Land Maker
When flowers bloom, the power of fairies works...
Developer: Placeholder
Platforms: SNES
Release Date: JP: Oct. 27, 1995 NA: Aug. 11, 1996 EU: Nov. 28, 1996
To-do: Play the fan translation and add more about the story.
Landbreaker has a really snappy flow to its gameplay, and it's fairly unlike any other puzzle game- your pieces are diagonal, and the goal is to slide blocks together to make square structures. They can be 2 by 2, 3 by 3, and so on. The bigger your building, the better. Since you lose by having any of your pieces pushed offscreen, you’re always risking it to fit bigger structures before they get pushed past the boundary. It makes for a very risky and fun back and forth.
This game did have an English release, but it cuts out most of the character specific dialogue with a set of a few win quotes. There’s a more faithful fan translation that I’m eager to play (once I can figure out how to get past a checksum error in MAME…). From my understanding, the story is that there are different characters who are looking to control the one remaining land, all for their own reasons. There’s also an evil woman and a demon that show up at the end. Each character has multiple different endings that depend on your score. Funnily, there’s a low rank ending for each character that’s nearly impossible to get. This is another can I’m kicking down the road, but I’m very curious about this world and these characters, and I really want to update this page more once I’ve learned more.
The game starts out with a bombastic, high energy intro showing all the characters and it's just such a good sign of what's to come. I think a puzzle game always gets extra points if they have an intro like this. The characters have beautiful designs with a lot of personality, with adorable little sprites that dance around on the board on top of your structures. There’s so many little details in the presentation- each character has unique animations for when they lose to every other opponent. Youen makes the other characters dizzy and fall over with music, for example.
There's a really good fan site for landmaker that I found that I want to I want to plug here, that also has that fan translation I mentioned. There's a ton of information about even the littlest tiniest mechanics of this game, as well as character bios, and just a ton of information. It’s super impressive, and the sort of effort that I’d like to match on this website one day.
Connie’s Codes: Figure out both cheat codes ^^;
The PlayStation version
The PlayStation release contains the original game as well as an entirely new mode included with it. It's a 3D version of Land Maker with a completely different aesthetic, focused around city building, and it functions like a “solve the puzzle with a limited number of moves” mode. It's pretty neat in its own right, and although it loses some of the charm of the original (there’s no voice clips…!) it still makes for a pretty cool bonus. Each level’s goal is to make a certain size of structure before the board overflows. However, you can go beyond the goal size and get a ton of points, contextualized as your settlement’s population.Going for these extra points can be a challenge, but once you realize that making any size structure will reset the timer for the pusher, it makes it a little easier.
There’s a very ethereal sort of energy to this whole mode. Some pretty good music as well. It’s fun to go through each level and try to bump up your population score just a bit more. Definitely worth playing if you like the main game. Oh shoot and there's like a multiplayer new mode too I need to look at.
Thank you for reading!
