Released by Enix in 1996 for the Super Famicom (meaning it was only released in Japan), Wonder Project J: Kikai no Shonen Pino is an adventure game with a focus on resource management and Tamagotchi features. It has never been rereleased, but team WakdHacks has fortunately developed a fully playable fan translation. This can be considered a rather relevant game, as it laid foundation to titles such as Seaman, Hey You! Pikachu, and later on Lifeline. In fact, its ingenious programming and intricate reactions are still discussed and experimented with nowadays.
Each act works as a small story arch that leads mechanical boy Pino to activate some of his “heart circuits”, which Geppetto created in order to try and convince humans that Gijin (robots) are just like them and deserve to live in peace. To progress, the player needs to make Pino interact with the right items and the right spots in the world to develop specific skills, such as Attack, Balance, Reasoning and Confidence. Statuses are divided in four categories: Aggression (Red), Athleticism (Yellow), Intelligence (Blue), and Sensitivity (Green).
It’s not possible to directly control Pino, though. Instead, the player controls Tinker, a fairy that works as “Pino’s interface” and hovers around the screen just like a mouse cursor. Through Tinker, the player can drag items around, tell Pino to move, stop or interact, and provide positive or negative feedback to the boy’s actions. In emergency cases — such as Pino trying to eat a book — a double negative can be used to bonk his head and stop him in his tracks.
“It was a new type of game, so I felt I had to explain my ideas thoroughly. That resulted in around 130 pages of game design documentation before the proposal was even accepted. We weren’t sure the ideas would fit in the cartridge’s capacity and often had to cut down on music to free space.”
Producer Hiroki Fujimoto during a CEDEC 2001 panel
Pino’s dialogs and animations change as his statuses change. Sometimes you’ll have to train Pino to go on an adventure, which may both require and cause a raise on his Aggression statuses. As a result, he’ll be kicking doors open and shouting with people once he’s back, making it impossible to complete tasks involving Kindness and Charisma. This is just one example of how statuses work, which honestly feels quite ahead of its time and creates some very cool interactions, if you ask me.
It makes perfect use of the game’s charming animations and highly detailed environments, which may remind you of Studio Ghibli’s works. That’s because Mr. Iida Manosuke, who’s worked on Lupin III and Laputa: Castle in the Sky was part of the team. Ironically, this collaboration only came to be due to a failed attempt to get Hayao Miyazaki involved in the project before it was even called Wonder Project J.
And since higher statuses doesn’t always mean better (high kindness making Pino avoid combats being an example), there’s no use in training Pino into a superhuman. At the store, players can use the gold they’ve earned by progressing the story and selling crops to purchase tools and consumables, the later which temporarily increase Health and Energy or help manage status.
There are a couple of situations that causes Pino to go angry and stop following your commands. This lasts for a while, especially if you have no spare pudding in your backpack to feed him. In this case, the only way to increase Pino’s trust until you can finally buy pudding again is by waiting for him to interact with ground items and then react positively to his action.
That’s why you’ve got to provide positive feedback as much as possible and avoid hitting him unless he has done something objectively bad. However, Pino’s main behavior is decided by his highest statuses, which in turn may lead him to hurt himself until he breaks, decreasing trust and resulting in a charge of 4000 coins. In general, trust management is what makes Wonder Project J a bit more challenging, but it is also quite frustrating at some points and nowhere as satisfying as training him and watching the story unfold correctly.
Unless you already know how things work and the tricks around them, Wonder Project J is one of these games where you can get in pretty tight spots — near unrecoverable — if you go out of resources. This combined with status requirements becoming less obvious with each act led us to abandon the game during the fifth act. That said, the game’s reception was great enough to warrant a sequel for the Nintendo 64, named Wonder Project J2: Koruro no Mori no Josette. We’ve got that one on our radar as well and hope to work on a feature about it soon, so stay tuned!
