Lost at sea

  • Developer: Sacnoth
  • Publisher: SNK
  • Release Dates: August 19th, 1999 (Japan), 2000 (US, France, UK)
  • Available On: Neo Geo Pocket Color
  • Genre(s): RPG, Vehicular Combat, Post-apocalyptic

At this point, I don’t know that Sacnoth is a particularly obscure company. They didn’t make many games before becoming Nautilus and even then they fell off into the Pachinko mines after just two games, but boy did they shine bright while they lasted! Their body of work almost exclusively consisted of Koudelka and the Shadow Hearts games, but when those games are the certified bangers that they are (Shadow Hearts: Covenant is easily one of my favorite games on the PS2!), you really don’t need anything else to leave your mark on history. They come up pretty often when people want to point out “obscure” or “underrated” RPGs, but I don’t think that’s even the case anymore. And yes, there’s definitely some delicious irony in a game coming up frequently when people are tasked with naming obscurities! Koudelka is a YouTuber’s dream come true and that’s reflected in how many effusively positive videos you can find about it nowadays. Think about it – it’s a great game that received middling-ish reviews and was misunderstood in its day, it’s a 10 hour long RPG, it has a strong horror backdrop, and it stars adult characters so it can easily be presented as one of the rare cases of a “mature” game in a genre people love to accuse of being immature for reasons they likely won’t want to admit. It’s perfect! Shadows Hearts has also gained a strong following over the years (and jumped in price, yeeesh!) and I’m sure the YouTube videos of those games will start pouring in over time as well. Heck, I watched one on Covenant just a few days ago! They’re wonderful games, but they’re mistakenly presented as the full story of Sacnoth and Nautilus when there’s actually more to the company than that. Sacnoth’s story began elsewhere, somewhere smaller and in a more unusual way.

Sacnoth spent some time on a platform that many likely wouldn’t expect: the Neo Geo Pocket! SNK platforms were seldom the place to go for RPGs, but the Neo Geo Pocket had a handful going for it. They were pretty cool too, including Biomotor Unitron and its sequel, Dark Arms: Beast Buster, the action RPG follow-up to a light gun game, the Japan-exclusive Ogre Battle game, and Nige-Ron-Pa, the neat (also Japan-exclusive) game with a funny name. Sacnoth was responsible for Faselei!, the closest thing to Front Mission on the platform, but before that, they really went for something unusual. Enter our game today, Dive Alert; it’s what you could call a “SRPG”. No, not a Strategy RPG, a Submarine RPG! In what might be the only attempt at this kind of thing ever, Dive Alert combines the narrative focus of a visual novel with customizable naval combat to create an RPG concoction guaranteed to be unlike anything you’ve played. The closest thing would technically be something like Utawarerumono and Tears to Tiara in that the vast majority of your time is spent reading dialogue and the battles are a rare treat. The story’s the main appeal, but there’s gameplay beyond just clicking through text boxes and making decisions, so it’s not quite a visual novel. This game’s narrative is a pleasure to witness as it presents an elaborate, interesting world that feels more ambitious than many other games on the platform while also backing it up with an effective development arc for its young protagonist(s). There’s just one key difference with Dive Alert compared to those games: the battles here are certainly not what I’d call a treat!

Come for the lovely cutscenes, but…

We’ll get into it, but Dive Alert is absolutely one of those games where if you want to experience its strengths, you’re gonna have to learn how to survive through its lowest points. Both its strengths and weaknesses make for a profoundly unusual and intriguing game, but it’s one that is a struggle to get through, so much so that I’m not at all surprised you never hear about it. There’s little information out there about how to play Dive Alert effectively and the game sure as heck doesn’t make it easy to figure out how to play it right. As I talk about the story and stuff, just keep all that in mind; I wanna emphasize that the narrative worked for me and is clearly the most interesting thing to take away, but I also don’t want to get anyone’s hopes too high only for them to come crashing down when they boot it up for themselves and actively have to play the thing, you know?

