With a title that unwieldy and long, you may quite rightfully have no idea whatsoever what this game actually is. But fear not! It's actually not so complicated (although it definitely still is, even for a Japanese game, a very weird and unwieldy title X3). Here in Japan, we call Dutch playing cards "trump", and the "Alice" in the title refers to Alice in Wonderland, as this is an Alice in Wonderland-themed collection of card games played with Dutch playing cards. This is a game I heard of a LONG time ago after just doing a simple google search for interesting Japan-exclusive N64 games. I managed to find a copy not too long after I moved here, and it was the first game I streamed on Twitch a little over a year ago. My particular copy is also one of the most immaculate N64 games I've ever seen, and ALWAYS boots up first time, so most of this thing's life for me has been to test the console to make sure it's booting properly X3. To celebrate my one year of streaming, I finally sat down and played through the whole story mode over the course of like 3-ish hours.
The story is, fairly predictably, a retelling of Alice in Wonderland but with basically every disagreement solved by Alice (whom you play as) beating her opponent in some card game. The game has a very tongue-in-cheek approach to how its written, and even pokes fun at the very premise, with Alice sarcastically predicting the upcoming card game only for her opponent to enthusiastically confirm her prediction XD. It takes place over 8 chapters in game, so 8 card games, and is fairly short. I had a lot of fun doing the voices for the characters on stream~. The game itself is really what it says on the tin, and it's really just a bunch of card games. There are like 16 of them in total, ranging from obvious ones like Old Maid, simple card matching, and Sevens, to variants of other games like "Page One" (the game Uno is based off of), and even oddballs like Seven Bridge (which is basically just Mahjong but played with playing cards). It was quite the work of luck to be able to pass most of the story trials for the games, particularly ones like Seven Bridge, and some of the rule sets were different enough from the how-to guides I'd looked up online that I was a bit confused on how to play, but you can look up how to play any of them whenever you want by just pressing the start button, so that's an awesome quality of life feature. Not every game is playable multiplayer, as the game has no ability to hide player information like that, but a fair amount of them still are. There are even a few games you can play that aren't present in the story mode like blackjack and video poker. It's all well put together, even if it is a bit confusing to get the grasp of the game's house rules sometimes. The game's presentation is really cute. The music is alright and is very "card game" in its presence but non-intrusiveness, but it's the graphics that are a bit more noteworthy. It has a very Paper Mario-like pop-up storybook aesthetic to it, as the story mode is presented literally as a story book on a big stage. And this is all in 1998, so actual Paper Mario was still two whole years away. It has a very charming and memorable aesthetic, and fits the "family fun" nature of a card game collection really well. Verdict: Recommended. It's hard to really judge a game like this on most levels. Though it's a pretty cheap, albeit uncommon, game, the amount of text makes it pretty difficult to recommend as an import. But if that isn't a problem for you and a somewhat multiplayer-light card game simulator with a cute aesthetic on N64 is something you think you need in your life, then this is will fit the bill about as well as anything could X3
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The last of the N64 Doraemon trilogy, and coming to us all the way in the year 2000, so ends my journey through these oddball region-exclusive hidden gems. Coming out in '97, '98, and 2000, the trilogy, despite the varied genres at play, give a pretty neat view of what the N64 could do at a glance as devs figured out how to use it more and more. This one was twice the price of the others when I bought it, so I did go in expecting a bit more than the others, and that's more or less what I got. It took me about six or so hours to do just about everything in the game on hard mode, and I only had to look up one or two things.
The game opens with Nobita being annoyed with doing his summer homework. He complains to Doraemon when suddenly a meteorite explodes in the sky outside. When Nobita goes outside to investigate, he finds his three friends have found the shards of the meteorite, but when put back together, they start a chain reaction that lifts up the block that Nobita lives on, and takes the whole thing into space faaaar away to the planet Duct. With his friends spirited away to who knows where and the town under attack by evil robots, Nobita goes to find Doraemon, only to find him passed out in his room. Everyone in town has been captured in time-space slime, freezing them in place, but Doraemon has partially escaped this fate. While Doraemon himself (and his trusty impact pistol) have escaped being frozen, all the tools in Doraemon's pocket are slimed and unusable! You embark on a mission to save your town and the rest of the citizens of Duct who've also been kidnapped and taken here. The story is a little more involved than the past two games, and it does lend itself to being a little more of an adventure game than the previous ones, but not by a tooooon. It does what it needs to, and also gives you a sense of progression as you go from level to level and area to area. This is an adventure/action platformer that is in many ways a blend of the first and second games in the trilogy. You go from stage to stage hunting for necessary mcguffins you'll need to access the dungeon at the end of the area, and in that dungeon you'll face a boss to rescue one of your captured friends. You once again have different playable characters (with even Doraemon's little sister eventually joining the fray), and at last their different characteristics (different swimming/running speeds and jumping heights) are explicitly told to you on the character selecting screens. Each one even has their own health bars that need to be healed independently. The gameplay is a mix of some behind-the-shoulder platforming stages (more like Banjo-Kazooie) and fixed camera platforming stages (more like Bomberman Hero), and while it's never particularly difficult, it's a fine test of action and platforming, especially for someone who might not be super experienced in this genre. However, the refocused story elements and gameplay loop changes somewhat hurt the game mechanically more than anything. As, even though it's nice in a sense to have Doraemon's tools not be lost for once, the way you get them back is by collecting this slime-destroying spray to de-slime them. However, you can grind for the spray if you want, so you can get all of your tools and weapons at the very start of the game if you want. Like in the second game, you do use tools to solve puzzles, but the game just tells you when to use the stuff for the puzzles. While this is a nice feature so you aren't just guessing forever on what tools solve what environmental puzzles, it very much does reek of "the game giving you a solution to a problem it has created itself". Not even needing to find tools means that exploration isn't so absolutely necessary as in the first two games, but it also means you're just never finding anything interesting by exploring other than more already super abundant healing items (which you can carry tons and tons of, so the game is never super difficult). Healing items being so abundant also means that each character having their own health bar doesn't really encourage switching between them very much, since you always have an over abundant supply of health. These aren't experience breaking problems, but they are an unfortunate drag on the gameplay loop despite how solid the first two games were in that regard. The presentation is what the trilogy has led us to expect at this point, combined with where N64 development was by 2000. All of the character models have gotten significant upgrades and have a pastel-y, nice Mega Man Legends style to them. There are a lot more animations, and while it isn't exactly Banjo-Tooie in terms of just how flashy it is, it's a very nice looking N64 game. The music is also, once again, pretty darn good, with the boss themes especially being really good. Verdict: Recommended. I still think the first game in the series is probably my favorite, but this is a much needed mechanical improvement on the second game. It's still got some fundamental design issues that make it feel a bit unrewarding to play in some regards, but it's still a fun time! It's definitely not a great import, as it's got some even more involved adventure/questing aspects than the second game did that require reading, but for those who can get past the language barrier, this is another nice hidden gem on the N64. I borrowed the GameCube Custom Robo from a friend as a kid and really enjoyed it, but I'd only ever heard about the N64 game. This Japan-exclusive first entry in the series is one that I scored ages ago, but only got to playing recently as something I did on Twitch. I was super out of practice and had forgotten most about the GameCube game, but things slowly came back to me as I went through it. It's definitely a first step rather than some inspired peak of the series, but I had a good bit of fun with it~. It took me around 8 hours to beat it over the course of two streams.
