In June of 1953 electronics company NEC Corporation split off its radio division as its own company & named it Shin NEC, where it'd manufacture & sell things like vacuum tubes, CRTs, tape records, & later on radio receivers & "white goods"; i.e. major home appliances. In 1981 Shin NEC would debut its first ever personal computers, namely the PC-6000 & PC-8800 series, the latter of which eventually becoming the most popular PC line in Japan during that decade. In 1983 Shin NEC would change its name to NEC Home Electronics (or NEC-HE, for short), expanding into products like CD players. In 1987 NEC-HE would enter the video game market with the PC-Engine (alongside Hudson Soft), which would become the closest competitor to Nintendo's Famicom & Super Famicom in Japan during the 16-bit generation & even introduce the idea of games being released on CD; outside of Japan the "TurboGrafx-16" was another story entirely. NEC-HE would continue seeing success into the 90s with the PC-Engine Super CD-ROM² upgrade as well as the later models in the PC-9800 series of computers, but eventually the good times would come to an end.
However, NEC-HE seemingly still wanted to remain relevant in the video game industry so it would enter the third-party business itself, deciding to work with partner developers to put out titles that would be completely different from Interchannel's output. For those wondering about market confusion, NEC-HE had full rights to use the iconic blue-lettered NEC logo on the covers of its releases, whereas Interchannel had its own unique logo for its releases, so there was no way to confuse which division released which game. Unfortunately, outside of a PS1 port of PC-FX game Wakusei Koukitai Little Cats (which itself was published by FamilySoft, not NEC-HE) in June 1998 & Dead of the Brain 1 & 2 for PC-Engine CD in June 1999 (the final official release for that console), NEC-HE would only release four original games before getting shut down in early 2000, all of which came out on the Sega Dreamcast. However, these four games all booted up showing the above image of something called "Atypical Alchemists Associate", with Sega Retro calling it "an internal development group" within NEC-HE. However, I think this was meant to be more of a collective branding than an actual development studio & that's because, aside from NEC-HE having never really developed a game in-house, these titles share a common central goal that was 100% true to the brand's name: Being anything, & I mean ANYTHING, other than "typical".
Seeing as 2024 marks 25 years since the launch of the Sega Dreamcast in North America, & two of these games did see release outside of Japan, let's go over the quartet of games released under the Atypical Alchemists Associate branding & see how NEC Home Electronics, the division that gave us the legendary PC-88, PC-98, & co-created the PC-Engine, went down swinging as a third-party publisher.
We begin with what could possibly be the most bizarre game of this quartet, Seventh Cross, not to be confused with the 1942 German novel by Anna Seghers or its 1944 live-action adaptation by Fred Zinneman. Released in Japan on December 23, 1998, alongside Sonic Adventure & Tetris 4D (the third batch of Dreamcast games ever released, after the November 27 launch quartet & the Japanese release of Incoming on December 17), Seventh Cross was the brainchild of Goro Fukagawa, a producer/director at NEC-HE who previously worked on games like Megami Paradise II (which he also planned & wrote the original scenario for), Metamor Jupiter (the debut title for the now-defunct Flight-Plan), Sparkling Feather, & Fire Woman: Matoi-gumi. For Seventh Cross Fukagawa was both producer & planner, even getting his name on the title screen via a little screenbug on the bottom right, while directorial duties were handled by Manabu Kurono of developer HuneX (which NEC still co-owned with Human Entertainment, at this point), who Fukagawa had worked with numerous times in the past, including on some of the previously mentioned games. This game would eventually see release in North America a little over a year later on January 15, 2000 by way of the newly-established UFO Interactive (the publishing arm of Tommo) under the slightly longer title Seventh Cross Evolution, likely so that the game's concept of evolving your player character into stronger forms was more immediately known (& likely because the shorter title was already copyrighted, due to the novel & film). Both in Japan & America Seventh Cross received a very middling reception, but in the years since has slowly found itself a cult following due to its interestingly quirky gameplay concepts & wild late-game storytelling.
