A best friend of mine started this game at the end of last week to practice his Japanese. He was having a lot of fun sending me screenshots, as he had never played it before. This is a game I've played portions of a lot and already beaten growing up, so the nostalgia kicked into high gear and I decided to play it alongside him on my Super Famicom Mini. One weekend later, he was still only a couple hours in, and I had binged the whole thing and finished it over the course of a little over 3 days XD . I did almost everything in the game, and even then mostly by memory, and it took me around 30 hours. This was my first time ever even seeing, let alone completing, the game in Japanese, but I still started to appreciate the design and especially the story in a way I never had before.
The gameplay is like a weird mix of FF IV's set jobs for each story character and FF V's job changing system. Every character (out of the 14 properly playable) has their own set job and unique abilities (save for Gogo who, shoutout to my friend MrPopo who told me can actually use EVERYONE's abilities if you press A on their stats screen), but can also be assigned Materia at a certain part in the story to begin learning spells and magic that any of them can use. Everyone can use the same magics, effectively, but their own powers still make them uniquely useful in their own ways, which is a level of party customization that I am exactly comfortable with (it's not generally something I enjoy). Something I also only noticed this time is how the game slowly tries to train you for using a more diverse party. The game really opens up in its second half, and you can use a party of basically whomever you want, but the game uses the more linear first half to get you used to different party constructions. The game has a large ensemble cast rather than any one main character, and different scenarios have you taking control of different sets of members at different times. It forces you to get used to something like a party without a magic caster, or without someone who can can't not fight without MP. Given that the final area of the game forces you to use 3 separate parties (ideally of 4 members each), this is a really clever way to help prepare the player for that that I really only noticed this time through. Something I also only really started to appreciate this time through is the game's narrative and the larger themes that are present throughout the game (This section will contain massive SPOILERS for a 20+ year old game: You have been warned :b ). This being a Square RPG, it's usually trying to make some more serious commentary about something with its narrative, and this game is no exception. For the characters who have a decent presence in the story (Everyone but Gogo, Umaro, Mog, Stragos, and Relm), the main things linking their backstories isn't just being drawn together to save the world, it's a deep feeling of regret and apprehension about the future. Everyone is chasing something impossible to catch. Terra (Tina in this version) is trying to find an objective answer to what it means to be a human and a reason to live. Locke is trying to erase the mistake he made in his youth that caused the death of his lady love. Cyan (Ceyenne in this version) is trying to fill the hole in his heart left by the death of his wife and child by seeking revenge against their murderer. Edgar and Sabin are chasing other preoccupations to try and distract them from their responsibility of working together to fill their father's large shoes in running the kingdom of Figaro. Shadow is constantly running from a past he's ashamed to have committed and trying to erase past cruelties with new ones. The list goes on. Their time in the world before the cataclysm shows these efforts to be self-destructive and very difficult, perhaps even bordering on not worth it. And then the apocalypse happens. Their time in the World of Ruin changes them and forces them to confront these problems in uncomfortable but meaningful ways. Terra learns through helping raise a village of children that love is a feeling you have to find for yourself, and is something that in itself can give life meaning. Locke learns that, while you can't erase the mistakes of the past, you can always learn from them and use that knowledge to serve your future actions. Cyan learns that his wife and child are never truly gone as long as they're in his memory, and continuing to live meaningfully is one of the best ways to honor that memory. Sabin and Edgar learn that their most important responsibilities are to each other and to their people and that ruling them together, as their father's last request dictated, is really the best way forward. And while I certainly take issue with the (unfortunately typically East Asian, especially of the era) glorification of suicide in Shadow's ultimate decision to allow himself to be killed to finally stop running from his demons, in that context, it does ultimately still fit with the themes of the story. The ultimate foil to this is the main villain Kefka. Kefka is definitely someone I have taken issue with in the past as a villain who definitely isn't a character but more of a force of nature. However, he does actually have