Minoru Kusakabe, who today also goes by the name Munoru Kusakabe, isn't exactly a known name in the video game industry, but there is a decent chance that you might have come across something he was involved in, namely in regards to CG cutscenes. You see, Kusakabe is a long-time veteran of producing computer-generated sequences, having directed CG cutscenes for games like Sonic the Hedgehog [2006], Panzer Dragoon Orta, Culdcept II, Tales of Symphonia, Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth, N3: Ninety-Nine Nights, & Gravity Rush. Prior to all of this, though, Kusakabe was an employee of Synergy Inc., a small Japanese developer/publisher that worked almost solely on PC software during its entire life from 1986 to 1998, all of which focused mainly on utilizing CG imagery. Kusakabe originally got his start helping work on the visuals for Haruhiko Shono's trio of Alice: An Interactive Museum, L-Zone, & the highly influential Gadget, & eventually was given the opportunity to direct himself, resulting in a pair of games that are immensely interesting for what they are, and have either become forgotten to time or sadly misunderstood.
Join me as I look back at the Tetsujin duology, better known abroad as Iron Angel of the Apocalypse.
Originally released for the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer on April 9, 1994 in Japan, just a little over two weeks after the console's March 20 launch in that country, Tetsujin/Iron Man wouldn't see release in North America until May 1995, where it received the less literal but more awesome-sounding title (though I'll be using the Japanese title for brevity), and most surprisingly enough all of the voice work is simply subtitled, rather than dubbed over; Europe wouldn't receive either game, sadly. As for the concept, you play as the titular Tetsujin, an armor-plated "motoid" (i.e. an android) based around a nameless human that suddenly awakens at the bottom floor of a giant tower by a video message by a nameless mad scientist. "The Scientist" feels that humanity hasn't managed to properly move on to the next level of advancement, so he has created Tetsujin, the "ultimate killing machine", and now wants to test his creation & see if it truly is worthy by challenging Tetsujin to make its way up all 30 floors of the tower, destroying any robotic contraptions that get in its way. During the trek up, Tetsujin meets & is occasionally contacted by a mysterious golden android, which also is trying to make its way up the tower.
At first glance, Tetsujin looks to be a first-person shooter, or what was still called a "Doom clone" at the time; the term "FPS" wouldn't be widely used until the late 90s, at earliest. However, id Software's seminal genre-defining classic had only come out a handful of months prior to Tetsujin's original release in Japan, & when you actually play it you come to realize that it's not really an FPS, even though you fight by firing guns. No, Tetsujin is instead a first-person dungeon crawler, as all 30 floors (plus the 31st floor roof) are comprised of generally claustrophobic hallways connecting together via larger rooms, as well as elevators leading from one floor to another; many even have multiple elevators, requiring going back down to actually go further up. In fact, as you find the map for each floor, you'll notice that they all fit within a 31x31 grid, though movement isn't literally a roguelike square-by-square affair; instead, each square of the grid requires a second or two of constant movement to get through. Also, defeated enemies drop no ammo for your guns, so you have rely on the few ammo caches you come across to restock (same for regaining health), though each floor also has at least one supply room that refills your health & ammo to full, while also allowing you to save your progress. As for the controls, they're rather simple: D-pad moves & turns, the two shoulder buttons sidestep (though you can swap that with turning in the options), A shoots your gun, B opens doors & grabs items, C activates your boost (when acquired), & P/"Start" opens the menu, where you can choose a gun, look at the map, got to the options, etc.
It's also instantly noticed that your view of the environment is relatively small, with the majority of the screen taken up by your HUD (which itself doesn't even utilize the entire screen resolution of the 3DO), obviously meant to imitate what Tetsujin itself sees through its helmet, and while it's understandable to see how that would annoy some people while playing, it also is a perfect example of the general mood & feel that Minoru Kusakabe & his team were going for with this game. The very atmosphere of Tetsujin is that of dark, heavy claustrophia, one where you start off each floor unsure of your surroundings, hoping that you can locate the map ASAP, and movement in general is slow & methodical, fitting for a humanoid robotic contraption that's literally only just woken up & has been told to make its way up a giant tower. That being said, the slow movement is also due in part to the game's performance, which is admittedly shaky. When in small, claustrophobic corridors the game might hit 30 fps (maybe), but whenever in large, open rooms the frame rate does drop pretty sharply, resulting in a game that can feel a bit sluggish to play at times. That being said, though, Tetsujin is very obviously designed around playing with a slower frame rate, as enemy patterns are generally very simplistic (make a beeline at you, roam around a specific path, etc.), and the draw distance is comparatively short on purpose; in fact, enemies only actually move about when in your draw distance range, so escape is possible. While I can definitely see how the performance will turn some people away, one can simply play the game via emulation, as programs like 4DO allow you to virtually overclock the CPU. Oddly enough, the 3DO's 32-bit RISC-based ARM60 CPU was actually underclocked, running at only 12.5 MHz instead of the native 20 MHz (my only guess is to prevent overheating), so bumping the virtual CPU up to 20 MHz makes the game run at a much better (& more consistent) speed. It's easy to see why it received such a mixed reception in North America.