If you look online you'll see Seventh Cross described as a "life simulator", but in reality it's actually more of an action/turn-based RPG where you start off as an absolute nobody before fighting foes & becoming stronger, and eventually you get to the point where you "Attack & Dethrone God", to some extent; you know, that usual chestnut of an RPG plot. However, in this case you start as a literal protist, needing to find nourishment before you eventually evolve into what the game calls the "Origin" form. From here on out the game's gameplay loop is to find creatures that you can fight & kill, while avoiding confrontation with the ones that can easily kill you, obtaining nutrients & "EVP" before you visit what's essentially a salmon-colored monolith. At said monolith you can save your progress (which takes up 172 blocks, i.e. 86% of an entire VMU's storage space!) & "evolve", which tasks players to fill in a 10x10 grid with blocks of various colors, which the player assigns to each stat (attack, defense, dexterity, etc.) before starting the campaign, the results of which will give both stat boosts based on the colors used, as well as giving the player a new part (Head, Arms, Body, & Legs) that can they can then swap out to at any time, as long as they have the nutrients to support it; over time stat boosts & parts creation require more & more EVP (2, 5, 10, 15, etc.) the more you do it. This mechanic is often stated as being overly complex & poorly defined, but people have since realized that the trick is to simply use one colored square at a time, both to maximize the amount of points to a single stat boost & also because the higher level parts actually require very simple designs, like a single square. The manual claims that there's an "AI" that learns over time how to interpret various shapes & figures to make parts from, but single squares have been proven to work best, in general. Spread all of this out across six "biomes", each one ending with a boss fight, & that's Seventh Cross' general gameplay in a nutshell.
It's not really as complicated as reviews claimed it was back in the day.
However, it's the entire aesthetic & style of Seventh Cross that makes it feel so bizarre. There are a total of 30 different "sets" of parts (so 120 different parts, in total) representing different creatures and among those are all sorts of wild names, like Electric Mollusk, Blade Crab, Stab Scorpion, Laser Horse, Hammer Lobster, Cannon Shark, Bio Racer, Evil Wise... as well as both Monkey & Man. Combine that with the game allowing you to mix & match whatever parts you want (again, as long as you've unlocked them & have the nutrients) and the end result is all manner of utter abominations that the player can look like. Combat is also a little awkward, as it's a mix of real-time combat & turn-based combat, complete with accessing a menu for "EX-Power" (i.e. spells), but mashing buttons to attack is a horrible idea because the game will literally remember every button press you make & execute them one at a time; luckily, you can interrupt accidental button mashes by opening the menu & casting a spell. Meanwhile, the music by Yayoi Okumura has some memorable beats (namely the boss fight & evolution music) but is mostly calming, more aesthetic style compositions. In fact, the biome you start at, a pond, literally has no music & relies solely on ambient sounds of nature... like the walking of a crab that will instantly kill you early on & quickly becomes something to fear at the start, until you get strong enough to survive & kill it. Another aspect that makes the game bizarre is in its storytelling, and by that I mean that all of the actual story happens in the final act. For the first two biomes there's literally nothing to guide you around, requiring the player to simply explore & experiment to figure out their way through, but upon entering the remaining biomes you keep seeing a quick in-engine cutscene of a "Neo-Bionoid" angel killing creatures before it flies off. That's literally all the plot you're given until you finally fight it in the last biome, and upon killing it & entering the end game you then start getting all of the backstory, world building, & overall plot that suddenly makes everything in Seventh Cross make sense. There are also multiple endings, depending on your actions starting with the fight with the angel as well as whether or not you've unlocked all of the Man parts by the time you enter the end game, and they're all rather wild in different ways.
Because it's such an early Dreamcast title, & came from both a smaller name dev studio & a publisher that was trying its best to survive after its final console bombed, Seventh Cross was summarily dinged for its visuals, which are admittedly simple & can sometimes look like a higher-res PS1 or N64 game, and there are points where the frame rate can notably drop simply via exploration, even when it doesn't look like much is on screen. Also, its tank controls using only the d-pad for movement do take a little getting used to (in all seriousness, learning how to K-turn to turn towards foes behind you without letting them get an extra attack in is essential), so there's a little bit of a learning curve to be had. Still, Seventh Cross Evolution is a game that was, in some sense, arguably ahead of its time, as while there was the duo of 46 Oku-nen Monogatari -The Shinka Ron- for the PC-9801 & E.V.O.: Search for Eden on the Super Nintendo (both developed by Almanic/Givro) before Seventh Cross, those were 2D platformers with streamlined & restrictive "evolution" upgrades. In comparison, what NEC-HE & HuneX put out was more like a spiritual precursor to Will Wright's Spore, predating the Maxis-developed PC game's release by an entire decade, though Spore is more of a god game than the action-RPG that Seventh Cross really is. If anything, the closest comparison to Seventh Cross would possibly be cult classics like L.O.L.: Lack of Love on the Dreamcast or Cubivore on the GameCube, the latter being the closest in similarity, though even those aren't quite like Seventh Cross, in all regards.
