wrong. I’ve played on the brightest of days inside my home, under a nice beam of sun. I got nothing. No sunlight power. Nothing.

They also say that you can play in the shade, because the rays of the sun reflect off of walls and such. This also is not true. I managed to play in really light shade, but not under a big branch filled tree. Strangely enough, I did manage to get energy during the time you wouldn’t expect you would: on a cloudy, overcast day. Grant it, it was incredibly weaker than that of a normal day, but it still gave me enough to play. Just two little problems with the solar sensor aren’t enough for me to complain about such a cool gimmick, though… and I hope it doesn’t stop you from buying the game.

Bokati looks pretty damn good. Your character and Otenko animate nicely, and I’ve seen neat graphical touches like misty fog when I’ve played in the early hours. While there aren’t as many enemy models as I would’ve liked (many of the enemy sprites repeat, with the only difference being a new color), each one is detailed and stylized in a very Japanese anime-ish way. The bosses, on the other hand, are ****ing amazing (I’m sorry Mr. Censor, this is the only way I could properly describe the bosses). Each one is animates smoothly and is very menacing looking, and most take up a good one third of the screen! One of the bosses, a giant snake/vampire hybrid, must be seen to be believed. All of the graphical touches and details in the dungeons manage to bring across a seriously dark and dangerous feeling… and when feelings like that are able to come across when you are playing just a little Gameboy game, that's pretty amazing. The only rough spots are the lame solar energy “bullets” that your Gun de Sol fires, and some very rare frame rate drops.

Music and sound effects can certainly add to the experience of any game, and they certainly add a lot to the Boktai experience. There are some rather epic and beautiful orchestral tunes that jump out of the tiny GBA speaker. The music during the boss battles will manage to get your heart pumping. The very soft background music while you outside in Istrakan creates a rather peaceful and calming mood. The music is great, but the little voice acting is even greater. Much to my surprise, part of the intro movie in Boktai was voice narrated! The voice acting doesn’t stop there, either. Otenko has a few sayings, and so does a helpful little beauty you save on your adventure. The bosses have some very effective shrieks, howls, moans, and laughs. All in all, think of the graphics and the audio as the mouth watering icing on the nice, yummy cake.

Controls suffer just a little bit. The eight-way movement that is in almost all RPGs is in here, and pressing the control pad to get Django to run in a diagonal line caused a few hand cramps for me. I feel I need to say that years of playing video games have taken a toll on my hands, and that some very minor arthritis may be to blame for those cramps. Now, the menus are mostly easy to cruise through, but much to my surprise, the game map doesn’t offer anything much to make it useful. The dungeons are huge and the difficulty would benefit from a map, but the one they included here doesn’t really help much at all. Considering the amount of polish that was put into almost every other aspect of the game, I’m surprised they didn’t rework the map at all to make it useful.

The minor (and I stress minor) control issues aside, Boktai is a pure gem of the gaming world. It effortlessly combines many different gaming genres into one package, adding a fairly interesting story and the brilliantly innovative solar sensor. Even without the solar sensor, Boktai would be fantastic. Don’t delude yourself into thinking that this solar sensor is just a gimmick to cover up faults with the main game. You couldn’t be farther from the truth. With a brilliant gimmick and a brilliant game to back it up, this game, quite simply, rocks.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 12/28/03