After playing the first two Last Bible games a couple years ago, I had been meaning to get around to their Super Famicom successor ever since then. But then I got kinda burned out on SMT and monster collecting games, and I got super addicted to Super Robot Wars games for nearly a year straight, so that didn’t end up happening until now XD. Still on my RPG kick, I decided to finally complete the old LB trilogy, and I’m really glad I did! It took me about 40 or so hours to beat the game in Japanese on emulated hardware.
The story of Last Bible 3 follows a young boy named Ciel, growing up in the tiny secluded village of Raga. He has his best friends Mochowa and Aaron, and he has his little brother Rudy, and they live a relatively normal life, going to school and playing together. But then one day, a few wild things happen in quick succession. They stumble across some ancient ruins, they find and revive an ancient warrior android named Duu, they hatch the egg of a baby Tetradragon, and they learn the government is going to ban the use of Gaia (the sort of magic/life force thing they practice at school). No sooner have their teachers left to petition the Senate to reverse their decision when a government-sent drop ship full of troops come to wipe the village out in their efforts to kill Ciel’s father, Glen. Fighting off the attack, the villagers all decide to flee the village rather than stay, and that’s only the too-short summary of the beginning of a much wider and deeper story than I would’ve ever expected on the Super Famicom. The writing in Last Bible 3 genuinely blew me away in just how well it’s done, and it really feels like a video game version of a fantasy OVA from the period. Not only are the character interactions very funny and well done, but god damn does this game have a political narrative I’d consider daring even for a game now, let alone nearly 30 years ago. A story in a console RPG from this era being in some greater or lesser terms about how unjust hierarchies are worth toppling is one thing, but I was hella surprised at just how bold LB3 goes with it. Not like so many other games of then and now does it use a religious institution as the stand-in for real-world institutions, but the game’s secular government itself. It even goes so far as to make it a democratic institution, a Senate, rather than some kingdom or what have you. It really goes out of its way to show the disinterest of the state in anything other than its own survival, and holy crap are they not shy about racking up a body count in pushing that point. I don’t want to give away too many spoilers here, but even for an Atlus-published game of the time (as they didn’t make it, the guys who made the other LB games did), this game is really pushing the boundaries of the kinds of stories video games can tell. It isn’t perfect, sure. I think the way the game handles race (Duu, a nearly speechless android, being the only person of color in the game) is certainly less than ideal by modern standards, but in both lacking any villages/locations based on racial stereotypes as well as having a person of color in the main cast at all puts this well above most other RPGs of the time in many respects. All in all, this is easily one of the best, if not the best full-stop, written RPGs on the Super Famicom, no question, and absolutely one of my new favorite games on the system. The mechanics are where LB3 starts to get really decidedly less than perfect, however. It is an evolution and refinement of the SMT-lite turn-based RPG system of RPG + monster recruitment that the previous LB games use, but it also maintains some of their most strange and frustrating design choices. You can recruit monsters who can fight for you via dialogue in battle. In a nice improvement from previous games, you actually get an affection meter for just how well you’re convincing them, as well as an emotion indicator for how they’re happy, angry, or neutral towards you. It’s kind of a more simple system of what the PS1 Persona titles would do for their monster recruitment very soon after this. They also keep the system previous LB games use where monsters will never deceive you like they will in SMT. If a monster asks for money to join you, they mean it, and paying them will make them join you 100% of the time. The one rotten new addition to monster negotiations is that you have a time limit of only a few seconds to decide a reaction to what they just said, which can make negotiations kinda frustrating if you misread what they’re saying or get distracted for a moment (not to mention it’s a real pain in the butt for a language-learner like me ^^;). Very much two-steps forward, one step back. Monsters can also still use equipment, and damn is that valuable because the inventory management is not only nowhere NEAR as bad as past games (like how monsters no longer just absorb the equipment they’re wearing if you fuse them with another monster while they have things equipped, like LB2 did), but monsters are also once again your biggest heavy hitters. While they mercifully don’t make you fight the final boss with a party of only humans like LB2 did, the most frustrating aspect of LB2’s larger design is still here: Humans are pitifully weak and useless compared to monsters you can get. Thankfully, LB3 is never a terribly hard game. I had to grind for a couple hours to be strong enough and have monsters strong enough to beat the final boss, but outside of that, most bosses and encounters will likely be pretty trivial. Humans being weak is a frustrating aspect of the design, but it mercifully