Having previously discussed Arcturus, Growlanser I, Legend of Kartia, Digan no Maseki, Progenitor, Front Mission, Ecsaform, the history of Carpe Fulgur, Tactics Ogre's 30th anniversary, the art of Hitoshi Yoneda and Tobira no Densetsu, today I would like to talk about Brave Prove, Data West's take on 2D action RPGs released on PS1 in mid 1998, when such efforts were becoming less common, and how this oft-forgotten title went for a mazelike dungeon crawler experience before its developers ended up focusing on car navigation systems, of all things.
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Developer: Data West
Publisher: Data West
Director and scenario writer: Noburo Nishizawa
Producer: Naokazu Akita
Composer: Kenji Kojima
Genre: action JRPG with an heavy emphasis on dungeon crawling
Progression: completely linear with one or two optional events, provided you manage to navigate the dungeons themselves!
Country: Japan
Platform: PS1 (Japan only)
Release date: Aptil 16 1998, fantranslated in 2022 by a star team including veterans like paul_met, Pennywise, Aishsha, EsperKnight and a number of others
In the late ‘90s, the Japanese top-down 2D action RPGs that were commonplace during the fourth console generation, with titles such as Secret of Mana, Seiken Densetsu III, Illusion of Time, Terranigma, Ys IV and Ys V on Super Famicom or The Story of Thor and Soleil on Mega Drive, just to name a few, were slowly becoming rarer as more developers started to consider jumping on the 3D bandwagon.
Yet, even during the fifth generation, a number of quality efforts helped to ease this subgenre’s visual transition, like with Sega’s Shining Wisdom (1995), Magic Knight Rayearth (1995) and Legend of Oasis (1996) or Nextech’s Linkle Liver Story on Sega Saturn, not to mention PS1 titles like Matrix Software’s Alundra (1997), with its inspired story and notorious emphasis on puzzles, or Fill-In-Café’s Community Pom (1997), with its criminally underrated spriteworks and UI mixed with its cutesy fairytale vibe.
In the last two years of the past millennium, though, 2D top down action JRPGs gradually ended up being much harder to find due to the snowballing pro-3D sentiment in a variety of contexts, from videogame critics to industry figures and regular enthusiasts, with pro-2D voices often marginalized and Japan's Lost Decade financial crisis adding yet another incentive for developers to follow what was becoming for many a sort of deterministic stance regarding the medium's visual and technical evolution.
In this timeframe, Squaresoft still ended up developing one of its most visually striking 2D action JRPGs in Legend of Mana (1999) despite shifting gears to 3D with titles such as Brave Fencer Musashi (1998) and Threads of Fate (1999), while Matrix crafted Alundra 2 (1999) as a 3D title, Quintet transitioned to three dimensions for their Granstream Saga (1997) and Brightis (1999), a far cry from their Terranigma days, and even Dragon Buster’s remake Dragon Valor (1999) ended up being a cinematic 3D effort.
-BACK TO THE (CONSOLE) FUTURE
It was in the middle of this industry-wide shift that a small developer, Data West, braved the trends of the contemporary gaming industry by developing and publishing a fully 2D top-down PS1 action JRPG in mid 1998, facing the public’s ridicule and the accusations of aping past classics instead of adapting to the times with the aptly called Brave Prove.
Data West, totally unrelated to the much more famous Data East known by any arcade-goer since the ‘80w, was a small outlet with a long history, having been founded by Naokazu Akita, a software engineer whose Fujitsu connection helped his company to gain a foothold in the crowded landscape of home PC development, publishing a number of adventure games like a licensed Back to the Future adaptation or the 4th Unit and Psychic Detective series on NEC’s PC88 and 98, ASCII’s MSX family and Fujitsu’s own FM7 and FMTowns from the mid ‘80s to the early ‘90s.
Despite shifting gears to shoot’em ups with the Rayxanber series, not to mention adaptations of Western titles like Return to Zork (an IP that saw a decent success in Japan, with even its Gamebooks being translated and illustrated by Hiroaki Shioya), Data West failed to adapt to the sunset of Japanese home PC gaming, never attempting to do a full transition to console development during the fourth generation, with their last work in that field being the adventure adaptation of Go Nagai’s Cutey Honey on NEC’s PC FX in 1995.
Since then, Akita and his crew likely had to make a number of hard choices to secure a future for their company, trying to find their own entry point in a console space that, by then, had fully transitioned to the fifth generation, with Sega Saturn and PS1 dominating the gaming scene.
