Snow Bros. 2 With New Elves

[Gauthier Zitnik]

Snow Bros. 2: With New Elves[a] is a 1994 platform arcade video game developed and published by Toaplan under their Hanafram label.[2][3][4] One of the last games to be created by Toaplan, it is the sequel to Snow Bros., which was released earlier in 1990 on multiple platforms. In the game, players assume the role of one of the playable characters to rescue a kidnapped princess from captivity.

As of 2019, the rights to the title is owned by Tatsujin, a company founded in 2017 by former Toaplan member Masahiro Yuge and now-affiliate of Japanese arcade manufacturer exA-Arcadia alongside many other Toaplan IPs.

Like its predecessor, Snow Bros. 2: With New Elves is a platform game similar to Bubble Bobble where players must traverse through six increasingly difficult worlds composed of multiple stages, each with a boss at the end that must be fought before progressing any further to ultimately rescue the kidnapped princess as the main objective.[5] Players fight enemies by throwing snow at them enemies until it is completely covered and turns into a snowball, while partially covered enemies in snow cannot move until it shakes it off. Once an enemy has been turned into a snowball, the player can roll it and rebound off of walls until eventually shattering against a wall, trapping any enemies on its way.

A new addition are three new playable characters, each with their own method of dispatching enemies from the playfield, however the snowman Nick was omitted in the sequel.[5] Another gameplay objective is to complete the words "EXTRA" at the bottom center by grabbing orbs left by defeated enemies that changes between letters and completing "EXTRA" gives the player an extra life, in addition of immediately advancing to the next stage. As with the first entry, the game hosts a number of hidden bonus secrets to be found, which are crucial for reaching high-scores to obtain extra lives. If a single player is downed, their character is immediately respawned. Getting hit by enemy fire or colliding against solid stage obstacles will result in losing a life, as well as a penalty of decreasing the characters' firepower and speed to his original state and once all lives are lost, the game is over unless the players insert more credits into the arcade machine to continue playing.

Snow Bros. 2: With New Elves served as one of the final projects to be developed by Toaplan, as the company ceased development of shoot 'em up games prior to their closure.[6][7] The soundtrack was co-composed by Osamu Ōta and Ryūichi Yabuki, although neither are credited as such in the game.[8] According to Junya Inoue, the project was developed by then-freshman members at Toaplan.[9]

Snow Bros. 2: With New Elves was released in arcades in April 1994 under Toaplan's then-newly formed Hanafram label, becoming one of their last games to be released before ceasing operations and declaring bankruptcy on March of the same year.[2][10][11] According to Japanese website Institute of Game Culture Conservation, the game was distributed in low numbers.[12] Prior to launch, the title was first showcased to the public in a playable state at the 1994 AOU Show.[13][14][15][16][17] On 25 April 2018, an album containing music from the title, as well as its predecessor's soundtrack was published exclusively in Japan by City Connection under their Clarice Disk label.[8]

In more recent years, the rights to Snow Bros. 2: With New Elves, its predecessor and many other IPs from Toaplan are now owned by Tatsujin, a company named after Truxton's Japanese title that was founded in 2017 by former Toaplan employee Masahiro Yuge, who are now affiliated with arcade manufacturer exA-Arcadia.[18][19][20][21][22]

Snow Brothers is a single-screen arcade platformer. Just like Bubble Bobble, the object of the game is to defeat all enemies on screen so you can proceed up to the next floor. Use the D-pad to move Nick and Tom both left and right. The A button jumps, and the B button throws a handful of snow forward. The idea here is to throw enough snow on an enemy to encase it in a giant snowball. Then, you push the snowball and it rolls to the bottom of the screen and defeats the enemy inside. If the pushed snowball collides with other enemies on the ledges below, they also get defeated and will leave an item behind for you to collect.

