Griffin (Switch)

In 1991, a humble little tank game called Griffin released on Game Gear exclusively in Japan. That could have been the end of its story, but we live in a beautiful time where more and more, gaming history is viewed as something to keep with us and make more available. Shinyuden’s ongoing efforts to bring Japanese exclusive retro games to the rest of the world means even a little game like Griffin gets to live again despite its small size and limited legacy.

When you prepare to play Griffin on the Nintendo Switch though, first you’ll be greeted by a newly made menu that does feel a bit like it was made for a game of greater scope. There’s a jukebox where you can listen to the game’s music, but it only has five songs in total and most are short loops, although the main theme is at least good enough to be worthy of such easy access. You can go check out the gallery which includes a similarly small set of art, although having a full scan of the manual is a nice touch even if it is in untranslated Japanese. This does mean the game’s plot isn’t really presented to the player outside of the descriptions on digital storefronts, but it’s a fairly straightforward one. The Griffin is a special battle tank developed to keep pace with hostile neighboring countries, one of which quickly proves the developers were right to be worried as the engineer behind the Griffin is kidnapped. The engineer’s granddaughter ends up being the one to step up and pilot the Griffin on a rescue mission, and while we never get much of a good look at the grandfather, the young heroine will make a fair few appearances in art you get as a reward for clearing stages. While a bit like pin-ups, they’re not that risque, her futuristic outfit certainly showy, but the game’s T for Teen rating feels a bit high, especially since the tank fighting action doesn’t exactly get bloody either.

Once you start your rescue mission, you’ll find yourself driving the Griffin tank through a forested area and pretty quickly realize there’s no external pressure that requires you to keep moving forward. You’re free to advance at your own pace and enemies will appear in set areas when you reach them, Griffin ending up a game about pressing ahead carefully and responding to what you see ahead. The Griffin tank’s default weapon is a fairly quick but standard shot that will fire in whatever direction your tank is facing, the game’s player-guided pace meaning you can often spot an enemy position and try to angle yourself just right to try and take them out safely. Naturally, not every foe is something simple like an entrenched turret, enemy tanks able to barrel towards you or move about on patrol, and since you can’t go beyond the bottom border of the screen, when something like an enemy plane comes in for a bombing run, you quickly need to scramble to get out of its path. However, your vehicle also packs two alternate firing modes, the player able to pause and swap out their weapon. A lobbing shot will let you launch the shot up and over any barriers while a special weapon fires an explosive bullet that can harm things in an area. While pausing to activate it does feel a little slow, it also means these otherwise very useful alternatives don’t become so useful they trivialize the foes they’re good against, the player needing to take that extra time and experiment to see if they will work making them a feel bit more clever for realizing a weapon’s value versus just doing it in an instant and barely even registering the danger they just overcame.

The Griffin also packs bombs that can be used in a pinch to deal damage to whatever might be in front of you, but they also serve another purpose. Despite having a big health bar on the right side of the screen that usually can handle enemy fire, actually making contact with enemies can be quite deadly. While it’s likely they’ll die in the collision as well, having a foe ram into you can shear off a good chunk of your life bar, and the last level in particular includes little flamethrowers that can easily kill you if you don’t get the gaps in their timing down. However, fire off a bomb, and you’ll get temporary invincibility that can save you from lethal contact, but bombs are a limited resource. Every now and then special transport vehicles appear you can shoot for power-ups, these usually being things like bombs or rather generous health refills as well as power-ups for your vehicle’s three weapon types. While you don’t get to pick which weapon gets the boost, picking up the power increases make the weapons much better in battle, although losing a life reduces you back to standard power despite placing you right back where you were when you died. Your strength isn’t often too much of a problem when facing standard enemy vehicles in the main portions of the game’s four unique levels, but bosses can be harder if you lose your boosts because they fire off more attacks and move more quickly. They do mostly have simple patterns to figure out and often involve you destroying their weapons so they get easier as the fight wears on, the bosses at least a decent challenge in a game that can otherwise feel like it’s rather easy and not even diversifying its levels too much.

