A Retrospective on Guild 01&02
Looking back on Level-5’s fun and weird 3DS compilation games
15 Jul 2024I’ve been in the mood for DS and 3DS games lately. I’ve got a lot of nostalgia for the handheld gaming era - I miss weird ports that try to condense down big console games, games that have really cool tech that makes you think how they managed that on weaker hardware, and I especially miss the smaller scale games with weird concepts which developers didn’t have to spend millions of dollars and years of development to make. So in my yearning of a bygone era, I decided to do a deep dive on the Guild games on 3DS, which I felt really embodied the weird small scale stuff we never see in the “mainstream” anymore.
Setting the scene
The year is 2012. Somebody That I Used To Know by Gotye is brand new but still being overplayed on all radio stations, every single joke that can be made about the world ending has been made, and the 3DS has finally gained the momentum it needed after a middling first year or so of sales. Video game developer and publisher Level-5 has some hits under their belt like Professor Layton and Inazuma Eleven but it’s probably fair to say they weren’t the absolute powerhouse they would later become.
It’s during this time that Level-5 would release Guild01, a compilation game for the 3DS. It was originally released in Japan in May 31, 2012 as a physical cartridge release. It wouldn’t come to the West until later that year in October, exclusive to the digital 3DS eShop. Guild01 contained four games, each with their own genre and each made by a separate developer. Level-5 followed up with another compilation, Guild02, one year later in 2013. This time, Guild02 only had three games and was exclusively published digitally in both Japan and the West.
Frustratingly, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of insight on the development of either of the Guild games like how the developers were chosen, or if Level-5 gave any direction on what they wanted to see or if it was just a free for all choice. There’s a clear prestige behind the designers of each of the games, they’re all pretty well known developers who weren’t attached to bigger companies (e.g. Square Enix, Sony) at the time. Was the Guild series an intentional choice to help empower those devs make something cool that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to risk? Was it the result of a pitch session and then we only saw the best of the pitches? I guess we’ll never know.
With the history lesson out of the way, let’s get to talking about the actual games.
The actual games
Alright so what I’m gonna do is highlight the main designer for each game and also provide a brief review like I did with my end of year wrap ups last year. I’ve also grabbed some screenshots from Nintendo to help visualise the games.
There’s a lot of text here, I’m sorry. If you want you can skip to the end and see my overall thoughts on the Guild collection but I promise this is gonna be all good writing.
Guild01
Aero Porter
Designed by Yoot Saito - famous for the Dreamcast classic Seaman
I actually played this last year and it’s the only one I didn’t return to for this article. Aero Porter is a puzzle sim game which places you in control of an airport and you have to manage the luggage for the different flights, making sure you get them onboard in time.
Since your airport goes across both screens, you really need to make sure that when you’re choosing to send luggage up or down a track, you’re taking in both views. It’s simple at first but it continues to add mechanics like energy consumption and VIP luggage that needs to be loaded first/by itself. The mental stack of things you have to manage becomes pretty intense and it makes the game stressful but in a good way. It definitely benefits from being on a handheld because you can play a couple of stages on the bus or whatever and stop before you get too stressed. 8/10
Crimson Shroud
Designed by Yasumi Matsuno - famous for Ogre Battle, Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story
Crimson Shroud was the first Guild game I played, although I never got really far in it. I picked it up in 2013 after seeing when I googled “D&D games 3DS” because I wanted to play D&D but thought it was something I could maybe try digitally. Crimson Shroud isn’t D&D but it does emulate the vibe of a tabletop RPG (TTRPG) in some pretty neat ways - story and out of combat action is narrated via text that sounds like it’s from a Game Master, characters and enemies are portrayed as mini figurines that even get tipped over when they’re downed, and there’s some occasional dice rolling that tries to add some randomness to encounters.
