Maka Maka

Maka Maka was developed by Office Koukan and published by Sigma Enterprises.  It’s infamously terrible.  Of course you can’t entirely blame development, since due to bankruptcy, it was published without bug testing.  These bugs range from the unsurprising memory overflow bugs to a bug that results in unreadable end credits.  It came out in 1992.

The town graphics are plain, but there's worse out there. The hero looks very annoyed.

The plot, as best I can tell, is a simple reincarnation plot.  Your hero’s girlfriend is a reincarnation of the wife of an ancient hero.   Of course, he is a reincarnation of an ancient hero.  You can unlock your past lives and transform into them for strong attacks.  An ancient enemy from the past has to be destroyed.

The world map in Maka Maka uses some Mode 7 zooming.

Graphically, the game is brightly colored.  The sprite artwork is by Koji Aihara much like Idea no Hi, which lends a distinct style to the graphics.  It’s not particularly pretty, but it’s competent.  You do get some interesting mode 7 zooming on the world map, as shown in the screenshots above and below.

When you bring up a menu on the world map, the map zooms outward to show more of the world.

So, the bugs.  You can have your stats roll over to zero randomly during level ups. If you use the magic system in the game, you can have your magic set to zero, preventing use of magic.  You can create some cascading bugs where your party members are replaced with clones of other party members and fighting graphically glitched enemies. Certain boundaries aren’t set properly, so you can wander outside of the ‘walls’ of certain caves, leaving you trapped in darkness.

There’s also curious stuff that you can’t tell if it is bugs.  For example, your first party member is a lazy reincarnation of a Greek philosopher.  He’s a cheerful man wearing an orange crate.  You have a plane that splits apart and crashes.  It zooms off screen to the upper left, and then zooms back on from the lower right, implying that you circled the entire world before crashing.  The end boss doesn’t really attack you.  There’s climatic situations, but your companions say absolutely nothing to you when you try talking to them.

The status screen in Maka Maka.

In the end, Maka Maka is remarkably bad.  It aims for comedic elements, but between the bugs and the general awkwardness of the game, dramatic moments just seem silly.    You can see attempts to make a unique game, but it’s hard to say if the programmers could have made it a good game.