Announced at E3 1997 in the form of a conceptual video far from representing the final game, Hybrid Heaven was the only new major intellectual property in Konami to elect home on Nintendo 64, apart from the Rakuga Kids and Deadly Arts anecdotics. Alongside Castlevania 64he was expected before his release as the biggest title of the publisher on the Nintendo console. Hybrid Heaven So came out in Japan just 26 years ago, on August 5, 1999. Aiming a world audience, the game quickly arrived in North America on August 31 and then in Europe on September 24 of the same year.
Hybrid Heaven is a game apart from Konami Computer Entertainment Osaka. This development division, which existed from 1995 to 2005, was then best known for its sports games. On a machine above all known for his family games – Nintendo obliges – Hybrid Heaven stood out by its dark and adult tone from the first minutes of its introduction. She immediately puts us in the bath with a cinematographic staging in the serious atmosphere, contemporary political issues (we hear about a treaty of nuclear disarmament between the United States and Russia) or even a mutical (but not very modest) protagonist who is shot in the metro under the eyes of his partner. Would Nintendo 64 hold its Metal Gear Solid ? The answer is no, but like the cult game of Hideo Kojima, it holds an unclassifiable production. Here, no infiltration, but an action-adventure game increased by elements of role play and combat. On a console that lacked both good role -playing games and good fighting games, this feels the right draw!
At the end of the introduction, it turns out that the player controls in fact a large blond named Diaz, who is a hybrid synthetic human who betrayed his masters by killing another synthetic human intended to replace the president’s bodyguard, a certain Johnny Slater (whose introduction made us believe in a misleading that it was the character we were going to embody). This is only the beginning of a scart-shaped twist scenario, true Nanar not hesitating to take itself seriously, involving an extraterrestrial conspiracy aimed at taking control of the earth by starting by replacing the President of the United States with a clone of their design.
During the exploration of the underground complex in which the entire adventure takes place, Hybrid Heaven Apply the codes of the 3D action-adventure game with a freedom of movement even reminiscent of Tomb Raider, less flexible. Diaz can move in all directions, jump, crawl, climb and progress from one room to another by pulling drones or surveillance cameras. He can especially spend his time reframing a slow camera and rarely in place. But when a real fight begins against a biological weapon, the gameplay suddenly rocks in a kind of mixture between role -playing and combat game with bare hands. A system … hybrid, yes, it was in the title of the game.
A combat system full of ideas
The player must first turn around his opponent, like a 3D fighting game, while the action gauge “Active Time Battle” is quite full (or even full if you want to optimize the damage). When entering into contact with the enemy, the action freezes and a control menu allows you to choose between using an object or attacking. Here, attacking means selecting one of the four members of the hero then a type of attack (low blow with the right leg, uppercut from the left). It is by collecting attacks that the player automatically learns new and increasingly powerful techniques, to the point that Konami’s game ends up looking like one of these wrestling games that was all the rage on Nintendo 64. Hybrid Heaven Develops its RPG part: by dint of executing this or that movement, Diaz wins experience levels. Classic, except here, each part of the body (members, torso, head) has its own statistics that evolve with experience.
Hybrid Heaven required three years of development, which is not nothing for the time. The developers revealed that they had spent a lot of time on the combat system. It must be said that in addition to a large range of techniques, the system allows you to store up to five portions of energy to trigger combos. These sequences can be improvised during the fight or selected from previously safeguarded lists. Part of the body can also be injured, necessarily complicating the continuation of the fight. When the enemy goes to the offensive, three defensive options are available to the player (guard, dodge and counter) with different levels of risk in the event of failure. Endowed with many subtleties that the game does not take good care to explain, in particular the effects of localized damage, this combat system tends to drag and lose in intensity over the game. The main reason remains to look at Hybrid Heaven Today.
Hybrid Heaven was produced by Yasuo Daikai, Konami veteran present since the early 90s and still faithful to the position today as a producer of the revival From the Suikoden franchise. In an interview with IGN in June 1999, he confirmed that he wanted to make a game with a strong story and a cinematographic atmosphere. “” There is no specific film or a particular work that has influenced this game, even if some parts have been inspired by Hollywood action films, like Blade Runner. But in reality, that’s all I saw from my childhood until today that has led Hybrid Heaven to become what it is “He said.
Unfortunately, this promising introduction, straight out of an American thriller, gave way hand in hand to metallic and monotonous environments throughout the game. A fairly linear complex but in which the player still gets lost quite frequently, due in particular to an illegible mini-card. The dubbing of the introduction, which suggested a blockbuster dimension, will no longer manifest until the end of the game. Admittedly, we could congratulate ourselves in having a French translation in the cartridge, but in terms of cinematography, we were ultimately very far from Metal Gear Solid.
The treatment reserved by the French press to what was supposed to be a game strongly highlighted by Konami is edifying to rediscover today. While the priority was given to the tests of the launch games of the Dreamcast, this strange Nintendo 64 game is just entitled to a “quickly seen” Entrefilet in Joypad (4 out of 10) and Player One (65 %) or at best a simple page in Consoles +, whose note of 75 % does not suggest the real feeling of the editor with regard to the game ” Uninteresting and flavorless, this title is distinguished from the lot only by its faults ». This is said. In the foreign press, it is not necessarily better. Konami’s game sometimes inherits good criticisms, but on Gamespot, the veteran journalist Jeff Gerstmann concludes his text with a 4 out of 10: ” Hybrid Heaven, to put it simply, is not a good game. But it is one of those little curious games that you have to have seen at least once. The improbable genres mixture deserves to be experienced by yourself. Praise it, laugh, give it back, and never think about it again. »
The 1999 registers show that Konami has had many commercial successes in Japan, notably Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania, Yu-Gi-Oh, Silent Hill and Suikoden 2. Something quite incredible, Hybrid Heaven is completely not found in the families of families: it is impossible to find the slightest small sales figure, as if the game of Konami Osaka had never been a feverish dream of a few magazines. Hybrid Heaven No more talked about him in the United States, where the Nintendo 64 was however in the form of his life (Donkey Kong 64, Pokémon Snap and Super Smash Bros are in the best sales of the year 1999). Just to strengthen its obscure curiosity status, Hybrid Heaven has never come out on virtual console or in the smallest compilation. The prices of a cartridge on eBay remain reasonable, however, given its rarity.
A quarter of a century later, Hybrid Heaven It remains an eternal ignored. Not a single youtubeur to tell us a heartbreaking story of ” unjustly unknown masterpiece »? No doubt because it is not one. That being, Hybrid Heaven To his followers and the minimum is to recognize him the originality he has shown. “”You could say that the game does not really know what he wants to be, and that he would have been better if he had chosen a unique genre: a real RPG, a beat’em up, or a third-person shooting game, rather than an awkward mixture of the three “, Estime Michael splashed the Hardcore Gaming 101.” If he had been more an RPG, he could have deepened his experience system and propose equipment to manage. And if he had been more action oriented, the combat system could have been more fluid and natural. But paradoxically, the game would probably not have been so striking if it had only belonged to one genre. »