never makes the game feel particularly difficult as a result. Another annoying Old RPG Thing this game has is that magic is VERY weak and far too expensive most of the time to justify using compared to just saving your MP for healing magic. This makes virtually all random encounters pretty quickly just an exercise in pressing the auto battle button and letting it resolve over the course of a few seconds. Conversely, enemy magic is often VERY powerful, but as long as you either befriend monsters with particularly annoying spells (so you can just tell them to leave you alone, just like SMT) or use the accessories that neutralize the element of magic most commonly used in that dungeon, you can avoid the meanest of enemy magic pretty safely. This random encounter rate is also pretty high, but that does thankfully mean that you pretty rarely feel under leveled or underfunded as a result. Dungeons are also thankfully nice and short, with even the final dungeon not being terribly long either. Between that and the relatively easy difficulty, the narrative is always moving at a brisk pace, which I definitely appreciated. I don’t think the faults in the system make the game particularly worse to play or are particularly unique or noteworthy for RPGs of the time (of the mid-/late-SFC era or early PS1 era), and the strengths definitely outweigh the weaknesses for me, but the mechanical stuff is definitely where the game is at its weakest, unfortunately, even if that “weakness” is still like, 7/10 quality for a SFC RPG. The presentation of the game is very nice, and Atlus really gave MIT (the development studio, not the university :b) the budget to make a game that looked *and* felt like a late era SFC game. Monster sprites are a wonderfully detailed collage of parody of familiar SMT monsters, and the environments and NPC sprites area also very well done. The NPC stat screen full portraits also have a ton of character to them, and they communicate the art style very well. The music isn’t particularly great, but it’s still pretty darn good to someone without a particularly tuned ear for music like me. They use it well to underline scenes, and they also introduce new musical scores for battles and locations to help set new atmospheres well. You can really tell these devs have made plenty of RPGs before, since their comfort with the genre really shines through with just how finely tuned an experience it is. Verdict: Highly Recommended. As I said before, this is easily one of my new favorite SFC RPGs. I get why these devs never made any more of them after this for the PlayStation or whatever, as the introduction of Pokemon the following year really changed the face of monster collecting games, and Atlus as a whole really began shifting gears after this with how their Devil Summoner and Persona series began evolving. But even if there were never any followups, MIT really gave us an exemplary game for the genre and the console with LB3. It does have an English fan translation, and while I can’t speak to the quality of that (or lack thereof), it does at least exist! If you’re a fan of turn-based RPGs of the era, this is absolutely not one to miss out on, because there isn’t much better to be found on the SC as far as I’m concerned.
0 Comments
I’ve always been a huge fan of Mario Party. Ever since I was very little, it’s always been a series I really love playing, especially by myself. Recently I had to get a new GameCube, since my old one was losing the ability to read discs, and the one I happened to get online came with a copy of Mario Party 6. Out of all the MP games on GameCube, this is the one I at least recall playing the least, as I put a ton of time into 4, 5, and 7 as a kid. I decided to rectify this, as I’ve also just been in the mood for some Mario Party, it seems, and I played a bunch of MP6 over the past couple weeks, really getting acquainted with what I’d say is the entry of the main series I’m least acquainted with. As I played more and more, memories kept coming back to me suggesting that I actually *have* played a fair bit of this game, but just haven’t remembered it very well, so perhaps it’s actually more accurate to say that this is just the Mario Party that’s left the weakest impression on me, rather than the one I’ve played the least XD. At any rate, as this game actually doesn’t have a sort of story mode single-player mode like most of the other Mario Party games of this era did, I sorta had to set my own parameters for what “beating it” entailed, and I set that as beating the hard mode computers on every map at least once, and unlocking the credits. I played over a dozen games over the course of a week and a bit on the Japanese version of the game on real hardware. I couldn’t begin to think of how many actual hours I’ve put into it, though XD
