King Salmon: The Big Catch (Genesis/Mega Drive)

King salmon is not only the largest type of salmon found in North America, but many also consider it the most delicious and most valuable salmon available in Pacific waters. Also known as chinook salmon, it’s little surprise many anglers head up to Alaska and Canada in the summer to try and snag some. Focusing your Sega Genesis fishing game on catching only a single type of fish might not be able to use the same type of justifications for its selection, but King Salmon: The Big Catch at least picked a popular fish if they were going to focus solely on a singular species to catch.

The process involved in catching king salmon is same across the game’s four fishing competitions. Heading out in a personal boat, you’ll first find yourself looking at the current fishing area of choice, it either being Kenai River or the waters around Vancouver Island depending on the stage. Your initial objective is to find a place where the king salmon can even be found, the player driving their boat around and pressing a button until they find a suitable spot. Now with a closer view of the action, you need to watch for shadows in the water and try to position your boat so you can troll with your lure. Trolling involves a fishing line dragging behind your boat, this specific approach to catching fish meaning you have to get close to the schools and try not to spook them away with your vessel’s movements. This early part of setting things up is fairly simple and while you won’t always be guaranteed a bite, you can find spots swiftly enough and get to trolling so that you’re not often left waiting too long until something starts nibbling on your line. There is the minor threat of other fishing boats possibly colliding with your vessel if you aren’t careful, but unless you hit a lot of them it won’t impede your work much and at worst you may just have to let a nibble go before you hook a fish so that you aren’t crashed into.

Once something is taking some interest in your bait, a small window appears in the lower left showing your fisherman, his line bobbing a bit and the player needing to press up with the right timing to hook a fish for the real action to begin. Once a fish is on the line the screen changes again to a top down view of the fish far out in the water, depicted at first as a shadow pulling on your line. From here a simple but sometimes challenging struggle begins as you need to account for a few factors. Reeling in will draw the fish towards you, but if it’s fighting too much you’ll want to pull your line taut to hold it in place until it has lost some of its energy. Wrestle with the fish too long without breaks though and your own stamina begins to wane, the risk of a line break or the fish swimming away to safety increasing if you don’t find your moments to let your fisherman’s fingers rest. You’ll be pulling up a lot of fish over the course of the game so many of these fights to pull in the fish are made to be over quickly, but the ones with more energy and likely more value can have unique events occur during the battle.

Sometimes your reeling in will be paused as a new consideration comes up. The fish you’re going for has likely taken some sort of action to try and break free, things like jumping out of the water, diving deeper, or heading towards another boat’s propeller requiring a response from the player. You’ll be given a few choices in a menu for what your response will be, and there’s a limited amount of logic involved in how they might unfold. Pick the right response and the fish will stay on the line fine and even be exhausted from trying to gain the edge, but sometimes that same response might instead break the line or lead to it getting further out. There are a few responses that are a bit more defeatist, things like letting the fish dive deeper without fighting it almost always going to lead to it pulling out more line but at least you won’t lose the fish like the gambles with the others. These events aren’t so bad though because of how quickly you can head out and try to get another fish if one does break away, and considering having a lack of fight does eventually become a problem for the salmon you’re after, having this shake-up allows for some complications that ensure the fishing process never becomes too basic or practically an automatic win.

One reason the king salmon fishing starts to lose some of its luster over the course of the game is a level up system. When you start in the first area near Vancouver Island fishing for chinook salmon in the open ocean, you will find the fish put up quite a fight. The king salmon aren’t the only salmon in the area so sometimes you pull one in only to learn it doesn’t count towards the competition, but it does build up some experience for the player so that they can slowly become stronger and more capable at pulling in fish. There are dog sharks that sometimes snatch up the fish on your line and reeling one in has no benefits, but it does at least make use of the underutilized aspect of being able to see the fish more as it is reeled in so you can cut it loose to avoid wasting time on a shark. The other salmon types in King Salmon: The Big Catch look identical until they’re out of the water and on the weighing scale, and while the manual says the fish fight differently, it is mostly to an imperceptible degree save for a limited case later in the game. Having these salmon that don’t count towards your total for the competition does mean the game can throw fish at you regularly enough but still making having the highest total weight across all king salmon catches for the day a bit more difficult, but the process of pulling in salmon could have been made more interesting if there were apparent clues to use and you could decide if you want to spend time pulling in a different species just for the experience points.

The game’s first fishing stage is a decent introduction, there being plenty of fish and more importantly there’s still some fight in the salmon you need to pull in. At your low starting level you might see your line break because a king salmon pulled too hard and you didn’t pace your reactions well, this being a promising start even if it’s a bit easy. Level 2 is a rough one though, the trip to the Kenai River leading to shifts that don’t work in the game’s favor. River fishing is a bit different in that the current requires you to keep your boat moving at all times to fight it and keep your lure near the fish properly, but this isn’t much of a complication. In the ocean fishing you have multiple lure types and depths to try and fish at to suss out what might work best for attracting big chinook salmon, but the river only gives you midstream and riverbed options for depths and fewer lure choices. They don’t seem to have much effect either, but there is at least still present the line length consideration since keeping your starting line shorter means it might be easier to pull a catch in but having it start further out means it will likely tire itself without being at as much risk of triggering a mid-battle event.

