Mr. Driller G
Mr. Driller 1 and 2 aren’t the kind of games that appeal to everyone, but Mr. Driller G marks an interesting turn in the series, adding a story-focused scenario mode on top of the standard arcade missions. It’s not incredibly deep, but the variety in the five short episodes it gives you is pretty fun. The most striking thing about this game is how it perfectly establishes the aesthetic of the games after it, building off of Mr. Driller 2 not just in visual style, but in writing and audio, too.
The mission mode in Mr. Driller G isn’t any more complicated than the games before it: Drill down to the bottom of a shaft, trying to match up colored blocks for points while avoiding getting crushed and grabbing oxygen tanks to keep your air from ticking down too much. It’s simple, it works, and I’m really bad at it. Scenario mode, though, is a major addition, and it isn’t just because it brings a full story to what was previously just an arcade game with some cute ending dialog; the mechanics in scenario mode are fundamentally different from the original, changing it from a frantic puzzle action game to something very deliberate, and very punishing. There aren’t even any lives, so if you die, it’s game over and a level restart.
The good news is that your air no longer ticks down every second, which means you have all the time you need to carefully consider your actions. The bad news is that for every block you drill, you lose a point of air. Of course, this makes X blocks more of an annoyance than a serious obstacle, taking only 5 points of air rather than the arcade mode’s 20, but it also makes air far more valuable, and makes a slight mistake have a waaaaay stronger impact on your odds of beating a level. Air isn’t a timer anymore, but it’s still a ticker, and if you don’t consider things more carefully, it’ll get you faster than an active timer did.
But scenario mode isn’t about to just toss you into a harder game without any kind of assistance. It’s a mode designed to offer greater variety to players and make the game more accessible to newcomers, after all. So as you drill through levels, you’ll find colored “Dristones”, which range from temporary power-ups like boosted speed and the ability to climb up one block higher, to color morphs for easier chains, destroying blocks within a certain range or color, or just giving you a quick boost of air. Not all of these are get out of jail free cards, though; Destroying an entire screen of blocks costs half your air, same with activating a layer of two shields to save you from getting crushed. It all forces you to be very conservative and think about when you use your Dristones as much as when you just drill normally, and makes scenario mode an effectively different game.
But while the challenge is an interesting change of pace, and it feels good to squeeze through an exceptionally difficult level, you kind of have to ask if they went a bit too overboard. Scenario mode is short, so it makes sense that they’d want it to take a bit longer to finish, but levels still take roughly ten to thirty minutes to complete, and losing an entire run to one mistake can be even more than disheartening, it can feel like a downright frustrating waste of time. The later levels seem to try accounting for this with Warp stones that let you restart with max air and any stones you might have already acquired, but it feels like a hollow solution to let a player have an easier time with a 30 minute level, by allowing them to restart with a slight advantage after making it 15 minutes in and hitting a wall where they have zero odds of progressing without running out of air. It’s a shame, it really puts a damper on what’s otherwise a solid story mode.
Mr. Driller G also features a vs mode where two players can compete to reach the end of a level, and even an online mode that presumably allows you to do it over the net, but I wasn’t able to test out either of these. Fortunately, scenario mode showcases a number of prefixed rival battles which race you down hand-made courses. They’re a lot easier than the regular levels, and the later ones have some genuinely clever design that keeps you on your toes, making for a really welcome change of pace after the exhausting gauntlets the solo levels put you through.
The real stars of scenario mode are episode 3 and the finale of episode 5, Egypt and the South Pole. Split into two levels, starring Ataru Hori and Dig Dug respectively, Egypt has you solving puzzles in ancient ruins, where the game shifts entirely from arcade-style puzzle action to literal puzzles utilizing the core mechanics and movement to make you consider how to approach it. A single mistake makes it impossible to reach the end, forcing you to think carefully about every little movement and block, every Dristone and every tiny bit of air. Coupled with the game’s phenomenal soundtrack setting a really strong atmosphere, Egypt is just a hell of a lot of fun if you can stomach the difficulty.
The South Pole, on the other hand, opens with the absolute most brutal, punishing level in the entire game, a 1000m gauntlet, and while the previous level was kind enough to give you three chances of beating its 700m drill downwards, Antarctica is nowhere near as courteous. It drops you in with the most soft, ominous track in the game, and you’re bound to hear it a lot before you ever beat it. Once you reach the end, you’re greeted with something unprecedented in Mr. Driller: a major moral choice. The main villain, a misunderstood and alienated drill scientist named Dr. Manhole, offers you a chance for shelter, to hide away with him and be one of the two sole survivors of his plan to eradicate humanity.
