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I first played through Snark's translation of Devilman shortly after it came out in 2009. Back then, I'd savestate my way through everything in a kind of video game tourism, and as a result I could hardly remember a thing about it. When I went to give Devilman another shot this weekend (this time without savestates), I only had the vaguest memory of aimlessly wandering around city streets, barging into houses to have inscrutable conversations, and teleporting up into the heavens.

That's only the first part of the game, though. Devilman is mostly a standard action-platformer, albeit a really weird one, with a dash of adventure game and a sprinkle of RPG. (It's kind of a mashup of other games: take the forest levels and rescue dynamic from Friday the 13th, the strange enemy spawn patterns from TMNT, the big man/little man gimmick from Amagon, and so on.)

Devilman has a cryptic reputation, but I found much of it to be oddly intuitive: there are no Castlevania II moments here. It's also forgiving, with infinite continues and a checkpoint-like system in some levels; the only real penalty for dying is losing some of your max HP, forcing you to grind to regain it. None of this is to say Devilman is a good game, though: the visuals and music are crude, the gameplay is mediocre at best, and the stage design relies too much on mazes. Maybe it's not quite kusoge, but it comes close. I actually enjoyed my playthrough, but I enjoy bad games.

Snark's localization isn't what I would call stylish. It's all-caps, it avoids using apostrophes for some reason, and the dialogue has that truncated, choppy quality I associate with early fan translations. That said, somehow it fits. Devilman feels like it should be a little bit enigmatic, a smidge rough around the edges. A florid, typographically-elegant translation would just be incongruous.

Extra kudos to Snark for making sure the password system still works. It's one of the stranger ones I've ever seen, using a mix of italic and non-italic uppercase letters, plus a random handful of lowercase letters and symbols. But it works, and since it's possible to screw up your game by failing to rescue people, having the option to restore from password is actually quite important. The README also includes a full walkthrough, which is a nice touch.