This is a super lauded and famous game, as far as retro RPGs go, and one I loved and played a ton of back when it came out on DS when I was younger. I’ve been meaning to go back to it for quite a while, and with me picking up the SFC as well as playing through Last Bible 3 (which came out a week before this and shares a major narrative twist with it), it felt like the perfect time to finally sit down and replay this classic. It took me about 23.5 hours to play through it the first time in Japanese on real hardware, and then I spent another 5.5 hours replaying through it to get the dev room ending as well.
Chrono Trigger is the story of the titular (?) Chrono, who is a young man living in a modern/fantasy-sorta village. On the day of the Millennium Fair celebrating 1000 years of existence for the kingdom he lives in, he meets a strange young girl named Marle, and they have fun traveling the fair together. However, upon going to Chrono’s friend Lucca’s demonstration of her new teleportation machine, Marle ends up being sucked into a portal back into the middle ages, and Chrono jumps in to save her. Though he doesn’t know it yet, this is only the first step on a world-saving journey that will encompass the distant past to the far future. Chrono Trigger’s story is kind of a weird one. It almost feels like SquareSoft was trying to make their own Dragon Quest game, right down to the Akira Toriyama character designs. You have a cast of colorful characters full of personality going through a grand adventure to save the world, but the depth of those characters and that adventure are quite shallow. Despite coming out during a point when RPGs, particularly SquareSoft ones, were really starting to mature in the kinds of stories they were willing to explore and tell, Chrono Trigger isn’t trying to do anything like that. It’s ultimately a very shallow narrative that really made me wanting. If anything, it has some really uncomfortable (albeit likely unintentional) themes around aggrandizing the sanctity of elites’ right to rule, which, thinking about it, is honestly also pretty on the nose for a Dragon Quest game. I think the narrative of Chrono Trigger, not unlike a game like Earthbound (though I think that game does have some Thing it’s trying to say) or Super Mario RPG, is something that you’re either going to vibe with and get sucked right into, or it’s something that you’ll find a bit too dry to find much fun from, and I was more towards the latter than the former for most of my time with the game. Mechanically, Chrono Trigger is also pretty straightforward and not too bold in any way. It’s a turn-based RPG from Square with active-time battles, making it very standard for the time, and the only thing that really sets it apart is the team-attacks that party members can do for extra damage at the cost of consuming two or three party members’ turns as opposed to just one. You explore dungeons, you fight monsters for loot and experience points, there are bosses with weaknesses and strengths. It’s a competently put together RPG for the time, absolutely, but even something back then that wouldn’t have inspired much shock or awe with its systems. I generally like games like this, for the record, but with just how easy Chrono Trigger is as well, it’s one more thing that made the game drag a fair bit on top of the story that didn’t really grab me either. The one major thing Chrono Trigger has going for it is the presentation. A ton of excellent music you’d expect from the masters as SquareSoft coupled with some absolutely stunning graphics for the Super Famicom. It’s not quite a PlayStation game, but compared to almost anything else on the system, the detail in the sprites and animations (not to mention just how infrequently so many sprites are reused compared to so many contemporaries) are absolutely nuts to think are actually happening on your SFC. They do an incredible job of making Akira Toriyama’s art come to life (even putting to shame just about any 2D Dragon Quest title), and just how good the presentation is (coupled with a pretty damn good English translation) is no doubt a big reason why this game has had so much cultural staying power over the decades since it was released. Verdict: Recommended. Even though I think it’s far from my favorite RPG on the SNES, Chrono Trigger is still a very well put together experience. Though it doesn’t appeal to me as strongly as something like a similarly simple game like Mario RPG does, I also don’t have much trouble seeing why I enjoyed it so much when I was younger or why so many people young and old still love it to death now. The striking graphics and relatively easy gameplay also make this a much better beginner’s RPG compared to something like FF: Mystic Quest as well, so whether you’re a veteran retro gamer who somehow hasn’t tried CT yet, or you’re just getting in to retro RPGs, this is one you’ll almost certainly enjoy if you give it a shot.
