Description
A playthrough of Ecole's 1996 light-gun shooter for the Sega Saturn, Death Crimson.
Since the game was only released in Japan, I included English subtitles for the Japanese text and the intro's voice-overs.
In 1986, the KOT plague was spreading like wildfire through Europe. A mercenary, Kousuke "Combat" Echizen, and his buddies stumbled into some ruins as they were fleeing an ambush. In these ruins, Echizen found a gun named "Crimson." He snagged the gun, made his escape from the warzone, and made his way back to his home country.
Ten years later, with Crimson in hand, Combat Echizen returns to Thessaloniki to investigate the source of the KOT outbreak. He arrives to find the city totally overrun by monsters, and when Crimson "evolves" and saves Echizen, the mercenary finds himself caught up in an utterly insane chain of events that'll ultimately lead him straight to the source of the trouble.
Death Crimson is a light gun shooter that sees Echizen traveling the world, blasting at bats, eyeballs, ogres, opera masks, and God knows what else over the course of three lengthy stages. It isn't a horror game in the conventional sense. There's no gore, the crude 3D graphics are garish and bright, and the soundtrack features lots of synth pan flute and accordion, but between its premise and (what one may chartiably call) gameplay mechanics, it was clearly striving to be "horror adjacent."
That being said, I think the people at Ecole pulled it off. It is indeed horrifying. The backstory that's served up in the intro makes no sense. The villain, Deathbisnos, has the most pathetic war cry I've ever heard, and he looks like an elementary schooler's crafts project. The title screen with the wiggling hands is one of the best unintentionally goofy things I've seen in a game. The enemies rarely have more than two frames of animation. The camera, which is supposed to represent Echizen's point of view, flies in ridiculous arcs and seems to be trying to induce motion sickness. The music is hilarious: it's not badly composed, but I think something went horribly awry when the sound programmer attempted to assign the instruments. The sound effects are blown out and super distorted. The controls and hit detection range from barely passable with the Stunner to utterly unusable with a gamepad, there's no grace period after you get hit, and enemies often overlap. The option screen contains one option. And though the manual never mentions it, you lose a life whenever you shoot flying squirrels.
As a game that would make most Net Yaroze hobby projects blush, Death Crimson deserves its reputation for being the worst Sega Saturn game, and I believe it still stands as Famitsu magazine's worst rated game ever with a score of 13 out of 40.
Incompetently made and utterly broken, Death Crimson is a surreal, incomprehensibly enchanting trainwreck. It's unsettling in ways you'd never expect, and I'm certain it'll leave an impact on anyone who has the tenacity to see it through. It creeped me out, I loved it, and I hated it.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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