Retronauts - Retronauts Micro 037: Little Samson

Episode Date: May 2, 2016

A look back at, to our knowledge, the final legacy ofMegaMancreator Akira Kitamura: The overlooked andoverpricedNESplatformer Little Samson. Be sure to visit our blog atRetronauts.com, and checkout our partner site, USgamer,for more great stuff. And if you'd like to send a few bucks ourway, head on over to our Patreon page!

This week in Retronauts, if you can't lickle them, join them. For the most part, people tend to associate the Mega Man series with Kiji Inafune. After all, he worked with a series from the start to effective finish, providing art for the original NES game and then shepherding the latter-day games through thick and thin. when Inafune left Capcom, the company killed all its in-development Mega Man projects. It's not for nothing that the two have become essentially synonymous. Despite Inifune's key role in the series, though, it's not like Mega Man's spring fully formed from his brain on day one. On the contrary, Inafune's original task with Mega Man

was to a large degree that of an interpretive illustrator, rendering other people's pixel art sprites as cartoon characters for posters, ads, manuals, and cover art. The original Mega Man-Man game was overseen by Ghosts and Goblins creator Tokoro Fujiwara, whose penchant for cruel design dressed up in cartoon whimsy certainly made itself manifest in Capcom's first original NES creation. While Mega Man didn't pull any total dick moves along the lines of ghosting goblin's mandatory run through a harder second loop of the adventure in order to see the ending, it also didn't pull any punches. The deadly floating platforms and Iceman's stage, the unforgiving yellow devil, the relentless boss gauntlet at the end of Dr. Wiley

stage. All of this added up to put Mega Man in that rare and storied category of notoriously challenging NES game that managed to be mostly fair about it. And yet, the credit for Mega Man's delicate balance of brutality and beatability doesn't really belong to Fujiwara. His role was more that of an overseer, a seasoned veteran guiding a team of novices. Of course, in those days, veteran game designer meant someone who'd been in the industry for just a few years, but Fujiwara had shipped a few hits, so surely he had plenty of wisdom to offer his charges. No, the ultimate credit for Mega Man's successful navigation of the difficulty tightrope belongs to the mysterious Akira Kitamura.

Credited in the game's staff role as AK and rarely heard from in the past 20 years. In a rare 2011 interview conducted by Hitoshi Ariga, translated by Shmublations.com, Kitamura made it fairly clear that everything great about Mega Man came about as a result of his keen instincts for game design. Kitamura filled Mega Man with intuitive grace notes of design. For example, he's spoken about how he carefully designed waves of enemies in each stage of the game to appear with a growing curve of complexity which breaks to be followed up with a single straggler that's much less difficult to defeat than its predecessors, which creates a subtle and

conscious sense of accomplishment for the player that encourages them to keep playing. Kitamura went on to take the lead design role in Mega Man 2 as well, putting together a somewhat unpolished but nevertheless brilliant game that many consider the pinnacle of the series. Then for his victory lap, Kitamura left Capcom to form his own company, Takeru. Nakeru wasn't long for this world, releasing only a handful of games that puttered along beneath the radar and couldn't keep the company from going under in just a few years. Online sources indicate that Kitamura then jumped ship to Mitchell, which became a sort of home for Capcom expats like Strider designer Koichi Yotsui.

But there's no indication of what, if anything, Kitamura did there. And then nothing. He up and vanished. When I've asked former Mega Man staff members, such as composer Manami Matsumei about his current status, They've simply said they don't keep in touch. And maybe I'm imagining it, but there seems to be an unusual undertone of sadness allowing their ingrained cultural respect for privacy and desire not to dwell on the negative. So we may never know what became of Kitamura, and certainly I don't have possession of enough

facts to speculate on his post-capcom years, but what I do have is a Japanese copy of his last great work, Sere Dinsetsu Lickle, for Famicom. And from that, I can safely say that Akira Kitamura was a genuine video game design genius. Lickle was the only one of Kitamura's post-Capcom works to see American release. Taito brought it to the US under the name Little Sampson. You may know Little Sampson by reputation, as the game flew entirely beneath the radar during the NES days, but has since become an exceedingly rare and infamously desperately sought after piece of software.

