Game Thoughts: Jade Cocoon
Jade Cocoon is one of those playstation games me and my brother rented a lot as kids, but never got very far in. Even with the advent of emulators, and even having a physical copy in my PS1 collection for years, it's been a title that I struggled to progress very far in.
Until now, apparently!
Jade Cocoon is a strange little playstation game that pulls from a lot of things I love. On paper it's Nausicaa's visual identity, Princess Mononoke's vibes, and Pokemon monster-catching with dynamic monster fusing mechanics. The opening sequence and character designs are by actual Ghibli animators (though they only animated the opening sequence, much to my disappointment), and there's 175 unique monsters to collect and fuse!
But holy shit did they drop the ball on this. 175 monsters is much less exciting once you realize they have randomizer-quality names like "Radoimel" or "Rugdogle" and basically share 8 general shapes and a set of vomit-inspired textures. Additionally, after some genuinely interesting (though slightly hidden) story beats the whole things ends up being pretty flat by the end.
The game has you playing Levant, a small town's soon-to-be young "cocoon master" who's father was the previous cocoon master... but he disappeared. In order to become cocoon master you need to marry a Nagi Maiden and go into the forest to cocoon up some poorly designed monsters then bring them home for the missus to purify (which is an extremely painful process for her, but cocoon masters gonna cocoon).
The gameplay is dogshit, I won't sugar coat it. The battles are boring, the systems are buggy and poorly designed, and the fusing system is pretty pointless. The vibes are immaculate, however. The music perfectly captures the scenery, the pre-rendered backgrounds are cool, and the setting pulled me in.
It turns out there's a lot I missed as a kid playing the game, and most of it happens in the static hub-town in between your silent journeys into the forest. The characters have a bit of meat to them, your mother and wife are having difficulty with one another as you piece together what happened with your father, you can listen in on villagers and hear them slowly turn on the mysterious Nagi folk within the village. There were layers here -- they were going for something and they nailed it, even though it was delivered in dialogue from villagers who basically never move, and the dialogue has no bearing on gameplay.
After a certain point in the story shit hits the fan and the developers decided it was time to take away the only interesting part of the game so you could focus on that fine gameplay, after which you replay three forests you already visited with zero changes except there's different monsters and bosses creatively named things like Fire Boss and Wind Boss. Then you find your dad, kick his ass, and jam out in the forest together on your instruments and tying the story up with some random bullshit.
Funding clearly ran out after the first act.
I want to stress how good of a time I had with that first act, however. You can taste the ambition in it. It felt like Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke -- they nailed the clashing of innocence and dark undertones and the conflicts of man vs man and man vs nature. I didn't mind grinding through the forests if it meant I could come back and see what dialogue changed and whether the old man at the graveyard had new lore to drop.
More than anything I feel relieved to have beaten it. This is a game that's haunted me for years -- one of those title that you boot up and get through the first 2-3 hours for the 100th time and quit again.