Founded on October 16, 1990 by ex-Sega employees, Genki Co., Ltd. (literally using the kanji that means "healthy/energetic/fit" for its name) got its start developing the occasional original game (like the duo of Devilish & Bad Omen for the Game Gear & Sega Genesis), porting over other companies games to consoles (like the Super Famicom version of SNK's King of the Monsters for Takara), or working with other developers in supporting roles (like helping out with Micronet's A/X-101 for the Sega CD). In 1994 the studio would develop Burning Soldier for the 3DO, an FMV game that played like an on-rails shooter (a common direction Japanese devs tended to utilize FMV in the 80s & 90s), and I personally think that it's one of the more enjoyable & solid takes on the concept. Two people behind that title, director Manami Kuroda & engineer Tomoharu Kimura, would then team up again as planner & designer (plus Kuroda writing the scenario) for their next game, one that would wind up being (arguably) Japan's first "true" first-person shooter, at least on consoles: Kileak the Blood. Released in Japan on January 27, 1995 for the then-new Sony Playstation that came out just over a month prior, the game would beat Sega's foray into the genre, Metal Head for the 32X, by just a month or so, & would even be one of the launch titles for the PlayStation for both North America (where it was renamed Kileak: The DNA Imperative) & Europe (where it kept the original title), where it both beat FPS/platformer hybrid Jumping Flash! by Exact to the punch & launched alongside it (depending on the region), respectively. While Sony Computer Entertainment handled publishing in North America & Europe, in Japan it was published by Sony Music Entertainment Japan.
Kileak would only be the start of Genki's multi-year venture in the FPS genre, though, resulting in four games released across 1995 & 1996 (or 1997 & 1998, in other regions). So let's take a look at these four titles & see how some of Japan's earliest "Doom clones" hold up, all these decades later.
So, first & foremost, calling Kileak "Japan's first 'true' FPS (at least on console)" sounds a bit pretentious, doesn't it? To be fair, there were games that were FPS-like made in Japan that predate Kileak, though whether they can be called an "FPS" is debatable. 1985's Star Luster for the Famicom was more of a space piloting game, while 1988's Star Cruiser for PCs & the Mega Drive is technically an action-RPG with some early FPS elements for flavor. Then there's 1991's Silent Debuggers for the TurboGrafx-16, which uses grid-based movement more akin to early first-person dungeon crawlers. 1992's Operation Gunbuster for arcades is certainly a contender for the title of "Japan's first 'true' FPS", as it does allow for free-roaming first-person gameplay & even deathmatch for up to four players, but sadly has never received a home release; that being said, however, it can certainly claim the title for arcades. There's also 1994's Iron Angel of the Apocalypse for the 3DO, which I have covered here before, & while the 1995 sequel (which came out after Kileak) is more of a straight FPS, the original game is technically more of a dungeon crawler, especially in feel, except with the main form of attacking being via various guns; the same can be said of Japan-only PS1 launch title Crime Crackers, which even features a three-person party. Finally, there's 1994's Geograph Seal, the direct precursor to the Jumping Flash! games, which was released on the Sharp X68000 computer; like its successor, this is as much of a 3D platformer as it is an FPS. No, when I say that Kileak is arguably "Japan's first ''true' FPS", I mean in it the sense that it was very obviously influenced in feel & execution by Wolf 3D & Doom, i.e. a "Doom clone", but before I go into why let's go over the plot first.
August 16, 2038. Captain Matt Coda (Takashi Koda in the original Japanese) of the International Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) is leading a small team to the South Pole Observation Base owned by the Byflos Conglomerate, which was recently analyzed to have been contaminated by a mysterious virus. The team is shot down en route to the Base, leaving Coda & Lieutenant Carlos Portero on their own to make their way down the 15-floor underground Base in order to stop Dr. Richard Kim, the Nobel Prize winning-turned-mad scientist who now wishes to infect all of humanity with mutated DNA coming from a mysterious alien being called "Kileak". The last six pages of the manual also go in decent detail regarding the world & lore of Kileak, like establishing an alternate history where the United Nations was dissolved in 1999, leading to the formation of the organization that the IPKF works for, the concept of a classified "Population Control" project that got terminated in 2020, the formation of the South Pole Observation Base for the purposes of solving ozone depletion, background stories for the Byflos Group (& how it might be run by Neo-Nazis wanting to establish a "Fourth Reich"), the IPKF, the White Lightning Polar Tactical Strike Force that Matt Coda is a part of, & even the Protect Armor SJ107 power armors that both Coda & Carlos are inside during the course of the game (designed by celebrated illustrator & modeler Kow Yokoyama); definitely a strong contender for "read the manual".
