Japanese Abadox manual scan sighted

[Skyknight]

http://www.videogameden.com/fc/extra/aba.pdf

I used Google Translate Mobile on the text for the story and stages. (Natsume boasted that this was the first case of downward-scrolling shooting on the Famicom!) Some highlights…

—Year 5012 of the…Essler Calendar? Not sure what this is about.

—Parasitis is thought to in fact be one person at first who bore the Parasite X, which somehow turned them into a planet-sized horror. And they’re still smart enough to control machinery within themself.

—The good news is that Parasitis is still some distance from Earth. The bad news is that they’re headed there, and nobody fancies the death toll that will commence if the spawn parasites rain down there.

—Oddly, Maria’s seeming death may have occurred some time ago—Nazar is mourning his comrades and her in seemimgly different milieus. Something, however, renews his resolve when he catches a glimpse of the “Mother Alien” at the heart of Parasitis. So he doesn’t actually know at first that Maria’s in there.

After some hypothesizing I saw on TVTropes, there’s the unsettling possibility that Maria was the original bearer of Parasite X, which “killed” her as it gained its substance. She’s extricated from it in the end…but is she cleansed of it?

For more fun, “Nazar” starts the place name “Nazareth”—as in Saint Joseph’s place of origin. Maria is of course a variant of Miriam/Mary, and with the two being lovers comes the possibility of Parasite X starting with their unborn child…

I know I spoke before of a theme held by some shmups of fighting demon-like aliens that might be just plain demons (e.g. X-Multiply, Pulstar), but if my line of thought is right, you’re fighting the ANTICHRIST…?!

[Skyknight]

Quick note: I finally figured out how Natsume got the name. No coolness or anything; it's a combination of Abaddon's name and that of Parasite X.

Considering that Parasite X's existence may have been meant to just be theorized in the Japanese original, maybe the point is that there was no physical parasite; Maria's unborn baby was simply possessed by Abaddon all along. (Or maybe we should instead look at an actual son of the Devil from the extracanonical The Questions of Bartholomew--Salpsan, maybe in full Salpsan ben Beliar, evidently in charge of thwarting heavenly reconnaissance of cacodaemonic activity.)

[BIL]

Oh man, that's an awesome catch re: Nazar-eth and Maria.

To further cement the diabolic theme, I'd cite (as in the old thread) the game's JP-only subtitle: Jigoku no Inner War. Beyond the literal, Life Force-styled "death from within" biohorror (complete with LF-styled mechanics and perspective shifts ;3), perhaps an allusion to demonic possession? Or even a more generalised divine struggle, with the player as knightly avatar. A cyber-paladin with sword and shield in hand, a mere cosmic heartbeat removed from the Templars.

Notably bowdlerised (or perhaps just haplessly mistranslated?) from "Hellish" to "Deadly Inner War," for Milton Bradley's wonderfully improbable NES localisation, whos ads IIRC focused heavily on the gross-out factor. Rather like Gynoug's "Wings of Wor" localisation did, IIRC. Gore played better than Satan BITD, I guess. And there's the whole Hitler no Fukkatsu affair, where they censored the torture sequence (lash the POW with your metal arm for sweet intel), and scrubbed the swastikas - while leaving not only Hitler himself, but also his head detonating in gorenographic slow-mo. Doesn't do to think too hard about this stuff, I guess.



Natsume being no strangers to censorship BITD - see also Final Mission's elegiacal visions of genocide, decisively chopped from its NES release... whose name is infinitely more offensive than anything the original version musters.