This was a game I more or less picked up not just because it's a Konami game (so likely to be at least pretty good), but also because the main character Fuuma is one of the characters in Wai Wai World. I didn't really know much anything about the game other than that it seemed to be in hell, so I dove right in and beat it in one sitting~. I used online guides mostly for the dungeon maps and for what items did, and it took me just about five hours to beat the game on real hardware.
In a very Famicom way, the game has a pretty weird story that honestly isn't THAT important. Some 12000 or so years in the future (apparently), in the first year of the demon lord, the demon lord Ryuukotsuki emerged from Hell to try and take over the surface world ruled over by the three Getsu brothers. The brothers ended up defeated, and only the youngest of the three, Fuuma, survived. On a quest to save the world and avenge his fallen brothers, Fuuma starts out to retrieve their three legendary pulse blades and stop Ryuukotsuki once and for all. It isn't ultimately any more complicated than collecting a Triforce with only three pieces, but it makes for a unique setting at the very least and does exactly as much as it needs to. The setting at hand is the hell-ified surface world that Ryuukotsuki has begun to make his own, and you traverse it between an overworld and pathway-like stages. You go around a top-down overworld, and whenever you bump into a stage, you need to get to the other end of it to get to the other side of it on the world map. The stages themselves several dozen in number, but they're all just linear paths in which you jump over pits, kill enemies, and find the occasional special item or powerup. The way this game approaches powerups and items is kinda weird, at least compared to a lot of other games I've played. The closest thing I could compare it to would be something like Ys, as your sword's power grows as you kill more and more enemies. It takes a fair while to get to max power, but you'll very likely get that strong before you beat the game. There are hidden items in stages as well as items sold in shops, with some being consumables and some being genuinely their own items. The new weapons you find are super useful and have unlimited uses, and the consumables range from having fairly confusing uses to some being damn near invaluable, and acquiring new items is always worth it when you can afford them. The extra weapons you can find are extra useful especially because Fuuma's normal sword's range is SUPER short, so those ranged weapons you find are gonna save your hide a LOT, at least until the sword significantly out-powers them. It's not a terribly unique or complicated system, but it's a pretty darn fun version of that sort of thing. There are three dungeons hiding three bosses that guard the three pulse swords that you'll need to fight Ryuukotsuki, but while the bosses (which are all generally pretty good fun and well designed) are fought in the same 2D style the rest of the game is done in, the dungeons are first-person mazes (which are a huge pain in the butt, and I wasn't in the mood to make my own maps, so I looked up maps online XP). It's not really true to call them first-person, actually, as they're actually third-person behind Fuuma. At specific points, you'll encounter monsters that you need to fight by slashing your sword in front of you, and moving back and forth will cause you to slash at them in diagonals. These are pretty neat fights, even if they get a bit repetitive once you've seen the three or four encounters that particular dungeon has to offer. The 3D dungeons aren't awful (even without looking up maps), but they're definitely the weakest parts of the game (particularly because when you run out of lives at the bosses, you of course have to go through their entire slow plodding designs AGAIN to get to the boss again XP). The presentation is pretty darn solid and what you'd expect of Konami for the time. The graphics are colorful and well defined, the bosses and enemy designs are creepy and well detailed, and the music is pretty darn good too (with the overworld theme in particular being quite the memorable track). Verdict: Recommended. It's not exactly Castlevania in how well done any of it is, but it's a very solid runner up as a sort of little brother to Castlevania 2. This actually came out about a month and a half before Castlevania 2 (making it more like a slightly older cousin, I suppose :b), and really does feel like the game you would've bought at the time if you didn't have a disc system yet so you couldn't get Castlevania. While it definitely isn't as good as Castlevania 2, it's not that far behind it, and if this Zelda 2-style side-scrolling action/adventure genre is your jam, this is definitely not a title to miss out on. You'll probably need a guide to know what different items do, but once you get beyond that, this is far from the hardest action/adventure game on the Famicom to import either, and the price is pretty cheap to boot~.
