Laplace no Ma (Super Famicom)

You can’t swing a dead shoggoth these day without hitting a video game based on the misanthropic “cosmic horror” of American writer H.P. Lovecraft. This wasn’t the case at all back in the 1980s, when mainstream awareness of the late author’s work was comparatively low. The vast majority of horror-themed games from this period instead dealt in stock images lifted from decades of Hollywood chillers. Caped vampires, masked slashers, and flesh-eating zombies ruled the digital night, crowding out Lovecraft’s mad alien gods.

Kudos to Japanese developer HummingBirdSoft, then, for taking a chance with their heavily Lovecraftian RPG Laplace no Ma (“Laplace’s Demon”). Originally released in 1987 for NEC’s PC-88 and PC-98 home computer lines, it must have done well. I say that because the next eight years saw it ported to other computer platforms, the PC Engine, and finally, in 1995, the Super Famicom courtesy of Group SNE and Vic Tokai. I’m reviewing the Super Famicom version simply because it’s the only one to date with an English fan translation. An excellent one by the Aeon Genesis group, I might add.

In the interest of accuracy, it’s worth pointing out that Laplace no Ma is patterned less on Lovecraft’s fiction per se and more on how said fiction is represented in Chaosium’s venerable Call of Cthulhu. This Dungeons & Dragons-inspired 1981 tabletop game was the original horror roleplaying experience and is still going strong today. It was in Call of Cthulhu’s rulebook that staple cosmic horror concepts such as ever-dwindling protagonist sanity were first rendered as concrete game mechanics. While not an officially licensed adaptation, Laplace no Ma does carry over some of these mechanics as well as the general party-based adventuring format of its analog forebear.

Laplace no Ma casts the player as a paranormal investigator paying a visit to the fictional city of Newcam, Massachusetts (a play on Lovecraft’s Arkham) circa 1924. Your initial goal is to recruit allies at the local bar and then start probing the enigma of Weathertop Hall, an abandoned mansion on the outskirts of town that’s been the site of several gruesome murders and unexplained disappearances. What, if anything, does this have to do with French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) and his famous “demon” thought experiment intended to explore the potential ramifications of causal determinism? I’ll leave that for you to discover on your own. I will say that the game’s story is easily its strongest aspect. For what seems at the outset to be a typical old dark house tale, it puts you through a number of truly bizarre twists and turns.

You can opt to have your main character belong to any one of five classes: Dabbler, Detective, Medium, Journalist, and Scientist. There’s ultimately no need to fret too much over your pick, as pre-made members of every class are available from the start to fill out the remaining three slots in your roster. I went with a Dabbler, as it allowed for an adequate mix of physical and magical ability. Detective and Medium are your dedicated fighter and magic-user, respectively. The Journalist and Scientist are where things get interesting, albeit not always in a good way. I’ll come back to them.

Given that it’s an RPG with roots in late ’80s Japan, it may surprise you to learn that Laplace no Ma doesn’t take the majority of its gameplay cues from Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy. Rather, it’s akin to Wizardry and similar antediluvian Western computer RPGs. In other words, there’s no overworld to explore, nor are there multiple towns teeming with NPCs to discover. The world here is a claustrophobic one starkly divided between Newcam and a single vast, continuous dungeon accessed through Weathertop Hall. You’re in for some laser-focused old school dungeon delving with this one. It’s one of those games that sees you launching expedition after expedition into the same convoluted maze, making just a little more progress each time before you’re compelled to return to town in order to heal up, resupply, and start the cycle again. Previous iterations of Laplace no Ma even used a Wizardry style first-person dungeon view, although the Super Famicom exchanges it for an overhead perspective, much to my relief. I’m really not in a graph paper mood these days.

Most of your time in the dungeon is spent managing a constant stream of random monster encounters. Combat is turn-based and largely of the routine “fight, magic, item, run” variety. If you enjoy (or can at least stomach) this sort of thing in Dragon Quest or Earthbound, for example, you should be fine with it here. The most satisfying option by far are the special attacks, which resemble the limit breaks later seen in Final Fantasy VII. That is, taking damage and performing actions gradually fills up a character’s special attack meter and once it’s full, he or she gains a single use of a powerful class-specific special ability. You can also attempt to talk to your opponents and dissuade them from attacking you altogether. Your success at this depends on having a party member with a high Fast Talk skill. Enemies rarely seem to have anything useful to say, however, so there’s usually no advantage in chatting as opposed to fleeing.

As an aside, many sources online describe Laplace no Ma as a survival horror game. I disagree with this assessment and feel that’s worth mentioning, since nothing sets a game up for failure quite like unwarranted expectations. Is it chock full of eerie locations and ghoulish baddies? Absolutely. Does that make your repeated forays into Weathertop Hall any more focused on survival than the magic MacGuffin hunts of the average fantasy RPG? Not at all. There’s no permadeath on the table ala Sweet Home, no strictly limited supply of key items to conserve, no emphasis on avoiding combat whenever feasible, etc. Laplace no Ma is, in all respects, just spooky Wizardry.

Anyway, it turned out I could tolerate Laplace no Ma’s archaic structure and ho-hum combat. What ultimately got under my skin was the poor class balancing and lackluster presentation. As stated above, the Dabbler, Detective, and Medium are fine. They’re standard, “what you see it what you get” RPG archetypes. The Journalist and Scientist…not so much. As far as I can tell, Journalists exist exclusively to solve a lone dilemma that itself only exists to justify having Journalists in the game. Holy walking tautology, Batman! Specifically, Journalists are your only reliable source of money, which isn’t won from monsters or found laying around in treasure chests like in almost every other RPG. By equipping a camera instead of a weapon, they can use combat actions to take snapshots of monsters and then sell the resulting photos for cash back in Newcam. The issue here is obvious: You now have 25% of your main party contributing 0% of what it actually takes to win a fight, all because getting loot directly from monsters wasn’t different enough. It reduces your team to three useful members and one spectator, yet it’s all but mandatory if you hope to finish the game in a smooth and timely manner.

The Scientists are a little better, I suppose. These guys are essentially off-brand Ghostbusters who use “spirit machines” to unleash a range of energy beams in combat. They’re not bad on paper. They’re not even bad very early and very late in the adventure. The problem is the other three quarters of the runtime. Spirit machines depend on new parts for upgrades and these are some of the least common items in the game. I didn’t come by any worthwhile new ones until I was nearing the final stretch. My Scientist become a veritable WMD at that point, sure, but his puny raygun was barely tickling the opposition for hours leading up to that.

Finally, this has got to be one of the plainest Super Famicom games ever made, with drab backgrounds and virtually no animation apart from a few mediocre spell effects and your party members’ choppy walk cycles. Some of the static monster portraits are alright and there are about a dozen brief cut scenes with detailed full-screen art. That’s as close as I can come to praising any of the visuals, though. The soundtrack is sparse, droning, and loops far too frequently for its own good. It’s genuinely hard to believe that a 16-bit game in this state was deemed suitable for store shelves in 1995. Tales of Phantasia it ain’t. Hell, it would have been sub-par in 1990.

After all that negativity, can I possibly still recommend Laplace no Ma to horror game aficionados on the prowl for deep cuts? Maybe, with the caveat that it is one profoundly qualified recommendation we’re talking here. If you’re into both bare bones dungeon crawls and weird Lovecraftian horror plots and you don’t need them to look or sound good, Laplace no Ma is your ticket. If the design fumbles I mentioned above sound like they would eat away at your real life sanity and leave you huddled in the corner muttering blasphemies from the pages of the dread Necronomicon, you may want to cross Newcam off your itinerary before it’s too late.