Custom Robo tells the story of you, the main character, who has just moved into a new town. Your cousin happens to live here, and he's a big fan of this new toy craze of Custom Robo. A "Commander" pilots the robos by "diving" their consciousness into the toy and battling other their opponents robot for who can KO their opponent's robot first. Lucky for you, your parents have gotten you your very own Custom Robo toy as a present for the move, and you get right to work as your cousin teaches you how to play. You turn out to be a prodigy as you go basically undefeated through every opponent you come across, winning every tournament their is and even saving the world from a Team Rocket-like evil. It's a story that's very typically anime for the time, and it gave me very Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh vibes between the relationship the main character has with his family, friends, and even the villains. It's got some really weird pacing and twists at times, and it's hardly gonna set your world on fire, but it's mostly here to give a set dressing for the robot fighting, and it does a more than good enough job at that. At the very least, you'll probably get some giggles from just how campy and expressive the characters' expressions can be when they're emoting their dialogue X3 The gameplay is very much like a prototype for what would eventually be the English-released GameCube game. The two robos launch into different directions from the center of the map, and then your cubes morph into the robots who then begin to fight. You fire your main weapon with A, fire your bomb with B, launch pods with Z, and can jump and boost with R. You can even use a C button to dash towards your opponent eliminating their normal fire coming towards you. There are all sorts of different main guns, bombs, and pod types you can get as you play through the story, and even different legs for your unit to affect things like how long it takes you to start moving again once you hit the ground and how fast your acceleration is. You can tweak your build a ton in the story mode, and there's a ton of skill present in how you can play. The only major complaint I'd have is that the action feels a bit too clunky/slow at times compared to how the GC version can feel. While that isn't a death sentence, it does mean that you can get punished REALLY hard if you happen to misstep, and the harder battles in the game can very quickly turn against you if you make a couple mistakes. While the game isn't really super hard and the AI is far from the best, the last fights of the penultimate and final in-game days are both super tough, and really drive home just how hard you can punish an unready opponent. I found the challenge quite nice, overall, at least for someone like me who is quite unaccustomed to fighting games, let alone in a 3D fighting genre like this ^^; Other more minor complaints are things like how you can't change the build of your robot in the story mode. There is an arcade mode you can basically play however you want in, but you're stuck using the all-around fine Ray model in the story mode. Different Custom Robo models have different recovery times, can get knocked down easier or harder, and even have higher defense values and different base speeds. You end up fighting a ton of opponents (there are like ten or so different models in the game), and it becomes a little bit of a bummer that your robo is always just plain ol' Ray (unlike how you can change that in later games). My only other significant complaint is that a fair few of the weapons in the game aren't just tactical decisions, but are clearly better than others. While that power creep does favor the story mode well (especially for a game this old with no online play and a fully functional arcade mode), it's still a little bit of a bummer for how the fighting itself is designed. It makes it feel like more of an RPG and less like a fighting game, which isn't a fault, per se (it honestly probably made me like it more), but it's definitely something worth mentioning here. The presentation is about what you'd expect for a Nintendo-published game on the N64 in 1999. Colors and models are really colorful and vibrant, and the game runs really well. The music is also quite good, although there's nothing particularly MP3 player-worthy in my book. Just how cool so many of the other robo models can look made me even more bummed that you're stuck playing as Ray all the time. I wanted to look a that cool too! X3 Verdict: Recommended. This is a pretty darn good game on the N64, especially for a system that is for the so barren of any competent fighting games (save for a few exceptions). While it's certainly an untraditional fighting game, taking more from something like Virtual On rather than Street Fighter, it's a very competent one. While the sheer amount of text will likely keep any non-Japanese speaker thoroughly confused and unable to play the story mode, the arcade mode can still be enjoyed to a point even if you don't know Japanese. It's certainly navigable with the use of a guide, and it's a cheap import worth checking out if you're a fan of fighting games and neat N64 stuff. With the title translating to "Nobita and the Temple of Light", this is the second in the Doraemon N64 trilogy, and after enjoying the first game so much, I rushed out to procure the other two games to see how they stacked up. Much to my surprise, this is actually quite the genre change compared to the first game, and also doesn't connect to the first in any way narratively despite the "2" present in the title XD. I guess this one just happens to be based off of somewhere different in the manga. It took me around 7 or so hours to beat the game getting all but a handful of the collectibles.
