Video Game / Linda Cube

aka: Linda Cube Again

Linda Cube (stylized as Linda³) is a Japanese Role-Playing Game developed by Alfa System and MARS Corporation for the PC Engine in 1995. Two Updated Re-releases were later released, Linda Cube Again for the Playstation in 1997, and Linda Cube Kanzenban for the Sega Saturn in 1998.

The story is set on an Earthlike planet called Neo Kenya in the year AMD 1991. A meteorite known as "The Grim Reaper" is set to destroy the planet in 8 years. However, a giant ship dubbed the "Astro Ark" and a tombstone fall from the sky one day, with the tombstone bearing a message from God saying that a man and a woman must pilot the Astro Ark together and capture animals of each sex to board the ship. Yes, it's that kind of game.

You play as a teenage boy named Ken Challenger, who volunteers to be the male pilot and help capture the animals, along with his childhood friend/girlfriend Linda, who is a feisty and violent Girly Girl with a Tomboy Streak, but is deeply in love with Ken. From there, the player can select from three scenarios to play from, each with their own self-contained story, as well as a unlockable bonus one.

This game can be described as Pokémon meets Earthbound, but darker and with a heavy dash of Surreal Horror.

This game was never released outside of Japan, but finally got an unofficial English translation on January 31, 2024, courtesy of Cargodin. You can download the patch here.

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Linda Cube provides examples of:

