I want to preface this Weekly Kusoge by saying that I absolutely love Tecmo’s Deception, but it is complete shit. I was inspired to try out the Deception series by community member Kerrik52. My only previous experience was watching a roommate try out 2005’s Trapt. However, upon looking at screenshots of Tecmo’s Deception, I fell in love.
Released in 1996, Tecmo’s Deception is just so PS1. While it established the foundation of the long-running series, it mostly failed spectacularly at everything it attempted. However, its King’s Field style first-person perspective and boxy, pixellated graphics just feel so cozy. A lot of what it failed to do was dropped by subsequent games in the series, which almost makes me feel like I won’t like them as much.
I will continue to send mixed signals throughout this article, I assure you.
Invitation to kusoge
Tecmo’s Deception starts with you, a prince, getting your idyllic life fucked over by your hilariously evil brother. You were set to marry the love of your life and take the throne of the kingdom, but that dick got jealous and framed you for murder. Typical little sibling.
However, you’re saved from the gallows and whisked away to the Castle of the Damned, where, in return for your assistance in resurrecting Satan, you’re given the power to exact your revenge. As a player, you’re not really given much choice in the matter, so thankfully, it just feels so good to be evil. It helps that the people visiting your castle are hapless at best and giant walking cola-douches at worst. And they’re usually at their worst.
The story is probably one of the legitimately best-executed facets of Tecmo’s Deception. Like many games of its era, there isn’t a whole lot of depth to it, but the fact that you play as a fallen hero doing evil stuff is pretty tantalizing. Your character isn’t really given any lines of their own, so their actions and reactions are largely up to your own imagination. For me, it was a lot like being an evil homeowner and trying to keep everyone off my damned lawn. Homeownership is a great fantasy for my generation.
Get off my lawn
You’re able to customize the Castle of the Damned at a great degree of depth. You can change the corridors and room placement as much as you want to make it feel more like home. You can, but there really isn’t much point in doing so.
Home customization is among the many, many undercooked features of Tecmo’s Deception. It sounds like a good idea on paper, and it still seems like a good idea when it’s presented to you. But then the gameplay gets applied to it, and you realize there’s no point.
You’re only ever invaded by a maximum of four intruders at a time. You deal with them by drawing them into traps that you set around the castle and activating them at the right time. However, I feel like the word “trap” implies a certain amount of automation, but there is none. Really, they’re spells that you set on the ground. You wait until someone steps on them, then manually activate them while the person is about five feet away. Satan should have just given you a powerful kick.
So, with the limited number of invaders and the fact that you have to be close enough to count an intruder’s nose hairs, you don’t really need a big castle. For most missions, I only used the room that intruders spawn in and the directly adjacent corridors. It actually would have been most efficient for me if I just shrank the overall footprint of the castle down as small as possible. The intruders aren’t after anything. You aren’t protecting something. They’ll just wander the castle until you choose to deal with them, so giving them less land to graze on would just expedite the process.
Our house, our rules
Yet, you don’t really need to reach for any sort of exploit in Tecmo’s Deception. Everything is already extremely skewed in your favor from the beginning. It’s unlikely you’ll run out of gold or MP since it’s given to you so readily. You’re eventually given the ability to upgrade your traps, and there’s no reason not to.
On the other hand, there’s very little reason to use most of the traps. At the start of the game, I experimented with confusion traps as a way of making it easier to kill or capture intruders, but I quickly realized that it didn’t really increase the chances of success much. Later in the game, I only used capture traps because they seemed most effective, and I could use the captured person as a building block for a monster.
Monsters are another great idea that was badly implemented. You collect the bodies of captured intruders and can turn them into various types of beasts who can collect experience and level up. You don’t get this ability until much later in the game, but it basically just removes the last threads of usefulness from the kill traps. With the traps, you have to lead someone into them and activate them at the right moment. Monsters you can just drop in whenever you want, as long as you have Block Orbs available.
Monster problems
If you run out of Block Orbs, you can invite a merchant to your castle. Despite them being instantly aggressive once they see you, they’ll gladly open up shop if you walk up to them. You then have to kill them afterward, but somehow they’ve banked all your money. I guess if you could just buy whatever you want and then steal back your money, that would be going too far. As if Tecmo’s Deception is any stranger to pushing the margins of acceptable game design.
When you really get down to it, most of your time in Tecmo’s Deception will be spent grabbing the attention of an intruder and dodging their attacks as you lead them over a trap. Enemies don’t have any real willpower beyond walking directly toward you, so there’s very little strategy. Later games in the series would address this by having you create combinations of traps, but that is absolutely not the case here.
And then, just to cap everything off, I defeated the last boss within seconds by placing a trap directly next to them. The trap activated immediately when the mission started for some reason. There was no showdown. It was just over. A brilliant way to end the game.
If you have to fail, fail spectacularly
Yet, for whatever reason, I loved the time I spent with Tecmo’s Deception. There’s an earnest effort to innovate beneath all its failure and I find that really endearing. There was a lot of ambition driving it, and it feels like the team put their full effort into all these different features before eventually realizing that the pieces weren’t fitting together. But a product eventually has to ship, and everything was hastily crammed into a box and pushed out the door.
Or, at least, that’s how I interpret it. I haven’t been able to find any details on the development through interviews or elsewhere.
However, the thing with failed experiments is that very few are willing to try and replicate the experience. The Deception series would continue using the foundation of Tecmo’s Deception but would excise a lot of the parts that didn’t work and fine-tune the ones that did. In doing so, it lost a lot of what makes Tecmo’s Deception truly unique.
So, the moral of the story here is: if you want to truly stand out, fail like no one has ever failed before. Fail so spectacularly that your failure is indelibly burned into the memory of every human on the planet. Because, as anyone who calls themselves a pickup artist will tell you, pity is a type of love.