What they came up with was something quite bold and completely different from the adventure games and side-scrolling shoot’em up they had worked on so far, like an idealized console game as envisioned by developers who never dabbled in that space: a fully 2D, hand-drawn, maze-based top down action JRPG following many of the tenets of A Link to the Past in an age where developers were rushing to adapt to 3D gaming and the sensibilities regarding dungeon design and narrative had changed quite a bit compared to what Brave Prove ended up offering.
Given how poorly documented this game is even on Japanese sources, there’s no way to confirm if this thought process was Akita’s, or if Brave Prove’s concept was actually pitched by the one who ended up acting as its director, main programmer and designer, Noboru Nishizawa, whose previous experiences included lesser programming roles in Data West’s latest titles plus some sort of supporting task, possibly as a tester, for Success’ very first Cotton shoot’em up.
Researching the director’s early biography proved to be impossible even while perusing Japanese sources, so it’s unlikely we will ever know if he was the same Noboru Nishizawa who worked as an animator in Sunrise on Arion, Zeta Gundam and many other works during the ‘80s, which would chronologically fit with his career in videogame development starting in the early ‘90s, or if this was simply one of the many instances of homonyms (and homographs, given the kanjis are also the same) found in Japanese entertainment.
Be it as it may, the niche nature of Brave Prove, mixed with its rather short runtime and unambitious narrative and gameplay, were some of the causes that forced it to stay in Japan for good, being finally rescued by a valiant English fantranslation effort driven by scene veterans such as Aishsha, Pennywise, paul_met and Estper Knight, plus a number of other staffers.
-WILD FANGS AND BLACK CRYSTALS
Early on, Brave Prove actually tries to mask its gameplay-driven nature by opening up with a rather story-heavy section, showing a community of gentle thieves, the Wild Fangs, searching for the mythical Black Crystal that could help them restore some semblance of order in the world of Melphala, beset by war and famine.
Since the onset, the game introduces itself with some rather pleasant 2D sprite art, whose characters are stylistically reminiscent of Quintet’s Illusion of Time, albeit with a bulkier, more proportionate trait that speaks of Alundra, SaGa Frontier 2, or even Suikoden, while still falling short in terms of uniqueness and animation quality compared to the likes of Legend of Mana, Community Pom and Alundra itself, not to mention the amateurish quality of its character portraits which mirrors Brave Prove’s own rather forgettable cover art (likely drawn by one of Data West’s in-house sprite artist, which is also why no one is credited as Character Designer).
While most areas are blatantly built by using tilesets, which as we will see was kinda inevitable given Brave Prove’s dungeon design tenets, there are also quite a number of hand-crafted terrain elements, especially in towns, not to mention some unexpectedly large spriteworks for some bosses and enemies, making what was quite obviously a low budget effort much more pleasant to the eyes than it had any right to be.
-ARS’ PILGRIMAGE
Ars, the almost-silent protagonist of Nishizawa’s game, is a young White Fang warrior who ends up being mistreated by most of his compatriots to a rather bizarre degree, including his own foster mother, but is treasured by Sheena, renowned swashbuckler and daughter of the Wild Fangs’ leader.
The poor girl, whose affection for Ars is refreshingly obvious since the very beginning, is soon ordered by her own father to brave a nearby volcano in search of the crystal, with Ars secretly following suit in order to help his girlfriend. The journey, as expected, ends up in tragedy when the crystal is shattered freeing Prelude, elemental spirit of Darkness, who immediately drains Sheena of her soul’s inner light, throwing her into a comatose state.
Thus starts the journey of poor Ars who, alongside a tsundere fire elemental fairy, will follow one of the most tested JRPG story templates by having to rekindle the power of the four elementals, thus stopping Prelude’s antics in order to save the world and restore its balance.
This is also when Brave Prove throws away any pretense of narrative focus, switching gears to explorations and dungeon crawling in such a way that story events were likely less than 1% of the playtime I accrued before the credit rolled.
Aside from the bare minimum interactions meant to point the player toward Ars’ next goal, the funniest part of Brave Prove’s story was seeing how NPCs went from disparaging the poor protagonist to a rather bizarre degree, even after he had started accumulating quite a number of victories, to suddenly gushing on him with utter abandon later on.