…Be ready to deal with a whole lot of this

Anyway, Dive Alert is effectively a post-apocalypse story. Sirius B, a star in the sky, exploded and caused significant damage to Earth, so much so that almost everything was wiped out. Some humans managed to survive through the use of submarines and fled to Terra, a supposed utopia run by the AI called Cur Deus Homo that intends to protect what remains of humanity. The catch is that Terra is nearly full, so in order for any stragglers to get in, they need to prove their worthiness by earning an impossibly high amount of points (99,999,999 of ’em!) through completing dangerous missions for CDH or by defeating the endless hordes of robotic “Automen” that populate the ocean. Depending on your version of choice, Becky or Matt is caught up in this all too relatable problem: they rise and grind, doing what they were told to do with the promise of a better life, but no matter how hard they try, the goal posts just keep moving. They’re very capable pilots and take out Automen on the regular, but to repair their submarine after each battle, they need to use the points they just earned! They’ve been at it for so long at this point that it’s all they know; they’ve never even seen another human! If that’s not a struggle we can all relate to in some capacity, I dunno what is. This lack of human interaction doesn’t last long from the player’s perspective, though, because after an introductory battle where your character has to save a curiously large and different kind of ship from Automen, they meet the mysterious and expressive Jun Mihara (presumably named after the Jun Mihara on the development team), which really reignites the protagonist’s motivation to start taking on proper missions for CDH. It’ll be obvious to anyone who has experienced this kind of story about a mysterious utopia that things aren’t as they seem, but the predictability of the “big twist” doesn’t ruin how impressive the story as a whole is.

Dive Alert is unique in that it both feels unfinished and messy while also feeling jam packed with information to process and potential mysteries to investigate. Including the introductory mission, there are only six missions in the game and most of them are more about reading dialogue than actually piloting your submarine. Seriously, the final mission has what feels like 20 minutes of cutscenes, which is wild for a game on the Neo Geo Pocket Color, let alone in general! Despite the game’s short length and certain elements of the plot feeling undercooked – there’s a character called Machio shown in the intro who never actually appears in the game! – it’s admirable how complete the main narrative thread with your protagonist and the central conflict between the CDH and the Resistance looking to overthrow it feels. By the way, both characters go through the same arc and really aren’t very different, so I’m gonna start saying Becky instead just to make things easier since that’s the version I played in full. Also, the two versions thing is entirely unnecessary and underutilized; there are differences that I’ll go over later, but know now that you can just pick one and be fine, this definitely isn’t an Oracle of Ages/Oracle of Seasons situation.

Becky’s naivete is immediately presented to the player through how quickly she buys into CDH’s game, but it’s made clear that it isn’t just to make the plot arbitrarily move along. She’s a kid born into the worst world possible, so she hasn’t had a chance to learn life lessons nor has she ever experienced the joys of friendship or human interaction. It’s only natural that she would cling onto every glimmer of hope she comes across, whether that’s the promise of getting into Terra no matter how obviously ridiculous it is or the idea of being friends with Sally Suez and her lackeys (they have a real Doronjo thing going on) even after they make their Resistance ties clear. Each mission you’re given could be misinterpreted as filler leading up to the climax since only the final one directly deals with the CDH-Resistance conflict, but every single one ends up tying into the lengthy finale. An early, seemingly random battle against a sea monster is actually a test by CDH to see if Becky’s even worth stringing along. A later battle against a giant man-made amoeba from humanity’s past causes Becky to question the world she lives in and wonder about the idea of future generations inheriting the problems of the past, a theme that resonates throughout the narrative and its characters. When her worldview is challenged during the endgame and everything she knows is revealed to be a lie, her mental breakdown is as powerful as it is brief. The struggle is real as she lashes out, but her eagerness to bond with others leads her to making the right decisions and everyone she met along the way doing their part to stand up to their AI overlord. Every single part of the story has some matter of relevance and every character gets a chance to shine, all in just four hours!

