The Alluring Mystery of PlayStation’s Deserted Island
The journey of the Deserted Island Story series is an interesting one. It began in 1994 with the release of Deserted Island Story, a survival simulation game for the PC-9800 line of computers. The game was developed by MediaMuse and published by its main client KSS, an entertainment company that did production work for anime, film, and music. KSS also formed Pink Pineapple, a division that specialized in adult animation. It’s no surprise, then, that nudity is a reoccurring aspect of the series.
The first game is about a group of two men and four women stranded on an island after an airplane crash. The player’s goal is to explore, create tools, and escape. Deserted Island Story was praised for its survival mechanics, characters, and the multiple endings and escape routes. In 1996, a port of the game was released for the Super Famicom. This version fixed some bugs and made exploration easier to do but censored all depictions of nudity. From 1997 to 2001, explicit content in the series became increasingly prominent. The Deserted Island R trilogy focused on romantic relationships between the player and the girls on the island. Falling in love was as important as surviving. The Deserted Island X tetralogy, developed by PinkPinapple’s game division, Pinpai, transitioned the series into the genre of pornographic video games. Violence and sex were paired with a semblance of the survival gameplay that made the series popular in the first place. Desert Island Story X.2001 ~The Invisible Devil~ was the last game in the series, and there hasn’t been a new one since.
The popularity of Deserted Island Story led to a sequel in 1995, but it was more of the same. In 1996, two games deviated from the series’ premise. Deserted Island Story 3, released in March, changed the setting to the ruins of Tokyo. Eight months later, Deserted Island flipped the premise. The protagonists were going to the island, not leaving it.
There are spoilers ahead. If you want to learn how to play the game so you can be surprised by what awaits you on the island, read my handy guide here.
This was unlike any other game in the series. Instead of exploring the island through windows and a map, you traversed a 3D environment in first person. The goal wasn’t to escape the island, but to explore it and document the animals, plants, and minerals.
You select a team from The United Kingdom, the United States of America, the Prussian Empire, or the Empire of Japan. Each nation is represented by a team of five characters accompanied by a dog. Each character has eight parameters that can be increased. Physical strength affects how many hits you can take during combat. Increasing intelligence only appears to be important for the captain. Muscle strength affects how much total weight the team can carry. Attentiveness increases the chances of rediscovering something you missed. Being able to attack first and evade enemy attacks is determined by the totality of each character’s “reflex” stat. How much damage a character can deliver during combat is determined by the “dexterity” stat. During exploration, you must monitor hunger, fatigue, and health points. Since time only moves when you do, some animals, plants, and minerals only appear at certain times of the day. As a result, you’re guaranteed to miss a discovery because you passed a spot at the wrong time. This can make recording everything on the island difficult. On my first playthrough, I revealed the entire map but didn’t find everything. I had no portable food left and there were things I hadn’t discovered scattered throughout the island. The only way I could survive was by eating fruit and hunting animals. However, hunting penalizes the player by reducing the trust of the other characters, which can contribute to getting a bad ending. Frequent access to emergency food would make surviving on the island without provisions more manageable.
It didn’t take long for me to realize there was something mysterious about the island. Floating blue spheres appeared at night and delivered ominous warnings. There were notes left by previous explorers. Lastly, there was a lithograph that couldn’t be deciphered. I finished the game more than once, but it left me with many unanswered questions. What was the purpose of the island? Where did all the animals, plants, and minerals come from? What were the floating blue spheres? I wasn’t the only one who was perplexed by the game. Players on the internet forum 5Channel tried to make sense of Deserted Island. But there was one mystery most of them couldn’t solve: How do you trigger the game’s third ending?
Most players have never seen this ending because the conditions for triggering it are never explained. To discover it, players experimented with entering different important locations under different circumstances. Eventually, it was determined that the key to the ending was the pyramid in the southwest part of the island with a closed door. To open it, the captain’s intelligence stat must be three hundred or more. Once inside, the team observes a slab with unusual symbols engraved on it. Afterward, they’re forced to escape as the pyramid collapses. Despite this significant event, the game continues as if nothing happened. Players couldn’t figure out what they had to do before entering the pyramid. Finally, someone had the answers. On a bulletin board, a staff member who supposedly worked on Deserted Island revealed how to trigger the third ending.
- Listen to all the spheres.
- Witness a mysterious light on the west side of the island.
- Read the notes left behind.
- Get a discovery rate of 90% or more.
- Get the trust of your allies to 90% or more.
- Enter the ruins.
Lastly, you had to stay on the island for more than 100 days — a task so absurd it couldn’t be true. Indeed, the post by the staff member turned out to be a hoax. But that didn’t discourage Tashiro Takahiro, a person so dedicated to documenting everything in Deserted Island that he created a website for it called Heaven Insite. Tashiro’s three-year search for the third ending drove him to the breaking point of frustration. One day, he finally discovered the key to triggering the ending. First, you needed to complete the game once and have the data saved to a memory card. Then — without turning the console off — you needed to enter the pyramid after making enough progress in a second playthrough. Surprisingly, this also turned out to be incorrect. You didn’t need to finish the game twice in a row to see the ending. The conditions for triggering it seem to be:
- An overall discovery rate of 90% or higher.
- You need to explore 100% of the island
- The captain’s intelligence must be at least 300 before entering the pyramid.
- I couldn’t trigger it because my team’s trust level was zero. I think you need each member’s trust level to be 90 or higher.
The third ending begins when the expedition team escapes the pyramid. An earthquake hits the island and everything begins to sink. The crater of an erupting volcano fires a beam of light into the sky. In a text scroll, the team laments the loss of the island and the mysteries left behind. A month later, a disc-shaped creature that had monitored the team washed up on Australia’s coast but was swept back to sea. After the credits, another text scroll reveals an excerpt from the captain. He hypothesized that the island was evidence of a prehistoric civilization more advanced than humans. The captain questioned if the island was an experimental facility by a higher power. The final text scroll reveals that a portion of the mysterious symbols noted by the team were deciphered in 1995. The writing is a greeting and a message of encouragement to future civilizations. The message instructs the reader to go to the moon. Knowing that another race might stumble upon the remnants on their own, perhaps this civilization intended for the beam of light — which could be a powerful object that could benefit another civilization — to land on the moon.
To this day, there are not a lot of games like Deserted Island. Perhaps the novelty of documenting an uncharted island doomed the game to obscurity. But that’s one of the reasons why I found it so fascinating. The game’s allure of the unknown tugged at my imagination. Deserted Island is marred by unappealing graphics and flawed exploration that makes finding things more difficult than it should be. But the mysteries and unpredictability of the game kept me playing though to the end. As the last bit of the island sank into the ocean, I was left with a bittersweet feeling. I tried to find the truth, but it disappeared. The remaining proof of the island’s existence was forever out of reach, somewhere on the distant surface of the moon.
Does this game deserve an English translation?
Absolutely! Each team will have a conversation when the player discovers something. This seems to be one of the best parts of the game.
How do I play Deserted Island?
Can’t read Japanese? No problem! I’ve written a “How To Play” guide so you can learn the controls and the menus. You can read it here.
Sources
The Atwiki page for the game: https://w.atwiki.jp/gcmatome/pages/2174.html
Heaven Insite: https://dario.gloomy.jp/tt/d.i-top.html
5Channel forum: https://kako.5ch.net/test/read.cgi/famicom/976342859/ Message 0037 references the fake conditions for getting the third ending.
Walkthrough website: http://dclab.web.fc2.com/game/deserted-3.html