• Adaptation Dye-Job: Linda's hair changed from pink to cyan in the remake.
• Ambiguously Brown: Ken and his mother Meme are both tan skinned, but aren't stated to be of any particular race. Averted with Hume, as it is mentioned more than once that he is black.
• Apocalypse How: At the turn of the millennium, a giant meteor will destroy Neokenya. Various NPCs imply that the federal government knew this would happen when they began concerted efforts to colonize the planet, and didn't stop simply so their initial investments wouldn't go to waste. The incoming meteor also means that as the game goes on, the federal relocation project will gradually but noticeably depopulate the planet, until only Ken and Linda remain.
• Art Evolution: The character designs from the remake are radically different from the original PC Engine version.
• The Atoner: In Scenario A, Nek has a near-death epiphany that he truly loves his brother despite his serious envy of Ken's loving parents and girlfriend, apologizes, and gives him a clue as to what the phrase that will recover Linda's memories is. In Scenario B, Sachiko becomes appalled at her part in the assassination of the entirety of Minago village, including Linda's parents, for dismembering Linda, for the assassination of several federal politicians, and for doing nothing to stop her father from sending her clone-sisters on suicide missions, and with her new name Sumire accompanies Ken to her father's mansion to retrieve Linda's missing arm so that the pair can operate the Astro Ark.
• Attempted Rape: Ken's run-in with Gomez's gang in Scenario B, in which they talk about how much they enjoy "puppy play", young men and preying on the weak before forcing him to act like a dog and humiliate himself and then surround and close in on him physically, reads eerily like a gang rape in progress. Even the calm and stoic Sachiko attempts to butt in by killing the members of the gang with "Mode A": a disintegrating laser ejected from her palm, though is restrained herself. In her place, Linda enters the room and puts a stop to the situation by tossing a vending machine at one of Gomez's poachers.
• Big Eater: Linda is described by Ben as a "bottomless pit" who could eat her future husband out of house and home; she learns the Glutton skill - which allows her to eat spoiled food without ill effect - much earlier than Ken to compensate for her lower HP.
• Cast of Snowflakes: Courtesy of Tatsuyuki Tanaka, best known for work on the Akira movie and artbooks published under the pseudonym "Cannabis".
• Chocolate Baby: Inverted and parodied. Hume, a black federal citizen, is convinced that Linda is a product of an affair because she looks identical to her mother, a white Beastian woman, which is the main driving factor behind their divorce and implied domestic abuse going on in the house. Despite this, dialogue from doctors in Scenario A imply that children born to a Beastian and non-Beastian couple will almost always take after the former due to genetic dominance. In Scenario B, Hume seems to have realized this and reconciled with Ann, and the two live as a couple in Ann's home again. It is out and out confirmed that Hume is Linda's biological father due to the perfect match Linda has with his donated arm to replace her own.
• Cloning Angst: Sachiko and her "sisters" in Scenario B, all based on the comatose Sachiko Emori's genetic material, equipped with various biological weapons such as lasers and self-destruct buttons, and employed by their father as assassins against key federal figures. None of them wind up happy with this arrangement, and the Sachiko who has so far accompanied Ken throughout the scenario as a party member will tearfully exclaim her joy at finally being "born" when Meme decides to name her "Sumire". Her sister later accepts the name "Yoshiko", by which they are known for the rest of the Scenario.
• Closet Geek: Meme Challenger names her adoptive son and later renames two of Sachiko's clones "Ken", "Sumire" and "Yoshiko" respectively after anime characters. Ken seems quite shocked to learn his namesake, though the others are too ecstatic about finally having names to care.
• Cloudcuckoolander: More characters than not, but Linda - an eccentric, mercurial, whimsical amateur wrestler constantly carried away by fantasies of marrying her childhood friend Ken, who is ambivalent towards her at best - and Emori - a mentally unstable Mad Scientist coping poorly with the loss of his daughter - stand out.
• Combat Medic: Ken and Linda both learn a skill early on called First-Aid, which has a low chance to recover around 25% of the target's maximum HP that increases in success rate the closer the target's HP is to 0. Sachiko has the Nurse command from the battle menu, which allows her to use the skill in lieu of a BP statistic or skill menu.
• Combatant Cooldown System: Instead of discrete turns where everyone acts once, every combatant in a battle acts with priority and frequency determined by their Speed score, of which Linda has the highest in the game barring a few insect enemies, such as ants and fleas. Fighting in suboptimal terrain, such as while wading or swimming through water or hiking through snow or sand dunes, will half a character's effective Speed for a battle, necessitating that they assume a form that avoids the respective terrain penalty or, in enemies' case, move to a tile with an optimal type of terrain. Speed also effects hit and evasion rates, meaning fighting in poor terrain will tank your accuracy and dodge rates. Enemy AI also seeks to exploit this; they will coax you to chase them into water or onto sand dunes, and then chase you down while your movement speed is halved on the terrain so they can get the Speed stat advantage for the fight. All this can make for some very difficult fights if you aren't familiar with the mechanic.
• Crutch Character: When Sachiko joins your party in Scenario B, she is level 11 and equipped with a good set of equipment, whereas Ken is expected to be around level 10 at most and will be relying on whatever he can scavenge at the time. To drive home this point, she cannot level up on- or off-screen, and is even still at level 11 when she rejoins the party when Ken can be expected to be in the 20s or even 30s. This is because she is not totally biological, and thus has nothing to gain from exercise or training as a hunter.
• Deconstructor Fleet: As with most of Shoji Masuda's work, Linda Cube is at once a love letter to and scathing criticism of the roleplaying genre, and is willing to turn on its head any convention or staple of its contemporaries it can find.
