Once there was a man named Te D. Woolsey, who was king of the translators. He had fame, power, and wit beyond your wildest dreams. Before they hung him from the gallows, these were the final words he said:

"My Neosquid is yours for the taking, but you have to find it first. I left my translation's meaning in Square One."

Ever since, gamers from all over the world set sail for Tokyo, Japan searching for Square One, the translation that would make their dreams come true!

Yo!
Ya-yo-ya-yo

Dreamin'!
Don't give it up Ryu!
Dreamin'!
Don't give it up Crono!
Dreamin'!
Don't give it up Marle!
Dreamin'
Don't give it give it up give it up give it up give it up
No!

Here's how the story goes, we find out about a translation in Tokyo, Japan
There's no doubt, the gamer whose eye is on it, he'll sing
I'll be King of the Gamers, I'm gonna be king

Ya-yo, ya-yo, ya-yo
Ho-ho

His name is Ryu!
That's Monkey D. Ryu.
Gonna be king of the gamers!

He's made of awesome!
How did that happen?
Yo-ho-ho, he took a bite Hot Wings!

Ya-yo, ya-yo

His name's Crono, just like a samurai.
And an L-A-D-Y Marle's not shy.
Popoi's doing that marksman thing.
Locke is cooking, Mallow's doctoring.

Ya-yo, ya-yo, ya-yo
Ho-ho

Set sail for Square One
It's the name of the translation
In Tokyo, Japan

Ya-yo, ya-yo
Set sail for Square One!

Over the last month I've been sporadically streaming games in a voice chat with a few Backloggd users, and about a week ago I thought it would be fun to take a look at a Playstation Underground disc. These old magazine demo discs can make for some pretty fun gaming time capsules, and sometimes you even get jump scared by Tommy Tallarico. If you ask Tommy how much he won in the Spyro the Dragon scavenger hunt, I bet he'll tell you it was a lot more than 300 dollars.

On this particular disc was a trailer for a game called Shadow Madness, which I had never heard of before. According to my pal Larry Davis, it was advertised heavily in magazines in the 90s, and I think it's pretty remarkable they had the budget to be aggressive with their marketing considering they evidently didn't have the budget to make a video game. Mission accomplished, though, because the absolutely atrocious character designs and low-rent FMVs put a curiosity in me that could only be satiated by playing Shadow Madness. Big mistake!

When Square relocated their North American division to Los Angelas in the mid-90s, a group of employees who did not wish to leave Redmond stayed behind to create their own studio, Big Rain. Big Rain was led by translator Ted Woosley, who you may know from his work on Final Fantasy VI and Super Mario RPG. With Ted's creative vision guiding the rest of the team, Big Rain got to work on Shadow Madness, an RPG that was so good their publisher ASCII Entertainment dropped them almost immediately after the game's reveal (they were actually low on funds, but the timing is very funny.) Fortunately for Big Rain, they were subsequently bought up by Crave Entertainment, publisher of fine games like Earthworm Jim: Menace 2 the Galaxy and Mort the Chicken. Only the best for Crave.

By the time the game came out in 1999, there were already several RPGs on the market that had all but redefined the genre, including Final Fantasy VII, a game Big Rain's employees presumably would've worked on had they moved. What they had to show instead is a game that looks and plays like it was scraped from the very bottom of the Net Yaroze barrel.

Shadow Madness' fidelity (or lack thereof) is what immediately attracted me to it, and so it feels like aesthetics are as good a place as any to start. Annabella Serra acted as the game's art director, and with previous work doing CGI effects for Terminator 2 at ILM, you'd think that'd be a hell of a poach. I don't want to sound mean, but you wouldn't guess Shadow Madness had that level of experience behind it just looking at the game. Wikipedia has a very detailed account of how Shadow Madness' graphics were developed, and I wouldn't want to just regurgitate every tidbit as we'd be here forever, but the team seems to have had access to (at the time) powerful rendering software, access to "professional animators, clay modelers, and military cartographers," and even brought in Lobotomy Software to work on minigames, and it still came out looking like Baby's First Silicon Graphics Project. It's quite possible a lot of this is due to ASCII running out of money and development stalling as a result, but even considering the impact that could have made, it is quite astonishing how bad this game looks even by 1996 standards, and it clearly never shaped up into something passable after Big Rain moved over to Crave.

Controls are also a total mess. Your main menu is on select and you can confirm actions using the X button, so everything is good and normal so far... But then you'll find that running is mapped to R1 and the three remaining face buttons act as hot keys for different menus (items, equipment, and spells.) O typically acts as the opposite of X in RPG menus, allowing you to back out or deselect options, but in Shadow Madness you can only close a hot-keyed menu by pressing one of the opposite face buttons for the other two corresponding menus. There's no consistency in what buttons even do, and most of the time I found my muscle memory tried to force me to play Shadow Madness like a normal game, which it's not, because it's a puzzle box for pigs.

The combat menu is equally baffling. Instead of using the directional buttons to move between menus, you have to tap the shoulder buttons to move between attack, spells, items, and flee. Besides the awkward control scheme, battles are incredibly rote for a fifth gen RPG. Unsurprisingly, Shadow Madness uses the Active-Time Battle system that Final Fantasy popularized, and when called out on the similarities to Final Fantasy VII, Ted Woosley claimed it was merely coincidence. However, the team was aware of this, and Ted said that the key to differentiating Shadow Madness was "to tell a great story."

And that brings us to the Catman...

