Treasure did what Konami didn’t.

And really, Treasure needed some reigning in, but of all realistic outcomes? This is a good one. I’m glad Treasure made impractical, unmarketable games. Sure, sometimes they just got it right: Gunstar Heroes, Ikaruga and arguably a few others. But other times, they went systems heavy, expecting players to grapple with unintuitive controls until the game clicked: Alien Soldier, Bangai-O, and today’s topic, Mischief Makers.

The system here is grabbing in a side-scrolling platformer. Grab enemies, items, NPCs, lasers, and then throw or shake them. There are some fussy dash and jump moves too.

Rather than giving you the tools you need early on and crafting escalating challenges that require proficiency, Mischief Makers encourages you to experiment. It does this a little through tutorializing message blocks you can interact with, but mostly from the ways its stages are designed, and herein lies its failing.

Mischief Maker’s levels are usually gimmicks, or sometimes puzzle boxes. They require you to think about how you can utilize an unconventional move-set to achieve some objective, like defeating a unique enemy, finding missing children, or outracing a rolling boulder. The bosses I like and Mischief Makers does have some great levels, but it also has annoying maze levels, timed levels, repetitive sequences. It misses more than it hits.

I didn’t really enjoy playing Mischief Makers, but I kind of love it anyways. It’s the quintessential weird B game that went for the unconventional. It’s the kind of game that deserves cult status, or when iterated on becomes a masterpiece or even a new genre. Demon’s Souls begot the Souls genre and King’s Field (which itself follows a legacy of computer RPGs) begot Demon’s Souls. I’m not saying that happened here. Mischief Makers is a dead-end. But at least it’s fascinating.