11/8/2021
Review of Mister Mosquito
Developed by: ZOOM
2001, PlayStation 2
Eidos Interactive published a few games on the PlayStation 2 under a label called Fresh Games, which Mister Mosquito was a part of. (The other ones I've played, Legaia 2: Duel Saga (9) and R-Type Final (8), are two of my favorites on the system.) Apparently the label was made to publish Japanese games that otherwise might not be released outside of Japan. Mister Mosquito probably fits that purpose best, even to the point of usually being described along with a wacky Japan cliche. The game takes place in a Japanese home where the Yamada family is spending their summer. The scenes that play between levels show their familial love that has festered in apathy. You play as a mosquito who needs to draw a certain amount of blood from each character, and you become the rallying point for their family as they try to destroy you.
There definitely are some weird things about the game, like how there are full three-second pauses between lines of dialog, and how the game is semi-jokingly erotic. After the first level, where you bite the inside of a seventeen-year-old's thigh, the narrator asks sultrily if you "enjoyed your first bloodsuck". Say what you want about Japanese humor, but there is some subtlety in how you spend a lot of the game just flying around different rooms of the house, watching the family in their daily lives.
Each level takes place in a different room where you need to suck the blood from designated points highlighted on a character's body. If your bloodsucking is too erratic or you don't stay hidden well enough, they'll try to attack you. Sometimes you can interact with things in the room, like a radio or a light switch, which will cause the characters to move around, presumably to make biting them easier, but those are dropped from the game pretty quickly and I never understood how they helped. There are no environmental puzzles you need to solve in order to finish a level, like something from Shadow of the Colossus (9.5), but instead you just wait for the characters to go through their clockwork routine until a bite point lights up.
The whole game doesn't feel very dynamic. You don't choose where you want to bite by factoring in where the character is looking, or choose different points based on if it's more or less likely to agitate them. Whether or not the characters become agitated seems arbitrary, as well as how easy it can be to hide from them. But aside from the gameplay mechanics, there's still something fun about the gameplay design of being a small thing flying around a comparatively giant place, hiding from and having to land on giant things that want to kill you while not being noticed. There are some Honey-I-Shrunk-the-Kids-isms with having to avoid bubbles from a bath in the air, or the air conditioning suddenly coming on and blowing you out of control. And the game does a good job of accenting its scale sometimes by zooming out when you've landed on a character's skin so that you just look like a speck. As much as it's an unusual game in concept, it's also a game that focuses on giving you an unusual feeling.