Japanese PSX budget titles have no reason to be this stylish.

This article pairs well with “Night Walk” by Rick Braun. For that mellow Jazzy sound and that trumpet I so enjoy.

~Doug Rohal

Do yourself a favor and watch this, skip till you find the mission starting part.

Still /images are fine but the transitions in-between them are half the fun.

Have you ever wanted to exude style so much that people don’t see how much of a shallow person you are?

uh… Yeah uh.. me neither.

Well this game does that.

It punched above its weight class by stylizing the hell out of itself, especially for a game in this series.

The 1500 series of games was named that because the games would sell for 1500 yen.

Or around $10 Freedom bucks.

Other games in the series were almost shovelware, with stuff like solitaire, bowling and chess.

Number 55 in the series was Throwing Darts, and Number 57 was…

wait what?

Number 57 was a Maze game where you attempted to escape another player and it controlled like 3d fighting game?

I will have to come back to that later.

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Number 56: The Sniper is a simple game, with a story filled with big Hideo Kojima energy.

Hideo Kojima energy as in the way that they treat the game like its a movie.

Each mission has a fully voiced and animated opening and contains a title and credits sequence for each of the 8 missions.

This 1500 Yen game has no good reason to have this much style and story put into it. Yet it does.

I mean just look at this image.

In this game you could have just played some generic sniper dude who sniped because that is what was needed for the game to exist.

Instead we have this character with thoughts, feelings and motivation for his actions. In the equivalent of bargain bin game.

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This game is fully voiced in Japanese, the characters barely have a face yet I know that this sniper reluctantly does what he does, had a wife that is now dead, and has a daughter he is supporting.

At least that is what I understand from the visual cues.

I don’t speak or read Japanese.

I read 80s action movie though and this game has it written all over it.

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The game transitions’ look like a moving Blue Note Records album and I like the show of style and attitude associated with its Jazzy origins.

It has solid anime Opening and Closing vibes as well.

They used film grain and mimic traditional film editing techniques throughout the game. Giving it the “Cinematic” impression to all those who played.

While technically it introduced “flaws” into the visuals, by modern standards, it made the game much better by giving us cues that say-

“Hey, treat this like its from Hollywood and not the bargain bin.”

Its use of bold colors, minimal animation on black backgrounds and white Slab Serif font, is just a great look that I will be using in the future.

I already used it as my inspiration for my article on Inspector Zenigata.

Fin.

So why did I want to talk about this 2001 Japanese PSX game that I found?

Well I thought it was neat. Which is pretty on brand for me.

I also like cataloging my inspirations for reference, in the case I ever want to make something that looks like this art.

In the future I might even edit a video or two to look like this.

If you take inspiration from tons of places you can make things look original and that gives people unique experiences.

And unique experiences make life worth living.

To me at least.