The simplification of play on Kenai River is not the biggest problem with level 2 though. Instead, it’s that king salmon in general become unusually rare in King Salmon: The Big Catch for this level only. With few options to change up how you pursue them, Kenai River’s competition becomes a bit of a slog as you keep pulling in other salmon types. This section of the game almost seems to exist for grinding purposes, the player needing to pull in every salmon to have a hope of catching a few king salmon to at least reach one of the top three spots to move onto the next fishing contest. The salmon that aren’t kings though will still give you experience, and you’ll slowly build up more strength and stamina as well as technique, this stat referring to how often the events will work out in your favor. However, by giving you so much additional power, the act of fishing in Kenai River starts to lose its oomph as most fights become fairly easy and more a matter of hoping it’s finally a king salmon on the line once it’s reeled in.

If you lose the fishing competition you can start on the last tournament you entered by way of a password, this helpfully stored under the Continue option unless you turn your system off. Building up your abilities in Kenai becomes a bit of an inevitable part of progressing unfortunately, the river already having fewer unique fishing spots than the ocean and if the weather for the day is poor you might as well just surrender immediately since your king salmon haul is not going to be satisfactory. Once you’ve pushed past this ill-conceived second contest though, a salmon derby back at Vancouver Island’s waters injects a bit more life into things. You’ll likely still easily pull in fish due to how much you’ve grown from repetitive river fishing, but it’s a relaxing enough follow-up. Funnily enough though, for the final level, you head back to Kenai River for what might be the best part of the game as the focus of the fishing turns from just trying to get as many king salmon as you can so they add up to the highest weight to only wanting to get a single record-breaking king salmon.

Kenai River is actually the real world location where the biggest king salmon ever caught have been reeled in, so it’s an appropriate setting for this final challenge. Being back in the river might be a bit scary at first, but finally there is a way to tell apart your quarry from the less valuable salmon since if you use the special new Kenai lure, the king salmon you want to catch to break the world record are major departures in temperament and difficulty from what you face elsewhere. These record-breaking whoppers will not go down without a fight, and these nail-biting confrontations are surprisingly tense. Each new event that pops up puts you on edge as you likely already invested a lot of time reeling it in and trying to avoid giving it any ground, but soon your stamina will wane, the alarm for a weakening line starts to blare, and you have to try and find a safe way to cool off while the king salmon fights for its life. Not every battle had to be these riveting conflicts between man and fish to make the game entertaining, but the king salmon in this last contest show the reeling mechanics do work very well when the proper pressure is applied, King Salmon: The Big Catch testing your ability with exciting fights that are far better than anything you’ll find in your first trip to Kenai.

THE VERDICT: The first and last fishing contests in King Salmon: The Big Catch show the promise inherent in the game’s fishing mechanics, the early trip to Vancouver Island’s waters simple but asking for attentive and balanced methods while the record-breaking king salmon you gun for in the final contest put up the kind of fight that really tests your wherewithal and how you handle a tough situation. Unfortunately, the first trip to Kenai River ends up a slog due to stingy king salmon distribution and it ends up providing too much experience, your high level making the return trip to Vancouver Island’s waters a bit easy. For the most part the fishing is still sound and has its enjoyable moments, but the second contest drags things down and makes the overall experience less likely to hook a player.

And so, I give King Salmon: The Big Catch for Sega Genesis/Mega Drive…

An OKAY rating. The enormous king salmon found in the record-breaking contest do so much for the game’s energy and thrills but unfortunately Kenai River provides both the game’s highs and lows. Admittedly, it’s not just a matter of that first Kenai River trip having a low king salmon population, as there are underfed elements that could have overcome this issue. The lures and fishing depths could have been a more present consideration and not thinned down for the river stages, the salmon could have been noticeably different in behavior and appearance so you can better judge if you have your intended quarry on the line, and perhaps most of all, the level up system feels like it could have been left out in favor of having fish in certain areas having set strengths to add a clean difficulty curve. Rather than keeping you trapped in the Kenai River until luck swings your way, it could have focused on making the hunt more involved and engaging, the player’s performance more important than the numbers they’ve built up by reeling in other species of salmon. Maybe it could have kept the improvements to technique since the events allowing you to tip the scales more in your favor still wouldn’t invalidate that dread you might feel when a king salmon is so close to being reeled in and one pops up asking if you want to take a risk, but the substance of the fishing should have remained in focus rather than a supporting system. That weak and overly long river trip extracts its toll but it doesn’t kill some of those early moments fighting for a good king salmon or those final battles to reel in record-breaking whoppers, both remarkably effective within the systems as they exist.

King Salmon: The Big Catch redeems itself after nearly tanking its enjoyability with the first river trip’s needlessly long chinook salmon hunt. The fishing design is perhaps still squandered even if you overlook that first Kenai competition, because while you get a few good battles, the process of finding and catching king salmon could have benefited from being more involved and require more thought to succeed. When you have some kings on the line either early or late in the experience though you can have a good time, but perhaps King Salmon: The Big Catch’s focus on a single fish species was a bit of a sign the game wasn’t feeling too ambitious with its design and thus it thrills aren’t abundant enough to make this fishing a trip a sure winner.