The story premise for Mario Party is always pretty slim, and 6 is no different. The sun and the moon are fighting, and they have a Mario Party to settle which one of them is right. There’s a tad more to it than that, but that’s really it, given there’s no proper story mode or anything. There are story books you can buy and read in the game’s shop, for a sort of “story” to things, but as far as the normal game goes, there’s not really much you could call a story. Which certainly isn’t a complaint, as far as I’m concerned. It’s a fun thematic choice, and it’s also a neat excuse to push the day & night gimmick that this game’s boards and mini-games are tied to. As for the overall design of the game’s mechanics, it’s a very nice evolution on what had come before, while also not being quite as polished or innovative as its immediate successor, which is to more or less be expected for the third entry in a series that had four games on the same console in four years ^^;. He mini-game design is, for the most part, very good. Playing against the hard computers, there were only two or three games that they were just unconquerably good at, which is a nice change from usual. The biggest issue I’d say this game’s mini-games have, which is not an issue unique to this game, is that the 1 vs. 3 mini-games are by and large very poorly balanced. Many of them are basically impossible to win as the three players, regardless of the CPU or human status of those players, and many others are winnable as one team or the other, but one team has a much easier time winning than the other, making them feel very unfair. I think how good the controls feel and how well the design is of the other mini-games make up for this, generally, but the 1 v 3 games are definitely the weakest part of the game for me. The board design is overall really good. They’re big, but not too big, and the new spins on the kind of board objectives is a very cool advancement from 5. We don’t have as many board types as MP7 would have, but we do have two classic-style “go to the star and buy it, it moves when you buy it” type boards, a board where the star stays static but the price changes and you can buy up to five at a time (one of my favorites), a board all around stealing stars instead of buying them, a more linear board about getting to the end at the right time, and the extra board where you need to chase down the star seller during the day and run away from the star stealer at night. The day and night mechanic changes aspects of boards every three turns, as big as changing the location of the star or your ability to buy them at all, or as small as just changing how you can get around it. It’s a really clever mechanic, and while it’s barely used in the mini-games (I think a whole two mini-games out of the 50+ in the game are actually changed by the status of daytime), it at least changes the aesthetic of the mini-games, which is a neat touch. The boards’ size also factors well into how the orb system, or rather capsule system, works in this game. In MP5, they abandoned the item system they’d used since MP2 for a more quantity-over-quality orb system, and this game expands on that further, ditching a lot of the more useless orbs and giving you a bunch of more useful and dynamic ones. Being able to throw them down and create hazards that trigger either only once when passed or are there forever until they’re replaced by another player’s orb is a really cool feature. Playing most of my games at only 25 turns, it was a very neat bit of strategy how me and the CPUs would almost carve out Monopoly-like chunks of the board to be our “safe” spaces, where we didn’t need to worry about other player’s traps hecking over our games. Orbs are also cheap and plentiful enough that mushroom orbs to give you more die blocks to roll means boards feel a lot smaller even when they’re still quite big, so you have incredibly star-heavy games compared to similar turn limits in older Mario Party games. A 20 turn game where there are 12+ stars gained would be an unthinkable thing back in the N64 days with just how big those boards are, but it’s a pretty common thing in MP6, and I loved it. Factor that in with how stealing stars through Boo is something only a single board in this game has, and you have an overall gameplay loop that’s much more about outscoring your opponent rather than making their scores go down, as older games were more focused on. It’s a change I love, and it’s really warmed me to the style of these late GameCube-era Mario Parties in a way I really never had felt before, and it’s made me very excited to check out MP5 and 7 again soon to reexamine their board and item design in a similar way. The presentation is very nice, but in a fashion very typical for how these games were made at the time. The music is nice as are the graphics, but a lot of this is asset reuse from previous Mario Party games. Not all of it, absolutely, but enough of it is that it means the game carries a very similar overall aesthetic to previous GameCube Mario Party games, so it’s kind of a nice thing that they have the day & night thing as a theme, since it helps this game’s aesthetic try and stand out a little from the pack. The music is also overall quite good, but I wouldn’t say the sound design is nearly as good as the N64 Mario Party days (I know in my time playing MP6 and MP2 in Discord with my friends watching the past week and a bit, I heard way more comments about the quality of MP2’s music & sound than I did for MP6). Verdict: Recommended. I don’t think it’s the best Mario Party on GameCube, but it’s a lot better than I gave it credit for. I grew to really appreciate its approaches to refining the formula as it had existed up to that point, and while its successors like MP7 and for sure Super Mario Party stand over 6 pretty well, MP6 still manages to hold its own and still be a fun experience. You can certainly do better for your Mario Party, even on the GameCube, but you can also do a lot worse. Unlike the last MP game I did a ton of play like this with (that being 3), this is one I really enjoyed, and I’m glad I spent more time with, and almost certainly will spend a bit more time with after I’ve finished this review. I may’ve hit the credits, but I’m still having fun, dang it! X3 |
Categories
All
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
|