Without a doubt, Seventh Cross Evolution is a game that honestly deserves a second chance to really find an audience. When it first came out there was really nothing to truly compare it to, and since it was such an early Dreamcast title (in both regions it came out in) it was simultaneously unable to truly take full advantage of the console's power, yet judged for not looking "next-gen" enough by critics, and it was this combination of factors that gave it the reputation for allegedly being terrible. In reality, though, Seventh Cross is actually really damn cool, but held back by both new hardware unfamiliarity & maybe some overly high ambitions that the dev team possibly couldn't fully achieve at that point yet. NEC-HE did initially announce a sequel for Dreamcast, planned to be called "Ninth Will", but it unfortunately never came to pass, due to NEC-HE's dissolution. If anything, though, it likely showed that Seventh Cross might have actually done OK in Japan, but not well enough to keep NEC-HE around.
Three weeks after Seventh Cross' release in Japan, NEC-HE would release its next third-party video game, Sengoku TURB, on January 14, 1999... and there's a bit of backstory to go over for this one. So back in 1991 a doujin circle named Bio_100% was founded by three men: Hideki "alty" Mori, Gou "metys" Takekoshi, & Masao "Hitsuji Otoko" Masutani. Using ASCIINet Bio_100%, which at one point had as many as 20 members, would collectively develop & release various freeware/shareware doujin games & would even become an official corporation in 1998, but a hard drive crash & server failure in 1999 prevented them from becoming anything larger. However, the various members of the circle continued to work in the industry, whether that be gaming or technology in general. Hideki Mori, for example, would co-found a company in 1997 that was an offshoot of a US-based online gaming service. That would be Dwango, which would later become a Kadokawa subsidiary that now owns Spike Chunsoft & Niconico! Another member of Bio_100% was Yuko Kuroyanagi, a.k.a. !J゜U (pronounced "Nanoray"... somehow) or nano-Ray-speX, who would not only later become Hideki Mori's wife but also worked at (now defunct) Bandai subsidiary WiZ during the mid-90s... where she'd help plan, design, & develop the Tamagotchi!! Seriously, Bio_100% might just be one of the most important doujin circles in history just from it leading to the creation of Dwango Co., Ltd. & Tamagotchi alone. Meanwhile, relevant to this overview, Masao Masutani (who at the time was working for NEC-HE) was also involved in the development of Seventh Cross, specifically for "Neuro Test", which I think would mean that he helped with the alleged "AI" that could interpret shapes & figures players made in the 10x10 grid for making parts with.
Anyway, in 1992 Masutani & Kuroyanagi co-developed a trio of games at Bio_100% called TURB, which were overhead action/adventure shareware titles for the PC-9801, and while there was a book containing a registered version of TURB sold at stores, it was later revealed that only around 20 people actually registered TURB, whereas around 2,000 people downloaded the shareware games. In 1997 Kuroyanagi started up her own studio called qnep (pronounced "ku-nep"), and this led to the development of Sengoku TURB for the Dreamcast, with the staff at qnep actually including members of Bio_100%; Masutani, for example, was the planner, director, & story writer for the game. That's why the above title screen includes a 1992 copyright for Masutani & Kuroyanagi, as this was pretty much an official continuation of the TURB shareware games, only now as a higher budget official release; this is also the only game to actually feature the Atypical Alchemists Associate name & logo anywhere on the packaging itself. At the time online gaming sites often called out Sengoku TURB for being so "utterly bizarre" based solely on its ultra-colorful but highly simplistic visual style, but I'd still say that Seventh Cross is still the more "bizarre" game, if only because TURB's gameplay is rather straightforward.
