Review by: Mike Luthi

You may remember this Konami game from the good old Sega CD days of yore. Well guess what? It's available for your Saturn (if you like imports, that is). Actually its been available for quite some time, but it's only just recently been re-released. To refresh your memory, Snatcher is a text based adventure that uses a window to display the games graphics, i.e.: what the room your in looks like, or to see the people your talking to. Most of the time the images you see on this window are still or just slightly animated (like the occasional fan on the ceiling) Once a conversation begins it may lead to character windows. Character windows are a small graphic of a characters face that appears in place of the text at the bottom of the screen in which they move their mouths in sync to some digitized voices, a nice touch and much needed relief, unless you like nothing but text!

The story of this game is a Blade Runner meets Terminator type with allot of classic anime touches (robots, cute chics, etc.). It's heavy on the drama and light on the action but that does not matter because the imagery more than compensates... The graphics are somewhat dated even though they have been updated for the Saturn's 32-bit color palette, but the game was so ahead of it's time the visuals are still executed with sheer brilliance and don't seem to deter from game play at all. Maybe because (unless you can read and understand Japanese) it has none, with the exception of the occasional shooting sequence. It's a shame that the Saturn version is not available in the U.S. because the story is so amazing and cries out for a translation. This is an otherwise perfect game for fans of RPG's and mystery games. The language barrier is the only thing that really deters from this game. I must implore you regardless though, if you can get your hands on this game DO IT. It is a classic and a must own just for the concept and execution even if you can't tell what the hell is going on. So, overall I would have to give one of the greatest Konami games ever made, a 9 out of 10!!