narrative purpose in being a human who just becomes the god of destruction (instead of a god of destruction pre-existing who so often fills the role of a FF game's final boss). Kefka is someone who never regrets his actions and feels no remorse. His response to things getting bad is to plunge them deeper and deeper into chaos and destruction, and the destruction of the whole world is up for grabs. In his final Bond Villain-esque Bad Guy Speech (TM) to the main party before the final confrontation, he preaches to them the futility of existence. Why is life worth living when death comes for everyone? Why build anything when the entropic winds of time grind all to dust? Kefka is emblematic of a depressive and self-destructive defeatism that is the alternative answer to the internal conflicts the party members face. He truly believe's he's doing the world a favor by seeking to outright destroy it instead of allowing it to suffer by existing. This playthrough really allowed me to see a method to his proverbial madness and appreciate his narrative utility in ways I'd never considered before. That's not to say the story is without its problems though. If you're not looking for deeper themes, it's fairly easy to pass over the story (as I had several times before this one) as a more disjointed series of vignettes that lead up to a greater whole rather than everyone working towards some greater unified narrative as a party, and there is regardless certainly some truth to that. The story is definitely more about each character's individual growth as a person, rather than a more unified party dynamic or personal relation to the main villain. The game also has some fairly jarring tonal shifts at times, and at more than one occasion will cut a very serious scene short with a comedic interlude to try and lighten the mood, often just ruining the whole thing. The very odd choice to give Ceyenne a samurai's accent (especially when his kingdom and even his own family don't talk like that) brings a weirdly dissonant and comedic tone to his otherwise tragic backstory (and this decision is probably my main beef with the original Japanese version's text as compared to the English one that gives Cyan a Shakespearean accent, which isn't quite so jarring, at least for me. Perhaps a Japanese audience has less of a comedic view of Ceyenne's accent than I found it). Verdict: Highly Recommended. I already had this game as one of my all-time favorite JRPGs, and this playthrough just solidified that opinion for me. It is up there with Chrono Trigger as one of Square's best JRPGs on the system and a timeless classic in the genre. Still as great as it ever was, and something that will always have a fond place in my heart.
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Also known as "For Frog the Bell Tolls," AJ convinced me to check out this 1992 Japan-Exclusive Nintendo release whose engine would go on to be used for Link's Awakening. He said it was a neat adventure game with lots of very silly humor, and he was right! I got it for 400 yen on the Japanese 3DS eShop and played through it over a weekend, and it took me about 7 hours all together. While it was a game whose engine would go to be used for a Zelda game, the game itself is a pretty far cry from a typical Zelda game, and is much more a straight-up adventure game with a surface-coating of action and a big heaping pile of platforming on top of that.
The story sees you as the Prince of Sablé, who chases after his rival Prince Richard of the Custard Kingdom to save Princess Tiramisu from the dreaded Keronian Army attacking her kingdom of Mille-Feuille. Over the course of the game, you gain the ability to turn into a snake as well as a frog to get past all means of obstacles, and meet all sorts of colorful characters in all manner of locations. My personal favorites being the extremely stereotyped and eccentric "Japanese Businessman" Junbei (whose speaking style indicates he's a foreigner despite being in a Japanese game made for a Japanese audience) and Professor Arewo Stein, the eccentric wasabi-loving president of the Nantendo Company which you go visit (who actually would make cameo appearances in games all the way up to Wario Land 4!). The game has all sorts of silly fourth-wall breaking jokes and Junbei especially just sorta had my mouth agape whenever he was on screen because he's SUCH an odd character. I can't speak to the English fan translation's style of humor, but I really enjoyed the silly writing in the Japanese original ^w^ The overall design of the game is mostly adventure with platforming elements as well. It's VERY linear, with small sub-areas to explore for treasure, but a LOT of the game is talking, puzzle solving, and platforming. And I mean a LOT of talking, probably more than any other Nintendo game of the 8- or 16-bit eras I can think of that isn't Mario RPG. The signposting is excellent, and there was never a single time I was lost. The game always makes very explicit points of telling you where to go (even occasionally saving you the walk and teleporting you there via a cutscene), and there are literally signposts in the case of giant billboards in each town that have a "news bulletin" of what you just did and