Psycho Fox (Master System)

Back when Psycho Fox was released, it was fairly common for references to Japanese culture and religion to be scrubbed from Japanese media when it came to the West. Onigiri often found itself replaced by hamburgers or lazily passed off as jelly donuts, references to Shintoism were dropped, and Japanese cities were often renamed to be American ones instead. Vic Tokai did not attempt to hide any of the cultural influences found in its Master System platformer Psycho Fox, but strangely enough, it was never released in Japan despite carrying plenty of elements that make its Japanese origins incredibly apparent.

Psycho Fox’s manual tells the story of the Inari Shrines that worship a fox deity called Inari Daimyojin. Foxes with special abilities are made priests at these shrines, but one called Madfox Daimyojin takes control of the shrines and begins sending creatures out into the world to enforce his new rule. A young fox called Psycho Fox, despite neither packing the psychic powers or having the deranged mindset such a name suggests, sets out to stop Madfox, and with the power of the Psycho Stick (which even the manual admits is just a Shinto purification wand with a fancy name) he’ll be able to take on the forms of a monkey, hippo, and tiger to face the challenges ahead. While I don’t believe it should have removed the references to Shintoism, it certainly wouldn’t be hard to do so, Madfox easily working as a generic world-conquering villain and the purification wand perhaps making more sense if it was swapped out for a magical item or potion.

Once you’ve looked past the retained Japanese symbols though, Psycho Fox looks like it’s going to be a pretty typical sidescrolling platformer. To beat most levels just requires getting your cartoon fox from the left side of the stage to the right, with a few levels ending in boss battles instead. Surprisingly, many levels in Psycho Fox are multi-tiered in the same way Sonic the Hedgehog’s early adventures were, meaning you can choose to take a few paths forward. The low route is often dangerous and pretty low on power-ups, but if you can handle the higher routes and not drop down, you can find power-ups at the price of facing obstacles, enemies, or platform placement that makes it difficult to stay on these higher routes. At first this may make the game’s 21 levels feel like they have greater depth and traversing them is certainly more interesting than going down a straightforward path, but Psycho Fox encounters a huge issue in that the screen is absolutely awful at showing you what lies ahead.

Too many times in Psycho Fox you’ll be asked to do things like take a leap of faith forward, this being especially dangerous and prevalent in the upper paths. There is a good chance you might drop down to a bottomless pit below, there may be an enemy ahead who will kill you since you die in one or two hits, and your jumps are momentum focused, meaning some areas require you to have a proper running start to clear the gap and will punish you with a deadly drop if you didn’t. These issues are just further compounded by the fact the left side of the screen is a hard border, meaning you might end up committed to a route that absolutely requires leaping into the unknown. The forms Psycho Fox can take are meant to make navigation a bit easier, and the game does throw plenty of Psycho Sticks at you to give you the chance to swap them around, but outside of the fox form, you swing from incredibly situational to almost a straight improvement. Tiger form is faster than the fox and thus can get the speed needed to clear gaps more easily, and unlike the other two forms it has no major drawback. Hippo form is both slow and has the worst jumps of the group, but it’s the only one that can break blocks, meaning sometimes you need to whip it out to open a path before quickly putting it away again. Monkey form is slower than fox but can jump higher, meaning its useful for vertical ascension but there are few points where tiger couldn’t have just kept on the higher paths by jumping better before an unfortunate drop. If you try to keep monkey or hippo on there are moments you will struggle to proceed since you won’t have the jump distance needed to clear gaps, and it can be hard to tell if that’s the case since sometimes the gap goes off-screen, the destination unclear until you take your leap.

Enemy placement also suffers due to the screen problems. Since they’re capable of killing you with a single touch, you are encouraged to take it slow, but you need speed to clear gaps as well, and you might find yourself running onto a new platform after a jump only to be blindsided by the baddies waiting on it. Some enemies actively chase you, some try to ambush you, and others just hop around dangerously in your path forward. If any of them touch you, you’re dead and thrown back to the start of the level, and while after-level bonus games offer chances to make up for lost lives, the instant kills you can’t see add up over time, making progress forward repetitive, deaths frequently unfair, and the general flow of the game poor. Perhaps as a mercy, most bosses are very easy, but strangely you face almost every boss twice across your journey. A large fly can be defeated by literally standing on the bug spray that hurts him and doing nothing else, the cat boss just requires you to jump on his head at the right times, but the boss that is a few stacked up rings at least requires you to guide its movement around so you can time shots from a cannon right. The final battle with Mad Fox is a bother because of the instant death, but if you’ve fought that far, then you probably have the patience necessary to learn the trick to avoiding his attacks.

