Not all kusoge are born bad; sometimes a decent game actually becomes a kusoge during the localization process. Ironically, this most often happens when a publisher sets out to make a thoroughly foreign game more palatable to the audience for which it is being translated. Mobile Light Force 2 commits just about every sin of localization imaginable, and the result is as personality-free a video game as you’re likely to find, if not an incompetent one.

The history behind Mobile Light Force is pretty convoluted. The first game bearing that title was released on the PS1 by publisher XS Games in 2003--nearly three years after the PS2 was launched. The game was actually a localization of Gunbird, a shooter developed by Psikyo which was already almost ten years old by the time XS brought it to the U.S. The localization was quick and dirty, excising the game’s plot entirely, probably in order to keep costs down by minimizing the amount of translation that needed to be done.

Mobile Light Force 2 was released on the PS2 in the very same month, with the very same cover art (which gives the impression that the game is a third-person shooter starring a trio of Charlie’s Angels knock-offs), even though it is completely unrelated to the first Mobile Light Force. MLF2 is actually Shikigami no Shiro, or Castle of Shikigami, a bullet-hell shooter developed by Alfa System--not Psikyo--and originally released in 2002. Once again, XS’s localization was less a translation than an amputation, removing game options, renaming some characters, and worst of all, once more dispensing with the plot entirely.

The problem with that is that what sets the Castle of Shikigami series apart from other bullet-hell shooters is not so much its gameplay as the fact that each playable character has a unique storyline, including dialogue that often sounds like a crazy fever dream (even in the Japanese version, according to Hardcore Gaming 101’s article on the series). Take that away, and you’re left with a pretty average shooter. It does at least have a couple of fairly unique features that survived the localization. Each of the five playable characters has unique bullet patterns, charge attacks, and bomb attacks. More important is the Tension Bonus System, a risk-reward mechanic that raises the attack power of your shots based on your physical proximity to enemy fire.

Unfortunately, Mobile Light Force 2 goes out of its way to put players off from ever reaching the gameplay with an exceptionally amateurish presentation. The game actually starts to load up the original Shikigami no Shiro opening cut scene, and the title (in Japanese) even appears on the screen for a moment before a hideous digitized version of the Mobile Light Force box art fades in to hide it. You might be reminded of a similar gag in the credits of Death Proof, except that here it’s not supposed to be funny.

 

Despite removing all traces of story and dialogue, XS did add some new English voices for the bosses, but it sounds like they did so by using a text to speech program with a robot voice setting. Castle of Shikigami wasn’t a gorgeous game to begin with, and this presentation makes it seem exceptionally drab.

The worst part of all this is that Castle of Shikigami is a pretty good game, and if XS had cared enough to truly localize it, they might have had a cult hit on their hands. Instead, they went at it with a hatchet in order to get it out the door as fast and cheap as possible. They did better by Castle of Shikigami 2, but fortunately had nothing to do with Castle of Shikigami 3, which got far better treatment from Aksys Games. The lesson is that presentation and localization are vitally important, and can even make the difference between a solid release and kusoge.