'I often find myself drawn towards the weird, obscure and even virtually unknown when it comes to gaming. The problem with liking obscure games, is that sometimes annoying circumstances prop up that hold me back from being able to play some of them. The biggest obstacle of all though is when a game was never released to English-speaking countries and has no available English translation, whether it be fan or official. Being a man of only one language, the only choice I have then is to ponder longingly on what it might be like to actually play these games. This is where a new series I came up with comes in, titled "Lost Games" where I will research and explore those games that we may never get a chance to play.'
It is from here that the player leads Matthew down to the snowy streets where he can enter his car and drive around the world of Mizzuna Falls. With the context already in place within my mind that this game is a product of 1998, I instantly found myself astounded by the vast amount of freedom and space available to explore. Despite this, the game isn't without its flaws, a particularly noticeable one being the way objects in the distance appear out of thin air as you get closer, which comes as a result of the PlayStation's hardware. But these flaws are easily excusable when we remind ourselves of how Human Entertainment went all out to push that trusty little grey box to its maximum potential. The level of depth to Mizzuna Falls is truly incredible. It features a full day to night cycle, a weather system, and the town's inhabitants have daily routines. This game was doing vast 3D open world gameplay a year before even Shenmue, the game considered the originator of such gameplay was even released! I am not taking away the glory of Shenmue, as it is one of my all-time favourite games, but how did Mizzurna Falls get lost to time like it has, despite pushing the boundaries of video games in a similar way to Shenmue, and on less powerful hardware? Another thought that comes to mind is, why didn't Sony push this game more? It was never even released in the west. This was during a time in gaming where consoles didn't have things like built-in DVD players, social media sharing and other such irrelevant gimmicks to push their consoles, they competed on the quality of their games and how well they could push the limits of the technology they were made for. With Shenmue being the trick up Sega's sleeve around this time, Sony could have embraced this game as a direct (albiet a much more graphically lacking) competitor, beating Sega to this revolutionary style of gameplay first. It is quite apparent that the potential of Human Entertainment's Mizzurna Falls has gone unrecognised, and criminally so.
After doing some research, I came across this terrific blog called Eastern Mind (R.I.P.) that discusses the game in very intricate detail. Quoting the blog, 'the sheer magnitude of this project increases when considering the modest scale of the remaining Human studio productions from the time' and 'Mizzurna Falls becomes an intriguing and unmatched display of ambition.' It is sad that this game never got to be seen by the rest of the world, but like most great works of media, they go vastly unrecognised, unless there is a big budget behind them, and in the case of Mizzurna Falls, it had such a limited budget that it didn't even make it outside of Japan. So all us English speaks can do is watch videos and wonder what it'd be like to enjoy this game deeper than what is available to us, but on the surface, it is quite clear that Mizzurna Falls was astounding for its time.