Playing as Jino you crash land on Planet Raiyon & get embroiled in a war between the Cats & the Sheep, in this case siding with the Cats; from what I can tell, this is the same basic setup as the original games. Sengoku TURB is generally classified as an action RPG, but similar to Seventh Cross that's only true to some extent, as while Jino does level up via combat the game itself is strictly level-based, instead of an action RPG's more general overworld & dungeon-focused execution. Between stages you can equip Jino with a weapon, which do have endurance & will break over time, & accessories (if you have any), but Jino's not by herself in battle. Instead, she can lead an army of Cat soldiers, who have their own stats & can be equipped with weapons & accessories, as well as be given orders as to what to do in battle; for whatever reason, all Cat soldiers default to "Suicide", which I'm sure is part of the humor. Once you enter a level you & your soldiers immediately engage with enemy forces, with the simple goal being to survive & eliminate all foes, though after winning a battle you can still walk around & retrieve dropped weapons & items at your own pace; you choose when to leave a level. From a basic gameplay standpoint, that's Sengoku TURB in a nutshell, especially since you only have one attack button (& each weapon has its own range & cooldown)... but don't mistake this game for being a walk in the park.
No, Sengoku TURB is absolutely brutal & WILL show no remorse against you right from Level 1! Jino starts with barely any health, resulting in a literal instant kill from any foe, and the Cat soldiers are pretty much meant to die, yet you have to keep as many alive as possible for the first chapter, which contains the first three levels (of which there are around over 50). You can save at any time between levels, but this makes the start of the game immensely challenging, though finishing a chapter at least gives you a couple of new soldiers. Once you reach Chapter 2, though, you gain the ability to transform innocent animals on the field into new Cat soldiers... maybe, because you're just as likely to fail & turn them into helpless & harmless creatures instead. Also, upon reaching Chapter 2 the game just ups the difficulty even more so, with the enemy introducing new types of foes who remain just as merciless, and I admittedly had to give it up this early in. It's a shame, too, because otherwise I think Sengoku TURB is actually pretty damn cool & isn't quite as impossible to understand as I think some fashioned it to be. The combat, though very simplistic (& in definite need of a proper camera system, since you can't turn the camera & move at the same time), still has just enough nuance with the cooldowns that you can figure out ways to chip away at foes while remaining alive yourself. There are also fairies called Tainyan you can grab for temporary stat boosts while in a stage, but if you time it incorrectly you could get poisoned instead. Also, looking into things, there are plenty of interesting stats when it comes to the soldiers, like their temperament & whatnot, which can affect how they work in battle. Finally, while the plot doesn't seem to be anything serious or dramatic, it definitely plays into being amusingly quirky, like the Cat Shogun calling up Jino when she's out on the field, only for Jino to see that the Cat Shogun is right by her... yet they still talk on their phones, despite being right next to each other.
As it is, though, Sengoku TURB is a game that I want to like more than I should, but there's no doubt that it's flawed... and absurdly difficult to a degree that I'm amazed qnep felt was considered fine to release. It's got a visual style that makes it unforgettable, and the basic idea behind the gameplay is there, but the execution itself is what kills it; maybe if UFO Interactive had licensed it for English release these flaws could have been fixed.
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| This is a composite of both regions' title screens. Both logos honestly look cool, so I couldn't decide. |
After Sengoku TURB NEC-HE's next video game release would be Dead of the Brain 1 & 2 on June 3, 1999 for the Super CD-ROM², but its next Atypical Alchemists Associate game wouldn't see release until September 28, 1999. By this point the Dreamcast's iconic "9/9/99" North American launch had happened, so one could argue that whatever was coming out in Japan for the Dreamcast was now going to get even more attention than ever; that certainly happened with Sengoku TURB. In that regard, NEC-HE's penultimate video game was Espion-Age-Nts: Industrial Agents for Active Espionage, which like Seventh Cross came by way of HuneX (in what would be its final game for NEC-HE) & was also directed by Manabu Kurono alongside Toyoharu Moriyama, who would later help design the Detective Pikachu game & co-write the script for the Sakura Wars soft reboot in 2019; I honestly live for this kind of wild cross referencing. However, unlike Seventh Cross & Sengoku TURB, this game didn't seem to have a single creative mind leading things, but rather looks to have been a collective effort by HuneX. However, easily the most notable thing about this title, from a visual perspective, are the character designs by Kazuo Miyamura, which feature males with massively large arms & hands... just like certain characters in Capcom's cult classic fighting game Rival Schools, namely Roy Bromwell & Boman Delgado from Pacific High. While Capcom only credits a collective "Project Justice" for the character designs in Rival Schools, Miyamura admits that he used to work at Capcom before going freelance, so I would have to imagine that he was part of that group, alongside the likes of Bengus & Edayan (both of which have been credited after the fact) & mangaka Kazuhiko Shimamoto (who created Hayato Nekketsu).