If you say yes, he steals your drill and locks you out of his bunker while laughing at you, and the game lets you reload from the start of the cutscene. Dr. Manhole may have been misunderstood, but he’s also just kind of a jerk. Still, Mr. Driller G must be given credit for helping to establish the standards of video game storytelling and player choice into the next decade of games, all the way back in 2001.
After picking the correct choice in this scene, you’re put into the final big setpiece of scenario mode, as you race down a deep shaft into the core of the earth to deactivate a giant death drill. This last scene is interesting for how it recontextualizes not just the core design of Mr. Driller, but also the altered mechanics of scenario mode, switching things back around to a frantic race down where you have no time or need to think about what’s around you, you just need to keep drilling, and drilling, drilling as fast as you can mash the button. Things heat up as the early floors give you dozens of air tanks, but you’re never able to go fast enough to catch up to the drill until midway through, where the game starts giving you speed Dristones. It makes the final 100m stretch a rush, popping speed upgrades as fast as possible in order to move fast enough to just barely reach the drill before it’s too late. It’s simple, and maybe not exactly elegant, but it’s just another example of Mr. Driller G’s admirable ability to shake up a pretty simple set of core mechanics and design concepts.
Less notable, but still interesting, is the time attack mode. It plays more similarly to arcade, but instead of focusing around score and randomly generated levels, it’s about racing down several premade courses for the best time, grabbing clocks to gain extra time as you go. Time Attack isn’t new to the game, but it adds some fun extra content to keep you playing nonetheless.
Arguably, though, there’s one single thing that defines Mr. Driller G, above its writing, its spectacular visual presentation, and even it’s core gameplay, and it’s Masaru “GO” Shiina’s music. An in-house composer for Namco since around the 2000s and later doing some of the most stand-out music for franchises like Tales of, Ace Combat and God Eater, the first five Mr. Driller games are among his earliest credits and also some of his best, and most experimental. I could go on about how good his music is, but, well… I do that enough already. Even if you never play this game, I recommend listening to some of the tracks; “Epunam”, “Re-Epunam”, “Go→” and “Holy Dream G” are some of the best pieces of music I’ve heard in a puzzle action game, and are a huge part of what defines the game stylistically.
It would be kinda sad to say the music is solely what defines the game, though. And it would be wrong! The art direction done by Minoru Sashida is bright, simple and pops out very effectively, with lots of tiny, almost imperceptible details mixed in, to be expected from a graphical designer who was part of drawing the ui for Ace Combat 3; and the character designs by Kaori Shinozaki are goofy and distinctive, every character has a unique silhouette and a look that perfectly fits their personality, and the writing itself is really fun.
The plot of scenario mode is just a simple kid’s cartoon thing, but most of it serves as focus episodes for individual lead characters, and their interactions with each other as well as their goofy characterization makes it really fun to watch. My favorite characters are Taizo Hori, who I will always interchangeably refer to as Dig Dug, who acts as Mr. Driller’s dense deadbeat dad and takes over the mission to go to Egypt so he can see camels; and Tony Kark Horunoski, a driller from Russia with bright shining stars in their eyes who gets less than five minutes of screen time, less if you don’t die in the level where you meet them, and serves purely to talk in a hilariously exaggerated manner, ending every sentence with an over-enunciated “DESS~☆”. Their contagious flamboyance is totally unmatched.
Ultimately, Mr. Driller G is just… fun. Its scenario mode could use a bit of toning down with its difficulty, but the core design of the game is so inventive, and the characters and artwork are all so charmingly presented and lovable. It’s a game where you’d never expect the kind of level of effort that was put into it, and it’s probably one of my favorite PS1 games for it. It builds on what works in the two games before it, and it successfully establishes the basis for the two that would come later. Mr. Driller G, is Great. And now you know what it stands for.
In Tales of Vesperia for the PS3, the newly added playable character, Patty, gets a Mr. Driller costume. For ten long years, Bandai Namco determined that it was too dangerous to unleash this outside of Japan. It is only now with the forthcoming release of Tales of Vesperia Definitive Edition, that they have finally determined that the world may now be prepared.
We can only hope.
