YMMV / Snatcher

• Anti-Climax Boss: The final shooting scene. Don't use your blaster and it ends in an instant, because you'll find a silhouette of Jamie. Shooting her will give you an instant Game Over.
• Awesome Music: Pleasure of Tension, the music that kicks in whenever the tension ramps up, is an awesome piece that'll get your blood pumping. Available in Sega CD, PC-88 and MSX flavors.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: One of the reasons this game is known well aside from the story is Vulgar Humor, such as flirting with some of the women. This game is the first instance of such recurring element found in Kojima's works like Policenauts, Metal Gear, and Death Stranding.
• Cult Classic:
  • The game sold poorly outside Japan, but it's widely considered a pioneer both for Visual Novels and Adventure Games alike.
  • Retrospective reviewers also give credit to the voice acting being surprisingly good for its time. Sure, there are a few instances of Narm, but overall, it's pretty good.
• Disappointing Last Level: Act 3, first added in the PC Engine CD version. Sure, it finally gives a conclusion to the originally incomplete story, but it's much more linear than first two Acts, has tons of Infodump in form of non-interactive cutscenes, and the actual climax is a Cutscene Boss. The Sega CD, PlayStation, and Saturn versions try to fix this by adding some shooting scenes in the act.
• Goddamned Bats: The Insectors can become this during the shooting sequences, depending on how well you do on your first visit to the shooting range. And especially if you're running the game on an emulator (which most every player probably is nowadays,) where you'll either have a reticule that jumps all over the place as your fingers desperately try to keep up on the keyboard, or with an invisible reticule that shoots a lot lower than your mouse's cursor would usually indicate.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The first two releases of Snatcher, from 1988, were shipped with two acts and missing an ending, simply cutting the story short without even a cliffhanger. According to Electronic Gaming Monthly's interview with sound designer Yoshinori Sasaki, its development already took about two to three times longer than an average game, likely the reason for Executive Meddling. As fate would have it, Hideo Kojima ended up making another game 27 years later, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, with exactly the same problem.
• Nightmare Fuel: Jean Jack Gibson's death, with Gillian coming across his corpse with his head twisted off his neck.
• Porting Disaster: Apparently so, in the case of the MSX2 version of the game. The original target platform was the NEC PC-8801mkII SR personal computer, well-suited for a sophisticated visual novel like Snatcher. This was the first time that Konami ever published a game for a computer other than the MSX or MSX2, platforms the company supported very strongly throughout their entire market lives. Thus, following the original release of Snatcher for the PC-8801 in November 1988, a port for the MSX2 followed a month later in December. Unfortunately, this port bears the hallmarks of being rushed out the door for the holiday season, such as:
  • Atrocious loading times. Like, seriously. Transitions between scenes in the MSX2 version usually take around thirty seconds to finish, and sometimes can take much longer.^note Thanks to modern emulation, this particular problem can be almost completely mitigated. For example, openMSX's "full speed when loading" option will kick the game into hyperspeed whenever it loads from disk, virtually eliminating the excessive wait times. Conversely, while the load times in the PC-8801 version are by no means instant, they are nowhere near as obnoxious.
  • Mediocre graphics. The PC-8801 can only display eight colors onscreen, and Snatcher therefore makes extremely heavy use of color dithering (a classic technique among computer games from The '80s) to enhance the game's visuals. The MSX2, on the other hand, can display 16 colors onscreen in its high-resolution mode (the one Snatcher uses), but the graphics were not upgraded at all to take advantage of this twofold increase in onscreen colors, compared to the PC-8801.
    • In fact, most of the graphics in the MSX2 version are downscaled and cropped slightly, compared to the originals, since the MSX2 has a lower resolution (512x212 pixels) compared to the PC-8801 (640x400 pixels).
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • In the Japanese-voiced versions, Randam Hajile and Jaime Seed are played by Kaneto Shiozawa and Kikuko Inoue respectively, who would both end up participating in many later Kojima projects.
  • Gillian's English VA Jeff Lupetin was later known for voicing Iam Hungry from McDonald's and The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald, which is funny in hindsight as Gillian is a big eater.
• Signature Scene: The shot of Jean Jack Gibson's decapitated corpse, due to it being among the game's most shocking imagery, and setting the tone for the player's mission, as it happens very early in the game.
• Squick: The rotting, maggot-infested corpses that the player finds in the basement of Queens Hospital.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: "Pleasure of Tension" sounds similar to Tangerine Dream's "Diamond Diary", from their soundtrack for the 1981 film Thief.
• Tear Jerker: Harry's death. While you barely see the character throughout the game, it's played full on when it turns out he's Gillian and Jamie's Child and he dies mere moments before Gillian figures it out.
• That One Level:
  • The fight with the Super Insectors under the church. They're fast, they can jump across the screen to fake you out, and since Gillian flinches when he gets hit, they can stunlock you to death. It's a notorious sticking point that stumps a lot of players.
  • The post Sega CD ports tend to zigzag this. They balanced out the church sections by placing the Insectors and snatchers inbetween, but they made the snatchers pop out more than one at a time. Though unlike the Insectors, they stay still instead of moving all around.
• Ugly Cute: Metal Gear is just a piece of Military Mashup Machine, but its unusually human-like behavior makes it strangely adorable in some way.
• The Woobie: Harry, on his way to death, admits to being alone for all his life, never knowing who his parents were, and did not have many friends. His only good friend, Jean, was killed, and he's been somewhat isolated otherwise. On top of that, he died without knowing that his own father was holding him!
• Woolseyism: The concept of "Neo Kobe Pizza" was originally a dumpling dish in the original Japanese... And son of a gun, it's really kind of tasty.
  • One of the followers of Slowbeef's Let's Play tried it with Chicken Noodle instead of miso, with similar positive results.

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