what you should be expected to do next. It's a fairly easy, relaxing game to spend a day or a weekend with. The game has no actual combat, per se. Combat is decided by touching an enemy, and that initiates a kind of scuffle where you each take turns hitting each other until one of you dies. There is (almost) never any active element to the combat aside from just dodging enemies, and combat serves more as a puzzle barrier than anything else. Almost every boss battle relies on you having explored the map/dungeon to the point where you've found all the new weapons, stat boosts (attack, speed, max health) to the point where you can kill that boss with one heart remaining. If you can't kill a boss, you haven't explored enough, or there's an item you should be using. The game also has a lot of side-scrolling sections which do a good job of breaking up the pace of walking around in a bird's eye view of the overworld. The overworld map and the side-scrolling sections should be immediately familiar to anyone who has spent time with any of the GB/GBC Zelda games, but the side-scrolling sections here are far longer, more numerous, and a lot harder. They're probably the hardest part of the game by a significant margin, as there are multiple points in the game where if you don't make a jump quite right, you'll fall in lava and be sent back to the hospital where you'll need to walk back to the dungeon and do the whooole thing over again. This is where playing it on the 3DS Virtual Console with save states was a real patience-saving godsend for me. It's honestly a bit of a shame they are so hard (and often at odd difficulty spikes in the game as well, as one will often be easier than the last and vice versa), because they make what's otherwise a fairly chilled out, silly adventure game have a much higher skill ceiling to enjoy than the lighthearted adventure portions would imply. You solve many puzzles by talking to people to learn information or by changing form into a frog or snake. The frog can jump high, talk to frogs, and not die in water; the snake can talk to snakes, turn some enemies into blocks, and get small to fit in snake-sized holes; and human Prince (whom you name at the start) has average jumping, can talk to humans, and is by far the best at fighting. It sounds like a gimmick, but it really never felt like that. Never once did I find myself thinking "oh well now it's time for the obligatory frog bit of this dungeon," as I so often do with these types of games. Some later dungeons even make the dungeons a little more open and you are encouraged to try out two of the forms to progress, as each may be able to reach different treasure or a different way forward. The main fault I'd say the game has, and it's a tiiiiny one, is how these transformations are handled though. You just enter water to turn into a frog, which is fine, but to turn back into a human, or to turn into a snake, you need to eat a consumable item, and if you didn't bring enough of those to the dungeon, you gotta warp out (which the game gives you an item to do) and go buy some at the town and do the whole dungeon over again. the game is pretty good about giving you a few of these consumables in dungeons, but it's never enough to do the dungeon. You'll need to have brought some. Money is really quick and easy to earn and you can carry a TON of those items at once, so it's a mistake you'll only make once, but it's still annoying to be worrying about whether you should just exit now or hope you have enough to finish the dungeon. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is definitely one of my all-time favorite Japan-exclusive games that I've played. I imagine it was for translation reasons (very text-heavy game with some awkward elements to translate adequately) that it was never brought over to the States, but it's a really fantastic game that's well worth playing with the fan translation patch. There really aren't any other adventure/side-scrolling games quite like this I can think of off the top of my head, but this has to be one of the best out there by a fair margin. Rounded off my revisit marathon of the old isometric Zelda games with a linked playthrough of the two Oracle games on the Gameboy Color. As with Link's Awakening, I just bought them on the Japanese 3DS eShop, as it was the cheapest and easiest way to play them for me (and I'd never gotten a chance to play through them in Japanese before, so this was a very neat way to do that~). Ages took me just under 13 hours to get through, and Seasons took me just a hair over 10 hours. I didn't do alll the content in both (and made no dedicated effort to collect rings in either), but I did do most of the heart pieces and the trading sequence in each. They're games which were released as a pair, and even have content that can only be accessed by using a code at the end of one at the start of the other. All of my praises and comments of one are really directly linked to the other in many ways, and the way they were developed side-by-side as well just made it make more sense to me to do a combo-review for them both instead of just constantly referring back and forth to each of them in two separate reviews to make all the same points twice XD.