The story here is similarly overly verbose like the first game's is, but it's an entirely new story about Doraemon, Nobita, and their friends. While traveling home on their time machine from an adventure, Nobita pulls out the shiny crystal he nabbed during their trip. However, the crystal suddenly goes off in an explosion of light that swallows the whole gang, dropping them in an unfamiliar location. Nobita finds himself alone in a strange fantasy land, and after finding his friends (which doesn't take toooo long), he learns that the whole reason this land is in peril is because of the gem he stole. He and his friends need to recover the other power crystals and restore the titular Temple of Light to an equilibrium to save the world~. The story is predictably nothing stellar (this is just a kids game, after all), and it's packed with fairly uninteresting dialogue among the many NPCs you meet. And there are a lot of NPCs in this game, because this is an adventure game! Where the first Doraemon 64 game plays more like a simplified Banjo-Kazooie, this game takes a big genre leap in that it plays far more like a simplified 3D Zelda with some platforming thrown in. However, it's far from a typical action/adventure game. You can change characters during specific plot points, but I don't think you can change them at will? At least I never found out how, although they all seemed to play more similarly than they did in the first game. You have an overworld composed of many areas with three dungeons to find those special gems in, but there's only combat in those dungeons. The overworld is entirely for solving puzzles (both environmental and NPC-related) and some simple platforming, and you can't even use weapons in it. The camera angle in the overworld is a pretty zoomed out isometric view, compared to the behind-the-shoulder closer angle in the dungeons, so combat would be pretty weird there, but it's still an odd way to put the game together. The adventure aspect of the game is overall pretty weak, sadly. A lot of the running around is mostly back tracking and just hunting for one of Doraemon's (once again lost) tools to use in the place you happen to need to use it, or going to do something for an NPC yet again (the lead-up to the 2nd dungeon is really bad about this). There not even being combat makes it feel like even more of a chore to get around to do these. However, the dungeons, while short, are quite well designed between their combat and their platforming. It's still the limited, no targeting method used in the first game, but it still ends up being a lot easier to hit enemies and the bosses are by and large pretty darn good too. It's far from a terribly hard game The presentation is pretty standard for a third-party '98 N64 game, but it's still quite solid regardless. While the graphics may not be super pretty, the character models have definitely gotten an upgrade since the previous game. The music is also once again pretty darn good, and I'm genuinely pretty bummed that I can't find a dump of the OST anywhere online. The only really weirdly bad part is the UI, which has the worst, most slow and unresponsive menu scrolling I've ever seen. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This game goes for a much bolder experience than its predecessor, but it ends up falling flat. The clumsy usage of the adventure aspects mean the solid dungeon action/platforming sections get sidelined to a secondary part of the experience in a way that's a real shame. The adventure aspects also sadly mean that this is a far more difficult game to get through if you don't know Japanese. While it would be possible with a guide, I don't think it's particularly worth importing this game compared to the first game. While it's still pretty fun and a bit of a hidden gem among N64 import games, it's a disappointing step back compared to how solid the first game was. Known as BLASTDOZER over here in Japan, this is a game I'd gotten for three whole dollars CIB back in the States but had never gotten around to playing. I'd actually sold that copy before I moved here, but I found ANOTHER CIB copy over here for the same price XD. I've owned that copy for quite some time, and it's only this TR theme that's gotten me to play it. I was playing the Japanese version of the game, and I didn't bother with most of the mini-game missions, but I did complete all of the main ones and got the credits at the end in around 7 or 8 hours.
Blast Corps doesn't have a ton of story to speak of, and is really more of a conceit for gameplay rather than a fully fledged story. You're a new employee in the titular company, and your job is to use your series of destruction vehicles to destroy buildings in the path of an out of control carrier for nuclear missiles so it doesn't touch them and explode! You've also got hidden beacons to find for extra levels, and hidden scientists to find for the true final mission (and the credits), but that's really it. It's very much a sandbox-style game, and it doesn't really have any pretentions of giving you any more exposition than you absolutely need to accomplish the task at hand. The gameplay of Blast Corps takes place between the main missions and the unlockable side missions. The main missions are you clearing the way for the previously mentioned nuclear danger truck. If that touches ANYTHING, it's game over and you gotta restart the stage (which is thankfully quick and easy). Your vehicle types range from the easy to use big tumbling robot that tumbles into things to break them, to the somewhat more complicated jet-booster car or bulldozer that just plow into stuff to break them, to the highly technical dump truck that destroys stuff by drift-sliding into them. You start a level in a particular vehicle, but you can get out of your vehicle to swap to a new one nearby if you need to, and you often need to, especially in harder levels. Aside from the main levels, there are also mini-game levels where you often choose your vehicle at the start instead of getting it given to you like in the normal levels. These levels involve things like destroying a bunch of buildings in a strict time limit or even completing a race, and you get a bronze, silver, or gold (or even platinum, if you're hella hella good at it) for doing it well enough. The game's main levels have this as well, where you get a gold medal for finishing them at all, and then there's another gold medal to be gotten if you destroy every building, free all the survivors (which is just destroying every building but easier), and light up all the lights on the ground by going near them (rewarding you for exploring, I guess). Those side missions in the main levels aren't super interesting, but getting gold on every level does unlock more levels in the post-game, so there is a sort of incentive to do it (although I did not). Blast Corps is fundamentally a puzzle game at its core, as you need to not just find out how to destroy the buildings in time, but also actually DO it. This makes it very much like another British-created puzzle game: Lemmings. Blast Corps, as a result, also shares a lot of the problems Lemmings has. It even has what I call the Lemmings Problem: You know what to do for how to solve it, but now you gotta DO it. Blast Corps suffers more from this than anything else, and how much that impacts your enjoyment of it will really determine how much of a winner this game is for you (AJ loves this game a lot, and I'm a lot more mixed on it). The large degree of technicality that something like the dump truck uses compared to the bulldozer or robots make for a really uneven difficulty curve as well, and combined with somewhat awkward camera controls (you've gotta take your hand off the accelerator to turn the camera, and in the later levels which have SUPER strict time limits, that can be a death sentence) that can sometimes make walls look invisible, you've got a game that is pretty easy fun on the lower end of its difficulty, but a game I find very hard to recommend anyone stick with to see the credits in. The presentation is fine, but nothing about it stands out a ton. It was a game made by a very new, quite small team in just about a year, and so it's a game that largely just "works" as well as it does and that's all it really needed to do. It's not an ugly game, and stuff like the big one-armed tumble robot are very iconic (one-armed because the designer ran out of memory to make the other arm, and then just liked how it looked so he kept it X3). It's also nearly identical to its English counterparts, with the only changes being some slightly more lenient platinum medal times and the graphics updated to reflect the different title. