Artifacts of civilization are everywhere. In addition to flamethrowers and other military weapons, you can pick up metal swords, armor, and boomerangs.
Instruction booklets for different ports include contradictory details about the story. One describes the setting as the city of N’Maqqok on the planet UGC2750+B Gamma, among the ruins of the Tecohti civilization. Another sets the game in a far-future Earth after the soldiers from the first game fly a plane into a mysterious storm.
But these may simply be attempts to make something up for English-speaking audiences. The arcade version seems to be silent, other than the taunting words of that floating head and the vague text at the end.
This game’s surreal environments work especially well for players who are accustomed to walking around in normal-looking JRPG worlds. Even if what you see turns out to be a corrupted version of one of these normal worlds, the effect remains.
And, of course, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop music also helps build atmosphere.
I don’t know. A sphere is often wholesome or artificial, so seeing it get broken up by organic cracks contrasts excitingly. So maybe it’s just repeatedly evoked independently, or maybe there’s some anime like Laputa with a distinctive scene of a ball suspended by roots, and everyone’s riffing of that.
edit: I mean like how all the floating ruined castles in video games tend to point to their designers having watched Laputa.
edit: In the case of a plant with a weirdly spherical tuft, I would bet they got it by exaggerating the idea of an “iconic tree”
Evidence suggests that European artists who were aiming for lush realism instead of abstracted cuteness would go the other direction and make their trees DISGUSTINGLY GNARLED, which usually worked against them.
I like the look of those Valis games. I’d seen the NES and PC Engine versions before, but they never struck me as particularly noteworthy. Some of the messy, expansive areas in the FM-7 and MSX versions, however, are quite appealing.
Another game that had a nice, alien feel to me was Spiderbot (also known as Arac) on the C64. You control a robot that goes around capturing wildlife to analyze them and improve its own design.
I’m not sure if this counts, but the looping 2d space and heavily tiled backgrounds of Metal Storm always strike me as otherworldly. But only in motion, I guess.