Playing Kileak, it's immediately obvious that Genki were influenced by id Software's games. It's the very definition of a "corridor shooter", an early name given to FPS-es due to their habit of levels being comprised of claustrophobic corridors, as each floor in the Base (i.e. each stage) is literally nothing more than larger open rooms connected together by cramped corridors. You maneuver through each stage looking for key cards that will unlock doors, eventually leading to the elevator that will take you to the next stage, taking out robotic foes all along the way; sometimes, a stronger robot is holding a key card. You start off with just one basic weapon (though it fires about as fast as you can mash, & you start with 500 ammo) & can come across a selection of other guns, though unlike in Doom these weapons have to be found. That's because enemies don't drop weapons, but instead health (which come in +3 or +10 variations), ammo, or energy (also +3 or+10). Yes, while you have the usual health to worry about, there's also an energy bar that slowly drains over time (& some weapons use energy instead of ammo), and if either of them fully drain you die & get a Game Over; luckily, you can save between each level & restarting from a load can be pretty quick. However, each stage also has a spot where you can fully recharge your energy as many times as you want, which is helpful. However, I would say that the biggest issue with Kileak is that it's hard to the point of being a bit cheap at times.
As I said, the majority of the levels are made up mostly of cramped corridors, and this is where you often fight enemies. Because of this, most fights will simply be a war of attrition, and while you might get some health back afterwards, you're also just as likely to not get any health back, resulting in you slowly getting chipped away. You can technically evade in the corridors, but only so much & only with certain enemies; your best bet is if you manage to get into a fight at an intersection, so you can pop in & out via strafing. As you move on you also come across environmental hazards that can cause fast damage (& while some can be turned off, others require destroying... which can drain your ammo), so death is something that's constantly on the verge of happening in Kileak, especially if you aren't careful; this is arguably as much an old-school dungeon crawler in some ways, especially in difficulty. Outside of gameplay, while the game does suffer from each level looking a bit too much like the ones around them (you do change the environment every four floors, though [and each floor has its own wall texture], resulting in three overall environments), it has an overall consistent visual feel to it that does admittedly work & the performance itself is overall solid; the frame rate can dip at points, but it generally runs well enough. The controls are simple but easy to pick up & play, and the general movement speed is good, another obvious influence from id. There's also a little more storytelling here than most FPS-es of its time, whether it's the intro sequence, the occasional message from Carlos, & later moments; you can even pick up "Record-Decs" that give you little sequences featuring Dr. Kim & the head of Byflos, for some extra story details. There's also a much stronger focus on searching each stage to its full extent, as you can definitely miss out on stronger weapons, which are mostly hidden behind, admittedly simple, puzzle-locked doors, & leave yourself too weak; my first time through, I missed out on two weapons by Level 6 & had to start over. Finally, the music by Kimitaka Matsumae (Burning Soldier, Harvest Moon: Save the Homeland) is actually really damn good, being nice & moody for the fittingly soulless environments you're constantly in (sometimes even just going with general ambience), but with the occasional bit of hard rock that you honestly only ever got from Japan-developed video games released on CD during the early & mid-90s.
Overall, Kileak: The DNA Imperative is a decent FPS, one that I think is actually just a little bit better than its general modern reputation precedes it; that said, it's still what would be considered "average". Yes, it is admittedly a bit too simple for its own good in terms of design (the stages, though more realistically laid out, wind up feeling rather generic), & the difficulty can be a bit too much for its own good at points, but for a first effort it could certainly be a hell of a lot worse. It certainly won't go down as one of the PS1's best FPS games, but it's also nowhere near its worst, and that's kind of impressive considering it's a launch-era release by a Japanese studio that had no prior experience in the genre.
