Team Innocent is a significant game for a few reasons. First of all it has many classic survival horror conventions, but was released a few years before the genre term was even coined. Secondly, this title has actual gameplay that doesn’t consist of just watching full motion video sequences and making dialogue choices. That may not seem important, but considering the fact that most games on NEC’s PC-FX are visual novels or dating sims it actually is. Because of my love for survival horror, and obscure Japanese video game consoles Team Innocent is a game I’ve long wanted to play. Fresh off of finishing it I’m here to tell you my thoughts. We’re going to take a look at Team Innocent today, and figure out if it’s worth the high cost of entry to play. Let’s get on with the review!
The game begins with a well drawn anime sequence depicting a future where humans have established space stations, and can travel between them easily. The opening story describes the work of a doctor involving messing with genes and creating more powerful humans. He is arrested for his crimes against humanity. What the police are left with is three byproducts of his experimentation. These young girls possess super human abilities, and rather than being put down or re-integrated into society they’re trained as soldiers. When they reach their teens they’re assembled into a three person special forces squad called GCPOSS with the goal of maintaining peace in the galaxy. This squad accepts special missions that might prove too difficult for normal humans. In the beginning you’re stuck playing as just one member of the team but this changes later on.
Truth be told this is far less exciting than it sounds. Team Innocent is firmly placed within typical anime tropes. The girls all wear revealing clothing, and have generic personalities. Lilis is the tallest and most headstrong of the group, Saki is the fearless leader, and Ariel is the typical nerd who does all the tech stuff behind the scenes. One thing that immediately stands out is that there is a ton of dialogue, and most of it is spoken. This means the language barrier is high, and there currently is no fan translation available. I found the best way was to hold up my phone to the screen with google translate, but honestly after a while I stopped doing this. Most of the dialogue is not important, and consists of mere banter between the three. It’s not particularly interesting, nor is any aspect of the story to be honest.
As I mentioned earlier Team Innocent is kind of a survival horror adventure game. It even uses the same camera style as Resident Evil. All of the backgrounds are pre-rendered meaning the camera is static. You walk from one edge of the screen and the view shifts to another scene. The big difference between this and most other survival horror games is that the characters are entirely sprite rendered. This is because the hardware didn’t really support polygons. I actually really like the style and think it goes well with the anime aesthetic. Regardless, when you start the game you have three missions to choose from. Each takes place in a different stage and have a few varying mechanics. At the onset you’re given a list of objectives to complete, but there’s nothing crazy or innovative. It’s a basic ‘reach the end’ structure.
Unfortunately you’ll need a lot of items to move forward. There are plenty of locked doors to discover in Team Innocent, and due to the language barrier it can be puzzling on how to proceed. In those instances google translate while holding my phone up to the screen helped tremendously, but that’s a very cumbersome practice. At least inventory management isn’t an issue here. You have the typical healing items as well as key items, and I never had a problem with having enough space. Unfortunately things are a little difficult to see. I found myself having to press the action button on literally everything that looks out of place, and only half the time did it give any results. Progression is very cryptic even when you’re using a device to translate the text. Team Innocent is unforgiving in that you can interact with things that cause instant death.
And now we get to the combat. This area is what typically makes or breaks a survival horror game. Unfortunately it is not very good here. It takes some time before you even encounter enemies, and when you do, they tend to be cute pink aliens that crawl on the ground. It’s hardly startling, or frightening in the least. There are zombie-like creatures, but they’re surprisingly colorful and just look like a mess of pixels. It’s a bit of a stretch to call this is a survival horror game at all to be honest. Your character has a few options for fighting foes. There’s a punch, kick, and gun with which you can shoot them down. Oddly enough you have to set the command outside of battle, and can only use one at a time. Punching and kicking is largely the same, but the gun is nice if not inaccurate.
Combat is very clunky. You’re basically just using timed button presses to hit foes, and no method seems particularly effective. Pair this with the tank controls and you’ll find it’s not easy to dodge or even retreat. What’s more is the fact that there isn’t any kind of HUD displaying your health. There were times when I thought I was good to go, and then fell immediately when trying to dispatch a monster. Shooting is too inaccurate to be consistently useful, and punching/kicking is clumsy. Team Innocent provides very little feedback to show you’re even hitting them. Sometimes you’ll think they should be about dead only to discover your attacks haven’t been landing. There aren’t a ton of enemies in the game, but whenever I came across one I was annoyed. I realize this is an early survival horror title so I’m cutting it a little slack, but not much.
Team Innocent is a real mixed bag in terms of graphics. For one thing I really don’t like the generic sci-fi anime motif. It’s clear from the art style (especially the characters) that this was aimed at teen boys in the worst way possible. It hasn’t aged particularly well, and the fan service is just annoying. The enemies themselves are laughably bad in design. Surely Hudson Soft should have realized how awful they are. During gameplay the character sprites are kind of neat looking. I love the use of color, and it clashes well with the sterile environments. Unfortunately the animations are bad. They use too few frames, and running is like watching a badly made flip book of the characters. The scaling is also horrible. The music fares a bit better with a lot of ambient sounds that fit everything well. If only the characters weren’t so chatty.