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Maken X on the Dreamcast was my most disliked game that I beat last year. In a year where I played Drakengard 2, Sonic Heroes, Shenmue 3 (which honestly wasn't even a consideration for the "most disliked list", but still), and plenty of other less-than-great games, Maken X stood out among the rest as the worst of the bunch. A first-person swordfighting game on Dreamcast and also one of the only action games Atlus ever developed in-house, it's a super unique and weird thing I had to play. Unique: yes. Good: no. A combo of the weird combat and the poor implementation of first-person controls on a console with only one joystick made this one a really hard game to enjoy despite its super wild and weird premise (and art by the same guy who did it for Shin Megami Tensei 2). Surely, this remake several years later on the PS2, a remake that is on a console with 2 joysticks that also changes the camera perspective to third-person, would be the push in the right direction that this delightfully weird game needed to succeed, right? Well, it took me about 12.5 hours to reach the end of the Japanese version of the game (with one of the good endings) to try and find the answer to that question.
The story of Maken Shao is basically identical to the plot of Maken X. Although a couple more expository cutscenes have been added here and there, it doesn't change the story terribly meaningfully outside of giving you a slightly better picture of the world at large. You play as Maken, a strange sword infused with the power of "Image", a bold new area for science that's a mystical energy linking all human consciousness (I think). You also play as the young girl Kay, who is forced to mind meld with Maken to save her father after he's taken by an Illuminati-like group who are bent on using his research to allow their own Maken-equivalent to destroy the world. The setting and character design is definitely one of the strongest parts of the game, as you would expect from Atlus. You go all over the world to weird locations and see just what the Hakke (a term left totally unlocalized in the English release, that basically means something like "Eight Controllers") are doing to the world to corrupt it for their dark master. There's even a ham-fisted morality system where you answer moral questions from Kay after each level in the shared mind-space of Image you have with her, and that's what decides your endings (mostly). It's a strength effectively identical to how Maken X has it, as nearly all of the really wild stuff from the original game is here, save for all of the swastikas (can't have an Atlus game without those) which have for some reason been replaced with the Japanese character for "nothing" 無 (although all of the other very obviously Nazi symbology has been left in place, I guess to pass the minimum bar to release the game in Europe? O_o). The gameplay on the other had has been pretty radically changed. On the smaller side, you have some well appreciated quality of life features introduced. In Maken X, items you picked up were immediately used, but in Shao, you hold onto them (a maximum of one at a time) and can use them when you see fit. No more backtracking through levels to collect that one health powerup you left for safekeeping! The other very appreciated addition is the inclusion of mid-level save points. Not just checkpoints, which the original game didn't have at all (from what I remember), but bonafide save points that you can turn off the console and come to later. It makes retrying bosses way WAY easier, which is nice because Shao is a game in many ways even harder than the original Maken X. The last addition is that changing characters on the map screen is now far easier and can be done from one big menu instead of hunting around the world map for where you happened to leave the character you wanna play as next. That's right, changing characters! Just as in Maken X, Maken is a creature of Image, which means it can also interact with the Image inside anyone. What that means on a narrative and gameplay level is that Maken can consume the consciousness/Image of defeated bosses (and certain willing allies) and you can then play as that character! The original game had an EXP system where you got experience points from killing enemies that made an overall level go up, and you needed to be at or above the level of any bosses/characters you wanted to possess. However, that system has been done away in this game in lieu of something else, and that brings me to the start of the long, LONG list of ways this game is somehow significantly worse than the original Maken X. Instead of the old leveling system, now defeating any enemy gets you Image points that are basically money that you spend to swap bodies. This point system also works on a combo system where you get higher multipliers of points for killing consecutive enemies without taking damage. That's right, they took away the ability to freely swap characters (in a game where you still are very often required to use a particular character to play over half the stages in the game), and now you need to grind points for the privilege. But that's not all, as there's actually still a leveling system, but