While Kileak was in development, another team at Genki was working with Micronet on their own FPS, though this one would be exclusive to the PlayStation's direct competitor. On March 24, 1995, just two months after Kileak, the Sega Saturn saw the Japanese release of Daedalus, and while Sega would handle publishing duties in Japan & Europe, where it was renamed Robotica: Cybernation Revolt, it would be Acclaim that handled publishing duties for it in North America, where it was simply titled Robotica. Unfortunately, there is no proper release date outside of Japan, outside of a vague September for NA (or roughly around the time Kileak saw release in English) & November for EU (or sometime after Kileak, ala Japan). Since Genki was only used to assist (the studio isn't even credited anywhere on the game, & it's only acknowledged by Genki's own old website), almost none of the credited staff for Robotica either had any involvement with Kileak, and only a handful would go on to have future involvement with Genki's later FPS endeavors, mostly working on the CG cutscenes, map designs, & enemy programming. Still, while the Kileak team was experimenting with the genre in their own way, what was the Robotica team doing with the genre?
It is the year 2877, 800 years after a singular world government was formed & a separate peacekeeping force, the World Silent Security Service (WSSS) deals with any & all disputes & violence throughout the world, based out of an asteroid base in space called "Daedalus". Today, though, the world population has started to split, with some worshiping Daedalus as thought it were a god, while others have formed a revolutionary faction, Robotica, based out of an abandoned underground jail colony. After many minor conflicts on the surface, Robotica feels it is ready to mount an assault on Deadalus itself, though after the fight to infiltrate the asteroid base, all that remains is a single remote-controlled vehicular machine named the Laocorn, which must now make its way through the 30 floors that comprise Daedalus all by itself. The manual here only details the plot at the start, while the end features a unit-by-unit description of the Laocorn & the various other machines encountered throughout the game.
Upon first glance, Robotica isn't all too different from Kileak in many ways, as both deal with the player going through stages laid out in a "large rooms connected via cramped corridors" fashion, the foes are all robotic, & the goal for (almost) every stage is to reach an elevator that requires a key card to access. However, the difference between the two make themselves known very quickly. First, while you start with a simple vulcan shot & a melee attack, other weapons (like a laser blast & a homing missile) only require you to pick up ammo for them, upon which you automatically can use them at the touch (or two) of a button; you can also find weapon power ups (& power downs) to increase strength & max ammo for each. Second, there's an on-screen automap of the entire stage (whereas Kileak required you to enter the menu to access a full map, just as with swapping weapons), which is very helpful in figuring out where you've been immediately; each stage also has a computer terminal to access that give you a filled out map. Third, you also have access to a variety of support abilities (a shield, health recovery, a super dash, etc.) that use up an energy gauge; you also always have access to a controllable boost that uses up no energy. Finally, and most importantly, Robotica is actually as much of a rogue-lite as it is an FPS, as pretty much everything is randomized. Stage layouts, enemy drops, key card & elevator placement are all random (seemingly seeded upon starting a new game), which means that no two consecutive playthroughs of the game will ever be 100% the same, and enemies constantly respawn in rooms where you had previously cleared out; you always spawn in a room with no enemies, but a return trip could have you dealing with foes. Yes, you can literally spawn in a room with both the key card & elevator, allowing you to finish a stage in mere seconds, but you're also just as likely to get a layout where you'll find the elevator long before you find the key card. However, what makes Robotica more of a rogue-lite & not a roguelike is the fact that you do have a little bit of leniency when dying, as it only takes you back to start of the newest section of stages (for example, I died once on Stage 15, so I had to go back to Stage 12, which was the start of that section), instead of forcing you to start over from the beginning; that being said, though, you still start with no upgrades and only your vulcan & melee attack again.