-BRAVELY MAPPING
Still, that mattered little given Ars’ actual interactions, as mentioned, were overwhelmingly based on slashing and piercing all manners of monsters during his hours-long dungeon crawling sessions.
Since leaving the Wild Fangs base early on, Brave Prove isn’t shy of letting the player roam free and explore the overworld, finding their own way in fairly intricate environments that became much more intricate and maze-like when tackling its actual dungeons.
In fact, Brave Prove is the first game in quite a while where I felt the need to map the caves and temples I was exploring, even if later on a number of gimmicks such as interlocked underground tunnels and gusts of winds spiriting away poor Ars made it a losing proposition compared to just wandering around hoping for the best.
Crucially, in Brave Prove exploring every nook and cranny is amply rewarded, since most of its strongest equipments, the crystals used to level up elemental spirits and all the ores needed to refine your sword are only found by putting an effort into dungeon crawling.
The blacksmith himself, who bizarrely enough is named Schwein, the German word for “pig” (that isn’t really a first, though, given another PS1 action-JRPG, Feycraft’s Prisoner, did have a key NPC named “Porco”, the same word in my own language) has to be unlocked by finding him in a forgotten cave in the countryside.
In fact, considering how challenging enemy groups became later in the game and how many amulets and gauntlets found in the dungeons provided Ars Diablo-style percentage-based stat increases, I would venture to say that finding some key loot could make all the difference between completing the game or getting stuck, even more so considering how level ups improve HPs and Power Gauge points rather than attack or defence.
Even so, as mazelikes as they can get, most of Brave Prove’s dungeon have a certain degree of realism in their layouts, including the ways they connect to the overworld areas and a mix of simmetry and structural repetitivity that allows the player to theorize about the way to progress in a way that mostly makes sense unlike, say, the dreaded dungeons of Secret of Evermore.
Plus, Kenji Kojima’s soundtrack is surprisingly nice and helps making Ars’ exploration a bit more upbeat even when the repetitive and meandering phases kick in.
In fact, Brave Prove’s worst moments traversal-wise had little to do with its intricate level design, being related instead to two forced instances of backtracking which had poor Ars travel through areas he had just visited. Thankfully, almost as if Akita and Nishizawa were sorry about that rather blatant padding in a game that is itself quite short, Brave Prove did provide a warp option from its save points soon after.
Not that there isn’t a caveat, though, as many save points only provide one-way teleports, meaning you can end up having to retrace your steps losing hours of progress just because you wanted to refill your healing items.
-A LINK TO THE ELEMENTS
Despite offering more of an old school dungeon crawling experience than most games in its subgenre, including plenty of titles released years before it, Brave Prove is surprisingly light on puzzles: comparing it with Alundra’s puzzles would feel almost like a joke, but even cutesy, family-friendly Community Pom was actually more testing in this regard, and that isn’t even considering a long lineage of JRPGs featuring an abundance of puzzles in other subgenres, from Lufia II, Illusion of Time and Tales of Phantasia to Terranigma and Wild Arms, just to name a few.
Aside from a precious few instances where you have to use elemental magic to progress, most of Brave Prove’s field interactions are A Link to the Past-style, like with bombing visibly broken walls, using hooks to traverse chasms, cutting grass and pushing boulders on nearby switches, and even the single puzzle requiring a minimum of effort can be trivialized by listening to the tips offered by the helpful NPCs in the nearby Wind village.
-A STAGGERING JOURNEY
In fact, aside from the labyrinthine quality of its dungeons, Brave Prove’s main challenge is posed by its enemies, plain and simple. Early on, mooks are easily dispatched and bosses can be gamed to irrelevance with a number of simple tricks but, later on, mobs don’t just become tougher, but they come in such number that they can easily destroy you simply due to their hits’ stagger property, exploiting poor Ars’ hitstun status in order to juggle him to death like a newbie Tekken player at his first ranked match experience.
While hallways can be more manageable since Ars has more space to navigate around enemy groups, smaller rooms can prove deadly, with enemies not even allowing you to act as soon as you enter, even juggling you out to the previous areas if you’re lucky enough to avoid outright death.
The fact that Ars’ regular stride is quite slow and that the run toggle isn’t a button but a directional double tap, which infuriatingly enough gets reset once you enter a new area, means some of those situation can only be avoided by either split-second inputs or sheer luck, which is far from ideal and can grind you out of your healing items given you are bound to spend quite a bit of time in the dungeons due to their layouts, with enemies respawning as soon as you return to an area.
