I went home after work yesterday and sat down to a good two hours of Kyojin no Doshin (Doshin the Giant), which equates to about four days of island time. I would’ve played more, but my fiancé wanted to ‘try it for a minute’ so I popped in a fresh memory card to let her start her own island. Four hours later, she finally gave up the controller and let me have a few more goes at it.

Needless to say, it is a very engaging title that quickly draws the player into its island paradise. Following the intro when Doshin arrives on the island, you quickly encounter the first bunch of villagers. The goal of Kyojin no Doshin is to help the islanders with a variety of tasks (or sometimes just torment them), ultimately leading them to believe that Doshin is a god. They will begin to joyously worship you (or just bow out of fear) and build monuments to your greatness after extended interaction with them.

There are four kinds of villagers on the island, each with different colors and cultures. Although the people themselves are small and detailed mainly by female or male clothes rather than having distinct features, they are easily distinguished by color. The red tribe is an Eastern-Oriental style culture that builds pagodas and such structures. The green tribe favors flat swamp-like areas and are of a tropical culture, building grass-thatched huts. The blue tribe is a mountainous culture, favoring stout stonework dwellings nestled in sloping cliffs. I have yet to encounter the yellow tribe; they live on a remote island that is a pain in the ass to get to.

You control Doshin and must assist the different tribes. The island is spotted with trees, which are the most important element in this game. Trees radiate green energy into the ground around them, and only earth imbued with such energy can support life. Naturally, the first thing the villagers ask for is trees. Each tribe begins with a small colored patch of earth (colored according to their tribe color) which indicates the area they are centered around and can build structures near to expand. When you plant the trees they desire (by hauling them from a different location) around their village-plot, they can build houses and start to multiply. As their numbers increases, the tribes will build tree nurseries, animal farms, larger halls and eventually monuments in Doshin’s honor.

There are 16 monuments to earn in the game. The first four are pretty straight-forward; you get one from each tribe when their village grows large enough. However, the advanced monuments come from what appears to be one of the most interesting aspects of gameplay. Doshin must facilitate new cultures. If you bring a girl from one tribe and a guy from another tribe to the middle of nowhere, they will start a new village. These new villages must also be attended to, and from them you can earn mixed color monuments. According to the monument list screen, the most advanced monuments are quad colored, requiring a village populated by islanders of each of the four colors. The sixteenth monument is listed only as a question mark, raising questions interesting questions as to who builds the final monument. I, personally, am hoping for aliens.

But expanding villages is not as simple as moving trees. Doshin must also raise and lower the terrain level with his magic, and occasionally relocate trees and buildings to create room for new and bigger structures. Each tribe has their own tastes, and Doshin must tailor his assistance as such. For example, the blue tribe won’t start building houses until you’ve raised a rather large mountain out of the flat lands where they’ve chosen to live, etc. A narrator-type guide pops up now and then to give you information and also provides you with daily hints (game days, not real days).

Every time you do something nice for the islanders, you get a heart for each person it benefits. For example, the first two red villagers ask you for a tree, and when you plant it, you get two hearts. Later on, if, say, eight villagers are calling you to move a tree or relocate a temple, you will receive eight hearts when you do it. These hearts gather and are displayed around the screen, and when the screen is completely ringed with hearts you grow larger and begin collecting again. However, you can also receive skulls (symbols of hatred or fear) through your negative actions. Stepping on villagers or lifting houses when they’re sleeping will earn you skulls. If you ring the screen with skulls, you will grow larger.

Also, you can transform at will into Jyashin the Hate Giant by pressing the L Button. Then, instead of lifting trees or villagers, you can smash them with your fist or launch fireballs at them. Either way, hate or love, by collecting a screen-full of hearts or skulls you can grow larger, granting Doshin greater abilities. It’s entirely up to you how you choose to play Kyojin no Doshin, but you’d be wise to set up a nice sized village or two before you decide to start leveling things, in order to keep from limiting your options.

Kyojin no Doshin does not have an English option. All the assistance and prompt messages are in Japanese text and voice, but the villagers themselves speak in icons. Thus, if you have a general understanding of what you ought to do and how you need to do it, it’s not hard to play Doshin with no Japanese skill. However, you may find yourself stymied now and then, but not so much that checking a guide or posting to a message board (hint, hint) won’t clear up quickly. For example, when the villagers build you a monument, you will know that they want a flower to decorate it when you see ten of them showing the flower icon, but you won’t know why it’s important or how to find one unless you can understand the Japanese explanation your ‘guide’ gives you. But overall, Doshin is easier to play without Japanese skill than Animal Leader or Animal Forest.

Doshin is a pretty game, but not without graphical faults. It runs in progressive mode for added clarity and shine, but there is a pretty decent amount of aliasing, especially in buildings. There is some pop-up, but only at times and usually only when you're looking for it. Usually, you will be so busy with the task at hand and watching your feet to make sure you don’t trample the villagers that you won’t notice it. The draw distance is great, and you can see from one side of the world to the other when conditions allow. There is a bit of slowdown now and then when there is a lot of activity on screen, but it isn’t a large drop and it lasts only a second or two. The texture work is simple, but nice. The landscape terrain such as high mountain, desert and grassland is very pretty. The terrain textures are nice and sharp, and really do resemble actual terrain, but there isn’t a lot of variety. The water effects are good though, and reflect nicely, but they’re not top-notch.