A lot of dialogue is shown from the perspective of a character’s cockpit, which gives things something of a Mecha anime feel. The designs of the Guardian enemies introduced in the final mission definitely feel influenced by classic Mecha anime as well

Something in particular I think is worth talking about is your AI handler companion that supports you throughout the game. Serving as both a way to combat loneliness and give the protagonist someone to bounce off of, you’re given a choice at the start to pick an avatar for this guide. As Matt, they’re all girls, and for Becky, they’re all guys. Because I’m apparently a glutton for punishment and love to ruin the mood, I picked Mo-Chu, the only animal companion. It talks like a human, sure, but it does so in a way that sounds like a combination of a Nopon from the Xenoblade games and someone making a bunch of gibberish noises. Mo-Chu still serves their purpose of both informing the player and keeping Becky from questioning her place with an aggressively “Shoot the resistance first, ask questions never” mindset, but man does it become hilarious this way! Having every conversation interrupted with various “Maa”, “Eeep”, and “Yerps” noises makes cutscenes both a chore to read in your head and far funnier than they’re supposed to be. Matt’s comedic option, Leita, is perhaps even more ridiculous. She speaks in a way that capitalizes random letters, she’ll call Matt things like “babE” and “bIG-GUy”, she inserts a bunch of hyphens into words for some reason, and she’ll even say “Mamma Mia!” on the regular. It’s really a sight to behold, but lemme tell ya, I dunno if I could survive an entire game of this! I think it’s best to think of it as a hard mode of sorts; sure, you could pick a normal person for your hero to converse with, but if you’ve got a real sicko streak, you can make every day of theirs an absolute chore as they put up with the most questionably designed AI companion around. Should you regret your choice, it’s difficult to buy your way out of it because the handlers are usually $50,000 each to buy, which is an unreasonably high amount of money even at the end of the game, so this is a choice only to be made by the hardest of the hardcore!

I don’t think I could wish Leita upon even my worst enemy…

All that story stuff’s well and good, but in order to get there, you’ve gotta play, and playing Dive Alert ain’t easy! Combat in this game takes place on a radar map battlefield where your submarine is represented by a little triangle. Every story mission boils down to the same idea of getting to a specific location and/or defeating some number of targets, and to do that, you’ve gotta equip various weapons to defend yourself. Torpedos are the classic, going straight and dealing lots of damage with zero frills, so that’s what you’ll use most of the time, but Dive Alert has a solid number of options for more niche cases. Because you’re using a submarine (duh), you can submerge yourself and get to lower elevations, of which there are four in total. Certain weapons don’t hit straight ahead but rather go up or down elevations. The depth charge, for instance, only hits enemies below you, whereas the mines are used when you’re beneath a target and want to attack it without having to rise and expose yourself. Again, despite the paltry mission number, the game actually does make good on these weapons and gives almost all of them a chance to shine. When you’re fighting the Flying Dutchman ship, if you’re savvy, you can exploit its inability to submerge itself by hiding beneath it and using missiles that’ll track it from below and defeat it without taking any damage. Similarly, when you’re up against the nigh-endless hordes of suicidal Clione in mission five, you can circumvent their whole gimmick simply by rising to the surface and dropping depth charges until they go away because they can’t go to the surface level. When the game tests you with these very specific scenarios, it’s actually pretty cool! Having to fight varied and unconventional foes really forces you to think about the advantages and disadvantages a submarine has in comparison to whatever it is you’re fighting. I have been calling this an RPG after all, so preparation and strategy end up mattering just as much as the level of your sub. Unfortunately, these scenarios are the exception to the rule that is the Automen, and Automen aren’t so fun to deal with!