not it's locked to each character instead of just to Maken itself. Each character has a "Synchro" meter for how synchronized Maken is with their body, and as this increases you unlock new combos to do with your character. Once Synchro reaches 100%, you can swap to that character for no Image cost at all, and you even get a max HP boost, a max attack boost, and even a magic attack you can activate by holding the button. The original Maken X had no leveling, and you had all your combos immediately as well as your magic attack. However, being in third-person instead of first-person, a lot of the old moves wouldn't really make sense, so basically every character has had their moveset meaningfully tweaked to fit the new camera perspective. The Pope (in all his strange, winged puppet-wearing glory) is still the best character despite the moveset change (even after they got rid of his super overpowered magic spell of temporary invincibility, they just replaced it with an arguably even better healing move you can use after a short recharge), but that's ignoring a bigger problem. The one thing, perhaps more than anything else, that makes Maken Shao a worse game than its predecessor is ironically enough one of the things you'd think would be one of the best things about it: the new camera angle. While the movesets got a change for third-person, the levels didn't, and that means you're now going through levels designed for first-person with a third-person camera, and that really sucks in a melee-focused game. In fact, you're often so big that you're blocking the character you're locked onto and trying to hit, so the fact that you can see your feet (thanks to the new camera) is counteracted by the bigger problem of not being able to see in front of your own nose. Bosses and enemies with wind-up attacks now flash before they do their special moves, and that's a REALLY good change, since otherwise there are a fair few bosses whose attacks would be nearly impossible to dodge because you're so huge compared to them. This problem also manifests in other weird ways, such as the fact that you now have width. Before I forget to mention it, I should clarify that Maken Shao may be on the PS2, but it doesn't really use two joysticks. The game still functionally plays like the Dreamcast game, but turning the camera when standing still is easier now. You're no more or less mobile than you were before, for the most part (although a little less, I suppose, since they took out the over-head 180 jump move). In the original game, you were just a camera with arms, so every character was about the same "size". But now, every character has to physically exist in space, and that is an issue in more ways than simply taking up a large portion of the screen space in a game packed with lots of narrow corridors. In those corridors are quite frequently enemies with guns. Some characters used to have ranged magical attacks, but the one that used to be my favorite had his removed, so you're a lot more vulnerable to these gunners now (not to mention how you gotta grind for 30 to 60 minutes to even see what a given character's moveset is like by maxing out their level). Worse still, basically every character is too physically large to actually dodge these bullets anymore, leading to quite a few points where you have no choice but to trudge down a hallway simply hoping you don't die before you get to the guy to club him to death. This makes an already hard and frustrating game even more hard and frustrating in a way that is utterly unfair and above all unfun. The presentation is fairly strong visually, as mentioned before, but that's all holdovers from Maken X. The music is never anything super special, but the character and monster design is just SO wild (the mafia boss and president being two of my personal favorites) that they're at least looking up pictures of. Verdict: Not Recommended. Maken X had the honor of being the worst game I played last year, and it's looking like Maken Shao has a very high chance of being the worst game I've played this year too. It is a triumph of design that a game as flawed and mistaken as Maken X was actually made so significantly worse an experience to play through. It's not a positive triumph or one worth bragging about, but it's certainly an achievement in and of itself. If you MUST experience this, play Maken X, because it's just a better (though still not good) version of this. As it is, Maken Shao only reveals the more glaring flaws with Atlus's approach to action game design, and that they probably would've been better off making a full blown sequel instead of this weird Frankenstein's monster of a remake. A friend of mine played this game very briefly as a part of a variety stream he did sometime last year, and the weird way the protagonist attacks by sticking out his tongue was just so funny that it spawned a meme that our community still uses all the time. Once I got my Famicom, I made sure to ask him what that game was so I could try and actually play the game properly, and I was even more excited when this proved to be quite a common and cheap game. I streamed it myself for roughly two thirds of it, and it ultimately took me around 4.5 hours to beat the game on real hardware.