Much like Seventh Cross, Espion-Age-Nts would see release outside of Japan by way of UFO Interactive, with both this & Seventh Cross originally being announced for English release just a couple of weeks befor the Dreamcast launched in North America. UFO also had also planned to release NEC Interchannel's Black/Matrix AD & Monster Breed in English, but backed down on the former (likely due to its pastiche of Judeo-Christian themes), while the latter never saw release anywhere. On June 1, 2000 North America saw the release of Industrial Spy: Operation Espionage, or I-Spy for short (not to be confused with a whole load of stuff), and while I fully understand the complete name change (which I still like) there is something to be said for the original Japanese title & its quirky charm. It's worth noting is that UFO actually used Kazuo Miyamura's artwork for the cover, because while today it's common to see Japanese "anime" cover art kept for international release it was still rather rare back then, even for 2000. Also similar to Seventh Cross is that I-Spy received a rather middling critical reception, with some outlets feeling that (at best) there was potential in its concept but that it needed some fine tuning to truly work. Why is that? Well, while I-Spy may look like a stealth action game, a la titles like Metal Gear Solid or Tenchu, it doesn't actually play like any of those...
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| I-Spy is a game that really doesn't endear itself when it comes to still images, does it? |
You see, where I-Spy differs is that you don't play as the titular Espion-Age-Nts themselves, but rather you play as their "Boss". What this means is that, instead of directly controlling any of the characters as they accomplish their respective objectives in a mission, the entire game is about watching your three or four-person team by way of multi-screen security camera footage & giving them commands to head to specific areas or do specific actions, like hacking, unlocking, investigating, etc. After completing a mission you then get points that can be spent on leveling up your agents' various skills, as well as increasing their SP (which they need to do certain commands) & HP, and while you can technically make an agent skilled at (mostly) whatever you want they naturally have their preset preferences, so Archangel is the pro hacker, Ling-Hua & Saunders are your all-rounders, Kleopatra can hypnotize enemies, etc. However, while the first mission (of a total 10) gives you a set of objectives written out for you to follow, since it's a tutorial mission, the rest more or less put you & your selected agents into an environment & it's up to you to figure out where to send each agent to accomplish the mission, with only a basic idea of where to initially place certain agents.
The end result is that I-Spy winds up feeling more like a puzzle game than anything... an admittedly slow-paced & sometimes boring one. This was a common complaint about the game back in the day, but all you do as the player is give orders to the agents & then watch them do as they're told, with all of the actions being mostly done on their own. When combined with the fact that you have to figure out where to send each agent on your own, this results in the game featuring a lot of simply watching characters go from one place to another, room by room & hall by hall, and only on rare occasion do they have to deal with a guard or something like that. This is only made all the worse by the fact that certain characters, like the young boy Archangel, move much slower than other characters so it takes them longer to move around... and then when two characters have to use the same door the game can't handle them moving simultaneously through the same doorway, so one character has to literally stand in front of an open door, & wait for it to fully close, before they can then open the door themselves & walk through; stupid canned animations. Still, I can't outright hate the game because of these faults & problems, mainly because the idea behind it is honestly sound & it is a unique concept that really should be taken more as a puzzle game than anything; also, the music by Tomohiro Morino & Yoko Tagaya is honestly pretty good. It's definitely an acquired taste of a game, but Industrial Spy/Espion-Age-Nts is a game that feels like it could have been improved on well with a second game, as there is potential here that was simply not properly realized this time around. I know that I-Spy is often derided as one of the "worst games of all time", but that's mainly because people are judging it for how it's not what they wanted, i.e. a stealth action game, instead of judging it for how it's meant to be, i.e. a tactical puzzle game; doesn't mean that it's a great game, by any means, but it's by no means one of the worst.
