Hong Kong 97 Review

There’s something that piques my interest about games that are hard to find.  Obviously they have collector’s value and that almost makes playing them feel like a privilege, like getting to see one-of-a-kind artifacts in person.  I have a few games myself that are considered pretty rare, like One Piece: Unlimited Adventure and Dokapon Kingdom, but for some of the obscenely rare ones like Limbo of the Lost, which was taken off store shelves within a week and only in another country, you pretty much have no choice but to pirate them.  Such is this case with Hong Kong 97, probably the single rarest game I’ve ever heard of.  It was released only in Japan on floppy discs for the Super Famicom, but they’re impossible to actually find.  Even pictures of physical copies online are hard to find and stores refused to sell it when it first came out.  After playing it for myself, I think I have an idea as to why.

Hong Kong 97 takes place in the titular year of 1997, which for this game was 2 years in the future.  Hong Kong’s history is a long and interesting one, but the basic idea is that for years it was a British colony, but in 1997, Britain handed over control of it to China.  Hong Kong 97 is based on the predicted results, in which Chinese people flood into Hong Kong from the mainland and crime rates skyrocked.

The game tells the story of Bruce Chin, an unspecified relative of Bruce Lee who looks suspiciously like Jackie Chan in the same way Big Boss looks like Sean Connery in the original version of Metal Gear 2.  Being from Bruce’s family, Chin is a badass martial artist and like the Clones of Bruce Lee, he’s tasked by the government to fight bad guys.  In this case those bad guys are the communist Chinese mainlanders and the goal of the game is to kill all 1.2 billion of them.  The Chinese mainlanders have more than just numbers though.  Through a secret government project the Chinese government uses the head of former ruler Tong Shau Ping (an stand-in for Deng Xiaoping) to create a weapon to fight Chin and take over Hong Kong.

It’s an interesting plot.  Chin is forced into genocide out of concern for his homeland in the power of a notoriously oppressive communist regime.  Hong Kong gave us Andy Seto, Hui King Sum, Win Yang and King Tung.  It’s understandable that he would want to do whatever it takes to protect that and you can feel how torn he is doing it.

Chin is not unlike Saitama in One Punch man, but rather than hit his enemies directly, he punches hard enough for the air in front of his fist to shoot forward in a wave of accelerated power so great that impact with other people breaks the atoms in their bodies, causing them to explode in a spectacular, but contained, mushroom cloud.  He does this as his back is turned, meaning he throws these punches so fast you don’t see him turn around, kind of like Han in Fist of the North Star and his copy, Cloned Zero in KOF.  And Freddie Mercury could probably do it too.

Chin’s back being turned away from the violence is the most telling aspect of the whole game.  Even he is disgusted at his mass murder, both directly and from the fallout resulting from the atomic blasts he causes.  It’s a very tragic story delivered well through the game mechanics, the core controls of which are as simple and accessible as can be.  You move Chin and press a button to shoot upwards.  Like old school shooter games such as Metal Slug or Contra, you die in one hit, but in Hong Kong 97 you have no continues.  When you die, the corpse of one of the men you killed is shown to you.  War is hell and death is final.  It’s a powerful message that was probably why so many stores didn't stock it.  It was ahead of its time.  Games about genocide and politics are common today, but in the 90s they hadn't quite gotten there yet.  I guess they were too scared of an entertainment system being so heavy.  It's sad to think we Americans never got this game because of people's fear of games being more than some plaything, but it also goes to show how far it's come as a medium.  Now we have games like The House of the Dead: Overkill.

Anyway, Hong Kong 97's gameplay is easy to learn, but hard to master.  Like other shooters of its kind, it can start to feel repetitive, but it’s striking visual and audio design keep it interesting through its entire run time.  As Chin fights the population of China, the mainland becomes a haze of Chinese and Coca-Cola propaganda, as if he doesn’t even know where he is anymore.  It’s almost like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas at times, all accompanied by a variety of music that is somehow both somber and badass at once, as if split between how the game is supposed to be portrayed and whether it’s supposed to be fun or not.

It’s not the most in-depth game by today’s standards (this was still the 16-bit era), but Hong Kong 97 will no doubt at least keep you busy for a while.  Tong Shau Ping’s head is the game’s boss, but he keeps being rebuilt until you kill every single one of those fuckin’ ugly reds. By my math that should take at least 30 years.  Unfortunately I have yet to complete this game.  After about 3 days of playing I died and had to start over.  With most games that punishing I would give up, but when you play you can feel yourself getting better each time until that satisfaction you get from finally beating it and being able to say “I beat Hong Kong 97.”  For a 16-bit game, the story, gameplay and visual all come together for a top-notch auteur-like piece and it is something everyone needs to play.

I give Hong Kong 97 a 9 out of 10.