The end result is a game that, I feel, was a bit misunderstood back when it first came out, and in some ways was actually a bit ahead of its time, both in the good & bad. While, just like Kileak, the visuals aren't anything amazing & stages within a section can look very samey, it does tends to move at a faster clip than its PS1 cousin, even with the more common instances of slowdown. I also feel that Robotica does a much better job at giving the player a much more bleak & suppressing vibe, as there's generally a much darker visual vibe to the stages, and it doesn't take long for stages to start off with the lights turned off (& need the computer terminal to turn the lights back on), resulting in it being much easier for enemies to sneak up on you, even with you having a small radar on screen at all times; whether it's better than Kileak's audio cue for nearby enemies is up to personal taste. The idea of a roguelike/lite FPS really isn't something that started to becoming a thing until the past decade or so, if even that long ago, so seeing Genki & Micronet do just that back in 1995 with Robotica is kind of mind blowing. It's by no means the first game in this genre to take place from a first-person perspective, but even titles like 1991's Moraff's World & 1993's Dungeon Hack were only a few years prior, and those were dungeon crawlers, not FPS-es.
Today, there's a glut of FPS roguelikes/lites that one can choose from, whether it's titles like Mothergunship, Void Bastards, Ziggurat, Immortal Redneck, or Strafe. While Robotica has definitely aged a fair bit after close to 30 years, I do feel that it still holds up a whole lot better than Kileak does, and if you're a fan of the Sega Saturn I think you should definitely give it a go, this time knowing what to expect. When compared to something like Doom or Wolf 3D it'll obviously not fare anywhere near as well, but when you go into it expecting a rogue-lite-style experience, I think you'll actually have some fun with it. In fact, I'm honestly kind of disappointed that most of the Robotica development team have their stories end here, so hopefully the Kileak team took some notes from this game for our next title.
Not content with releasing just two FPS-es in 1995, Genki managed to develop a full-on sequel to Kileak in less than one year! Released on December 29, 1995 in Japan (just barely making it), Kileak the Blood 2: Reason in Madness wouldn't see international release until October of 1996 under the much simpler name of Epidemic (at least the logo uses the same typeface as Kileak), and unlike the first game only came out in North America via Sony Computer Entertainment America; sorry, Europe. Fittingly, a lot of the major staff from Kileak returned for the sequel, including creative director Nakaji Kimura, game designer & director Tomoharu Kimura (no relation, I'm sure), writer Manami Kuroda, artists Koh Yokoyama & Tadashi Shimada, & composer Kimitaka Matsumae. So let's see what the Kileak team learned from their freshman FPS effort, if they took any notes from their compatriots that worked on Robotica, and if that means anything for their sophomore effort.
While Matt/Takashi Coda & Carlos Potrero were successfully able to stop Dr. Thomas Kim (yes, they changed his first name) & Byflos' Genetic Engineering Plan from coming to fruition, their mission was never publicly acknowledged, especially after the world was hit with the Gigari Virus shortly after the mission ended. Powerful beyond all belief, the Gigari Virus decimated Earth's population from over 10 billion to less than 100 million in under two months. However, after seeing that the virus couldn't be transmitted in places devoid of ultraviolet light, Byflos managed to get as many survivors as possible into Neural City, an underground complex that was still under construction. Not long after, though, a conflict between Byflos & the IPKF broke out, one that Byflos won, giving the conglomerate totalitarian power. Now it's the year 2065, 27 years after the Kileak incident, & Byflos is dealing with Del Sol, a resistance movement led by ex-IPKF agent Carlos Potrero. One of Del Sol's soldiers is Masao Coda, the son of the now-deceased Matt Coda, though Masao has long tired of the fight. When the love of his life, Layla Carmel, gets infected with Gigari, Masao's only chance to save her is to find the Lafres Flower, which only grows near the surface in the restricted zone of Satavisa... and escaping Neural City is something that Byflos forbids. Meanwhile, Carlos gets captured by Byflos in an attempt to get as much info on Del Sol as they can, so even if he can save Layla, Masao isn't out of the fight just yet. Just as with Kileak, the manual includes a lot of extra detail on the world & lore of Epidemic, which is really cool.
