“Colonization appeared to be successful” – Lost Planet: Extreme Condition

**Lost Planet: Extreme Condition** (Capcom, Xbox 360, 2006/2007)

The idea of defeating video game enemies and having them drop health boosts for you goes back a long way. Specifically providing those health boosts in the form of glowing orange balls of energy goes back at least as far as Metroid. But it was a little mechanical detail only. With third person shooter Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, Capcom took that same idea and built a game around it, both mechanically and narratively. It’s an approach which elevates the game into something more unique than its other action can provide.

The Metroid games provide a little bit more of a precedent for Lost Planet, in their zones where the temperature is so hot your health bar constantly decreases. You have to get the right suit power-up to be able to properly take those on, but you can try your luck with trying to get enough health boosts from enemies while you’re there, even if it probably won’t take you very far. Lost Planet is much more generous, and presents a world where the health-sapping extreme condition is the cold temperature, but it’s the same principle. Its snowy expanses, crystalline enemies that you have to try to outflank, and controls built for chunky deliberation more than action all made me think of Metroid Prime, in fact.

In Lost Planet, the number representing your health constantly decreases even when you’re not getting attacked, and you need a regular supply of glowing orange thermal energy to keep it up. That can come from blowing up abandoned cars or fuel containers, but mostly it comes from defeating enemies. Diminishing health means thinking of time as an important currency at all points. Is it worth the time it will take to roll out of the way of this charging alien insect, grapple back onto it and fill it with bullets, or would it be a better net position to just leg it? It adds something extra to even the fairly routine action, which has some impressively scaled boss battles and some bits where you get to climb in mechs and fire massive guns, but has much of the same early-generation feel as Onimusha six years earlier. Likewise, none of Lost Planet’s sequels followed it to the top of the chart.

The idea of recharging with thermal energy from others doesn’t just provide a twist to how Lost Planet plays, though. It’s right there in its story, which provides an interesting contrast to Halo, Gears of War and other alien/monster shooters to come. The usual story is for there to be invading forces threatening humanity on Earth or abstracted equivalent. In Lost Planet, though, the intro makes clear that humans are the one making an incursion, colonising a new planet. After an initially successful phase, they encounter life, in the form of the giant insectoid Akrid, and are overpowered by them. Rather than giving up on this particular planet, though, things take a turn. They discover “the precious thermal energy lying within the very bodies of the Akrid” and decide to use this resource to their advantage.

Time-skips, twists and turns and avenging dead fathers mean that Lost Planet doesn’t have the most coherently themed story. It comes off at points like it was shooting for moral ambiguity, made its people too obviously in the wrong, and doesn’t quite fully grapple with it. Plus you do, after all, spend most of the game shooting aliens to death to claim the energy from their bodies. The inversion of the norm compared to other games to have topped the charts is still striking, though.

Its tale of colonisers exploiting resources read to me immediately as commentary on American-led invasions of oil-rich countries, and producer Keiji Inafune has confirmed that he had Iraq in mind when coming up with it. The further background to that being that in 2003, there was strong public opposition in Japan to the government’s decision to send more troops to support that war than had been involved in any conflict since 1945. At the start of a year in which I am going to be delving deeper than ever into the world of US military propaganda games, it’s nice to be reminded that other perspectives are available.