Boktai – The sun is in your hands*

It’s 1 PM on a Saturday, firmly within the 5-6 hour window in which my balcony has access to direct sunlight. Perfect conditions boot up Boktai and purify Carmilla, the boss of Sol City.

Midway through the ritual, the true enemy appears. A cloud. Not in-game but outside, blocking the sunlight from reaching Boktai’s solar sensor. The game is now testing my IRL positioning skills as I am running around, trying to regain a bar of sunlight and failing.

It’s getting clear that I have to stall for time so I throw out a Rising Sun grenade to create some in-game artificial sunlight. Eyes on the cloud, then back to the sunlight gauge, then back to the cloud again. Luck is on my side and the cloud stops blocking the sun as grenade effect is about to end.

The purification ritual is complete and I savor the victory for about 2 seconds before I start scanning for passers-by down below, hoping that no one saw all that.

A novel feature on top of a great game

Boktai: The Sun Is in Your Hand is a Konami-developed, Kojima-produced isometric action-adventure game with a solar sensor on the cart, utilizing a battery to support its real-time clock system. At least 1 thing in that sentence must’ve caught your eye.

To give some context to the opening story, in Boktai you enter dungeons of varying importance, with the major ones ending with an Immortal boss battle at the end. The basic gameplay loop might sounds familiar to the Metal Gear Solid faithful as it entails stealthily approaching enemies to incapacitate them or avoiding them altogether.

There is a touch of Zelda in the dungeon design as you are solving puzzles that are either contained within the room you currently are or include area-wide obstacles that expect you to tackle the dungeon as a cohesive, interactive place. This is done well enough to stand on its own but there were some unsold UV-light detecting teddy bear components that Konami was sitting on.

Your gun is uses solar energy as ammo which can be replenished by charging it up while the cart’s sensor is being hit by sunlight. Area hazards will be affected by whether you are playing under sunlight or not. There are other optional interactions that are possible or sped up by utilizing sunlight. And most importantly, the Pile Driver needs sunlight to purify Immortals.

A different kind of run back

Once you have beaten one of the major dungeon bosses, you are going to have to carry its coffin back to the entrance of the dungeon. Boktai plays into how that would inherently create obstacles and designs the dungeons in a way to both accommodate this feature but also include it in the puzzle that is dungeon navigation.

The Pile Driver is what awaits the coffin at the entrance. It is the tool that lets you purify the Immortal but you cannot get it up and running or maintain its power without sunlight. While it’s hacking away at the Immortal’s HP, you are aiding the process by shooting at the generators to prevent them from going down and dodging attacks. Should the sensor stop receiving sunlight, the Pile Driver will deactivate and the Immortal will try to escape.

This is the context in which a cloud can throw a wrench in the process. But it is also why the game has permanently occupied a space in my memory after randomly picking it out of a selection of game in a store, a couple decades ago.

Experiencing Boktai today

I would be happy if this spotlight on Boktai got a couple of people interested in the game but it would be pretty naive to expect that the first thing they would do is search for and buy a used copy on eBay (quite pricey at the time of writing, too), pop it in their GBA and start playing in the sun. Especially when are talking about the few folks that are both not terribly busy during the day and have access to an outdoor space in which they feel comfortable playing GBA that is not shaded. Despite what the subtitle of the game says, the sun is not in your hands.

No need to despair, the game is nothing if not full of options. You can take advantage of Solar Nuts to replenish your gun’s energy, utilize a special gun lens to farm energy and make smart use of your Rising Sun grenades to temporarily mimic the sun. If you are desperate, you can get a shady sunlight loan from Dark Loans but this will most likely end how you would expect.

You will only really need actual sunlight when purifying Immortals, which is should be more than manageable. Another loophole is to grab a cheap UV light – that is what the sensor is actually measuring. It’s going to be your little pocket sun.

For the rest, do not get discouraged by the above. As described earlier, this is a very interesting and beautifully executed game that does not live or die by its novel feature. It offers great dungeon and puzzle design, clever enemy encounters and bosses, very polished visuals and surprisingly (or not, depending on your expectations) snappy writing.

So, playing your legally emulated copy most likely going to be a blast, too.