The Space Adventure: Cobra (Sega CD) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
841A playthrough of Hudson Soft's 1995 adventure game/visual novel for the Sega CD, The Space Adventure.
Though it is a slightly upgraded port of a 1991 PC Engine CD game (コブラII: 伝説の男/Cobra II: The Man of Legend), the English version, The Space Adventure, turned out to be one of the final games released for the Sega CD.
The game is based on the work of Buichi Terasawa, a manga artist who was directly involved in the production of the original version, and The Space Adventure is based on Cobra, one of his most famous characters.
Cobra is a loud-mouthed womanizer with a talent for attracting violence. Between his ship, his android copilot, his penchant for princess troubles, his love of seedy bars on remote planets, and his Mega Man-like arm cannon, it's clear that Terasawa is a Star Wars fan. There's no mistaking that our hero is based largely on Han Solo.
If you are a Sega CD fan, you'll probably immediately draw parallels between The Space Adventure and Snatcher, but don't feel fooled by initial impressions: both are adventure games driven by lot of text, but whereas Snatcher strove to be a "game", The Space Adventure is a visual novel in every sense.
Each scene plays out through context-sensitive menus. You click around investigating everybody and everything in order to tease out clues. Doing this will reveal further possible options for interaction, and once you've tripped an invisible progression "trigger", a way forward will inevitably appear.
Whether or not you'll enjoy The Space Adventure is most likely going to depend on your willingness to read a ton of text and your appreciation for half-naked, big breasted women carrying laser pistols. While most of the time there's nothing too explicit, the game earns its M rating. There are no puzzles to speak of, nor are there any action sequences - outside of a brief segment at the end that adopts some JRPG mechanics, this is more of an "interactive experience" than it is a game.
The art is excellent, and there's a lot of variety between scenes (though the animation is very limited most of the time). The voice acting is surprisingly good (even though it's often way too quiet), as is the music.
Games like The Space Adventure were rarely translated in the 16-bit days so the game ended up becoming something of an obscure oddity. It never gained the recognition that Konami's Snatcher received a year prior - and to be honest, it didn't deserve to - but if you are a fan of this style of game or its aesthetic, this is one of the few officially localized releases of its era to cater to those tastes.
It's not a runaway classic and it pales next to Snatcher, but if you do get into it, The Space Adventure does a good job at scratching a very specific itch.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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