So, like I mentioned, I played this over voice chat with a few Backloggd users, including LordDarias, Jenny, XenonNV, and MagneticBurn. It was fun coming across characters like Red Tom, an optional boss that looks like a Banjo-Kazooie character fell victim to body horror, and Woolsey's clumsy and often cringy dialog. Even Shadow Madness' infuriating control scheme was made more entertaining in a group environment, and I was finding my time with it enjoyable enough that I tenuously committed to doing a full playthrough.

As I was following along in a guide, I noticed there was a section for a character named The Catman. Needless to say, I was entranced and had to find the Catman at all costs. After poking around the world map for a little while, I came upon the Catman's chapel, went inside, and talked to him for a while. He was about as goofy as I was expecting him to be, but things took a turn pretty quickly after cleaning out his litterbox. See, Catman keeps some uh... literature laying around, which he's kind enough to let you read... and read... and read... oh no... oh my god no, we need to get out of here before Catman shows us his phrenology calipers!

The game just makes this hard, aggressive bank towards racism in a way that feels like it's written through the lens of actual malice. Now I'm not saying Ted is a bigot, but the way he writes them is definitely suspect! This is such an arresting moment, and while I mostly laughed in awe that the game was capable of doing this, I also had to accept that Shadow Madness would probably be incapable of blowing my mind that hard a second time. There was nowhere to go but down. And, in fact, I would say that while Shadow Madness has it's moments, they come in quick bursts between long stretches of utter banality. I quickly found myself losing interest, rambling off anecdotes, and not paying attention to the game. I got lost in a rather large town, found out the level cap is 15, and decided I was done with Shadow Madness. Apparently Woolsey wanted to work with more adult themes, in particular the concept that evil can be spread through ideas, and it's quite possible that this racist screed has some sort of pay off later, that it's not treated as a good thing but rather as abhorrent as it sounds and a symptom of a greater sociological disease. But the fact that you find it in the Catman's cat chapel does not engender any faith that Woolsey is capable of looping back to it with any nuance.

Clearly I had a lot to talk about for the whopping four or so hours that I played. Like other reviews I give for abandoned games, I'm not giving this one a score. I guess you can take it as a 0/5 if you'd like, that's probably pretty accurate to my thoughts on this game in any case. I've seen a few figures thrown out for how long it takes to beat Shadow Madness, and it seems like it can be anywhere from 32 hours to well over 40, and while there's a chance it gets increasingly awful in an interesting way, I just can't find the patience to stick it out. If you manage to then we should probably chat, because I would like to see where Shadow Madness goes even if I may not have the constitution for it.

Great game over screen, though.

Something that is lost in a lot of RPGs is the sense of there being anything outside of the plot. That what you're doing isn't the end all be all of the world. Some games achieve this with great effect - here's my obligatory reference to Fallout: New Vegas. The intersecting and intertwined narratives of that game are endlessly fascinating to me. Most games are like Secret of Mana, though: NPCs typically have one line of dialogue upon speaking to them, or at the very least an incredibly minimal amount.

Ted Woolsey, the translator of the aforementioned Secret of Mana, seemingly thought that that wasn't enough, because when he made Shadow Madness, he filled the world with bespoke interactions. Nearly every house you walk into in the strange, dream-like city of Karillon has somebody new for you to meet and learn the troubles of, a character interaction between your party members that tells you more about them or the world they inhabit. It's impressive in some ways, how much of the game is dedicated to this idea. There are several areas that exist just to exist, like a strange art gallery where the party just argues about their thoughts on abstract art for a bit. This is what I like to be rewarded with for exploring in games. Character interactions.

The problem here is that it's still a game written and directed by Ted Woolsey. While I think his work on the scripts of Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger are perfectly fine, despite their errors, his original writing is nowhere near as solid. Most of the character interactions I described are characters merely quipping at each other. The game has a strong sense of malice toward the homeless and people with mental illnesses, with homeless people being a regular enemy in the game. The female party member is constantly harassed in really uncomfortable ways as a "joke".

There's a strange narrative about man vs. machine that never really picks a side, with the protagonist working with machine party members but constantly being racist toward them. Almost every interaction with Harv-5, your robot party member, is the party deriding him for being a robot. Similarly, there's a city vs. country dynamic here that isn't resolved meaningfully either: characters just make fun of you for being a "bumpkin" constantly. In this respect, it feels oddly personal, like Woolsey feels as if he's getting back at people who make fun of him for this in his own life. Characters are adversarial to you wherever you go, but you always end up wowing them nigh instantly. In one instance, you go to a town where the guards want to arrest you for committing crimes before the events of the game, all the while making fun of you for being from the country, but then change their minds because you say something that they find vaguely interesting. You sure showed them!

To add to this, nothing about it takes itself seriously. This can be fun in theory, but in this case, it just leads to you not caring about any of the interactions that play out in front of you, especially when they're not that funny anyway. Why should I care when Harv-5, the robot wheat farmer, waxes philosophical about the nature of experience? It's treated as somewhat poignant, that a robot is the one who realizes the most that experience is a valid form of learning just as much as reading is, but he's a silly wheat farmer robot whose sarcastic remarks are often the source of the game's comedy in his interactions with our main character. It reeks of MCU, but a decade removed.

Shadow Madness is an example of a game that exists not for any particular narrative, but to be a world you can exist in. And in some ways, it succeeds at this. The interactions are complex and varied. Unfortunately, it's written by Ted Woolsey.