Five days after I-Spy's original Japanese release, September 28, 1999, NEC Group (the larger conglomerate that all of NEC belongs to, and is a part of the massive Sumitomo Group) announced a large-scale restructuring plan, which included NEC Home Electronics being split up, transferred, and just all around getting shuffled into the trash bin since it was no longer showing any major value. However, this didn't instantly result in NEC-HE's death, and the company would manage to get one last video game release out... though this really wasn't anywhere on the level of its prior releases.
On December 23, 1999, exactly one year after releasing Seventh Cross, NEC Home Electronics would release its final video game, Sengoku TURB: Fanfan I♥me Dunce-doublentendre, or simply Sengoku TURB: F.I.D., for the Dreamcast. As you can tell, this was the return of Masao Masutani, Yoko Kuroyanagi, qnep, & their shareware-turned-official-release title from the start of the same year. Also, like the subtitle indicates, Sengoku TURB: F.I.D. was really more of a "fan disc" than an outright follow up to the original. Therefore, it's a collection of 16 options, some of which are mini-games that apparently are based on games released by Bio_100% back in the day. Pyon-Pyon: The Race is a racing game where you select a character & a hopping steed....thing & have to mash the A button in order to move forward, but mashing too fast will tire out your steed & make it harder to control; think the chocobo racing mini-game from Final Fantasy VII, but really weird. Bakutotsu TURB is a shoot-em-up where you play as Jino & make your way through a constant assault of enemies shooting back at you. Unlike most shooters, though, scrolling is manually done, though there are still different types of shots, including homing. Pawafamonowa (i.e. "The Powerful Ones") is a straight-up light-gun rail shooter where all of your enemies are 2D, ghostlike foes that either are destroyed in a single hit or take multiple shots, all while doing your best to destroy the shots they fire at you, in order to stay alive; you have an unlimited rapid-fire clip, though, so just shoot away. Newn Kipp Diving is essentially a variant of the Lunar Lander genre of game, where the goal is to safely land your character or vehicle on the ground, like how the Apollo Lunar Module landed on the Moon in 1969; however, here the controls are extremely touchy & pressing the A button to make adjustments is extremely sensitive.
However, the mini-games kind of end there (except for one, which we'll get to in a bit), as the remaining options are all... rather different. Himitsu Kenkyushitsu (i.e. "Secret Lab"), is nothing more than a title screen were you can press A to make an on-screen character say a quick line... and that's it, with the lines the character speaks being seemingly randomized from a preset amount; there does seem to be more to it involving another character, but I don't know how. Sengoku Cameraman requires Sengoku TURB save data as you can enter any stage you have access to in the original campaign & see Jino & her soldiers enter battle, all while you can move around & snap photographs of the action; honestly, an interesting concept. Chara-Pose is nothing more than a set of 18 images you can look at, each of which has its own piece of writing to go with them. Bonbo Energy Hall is a straight up jukebox mode where you can listen to all 36 tracks found between both Sengoku TURB releases; in all honestly, the soundtrack by Harunobu Okubo & Kazuhiko Tomizuka is absolutely wonderful. Neko-gun no Theme is literally just a pre-rendered music video made using the in-game assets, though the video itself is just a compressed video file, instead of being done in-engine.
However, the main attraction of Sengoku TURB: F.I.D. is in fact the first option: Sengoku TURB: episode ZERO... which is NOT a mini-game at all. Instead, it's essentially a brand new Sengoku TURB campaign (likely a prequel, as the subtitle indicates) where you play as a woman named Gertrude who's allied with the Sheep as you engage in a new host of stages; it gives you 10 to start, with another 10 unlocked afterwards. However, this is a MUCH better experience than the original Sengoku TURB, and that's mainly because it's much more welcoming to players; you can even use the analog stick to move around, though you still can't move while rotating the camera. You start with some decent stats for Gertrude & a decently-sized squad of soldiers, and this time around you have the ability to recruit new soldiers from sheep right away... and, amusingly enough, sheep can literally grow on trees. In fact, there are some stages early on (Stages 5 & 9, in particular, especially the latter) where you can seriously just win the fight & then just wait for new sheep to spawn in from the trees, giving yourself a max of 12 soldiers for your squad rather quickly. You can even revisit stages after beating them & just farm new soldiers in peace, and unlike last time you have a 100% success rate in turning sheep into soldiers. Don't mistake this as making this campaign easy, though, as soldiers are meant to be expendable, & you can easily lose most of them in a single battle if things turn sour. The end result, even from the little I played, is a much more enjoyable & even fun game. You can tell that qnep must have gotten some good responses from the first game, because Sengoku TURB: episode ZERO is seriously what the first game should have been; while I gave up on the first game's campaign, I could see myself returning to this one.
