Original Release: Eidos, 2001, PlayStation 2
As an incredibly ambitious mosquito, you must infiltrate the Yamada household and sock away enough of their blood to survive the winter in a game that’s kinda like a helicopter simulator.
Mister Mosquito (PS2, Eidos, 2001)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: PS2 Emulation Guide
Review by: Master-B
Mister Mosquito isn’t meant to be a sexual game, but it has all sorts of coy fetish-y undertones right from the start. From the deadpan female narrator’s constant innuendos, to the odd little sounds of pleasure the mosquito makes as he feeds … hell, the Japanese cover is just a straight-up closeup of a foot.
What is a Mister Mosquito but an odd little pile of fetishes? You’ve got all sorts of mishmashed stuff here … gigantic women, blood sucking, feet, voyeurism … did I miss anything? I probably did.
Ostensibly it’s not about sex, however, but survival. We’re in control of apparently the smartest and most advanced mosquito on Earth, who pilots about rather like a helicopter. The mosquito’s goal is to harvest enough blood to overcome his usual lifespan of mere weeks and survive an entire winter. He’ll attempt this feat in the Yamada household, a modest home to a middle-aged Japanese couple and their teenage daughter.
Since we’re dealing with gigantic character models, the game is divided into levels that take place in a single room and usually have you up against one member of the Yamada family at a time. There are some big contrivances to make things more difficult. You can only suck blood from certain specific points on the body, and these are sometimes only revealed for a brief period by getting them to change position by hitting things (phones, stereos, remote controls, etc.). You are also often required to get X tanks of blood from each specific point before you’ve won the level.
The Yamadas will go about their routine unaware of you unless you fly within their field of vision for too long. This can send you into a battle mode in which you have to slam into several tai chi pressure points (or something) to relax them and get the level back to normal, all while they stomp around and aim attacks at you.
An errant slap will take off some health, but getting swatted while sucking blood is your greatest danger as that’s instant death and comes with little warning. The only indication is that a pulse tracker will change into orange and then into red when a swatting is imminent, but sometimes the game swats you while it’s still in the orange. You can also be insta-killed by a sudden change in position that grinds you against a hard surface.
Mister Mosquito is kind of a fun novelty, at least at first. It’s certainly a truly original premise. The game takes none of this whole affair seriously, having the Yamadas bust out more and more intense martial arts moves (culminating with the patriarch throwing chi blasts) as they get more and more irritated by your biting. The voice acting is also absolutely baffling. At the time, crappy English-as-a-second-language voice acting was not unheard of, especially in budget games. But for whatever reason, developer Zoom Inc. opted to hire English-speaking European actors … then have them do stereotypically awful Asian accents. At least for the Yamada parents anyway … daughter Rena gets a relatively normal voice, but is still subject to all sorts of clumsy lines.
The gameplay is a little clunky, but that isn’t what ultimately undoes it. It’s hard to stick with it past the first few levels simply due to how repetitive it is. You’ll have to hit some button in the room to expose a weak point, suck on it for a limited time to avoid an insta-death, then just repeat the exact same process a whole bunch of times. Some hidden blood tanks and bonus items that improve your control spice things up a little bit, but the gameplay still gets old really quickly.
There are 12 levels of hijinks in total; after seeing everything, there isn’t really any reason to replay. There is a “second quest” of sorts, but all it does is make the levels a little more difficult and give the Yamadas some new dialogue in the between-level “talking head” cutscenes. You might be all done with it in just one day. It’s an interesting little curiosity just for how weird and original it is, but a hard game to recommend actually paying money for.
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