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. It's kinda a shame they never expanded upon this concept, as with a bit more spit and polish, a Blast Corps 2 could've been something really special. As it is, this is a game that is really hard to recommend unless you can get it for cheap. It could be something you really love, but it could be something you're pushing through to beat out of spite like I did. It's generally pretty cheap, so if you like N64 games and the concept of a time/score attack building destroying game sounds cool, then this is probably worth picking up, but if any of this has sounded not up your alley, I don't think you're missing out on a ton by passing this one by. Ever since I moved here two years ago, the Book Off across town has had a trilogy of Doraemon games on N64 that I'd never heard of made by Epoch (a game company I'd also never heard of). Being licensed games on a console with a lot of experimental bad games on it, I'd avoided them until a few days ago when I finally decided the 500 yen was worth it to plonk down and have a giggle at how probably bad the first one was. And who knows, maybe it'd be good, as you don't often get three games if you're trash, right? It only took me five hours to beat it, and I did it all in one sitting, but I left my time with Doraemon quite pleasantly surprised by its quality.
The title translates to "Doraemon: Nobita and the Three Spirit Stones", and that really tells you most of what you need to know about the story. The game opens with three mysterious crystals shattering on a hexagram, and an evil looking demon coming forth from the void. Princess Corona (yes, I laughed a lot at her name) of the fairy kingdom goes to her father with worried news of the Demon King's return. The long story short is that only Doraemon and all the tools in his four-dimensional pocket can possibly save the fairy world and the human world, but the Demon King wants his pocket too. In a failed attempt to steal it, Doraemon's tools get spread all over the fairy world, and you'll need to look for them too as you hunt for the shards of the spirit stones as well as the kings of each of the three fairy kingdoms to mend them back together. It's a really simple story that honestly has way too much exposition for how light it is, and in a move I found hilarious, it all ends up being an environmentalist message at the end (the pollution in the human world weakened the elemental link to the spirit stones, so we gotta help the planet to make sure the Demon King doesn't come back UwU). It had a very sort of He-Man-like "look at the camera and tell the children the message of the episode" feel to it in a way that gave me a good giggle X3 The gameplay is a stage-based platformer with a hub world, and it's shockingly enough really solid! Doraemon and his friends are your five playable characters (with Corona playable as a sixth character once you beat the game): Doraemon, Nobita, Shizuka, Takeshi, and Suneo. They all have different weapons as well as different speeds and jump heights (like in Mario 2, but no princess-like hovering in this XD). The only thing is that you need to FIND their weapons, as they're included among of Doraemon's tools (being that their weapons are just some of his tools that they're borrowing to use as weapons). The game has a handful of bosses and three world with 4 stages in each one (and a final boss who is just his own stage). It's a pretty short game, but really solid given that it's only from '97. The thing with Doraemon's tools is that a lot of them are missable (you can even complete the game without them), so you need to keep your eyes peeled in each level for treasure chests that hide them. Many of the tools that aren't weapons (Doraemon gets an air cannon that's basically a mega buster in the first level, and it's one of the better weapons for sure) are basically keys to play other levels that aren't the first level. Granted you don't gotta know what the items do to have them used as keys, you've just gotta have them. They're all neat little references to stuff in the manga and comics, and the whole presentation in that regard is really cute. The only sorta annoying thing is that a lot of the missable ones are just collectibles with no actual in-game purpose other than to be found, so there was a good while where I was like "but I found an item! What does it unlock!?" despite the fact that it unlocks nothing ^^; The weapons themselves are fine but suffer from the lack of a MegaMan Legends-style lock on (especially Doraemon's mega buster), so the combat can be kinda frustrating at times, especially for bosses. The levels are all around pretty darn well designed, with each character controlling really well and most jumps feeling very fair and doable without much trial. They don't have maps, but they're small and often linear enough that it's hard to get lost. It doesn't have the sheer flexibility of something like Mario 64, but it plays like a nice, simplified Banjo-Kazooie. There are a couple things that are pretty poorly telegraphed though, like the fact that you need to do the race at least twice (there are three of them) and the shmup-style level at least twice to get all the required items from them. Those levels also kinda suck, but the normal platforming/action ones are the norm and they're all good fun, save for some slight difficulty spikes here and there due to health being an unfortunately rare drop. It's not a terribly hard game, however, as your health bar refills after each stage, saving is easy (lives are basically a pointless mechanic), and you can take a LOT of hits before you die. Despite all the text, it's actually a fairly easy game to import, as aside from a couple hints that it'd REALLY be nice to know (like how the final boss's weak point is the pendant on his chest, or that you take the three gem pieces to the kings of their respective worlds to be mended once you have them), the only thing you're really doing in each level is either killing a boss or collecting a spirit stone. The presentation is also pretty nice. It's very much "early N64 game" with how low-polygon and low-res the textures and objects are, but the music is actually pretty darn good, and I wasn't expecting to dig as many tracks as I did. It's hardly gonna set your world on fire, but given the expectations I had for "licensed Doraemon game on the N64 released in 1997", it cleared that low bar with flying colors. Verdict: Recommended. I was totally ready to really dislike this game, and I am so happy I was wrong. I was so happy that I actually went out today and picked up the other two games in the trilogy! XD. This is a really solid N64 platformer that's a pretty forgiving import even for non-Japanese speakers. It's a decent challenge without ever feeling unfair, and an experienced player can probably knock it out in an afternoon if you're not going for collecting 100% of Doraemon's gadgets (I got 27 out of 32, myself). This is a game I've owned since my first trip to Japan eight years ago, but this month's TR theme finally pushed me to play it (I had always considered my Japanese not quite good enough to try it previously). A Japan-exclusive game I mostly knew for being one of Nintendo's worst selling first-party titles ever, it was only recently after playing moon that I learned that Captain Rainbow was the same dev team of Love De Lic alumni who made Giftpia and Chibi-Robo. With the combination of those two factors, I set to work at last playing through this oddball adventure game that I'd had on my shelf for so long. After 13 or so hours, I found my way to the good ending of the game.
