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A G-MODE recreation / reissue of old mobile phone games, this introduces "G-MODE Archives 06: Shijou Saikyou Miyamoto Julia". They've released quite a few reissues for the PC (Steam) and Nintendo Switch and it's good to see them getting ported from old defunct hardware for posterity. Of course, most of them have not aged well and this is more for novelty than anything else, but it's a commendable project and I hope many more old mobile phone games can be salvaged such as the BREW service titles, J2ME releases and older Android / iOS titles. There are a few games I really WANT to play such as Climax's 2006 iteration of "Lady Stalker" ("Waltz of the Labyrinth", which has practically been forgotten) and many Western Java games on mobile, to name a few, but this is a good starting point. There have been projects for years now slowly integrating old mobile titles for use in emulators.

That said, while this is a great recreation of Magic Co.'s 2008 "Appli Series" game, SSMJ is an abstract title that is a bit of a hidden gem. The game, which also goes by the name of "History's Strongest: Julia Miyamoto", is a Sci-Fi Action RPG that takes place in the future and is both a parody and statement about the way of the world, particularly from the perspective of the Japanese. The original concept of the game was stemmed from "Yukigassen" or "Snowball Fights", but the devs changed the concept to energy balls and various beams to make the game more exciting and created a space motif to have more flexibility with the characters and story. When you look back at games like these, it's truly impressive how far mobile phone gaming has come in such a short time (but at least these titles weren't predatory like many of the phone games we have today).

G-Mode has done what they need to on their part with a few basic configuration elements, the ability to scale up to 1080p and the ability to turn graphics filters on or off (though the in-game filter here is pretty good without making things blurry or too pixilated). The same jerky, low framerate is also here (for better or worse) and the game has gamepad support which doesn't seem to suffer any issues in terms of lag or latency. Even with the game's low framerate, it's easy to control for the most part, but you can't control things with maximum efficiency like most games in the 30/60FPS range. The story takes place during an unspecified future period that takes place 50 years after the "Great Galactic War". The bubble economy caused by previous generations who escaped the poverty of the war has collapsed, and the world is in a great recession. After an era classified as the "employment super ice age", the galaxy was heading towards a disparate society with clear winners and losers.

The main character, Julia Miyamoto, is a temp worker who is desperately surviving such times, working for a crisis management company called the "Galaxy Crisis Management Organization" in a sector known as the "Eastern Galaxy". She came here because of an ad slogan promising 10 times the hourly wage and the job description that "anyone can do cleaning work", but the reality was a life-or-death battle fostered by the greed of competing entities... Despite her confusion, she displays rare fighting potential and eventually gets caught up in a whirlpool of conspiracies surrounding the company and the nation and is driven to be the strongest in history.

This is a game of grinding and big numbers. At its core, the player takes part in various timed missions with a quota for how many enemies you must defeat. Each level initially advances the story but can be repeated to grind for various weapons and armors as well as rare drops or secrets with specific conditions. Things start off fairly modest but blow up into battles with hundreds of enemies, multiple bosses and hit points that scale into the billions (!!), and there's a surprising amount of depth in this mini-game. With seven different weapon types that grow in their utility from stats to charges (which influence size and damage) and four different armor classes, the game features over 300 collectibles. Weapons come in systems and run the gamut of Basic, Continuous, Diffusion, Reinforcement, Tracking, Penetration and Slashing, and enemies also drop support items that keep your charge up, heal or even add special gauge which allow "Burst" or "Power" attacks.

The game looks and sounds decent for what it is and is one of the G-Mode titles I recommend that's easy to drop in and out of and also lasts a while (Japanese knowledge for the plot is a plus, but not required). A spin-off ADV game was released titled "Miyamoto Julia Haken Desu ga Nanika?". You can get this game at:

https://store-jp.nintendo.com/list/software/70010000030529.html

Enjoy.

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