The gameplay is both simple and straightforward, but there is some nuance to the mechanics that gives you some surprising versatility. You can jump up through floors allowing you to climb higher more easily. A pushed snowball disappears once it hits a wall on the ground level, and it rebounds off any other wall above. Sometimes you can get a snowball trapped within a ledge off the ground level and it will bounce back and forth a bit before vanishing on its own. You can have the snowball hit you and carry you along with it. While riding, you can either jump out early on your own or let the snowball run its course. Once you finish your ride, you will gain some brief invincibility. You can throw a bit of snow on an enemy to start the process of forming a snowball, briefly stunning the enemy in the process. As partially covered enemies sit there untouched, they slowly melt the snow until they can break out and freely move around again. You can defeat an enemy by running it over with a snowball even if it is partially covered, which is an effective strategy. If two full snowballs collide, they rebound off each other and both start descending which can knock out enemies on both sides of the stage if done right. Some levels have slopes and snowballs can roll up these hills with no problems. You can use a stationary snowball as a platform to reach higher ledges, and you can even lift a snowball by jumping into it from below. All these techniques give you plenty of ways to approach any challenge.

There are several different enemies in the game. Most of them have some way of climbing around the level. Some enemies will attack you if you come near, a couple breath fire at you, some fly around, and so on. All normal enemies can be covered in snow and must be defeated. One neat thing you can try to do is clear all the enemies by pushing only one snowball. You can do this with a single snowball, or with more than one as long as you set up a chain reaction first. Defeating all the enemies at once causes some paper money to rain down to the bottom of the level. These disappear very quickly, but are worth either 10,000 or 20,000 points each. If you are playing for high score, you want as many of these as possible.

You begin the game with only two extra lives. These can go by quickly when you are just starting out. The good news is that you get many continues. The manual states you get four continues, but you actually get nine. Upon losing your last life, the life counter at the top will blink and instead display the number of continues remaining. You resume play with three new lives exactly where you left off. In a two-player game the continues are shared, so lives are more precious here than in single-player.

The cost of some individual games like Snow Brothers caused me to divert my attention toward buying games in bulk. I focused heavily on games that fell in the $15-$30 price range. I could make consistent progress through the deep middle ground in the NES set and often found these titles bundled with cheaper games to fill that part of the collection at the same time. That strategy paid off immensely because many of the $20 carts I bought soon became $50 titles or higher. I would eventually need a plan to buy all these high-end titles at the end.

The original version of Snow Bros. features 50 levels, with a boss battle centered around making snowballs out of regular enemies to then launch at the big guy (or big guys, on occasion) every 10th of those. Not much was made of the story in the original. You were a snowman or snowmen, and you threw snowballs. Fire melted you, because again, snow-based person. There were multiple ports that added all kinds of canon changes to the tale, though, or at least introductory and end-game cutscenes that fleshed out a little more about how these snowmen were actually regular old princes until they were cursed by an evil king who they then set off to defeat to get their old identities (and princess girlfriends) back from.

Toaplan rose from the ashes of two other short-lived developers, and made a mark on the arcade scene of the 80s and early 90s. They were influential, they were innovative, they made the games they wanted to make, but they couldn\u2019t survive the changing landscape of arcades, and shut down in March of 1994. Still, their influence continued both because of the games they had made and the games the branches of their family tree would go on to make, and Toaplan is now seeing something of a revival in many ways: all of this will be covered throughout the month of March. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Toaplan was primarily known for their shoot \u2018em ups, which makes sense, given their work in that arena helped shape both the era they developed in as well as the long-term future of the genre. They\u2019d regularly venture out into other kinds of games, though, and while few of them found any success whatsoever \u2014 there\u2019s a reason Toaplan kept going back to shooting games outside of just the fact their developers really liked both making and playing them \u2014 there\u2019s one that stands out from the crowd. That would be Snow Bros., which did well enough in arcades to generate a sequel, and was also ported to a number of home platforms over the course of a few years. That was standard procedure for some of the company\u2019s STG, sure, but sequels for non-shoot \u2018em ups were something Toaplan just never did outside of Snow Bros. 2. There was a planned sequel to the falling blocks puzzle game Teki Paki, but even that had more to do with its popularity among Toaplan staff, and certainly not its popularity in arcades \u2014 that canceled project is the closest the studio ever got to a second sequel for a non-STG.

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