Captain Rainbow is the story of the titular Captain Rainbow, or more accurately, Nick, whom Captain Rainbow is the alter ego to. He used to be a big shot TV superhero, hero to children everywhere, but as soon as a new big hero came onto the scene, Captain Rainbow found himself unloved and looking for answers. In his quest to regain his glory days, Nick builds a raft and sails off to find the legendary Mimin Island, where it's said wishes can be granted. Through some more shenanigans, Nick finds himself not just on the island, but also as the arbiter of wishes to the many other people who've come to the island. Those other people just also happen to be washed up Nintendo mascots from older games (a motley crew of characters from the nameless protagonist of Nintendo's "Golf" to even someone as recognizable as Birdo). Captain Rainbow is an adventure game with some light action elements, and going around Mimin Island is how you'll experience his quest for renewed glory. Nick can transform into Captain Rainbow to use his yo-yo powers to destroy obstacles, but you have a timer on this and you'll need to eat fruit you find all around the island to refill your meter. If Nick chooses to help out the islanders with their problems and gain their trust, he can then take them up to the top of the island and have their wish granted (or he can just grant his own wish and get a bad ending). The only real action parts of the game come in this wish granting sequence, where you need to get to the shooting star that's landed (once you collect 20 little stars hidden around the island) and avoid evil ink-like darkness creatures who wanna steal the wish for themselves. Faking out these guys isn't too hard, especially if you're being Captain Rainbow to bop them in the face with your yo-yo. It's not super engaging, but like Chibi-Robo, Captain Rainbow's action segments are an element of the that doesn't exactly harm the game but definitely does feel out of place. There are 12 islanders in total, and the length of just how much you'll have to help them with their problems varies from character to character. You actually never really see their wishes, and all you really see is Nick helping them improve their lives and qualities about themselves. Even as you go through the game, you end up playing as Captain Rainbow less and less as Nick is better equipped to solve their problems. The game's message is largely one around this, about how you don't need to be a super hero to help people out, and how you don't need some magic wish to make your life visibly better. All it takes to make things better and help people around you is to have the willingness to do it. It's not a story or message done quite as well as something like in moon or Chibi-Robo, but it's still a sweet story that I enjoyed most of. That said, while the quality of the writing itself is often quite good, or at least charming, it often wanders into the realm of crass and even downright perverse. The game's treatment of Birdo may not be the most transphobic thing I've seen in a game (it's a disgusting caricature as opposed to being outright hateful/demonizing), and it honestly didn't ruin the game for me entirely (as it's out of the way fairly quick), but like how I feel with Mother 3, it's a black mark on the game's quality and is a HUGE caveat to anyone interested in playing it. The game's presentation is very much in line with how Giftpia and Chibi-Robo look, but more towards how the former does things. The island is a super colorful but small location that you'll get to know pretty quickly, and the super deformed representations of other Nintendo characters is a mix of charming and uncanny. The music is also pretty good, and it suits the environments well. The themes of each of the islanders are also fun renditions either remixed from or inspired from (I think) the game's they're actually from, which is another nice touch. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is a pretty solid adventure game (no real moon logic to be found), and I enjoyed my time with it for the most part, but with the language barrier as well as the spotty writing, I don't think it's one super worth going for. If what I described sounds like something you'd be up for, I wouldn't call you a weirdo for wanting to experience the game yourself. But if the choice of your time is between this or most else of the Love De Lic alumni's library, I'd say this is definitely one you don't really need to give your time to. It's pretty good, but it's not THAT good, and it's no huge deal that English speakers never got this game. Special shout out goes to WASDBee for using their awesome musical brain to help me get through the monkey rhythm puzzle ^w^ After playing through Mystical Ninja on N64 a while back, I was intrigued to finally try to play the other big (and infamous) N64 Konami game I'd never beaten before. While I have beaten Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness on the N64, I'd never tried the game it's so largely based off of. I thought this would be a fun thing to stream, and I played the Japanese version over two different streams over the course of around 6 hours playing as Reinhardt on normal mode (and even got the good ending on my first try, not even realizing there was a good ending to shoot for ^^;)~. This game has a pretty negative reputation, and I'd say my time with it largely confirmed for me that it deserves that reputation XD. While I think that streaming it definitely made the more frustrating parts more tolerable, it's still not something I think I'll ever wanna play again XP
