SonSon (Arcade)
The now legendary Capcom didn’t exactly hit the ground running with their first ever video game. Vulgus was an unimpressive space shooter in era where many companies were in a rush to make their own, but with their second ever game, released just a month after Vulgus, Capcom started to show a little more promise and creativity. While still a shooter of a sort, SonSon is a horizontal shooter where the character you control has to hop between platforms as they fight, this genre mix and its choice of aesthetic helping it stand out a bit more. SonSon is one of the first video games to ever theme itself around Journey to the West, the Chinese novel’s characters eventually cropping up in video games so often it’s almost old hat, but for many, this would be the first time they would ever see a game based on the monkey king’s exploits.
Despite being one of the first games to use Journey to the West as its source material though, it’s not quite borrowing elements directly. The game’s hero, SonSon, is supposedly the grandson of the monkey who rebelled against the heavens, Sun Wukong. Similarly, since the game allows two player simultaneous play, your co-op partner finds themselves not as the pig man Zhu Bajie, but a cuter chibi pig known at TonTon. While out for a stroll, SonSon and TonTon see their friends kidnapped by a man riding a cloud. This Daimashin, also known as the Great Devil, is actually but one of three, and with a proclamation of “LET’S GO TENJIKU!”, SonSon and TonTon head to Tenjiku (a name for the heavenly land seen in Journey to the West) to track the Great Devil down and rescue their friends. Unfortunately, this is an endless arcade score chaser, meaning you’ll never actually get to save them, and even when you do reach what could have been an end point, all you see is a statue providing you with a scroll before things loop back around to start over.
As you start your quest for the scroll, you’ll see that the area SonSon and TonTon walk through is divided into six layers. At any time, you can press up or down to hop between them, and you can even hop up to grab airborne items if they’re over the top layer or placed in a gap in the platforms. Both heroes fire bullets out in front of them that can cover about half of the screen, and while there are definitely times the jumping feels a little rigid or the shots a touch slow, you are fit to fight the waves of enemies you’ll encounter. As the screen scrolls automatically you’re given free rein to run around the available space, enemies able to appear from the left, right, and below often in waves. Whether it’s the Terracotta statues, bandits, piranhas, or dragonflies, most of the enemies you encounter will thankfully be defeated by a single shot landing, your opposition differentiated by the way they move. Whether the foe flies, leaps, or runs, each enemy has a specific rhythm to figure out that is key to avoid injury, one touch enough to kill your character. Jumping enemies, for instance, will always wait a specific amount of time before changing the layer they’re in, while bats on the other hand fly in a reliable pattern. Dragonflies will linger in place before launching themselves towards you, giving you time to take them out or bait them. Most enemy groups are made of five or six of the same type of enemy though, often filling every layer at once or giving you just enough targets that your firing might not be fast enough to immediately wipe them out.
The difficulty in SonSon comes from your management of the incoming enemies, because while you can let some go off-screen as a way of making them disappear, others will keep chasing after you and the screen can get packed with danger if you’re not being aggressive. Two player play is definitely the more entertaining way to go, the game providing ample enemies to keep both of you busy with it less likely you’ll be overwhelmed. Points are fairly useful too, defeating an entire enemy group giving you a good boost and extra lives earned at certain thresholds. Food pick-ups are scattered about to provide points as well, and if you are able to find a POW, all enemies on screen will be transformed into food for quite a boost to your score. Bamboo shoots can also sprout up if you step in specific areas for a helpful point infusion, but when you start to encounter dangerous spinning skull coins, you can often expect a fortress to appear soon.
While SonSon doens’t have levels per se, its long sideways play area does have stone markers labelled with numbers from 19 down to 1. What you face will match up with the numbers so you can learn what to expect, and every now and then on your journey, the automatic scrolling will come to a stop as you face a fortress. Bomb throwing baddies hide behind walls you must destroy, the player needing to do so in a limited amount of time to earn a high value Yashichi, the pinwheel emblem from Vulgus already becoming a bit of a trademark from Capcom with its reappearance here. If you don’t defeat the fortress in time, there is no penalty and the screen starts moving again, but sometimes up ahead are three Great Demons to face. A rare enemy who takes a few shots to defeat, the Great Demons fly through layers without hindrance, but similar to most foes, you can also just pass them by if you let them go off-screen, the trio hardly worthy of being called bosses because of it.
SonSon is better in co-op as mentioned, but on your own, it still puts up a decent fight because it rolls out enemies in groups that are manageable and a bit tough as time goes on as they appear on-screen more quickly. It can still feel rather repetitive before you ever reach the statue with a scroll and some of that comes down to the fact you will likely learn the enemy rhythms off the back of lost lives. SonSon isn’t the kind of arcade game you need to commit too much learning to though and it doesn’t feel like it invites long term play too much, the most interesting change to its layout across the journey likely being when it starts putting fortresses close together as you approach the heavenly clouds near the end of the loop. You’ve seen much of what SonSon provides after your first run in with the Great Demons, a bug enemy introduced shortly after the last bit of meaningful newness, but you also need to stay moving and shooting to survive so you at least feel your reactivity tested until you get a Game Over, SonSon sadly not letting you continue from where you left off after all your lives are lost.
THE VERDICT: SonSon’s mix of platforming and horizontal shooter isn’t too varied but it is fairly lively, the enemy numbers keeping you constantly hopping around trying to manage them so you don’t get overwhelmed. It’s certainly a cleaner experience when TonTon’s along for the ride, a solo player likely to spend a fair bit of time figuring out enemy rhythms only to still find later areas rough to manage. It’s not likely to be your next arcade addiction, but trying to figure out the action well enough to at least grab the scroll once still feels like a worthy venture even if the experience could have been made smoother.
And so, I give SonSon for arcade machines…
An OKAY rating. Little elements like trying to earn precious extra lives, time POW pick-ups for maximum effectiveness, and spacing out who handles what in a co-op run can make SonSon a nice arcade cabinet to visit on occasion, but it dries up pretty quickly since there’s only so much to figure out. It can be exciting when you first start to get a feel for the jump timing on your foes and can weave around them, but beyond throwing more enemies on screen at once, SonSon feels like it doesn’t ask much more from you beyond constant attentiveness after the learning period. Later areas go a bit overboard with how many foes can run in at once which is one reason it’s nice to have someone watching your back, and the fact you ride back in after a death on a cloud that makes you briefly invincible will likely be something you exploit just to get a break from the waves of foes that make that last push to the end fairly difficult. Having fortresses and the Great Demons break things up means it doesn’t become too repetitive too early and the game’s challenge remains intact enough that you have to keep your wits about you and movement as clean as possible to keep pushing further. However, it’s not doing much to motivate you to keep trying since its Game Overs are so final and by the time you’ve seen a rock with the number 15 on it, you’ve seen most of what the game will use to try and block your path.
SonSon isn’t the breakout hit Capcom needed to start establishing its legacy, but it is more unique than Vulgus and has more character. It may borrow its looks from Journey to the West, but SonSon is almost a run and gun and Capcom is showing a bit more creativity in gameplay design and theming than before. This would eventually lead to the likes of Ghosts ‘n Goblins and 1942 where different thinking helped Capcom attract more attention, but SonSon isn’t purely a stepping stone. SonSon starts off well and figuring out the rhythm of the enemies gives you a satisfying first stretch, it just needed to keep throwing in new dangers so that learning process could be a consistent compelling underpinning that makes you want to keep playing to get deeper and deeper into Tenjiku.