Instead of calling The Mafat Conspiracy “The Mafat Conspiracy” Vic Tokai should have called it “How Vic Tokai went ass-backwards in time: starring Golgo 13,” because it makes huge strides in the opposite direction of gaming progress.  To their credit, Mafat was called “Golgo 13: The Riddle Of Icarus” for the famicom.  Not that anyone would recognize the names “Golgo 13” or “Duke Togo (G’s real name) anyway, since the .38 packing sniper who’s appeared in manga for oh, something like the last forty years, never caught on in the states.

American audiences largely ignored the good-for-its time (that time being 1983) anime Golgo 13: The Professional, and, likewise, mentioning Vic Tokai’s first Golgo’s NES adventure, the hilariously named GOLGO 13: TOP SECRET EPISODE, will probably result in blank stares from 99.85 percent of anyone, ever.

For some reason, though, Vic Tokai, who doesn’t even make games anymore, decided to release the sequel to TOP SECRET EPISODE in the U.S. anyway, although they changed the name so that it had nothing to do with Golgo 13 and hired some crappy American artist to paint an equally crappy cover painting for the game that doesn’t look like anything to do with anything.  It seems the boys at VT were pretty determined to get rid of all immediately obvious references to Golgo 13.  I can imagine a conversation between two higher-ups in Vic Tokai’s U.S. branch:

Vic Tokai higher-up 1: “So, how about that Golgo 13 sequel?  What’s it called, ‘The Riskbreak of Icarus’ or something?”

VT higher-up 2: “I don’t know what the hell it’s called.  I don’t give a shit what it’s called.  Let’s release it.”

VT H-U 1: “Uh, what about the name?”

VT H-U 2: “I don’t give a shit about the name.  What’s the game about?  No, I don’t give a shit what it’s about.  Who’s in it?”

VT H-U 1: “Golgo 13. He has to stop some shadow organization—”

VT H-U 2: “I don’t give a shit what he has stop.  I don’t give a shit about the character.  Just slap some goddamn conspiracy spy crap on the box and hire some shit artist to make the cover.  I want goddamn European flavor with some Tron and character inaccuracies. And while you’re at it, get me a goddamn parasol.”

Or something that makes about as much sense as that.

Not that anyone probably cared anyway, since The Mafat Conspiracy’s time in the limelight was not particularly long-lived.  And for good reason, since it’s really a bit of a letdown.  Taking a few cues from the multiple gameplay styles of TOP SECRET EPISODE, the game includes the bland side-scrolling levels, sniping, “exploration” and even an exciting car chase, if you enjoy shamefully ripped-off Pole Position game mechanics.  Out of the various design styles, the worst is by far the “exploration” parts, which basically consist of running through “3D” (read: still images that scroll) mazes that break up the side-scrolling sections.  Once in the maze, you enter a first person perspective, and have the option of rotating in the directions of the compass or moving forward.

On paper, it doesn’t really sound that bad.  But in practice, you’ll want to put a gun in your mouth after about five minutes because every bit of the maze looks exactly the same.  There’s no texture differentiation, no helpful markers to guide the way, and every door and passage and wall uses the same plain graphics.  Unless you play with a pad and paper (which only tricks you into thinking that it helps—it actually doesn’t) ol’ Duke (Golgo’s r will be horribly, horribly lost after about three or four moves.

Seriously, there’s NO FUCKING WAY to tell where you’ve already been and where you haven’t unless you spend hours wandering around the same maze until you can approach a room from any direction and know where you are, and even that’s pretty spotty, not to mention inexcusable from a gameplay standard.  There are also enemies in the mazes, so if you don’t watch your back, you’ll wind up dead and having to start the maze over from scratch.  After awhile, I would’ve preferred to stick my head in a blender than keep playing.

Even if you cheat and use maps, which is, for all intents and purposes, an unavoidable inevitability, it still takes some getting used to.  But Vic Tokai didn’t stop there.  Oh no.

See, VT liked the idea of these goddamn impossible to navigate mazes so much that when you’re finished with them, they make you run through them again.  Backwards.

Courtesy of the same drooling, brain-dead plot device, (“BUT THE JOKE IS ON YOU, GOLGO 13.  THIS BUILDING/PLACE WILL EXPLODE IN FIVE MINUTES.”) you’re forced to go back the exact way you came through the multi-floored maze in five minutes.  And guess what?  If you don’t make it out in the allotted time, you have to do it all over again, from the very first time you set foot in the maze.  Although I only counted two times when you had to do this in the games six or so levels, (a few of the levels are made up by much easier filler mazes, sniping and driving) it’s nevertheless one of the most idiotic things I’ve even seen in a game, period.

Things don’t fare much better in the other levels.  Although it’s cool to see Duke striding along with his hands in the pockets of a fine white suit like someone out JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (as compared to sprinting like an idiot), the sidescrolling gameplay is pretty uninteresting, playing like a cheap Castlevania rip-off, only Duke’s packing a piece.  Try as they might though, globetrotting from the Champs-Elysées through Europe and on to a thrilling conclusion in a Contra-esque lab in underground Afghanistan, trading bullets and karate kicks with suited thugs and some politically incorrect Afghani jumping monkey-foes (not like in Grasshopper’s Samurai Champloo game) doesn’t ever really get very exciting.

The game also features sniping, which is probably the only thing that’s even remotely interesting thing about the game other than the pixlellated sex.  Unfortunately, Mafat lets players try their luck looking through the scope of Duke’s custom M-16s for (literally) less than two minutes of total gameplay.  The driving section’s a joke too.  There really isn’t any reason to actually play this game though to the end, unless you just want to see what happens (it’s not worth it, the titular conspiracy isn’t even a conspiracy, really) or you really, really want to get in that extra thirty seconds of sniping.

What doesn’t make any sense is that for as bland as TOP SECRET EPISODE was, it was more advanced.  The first-person action segments were tighter (sometimes a little cheaper, but whatever), the side-scrolling parts had a slight element of Simon’s Quest non-linearity and character interaction, and Duke had to go into various places (generally train stations) and to talk to informants.

The only real “improvement” Mafat has over TOP SECRET EPISODE is that the sniping is done a little better—though that’s as much due to the fact of the better technology that was available in ’92 as anything else.  Though the horribly written story might keep you playing out of morbid curiosity, after awhile, you’ll find Mafat offers about as much fun as a good kidney-punching session (where you’re the one receiving the blows), only the anguish lasts longer.