The game takes place in 1852, and Dracula has begun to awaken after nearly 100 years since he was last defeated. The two playable protagonists (whose quests don't overlap at all, so I take it to mean that only one of them actually defeats Dracula in the end), Reinhardt Schneider and Carrie Fernandez both travel to Wallachia to go to Dracula's castle and put him to rest. They meet a series of other characters along the way, including an older vampire hunter, a beautiful young vampiric maiden, and a strange little boy, but the story isn't terribly interesting. It's very of its time as far as trying to be cinematic in its presentation, but mostly comes off as campy and silly, which fits Castlevania just fine, so I don't see it as much of a problem. It does what it needs to to bind the stages together, and it's good enough for that. The gameplay itself is where the bad (and deserved) reputation starts coming into play. The game takes place across 10 or so stages with certain stages or versions of stages being unique to each of the two playable characters. You go around 3D environments solving puzzles, doing platforming challenges, fighting enemies, and collecting items to get to the end of the stage where a boss often awaits. This is a game with some pretty dang clunky platforming and combat that is wall-to-wall platforming and combat. It can be conquered, but it's overall a challenge that will frustrate more than it will feel like a fun level of challenge. The combat is a combination of an upgradable main weapon (of which Carrie has the better between the two heroes), a much weaker secondary weapon, and then the ammo-dependent sub-weapons like the cross and axe that Castlevania knows so well. The weaker secondary weapon is so weak you'd basically never want to use it for anything except breaking a torch to try and get an item from it, and the sub-weapons are good for the range but often annoyingly weak for what they are. The main weapon isn't much good unless its upgraded, but those aren't the big problem. The biggest problems with the combat are the lack of any Ocarina of Time lock-on feature (and OoT was out by now, so Konami has no excuse XD) as well as the awful camera that comes along with it. The C-buttons are used for things like your secondary weapons, looking around, and picking up items, so they don't control your camera. Only pressing R realigns the camera behind you OR, if you have an enemy nearby, focuses on the enemy, and you have no choice but to focus on that enemy even if you'd much rather look somewhere else by pressing R. The lock-on that is there is entirely automatic, leading to a lot of cases fighting several enemies where it can be difficult just to hit what's in front of you. The boss design is overall alright and often fun, but the combat controls never feel like anything you aren't fighting against just as much as the monsters and demons. The stage design is overall not awful, but what DOES make the platforming awful isn't just the awkward camera, but it's also the fact that your edge grab is awful and your jumps feel quite floaty. The jumps are something you can get accustomed to, but the fact that your edge grab, an edge grab that much of the platforming in the game relies on, can at times simply decide not to work and drop you to your death. And some stages have little or no save points in them (*shakes angry fist at Duel Tower*), so dying from something that wasn't your fault at all to then redo a bunch of frustrating combat and platforming is a pretty common experience. The stage design itself ranges from annoying to feeling alright, but the one stage whose design is MOST awful is the most infamous one: the alchemy tower where you need to safely deliver magical nitro through a bunch of danger without either getting hit or jumping, lest you eat immediate death. I managed to do that in one try, somehow, (which felt AWESOME, especially on stream X3), but I didn't so much feel satisfied having done it, so much as I was only relieved that the segment I thought would be a playthrough ender was finally over and done with XP The presentation is alright for the time in terms of graphics. The humanoid models look VERY N64, but in a sort of charming, low-polygon retro aesthetic and not a particularly uncanny valley-type of 3D human modeling. Common for Konami of the 90's, however, even their not so good games have good music, and this is no exception. This game has a pretty good soundtrack composed of remixed of classic tracks as well as a few of its own, and although I'm not gonna rush to slap any of it on an MP3 player, there were several moments during the game I thought "gosh, this game has some pretty good music". As far as changes between the English and Japanese releases go, there are almost none save for the Japanese version having on-cart saves rather than requiring a controller pack to save with. Additionally, a curious thing that is identical between versions is the voice acting, which is in English in both versions. Verdict: Not Recommended. For an N64 game, this is on the boarder of being hesitantly recommended, and it would be if Legacy of Darkness weren't just this game but good. This game's main problems stem from it being so unpolished because it was rushed out for a holiday release. Legacy of Darkness takes what are for the most part the same stages and polishes up the level design (no more alchemy tower~), platforming controls, and combat all to a degree where that game is actually fun and recommendable. If you're gonna play any N64 Castlevania at all, it should be Legacy of Darkness or nothing, because after having already played that game, this game just feels like an unfinished beta, and that's because it basically is. Released in 1997 on the PS1 only in Japan, moon: Remix RPG Adventure was one of the few cult classics released by the tiny company of ex-Square employees known as Love De Lic. Veterans of that company would go many directions, but some of the creative heads went on to form Skip Ltd. (makers of games like Chibi-Robo) or to make games like Rule of Rose and Chulip. A close friend of mine played through Chulip last year and loved it, and when I saw that this new, weird Switch game simply called "moon" had ties to it, I had to see what the fuss was about. This month's Together Retro theme offered the perfect opportunity to finally sit down and play it, and I'm really glad that I finally did. Many reviews describe moon as some "anti-RPG", which I get, in a sense, but it's really just an adventure game, and a damn good one. It took me around 15-ish hours to complete the game in English.