As I said early on, Sengoku TURB: Fanfan I♥me Dunce-doublentendre is really more of a fan disc than a proper "follow up" to Sengoku TURB, though I am just a little sad that there weren't more mini-games to play here. However, the main attraction is definitely Sengoku TURB: episode ZERO, which honestly felt like an effort was made by the team at qnep to deliver an improved & overall just more fun version of the game they originally released earlier that same year. As for Sengoku TURB: F.I.D. being NEC Home Electronics' final game ever... well, it was certainly "a way" to go out, that's for sure. Honestly, I wouldn't be shocked if qnep intended for episode ZERO to be a full game & campaign, but the previously mentioned NEC Group restructuring plan likely made qnep have to change course & make it into more of a fan disc, just so it wouldn't get outright cancelled.
Three months after Sengoku TURB: F.I.D.'s release, NEC Group would "cease all business activities" for NEC Home Electronics on March 31, 2000, effectively closing the division for good (i.e. by the time I-Spy came out in North America NEC-HE was no longer active), and in February 2002 the division was fully liquidated. HuneX would also become a fully independent studio in 2000, especially after Human went bankrupt that January; ironically enough, though, HuneX would often work with NEC Interchannel early on in its independence. Meanwhile, in March 2004 NEC sold off 70% of its shares of NEC Interchannel to Index Corporation, and on July 1, 2004 the company's name was changed to simply Interchannel Co., Ltd., effectively ending NEC's entire involvement with the video game industry; this also ended a short-lived attempt by Interchannel at releasing games in North America again in 2003. As of now the rights to NEC's various game-related IPs, consoles, & hardware are a bit all over the place. In November 2007 GungHo Online Entertainment purchased the rights to the majority of Interchannel's video games, while on March 1, 2010 Lightweight purchased everything else of Interchannel from Index, including the name, and this effectively brought an end to Interchannel as a company. Then, on July 21, 2023, M2 bought the rights to Interchannel's PC-Engine catalog, including both HuCard & CD, from Lightweight. Today it looks like M2 owns Interchannel's games that came out specifically on NEC-HE's consoles, including the NEC Avenue catalog, while GungHo owns all of Interchannel's non-NEC console games. Interestingly enough, UFO Interactive (the company that brought over Seventh Cross & I-Spy) would itself shutter after releasing Athena's Super Bowling for the N64 in 2001, which is now a holy grail for N64 collectors, before Tommo would revive the company in 2006, managing to survive to this very day mainly on (most of) the newer Raiden games & more recently re-releases of Humongous Entertainment's catalog of children's adventure games, among other (generally forgotten) titles; for example, did you know that UFO released Way of the Samurai 3 in English, but specifically only the Xbox 360 version?