In many ways, Epidemic plays a lot like Kileak, but with a variety of little updates & quality-of-life changes that make it almost immediately an easier & more enjoyable experience. First of all, you start the game with three different weapons (a laser gun, a machine gun, & rockets), which can be switched between in order with the press of a button. Not just that, but the laser gun has effectively nigh-infinite ammo, so while it's the weakest of the bunch it's still generally more than enough for most regular foes you come across in each stage; technically, it does have finite ammo, but it takes so long to actually run out. Second, movement feels a bit more fluid than in the first game, which when combined with the more open layout of the corridors you find yourself in results in less of a feel of you constantly fighting wars of attrition; you even have access to a dash function for quick advancement & backtracking. Third, there's a much heavier emphasis on the plot this time around, as each stage is technically its own "mission", and to my own surprise Masao actually finds the Lafres Flower after only Mission 2, allowing for Layla to be cured early on & moving the plot over to helping save Carlos from Byflos captivity. Finally, the weapon & status pickups you come across are MUCH more generous, like getting 20 units of energy, health, or shields (yes, you even have a shield gauge now!) from each of their singular recovery items, which also helps ease the difficulty a bit; still best to be careful, though, as certain enemy attacks can just shred your shields instantly, especially bosses. The end result is a much better game than Kileak, one that actually holds up better today than the original, which only just holds up enough with proper context.
That being said, though, Epidemic is still the same overall kind of game that Kileak was, only now more refined. Even though there is a dash now, the game itself is still much slower paced than its contemporaries, the environments are still a bit generic in how they're designed to be more realistic in structure (though corridors are much wider now), and some stages even repeat for multiple missions, though at least repeat trips do feature some differences in path layout, like blocking off a previously open path & now opening up one that had previously been blocked off itself. Also, as mentioned before, the actual plot plays a much larger role here, with cutscenes in between each mission to continue the story along with the usual twists & turns, like Masao finding out that Layla is actually the daughter of the head of Byflos' after rescuing an old Del Sol compatriot, but he knows that their love for each other is indeed real. Naturally, this means that all of these CG cutscenes are fully voiced, and the English dub is absolutely charming in how stilted most of the line deliveries are; you can tell some are honestly trying, but it was likely directed by a Japanese person with very little familiarity with English. To be fair, this style of storytelling still wasn't really a focus in FPS-es at the time, as the closest comparisons would be stuff like Killing Time (which used FMV actor "ghosts" as part of the in-engine environment), or Iron Angel of the Apocalypse: The Return, William Shatner's TekWar, or Congo: The Lost City of Zinj (which all also used cutscenes interspersed during/in-between gameplay); beyond those were games that simply relied on text descriptors or. It wouldn't be until later titles like Strife: Quest for the Sigil (which was literally an RPG made using the original Doom engine) & the duo of Trespasser(: Jurassic Park) & Half-Life (which told their entire stories as part of the literal gameplay experience) actually started making plot a major focus for an FPS, so the fact that Epidemic manages to tell a decent enough story actually makes it a little bit ahead of its time, even if that wasn't exactly hard to do at the time. Some stages even have screens that you can activate & will play their own short videos, usually just giving some extra lore & helping give the world of Epidemic more of a "real" vibe to it.
Overall, while Epidemic's adherence to Kileak's general gameplay feel does prevent it from being one of the PS1's all-time greatest FPS-es, it's still a much, much improved game over its direct predecessor, and I'd say that you can certainly just skip the original & move right on to the sequel. While I can appreciate Kileak for what it was trying to do on the hardware at the time, & Robotica is indeed an interesting title in its own right, Epidemic is the first of these Genki-developed FPS-es to truly feel like it "fit" within the genre.