In terms of pacing, Tetsujin segments the 30 floors into five "stages", made up of six floors each, with each stage having its own set of wall textures, unique enemies, & gimmicks. As you make your way through each floor & stage, Tetsujin will come across new power-ups, whether it's extending its health from one bar to two to finally three, getting new guns (each one more powerful than what came before, though you can always switch back, if you want), or acquiring new skills like the ability to dash for a few seconds or a radar that lets you see incoming enemies ahead of time. Every sixth floor ends with a boss fight that also acts as a final test for the gimmick or new skill you learned: Boss 1 requires you to master sidestepping, Boss 2 is about using the dash to catch up to it, Boss 3 teleports around & needs the radar to beat, Boss 4 can only be destroyed by explosive floor tiles you had been avoiding earlier, etc. At the end of each stage you also get some bits of storytelling, usually focusing on showing Tetsujin making its way up from one stage to another, or having the Android communicate with Tetsujin in some way. In terms of an overall plot, it's purposefully thin, focusing more on mood & atmosphere than grand storytelling, though there is a fun little twist at the end of Stage 4 where you learn the truth behind the Scientist, Tetsujin, & the Android.
Said story sequences are told almost entirely via CG, which today has obviously aged but honestly holds up better than other CG of the time. The sole exception to all of this is the Scientist himself, who is portrayed via FMV by Kyusaku Shimada, best known for portraying Yasunori Kato in adaptations of Hiroshi Amada's iconic novel Teito Monogatari, most recently at the time for Rintaro's OVA adaptation Doomed Megalopolis. For this game, Shimada plays the Scientist as highly unemotional & simply driven by logic, though one could argue that he's maybe a little too unemotional, as a major reveal during the Stage 4 cutscenes is stated by Shimada without any sort of feeling. Still, Shimada's visage alone is appropriately chilling (his Kato was the direct inspiration for General Washizaki in Riki-Oh & M. Bison/Vega in Street Fighter II, after all), and even the one bit where he's obviously greenscreened into a shot doesn't look all that bad. Accompanying all of this is an absolutely stellar soundtrack by Norikazu Miura, who had previously composed the music for L-Zone. Each stage gets its own song, with each delivering a different style of atmosphere to it, whether it's mysterious, threatening, or subdued, but all of them are very focused on delivering a heavy weight to them, befitting the highly robotic & dour mood the entire game pours on you while playing. And, really, that's main appeal of Tetsujin: It's atmosphere & mood. The gameplay is admittedly rather simple, the performance isn't ideal, and the story is pretty barebones, yet once you understand that this is more of a dungeon crawler than a first-person shooter you realize that you're still hooked. Minoru Kusakabe & his team at Synergy created a game that truly is more the whole sum of its parts rather than any individual aspect, creating something truly worth playing, at least with the right frame of mind. While it is a shame that it's exclusive to the 3DO, that also makes Tetsujin a true must-have for people who own one of its variants (like myself), since the console has so few real exclusives to it, let alone ones worth owning & playing.
While the first game certainly had its storytelling moments, Tetsujin Returns puts forth a much larger effort. In fact, the first bit of gameplay is purely storytelling related, as you play as the test pilot during his deadly experiment, moving left & right to avoid hitting walls in a never-ending sequence, until you finally just die. It also gets the player acquainted with this game style, as a later scene imitates it, only you have to survive that one; there are also two on-rail shooter sections, just for a little variety. Also appearing more often are in-stage short sequences, where Tetsujin is talked to by a little flying robot from the rebels named Robby, usually in regard to what's coming next, & some other people, so as to move the plot forward; the first game had some moments of this with the Android, but nowhere near as often as Tetsujin Returns. There are also the usual CG cutscenes in between each stage, which do look a good bit better than the last game. As for gameplay, Tetsujin Returns definitely aims to feel more like your standard FPS, especially in terms of movement. Whereas in the original you could literally only move in one direction at a time, the sequel now allows for more nuanced movement, even allowing diagonal movement by edging the d-pad to the left or right while moving forward or back (instead of simply turning, like you would when at a standstill); you still can't circle strafe with the shoulder buttons, but it is improved movement. Also, the sequel plays at a much, much faster & more consistent clip than the original, resulting much smoother & fluid gameplay; it's as if the boost from the first game is on at all times. Whereas you could only hope to maybe reach 15-20 fps in the first game, this one definitely seems to stick to that (if not better) more or less from start to finish, and playing it at 20 MHz on an emulator almost feels too fast.
