An unsinkable start.
One of a surprising number of early SG-1000 releases to center on a martial theme, Yamato returns once again to the well-worn topic of military warfare but showcases a distinctly Japanese perspective in its design. Compared to N-Sub’s underwater combat (which skews toward the German side of World War II) and Borderline with its distinctly “American war flick” feel to its Jeep-centric gameplay, Yamato unquestionably presents WWII from a home-grown perspective.
The Yamato, of course, was the single most famous warship in Japanese military history. In reality, the ship didn’t actually accomplish much before being destroyed toward the latter portion of the second World War, but it looms large in the collective consciousness all the same. It lives on through popular media works, such as the classic anime Starblazers, aka Space Battleship Yamato, in which a future spacefaring society inexplicably salvaged and upgraded the old battleship into a space cruiser. The maritime equivalent of the HMS Titanic meets the Alamo, the Yamato was an engineering marvel that became famous for its symbolic defeat.
Despite being armed and armored in sufficient measure to make it one of the deadliest vessels ever to have plied the seas, the Yamato engaged in very little direct combat. However, it went down holding the line, enacting a hopeless battle against overwhelming odds to buy allies a little more time—the sort of fatalistic courage and devotion to duty that kindles a certain patriotic romance. Yamato for SG-1000, which debuted in arcades on Nichibutsu’s Crazy Climber arcade hardware, recounted its namesake’s famous last stand off the coast of Kyushuu. This home port does not appear to have been developed internally at Sega but rather is the first of a handful of titles produced by ELS, a little-known engineering or programming firm that largely worked as a contractor in the early days of the medium; ELS seemingly programmed both the arcade and SG-1000 versions of the game, giving this release a strong claim to fidelity if nothing else.
Here you control the Yamato itself, viewing the action from what appears to be the vessel’s conn tower, firing cannons and guns at an endless array of enemy vessels and projectiles. A hopeless game, Yamato sees you greatly outnumbered; your goal is simply to shoot down as many incoming threats as possible before the mighty vessel succumbs to the enemy’s withering barrage. Like N-Sub, Yamato takes its cues primarily from Space Invaders: The warship’s bow moves laterally across the bottom of the screen, and you fend off threats and hazards by firing upward at them. Yamato also keeps things closer to home in deriving its mechanical distinctiveness by inverting N-Sub’s mechanics slightly. Where N-Sub allowed your vessel to move freely underwater, advancing laterally while alternately ascending and diving as it fired directly overhead, Yamato limits your movement to a single axis but gives you more finesse in your targeting. Pressing up and down on the joystick moves your targeting reticle up and down the screen.
Or rather, that’s how you move your reticles: You control two targeting systems at once, both of which move at slightly different speeds to one another. One reticle corresponds to the main cannons, which fire large blasts, singly, against surface targets and can’t aim above the horizon line; the other controls the ship’s turrets, which spray machine gun fire and play an essential part in taking out planes and incoming missiles. The main guns—denoted by the X-shaped reticle—function as hitscan weapons; when fired, they immediately detonate anything that happens to sit in the crosshairs but nothing between the ship and your target. The turrets fire projectiles that track to the top of the screen along the path designated by the cross-shaped reticle. It takes about a second for them to ascend, and they’ll destroy anything they pass through along the way—handy if an incoming missile happens to cross your line of fire.
As you take out enemy vessels, you’ll advance to a new round of action, indicated by both a change in the time of day (midday to sunset to night) and the enemies becoming more aggressive in their attacks. That’s the full scope of Yamato’s gameplay loop: Avoid enemy fire, take out their ships and planes, and keep going until you run out of lives. As a big, bulky target with a large hitbox, the Yamato doesn’t really have a whole lot of survivability in this situation. Dodging enemy attacks is extremely difficult, especially when projectiles come streaking in on a diagonal. I suppose that makes it historically accurate, but it does make for a less entertaining game than N-Sub.
