Past meets present: Wonderland of Carbuncle

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.

Compile truly did have more in common with independent developers of the modern era — the kind releasing games on itch.io themselves, not the ones getting the major pushes from relative behemoths in the space like AnnaPurna Interactive — than with many of its peers in its own time. Yes, Compile had the relationship with Sega, and it had loads of console and handheld games on all the systems of the major players of the 80s and 90s, but a massive percentage of its library was actually contained within its digital magazine, Disc Station. And those mags and the games within, regularly released for MSX and NEC PC hardware, tell a story of a far different and even more prolific company that kept trying new things and making the games that they wanted to make, even if it kept them from ever growing into the kind of success they should have been based solely on quality.

As Compile founder Masamitsu “Moo” Niitani explained in a 1998 interview, “Back then, we didn’t have any kind of agenda. We just enjoyed making stuff. (laughs) We were absorbed in it, both myself and the staff. We'd often spend 2 years working on a single title, but that’s because we wanted our games to be solid. It may not have made us rich, but it was satisfying. And as a company, I think we did a good job.” Because of the financial issues sometimes caused by this commitment to quality and the games that Compile wanted to be making, staff would leave the studio in waves on more than one occasion, but the spirit that drove the studio and Disc Station remained, and resulted in little oddballs like Wonderland of Carbuncle for the fans who stuck around.

For the most basic comparison possible, just to give you a sense of what kind of game starred Compile’s mascot of both the company and it’s most popular series, Puyo Puyo, Wonderland in Carbuncle shares some DNA with Nintendo’s arcade classic, Donkey Kong 3. Both are shooting games (STG), but also rely on platforming and multitasking rather than “just” holding down the fire button and dodging projectiles. That’s not meant to be dismissive of more traditional STG — please, this is me we’re talking about — but to give you a sense of what the goal and gameplay here are. It’s a vertically oriented shooter, yes, but there is also jumping and additional considerations beyond the Xevious-style shooter that dominated — and still does — the eras in which both 1983’s Donkey Kong 3 and 1991’s Wonderland in Carbuncle released in.

What makes this game work, just like Donkey Kong 3, is that you have two very separate goals here to focus on that make you deploy a different kind of strategy than you would for a standard STG. You have to decide if the safe spot that you’re firing from is more important than the apple that’s about to fall, if it’s worth the risk of movement, if you already have enough apples that you’re confident you don’t need another and the more important thing is preserving health for the coming boss fight. Those apples, which fall from the tree that is the setting of every stage, are needed to summon the level’s boss. You do this by launching apples from Carbuncle at the… stork? pelican?… flying by with a basket ready to catch them as they fall back down to earth, and upon your success the window in the middle of the tree opens up, and the boss emerges from it. You can catch the apples that miss the basket, too, letting you reload, as it were, but if the apple hits the ground then it’s gone forever — this is why you want more than a single apple during the collection phase, but if you trust your own skills don’t have to risk death or damage to acquire more.

You aren’t just catching apples during those pre-bird segments. You’re fending off multiple enemy types — falling mushrooms that keep growing out of the tree, spiders trying to sneakily make their way down, clouds that absorb your shots, blocking their access to the higher reaches of the tree, until they explode in a hail of revenge bullets you need to dodge… and are then immediately replaced by another cloud. While attempting to survive all of this, apples are falling, and the occasional Puyo is with you on the ground, trying to get in your way to damage you or make jumps more challenging by being in the way. These Puyos are a significant obstacle during the boss fights, which are otherwise the most traditional part of the game as they deploy pure STG strategies against you: more bullets, patterns to recognize and exploit, defensive enemies, foes that change color as damage is done and also sometimes speed up or alter attack patterns as that damage builds up — the works. But also watch out for the Puyo on the ground: you won’t just be dodging bullets here, even if the apples are, at least temporarily, not an ongoing concern for you.