The overall action isn't really all too different from the first game, though, as the robotic enemy grunts you encounter here aren't all that different from those in the first in terms of aggression, which in turn often makes you forget about your new defensive option, at least until near the end. Yes, you now have access to a shield that you can turn on for a couple of seconds, which in turn changes the controls slightly, as while the D-pad & shoulder buttons are the same, your face buttons are now A for shooting, B for the shield, & C for interacting with doors & switches. Meanwhile, P/"Start" now only opens up your map (pressing A during this screen then shows your current inventory of weapons, items, & current shield level), while X/"Select" now switches between the two guns you can carry. Yeah, instead of simply carrying all of the guns you acquire like in the first game (though, admittedly, there was no real point in going back to a weaker one), Tetsujin can now only carry two guns, a weaker but faster-firing "gun" type & a strong but slow-to-fire "launcher" type; there are multiple variants of each to choose from, though. In reality, though, you'll just use the gun 99% of the time, as all of them auto-regenerate ammo when not fired (though going anywhere below 30-50 shots remaining results in them doing no damage at all), while the launchers all have extremely limited ammo & take forever to fire, as you have to press A a second time to reload between each shot. Honestly, minus a rare hectic moment at the end, you'll probably only ever use a launcher for boss fights, & the final boss can only be damaged by a specific one. And as if this didn't already sound like a bizarre spiritual predecessor to modern FPS games, you also regenerate health & shield energy when not being hurt or using the shield; in fact, Tetsujin is better than all of them, since he also regenerates ammo for one of his guns!
All that being said, though, there's just something missing from Tetsujin Returns. By breaking free of the original game's dungeon crawler restrictions, it almost feels as though the gameplay is a bit more hollow than before. Without the 31x31 grid restriction, the stages are able to become larger & more sprawling, but at the same time this can result in you getting lost much easier, even with the map being available at all times (which auto-fills are you move around); SCR Headquarters (Stage 4 of 6), in particular, has a problem with that early on. By creating a larger, more focused story, the sequel's plot winds up not having the same sort of post-apocalyptic mood as the original. In comparison, the original's isolated nature made it truly feel as though The Scientist might just be the last surviving human, in some ways. In fact, the intro to the sequel makes it look like the Tower from the first game was actually... on the Moon(?!), effectively making anything The Scientist was doing feel pointless, outside of creating Tetsujin. Also missing completely are live-action elements in any of the cutscenes, as everything is now done entirely via CG; the only live-action you see is a greyscaled re-use of Kyusaku Shimada from the first game during the intro. Now, to be fair, the CG seen here is of a much better quality than what was shown in the first game, showing Synergy's (& Kusakabe's) talent for it improving, and the plot does have one or two twists that do play around with some basic expectations (namely that none of the parties, outside of Tetusjin, are actually "good"). The English release also features English voice acting, and it's decent for its time, though definitely aged compared to today's output, and is performed by "gaijin talent", the most notable being the late Scott McCulloch (Chris in Resident Evil, Richter in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night). At least the music by a returning Norikazu Miura is exquisite, this time (mostly) going for a strong amelodic ambience that gives each stage its own uneasy feeling; there are also a handful of "traditional" songs, plus a couple of callbacks to the first game's music. If you're a fan of Aubrey Hodges' scores to Doom 64 & the PS1 and Saturn versions of Doom, then you'll love what Miura does here.
Still, even though Tetsujin Returns is the superior game on a technical level, those very technical improvements actually remove a fair bit of the inherent appeal the original game has, resulting in a solid game when taken on its own, and definitely one I recommend for any 3DO owner, but also one that can't quite reach the same levels of esoteric enjoyment as the game that came before it.