Magical Taruruuto Kun is a manga very much like Doraemon, where a somewhat loser protagonist one day gets a magical and mischievous friend to help him out when he gets in trouble. It's honestly so much like Doraemon that it's a bit shameless, and it's also a property I know genuinely nothing about other than what's in this game. The game's eight worlds encompass eight different small and largely unconnected stories about Taruruuto Kun helping out his human best friend. It's lighthearted but also makes for some interesting setups for the different worlds you go to. You play as the titular character as he tries to help out your best friend Honmaru with his various problems, and no matter what the problem is, it always seems to take the form of going through action platforming stages. The game itself has world maps very much like Mario 3. This game came out in 1991, so it's quite pretty, but the world map and cute pastel art style make it pretty clear where the game's inspirations lie. There are even special powerups you can activate before levels to give you an extra advantage during the levels, although the way you get this stuff is a bit different than Mario 3. Quite predictably, however unfortunately, this game is also nowhere near the quality level of Mario 3, even though it's surprisingly okay for a licensed JUMP game on Famicom. The stages are probably the most underwhelming part of the whole thing, as they are almost entirely constructed of the same copy-and-pasted pieces just realigned and with different enemies put in. It makes for an entertaining enough experience, and those enemy placements get REALLY mean later on in the game, but it definitely makes the game feel pretty uninteresting a lot of the time outside of when it's frustrating you because the stage design is too mean. Though boring, the game does have some interesting points, such as this game's stand-in for Mario's coins: takoyaki (fried octopus balls). Takoyaki occupy the triple job of money, platforms, and question-mark blocks. Taruruuto Kun attacks enemies by extending his tongue at them, and you collect takoyaki the same way by licking them up into your mouth. Sometimes these takoyaki hold powerups such as extra lives or many more takoyaki (like a Russian doll of takoyaki), but for the most part the game itself doesn't have powerups like Mario has his fireflowers and whatnot. Instead, you collect special items on the world map, and then you can use an expendable item mid-stage to call on that item to help you out temporarily, and that can be anything from a ranged weapon to a rain cloud to put out fires (an extremely useful tool that's all but essential to get through the last few worlds). There are also powerups you can activate on the world map screen, and these are both bought from the store you go to after you complete a stage (which you spend takoyaki at (just don't think about it)), and won from the scratchcards you get for buying stuff. The game is SUPER forgiving with extra lives, as they're pretty cheap and the game hurls them at you constantly. A lot of the powerups themselves have pretty questionable uses outside of the P-wing equivalent of bat wings you can get from scratchcards, and overall I really would've just loved a Mario mushroom-style thing to just give Taruruuto Kun a little more survivability beyond his "one hit and you're dead" nonsense XP. The game overall has a pretty significant problem with difficulty spikes randomly in a world, where one stage will take you a dozen tries to do yet you did every other stage in just one try, although at least the bosses are generally not too hard. The presentation of the game is fine and about what you'd expect on the Famicom in '91. It's got the aforementioned cute art style and color palette that's very reminiscent of Mario 3, but the aesthetics feel so arbitrary that it's hard to really grasp onto much and really make it memorable (outside of the game's most terrifying enemies like the falling stars, who are memorable for a different reason than their design XP). Taruruuto Kun himself is quite well animated though, and his tongue attacks are hilarious. The music is very forgettable and nothing special, but it's not actively annoying at least. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is an exceptionally "fine" game on the Famicom, but not exactly one worth playing. It's quite unpolished and clearly quite cheaply designed, if not cheaply made, with how repetitive the level design is. You probably won't dislike it if you play it, but this is another case where your time can probably just be better spent playing something else. Known in Japan as "Rock Man Rock Man", this is one of the last proper Mega Man games I hadn't yet played in my marathon (the 25th one in the marathon, to be exact X3), this was a game I had as a kid but never quite ended up beating. I was really determined to beat it on hard mode, but just couldn't best the last couple Wily stages, and if I wasn't going to beat it on hard mode, I wasn't going to beat it at all. Thankfully, I hold no such convictions now, and was able to beat the Japanese version of the game on normal mode in about three hours via my PSTV. However, after that, I ended up playing it for another six hours, as there is much more to do than simply beating the game as Mega Man.