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I bought a Super Famicom a few weeks back, largely to facilitate playing GameBoy games via the Super GameBoy (which has been very fun, yes x3), but also to try out and own some SFC RPGs that are super cheap and plentiful around here. Mystic Quest is a game a friend of mine really loves, and given that I was able to find it for just 500 yen around here, it seemed like the perfect thing to finally try out. It took me around 13 or so hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
MQ was made with consultation from SquareSoft’s American branch to make a beginner RPG for both kids and newbies to the genre in the hopes that it would help bring more Americans into the RPG genre. This gives it the weird place of, even though it was written in Japanese and then translated to English, it didn’t actually come out in Japan for another year or so after the American release. The story is, nonetheless, about as light as you’d expect an RPG made explicitly for beginners to be. There are no grand themes or messages to be found here. It’s just a straightforward adventure to save the world as the hero the god fella seems to have found as a legit-seeming world saver. You meet a cast of colorful characters through your adventure, but it’s mostly just silly fun and light fluff as you go from Plot Event to Plot Event. That’s not a bad thing, especially for a game this easy and short, but it’s certainly something difficult to ignore. It’s a perfectly fine story, but it’s nothing that’ll be terribly exciting to more discerning players either now or back when it came out. The gameplay is a very straightforward turn-based RPG, but it does have some action-based elements as well. There are no random encounters, with monsters instead chilling out on the map, waiting for you to attack them (usually blocking your path as to require you to fight them in some way). The action elements are some light Zelda-style world exploration via the weapons you have. You can cut bushes with axes, bomb walls, push buttons with your sword, and even jump over pits with your jump button (which can also be used to vault over annoying NPCs, thankfully). It’s not much of an action game so much as it still is very much an RPG with action elements, but it gave me some strong Lufia II vibes that I enjoyed nonetheless. You only have a party of two, which is your main character plus whatever party member the story had placed with you for that duration of the story. You have money, but shortly after the start of the game, it doesn’t really have much of a problem, as most things until the very late game are trivially cheap with how much money you get from things. There isn’t really equipment, per se, either, at least not like a normal game. You don’t even have an equipping mechanic, as when you acquire new armor or versions of weapons, they’ll equip automatically, as they’re always just outright better than what you had before. Your party members, on the other hand, are completely static. Not only can they not get new equipment, but they can’t level up either, so they’re always exactly as good as they’ll ever be (unless the plot increases their strength for you). This isn’t so bad aside from the glitch that will make your party member’s stats not actually change when you get a new one, which can be pretty bad depending on when it happens, but they’re generally good enough with the new spells they get anyhow that it’s not a severe problem. Enemy encounters are also balanced quite viciously at times, with many fights often being a fight you literally couldn’t win with how fast many enemies with instant-death spells are. However, given that you can just retry the battle from its start when you die, dying has very little consequence despite how mean it sometimes is. The generous retry mechanics turn a battle system whose meanness would make SMT blush to one that’s more so style rather than substance in terms of how difficult they actually are. The mechanics are quite simple overall, sure, but it’s still not much trouble given how short the game is. They will likely outstay their welcome for some, but with only a little over a 10-hour playtime, they won’t be too bad for most, I think. The presentation is a mixed bag. The previous game this team did was SaGa 3 (aka Final Fantasy Legends 3), and a lot of the UI, battle system, and graphics are reused from that. As a result, it has an even more “8-bit RPG on a 16-bit console) than even a game like FFIV (released the previous year) does. The music, however, is absolutely excellent, with tons of tracks being super stand-out in just how hard they rock. The music quality alone has made me want to try more games by this team/composer in the future, so SaGa 3 and Treasure of the Rudras will absolutely be games I’m playing in the future. I’ll let that speak for the quality of the music itself, I suppose x3 Verdict: Recommended. This is a weird one to recommend, as while it’s a very competently put together and quite short game, it’s also one that I think anyone but retro enthusiasts will have a difficult time justifying giving their energy to these days. It you’re looking for more meaningful narratives or mechanical depth, then you’re better off looking elsewhere. It’s also difficult and not self-explanatory enough (while also being bog-simple enough) that I wouldn’t call it a terribly good beginner’s RPG either (compared to other SNES games like Earthbound or Super Mario RPG, to name a few), so that’s another difficult point in recommending it. But if you’re into retro RPGs and looking for something a bit different to spend a weekend or two playing, I think this will likely fit the bill quite well~. This is a game that I bought back when it came out but then never actually finished once I got it ^^;. I just wasn’t in the mood at the time (I had even tried to cancel my pre-order but it was too late to do so XP). I’d just been sitting on it, meaning to get to it for ages, but then with my partner visiting me over spring break, it was the perfect time to break out the game’s co-op mode and try to get through it~. Thanks to her help, we were able to 100% the game in a bit over 25 hours~. We played through almost the entire game in co-op, and we played the English version.
