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• Last Update: June 02, 2012, at 09:53 AM
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It is immensely satisfying to modify a North American SNES to play Japanese games. All that’s involved is yanking out those plastic tabs that help keep the carts aligned out with a pair of pliers. Yet once you’ve done it though, there aren’t all that many rewards to reap. Most games that weren’t released in the U.S. were RPGs with impenetrable walls of untranslated text and strange stuff that’s just so very weirdly, idiosyncratically Japanese. Then there’s Umihara Kawase, which... OK, sure. It probably falls into that latter category, between the title (an untranslatable pun about fishes) and the weird backdrops made of black-and-white coastline photographs, and being just generally strange. Still, it’s not like it makes any more sense in Japanese, particularly since there isn’t any text to translate. Always a plus for an import game.

Also completely irrelevant, and incomprehensible, is the premise of the game. We’ve got a girl with a pink backpack platforming around a surreal landscape full of ambulatory fish. Stun a fish and you can put it in your backpack, which is nice because there’s no more fish in your way, but there’s no other incentive to do it. You just wander from area to area until the game ends, which it does with no fanfare at all, there’s simply no new level. There are branching paths and different... well, not so much endings, but final levels. No attempt is ever made to explain what the deal is with any of this. This is a game that’s 100% solid game. Plot isn’t a factor.

The game, however, is really something special. You have a grappling hook (technically, a fishing line) which you can use to swing around off things. Yes, that’s nothing special; Bionic Commando had that on the NES. The key difference here is that the line attached to this hook is elastic. Not only are you swinging around, you’re also bouncing. And it doesn’t just stick to fixed surfaces, it sticks to everything. Those ambulatory fish for instance, who will be pulled towards you and you towards them. Or conveyor belts—perhaps conveyor belts whose pull you can fight by trying to walk the other way until the line tension is too great to overcome. For that matter, moving platforms can bend the line while it’s extended. Point, is some crazy crazy stuff goes on with this game’s physics. Mess around with it for a while, you’ll see some truly insane things. Really get a handle on it and you’ll eventually be capable of the craziest, bounciest, give-the-finger to-clearly-defined-pathiest speed-running ever.

The SNES isn’t the only platform to see this particular brand of insanity. Umiahara Kawase has seen half-sequel/half-ports on the PlayStation, PSP, and DS. All of these change the physics though, and the physics are the whole point. Now, granted, the odds of you ever happening across an obscure Super Famicom cart in some used game store with only its title on it... well, you probably won’t be able to read it. If convenient signage identifies it as Umihara Kawase, you need to buy that game. Buy it, run home, and start bouncing all over.