It’s a unique take on trying to achieve the TTRPG feeling by leaning into the presentation side of things harder than the mechanics side. Combat wise it really feels more like a standard turn based JRPG with nothing that sticks out too much as being special. Every now and then, a gimmick encounter might start where something like range attacks aren’t as powerful or there’s a fog of war so you’re much less accurate, and this is when the dice rolling tends to come in: you roll to determine how long it’ll last or to see if you can see through the fog. It’s a nice bit of flavour but not really a killer feature.
I like the world of Crimson Shroud and the characters are cool enough as well. The story’s a bit of a let down overall and the pacing of it gets thrown out of whack when you’re forced to spend time grinding combat encounters to get an item drop to progress the story, but for a 10 hour RPG, it does the best it can do. 7.5/10
Liberation Maiden
Designed by Goichi Suda aka Suda51 - famous for No More Heroes
Liberation Maiden is a short and sweet shoot em’ up game. You’re the President of New Japan and you have to protect your country from invaders with your sick mech suit. It’s got a sort of arcade type vibe to it with simple mechanics that are easy to learn and stages that are short but replayable. There’s not too much to say about it mechanically to be honest, it’s exactly what you’d think it is.
It feels like it’s got the most amount of production value of all the Guild games - it’s got anime cutscenes by BONES (probably best known for either Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood or more likely My Hero Academia these days), it features voice acting in both Japanese and English and it’s a killer cast too (Jamieson Price I will listen to you in anything), and also has it’s own vocal theme too.
Weirdly enough this is the only Guild game to get released on anything else, having made its way eventually to iOS in 2013 exclusively in Japan. It also got its own sequel, also exclusive to Japan, in the form of a visual novel written by Suda and developed by 5pb. It’s a strange bit of legacy for the Guild collections, which I guess shows that the developers got to keep their IP and it was more just a publishing agreement than Level-5 going “hey make this kind of game for us”? 6.5/10
Weapon Shop de Omasse
Designed by Yoshiyuki Hirai - famous for being a comedian and very occasional voice actor?
This is the weirdest game out of the Guild01 collection. It’s designed by a guy who doesn’t seem to have any other video game dev history outside of wanting to be a developer when he was younger. He’s done some voice acting for Level-5 before so maybe he was talking about this idea he had for a game? Who knows. It also didn’t get released in the West at the same time as the other Guild01 games, instead coming out in 2014. As far as I can find, there was never any official reason on why it took so long, but it might have been that it’s got a lot of text to translate compared to the other games?
Weapon Shop de Omasse is a rhythm RPG game where you play as the apprentice son in a father-son weapon shop who crafts weapons for adventurers and rents them out instead of just selling them. It’s gone for a comedic tone where every customer has some kind of funny gimmick like a very unlucky samurai who keeps having a hard time at work or a warrior who speaks in French and keeps asking for weapons from the show he watches. There’s even a sitcom audience who cheers, laughs or gasps as conversations play out. I have to admit that not a lot of the humour landed for me, but I’m also willing to bet most of it got lost in translation. At least, I hope it did.
There’s two things you do in the game. The first thing is you craft weapons for customers via a fun but repetitive rhythm game where you hammer the metal in time with the music, following the beat pattern that your dad sets. The better you do, the better the weapon, the higher the chance a customer succeeds in their quest. The other thing you do is wait. When a customer goes out, you can either craft more weapons that won’t ever get used, or you just stare at the faux Twitter feed that gives updates about how their quest is going until it’s done. It’s brutally boring, and the longer you wait around starting at the screen, the worse the game gets. If this was like half the length (4-5 vs ~9 hours), it’d go down a lot better. 4.5/10
Guild02
The Starship Damrey
Designed by Kazuya Asano and Takemaru Abiko - famous for the influential visual novel Kamaitachi no Yoru/Banshee’s Last Cry
The Starship Damrey is a sci-fi horror adventure game where you play an amnesiac stuck in a stasis pod. You remote control a robot who’s on the ship and explore what looks like an abandoned spaceship, trying to find a way out. The game makes a big deal about how it won’t tell you any of its controls and that you’ll need to figure it out for yourself but it’s nothing complicated, and there’s enough in game hinting about what you do that it feels like it betrays that premise.