The sound is made up mostly of bird calls and nature sounds, coupled with the singing voices of the villagers when in close proximity to them. Not so good, not so bad.

I really enjoyed the first few hours I put in with Kyojin no Doshin, even without encountering the fourth tribe or playing around as the Hate Giant. I can’t wait to get home and play some more! Stay tuned to Planet GameCube for more impressions, movies and gameplay help!

Update 3/20/2002

I have had Kyojin no Doshin for a week now. My initial impressions haven’t changed a great deal, but there are a few things worth noting and clarifying.

First, this game is more difficult than I had assumed. Although the basic mechanics of gameplay are simple enough, steady progression and success can be really tricky. The first few days are easy enough. You merely have to move some trees and raise some land to please the villagers, and repeat the process in another location in order to earn the first few monuments. But then life quickly becomes more unmanageable.

The first three villages are located relatively close to each other on the main island body, but the fourth (as well as subsequently ‘created’ villages) is on a costal rim island. This makes time your biggest enemy, but not in the urgent “I-gotta-earn-that-monument-before-the-sun-goes-down” sense that Pikmin instills (you can dally all day long in Doshin with little adverse effect, except cultivating a boring island).

Rather, as the number of villages you are trying to manage increases, so do your tasks. The biggest trouble arises when multiple villages are expanding at similar rates, and wind up ready to build monuments at the same time. Monuments require flowers to activate them (otherwise you get a useless pile of stones that resembles turds), and flowers must be ‘created’ by gathering trees tightly together, causing them to die and produce fresh, new trees and a flower.

The kicker is, there can only be one flower in the world at any given time. Flowers that have already been used to activate a monument (even though that monument has not yet finished construction) don’t matter, but the overall timing is very tricky. It takes time to amass trees, time to place the flower, time to travel across the island to another village, and even more time to repeat the process if you misjudge the timing and your new flower disappears.

What’s more, once a village decides to start a monument, you have only a little bit of time to provide the flower before your efforts there go to waste. And if they DO build a turd monument, you have to smash it before they’ll make another, an depending on immigration to said village (meaning if other colored humans have found their way into it, which happens often), the new monument may end up a mixed color monument, and not the one you wanted in the first place!

Therefore, it takes even more time to weed out the odd colored buggers before you smash the monument, and even then the villagers will have started to fear you, and may choose to build a Hate monument rather than the original Love version (which still counts, but might not be what your hoping for). As such, it’s sometimes better to just start a whole new village by design in order to encourage the production of a monument you want. But then you wind up with yet another village to mind, and everything gets stickier.

But please don’t misunderstand. This is not a bad thing. Far from it, really. It is frustrating at times watch the results of your own poor planning (or blatant screw-up), but the experience is highly engaging and is evidence of great game design. The balanced mix of daily tension at trying to deal with your islands effectively and overall reassuring relaxation of knowing that even when you do fumble, you still have all the time you want to fix (or just torch to the ground and recreate) your villages is wonderful.

However, there is one thing that sucks on ice. Not a game flaw (although there are some graphic and control issues), but the most evil, nasty aspect of Kyojin no Doshin gameplay, disasters. Remember SimCity? When a fire would break out or Godzilla would come rampaging through town? Well, Doshin has them too, in spades. Fires, twisters, earthquakes, rainstorms and the terrible, terrible volcanic eruptions (and more) all make life hell at the worst times.

Each is pretty easy to deal with, providing the conditions aren’t at their worst. Fires are quelled by lowering the ground until you strike water, and twisters are stopped by tagging them with Jyashin fireballs, for example. But if a fire breaks out on a mountain that happens to have a village nestled up against it, you can’t very well sink the whole mountain and must instead sacrifice a large portion of the lowland village to reach the necessary water. And if a twister touches down in the middle of your frigging village, you can let it rage or let the fireballs rip. Either way, you can kiss more than a few structures goodbye. It’s agonizing to see a desired, carefully cultured monument in mid-construction get taken out by a chunk of volcanic mountain or leveled by an earthquake, but Doshin gets points again for creating a sense of urgency (re: tragedy) while still allowing the player to relax and try again even after the worst disasters. It’s balanced and it’s fair, and it sure pisses me off sometimes.

Additionally, a small note about the graphics. I am more impressed now than ever at the texture detail and water effects in Kyojin no Doshin, but at the same time I see more of its graphical flaws as well. The water reflections and transparency effects are fantastic, and the terrain textures are rich and detailed, although there are only a few main types of terrain (green land, browner land, high mountains, etc).

However, the framerate issues become more apparent as your island grows more complex, sometimes slowing down for five or ten seconds at a time, although only somewhat. Also, pop-up is more prevalent than I had initially assessed.

Control can be a little clumsy at times, mainly due to its design. The movement scheme is set up so that when you press the analog stick in the opposite direction that Doshin is facing, he will back up rather than turn around and walk. He will eventually do the 180 and carry on in whatever direction you bid him, but the fine control is meant to enable you to back up slightly when in tight quarters to avoid stepping on things.

So, in order to turn in place, you must kinda rotate the stick in quarter and half turns (like a slow motion Street Fighter fireball motion). This can be awkward, and while I appreciate being able to take a few steps backwards now and then, I more often need to rotate slightly to place or pick up a tree properly.

I would be happier if normal control was handled as absolute (meaning you push right and you turn and go right, immediately) and was coupled with back up movement engaged by holding a button or trigger.