Before Final Fantasy, Square Made An Aliens Game
Hear the name SquareSoft and your mind is immediately flooded with images of quality, beloved RPGs. Final Fantasy, Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, Vagrant Story. But back in 1987—not long after it was founded—the Japanese studio developed something most people seem to have forgotten about: an Aliens game. Launching exclusively for the MSX, this was one of several digital spin-offs of James Cameron's action-packed sequel. But this one had a harder time finding a worldwide audience, as it was only ever released in Japan.
Related: The Best Survival Tool In Alien: Isolation Is Your Ears
Square was a very different company in the mid-to-late '80s. It had yet to find its niche with fantasy RPGs, and was trying its hand at everything. There was Cruise Chaser Blassty, a curiously named first-person mech battler with RPG elements. (Side note: this was the first game legendary Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu ever wrote music for.) Alpha was a sci-fi text adventure set in a post-apocalyptic future. King's Knight was a vertically scrolling shooter with a medieval setting. Then there was Aliens: Alien 2.
No, I'm not sure why they felt the need to add 'Alien 2' as a subtitle. Perhaps something was lost in translation there. Like most licensed games of the era, Square's take on Aliens is very loosely based on the events of the film. You play as Ellen Ripley, toting a pixelated pulse rifle, and must rescue Newt from the alien-infested colony of Hadley's Hope. This being a game from the 1980s, there isn't much to it. It's a side-scrolling shooter in the most primitive sense, with a dash of platforming thrown in. They loved that shit in the '80s.
As Ripley makes her way across the surface of LV-426 and into the stricken
Read more on thegamer.com