The first thing I'll comment on is the original translation of the games. Other than some super minor things like General Onox being named General Gorgon in this version, the translation is pretty hard to find differences in compared to the English version. Nowhere is there something nearly as blatantly obvious on a visual level as Link's Awakening's changing of you returning the mermaid's bikini top to her (instead of her necklace as it is in the English version). However, the one REALLY painfully obvious bit that was changed for the English version is the ring-shop owner. The Oracle games have a ring-system that is basically just passives that Link can equip several at a time at the ring shop after having them identified. In the English version, the ring shop owner is just a bit of an eccentric guy who loves rings and sharing them with people. In the Japanese original, however, the ring shop owner is a pretty damn offensive gay stereotype who hits on Link in like every conversation they have together (he even gives Link the ability to use rings because he says Link is "his type"). '~' to emphasis syllables being said lyrically and hearts punctuate his speech constantly, and I'm just glad he's a pretty easily ignored part of the game, because it's honestly a pretty terrible portrayal that has NOT aged well (although is hardly a rare sight in Japanese media from back then, unfortunately). Like, at least he isn't a villainous character, but using "they're queer" as shorthand for eccentricity is just such appallingly lazy writing on top of the offensive trope that I really can not let it go unmentioned here in good conscience. And while I can let Nintendo themselves slide on this one, as Flagship wrote the scenario for this instead of them, main villains like Yuga and Girahim in more recent Nintendo-written and developed Nintendo games show that they still aren't afraid to use queer-coding to denote eccentricity :/ Pivoting to their design, both games take a lot of graphical assets, like a LOT, from Link's Awakening, and both play pretty similarly to that game. There has clearly been some engine work done on more subtle mechanical levels (for example, picking up pots with the power bracelet takes ever so slightly longer), as well as more directly and immediately noticeable ones (like how you need to be moving forward to throw a bomb/pot in front of you, and not just drop it on top of yourself). Other than that, though, the way the game plays should be immediately recognizable to any who has spent any length of time with Link's Awakening, even down to how you can still reassign any item you have to either the A or B button. The main difference that is most immediately obvious is how much this game has improved its signposting compared to Link's Awakening. You just about always have a character whom you can go back to talk to for a hint about where to go next, and they always hit you up with a quick, mandatory cutscene not only after dungeons but after key plot developments to give you a kick in the right direction. Knowing where to go next and how to do it is FAR less of a problem in the Oracle games than in Link's Awakening, and it makes getting from point A to point B in each game a much easier affair. These games have an interesting history that really shows in their final presentation. Originally intended to be SIX games developed by Capcom for Nintendo, two of which being remakes of the first two NES Zelda games, that was soon scaled back to three new games that would be interconnected, and then again scaled back to two. This can be seen not just in how Seasons has many dungeon bosses that are straight-out of Zelda 1 (likely assets finished before the decision was made to scrap that remake idea) to how similar the sub-items in each game are to one another. However, the other thing I really noticed that made sense with this history is just how much Oracle of Seasons feels like the "first great idea" for the interlinked-game premise, and Oracle of Ages feels like the "good enough supplementary idea". Oracle of Seasons is superior in so many ways to Oracle of Ages, mostly on account of each game's respective gimmick, that is makes Oracle of Ages look a lot worse quality-wise when the direct comparison is forced due to their connected nature. Seasons' gimmick is a rod that lets you change seasons by standing atop stumps you can find throughout the game. A mechanic that Minish Cap would later almost directly copy with how you can only shrink on top of certain stump (or stump-like objects). You change the seasons depending on what season-spirits you have, and it's an animation that takes roughly a second and a half. The world around you will change depending on the season (snow piling up to make new platforms in winter, leaves covering up pits in fall, water drying up in summer, flowers blooming in spring) and can allow you to access new areas because of it. It works really well, and even though you need to find the stumps to progress are easy to find as the world map is telegraphed very naturally to lead you where to go next. The game has lots of effectively micro-areas that are explored on their own and lead to the next dungeon, and it gives the game a very nice flow that is reminiscent of how quick the pacing was in something like LTTP. Ages' gimmick is a harp that allows you to change time periods between the present and a hundred years in the past. This is done first through special spots on the map where you can activate a time portal, but you eventually get the ability to do it anywhere in either time period. However, you need to do this a LOT, and the