The trick with the previous three FPS-es is that, though Genki was the (co-)developer of all of them, none of them actually belonged to the studio, after the fact; both Kileak games were owned by Sony Music Entertainment Japan, while Sega owned Daedalus/Robotica. In fact, this applied to pretty much every single game Genki had developed up until the end of 1995, so in 1996 the studio expanded into publishing its own games, starting with the first PS1 entry of the Shutokou Battle series (later known abroad as Tokyo Xtreme Racer) on May 3, 1996, though that was technically co-published with Bullet Proof Software (which had published prior games in the series until that point). Genki's second self-published game (& first one that Genki published 100% on its own), released on November 15, would then be Beltlogger 9, a new FPS which was initially showcased as the PlayStation Expo earlier that Summer & confirmed as the spiritual successor to Kileak, though now owned 100% by Genki. Luckily, there wasn't too much of a wait, as Jaleco would be the ones to release the game in North America on April 9, 1997 under the name BRAHMA Force: The Assault of Beltlogger 9; sadly, Europe wouldn't get the game, now shortened to just BRAHMA Force, until March 1998 via JVC Music Europe. In terms of major staff, only Manami Kuroda returned to help with the publicity & Tomoharu Kimura returned as a planner & producer; the game was directed by Kenji "Randy" Shimizu, who was normally a producer & programmer at Genki. So let's see how Genki's final FPS (or, at least, its last "traditonal" one) fares both on its own & as the end point of these early Japanese FPS-es.
October 23, 2096. A distress signal is transmitted from resource excavation colony Beltlogger 9 in space. Cosmic Marine Command sends out the space carrier U.S.S. Seeker along with Taurus & BRAHMA Force squadrons to investigate under the code name "Operation: Kingdom". Just prior to launch, though, an unauthorized transmission is received by Captain Seth "Wrangler" Beckford, who recently lost his girlfriend to Pickman's Syndrome, an illness that keeps the mind from engaging in self-destructive behavior, and the Operation is called off once barely anyone in the BRAHMA Force makes it to Beltlogger 9 alive. Also, does this distress signal share any similarities to a incident ten years prior on Probe Ship Mina 3, where the entire crew was overcome with hysteria, depression, paranoia, & fear, and one sole survivor was found responsible for half of the crew's deaths? Sadly, the manual for this game gives nothing more than a basic set up for the plot, even less than Robotica did, & nothing extra in terms of lore other than specs for the BRAHMA/Bipedal Robotic Assault Heavy Mechanized Armor itself, the power armor that you pilot for the entire game; at least the staff behind the game are finally fully credited at the end of the manual, for once.
In terms of how Beltlogger 9 (yeah, I'm using the Japanese name here for simplicity's sake) plays in comparison to the prior Genki FPS-es, the easiest way to put it is "paradigm shift". Where Kileak, Robotica, & Epidemic all played similar enough to each other while having improvements with each entry, Beltlogger 9 truly feels like a more "modern" FPS, at least in context of games of that ilk on the PS1. Gameplay is much faster & more kinetic, feeling much more like Quake (amusingly enough, as Beltlogger 9 actually came out first, technically) & even fully encouraging the usage of circle-strafing to fight enemies. That last bit is made extremely easy due to the generally open environments that comprise the stages here, ones that utilize verticality a lot (so much so that you now have a jump button), with you using both elevator lifts & even catapult pads to access higher levels; I do have to wonder if the staff behind this game were influenced by Jumping Flash. Not just that, but you also acquire items that you can hold on to & use when needed, namely in regard to recovering health & energy (for your shield), & even increasing their max limits; you also get various weapons to swap between & the game tosses out weapon upgrade items like candy sometimes. While the prior three Genki FPS-es all had almost a purposefully slower pace to them, though Robotica could get faster paced at points, Beltlogger 9's immediately notable speed increase kind of makes it easier to get into today, and even though it predates the Dual Analog & Shock controllers it still feels rather good to play today; Genki even finally made looking up & down their own shoulder buttons, instead of requiring double-button presses. Storytelling is also given a notable focus here, about as much as Epidemic does, though here it's done more via mid-stage communiqués than via CG cutscenes between stages. Sure, it's not exactly a mind-blowing plot (you're trying to escape the colony, seemingly under the control of the mysterious figure that sent Seth that weird transmission, while figuring out how it all relates to Pickman's Syndrome), but considering what the genre was known for at the time when it came to storytelling, I have to give props to Genki for trying to make storytelling a focus for three of these games; it definitely showcases a distinct difference in how Western & Eastern devs at the time tackled the same genre.