• Equipment-Based Progression: Downplayed. Most playable characters (with the exception of Sachiko, since she is a biomechanical android) can earn experience points and levels (Ken earns more HP, Attack and Defense; Linda earns more BP and Speed), though humans' Attack and Defense growths are much, much lower than animals', for obvious reasons; capturing animals and making equipment out of them serves to bridge this gap.
• Evil All Along: Elizabeth Green comes off as a sultry, but well-meaning CEO of a pharmaceutical company who is helping Linda regain her memories, but it turns out that she has massacred Beastian women for their blood in order to keep herself young looking.
• Evil Twin: Ken has one named "Nek".
• Expendable Clone: All of Sachiko's clones are equipped with a self-destruct function. All use it.
• Failure Hero: In an inversion of the typical heroic fantasy protagonist common in roleplaying games, Ken is a lackadaisical, perpetually late, hormonal, hard-done civil servant earning minimum wage and who few people like and even fewer respect.
• Fragile Speedster: Linda, Sachiko, and most female animals have higher BP (with the exception of Sachiko, whose BP is permanently 0) and Speed statistics than they do HP, Attack or Defense, giving them more frequent and sooner turns and better dodge and accuracy rates. Because Speed is the One Stat to Rule Them All, this means they they outperform their male counterparts. Some exceptions, most notably hyenas, exist and flip this paradigm.
• Good Stepmother: Meme is a good natured and well meaning adoptive mother to Ken unlike his brother's adoptive mother, Elizabeth Green.
• Going Commando: Sachiko, who is shy and not very good at expressing herself, briefly attempts to flirt with Ken by telling him she has "nothing on" underneath her field dress. Whether Ken says he would like to see or not, she pivots the conversation back to her usual clinical tone and then submits a medical report on the subject to her father, Emori.
• Gotta Catch Them All: The goal of this game is to catch animals from both sexes to board the Astro Ark. Doing so will increase your pilots' statistics (male animals empower Ken, and female animals Linda), give them access to new animal forms which augments their statistics and terrain affinities, and teach them new BP skills as they register specific animals and break new total thresholds. From the midgame onwards, doing this and making new equipment can be a more viable way to increase Ken and Linda's usefulness in combat than Level Grinding.
• The Grappler: Linda loves wrestling, and after a few levels is able to put targets in a headlock, immobilizing both them and herself, to deal gradual, low damage. This skill, Cobra-Twist, is an excellent and safe way to lock down dangerous animals that represent a serious threat to the party as well as to capture fragile animals normal attacks or skills would kill alike. You'll probably be using it more than her regular attacks and most of her other skills.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Linda is violent and very brash, but is otherwise a good person. Ben McDonald, Ken's boss and Meme's boyfriend, is also perpetually grumpy and ill-tempered, though worries strongly for the pilots and their families.
• Lighter and Softer: Scenario C lacks much of the violence and insanity of the previous two scenarios, with previously antagonistic characters like Nek becoming much nicer, characters who died surviving, and overall getting along with each other much better.
• Mistaken for Gay: If you go to a love hotel with Hume in your party, the receptionist will insist that she isn't homophobic, but still has to charge you for the room.
• No Fourth Wall: Many roleplaying game staples and elements are systematized in the game-world as diegetic elements, such as "Levels", which are generally used to track how competent a ranger someone is. Early on, Linda can give Ken a sucker punch that knocks him across her room and chastise him for responding so dramatically to a punch from a "weak little Level 3 girl!"
• Reincarnation Romance: A recurring theme with several examples. Linda and Ken most obviously, but also Ken and Sachiko, Panheim and Elizabeth, Ann and Hume; the list goes on. Lampshaded by Linda during one camping conversation, where she asks a question while bluntly stating she and Ken will surely be lovers in their next life too.
• Those Wacky Nazis: The Emori family are a comedic blend of cliches about German and Japanese fascists, the patriarch sporting Adolf Hitler's haircut and facial hair, a disdain for Hume, a black man, and is on the run for crimes against humanity, all while living in a lavish and stereotypical Japanese mansion; his daughter Sachiko is a shy and ladylike Yamato Nadeshiko who contrasts against Linda, a brash and outspoken mixed-race Indigenous woman.
• Sanity Slippage: The Mad Scientist Emori in the second scenario lost it after his daughter Sachiko committed suicide because she was not able to be the female pilot of the ark. He makes several clones of her that he sexualizes and he's responsible for the death of Linda's parents, taking Linda's left arm, grafting it onto one of the Sachiko clones, and putting her in one of Linda's dresses in his mad attempt to convince Ken to relent and take Sachiko as the female pilot.
• Scary Black Man: Hume, Linda's father, is huge and brutish-looking. The fact that he attaches his wife to himself and kills her off in Scenario A makes him play this trope very straight.
• Self-Made Orphan: Nek has killed both his biological father, and later his adoptive mother Elizabeth Green.
• Sexy Discretion Shot: Linda and Ken have sex multiple times across the game off-screen; a few of the camping conversations possible with Linda trail off as the two begin or are distracted by sex they are already having, and going to sleep at camp or in a hotel with a tissue in your inventory will cause it to disappear; they have no other immediate use.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Hume is a giant hulking man who is rather Gonkish, but his ex-wife Ann is conventionally beautiful.
• You Gotta Have Blue Hair: While ethnic Beastians betray a wide variety of skin tones, the overwhelming majority - if not all - of them have some shade of green or blue hair and eyes. Federal subjects are known to dye their hair and wear contacts to pose as Beastians to find work at tourist traps or charity scams.