The Famicom-era Metal Max is one of a handful of games that ended up far more famous in mainland China than in Japan, and the fan translation is almost entirely the reason.
I don't carry any childhood glow for it, though. Mine is a near miss.
At the end of September 1996, the second day of the school's autumn sports meet landed on the Mid-Autumn Festival, so the closing ceremony was short on speeches and we were out by about one in the afternoon. A friend and I took the opportunity to hit the electronics market and buy a Mega Drive. I paid for the console, he paid for the cartridge. But with a half-day holiday there was a good chance the adults would be home early, and carrying a new console into the house was too risky. He got the jump on me and stashed the thing in his grandmother's bookcase.
The next three months were spent waiting for winter break, when I could retrieve it and finally play properly. We were leaving yellow carts behind and entering the era of black ones.
The first winter break of high school, in 1997, was a long one, running from the twenty-fourth day of the twelfth lunar month until it was cut short for Deng Xiaoping's memorial service. On the evening of the little new year I went to my grandmother's for dinner, and my aunt insisted I stay a couple of days. I figured the following two days were the weekend, my dad would be off work, and I couldn't play the Mega Drive at home anyway, so I agreed.
My cousin proudly produced two decent carts she'd gotten hold of: Kyatto Ninden Teyandee, Tetris plus Bombliss, Dig Dug 2, Mighty Final Fight — none of which I'd played — plus Chip 'n Dale 2 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3, which I'd only touched briefly. All of them were good.
The next morning she went out and came back with a text-heavy cart. One of the younger kids who trailed after her couldn't make sense of it, she said, and since word had gotten around that I played a lot of games, could I scout it out for him. We swapped the cart in and four characters filled the screen: Metal Max. I thought, this is the thing the magazine was just introducing — some small knockoff RPG, nothing to be afraid of. My cousin is three years younger than me and the kid was two years younger than her, still in primary school; of course a text game was too much for him. Being asked to help with something like this made me rather smug.
I put in two or three hours that afternoon. I hit the Cannon twice and couldn't get past it. Going by ordinary RPG logic, that spot either demands a clue or a weakness item, or it demands levels, and neither was going to happen in ten minutes, so I left it there. It clearly wasn't a knockoff, but beyond needing two sets of gear for the tanks there didn't seem to be much to it. I switched back to Kyatto Ninden Teyandee. There was a prejudice in those days: an RPG you can't save anywhere belongs to the previous generation, one tier down, not worth the time.
On the third morning I plugged it in again and the save was gone. That knocked my assessment down another notch. Later that morning the kid came over to learn something, so I demonstrated what equipment meant, what saving meant, what it meant to search every drawer and cupboard, what a maze and a trap were. First village, get the tank, drive to the second village, save, reset, load. He was utterly impressed. The file hadn't died during the demonstration, so I never mentioned the battery.
After I got home I folded the corner of a two-page walkthrough in the December 1996 issue of Electronic Games Software and closed the book on it.
Later issues of the magazine's tips column ran the bugle bug and a method for combining laser guns. I paid some attention — if there were home remedies circulating, people were playing it. Was it really that popular? It didn't matter much; in May 1997 I bought a brick Game Boy, and Famicom games mattered even less to me.
Only later, seeing the game mentioned again and again, did I begin to suspect I'd missed something good. Missing something is fine, though. There are plenty of games; you play the new ones. I never let it bother me.
Because there's no emotional entanglement, I wasn't bound to the Famicom version when I finally sat down to play. Naturally I picked the Super Famicom remake, Metal Max Returns, which is the better experience. I also have a lot of respect for the person who translated it: he kept revising the patch until 2021. I've translated a game myself, so I know how that goes. Interest carries you through text insertion and getting the game to load properly, through being able to read the whole story — that's the passionate phase. Then comes the refractory period, where fixing typos, adjusting text overflow, and polishing lines is tedious work with no sense of achievement attached.
Out of respect for the original and for the translator, I played with nothing but save states. No cheats.
But some things in the bones refuse to stay hidden. You know how it is.
Metal Max Returns adds a subway ruin route running from Fry through Soro to Hell's Gate. Tanks can't get through it; you fight the whole way on foot, and the laser earthworms in there hit brutally hard. On real hardware, running that at a low level is a near-death sentence. With save states it's easy. So out I came at the village west of Hell's Gate, upgraded my gear, and still wasn't satisfied — I kept going south to Kara before flying back to run the normal route.
On the evening of October 5th I got there, walked out of the village, and no wildfire had started. My own fire, however, had. On the 6th I rolled back to the mutated crocodile fight and spent a whole day on it. No fire. On the 7th I swapped in the 0.95 patch, rolled back to the crocodile again, and burned another day. Still no fire.