Unlike the original game, though, the sequel wouldn't remain exclusive to the 3DO hardware, as on March 19, 1996 a port of Tetsujin Returns for Windows 95 saw release, but only in Japan. Requiring a Pentium processor running at a minimum of 90 MHz (100 MHz was recommended, though), this PC port actually asked for more CPU power than id Software's Quake would just a couple of months later, shockingly enough; also this was a Win95-only program, whereas Quake could run on DOS. Unfortunately, while someone has actually preserved this port (& all of its included materials) as a downloadable ISO over at the Internet Archive, it unfortunately cannot run natively on modern PCs; you can get the autorun menu to open, but are prevented from playing or installing. Therefore, I sadly can't tell you how the performance is for this port, but I can tell you that all of the various cutscenes, even down to the small shots of a weapon spinning before choosing whether to equip or not, are literally just AVI files, which means that one can watch all of them in their raw, 288x162 resolution glory with no problems. Also, since the game runs at a native 640x480, rather than interpolating it up as a 3DO would, I would hazard a guess that the Windows port looks just a little bit cleaner. From what one can find online, it looks like this port still displays everything in a letterboxed format, and though I can understand that this was likely done for both games on the 3DO in order to help with performance, it does feel a bit unnecessary for what would have likely been stronger PC hardware, even at the time.
Then, a year later in June of 1997, Synergy would re-release the Windows port as Tetsujin Returns: Premium Version. From what I can tell, this is literally the same thing as the original PC release, except that it now came with a second disc, titled Atmos Tetsujin Re-Mix. This bonus disc is definitely a bit of an oddity, as it's nothing more than a basic program that houses two versions of a unique trance instrumental song of the same name composed by DJ Q'Hey: One that's audio only & another that's just an AMV made up of modified cutscenes from Tetsujin Returns. Running just over seven minutes long, I really can't explain what the exact purpose of all of this is, other than it being an odd form of cross-promotion, but if nothing else, the video version is at least worth a watch, and there is some new CG made just for this; Atmos Tetsujin Re-Mix also had its own separate release around the same time. Then, on March 25, 1998, Synergy Inc. released Tetsujin: The Mutant Solid, a DVD made up of three videos that can be chosen from the main menu. The first is "Tetsujin Returns", which is a ~3-minute music video directed by Minoru Kusakabe essentially acting as a trailer for the game itself, though now the CG is all rendered beautifully in DVD quality, and I think there might even be some new footage mixed in! After that is a DVD-quality version of "Atmos Tetsujin Re-Mix", while the third is "Blackout", a brand new minute-long collaboration between Kusakabe & DJ Q'Hey; both the first & third videos can be played in either stereo sound or Dolby 5.1 surround. While the release itself is pretty bizarre, though I guess very fitting for the entire series itself, I think it's honestly worth a look just to see the CG from Tetsujin Returns in such sharp clarity, as it really shows just how much it had to get compressed to work for the 3DO. The Mutant Solid's videos are actually part of that Internet Archive link a paragraph above, and can be downloaded for posterity, so definitely check it out.
Unfortunately, Synergy Inc. would file for bankruptcy on December 21, 1998, as it had ~900,000,000 yen-worth of debt(!) to its name. Today, it's completely unknown where the rights to the Tetsujin games even lie, so any sort of new release, even if only Returns' Windows 95 port modified to run on modern PCs, is likely an impossibility.
And that brings us to the end of this look at the life of "Tetsujin, Iron Angel of the Apocalypse." Following the closure of Synergy Inc., it wouldn't take long for Minoru Kusakabe to find work elsewhere in the gaming industry, and he was even most recently seen in the credits of 2019's Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown as a modeling artist; he even got a "Special Thanks" by Fumito Ueda in 2016's The Last Guardian. Likewise, Norikazu Miura would quickly become a mainstay for Konami, composing music for titles like Gradius Gaiden, Shadow of Destiny, and Suikoden IV, Tactics, & Tierkreis, with his last known credit being one of the musicians for 2010's Castlevania: Harmony of Despair; some of his work on HoD would later be included in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, in fact! As for Synergy Inc., it seems to be that whatever legacy it had on gaming mainly comes from Gadget, with Tetsujin/Iron Angel of the Apocalypse seeming to remain nothing more than a bizarre curio in what was already a rather curious catalog of games. Still, both Tetsujin games are definitely well worth playing if you ever get the opportunity, you might even prefer the sequel over the original, and I think they are both completely necessary inclusions in any 3DO owner's library.
This one may not "gao", but godspeed nonetheless, Tetsujin!
Iron Soldier of the Apocalypse © 1994 Synergy, Inc.
Iron Soldier of the Apocalypse: The Return © 1995 Synergy, Inc.
Tetsujin Returns: Premium Edition © 1996 Synergy, Inc.
Atmos Tetsujin Re-Mix © 1997 Synergy, Inc.
Tetsujin: The Mutant Solid © 1998 Synergy, Inc.
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