In regular stages, enemies can be dealt with in a few different ways depending on if you’ve found certain items. Psycho Fox can jump on enemies to bury them in the ground, requiring extra jumps to truly eliminate them, but for foes in front he has a stretchy forward punch that can damage or defeat most regular enemies provided they’re pretty close. To prevent having to get in dangerously close or jumping into the fray you can find Bird Fly hidden in eggs around the level. Bird Fly will replace your punch when you’ve got him, the player tossing it forward to damage enemies it hits along the way or when returning back to Psycho Fox. It takes a bit for Bird Fly to return, meaning a miss may leave you open, but you can still punch without him. Bird Fly also grants you an extra hit, the player losing Bird Fly if they take damage when it’s on Psycho Fox’s back, but it’s the one way instant death can be skirted around. The eggs scattered around levels can contain other goodies or even baddies, but besides Psycho Sticks, you can also find a straw effigy that will clear all regular enemies from the screen when used. Although its rare you’ll find a situation that seems to require this power-up, if you panic pause when you’re about to be hit, you can save your skin with it. Another item found in eggs are the magic potions that will make you briefly invincible, and for segments with plenty of enemies waiting to kill you, these can be godsends. They don’t protect you from things like drops into bottomless pits so you can’t blindly charge forward, but building up a magic potion reserve can at least make certain situations more tolerable. None of the power-ups help Psycho Fox consistently overcome its consistent flaw with overly punishing outcomes awaiting players when they’re forced to press into unseen dangers though, the game more about memorizing how to proceed through constant failure rather than reacting to the game world.

THE VERDICT: Rather than focusing on its potential for intelligent route optimization through multi-tiered levels and interesting power and form use, Psycho Fox ends up being a game about memorization through constant failure. The game’s awful relationship with screen size means frequent situations where you must blindly jump into danger or end up dropping from the high road into enemies you couldn’t have anticipated. Parts of the game unrelated to the constant blindsiding like the bosses come up short as well, with the few effective elements like the satisfaction of the invincibility power-up coming from the fact you get a brief reprieve from the game’s poorly designed levels.

And so, I give Psycho Fox for the Sega Master System…

A TERRIBLE rating. If you can’t see what you’re meant to be doing in a platformer, you have a recipe for failure. Intelligent movement, fast reflexes, or knowledge of the game’s mechanics will not avail you in Psycho Fox until you just learn the level layouts through trial and error, and the frequency with which ambushes or leaps of faith can crop up ensure the player will be cast back to the start of the game’s levels often. Any unique stage gimmick like ice, conveyor belts, or trampolines add to the frustration rather than shaking up the play in interesting ways all because they contribute to the issues with instant death waiting outside the borders of your television screen. If you did widen the screen to see the trouble waiting ahead many of the issues would be solved, but it still would not likely elevate itself beyond mediocrity because of the underutilization of the forms, the weak design of the boss battles, and levels that were mostly challenging because they had frequent setups to instantly kill unsuspecting players rather than engage them with decent hazards.

Psycho Fox seems relatively well regarded at the time of its release, but artificially lengthening a game with unpredictable deaths and a need for memorization is an archaic game design in a world with so many games that instead encourage you to play them with their fun and interesting content rather than unfair difficulty. Even modern difficult platformers where you do learn from death at least have systems in place to allow for speedy reentry into a level, but Psycho Fox encourages slow play without providing any substantial hooks to justify trying to memorize the right route through levels. Besides, almost everything Vic Tokai tries to do with Psycho Fox is done better by their later release Decap Attack, a game that didn’t need cheap offscreen deaths and has the proper mix of power-ups and level variety to make it truly worth investing time in.