SD Snatcher (MSX2, 1990)

In the late 1980s some madman in Konami decided that slow-paced Blade Runner-influenced point-and-click adventure Snatcher was the perfect candidate to be transformed into a 2D turn-based RPG. SD Snatcher – aka ‘Super Deformed Snatcher’ – is the result.

In 2022 this Japan-only release is literally a footnote to the core Snatcher game – undeserving of even its own Wikipedia page. I figured I’d skim through it in a couple hours, see the sights and move on to something else.

But Konami wasn’t screwing around. SD Snatcher took me about 20 hours to get through, and that’s with various time-saving features you need to make the game playable these days.

Just as in the original you play as J.U.N.K.E.R. (Judgement Uninfected Naked Kind & Execute Ranger) Gillian Seed, tasked with uncovering robots disguised as humans in the cyberpunk Neo Kobe City. SD Snatcher follows the skeleton of this plot, though quickly proves to be very much its own story.

Certain elements are reshuffled, characters’ roles in the story minimized or enlarged, and there’s a whole lot of brand new stuff that only appears here. For example, there’s a huge mid-game exploration of a Snatcher cult that’s taken over a church, much of the finale takes place in a surreal amusement park with Snatchers in disguise as pandas and clowns, and the final boss is an enormous monster skeleton Snatcher. All this stuff rules, and whenever the story zigged instead of zagged I got a little thrill that something new was happening.

And then there’s the downside. The conceit of Snatcher is that robots are secretly infiltrating society and slowly replacing key people. This is theoretically true in SD Snatcher, though you have to question how sneaky this plan is when every inch of Neo Kobe City is crawling with killer robots. These autonomous drones make up the meat of the game’s enemies and you’ll spend most of your playthrough battling them.

The turn-based battle system isn’t exactly bad with its focus on blasting components off enemies to slowly lower their accuracy, armour, and movement, but it’s glacially paced. Even fodder enemies can dance away from your shots and by the time you’re in later levels facing giant metal monstrosities everything starts to painfully drag on.

Fortunately, Retroarch comes with a fast-forward feature, and SD Snatcher on 3x speed suddenly becomes a lot more palatable. Sure the music suddenly sounds like a Game Boy in a washing machine, but that’s preferable to the painful minutes wasted watching slow battle animations.

Sandpapering off the rough away reveals a game with a fair amount of Kojima charm. There are fun fourth-wall-breaking moments, like a puzzle in which you’re trying to see what’s on a cinema screen. Gillian cannot see it in-game, though if you head into a bathroom the screen scrolls up just enough for the player to get the info. At one point you need to go undercover, with Gillian choosing ‘Solid Snake’ as his codename.

We don’t know too much about SD Snatcher‘s development, though a couple of translated interviews from Japanese magazine MSX-Fan indicate that (like most people) Kojima’s first reaction to SD Snatcher was confusion as to how his game would work as an RPG (“I wondered myself why they were developing such a game“). Nonetheless, we know he did directly work on this, with the Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake team being ordered to save SD Snatcher after management realized things were going awry.

There are way too many faults with SD Snatcher to actually recommend it. Aside from the dull battle system general movement (and even navigating the menus) feels sluggish. But deep down there’s an interesting game here and if anyone cared enough to port it to a more capable engine, tweak combat speed, and lower the amount of enemy encounters it could be a retro hit.

Seriously though, who are we kidding? Konami doesn’t show any interest in reviving Metal Gear, let alone Snatcher. And SD Snatcher? We’re betting there are few in Konami who even know about it, let alone care.