Game

Game

Game

Game

The scheme is a game that kind of wears its influences on its sleeve. Made by Onionsoft, a one man team, and Bothtec, who’d later become Quest, the Ogre Battle people, it’s a 1988 metroidvania for the PC88, and I can only assume the devs played a lot of Metroid and went “Hey, this is fun, let’s do something like this”. That’s not to say it’s a rip off or a copycat, it’s its own thing, it just, as I said, wears its influences on its sleeve. Another influence is clearly Ys. That is CLEARLY Adol.

In The Scheme you play as Mars Rhea, the King of Rhea, who is TOTALLY not Adol. He actually looks kinda butchish, and since there’s no real plot or dialogue or character, I’mma just say she is. Anyways, an evil demon is taking over the world, go take them out. Very simple stuff. Your weapon is magic orbs that shoot little orbs, and eventually lemons as you upgrade it with the wave beam wave attack. You explore a labyrinth, fight enemies which respawn, and find items to upgrade yourself and explore deeper. The map isn’t just a carbon copy of the Metroid map, though it’s a similar idea. Lots of winding corridors and shafts, and not much else. No like, big open rooms, just long thin ones or tall thin ones. But it feels way more large and stretching than Metroid, in the end.

Each room is its own thing, with slow scrolling as you reach the edges. Enemies always respawn, and they drop these orbs which bounce all over the place REALLY weirdly smoothly for the PC88. They increase your health or your Force, which once you get to certain levels, will increase your level, and thus your damage. I got my force to 9999 like 2/3rds of the way into the game. You’ll also pick up E Tanks and L Tanks, E tanks will increase your max life, in true Metroid fashion, and L tanks increase your level. At first you can only have 2 orbs on screen at a time, but eventually it upgrades to like 5. Oh, and you can crouch, but Adol Cannot Crawl, of course. Crouching is still really cool and useful.

And that’s about it! Your upgrades are stuff like keys to unlock doors to new areas, an item that stops an infinite staircase like thing, a super jump, etc etc. Nothing as complex as an ice beam or a screw attack, but it doesn’t have to be. This game is really amazing for the PC88. It’s a tiny bit stiff in that classic game way, but it’s not unfun, and it’s not too much. I really enjoyed myself. It does have some really weird things to it though. Two of its upgrades are hidden in really weird ways. There’s a bunch of these like, spiky grass in the first area, which do not die if you shoot them. Except for one. But it takes like 30 seconds at max level. And in a later area, there’s one wall that hides a health powerup if you shoot it for 30 seconds. How the fuck did a kid figure these out???

This game is EXTREMELY helped out, however, by its soundtrack. Friends and lovers, may I introduce you to the legendary Yuzo Koshiro.

If people know about this game, it is ONLY Because of Yuzo Koshiro. he recently released an album of this game, which kinda made people realize it exists. If you don’t know him by name, you know his music. He started at Falcom, doing classics like Ys and Xanadu before going freelance and making soundtracks like Actraiser, Streets of Rage, and of course, this. But this soundtrack is really interesting… in that there are TWO OF IT.

So the PC88 had a soundchip, OPN. This was its original soundchip, but it got an upgraded model later in its lifespan, called the OPNA. Well, we don’t want to alienate those who aren’t upgrading, but we DO want to support those who did, what do we do? WE MAKE TWO SEPARATE SOUNDTRACKS. That blows my fucking mind. I can’t really find any rips of the OPN ost online, except for on Zophar’s domain, but here’s a song from the OPNA one, which sounds suck as fuck, of course.

https://youtu.be/0orBtoUC8Ss?si=bU-eEhEPPVDMN76C

All in all, The Scheme isn’t like, a classic. It didn’t change my life. It is, however, the best fucking PC88 game I’ve ever played. Considering all I’ve played are Super Mario Bros Special, Hydlide, and Minky Momo no Panic Ball, that’s not a high hurdle. But it is actually quite enjoyable, and I had a good time with it. It also made me break out pen and paper and draw a map, which is pretty sick!