Kirby and the Forgotten Land is the story of the titular Kirby, as usual, but this time he’s been sucked into another world along with a bunch of the rest of Dream Land! The evil beast tribe has been snatching up Waddle Dees for an unknown purpose, and it’s up to Kirby, Bandana Waddle Dee, and their new flying friend Elfilin to save them! If you’ve played any main-line Kirby game in the past decade, the premise and its twists will likely not surprise you at all, but they do a good job at making them feel fresh either way, especially with the big console-powered coat of paint they have on display~. It’s a perfectly serviceable story full of colorful and fun new characters that facilitates the gameplay very well, so it’s hard to complain, really~. The gameplay of Kirby is something like Kirby: Star Allies (minus the partner creation and power-combination) mixed with Mario 3D World. You go through stage after stage, fighting enemies and finding collectibles, getting copy abilities and solving puzzles for goodies, but in 3D spaces rather than Kirby’s traditional 2.5D fare. It’s not quite the “Kirby but Mario Odyssey” I’d first hoped it’d be when the first trailers came out, but regardless it’s still the reimagining Kirby has *desperately* needed for years, and I had a blast. The levels are very fun, the bosses are well-designed and challenging (never before have I thought so much about I-frames on dodges in a Kirby game XD), and, like most modern Kirby games, while beating it normally may be not very hard, they’re gonna REALLY make you work to 100% it with how hard those last few challenges are. The presentation is really good as well! It’s a beautiful game, as one would expect from Nintendo on the Switch these days, and the music is excellent as well. The only real visual complaint, if I could even call it that, is that it’s not hard to see where corners are being cut to save on processing power in more crowded and spacious areas. Enemies and obstacles that are a bit far away but still very clearly visible will slide-show stutter around, only gaining more animation frames as you get close enough to actually interact with them. It’s very far from a deal-breaker, and I still think the game looks and sounds great (especially that new King Dedede theme, hot damn), but it’s something I can’t help but mention here. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is an absolutely excellent Kirby game! It’s the fresh face and reimagining of mechanics that Kirby has needed so badly for so long, and they absolutely nail it. There’s room for improvement and innovation, sure, but if the template they’re working from is already *this* polished, then I’m very excited for what HAL Labs thinks up for Kirby’s next big adventure. If you’re a Kirby fan, I think it just about goes without saying that this is definitely not one to miss out on~. Continuing my Mario Party excursions and excitement, I went back in time from 6 to a game I played a TON as a kid, Mario Party 4. This was a game I tried to 100% as a kid, doing the story mode with all eight characters, but got petered out with a few playthroughs left. To call this one “beaten” this time, I went through the story mode twice: once on normal, and then a second time on hard. I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
The whole conceit of MP4 is that it’s a big birthday party! Who’s birthday is it? Everyone’s kinda XD. Playing through the story mode, it’s that particular player you picked’s birthday, going through boards made by the five party planners (Toad, Shy Guy, Koopa, Goomba, and Boo) to get their special presents customized for the character you picked. It’s a light dressing for a story, and the overall setting is certainly less striking than the “sucked into a storybook” pretense for MP3 was, but it’s more than enough for what we need to get our Mario Party on, and seeing what presents each character gets is always super fun and cute~. As for the gameplay, the real meat and potatoes of the experience, that’s where things are a bit fuzzier. Mario Party was an annual series on the GameCube, with MP4 in 2002, and another game coming out every year until MP7 in 2005, and even though they had a year break between MP3 in 2000 and this, you can tell there were still a LOT of corners cut to get this out in time. First of all is the mini-game selection. It’s overall a pretty good