My heart went cold. A whole National Day holiday wasted. And by that point the story was roughly 85 percent done — only two bounty heads and the final boss, Noah, remained. Giving up there felt unacceptable.
I was convinced the sequence break plus the translation patch had broken the event flag. So I gritted my teeth and started a fresh file on the Japanese version.
To make up for the lost time, I went straight to the tools: levels, items, tank equipment, all of it. Then I followed a walkthrough with excessive care — every village entered, every NPC talked to, every bounty head gunned down in order. And I have to say, three characters each carrying a laser gun with 500 attack, pumping rounds into Marshall, felt great.
During the week after the holiday I played a little each night and reached the same spot on Thursday. With some trepidation I collected vehicle number 8. Still no fire. Since it was the Japanese original, the ROM couldn't be the problem. It had to be me. Feeling complicated, I walked out of the village and wandered around.
I had the wrong mountain. The wildfire doesn't break out on the mountain you can see above Kara; it happens two screens to the east. My tunnel run had been fine. The skipped sequence to grab the tank had been fine. The 0.96 patch had been fine. The only problem was that I hadn't walked two steps east.
I dropped the cheat file, loaded the October 5th save, and continued.
Having never played the original properly, I have no baseline for how badly the bugle, the smoke bombs, and the radar got nerfed. But the fact that Metal Max Returns lets the 3, 6, 7 and 8 vehicles carry double SE is a joy. Three tanks fitted with maxed-out paired Excalibur missiles kill anything — gods, Buddhas, Noah, all of it. Noah goes down in two or three rounds.
Returns also adds an assist system so strong it bends the balance. Put an Amy C-unit on vehicle 5, mount a lightning machine gun, park it at the back of the party, and the Iron Centipede, Gomez, and the Ship of the Desert instantly stop being worth mentioning.
The walkthrough I'd saved for twenty-six years was useless for a single line. Never mind that illustrated guides and even narrated videos are everywhere online (I didn't watch any of the videos). The game itself has changed too much. The Famicom translation used abbreviations everywhere to save space, and the quality was mediocre besides. With the hardware limits gone in Returns, about 80 percent of the terminology was redone, so a list of names that no longer matches anything is basically a codebook. No reason to keep it. Times change.
Even without having played the original, just gathering material for this run made it clear that Returns is an unusually conscientious remake. On one Japanese fan site dedicated to the series, it's listed separately and ranks third in the whole franchise. The differences I ended up noting:
- Controls can be assigned to shortcut keys.
- The smoke bomb and bugle bugs are fixed; neither is miraculous anymore. The radar was weakened too.
- Proper ending music and visuals were added.
- Vehicle configuration changed: on vehicle 2 the SE and main gun can be swapped, and the driver can use human weapons and items without dismounting; on vehicles 3 and 5 the SE and sub-guns are interchangeable; vehicles 6 and 7 can mount double SE; vehicle 8 can take double sub-guns and double SE.
- Five new bounty heads, two minigames, a batch of new weapons and items, and changed acquisition methods for some existing ones — including the strongest engine and the most useful main gun, neither of which is limited in quantity anymore.
- The east-west subway ruins, which let you reach Hell's Gate early.
- A new dungeon: the twin towers in Sol.
- A new item, the BS machine, for looking things up, calling in support, and remote-controlling tanks.
- Upgraded C-units with return, recovery, interception, and assist functions. The assist is the one that breaks the game.
- Daily bounty jobs for earning money, and a bar that buys back junk items.
- A title system.
I originally assumed Returns had added scenes for Red Wolf and Nina, then crossed that out — the branch is there either way. If Red Wolf's tank is in your party when you meet Pal, Nina follows him in death; if it isn't, she stays there waiting for a husband who isn't coming. Save before the meeting and you can watch both.
One flaw: the encounter rate is genuinely too high, and the older I get the less patience I have for stepping on landmines every few paces.
One virtue: the escape success rate is close to 100 percent.
The five new bounty heads share a habit — status attacks that don't bite so much as make you miserable from a distance.
As for difficulty, the toughest bounty head felt like Franken, with the Beetle car behind him. The hardest enemy in the entire game isn't a bounty head and isn't Noah. It's the old friend, the Cannon.
The final boss, Noah — the childhood shadow of however many people.
The ending recaps the people you met, the places you went, and the bounty heads you killed.
And a small discovery from digging through Japanese material: a PF=10 fart trick. Start the game, pick a save slot, talk to your father, go into the village and save. Reset the game, choose that save, and begin a new game. You'll get a message telling you the save can't be written — ignore it. You'll start with 99,999,999 G in your pocket, and the price is that you can't save at all; the person at the save point even needles you about it, saying they already told you it wouldn't work. On real hardware it's a curiosity with no practical value. With an emulator, who knows — I didn't dare push it far. Anyone who wants to try is welcome to.