Meanwhile, in 2006 the rights to NEC Home Electronics' catalog were transferred over to Biglobe, NEC's internet service providing division that it later spun off into its own company. These rights included NEC-HE's game catalog, the PC-Engine hardware family & the PC-FX (NEC looks to have held on to the PC-6000, 8800, & 9800 series through its own PC division), as well as co-ownership of the game Linda³, which NEC-HE co-produced with ASCII Corp., Alfa System, Shouji Masuda's company Mars, & MediaWorks; simply put, the rights to that cult-classic RPG are a lot. NEC would then later sell off its shares in Biglobe in April 2014, and eventually telecommunications company KDDI would become the sole owner of Biglobe on January 31, 2017. Today that looks to be where the old NEC-HE game catalog rights seem to currently exist, with Biglobe co-owning the PC-Engine rights with Konami, which eventually absorbed co-creator Hudson Soft in 2012; Konami owns the Hudson game rights, but Biglobe owns the physical hardware rights. Unfortunately, unlike how GungHo was very gung ho on re-releasing Interchannel's games on the PS3 back in the day, Biglobe is not a video game company, so it hasn't really done anything on its own when it comes to making the old NEC-HE catalog available once again. The most it's ever done was approve of Konami making the PC-Engine Mini & TurboGrafx-16 Mini in 2020, getting acknowledged in the credits under "Special Thanks", since those had to imitate what their respective physical hardware looked like. To be fair, though, even just a cursory look at the games that NEC-HE published shows that there really aren't many titles that are now exclusively the property of Biglobe, even as late as Sengoku TURB. To give credit where it's due, NEC-HE seemed to be big on giving the developer of an original game partial ownership of their work (if the copyright listings I came across are any indication), but that now makes Biglobe effectively unable to really do anything with most of the games it now owns the rights to, outside of around maybe 10 or so, including Seventh Cross & I-Spy, which only list NEC-HE in their copyrights.
It also doesn't help that a lot of those developers are no longer around, so it's now a rights nightmare; at least HuneX is still around.
If you were to look around for information regarding NEC Home Electronics' life in gaming, what you'd readily see would be general, at best, yet incomplete, at worst. Sure, you'd come across that "NEC" (as in the corporation, in general) produced its iconic range of PCs during the 80s & 90s, would work with Hudson Soft to make the PC-Engine, had its North American division publish a variety of TurboGrafx-16 games in the early 90s (that would be NEC Home Electronics USA, which itself was a different company than NEC Corporation of America, which still exists), before forming Turbo Technologies Inc. with Hudson Soft to handle those duties with the TurboDuo in 1992; that's where the infamous Johnny Turbo came from. "NEC", then, would give up outside of Japan & focus on the Japan-only PC-FX, which itself would summarily bomb due to the decision to focus more on 2D visuals & high-quality FMV playback, rather than the 3D polygons that would become the industry's obsession for the remainder of the decade. However, after the PC-FX was discontinued in 1998 you'd mostly see the story of "NEC" end there, acting as though the company decided to just bounce from video games entirely from that point on, outside of Interchannel's (mostly Japan-only) releases, and since that division still had "NEC" in its vey name until the mid-00s that must mean that everything after the PC-FX's mercy killing was from NEC Interchannel... right?
The truth of the matter, though, is that NEC Home Electronics did make an attempt at continuing on after leaving the first-party console market, completely independent of what NEC Interchannel was doing. Just like The 3DO Company before them, or even Sega after them, NEC-HE tried its hand at being a third-party publisher, but unfortunately that effort died after only four titles released across a literal calendar year (plus one last release for its own hardware) & just barely over two years after the PC-FX was discontinued NEC Home Electronics was pretty much dead. Maybe it was done in a completely earnest fashion as a way to deliver unique & "atypical" gaming experiences, or maybe the people running NEC-HE knew that the company wasn't long for this world anyway & decided "Screw it, let's just go wild!", but the way NEC-HE went out with the Atypical Alchemists Associate branding, delivering games that truly stepped away from the norm, shouldn't be forgotten. Are any of them going to go down as true "hidden gems"? Well, I would honestly make that argument for Seventh Cross, but even the other games at least still showed a willingness to experiment & try different ideas out in a way that's, sadly, mostly gone from the video game industry today, outside of the indie scene at least.
At the very least, Biglobe should work with another company to get modern-day remasters of Seventh Cross & even Industrial Spy out on current hardware, because those two are games that Biglobe should own full rights to.
Seventh Cross Evolution © 1998 NEC Home Electronics, Ltd. (now Biglobe?)
Sengoku Turb © 1998 NEC Home Electronics, Ltd. (now Biglobe?)/qnep Co., Ltd. © 1992 Masao Masutani & Yoko Kuroyanagi
Industrial Spy: Operation Espionage © 1999 NEC Home Electronics, Ltd. (now Biglobe?)
Sengoku Turb: Fanfan I♥me Dunce-doublentendre © 1999 NEC Home Electronics, Ltd. (now Biglobe?)/qnep Co., Ltd. © 1992 Masao Masutani & Yoko Kuroyanagi
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