spread of quite good mini-games (with much better 1v3 games than 6 would have, imo), but it’s also a very small spread of mini-games compared to how they usually were, and you’ll find yourself playing the same ones quite a lot. On top of that, letting the quite short dev time shine through a bit more, they’re often quite simple games as well, with not one but two of the 4-player mini-games being just mashing the A button as fast as you can. Item mini-games are also completely gone, and after duel mini-games were so hyped up and trotted out in MP3, MP4 doesn’t have them at all in any way, shape, or form. They don’t even have the board-specific ones like MP2 did. The overall mini-game quality is still pretty good, but it’s pretty lackluster in some pretty important ways compared to a lot of other games in the series. The biggest fumble as far as I’m concerned is with the board game design though. I make it no secret that I’m absolutely not a fan of Mario Party 3, in large part due to how poorly constructed so many of its boards are. MP4 isn’t quite *that* bad, but it’s still far less than stellar, with six maps in total having 2 I’d say are awful (super random and easy to get screwed over very quickly, very hard just because of a few bad die rolls), 3 I’d say are just okay, and only one I’d say is really even decent. The boards are by and large better than MP3’s were, but there’s still a *lot* of the randomness-focused design philosophy DNA left over that’s still to be ripped out, and it makes the experience suffer pretty hard. On top of that are the revamped items, with many new additions that MP3 got taken out and a good few new things put in. The most notable change is that normal and golden mushrooms (which gave you two and three die to roll that turn respectively) have been taken out, and mini- and mega-mushrooms have been added in their places. Mini-mushrooms make you small and give you only one die (or two for the better version) that goes from 1~5 to roll (vs. the usual 1~10 die), and mega-mushrooms making you large and giving you two (or three with the better one) 1~10 dice to roll. These are a neat idea, as sometimes you want to go only a short distance so an item is nice for that, and when you’re big with a mega mushroom, while you may steal 10 coins from every rival you pass, you also can’t activate any events (and that includes buying stars!). The bad board design really hampers what could’ve been some interesting design changes. In practice, with item mini-games gone and in their place spaces that give you randomly either a mini- or mega-mushroom, mini-mushrooms are useless trash that clog up your inventory, and mega-mushrooms are still far too good a tool to steal coins from your enemies and get you where you need to go, even with the added risk of not being able to get a star if you over-roll. It’s understandable that the gameplay is still very largely influenced by MP3, given that this is so clearly the preliminary outing for MP on the GameCube, but in retrospect, it holds up pretty poorly in design and mini-game selection to most games before and after it. The presentation is solidly okay. The music is nice and the 3D models look pleasing as well, but it’s all very stock and boiler-plate feeling compared to just how striking MP3’s art design was. The taking out of the old pre-rendered 2D boards for big 3D environments look awful, with 3D tracks lying floating above poorly textured and ugly 3D planes to give each board their theme, it’s hard for MP4 not to feel like a steep cosmetic downgrade. It’s not bad in a vacuum, but in comparison to what came before (not to mention after), it’s difficult to be too kind beyond, once again, allowing for the context that this was the first one on its console. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. There is certainly worse Mario Party to play, but not by much. It’s missing a lot of features from my personal least favorite, MP3, but it’s also an exercise in higher lows and lower highs. It’s a perfectly adequate Mario Party experience, but whether on the N64, GameCube, or almost any console after that, really, you don’t need to look far for a Mario Party experience that will be much better than this. |
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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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