Powered Up is, at the pitch level, a re-imagining of Mega Man 1 with a new chibi art style and a silly sense of humor. The original six robot masters are here and have their own stages, but those stages are very different to their original versions, however they do have stages that maintain a "feel" of those originals while still being quite different. The Wily stages are similarly "similar feeling, different content", but the fortress bosses have been changed in how they fight you quite a bit. They even add an intro stage as well as two whole new robot masters to fight (Time Man and Oil Man) to round out the roster to an even 8 robot masters. The game has a lot of voiced dialogue before fighting each boss that's really lighthearted and funny, and it even changes depending on who you're fighting each boss with. That's right! This is a Mega Man game with multiple characters! That's actually what the weird Japanese title is for, as when you save and quit as a character in that version, the title changes so the second "Rock Man" in the title changes to their name (e.g. Rock Man Fire Man, if you just played as Fire Man). Beat a robot master with only your mega buster, and you'll unlock the ability to play as them in their own story mode as opposed to Mega Man. In their own story modes, it's them who is the only robot not to get kidnapped and mind controlled by Wily, which means you even get to fight an evil version of Mega Man in those modes~. Each boss has their own abilities that they have when they fight you as well as sometimes other abilities as well, such as how Cut Man gets a wall jump. In addition to that, you also unlock other variations on Mega Man to play as when you beat the game, and can even unlock a shield-toting Proto Man by beating every stage in challenge mode (which is SUPER hard and I would never recommend doing). Thankfully, you can also just download Proto Man as free DLC, and you also can get Roll as a playable character through that free DLC as well! She uses a sword, and ends up playing a fair bit like Zero does in the X games as a result, and she was another character I ended up beating the game with. I played a fair bit as Cut Man and Fire Man as well, although I only beat it again as Fire Man. Playing as the robot masters is quite the difficulty bump compared to playing the game as Mega Man, as you lose your ability to change weapons. The game overall being just a bit too hard is my only real overall complaint with the game. The platforming is a bit unpolished and overly difficult in a few places, and some bits like the boss rush at the end are ridiculously hard due to the fact that this is one of the only games in the extended Mega Man series where you don't get healed after each boss fight. This manages to be basically the only game in the classic series' style with both difficulty levels and multiple playable characters as a main conceit of their design to actually manage to still be quite good. A lot of that is due to how simple yet quick-paced the stage design is, which allows this game to avoid the "too hard for its own good" issue that Rockman & Forte has, and they're also small in scale enough to avoid the "big, boring, and empty" problem that Mega Man 10 has. The stage design could certainly use some polish in some places, but the bosses manage to be for the most part excellent no matter who you're playing them as. The presentation is also excellent. The cutesy art style goes great with the silly writing, and it's an incredibly charming game. The music remixes are also quite fun and well done. The game even has a stage contrusctor mode where you can make your own stages to upload online, and download others' stages to play yourself! (this level uploading mode is actually where you download Roll and Proto Man from, and not the PSN store). Verdict: Recommended. It's a real shame that this game is the only one like this that ever got made. This idea is a really cool one that's executed on pretty darn well, but it's definitely lacking some polish in the level design in just a few too many places to make this a game I can recommend quite that highly. It's definitely a game worth tracking down if you're a Mega Man fan, though, as the extra characters and difficulty modes make it a great value to fans of just about any skill level~. |
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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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