animation for changing time period genuinely takes like 10 seconds, and it's not loading times or anything. It's just a luxury animation that takes that long to do. This means, especially later in the game when you're trying to find out just where to go next, the trial and error to find those places takes FAR longer than in Seasons' where the season changing is so quick. The methods of design necessitated by these gimmicks is where the steep shift in quality between them originates from. Originally, there were going to be the three games, one for each part of the Triforce: power, wisdom, and courage. Courage (and the intriguing concept of it being based around a color gimmick, not unlike Link's Awakening DX's color dungeon) was scrapped and Power became Oracle of Seasons and wisdom became Oracle of Ages. This means that, as a deliberate focus of the design, Seasons has a bigger focus on combat, and Ages has a bigger focus on puzzle solving. But this extends further than just a marketing platitude. Ages' focus on not just puzzle solving but time travel means that it has a MUCH larger focus on narrative than either of the other GBC Zelda games, as the causality-focused time travel game mechanic is inseparably linked to the game's narrative. The evil Priestess Veran is constantly coming back up in the story with a new scheme to alter time in her favor usually involving the titular Oracle of Ages, Nayru. By comparison General Onox (aka General Gorgon in the Japanese version) and the Oracle of Seasons he kidnaps, Dinn, are so rarely even mentioned, let alone present, in Seasons' narrative it can be easy to forget they're even there. But this has the knock-on effect that Ages is a much more frustrating and rigid game to get through, as many more NPC-related sidequests are required to get from dungeon to dungeon as Link alters their fates through the time stream. This ends up slowing the game WAY down with a lot more dialogue (and time travel cutscenes), especially if you can't quite work out how to progress the plot. The signposting in these games is better than Link's Awakening, but it's still noticeably rougher in Ages than Seasons. Where the end of a mini-area in Seasons is often capped off with entering the dungeon for it, Ages is plagued with frequent back-tracking through an area and its NPCs to try and find the dialogue cue you missed that lets you get the next thing that will let you get into that dungeon in the first place. Seasons still has puzzles, and good ones too. I found them more often far more intuitive than Ages, where I frequently had to look up online how to progress because I just wasn't getting what the game wanted from me. Ages' focus on puzzles for the sake of them really slows the whole game down, and can make its dungeons feel labyrinthine and kinda devoid of enemies because the puzzles are the focus. This makes Ages' dungeons feel like far more of a slog where progression is incremental and mechanical, like work, where Link's Awakening and Seasons' more mediated approaches to dungeon design give them far better pacing and makes the dungeons more fun. Sure, Seasons has a lot of bosses recycled from Zelda 1, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it as far as I'm concerned. Seasons' re-use in a GBC-style of Zelda 1 bosses (and one Link's Awakening boss as a mini-boss) gives it ultimately better boss fights than Ages, which often feel more like an afterthought (or a frustrating, poorly explained puzzle in and of themselves that require looking up how to even harm). Ages feels like its focus on puzzles comes at the expense of the rest of its design, where Seasons feels like a more balanced experience overall, and only has a more pronounced combat focus in comparison to Ages. As far as overall balance is concerned, Seasons feels like a much more natural successor to the pacing set forth in Link's Awakening than it does as a companion game to Oracle of Ages. Ages' narrative is really nothing special either. It's the most dialogue-heavy of the handheld games for sure, but both Oracle games came out after both N64 titles (and each actually feature NPCs from each N64 game to boot). Ages narrative, the most noticeable and pronounced part of its design, does not do nearly enough legwork to make up for the overall quality lost in its mechanical and design aspects, and even then doesn't hold much of a candle to either N64 game's narrative. Verdict: Oracle of Seasons: Highly Recommended. Oracle of Ages: Hesitantly Recommended. Both Oracle games were designed around gimmicks, but where Seasons exceeds its status as a gimmick game and just feels like another good Zelda game, Ages feels bogged down by its gimmick every step of the way and never escapes feeling like a gimmick title. Oracle of Seasons feels like a natural progression of the good combat and dungeon design of Link's Awakening with better signposting to boot. Oracle of Ages, on the other hand, feels like a monument to compromise in many ways, and it consistently feels like a game that was put together to fit the theme rather than the other way around, and the quality suffered because of it. Oracle of Ages certainly isn't a bad game, but if you can only play one Oracle game, make it Seasons. Seasons has always been my favorite isometric 2D Zelda game, and this replay re-confirmed that for me. However, all my replay of Oracle of Ages did was cement it firmly at the bottom of the list of my favorite 2D isometric Zelda games. |
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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
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