Now, as you can tell if you’re familiar with the much better-known game, Wonderland of Carbuncle not only doesn’t play just like Donkey Kong 3, but it at least worked for a basic grounding. Wonderland of Carbuncle is also significantly more forgiving and easier than Nintendo’s offbeat platforming STG, which got its start in arcades and so had to be tuned a certain way to ensure it was worth both Nintendo’s and the arcades’ time to have this cabinet out there. Wonderland of Carbuncle features infinite retries and you can take a few hits before dying, whereas you have to master Donkey Kong 3 in a hurry or else you won’t get to keep playing for very long. Even the way the timer works draws a stark contrast: for Donkey Kong 3, the timer expiring means you have failed to defeat the titular Kong and save the greenhouse, but in Wonderland of Carbuncle, the clock running out means you have survived the onslaught, and it’s time for the birds to get their apple, leading to the boss fight.

Difficulty isn’t really the point with many of these Disc Station releases, however: these were often Compile working on concepts or creating subscriber-only games for the only audience that was expected to ever get their hands on them, in a non-commercial setting. Well, yes, Disc Station itself cost money, but the point is that these weren’t that kind of retail game fighting for shelf space, but were instead something new and fun for a specific audience that had pre-committed to the concept of getting random games from a beloved developer willing to put them out. Worrying about game length or depth or even replayability didn’t have to be an ongoing concern for Compile’s Disc Station releases, since they weren’t competing for attention against anything in the traditional sense. The audience was already captured, and the result was some games that could be completed and enjoyed in a short afternoon or an hour or even less, if you got the hang of things in a hurry.

And Wonderland of Carbuncle certainly qualifies as one of those you can complete relatively quickly if you have any skill in the genre whatsoever. It has layered gameplay, yes, but doesn’t possess the length of Disc Station role-playing game Gensei Suikoden, nor is it as fiendish as platforming puzzler Carbuncle Pi at that game’s most challenging. There is a second loop where each stage’s difficulty — and the bosses — get a noticeable boost in sheer volume of attacks and foes, that make the initial loop seem like more of a tutorial and this the true game. But once you wrap the more challenging editions, that’s it. Credits roll, and Carbuncle gets to frolicking in the grass and relaxing, as the wolf and his fellow creatures have given up on taking over the tree that provides all these juicy apples.

It’s short and never rises to the level of difficulty of Compile’s retail shoot ‘em ups, but it wasn’t supposed to. This was an idea a team at the studio had in mind and wanted to see through, and did, to the benefit of, at first, the Venn diagram audience of “people who own an MSX2” and “people who know what Disc Station is.” And in the present, thanks to D4 Enterprises having control of so much of Compile’s library, as well as the existence of their PC-based ProjectEgg subscription service and the EggConsole variant found on the Switch, anyone with access to either of those platforms can now see what Compile was delivering to its dedicated following 35 years back. Neat.

Sega had to give its blessing here, as is the case with anything released by D4 that includes any characters from Puyo Puyo — Compile sold the rights to the series to Sega decades ago with the intention of buying them back once its finances were back in order, but they never did get those problems sorted, and instead ended up closing years later, Puyo-less. Between ProjectEgg/EggConsole and the revival of Madou Monogatari, though, Sega has at least been continually granting permission for the use of these characters once more, opening up more people to experience them for the first time, or, at least, not through emulation.

Which is a positive in other ways, too. There is something to a game like this at all times, but especially now, when “More” and “Forever” are so often leading considerations in both game development and audience desire. You might spend less time with Wonderland of Carbuncle than you would a movie, but you’ll also spend less to buy it than you would to purchase a movie ticket or rent it via streaming, so what’s the problem? These small, closed releases, meant to be ephemeral yet enjoyable, are a balm in this era where we are, for some reason, bombarded with concerns over active player counts for single-player games, as if these are tea leaves worth reading. Experience something a little different from what’s being pushed on you, enjoy yourself (or don’t!), and move on. Not right to the next thing, in a checklist-y, worrying-about-your-backlog way, but just let the experience be, and be done with it. Think back on it, sure, but be free. It’s lovely to be able to spend an hour here and there like that, in a time when everything has to have some greater, efficient meaning attached to it or else it feels wasted, and Wonderland of Carbuncle can give you that hour with Compile charm to spare.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.