Shadowrun (SNES) Playthrough
399A playthrough of Data East's 1993 cyberpunk RPG for the SNES, Shadowrun.
This video shows a full run of the game. By the end, Jake has the best equipment, all of the spells and optional skills, and every stat is maxed. It also shows the only possible scenario in which anyone but Jake survives at the end. The video does include the grinding, but I did it in isolated chunks to make it easy to skip those parts without missing anything important. The initial grind session in the apartment building ends at 28:41.
Shadowrun is one of those games that many people aren't aware of, but seemingly, everyone who has ever played it loves it. It was true back when the game first came out - the reviews were extremely positive, but it didn't sell well at all - and though the internet has spread some awareness of it, it still yet hasn't received near its due.
You play as Jake Armitage. The victim of a botched hit, Jake wakes up in a drawer at the morgue suffering from a "burnt" brain. After terrifying the morticians who had just pronounced him dead, he escapes and immediately runs into a street courier who witnessed his attempted murder. Jake chases him into an alley just in time to see him shot to death. He grabs the downed man’s gun, takes care of business, and finally comes face-to-face with a mysterious talking dog who warns him of dangers to come.
And that's just the first five minutes! The remainder involves Jake's searching out who did this to him, finding out why they did it, and following the trail of evidence to the heart of a massive conspiracy. I can't say too much more about it without giving spoilers, but it's quite a wild ride.
The gameplay is an interesting mix of styles: it's one part Secret of Mana with its stat-based, real-time combat system, and two parts CRPG with its heavy emphasis on key words, dialogue trees, relative open world, and cursor driven control scheme. Shadowrun's design builds and improves upon what Beam did in Nightshade, a similarly structured adventure game that was published by Ultra on the NES a year prior. Nightshade's influences - the gritty urban tone, the off-kilter sense of humor, and the heavy emphasis on character interactions - are clear in Shadowrun, and they make for a game that's loaded with personality.
Shadowrun was one of the more adult-oriented games released for a console in its time, and it makes no effort to shy away from gun violence, organized crime, or even addressing sex, though only in oblique ways. The story has teeth, and tone of the writing and the weird but cool mix of sci-fi and high fantasy gives 2050s Seattle a uniquely dystopian flavor. The world is a vital contributing factor to it - it's a character unto itself, and an impressively realized one at that. It’s like a crazy mix of Rise of the Dragon, Snatcher, and Blade Runner, all compacted into a tiny eight megabit rom.
The look of the game is more typical of a PC title than an SNES one. The small sprites and the zoomed-out isometric perspective give everything a sense of scale, and there's an incredible amount of implied detail in every scene despite the game's inherently chunky, low-resolution look. Everything feels lived in and worn. Stuff lies in the streets, desks are cluttered with coffee mugs and overflowing inboxes, street vendors hang out next to their stalls, and people go about their business in the city streets. It does a nice job of playing into a thematic sense of disconnectedness. Jake is a participant in this world like anyone else. The world doesn't revolve around him.
The soundtrack is also a real highlight. The tunes regularly switch tone to fit the situation, and whether somber and slow or dramatic and upbeat, they all carry the grungy, industrial feeling of the world exceedingly well.
Shadowrun was a bold attempt to do something different, and the effort paid off nicely. It has a few flaws - the controls are clumsy, the game is grind-heavy, the framerate tanks hard in the late-game battle scenes, and there are a few plot points that never get addressed properly (what's the deal with Kitsune?) - but I’ve always absolutely adored Shadowrun, warts and all. It had my attention to the very end, and it's a game I've never forgotten over the years.
If you haven't yet had the pleasure, check it out!
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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