However, the most infamous aspect with Beltlogger 9 is easily the difficulty, because this is a case where the region defines the difficulty. As was sometimes done during the 90s to prevent players from simply beating a game within a single rental, & never actually buying it, Jaleco had Genki up the difficulty of Beltlogger 9 for its international BRAHMA Force release, and that modified difficulty was kept for the later European release. What this mainly comes down to is that enemies do more damage than before & take more shots to destroy (& they may respawn more often, too), and while you do get health recovery items often enough, it is very easy to lose at least half of your health in a matter of seconds, because not only do enemy shots hurt you (& some enemies fire pretty fast) but even physically touching them does damage; luckily, stages do have their save points, even though they aren't really long, on average. On the whole this doesn't ruin the game by any means, though it does make some sections way more annoying than they were intended to be, and there is a simple code to input at the "Press Start" screen to lower the difficulty, which halves both the offense & defense of enemies, though I don't know if this reverts things back to the original Japanese difficulty; amusingly enough, there's even a code to increase the difficulty, I guess for masochists. Even with all of that, though, I'd still say that the original Kileak remains the hardest of these Genki FPS-es. Regardless, much like the prior games, Beltlogger 9 isn't a super long game, despite being 22 levels long, with Genki even rewarding players for managing to complete it within 90 minutes by unlocking some small bonus content.
Overall, BRAHMA Force: The Assault on Beltlogger 9 is, far & away, the best of Genki's FPS-es on PS1 (& Saturn), showing a true evolution of form from Kileak to here. Fast-paced action mixed with small, arena-like stages (plus the occasional focus on standard corridors) that feature a surprising amount of verticality to them results in an interesting FPS for the time, and one that's sadly been forgotten with time when compared to the console's later output in the genre.
To be fair, the PS1 isn't exactly the first console people would think of when it comes to "console FPS games". That being said, there are a number of iconic or even simply solid-to-great games in the genre to be found there, whether they're ports (Doom, Quake II, Star Wars: Dark Forces, Descent, Duke Nukem 3D), originals (Medal of Honor, Alien Trilogy, CodeName: Tenka), or even cult-classics (PowerSlave, Alien Resurrection), so where does Genki FPS quartet factor into this? Kileak: The DNA Imperative has definitely aged the worst of them all, though I still wouldn't call it "bad", as I still had some fun with it, even if it might sometimes feel like that came despite itself; it's only worth playing today as a time capsule, really. As for Robotica, it's definitely a better FPS than Kileak, and due to its rogue-lite execution is arguably a game that was years ahead of its time, though because of that it can be argued whether it truly manages to live up to its ideas; I enjoy it, but I can certainly see why others don't. Meanwhile, Epidemic is best described as "Kileak in its fully realized form", and while it's still held back in some ways by being so similar to its direct precursor, it's the various little changes, fixes, & additions that result in it being the first one that I can wholly recommend playing. Finally, BRAHMA Force: The Assault on Beltlogger 9 is the one Genki FPS that I feel can be recommended without any notable caveats, outside of "you have to strafe with L1 & R1", due to its fast-paced & kinetic gameplay & interesting focus on verticality; it's unfortunate that the difficulty was artificially increased outside of Japan, but that's just how things were at the time.
Following Beltlogger 9's release, Genki would shift over its focus on developing racing games primarily (namely the Shutokou Battle & Wangan Midnight series), though with the occasional breakaway from that (Super Magnetic Neo, the Kengo series, various port jobs, etc.), & while the company is still around today it's primarily a mobile developer, minus the occasional Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune arcade release. The closest thing to an actual successor to Genki's old FPS output would be 2002's Phantom Crash on the Xbox & 2005's S.L.A.I.: Steel Lancer Arena International on the PS2, though those were more mech combat games that simply included a first-person view as a selectable viewpoint; still, all six of these games involved piloting some sort of mech or power armor. Even today, the FPS genre has mostly remained something that Western developers have continued to claim primary ownership of, but it's still neat to see how the earlier days of the genre were once interpreted as over in Japan.
Kileak: The DNA Imperative © 1995 Sony Music Entertainment (Japan), Inc.
Robotica © Sega Enterprises, Ltd. 1995
Epidemic © 1995 Sony Music Entertainment (Japan), Inc.
BRAHMA Force: The Assault on Beltlogger 9 © 1996, 1997 Genki
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