From what I can gather, Wolf Team’s (Arcus Odyssey, El Viento, etc.) PC-98 exclusive adventure game, Apros, was created as one part of a broader multimedia concept, a general setting for various stories to exist within rather than a defined tale for others to pick apart and then expand upon in their own unique ways later. If I had to crudely explain it quickly: more like Dungeons & Dragons than Star Wars, I suppose. Apros’ manual briefly mentions the developer’s desire to expand upon the idea at a later date, hoping to create a full-fledged RPG in the future to go alongside this mouse-driven tale.
A quick prod around the internet seems to suggest that imagined game never saw the light of day, and the bits of Apros’ world that did exist don’t appear to have fared much better in the grand scheme of things. After playing this adventure through myself, it’s not all that hard to see why. The setting was in no danger of standing out at any point in time, but especially not in 1992. This is a fantasy world where big pauldrons and even bigger hair are liberally applied to just about everything that moves, grizzled combat veterans are a thoroughly crusty 18 years old, and cute mascot-like creatures, clearly created with one eye on post-release merchandise opportunities, turn into powerful beings that can carry the group off into the sky the instant the party need some magical transportation. Nobody is missing a story like this from their lives. In fact, I’d bet most of us of a certain vintage will have already experienced a dozen or more like it purely by accident over the years.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not fun.
There’s an easygoing charm to Apros that makes it hard to dislike. I can’t resist smiling at the sight of a brave and breezy heroine, even if I’ve already seen goodness knows how many of them before. Shian’s reactions throughout her little adventure aren’t in danger of surprising anyone, but as making progress is always so frictionless there’s little time to dwell on anything that’s already happened, for any one issue to take root and grow into something more mood-souringly serious. I did still need to react to whatever’s happening and consider the streamlined options available to me, but Apros never put me in a position where I was fruitlessly bouncing back and forth between the same few actions, wearily trying to figure out if I needed to LOOK at something one more time before I TALKed to NPC#3 again to free the story from some awful loop. This, as well as the highly restrictive movement options (generally limiting Shian to where she is and where she needs to go) and the unbreakable invincibility of the cast even when controlled by someone like me, someone determined to make them do very stupid things in the name of gaming science, gave the story some very much appreciated forward momentum. I quickly stopped worrying about whether I was on the verge of making a game-ending choice, because there were no game-ending choices.
And then there were no choices at all. The third (and final) scenario disc is even more hands-off than Wonder Project J2‘s jarringly “look, don’t touch” final act. I didn’t even get to decide who to talk to to kick off the next conversation, and the game never bothered to paus for a polite, if ultimately pointless, bit of THINKing time, or give me the chance to LOOK around and prod the story for a bit of optional flavour text. If the climax had felt a little more dramatic I’d have happily brushed this aside as a story that couldn’t wait for me to see its epic ending, but the grand finalé here didn’t really hit the mark for me, probably because, as I mentioned at the top, I’d already seen some version of it all before and was pretty much playing ’90s anime bingo by this point.
Still, at least the art I saw along the way was never anything less than utterly gorgeous to look at.
Everything shown in the main window appears to have once been a hand-painted illustration, which was then reduced in both size and colour depth to better suit the PC-98’s capabilities. This means there’s heavy dithering in every scene, and a lot of clean lines transformed into rough, fuzzy, edges. Here, these unintentional side effects give the lines a sketchy, pencil-like quality, and the dithering brings some interesting texture to what would have otherwise been flat sweeps of colour. Remarkably, almost every image is unique, and although there were a few spots where I think the storytelling would have benefitted from a few extra illustrations, I came away from this floppy disc adventure thoroughly impressed with the quantity and quality of the art on offer.
Although for a game that looks this lush, I was surprised to learn that the manual is only four pages long. Yep, you read that right—four. The boring (but useful) technical manual dealing with machine compatibility and optional hard drive installations included in the box is a lot longer. I think I was expecting something more… Falcom-y, some sort of gorgeous tome filled to the brim with beautiful illustrations and lots of engaging background material for me to absorb, but all I got was a flimsy pamphlet containing only the very bare minimum. I honestly went and checked I wasn’t missing anything after I flipped through it, and as far as I can tell I’m not. It’s quite hard to become emotionally invested in a world that barely exists.
The soundtrack that accompanies those beautiful pictures is sadly only adequate at best. Sure, it generally suits the tone of each scene well enough but it’s all a bit beepy, and not in an attractive retro chiptune kind of way. I was quite happy to play the game on mute after a while, only turning the volume back up just to confirm that yep, the music was still nothing worth keeping on.
Apros is a light and easily cleared adventure, and some days that’s all I really want from a game, but the trouble is it feels light in a way that makes me wonder what it’s missing, how much better it could have been if there had been a bit more to it. I wanted to come away from Apros astounded, but instead I ended up merely amused, and with a strong sense of déjà vu.
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Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster 