Past meets present: Cleopatra Fortune

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Falling block puzzle games were all the rage post-Tetris. Sega got in on the action with Columns, of course, and Compile scored a hit with Puyo Puyo. Companies like Warp kept iterating on the gameplay of Trip’d, Namco produced Cosmo Gang the Puzzle, it became time for Klax, Toaplan took time away from shoot ‘em ups and platformers to release Teki Paki, and it wasn’t a rarity to see established mascots like Bomberman end up as the star of their own falling block puzzler, either, like with Panic Bomber. Whether these games played anything like Tetris outside of clearing lines and blocks falling from the top of the playing area didn’t matter: like how every action-adventure game with a topdown view was a “Zelda clone” and every first-person shooter was a “DOOM clone” for a while, every puzzle game that fit at least those qualifications had “Tetris-like” gameplay.

Taito was not immune to this wave. While Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move is the series most people think of when the topic of Taito puzzle games comes up, they had others, as well. Cleopatra Fortune was one of them, but owing to how it mostly stayed in Japan and had one arcade-exclusive sequel, you don’t hear about it nearly as much as something like Puzzle Bobble, which got going in 1994 and then never really stopped. Which is a shame — the lack of Cleopatra Fortune, not the abundance of Puzzle Bobble — because Cleopatra Fortune is great, with enough variation on the “falling blocks/clear lines” gameplay loop to merit attention in a crowded space, even now, decades after it first hit.

Cleopatra Fortune has a fascinating backstory, in terms of where it first released. Taito didn’t put it on a traditional game platform at all at first, but instead, on a karaoke machine: the Taito X-55. Insert Credit forum user chazumaru went into great detail on the X-55 nearly five years ago now, and the small library of games that this karaoke machine played host to. You should read the whole thing, but here’s the gist of what the machine even was:

Cleopatra Fortune would release for the X-55 in December of 1995, alongside Space Invaders — Taito’s impossibly influential and successful arcade hit, and something new that should have been a bigger deal. The arcade version of Cleopatra Fortune wouldn’t actually hit Japanese arcades (and only Japanese arcades) until September of 1996, with a Japan-only port of the game to the Sega Saturn following five months later, with the help of an occasional partner in finding new homes for Taito arcade games, Natsume.

That’s quite a few versions in a short amount of time, but any further proliferation of Cleopatra Fortune waited until 2001, when the Playstation, which had already been replaced by the Playstation 2 nearly a year before in Japan, received a port of the game. That same port would not release in North America or Europe until 2003, which is a shame for two reasons: one, how late that hit, and two, it’s the worst version of the game out there. It looks, sounds, and plays worse than the arcade or Saturn editions, so it’s not fully representative of what the game is, which, in addition to being just outright fun, also had a serious charm to it visually, and, courtesy Zuntata’s Shuichiro Nakazawa, had some excellent music, too. It’s still fun because it’s Cleopatra Fortune (or, Cleopatra’s Fortune, in North America), but it’s also clearly lesser if you know what it was elsewhere.

Oh, and it probably didn’t help that this is the North American box art for the game:

Japan (and Europe) received the below box instead. Which, sure, it’s not wholly representative of what you’re doing in there, but it doesn’t also look like you’re buying edutainment software that leveraged fair use to design its art.

How much of the difference can be attributed to the developer, Altron, which Taito licensed this out to, publishing the game in Japan, while it was left to Mud Duck Productions in North America, a budget arm of Zenimax that published three different bowling video games in a three-year span in the mid-aughts? Now I don’t want to speculate, and I love bowling enough to own my own pair of bowling shoes but, you know. A budget publisher was who would pick the game up in 2003 after the Playstation’s heyday was over, which should tell you something about the moment in time. Consider that the Sega Saturn edition released in 1997, and that by the time North America saw a version, any version, of Cleopatra Fortune, Sega had already been out of the hardware business for two years, and the Dreamcast, by this point no longer supported by its creator, had seen its port of the game two years before, as well.

Not helping matters further outside of Japan is that the arcade update, Cleopatra Fortune Plus, ran on Sega’s Naomi hardware, but didn’t end up on the Dreamcast despite those two being practically the same thing, a fact studios like Capcom took full advantage of. So even though it’s an impressive update with some changes to the formula, it’s stuck in arcades most of the world never had access to.

So what is this game that so many people missed out on until they found it well after the fact, either through the arcade collection Taito Legends 2, or, in much smaller numbers, on the Egret II Mini, or through a modern console where Cleopatra Fortune S-Tribute released in 2022? As said, it’s a falling block puzzle game, and one that doesn’t bother with color distinctions or matching like you’re used to. Instead, it’s about sealing gems or sarcophagi inside bricks, which then clears out whatever you trapped inside that structure, and causes a cascade effect that maybe ends up clearing some lines and scoring you bonus points while you’re at it. Observe:

The standard starter blocks are one brick and one gem, but there are also three-block pieces you’ll get with a two-brick piece and a gem stacked on top of each other, or sometimes the gem attaches to the side of the long brick, and sometimes you get a three-brick long block with no gem. The sarcophagi are the real tricky pieces, since they themselves are two-block pieces, and can be attached to other two-block pieces, necessitating some quick thinking and reaction time if you’re going to avoid gumming up the works.

Like in Puyo Puyo, if you have a piece hanging off the “edge” after placing part of the block, it’ll separate and fall below. Which you can use to slide additional gems into a hole you’re building up around and will later seal off, or to ensure you aren’t extending a preexisting space with another gem you’d need to seal off before it can clear. The game speeds up but then slows back down, and goes on and on like this, so you’re not perpetually going all-out by any means. But when it speeds up and you’ve got a lot of blocks close to the top, well, you’re probably in trouble given how difficult it can be to properly maneuver the bulkier sarcophagi pieces around even when your in relatively good shape, organization-wise.

The arcade game was just your standard go as long as you can setup, though, it did come with the ability to pick your starting difficulty. If playing around with the simpler blocks the game begins with is a little too easy for you, then why not pick the mid-range difficulty that kicks you to level 20 to begin, and gives you a 100,000 point bonus for your trouble? Or you can start off at level 40, with 500,000 points, and see how long you can live from there.

Chains are where you get your points. You can survive for quite awhile by getting every singular clear you can, sure, but if you want points, you’ll have to take risks. Build structures that are meant to fall until the chain reaction begins, with gems clearing out, then lines vanishing as the cascade begins, until the points truly come rolling in. You’ll notice how significant even short chains are compared to standard clears in a hurry, because that score is going to shoot right up. Again, there’s more in common here with Puyo Puyo than Tetris in this regard, but language and precedent being what it is, Tetris gets the genre credit.

One other thing that Cleopatra Fortune does is reward you for a “Perfect” clear, which means one that got rid of every block on the screen. The score goes up each time you manage the feat, too, so attempting to build your future combos in such a way that a chain will clear everything out for more than just aesthetic reasons is the plan. This gets much harder to do the longer you play, the higher your score (and level) goes, and the more annoying the pieces get to place, but take advantage when you can, and try not to seal off entire areas from your influence by misplacing a sarcophagus.

In some ways this game is simple, in that what it requires from you is pretty obvious from the start. But what it lacks in overall complexity, it makes up for with complication. The rate at which you can totally screw things up with a single misplaced piece is way ahead of what happens with Tetris, and I don’t think that’s just because I’ve got decades more Tetris in me that allows me to more easily recover. Tetris doesn’t have any pieces as large as some of what Cleopatra Fortune has, and you’ll notice the playing area — which is seven blocks wide — is smaller than what you’ll deal with in Tetris, too. That can mean fewer pieces to make clears, yes, but also fewer pieces needed to completely impede your own progress and plans.

The Playstation edition of the game might have its faults, but it does have a couple of things going for it. A Time Attack mode, for one, which the Saturn edition did not include, as well as the ability to rotate your pieces the other way. Previously, you just had to rotate extra fast to get back to the orientation you’d accidentally gone by or realized too late is what you actually wanted your blocks at. Its multiplayer component is also a positive, since it handles the garbage it sends to opponents in a less frustrating manner — or, as Rattz put it to me, it’s the only one “where the versus damage isn't the funny mummy garbage chute.” Given Ratttz is the admin for the variety puzzle game tournament series, Puzzle Wednesday, she’d know.

What all of the console versions include, as well, is a “Mystery” mode, which is a 50-stage set of puzzles designed for you to complete them with a limited number of blocks. (It’s actually 100 stages, but only if you complete some still unconfirmed tasks in the initial 50.) There are instructions for what, specifically, you’re supposed to do and how you’re supposed to solve them, as well. So you might manage to clear everything but lose, because what you were supposed to do is something like clear it all, yes, but do so with a chain of four instead of clearing it with a line cleared here or there each time you play a block.

Some of these stages are pretty easy if you understand how Cleopatra Fortune works, and others are pretty obviously skill checks meant to stymie you. It’s a great addition to the game to give the home versions a bit more depth, though, with the only real complaint being that there are merely 50 of these levels. You can’t begrudge a guy his desire for more Cleopatra Fortune, you know, especially since that seems to be the one thing that’s in short supply.

If you’ve never played, you should give Cleopatra Fortune a whirl. It’s not like Tetris or Puyo Puyo where there have been a million sequels and changes and versions and experiments, nor have there been a whole bunch of other games that worked off of the same concept. It’s that rare thing, a somewhat singular effort, and one you don’t need to seek out with quite the same effort as you used to, at least. But you do still need to know it exists at all to give it a shot, and it’s just not up there with Taito’s better-known series. If you didn’t know it existed before this, though, you do now, so go see what you’ve been missing for decades now.

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