As a little break after a case in Ace Attorney 3, I decided to play through this little GB puzzle game that I nabbed for 100 yen at Book Off a week or so ago. This was a game I had on SNES as a kid, but never played all that much of. This seemed like a good a time as any to fire up the ol’ Super GameBoy and finally see what this Nintendo Tetris-wannabe was all about~. It took me about 1.5 hours to play through the first hundred stages and reach the credits, and I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
As said previously, this is one of the many wannabe Tetris clones from the 90’s, and one of the several that Nintendo themselves put out (and on the very handheld that Tetris itself helped make famous, no less). Mario and Yoshi are running a cookie factory, and they need your help to guide them to help the cookies not overflow the factory. At the very least, that’s what I could gather, narrative-wise XD. It’s a simple points-based falling-block puzzler, so it’s hardly worth much caring about the story, but it makes for a cute aesthetic at least~. In a bit of a change from usual puzzle games (though a fair bit like one of the games that Gunpei Yokoi would later make for his Wonderswan, Gunpey), you don’t have blocks just coming from the top of the screen, but from the right side as well. Lines of new blocks come simultaneously from above and from the right, and they pause while you’re clearing lines. The only way to clear lines is to shuffle pieces around so you have a complete, unbroken line of pieces (usually cookies) of the same type from one end of the cookie cluster quadrangle to the other. This is dependent on the end, as well, so if your quadrangle is currently 3 by 6, you can much more easily make a match on the 3-long side than the 6-long side. This comes with a catch, however, as should either side of the quadrangle extend beyond the edge of the screen, it’s game over for you. It’s a quite good puzzle game, as it is! My main complaint would really be that it’s a bit too easy, at least on slower speeds (I played on low speed and didn’t game over a single time in my quest for the credits), but when it gets harder, it’s impossibly hard. The cookies themselves are fairly easy to tell apart on the GameBoy (even the Super GameBoy) monochrome color palette, but once you extend beyond the first 10 rounds (which are ten stages each, so that’s the first 100 levels, effectively) using the code they give you after the credits, the piece shapes can change. For me, I decided to see how hard round 99 would be, and it’s unsurprisingly absurdly difficult XD. A thing I didn’t mention before is that matching a given piece type five times will get you a wild card cookie that will match with anything. In those later rounds, you’re given a special sixth type of piece to deal with, but you’ll never get more of that type dropping from the edges. You MUST get rid of it by matching it with wild cards, and that is incredibly difficult to do. It also doesn’t help that the piece shapes change from cookies to sprites from the GB puzzle game Yoshi (or Mario & Yoshi, if you’re in PAL regions), which look far more similar to one another than the usual cookies do (making it far easier to make mistakes). The presentation of the game is really just what you’d expect for an early-life GB puzzle game. Simple animations but relatively detailed sprites make the little cutscenes you get between rounds extra cute, and the normal cookie pieces, at least, are well distinguished and easy enough to tell apart, even in a rush. There aren’t many music tracks, but the ones that are there are good songs and fun to listen to while you puzzle away. Verdict: Recommended. It’s not gonna set your world on fire, sure, but this is a perfectly fine puzzle game on the GameBoy. There are certainly other puzzle games I’d recommend before this one, if given the chance (from Tetris itself to even the aforementioned Yoshi), but that doesn’t take away from this game’s general competency. While it probably shouldn’t be your first choice of puzzle game, it’s a great little way to kill time and a perfectly fun enough puzzle game to include in your GB library~.
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Continuing replaying through the original releases of the original Ace Attorney trilogy, next up on the list was of course Gyakuten Saiban 2. Now while it has been like eight or so years since I last played these, there were still at least a few things about this game in particular that I remembered quite disliking. A few puzzles in particular I remembered the solutions to, even all these years later, just because they stumped and frustrated me so badly back in the day xD. I overall remembered not really liking the game nearly as much as the other ones I played back then, but overall I still remembered it being mostly fine. It took me a bit over 20 hours (probably, as this game doesn’t count your playtime at all) to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware (that being my GameBoy Player).