There’s a couple of brief spooky moments but to me it’s all about the vibe. The atmosphere of the game is well set with the lack of any music and claustrophobic map to navigate. I’ve seen this listed as a “survival horror” game but I really don’t think that’s the right genre for this. The game’s story itself is fine, it feels like it’s a bit more on the pulpy side of SF as opposed to the super scary stuff, and some of the payoffs didn’t land for me. But it’s only like 2 hours, so I’m not overly disappointed. 6/10
Attack of the Friday Monsters!
Designed by Kai Ayabe - famous for the Boku no Natsuyasumi series
Yet another game that’s on the shorter side of things, Attack of the Friday Monsters feels like a nostalgic love letter to childhood, imagination, and 1970s Tokusatsu TV shows. You play as a 10 year old boy named Sohta who’s just moved to Tokyo from the countryside, into a town where heroes fight kaiju every Friday and that gets aired on TV. Sohta adventures around, making new friends and tries to figure out the truth of what’s actually happening in the town.
It’s a very comfy game to play. Finding your way around town, meeting all the people and seeing how all their stories play out is a lot of fun. Everything has this air of childish whimsy that creates an undeniable charm, and the cutesy cartoon graphics only enhance that. I think the only negative is the card (known as “glims”) minigame is pretty repetitive and collecting the cards is a hassle, but you don’t really need to engage with it to have a good time. 7/10
Bugs vs. Tanks!
Designed by Keiji Inafune - famous for being a big fraud Mighty No. 9 and designing some Mega Man characters
This is the most straightforward concept of all the Guild games. You are tanks, and you fight bugs. That’s it, that’s the game.
Alright there’s a bit more than that. You play as tank regiment who were shrunk down during WW2 and now find yourself trying to fight for survival against the bugs. The game is split up into stages where you’ve got a goal to achieve like finding a type of resource, protecting your home base from waves of bugs, saving soldiers who have been stranded etc.
Combat is simple, the boss fights are not very good, but it is fun to see all the different stages you find yourself in while being a tiny little tank. My favourite was the tree level where you can’t move too fast or you’ll fall off, since that added a little bit of movement challenge which didn’t exist otherwise. There’s also basic tank customisation which is good in theory but most parts just aren’t very good so you’ll quickly settle into one or two builds and that’s it.
Honestly the weirdest part of the game is that you play as Germans. You’re never identified as Nazis but bro that’s what you are. Why not choose British forces or even like the Italian army? Why did you choose the quintessential bad guys to play as but also not ever acknowledge that they’re Nazis? Weird shit tbh. 6.5/10
And now for some retrospective thoughts
I had a blast going through all the Guild games and seeing what they were cooking up. I think the coolest part is that a lot of them are just like 6-7/10. They’re imperfect, unpolished experiences but they’re at least trying different things. It’s such a shame that we didn’t see more Guild collections come out, especially since Level-5 only became bigger from here during the 3DS era with the success of Yokai Watch. It doesn’t seem like the games did commercially well so I can understand but also why not take risks when you’ve got the money to spare?
It also kinda blows my mind we haven’t seen something like this pop up in the indie or AA space. I could absolutely see a publisher like Devolver Digital or Annapurna Interactive have a game jam type project where the games come out as a loose collection. Maybe it’s just not something that’s viable with how games are developed these days.
The biggest kicker about all of this is that the Guild games are no longer able to be bought since the eShop has been turned off. You can pirate them on a hacked 3DS or probably emulate them but it’s not easily accessible and that sucks. The digital future has a lot of shortcomings that we still don’t have answers for.
If you have the ability to, I think you should play these games. Maybe not all of them but if any of them sound cool to you, you should try it. They’re perfect bite sized representations of the bygone handheld era and everything that it stood for.