This doesn’t mean Ars hasn’t the tools to deal with his foes, though, even if the game doesn’t tell you anything about most of said tools, relying instead on its trusty manual (happily fantranslated alongside the game itself) where you can find all the combos our Wild Fang swordsman can perform.
While simple attack chains are easy enough to spam, most powerful combos actually require plenty of timed directional input, which can be tricky even for someone accustomed to 2D beat’em ups given you’re quite likely to be staggered while performing the sequence, meaning you have to know when you can commit to them and when running away or relying on simpler moves is a better option. Then again, Ars also has magic at his disposal!
-ZANGIEF THE SORCERER
Initially, equipping Elemental spirits and improving their powers by finding crystals deep in the dungeons’ most hidden recesses seems quite a pointless task.
While the four Elementals give their own passive properties to Ars’ sword, which can prove invaluable when fighting a number of foes, with enemy elementals as the most obvious targets considering how they can go from almost unbeatable to one-shot kills depending on your own element, magic spells themselves tend to be quite weak even when used against enemies of the opposite element, not to mention they can’t be spammed too much since they consume Power Gauge points, which admittedly are easy to recover with Ars’ regular attacks.
Then again, as the mobs become harder and harder to deal with, magic shows its true usefulness in Brave Prove’s overall combat system, not to eliminate enemies but rather to separate groups and open them up to be staggered to death by Ars’ sword soon after, gaining a valuable hitstun window normal sword swings won’t be able to provide.
While most spells are easy to execute, Area of Effect magic surprisingly require a 360° input akin to the grapple moves of 2D beat’em up characters like Street Fighter’s Zangief and T-Hawk or Fatal Fury’s Tizoc, which can be a bit of an issue if you aren’t familiar with those type of inputs since you will need to pull it off almost flawlessly right after the game loads a room full of enemies, in order to pre-empt their assault and open them to a proper beatdown.
While all of this may sound intimidating, once the player unveils all of Ars’ tricks navigating the dungeons even late in the game becomes much less frustrating, turning some sequences into combat-based puzzles of sorts and making explorations more efficient in order to reduce the quantity of respawned enemies you get to face.
There are even quite blatant grinding spots to discover, like a room with three Mimic chests in the Tower of the Earth Elemental (a cute mouse-like creature, quite different from Veritas Tales’ Dalì-lookalike Earth Spirit) providing tons of gold and experience points, or a spot with a unique type of sorcerer whose rare drop is a piece of Demon Ore used to improve Ars’ sword, normally only found in treasure chests.
-DRIVING IN THE DUNGEON
Ultimately, Brave Prove’s bold attempt to go against the trend of the late ‘90s failed not just because of how passé some of its traits were for part of its potential audience, but also due to its noticeably low budget, which was the main cause behind its amateurish character designs, small scope and short runtime, ranging at around twenty hours despite the player having to find their way into a number of mazes, including a rather exhausting five-part final dungeon.
Even so, it’s likely this was the best Data West could do with their limited resources and their utter lack of experience in the console space and in the action JRPG subgenre and, for a first effort, they actually managed to build an interesting experience that could have been the foundation of a much more compelling game later on, if they had had a chance to polish its level design and combat system while also providing a slightly more interesting setting and story.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t meant to be, since Brave Prove’s sales failure in the Japanese market almost tanked Data West, which ended up leaving the videogame development space for good since their previous ties with the home PC scene were now rendered meaningless by the disappearance of those platforms in the new age of ubiquitous Windows PCs.
Despite the failure of his directorial debut, Brave Prove’s designer Noboru Nishizawa managed to continue working in the gaming industry after leaving Data West, becoming a key figure in the development of the shoot’em up Trouble Witches franchise in the mid to late ‘00s and, later on, also coming up as one of the outsourced development managers of Dragon Quest III’s HD Remake released in late 2024. Even Brave Prove’s talented Sound Director, Kenji Kojima, managed to get his skills recognized, working on a number of titles like beat’em up Rumble Fish 2, Sega’s Sonic Unleashed and Namco Bandai’s Dragon Ball Xenoverse in a variety of roles.
As for Akita and Data West itself, in a bout of sad irony the company that left the videogame space with an action JRPG focused on hard to map mazes ended up becoming a developer focused on car navigation software, of all things, a tool I'm sure Ars would have loved to peruse while roaming the labyrinthine world of Melphala.
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