These days it stands as one of a handful of shockingly expensive video games that stand in the way of obsessive collectors who want to own a complete set of NES releases, whether complete or cartridge only. Feud separately from that legacy, however, Little Sampson should be known because it's such a brilliantly designed piece of NES software. It feels like a hybrid of the best 8-bit action adventures combined into a single work. that pushes the boundaries of the NES and the MMC5 memory maver chip. Little Sampson plays as if Kitamura used Mega Man 2 as a base,

and instead of simply iterating endlessly on the eight stages and bosses followed by a Wiley Gauntlet formula the way Capcom did, he chose to branch out and build something entirely new. Little Sampson has basic physics and even boss encounters that appeared to have come straight from Mega Man 2, but in every other sense, the game exceeds its forebearer. Visually, it's utterly stunning. Much as with Mega Man, it makes use of fairly small character sprites, but these simply allow the level designers to turn each screen into a veritable playground in which to take on the game's challenges in a variety of different ways.

Little Samson has that dense, dark, detailed look you saw in many latter-era NES games, using deep black spaces not for memory-saving purposes, as with something like Metroid, but rather to create a sense of kuroskuro, with shadows defining the world to better enhance what limited visual information the game could contain. Great as Little Sampson looks and sounds, though, it's really the action that stands out. The game initially comes off as a standard platformer, with players controlling a little green dude named Lickle. This lasts for all of a single stage.

Once you complete the opening level, you're cast in the role of a different character altogether, then another, and another. First a dragon, then a golem, then a mouse. Altogether you play as four separate characters, then return to controlling Lickle, who battles a dragon and gains the ability to team up with all the other characters, swapping between them instantly to play up their individual strengths. So, suddenly after those first few stages, Little Samson plays like a hybrid of Mega Man 2, Castlevania 3, and even smacks of Master System Masterpiece Wonder Boy 3, the Dragon's Trap.

Each of those games individually stands as a high watermark for 8-bit game design, so playing as all three of them combined is a truly special experience. As you might expect, based on how its inspirations work, Little Samson's four characters each come with their own distinct strengths and weaknesses, making them each most effective in different situations. Protagonist Lickle is an all-rounder, but not in the boring sense. It comes off as a bit of a riff on Sun Wukong from John. journey to the west, and possesses the monkey-like ability to scramble up walls.

He's not the strongest, the most rugged or the most nimble character in the game, but he's pretty good at everything, has great agility. On the other hand, the golem has the durability that you'd expect of a character made of rock. Not only does he laugh at damage, he can walk over deadly spikes without being hurt. His punch packs a tremendous wallup. The downside is that he has absolutely terrible maneuverability and controls like the proverbial Led Zeppelin. On the other hand, the mouse is incredibly fragile, but it can sneak into tiny spaces that are inaccessible to other characters.

Also, surprisingly, the mouse possesses the game's strongest attack. In keeping with an odd recurring theme in NES games, like Mouser from Super Mario Bros. 2, the mouse can use bombs against bad guys. And then there's a dragon who can fly and breathe fire the whole nine yards. Its claws give it great traction on ice, and its breath works like Mega Man's charge shot. Despite its power, though, the dragon can be surprisingly tricky to use. The game contains an impressive variety of stage designs, ranging from the usual forests and ice caves to an auto-scrolling stage in which you ride the back of a crab and can't

swap out alternate characters. Little Sampson always keeps you on your toes, switching up environmental motifs, and the specific mechanics of individual stages in a way that forces you to adapt and think quickly about which character is best suited for a given situation. Little Sampson simply radiates excellence, and it showcased Akira Kitamura's design instincts in a new and interesting way. Yeah, it feels enough like Mega Man that fans of that series will want to check it out, but the game isn't content to simply reprise familiar territory.

It's a shame that it's so hard to come by because it deserves wide acclaim. But due to Takaro's bankruptcy and Taito's acquisition by Square Enix, I can't imagine ever seeing this game reissued on any kind of virtual console service or collection. Square Inix doesn't really go in for that these days, and who knows if they even have the rights to the game. who has the rights to it. So this is one of those instances where we have to be grateful for emulation and virtual cartridges like the Everdrive. Little Sampson could have disappeared along with its designer, but thanks to archiving and gray market distribution online,

anyone can enjoy this masterpiece. For Retronauts, this is Jeremy Parrish. Follow us at Retronauts.com, USgamer.net. Subscribe to us on iTunes. Follow us on social media as Retronauts. And, of course, please consider supporting us through Patreon so that we can continue talking about memorable obscurities like Little Samson. Thanks, and we'll be back next week with a full-length episode.