Changing elevations changes the color of the screen and the music as well, which is a neat touch

Though they’re robot things, Automen are functionally identical to your submarine. They spawn endlessly in every mission, they can pull from any of the potential weapons to use against you, they have access to all four levels of elevation, and they way outnumber you. In a more, let’s say, conventional game, this is no big deal, but in Dive Alert, every fight with them is a struggle. The reason for that is simple: this game is really, really slow and offers zero feedback on most of your actions! Especially early on, your submarine chugs along so slowly and with zero animation, which makes it hard to tell if it’s even moving. When missiles start flying at you, it’s basically up to chance whether or not your slow butt will even get out of the way. It makes sense that submarines aren’t exactly able to fly around and dogfight, but it doesn’t make the game feel particularly good to play, either! Things become even more tedious when you realize that every mission except the last has you spend minutes traveling to a point for the actual mission to begin. In a game as slow as this is, it’s pretty dang boring, and the way it can drain your resources before the actual mission begins ensures that much time will be spent repeating runs to get a good enough start on the actual boss fights. Keep in mind that failing a mission kicks you back to the title screen, so have fun mashing through all the cutscenes to retry the super hard final mission each time!

The compass that’s supposed to guide you doesn’t make getting to your objectives any easier; I thought you were supposed to follow whatever direction it points in at the start, but it turns out you’re actually supposed to orient it north and always go that way. Imagine my surprise when I spent the first hour of the game trying to figure out how to even get to missions! The idea of having to swap between elevations to dodge attacks and hit your foes is definitely an interesting one that makes the combat consistently tense, but it comes at the cost of frequent annoyance. You’re always informed of what elevation an enemy is on, but not when they’re switching elevations, so you’ll frequently waste ammo due to a lack of tells from the game’s visuals. You’ll both be at elevation level 2, you’ll shoot a torpedo, but it’ll sail right through them as their number changes to 1 or 3, and at that point, you begin to wonder if you’re not just better off trying to ram everything to death. You also can’t tell what kind of weapon your foes are using because they all look the same, so you’ll encounter plenty of situations where you think you’re safe on a different elevation only to get slammed a second later by a depth charge or something. As a general rule, the surface becomes lava towards the end because good lord do the Automen just vomit missiles everywhere if you stay on the surface for even just a second!

Would you have guessed that this was a boss fight if I hadn’t just told you?

In fact, I’d go as far as to say that the visuals in combat are one of the biggest things holding this game back. The characters and backgrounds in cutscenes are depicted with absolutely gorgeous illustrations (the general style and vibe feels like it was carried onto and refined in Faselei!, too), but every battlefield looks the same (for admittedly fair and obvious reasons) and every foe looks like the exact same blob. Not only does this make it difficult to tell what type of Automen you’re even fighting (each one has differing amounts of HP and different elevation/weapon preferences), it makes every fight that isn’t a boss feel exactly the same. That’s not even true for all of the bosses – the final boss gets a different icon, sure, but because of how lacking in pomp and circumstance the game is, the fight against it is completely unremarkable. The Automen that tagged along with it ended up being the bigger problem because I took the final boss out in, like, two hits! It’s really a shame how the minimalistic presentation in combat holds the game back because the world they’ve built here is so interesting and with how varied some of the character designs are, it’s easy to imagine a game that offers different, equally gorgeous environments, way more interesting enemies, and attacks that look identifiable from one another.

The submarine designs are really fun and creative, they change as you level them up too