moon tells the story of a little boy up late at night playing his new video game, "moon". He's a valiant knight going through a Dragon Quest-style RPG, and you get a few perspectives from various "save points" of the Hero's journey through this land to slay the Dragon and rescue the moonlight. Then, just as you slay the Dragon, your mother tells you to turn the game off and go to bed, which you do. However, the TV suddenly turns back on, and when you go to inspect it, you're sucked into the television and dropped into a world that looks uncannily familiar. You're invisible at first, and can only hear conversations, but eventually an elderly woman who has recently lost her grandchild mistakes you for him and gives you his set of clothes to wear (hence the little invisible fellow on the front of the game's cover). From the way the townspeople speak, it seems that you're at the start of the game, and the Hero hasn't even set out on his quest yet. However, once you set out around town, you realize that not everything was as it seemed when you were originally playing it. The wild, stray dog you fought at the start of the game is revealed to have been a totally ordinary dog the Hero just thought was some sort of monster to chase. This begins your introduction to the game's main premise, which is following along after the Hero to try and clean up the messes he makes and also to save the world in your own way through love. Upon your first night sleeping, you're visited in your dream by the God of Love, who informs you that the only way to combat the Hero's misguided quest is to gather enough love. The gathering of love is the main core of the game, and it takes various forms. It takes place both in the form of helping people with their problems, and also bringing back to life all of the animals (monsters really, but the game quite purposefully calls them animals) that the Hero has slayed in his quest to level up and get stronger. There's the wider quest of saving the world, and then these smaller puzzles to save animals (hints to them are given when you inspect their corpses), and it all flows together to make a really solid adventure game with barely any (excuse the pun) moon logic. Most importantly, however, collecting love upgrades your love level, and your love level extends the time you can stay awake. Several puzzles, particularly the penultimate one, weigh on your ability to stay awake for a very long time, so getting to love level 22 or so is effectively the end goal of your quest from a purely mechanical standpoint. Eating food extends the time you're awake a bit, but money is a resource you'll either need to grind for with fishing (which can't be done immediately, at least) or is quite limited with the rewards you get for saving animals. If you don't sleep before you run out your action limit, you're dead and you have to go back to the last time you slept. Once you're able to stay awake for days at a time, forgetting to sleep could end up meaning you've lost a lot of progress, so it's good to keep an eye on the clock in the upper left of the screen. You get used to this mechanic quite quickly, although compared to games like Chibi-Robo and other offshoots of this dev team, an outright game over is a pretty brutal punishment for staying out too late, and it's something to be aware of going in. There's no larger time limit to complete the game within (and your ending doesn't weigh on how much time you take either), but it takes a little getting used to. moon's writing is definitely its highlight, as one would expect for an adventure game. It's setting is certainly unconventional, being a strange mix of Western fantasy and modern technology, but the relatively small game world is one you'll grow intimate with fairly quickly. The characters are all unique and quirky in their own ways, and have their own schedules they follow on each of the seven days of the week. The localization is honestly amazing, and I'm kinda glad it took 20 years to get this game localized because it probably would've been much worse had it come out in English back in the 90's. moon's ultimate message can definitely come off as one that is a bit disparaging of video games and the time spent playing them, but I don't really see it that way. I see moon much more as a message not to the people who play games so much as to the people who make them. That games don't need to be all about violence and killing to be satisfying, and games can (and perhaps should, depending on how far you wanna take the conclusion) be about more than that. moon is an "anti-RPG" in how it decides to pose this question to the player through the lens of a typical RPG turned on its head, and it's a really cleverly put together bit of commentary. The writing of the game is bolstered by its presentation. There isn't a ton of music in moon, but that's because the game actually has its own in-built music player for MD (mini-discs, I assume?) you can buy starting fairly early in the game. What music is there, however, is quite good. The graphical style is a mixture of detailed 2D models for the human characters (usually) and claymation-style digitized sprites for basically all of the "animals", walking around pre-rendered 2D locations. It makes for a very varied but still cohesive style that will likely be at least somewhat familiar to those familiar with something like Chibi-Robo (a game I use as an example so often since it's the product of Love De Lic's alumni that would be most familiar to Westerners ^^;). Even the sound design is fascinatingly unique in how it uses clips of actual language cut together to make the voices of its NPCs, with different NPCs often speaking in different languages from any other character (me and my friends were able to pick out English, Japanese, Arabic, Polish, French, and German, but there were plenty we couldn't identify), and makes even talking to NPCs feel like a memorable experience in how uncanny it can feel to hear your own language distorted in such an odd fashion while trying to read the subs that contain their actual dialogue. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is an adventure game that is a must-play for any fans of the genre. I was surprised to see that this 2020 port is actually not available on anything but Switch, making it a pretty stellar cult classic of an exclusive for Nintendo. It's well worth the asking price of 20 bucks and is honestly one of my new favorite games. If you've played things like Chulip or Chibi-Robo and want more games with that sort of oddball style and unconventional approach to gameplay and storytelling, then you are likely going to adore moon, and should absolutely give it a look. Fast told me about this a week or so before it came out, and he described it as Link to the Past but a 4-player co-op rogue-lite, and I checked out the demo and was basically instantly sold. This is the first game I've pre-ordered in who knows how long (it came with some extra goodies if you preordered), and I think it turned out to be worth my $20. This game has been out on Early Access on Steam for quite some time, but only a couple weeks ago did it finally launch on Switch (I beat within the first week it was out). I never had any friends to play it with, but even still I managed to beat it in about 9.5 hours, and then spent another hour and a half or so in the post-game trying to (unsuccessfully) unlock more stuff.