Level 3 is the exception though, because while the Griffin normally serves as a tank, for that stage alone, you get to take off into the air. Unfortunately, the shift to flight also comes with a shift to a weaker gameplay format. Enemies will now fly in at speed and often disappear off screen before you’ve had much time to fire on them, the flight stage actually feeling more like you’re better off avoiding trying to kill anything. The threats the flying enemies pose aren’t too great either and they whizz past so quickly you almost wonder if the only threat they were meant to pose is being an obstacle to bump into, although at least the stage’s boss fight slows things down to a more manageable skirmish where you aren’t just watching enemies go off-screen before they can act. The flight stage isn’t a very good attempt at play diversity, and perhaps tellingly, it’s left out when you beat the game’s fourth stage and are sent back to do a second run through to see the true ending. While forcing the player to replay the game might sound unappealing, Griffin is a game that might not even take a half hour to clear otherwise, and there do seem to be little changes to enemy placement on the repeat runs through Levels 1, 2, and 4. Considering you’ve also figured out some trickier foes like the helicopter miniboss by then, the extra time playing Griffin isn’t to be resented even if an adventure with 7 unique levels would have been preferred.

In fact, one reason the second time through doesn’t really sting at all is because Griffin isn’t a very difficult game. As part of this rerelease, there are added options to make saves at any point in the adventure, enable cheats like infinite bombs and lives, and even rewind the gameplay to an extent. The rewind does seem to sometimes glitch out a bit if you do it too quickly, the game saying it’s rewinding while play is actually continuing on like normal if you trigger this issue, but it’s not something you’ll probably see if you play the game normally. Part of that is because rewinding or relying on save states isn’t really necessary to clear Griffin, because beyond early encounters that teach you how dangerous something like the flamethrowers are, you can usually keep up with the game’s low difficulty level fairly well. Such options are certainly not bad to have, but the low difficulty level already made it a pretty approachable top down tank shooter and even getting a game over hardly impedes you when the general experience can be cleared in so quick a time.

THE VERDICT: Griffin is a very simple tank game, and while that makes it pretty approachable, it also means it’s quite unexceptional. The bosses pack a bit of a punch, but otherwise pressing forward isn’t opposed very well by the game’s small stable of enemies. The flying level feels like it was thrown together with little thought, and while your three weapons and bombs add some options, it’s not enough to add truly appreciable variety to the affair. For the most part Griffin’s stages are harmlessly mediocre in the way early game levels can sometimes be, but considering it’s only got the four stages, it ends up an unfulfilling little adventure despite all the simple but nice options this rerelease added.

And so, I give Griffin for Nintendo Switch…

A BAD rating. Griffin’s flaw is it just never took off, although technically the Griffin tank does take off and that ends up being the one part of the game you can point at as being outright bad. One out of four levels being a rough experience is definitely one of the main reasons this game can be written off as serviceable at best, but the regular tank stages also are in need of more exciting encounters, only the boss fights really feeling like they push you to do much. As nice as it is to realize one of your extra weapons can make a situation easier to overcome, it’s not like you’re truly outfoxing a dangerous foe, you’re just finding an excuse to use your otherwise underutilized toolbox to avoid a situation that was a touch testier than the usual quick encounters. Griffin having you replay the three regular stages does feel like it should have taken the chance to really crank up the difficulty some, but instead, the adventure feels rather slight and it’s hard to say there’s a good reason to search out this game specifically. It’s not as creative or varied as fellow handheld tank game Trax but it’s also not a barely functional wreck like Tank Command over on Atari 7800, but also, if not for the engineer’s granddaughter appearing in the post-level art, it would be very easy to forget what little this game even features.

The extra menus added to Griffin for its rerelease 34 years afters it Game Gear launch does feel like a little too much for the humble material that Griffin provides and those menus are surely seeing use elsewhere, but it also brings to mind the idea of a retro game collection. Griffin was part of a set of nine games licensed to Shinyuden by rights holder Edia, and while it’s always nice to have the option to buy games either individually or as part of a set, Griffin feels like it would have been more at home in a package alongside some of the other better known games like Final Zone and Psycho Dream. It is still a treat any time you can take a look at a game almost forgotten to time and Griffin’s issues really stem more from being far too plain rather than being rough to play, so if curiosity strikes and there’s either a decent sale or some bundle it ends up a part of, you could do worse than checking out this little shooter that escaped Game Gear obscurity.