Tail Concerto

1998 · Action Platformer · PlayStation

About Tail Concerto

Tail Concerto (1998) is CyberConnect's first game, a PlayStation 3D platformer in which a dog police officer pilots a robot to catch the cat sky pirates of the Black Cats Gang, in a steampunk world of floating islands.

Tail Concerto in Depth

Players control Waffle Ryebread, who pilots the semi-humanoid "Police Robo", which can run, jump, climb ledges and hover briefly. Its mechanical arms pick up and throw crates and bombs, and a long-range "bubble blaster" damages or immobilises enemies. Most levels involve catching enemy kittens by grabbing them with the robot's limbs, some end in boss battles, and others call for mine carts, a jet pack or heat-seeking missiles. The camera is mostly static but can be rotated in some action scenes. Players can also explore towns and talk to non-player characters, and each area hides whistles that give extra lives and boxes holding pieces of artwork for a gallery. It supports the DualShock's analogue sticks and vibration and has three difficulty settings.

The Kingdom of Prairie is a floating archipelago of anthropomorphic dogs and cats with a history of conflict, where dogs are the majority, people commute by airship and technology runs on steam and crystals from an ancient civilisation. Investigating the Black Cats Gang, Waffle recognises its leader Alicia as a childhood friend. The gang kidnap Princess Terria and gather five crystals for their backer Fool, unaware that they once powered the Iron Giant, which nearly destroyed the world centuries ago. Fool awakens it using Alicia's pendant, a childhood gift from Waffle, but the giant turns on him, and Waffle destroys its core.

Making Tail Concerto

CyberConnect began it in 1996, shortly after the company was founded, proposing to Bandai a PlayStation game in the vein of Super Mario 64 and Nights into Dreams. It took nearly two years, with almost 20 minutes of animation by Astrovision and music by Chikayo Fukuda and Seizo Nakata, and came out in Japan in April 1998 and France that December. Bandai of America worried that localisation would not finish in time, and the rights passed between US companies, including Activision, before Atlus USA released it in November 1999, replacing the theme song with an instrumental.

Famitsu gave it 30 out of 40, and Western reviews were above average: critics found it charming but too short and easy, and IGN noted an increasingly awkward translation. Company president Hiroshi Matsuyama pitched Tail Concerto 2 to Bandai in 1999, 2000, 2003 and 2004 and was turned down each time because of the low sales, so CyberConnect turned to .hack. The Little Tail Bronx world returned in Solatorobo: Red the Hunter in 2010 and Fuga: Melodies of Steel in 2021.

Tail Concerto Trivia

Manga artist Nobuteru Yūki designed the characters.
Its Japanese theme song, "For Little Tail", was recorded by Kokia in 1997, a year before her debut.
Kokia called it an "illusion song" because it was not released until 2010, as a B-side.
It sold about 97,000 copies in Japan, short of its goal, and around 150,000 worldwide.
1Up.com's Jeremy Parish said the series felt like a combination of Laputa and Porco Rosso.