Dun's PC-98 Reviews

Binyu Hunter



Binyu Hunter is a light-gun style gallery shooter released by T2 in 1995, featuring 4 stages of shooting action, with cutscene story telling and photography-shooting scenes between each stage. During the shooting segments, you control the crosshair with your mouse, with which you can also shoot and reload using the mouse buttons, and you can move your character side to side using the arrow keys (Or, more comfortably for me, the D and G keys), and keys are usable in place of the mouse buttons as well. 




Binyu Hunter plays surprisingly well, considering the computer its on, and that its being ran through an emulator. You can fire at a quick rate, move the cursor quickly, and dodge roll on a dime. Your dodge roll also has a healthy amount of invincibility frames, even when being used against a wall. The game throws enough at you to make this meaningful, too, as enemies fly in quick, and often in high numbers, and while the flow of each stage seems consistent, there is definitely a healthy dose of RNG in exactly how each fight plays out. There are, of course, civilians running about in the middle of the shootout, and hitting them will subtract a fair bit of health. The background environments are also destructible, which usually is just a visual effect, but in this screenshot, that trash can will actually block your shots and can be quite annoying, but 2 full clips into it will blow it up! 



After each stage, your character will get a call for a photo shoot. You get to pick between two ladies, and are given a scrollable image (Imagine two screens stacked atop one another), with which you find your desired spot and snap a photo. Depending on your rank in the previous stage, you can get additional photos (3 for clearing the stage, a 4th for B rank, and a 5th for A rank), and each photo gets more and more lewd, I suppose as a reward for ranking well. This bit of the game is really random, and has nothing to do with the story, but its there. I guess it does give some replayability since you'd have to clear each stage twice to see all the photos. One neat thing I noticed in the credits, is that each lady appears to be drawn by a different artist, all of which are credited. Kinda cool. 



In between the shooting baddies and shooting ladies, there is actually a fairly decent story being told (Albeit, in Japanese, but that's what text hookers are for). Humans have colonized space due to pollution making Earth uninhabitable, but colony-born humans (Which, the start of the game states, is basically everyone now) have much shorter lifespans. A company develops technology to combat this, but it goes awry, either killing the person it meant to save or creating a "Bio-Roid", which then goes around killing people. The lead of this project dies, and the guy now controlling it wants to use the tech for evil, so you are tasked with taking the company down. Of course, this is a 4-stage arcade shooter, so the game doesn't go too far into this story, but there are some twists as you progress that at least show some effort was put in. 

Binyu Hunter is pretty easy to get through, and would probably take the average player about 30 minutes to get to the credits. However, beating the game with all A Ranks is quite challenging. Your rank is determined by how much health you have left at the end of a stage (Shown in colored segments). getting hit takes away a ton of health, 2-3 hits will take you out of A Rank range. Hitting civilians has a similar effect. One thing I hadn't realized until going for A Ranks, was that enemies escaping also takes away a small bit of health! Each enemy will, typically, come on screen to shoot you and then immediately fly away afterwards, and some enemies will just run from one side of the screen to the other, their sole purpose being to damage you by escaping. The first stage is pretty doable, but from there the game gets pretty damn hard, as Stages 2 and 4 are boss fights, with enemies running all about the place, and from stage 3 on the game floods the screen with enemies. 



I was determined to A Rank every stage though. Stages 1-3 have an obvious reward, but the last stage has no photoshoot at the end, and the game's ending seemed like it might be a Bad End (One of the characters practically says this). So after an initial 30 minute clear, I spent about 3 hours practicing each stage to get an A Rank. Luckily, you can save between stages, so you only need to clear each stage once (Or twice if you want all the ladies 5th photo). It was pretty frustrating at times, but I actually ended up liking the game even more playing it like this, and I had a couple genuine fist-pump moments when finally getting a stage done. The final stage was particularly tense, with RNG debris dropping form the ceiling as the boss zooms about shooting at you, and enemies fly out of a hole in the ground to escape the collapsing building (Still damaging you, as they count as escaped). I beat this stage with what must have been a third of one bar in the A Rank range, which amounts to one enemy escaping. 



What did I get for all that effort? Well... the ending screen, which just scans across a table scattered with photographs of ladies from the game, was in color rather than black and white. No secret last stage, no bonus photoshoot. Ah well, the fun was in the journey I suppose. 



Gameplay 7/10: I actually had quite a bit of fun with this game. It controls well, shooting and rolling about the screen feels good, and going for A Ranks was challenging enough without being frustrating. The boss fights can be a little annoying, and the gameplay itself doesn't have a ton of variety, but its a quick enough playthrough that I think those flaws don't have time to bother much. 

Art/Sound 7/10: The visuals are actually pretty nice here, both in its gameplay and cutscene presentation. There are also some really solid music tracks in here, like many PC-98 games the music is probably objectively the best thing to come out of the game. The biggest flaw here is just the lack of variety. What's there is good, but there's so little of it, and despite having 4-5 really solid tracks, you spend the majority of the gameplay bits listening to just one. In a single playthrough this probably won't bother much, but in going for A Ranks that song starts to be less memorable. 

Lewds 5/10: They're there, and its cool that they had a collaboration of artists work on them. I like the idea of using lewds as a fishing hook to get players to play better. It just feels really out of place in this game, very clearly tacked on for sales. Not a huge bummer, but not a huge plus either. 

Bonus Content: This game has a ridiculous Options screen. I'll spoiler it and give an epilepsy warning, but I have to share it because it is so ridiculous, and also so out of tune with the rest of the game. I guess the devs were having fun. 

True, I wasn't quite sure how to call this genre, I guess Gallery Shooters? The first game it reminded me, though its far from the same quality, was Wild Guns. 

Cabal is definitely where I'm more familiar with the genre - I remember the Walmart closest to our town having the machine. Very cool trackball setup, and I even got to play it a couple of times. Since I tend to like those types of games, I should file this one away for sure.

I don't wanna post youtube links in my reviews in case they go bad (I should just make my own vids to do so, maybe someday), but here are some music tracks from Zeta:



Sadly, Nirvana does not have its OST uploaded to youtube. In fact, Nirvana isn't even in the Neo Kobe archive, and it was quite difficult to track down.

For quite a while, Nirvana was undumped. A streamer I've been following for a while across twitch and various forums, Macaw45, shared that he'd been looking for this game on Japanese auction sites for 8 years before finding a copy. Once he did, he dumped it, and had someone help him crack it. It exists on the internet now, but even knowing that, I had a hard time finding it. After playing Zeta, though, I just had to play Nirvana, and so I DM'd Macaw on Discord, and he sent me his dump of the game. He said he is willing to do so for anyone, and doesn't mind if the game is hosted by anyone else, so if anyone here wants to play it and is having difficulty finding it, just let me know and I'll host it somewhere.

Same goes for any difficulty playing these games or games like them. I had to brute-force my way through figuring out how to get these games translated, so I don't mind helping anyone with that if they'd like.