In between missions is perhaps where Dive Alert is most interesting on a mechanical level. Depending on the submarine you picked at the start (you can buy the rest later if you want to swap), you have a variety of stats to worry about across all of your parts and weapons, such as size, density, energy consumption, power, and even noise. You can buy batteries to more efficiently power your sub, you can get engines that’ll make the game a bit less plodding, oxygen tanks can be equipped to help you stay underwater for longer, and there are even items that’ll let you go up an elevation instantly. The game throws all of this at you at once and gives you no idea what any of it does (I assume that’s what the manual was for), but if you’ve played an Armored Core game, you can approach it in much the same way. Most parts are linear upgrades over what comes before them at the cost of being bigger in size, so as long as you upgrade at a pace where the size of your parts doesn’t exceed the capacity of your submarine, you’ll be in good shape for most of the game. Weapons are a bit more complicated because you buy individual ammunition; you’ll have to decide not only what weapons to use for your three slots (if you even fill all three), you’ll also have to determine the exact amount of shots you’ll bring along for each one. The decision making at play is definitely interesting and the way your submarine improves significantly elicits the same dopamine reaction it would in Armored Core, but once again, that pesky minimal mission count gets in the way. Depending on how you play, you may only ever customize your sub a few times and end up completely ignoring much of the parts list. Such a short runtime also doesn’t give the game a chance to go wild with expensive but ridiculous upgrades at the end. Imagine if you could save up for an engine that lets you move around super fast or something? Now that would be a great reward that would make a New Game+ run a whole lot more appealing!

I’ve been going in on how little there is to the main campaign, but there’s actually a bit more to it than I’ve been letting on. Only a bit, though! At the Domus hubs in between missions (essentially checkpoints scattered throughout the ocean), you can take on “N-Missions”, which aren’t really missions in the conventional sense. Kind of a misleading name, I know! Instead, these are really more like free battles or free explorations where you can sail around and fight Automen to your heart’s content, so long as you dock back at the Domus before you die. Fighting even more Automen isn’t exactly the most appealing prospect, especially since you’ll have to use precious ammo to do the grinding, but N-Missions are essential for earning cash to cover said ammo costs, random part drops that can be utilized or sold, and experience points to level up the sub you’re using. You’re not told how much money and experience a kill gets you (this game just hates the idea of communicating information to the player!), but doing a bit of grinding is absolutely essential to stand a chance in the final mission. By playing straight through the main missions, assuming you can win without any grinding, you’ll probably end up at level 2 out of 5, maaaaybe level 3 if you fought a lot of Automen on the way to each boss fight. Level 3 is the absolute bare minimum needed to finish the game, but the final mission is going to be an absolute nightmare and will take you many tries. I would know because that’s how I did it! Each submarine goes up to level 5, which I would assume makes things way easier, but to get to that point would be a really tremendous grind. If you decide you wanna switch to a different sub, it’ll start at level 1, so that’s a whole bunch more grinding to add to the pile. Even in its side content, Dive Alert runs into the same issue – there’s so little meat on the bone and so little substance for a game that expects you to commit hard to its expectations and do everything it takes for even a crumb of progress.

It sounds harsh, but this game’s insistence on making progression as time consuming and/or taxing as possible really baffles me. Was it their way of padding the game out to justify people buying it at full price? Perhaps, but the way they go about trying to add what some would call “replay value” is just so strange. You can grind up your submarine(s) by doing the same N-Mission for hours, but if the final mission is doable at level 3-4, then why bother with the grind? There’s a multiplayer mode, sure, but from what I can tell, it exists just to allow you to trade submarines between versions and battle another player, which is cute, I guess, but I’m not sure that’s terribly useful at all. Unless you’re dying to grind up more subs, anyway! Well, I could see two people getting a kick out of the versus mode briefly, but it’s kinda hard to really rub your progress in the face of another player when they can’t even tell what you have or what you’re doing right unless you directly show them your screen. I of course didn’t get a chance to test this mode, but I can picture it involving lots of shifting between elevations and having attacks miss both players, which doesn’t sound super great! When you beat the game, you can replay it with all your stuff intact, but according to this Gamefaqs guide, nothing changes on subsequent playthroughs, so there’s really no point. If you really enjoy playing the game, then that’s all the reason you need, but I imagine most people will be tapped out by the end because of the difficulty and repetition of it all. Since there aren’t any exciting bosses, dramatic set pieces, or any missions that really feel distinct from one another, it’s hard to relate to the idea of being pulled in again and again.