The land of Tasos was long ago ravaged by evil Titans, but the four goddesses waged a war against them to seal them away forever. It once a beautiful land of magic and prosperity, but the greedy ambitions of the foreigners who found it led it to ruin. Pushing the native people to the wilderness and vastly exploiting its natural resources, the magic that sealed the Titans begins to wain, and monsters slowly begin to return to Tasos as the Titans prepare for their cataclysmic return. That's where you the hero(s) come in. An avatar chosen by the goddesses, you've been sent to slay the Titans and save Tasos! The story is almost 100% in the opening movie (in a sequence very reminiscent of Zelda games like Minish Cap or LTTP), and the themes it seems to present (the damaging effect of things like colonialism and environmental destruction) are almost entirely absent from the dialogue that is actually in the game. I'm not sure if they set that up as a joke, some kind of homage to back when games had just about all their story in the opening movie, but just how disconnected from the actual game was a bit disappointing. The game's story itself is honestly just about as simple as "you're a hero who needs to save the land from the slumbering (but soon to wake) evil", and while there's some quirky and at times entertaining dialogue, it's all super forgettable. It's serviceable for delivering you the action at hand, but they should've probably ditched the notions of wider themes if they were going to just ignore them so brashly. The gameplay is more or less as Fast originally described it to me. You have a curated overworld with a town in the center of it. All of that is pre-built, and has loads of little secret caves and secrets to find special goodies. Around the world are four dungeons that you'll need to get through to kill four bosses to unlock the final dungeon that houses the Titans. These dungeons are fitted with three floors each, and each floor is procedurally made of pre-made rooms that have enemies, treasure, and traps in them. On the third floor waits a boss, and they're pretty darn good fights. The overall construction of the game is really solid. The overworld is fun, and the mini-quests to unlock dungeons feel like proper Zelda ones. There are even some hidden dungeons you can do to unlock new classes and such. The dungeon rooms are also well designed, and the combat feels punishing but never super unfair (granted I've played a ton of games in this 2D Zelda style, so my experience in the genre might give me some bias there). There are several classes you can pick from as well, with each having their own base stat multipliers (for attack, defense, and speed) as well as a mobility move. They all fight pretty similarly with a sword, and the mobility moves often aren't suuuper different from each other, but the changes between them make them feel different enough that you'll likely find a favorite among the bunch (my favorite was Reaper). In the overworld you find (admittedly almost useless) coin money, but in dungeons you find gems, and these are SUPER important. You use gems for everything from building and upgrading buildings in your town to upgrading the stats of your base weapons as well as the extra tools you get (like your bow, bombs, etc). However, you lose all your gems when you enter a dungeon, so it behooves you to spend them and not horde them. Most of the hidden caves and treasures around the overworld contain little orbs that make you lose slightly less gems when entering a dungeon, but you'd probably have spent just about all you possibly could anyhow, so these collectibles feel really uncompelling to go out of your way to grab (they may as well do literally nothing). This is where my complaints with the generally unpolished nature of the game come out. Sure, you can upgrade your gear, but weirdly for a rogue-lite, you can get way too powerful way too fast. Even with just the gems I got from doing the 2nd dungeon, I was monstrously powerful in the 3rd dungeon to the point I killed its boss in only a few seconds, and much the same sort of situation repeated in the 4th dungeon. Some kind of cap on how far you can upgrade that extends when you beat a new big dungeon would've really given the game some much needed difficulty balancing, as it starts out pretty darn difficult but then gets way easier really fast as you get more health and higher damage. These balancing issues extend to the enemies as well, as while they're pretty well designed, there aren't many of them. Once you learn how to deal with the enemies in the first dungeon, you'll probably be able to dispatch them no matter how tough they are. Enemies from dungeon to dungeon are just higher level, and there's a pretty low actual diversity of enemies, so just having learned how the limited number of enemies fight also makes the game much easier after you beat the first dungeon or so. The game's admittedly quite cool concept also results in some fairly lackluster dungeon design when compared to a proper game in the genre. Because they're pre-made rooms put together procedurally, puzzles only exist within rooms. No multi-room puzzles exist of any kind because that would require some much more stiff procedural generation to the point you may as well just make a non-rogue-lite game, and it ends up making the dungeons lack any kind of identity between them. There are some traps exclusive to each of the four dungeons, sure, but I think it's telling that the final dungeon is just a collage of all the other fours' room types and they barely feel out of place next to each other. The importance of gems and the similarity of the classes also makes actually exploring the overworld not that compelling. The orbs are almost useless, and all money does is just unlock special chests in dungeons that get you a big boost of gems. Granted exploring the overworld is pretty fun because it's well designed, you're really exploring just for the sake of doing it, as any extra classes you unlock are done through pretty darn well signposted side quests that take place in or around the main town. Yet that's contrasted with some really poorly signposted areas and some really cruddy quest design (there are a few areas I just never figured out how to get to, and the Pirate class I never unlocked because it involves spending AGES doing a really boring fishing mini-game for several randomly spawning legendary fish). None of this stuff is experience ruining, but it adds up to consistently annoying problems that will be present just about your entire experience. The presentation is a resounding "okay." The game doesn't have much music, with tons of outdoor areas being just ambient sound, and what music is there isn't really memorable or noticeable beyond simple atmosphere. The graphics are pretty darn good pixel-art, but like how Cathedral (another recent Switch game) apes far too much from Shovel Knight's style to be all that memorable itself, Rogue Heroes does the same with Link to the Past. They crib from that game's style a TON, and while it IS good, it's a very good imitation and it never really feels like anything more than that with the fairly generic enemy design. The game is mostly bug-free, although there is a bug I ran into a couple times where the game didn't realize that I'd changed planes I was on. This only happened two or three times, but I'd jump down from a ledge but I was walking over enemies and pick-ups because the game thought I was still above where I was. It's pretty easily solved by jumping down/up another ledge or changing screens, but it was a very noticeable bug I felt I had to point out. Apparently the game was pretty routinely criticized for being buggy during Early Access on PC, so the fact that the Switch release works as well as it does is definitely something worth commending in my mind. Verdict: Recommended. Despite all its faults and how generic it is, Rogue Heroes is still an incredibly competent game at its core. It provides a really solid experience in a genre (Zelda-like rogue-lite) that I don't really know of anything else tackling, and I imagine it's quite a good time with friends. I think a lot of people are better off waiting for a sale, especially if you either don't have friends to play with or aren't much of a fan of the genre, but this is still a good experience that I don't feel I wasted my money on. |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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