GAME CLEAR No. 271 -- Baraduke

Baraduke (1985, Arcade)

Developer: Namco
Publisher: Namco
Clear Port: Arcade Archives: BARADUKE (2022, Switch/PS4)
Port Developer: Hamster
Port Publisher: Hamster
Clear Version: Switch
Clear Platform: Switch 2
Clear Date: 1/13/26

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Why should I care?
Baraduke suffers from some of the worst arcade game design sins of its era, but at least you get to play as the lady who divorced the Dig-Dug guy.

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Kissy is under fire

In my year-end retrospective, I joked that Shadow Labyrinth had me saying shit like “I really gotta check out Baraduke.” Well, I did it. I wouldn’t say it’s a very good game, but I certainly checked it out.

Baraduke is one of Namco’s more obscure titles, and as far as I can tell it had very minimal cultural impact here in the North America (where it was released as Alien Sector). I’m reasonably certain I’ve never seen a cabinet anywhere in my fairly extensive arcade travels. I don’t think it was much more than a minor hit in Japan either, although I’m less confident in that assessment.

Regardless, it’s a little piece of UGSF minutia I wanted to check out.

Its place in Namco’s sci-fi universe is the Paccet planet. Protagonist Toby “Kissy” Masuyo has been called there to rescue the peace-loving, one-eyed Paccets from the evil Octy who have established the extensive, 48-floor, underground Baraduke fortress on the planet. King Octy dwells at the very bottom. He must be destroyed to save the poor Paccets.

As was the style at the time, it’s a damned simple game mechanically. The orange-clad Kissy has got a big gun that you can shoot with the fire button and a jetpack that allows you to move in all directions with the control stick. That’s all there is to it.

When you first start the game, you drop into the fortress and are immediately greeted by a Paccet who announces his alliance to you by hollering “I’M YOUR FURENDO” in a wonderfully silly and highly compressed voice, one of two voice clips in the game. After that, you’ve got to be nimble as hell with the game’s simple controls because this game is absolutely relentless. Once you’re acquainted with that first Paccet, the Octies are all varying shapes and forms of blue blob guys that spawn rather awful-looking jellyfish and shoot bullets at you. Random other little aliens will fly across the screen or pop in briefly to fire a quick shot at you. Failing that, sometimes little energy balls will just form spontaneously from the walls and make their way toward you. The point is to focus on the Octies, though. Kill all of them, and you can move on. Each killed Octy drops a capsule that can be opened to reveal a gem (points), improved gun, another Paccet friend, or just an extra enemy if you’re unlucky.

The first few rooms are pretty simple and manageable, but after that the game pretty quickly becomes a clusterfuck. The rooms become more labyrinthine, the enemies become more numerous, and it will take everything you’ve got not to get hit constantly. And you’d better fucking figure out how to avoid at least some shots because you can only take two god damn hits per life with your standard shield. The Octies never fucking seem to run out of those stupid jellyfish to spawn, which constantly slowly approach you. This means that Octies that are positioned in a particularly advantageous nook become essentially impossible to approach because you can only shoot straight ahead. What’s more, you don’t get ANY invincibility frames when getting hit, so you really can’t get away with approaching big mobs of enemies and hoping to take a couple guys down with said i-frames. You’re just fucked.

Oh, also, your gun has recoil. You have to manage that while flying around with a jetpack, so that’s a nice added challenge as well. Yay!

There are a couple saving graces, though. When you respawn, you do so more or less exactly where you died, and all the jellyfish and other random-spawn enemies are gone. This means you can usually get up close and personal with a hard-to-reach Octy, it just may be at the cost of a life. You can also earn yourself an extra shield or two if you have some Paccets with you at the end of each floor. A little spinning-wheel game is played, and each Paccet you have fills a slot on the wheel, up to eight. If you land on one, you increase your shield total by one. You may wish you hadn’t, though, as the Paccets also provide very useful stun attacks against the bosses of the game. So even the buffs have tradeoffs!

Most importantly, the game allows infinite continues (if the proper dip switch is set in the settings) as long as you have enough quarters, which naturally you do in the Arcade Archives port. This means if you are hard-headed and stupid enough like me, you can brute force your way through this one. I have no idea how many continues I used, and I don’t care. This game would be absolutely insane to 1cc.

Anyhow, even with the continues, you are forced to restart the floor you were on entirely. Even with the maximum-allowable five lives per continue, some floors offer a really stout challenge to complete. Like I said, I certainly lost count of how many times I hit continue in this game.

I did finally beat it, though. I didn’t like it very much, and I’m a bit sad about that. If it weren’t designed to be absolutely brutal, the basic shooting and maze-navigation is a cool enough concept. I found that if I really focused, I could lock in and feel like I was doing well, but eventually I would turn a corner and the unrelenting enemy spawns would simply overwhelm me. A fairer tuning could’ve produced a much more memorable game.

It also could’ve benefitted from a soundtrack, which is nearly nonexistent except for an intro jingle and the occasional ambient ringing noise. I nearly forgot to mention anything about the music because of its absence.

Despite my complaints, I do have a couple good things to say about Baraduke. The graphics are pretty sharp and moody for the time, and the vibe is generally sort of oppressive and stressful in the way it should be for a game of this type. Although it can be annoying, putting recoil in the game was a neat idea. The boss characters do a hilarious, very human-sounding death scream when you kill them which made me smile every time (and is the other voice line I alluded to earlier). The final boss also requires you to fly into his mouth and blow his eye out from the back. That’s pretty fun.

Oh, also, that thing I said above about Kissy being the ex-wife of the protagonist of Dig-Dug is true. The two are also the parents of the protagonist of Mr. Driller. UGSF lore, baby!

Anyway, that’s my list of things I like about Baraduke. I’m afraid it’s just not very good.

I should also tell you that the game’s female protagonist was a secret reveal on the ending screen. In 1985. That’s right, a labyrinth-traversing, alien-blasting spaceperson did a shocking face and gender reveal at the end of a game a whole year before Metroid. Everything I’ve read about this game takes great care to mention that fact, so I suppose I shall too.

Maybe you shouldn’t play Baraduke. You don’t have to be like me and struggle your way through it to prove something to no one. Now you at least know it exists and know some things about it. That’s probably enough.

Alternatively, maybe the better angle to take would be to simply enjoy it as an arcade game that is meant to wear you down and win by attrition. It’s not really meant to be beaten, per se. Fight valiantly, and fight as long as you can. Get a high score. Maybe through that lens Baraduke is a more worthy title than my “you have to beat the game”-poisoned brain can see.