For any of you detectives out there, I’d love to learn what happened with this guy and why he’s not in the game at all

If you’re like me and the story was the main draw, even the other version won’t satisfy you because the story is the same between the two games. I have no evidence of any of this, but it really feels like this faced development troubles and had its ambitions cut very short. Well, according to this IGN preview, they had trouble developing the wireless multiplayer capabilities of the game and had to strip them from the US release of the game due to a lack of FCC certification, so this game definitely wasn’t easy to make! The IGN preview also claims that the wireless multiplayer in the Japanese version allowed for 64 players and anyone within a 200 feet radius to join, which I can’t verify is true at all, but man, that actually sounds like an amazing idea! It really feels like there was meant to be more game here, between the scant few missions, the sudden difficulty spikes and uneven power curve, the minimal multiplayer features and version differences, and the whole heckin’ character in the intro that just isn’t in the game, and what remains feels like mere scraps meant to serve as the foundation for a much bigger idea. It’s a proper tragedy if you ask me!

If you don’t feel like grinding Automen, you can play this little shooting gallery minigame to earn cash, though it becomes outclassed pretty quickly

I love Sacnoth/Nautilus because the Shadow Hearts games provided me so much joy in my teenage years, so it pains me that this deeply experimental and interesting game is such a miss in my eyes. It’s a truly one of a kind game with a story that’s genuinely impressive for a number of reasons, but the act of actually playing the game was such a chore for me. It was so much of a struggle that I had to delay this post multiple times so I could figure out how to get through it! I always want to champion unique and unusual games because that was kind of the point of starting this blog in the first place, but it’s kinda hard to do that when I can’t recommend them in good conscience because of how taxing they are to play. If you’re a very specific kind of person, say, someone exploring the history of submarines in video games, someone looking for truly unique games, or someone curious about Sacnoth’s pre-Koudelka output, then you’ll certainly find something interesting here. Painfully harsh, but interesting! This is the kind of concept that was perhaps too ahead of its time and in the wrong place as well. I think the Neo Geo Pocket Color is cool as heck, but was it really the best place to try out the whole Submarine RPG thing? I can guarantee you that indie devs of the present day could do wonders with this idea, though. Get some great visuals in there, maintain the strong storytelling, make combat involve a much wider variety of enemies and weapons, give the player more interesting ways to upgrade their submarine, and you’d have yourself an extremely cool game! Not exactly an easy task, but one that I think could really scratch some itches people didn’t know they had, especially in a time where Armored Core can hit the mainstream. Dive Alert may not be the most appealing experience, but its ideas could very well be the foundation for something truly special. I just hope an indie developer discovers it at some point! If you know of any, point ’em this way, will ya?

More Screenshots

Sources:

  • Vysethedetermined2. “Biomotor Unitron Game Sample 1/2 – Neogeo Pocket Color.” YouTube, YouTube, 15 Sept. 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwKhh-KC6Xw.
  • Vysethedetermined2. “Dark Arms: Beast Buster 1999 Game Sample – Neogeo Pocket Color.” YouTube, YouTube, 16 Sept. 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ8kcOMvDTU.
  • Were1974. “Nigeronpa (Neogeo Pocket Color) Part 1 Getting the Workers Test.” YouTube, YouTube, 17 May 2020, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvCsvSJu97Y.
  • Toneman. “Faselei! Neo Geo Pocket Color.” YouTube, YouTube, 29 Dec. 2006, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-9rELc2eHo.
  • Heimdall_Gazzo. “Dive Alert: Becky’s Version – Guide and Walkthrough.” GameFAQs, 29 Jan. 2004, gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ngpc/915799-dive-alert-beckys-version/faqs/28378.
  • Harris, Craig. “Dive Alert, Becky’s Version.” IGN, 18 Feb. 2000, web.archive.org/web/20040622023541/gameboy.ign.com/articles/136/136710p1.html.

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