Narratively this game is a straight up sequel to the last one. While the first game covers Phoenix Wright’s first year as a defense attorney, this game covers his second. Miles Edgeworth is replaced with the daughter of one of the first game’s antagonist, Franziska Von Karma, and Phoenix gets a new sidekick in the form of Maya Fei’s little cousin Pearl. However, despite this game having the exact same writer/director as the previous game, the writing is *so* aggressively inferior that for years I thought for sure it had to have been written by someone else. The issues are really so widespread and varied that it’s hard to pick just one place to start, but we may as well start by taking a look at our new cast. Maya ends up actually spending a lot of this game occupied with other things (whether of her own will or otherwise), so Phoenix’s main partner is Pearl for roughly 2/3rds of the game. This isn’t a terrible problem, really, as Pearl is cute and funny, but she’s also just a weaker copy of Maya in most ways. She’s silly, she’s not very worldly, and she can summon Maya’s dead big sister Mia (which is super creepy, given that they still give her huge boobs with cleavage even though Pearl is an eight-year old), and she just doesn’t have the chemistry with Phoenix that Maya has. The one case that Maya is actually around for the entirety of really helps drive this point home as well. However, as much as Pearl is a sorta wimpy replacement for Maya, the much worse addition to the cast is our new prosecutor, Franziska Von Karma. Over the course of the first game, Phoenix and Edgeworth have a relationship that covers the span of the entire story. Thanks to Phoenix, Edgeworth slowly realizes that his world view of “victory at any cost” is a harmful one, and that he can very much use his talents as a prosecutor for something other than just getting guilty verdicts. Edgeworth becoming a better person through his relationship with Phoenix is easily one of the biggest strengths of the first game’s narrative. Franziska, on the other hand, is a VERY underwhelming replacement for him. Morally, she is nearly exactly the same as Edgeworth in the first game (victory at any cost), yet even then she barely has any character arc to speak of, and that which she does have is very poorly done (giving her the whip back at the end is also one of the most astonishingly misguided bits of character writing I’ve seen in a while, hot damn). She is more or less narrative dead weight and just Edgeworth’s hype woman, warming his seat until he can make his triumphant return in the game’s finale. She feels very disposable as a result, and she’s mainly just a conduit for the game’s very poor sense of humor (that sense of humor being that being cruel and mean to people is always funny, which comes off far more often as mean spirited than funny). This, in turn, is a factor of the game’s larger problem with how it writes its women. Women are never allowed to be as complicated, flawed, or even straight up evil as their male counterparts. This is, to a degree, a problem that the first Ace Attorney has as well, but it’s MUCH more of a problem here. Whenever a woman is evil or bad, it’s always underlined with this ultimate reveal of them actually being scared, weak, vulnerable, etc. While it’s not like men are never emotional, absurd, or foolish in Ace Attorney 1 and 2, the fact that they get to be more than that while women don’t is very difficult to ignore for me. Women seem to always be written with this underlying assumption that they are fundamentally caring and sensitive creatures, and it means that their writing is fundamentally hamstrung from the start. AA2’s misogynistic approach to how its female characters are written isn’t the explicit cause of why I say the writing is bad (any more than the racist caricatures or the profoundly toxic attitude towards suicide are), but they’re part of the larger structure of why the game’s writing is so weak. The game largely being focused around female characters who are then written so poorly means that the story is very flimsy as a result. This game lacks any meaningful meta-narrative that covers all four cases (with little it does have being confused and contradictory nonsense), and Franziska being such a paper thin bench-warmer of a character is a very big reason for that, in my eyes. It would be one thing if AA2 was just a less well realized story than its predecessor. It might even be something I could look past. But with its combination of poorly written and very distasteful characters, it’s a mish-mash of bad taste and weak writing that makes for an experience that is as difficult to care about as it is just generally unpleasant to go through. This is also not helped at all by the game’s relatively weak case design either. We still have the same formula of more linear investigation sections alternating with the court room trial sections, but this game spices up both in very meaningful ways. First of all, the investigation sections are spiced up with the psycho lock system, which is basically just adding cross-examination sections to the investigation sections to make them a bit more than just reading text. Then, you have the trial sections, which are varied up by the changing of the penalty system. In the first Gyakuten Saiban, it was five strikes and you’re out (and in the original GBA version, you had to start from the very beginning of the case if you struck out, not just from your last save point). From this game forward, we have more of a health bar system, with different errors taking away larger amounts of health (and that includes several penalties that are simply an instant death if you get them wrong). Both of these new mechanics are mired terribly by the generally bad signposting and illogical design that are peppered through the entire game. From the first case through to the fourth one (which, from its writing to its puzzles, is one of the weakest cases in the entire series, at least for me), you have at least one puzzle per case that is very unclear on what it wants from the player. Whether it’s down to an unclearly worded question or down to a completely illogical deduction you’re forced to make (with cases 2 and 4 having the worst instances of illogical nonsense, with number 4 having one that I’m still not sure of the logic behind reading it in either English or Japanese). It makes a game with an already weak narrative that much more weak on top of all that, as it’s very hard to care about a mystery or its deductions when the solutions seem so arbitrary. It easily turns into a vicious cycle, where, because you just stop caring about the mystery or the story, it’s that much harder to solve the deductions that are actually doable because you just keep doubting yourself that this logic is actually logical along the game’s strange lines. There are other meaningful problems too, of course. For example, this version of the game lacks any mid-section hard save points as well as a speed-up feature of any kind, so failure is punished by wasting a LOT of your time redoing stuff you’ve already done. You also can’t restore health any way other than succeeding in breaking a psycho lock, so if you’re having trouble in the middle of a court section, you might need to replay through a LOT of content very frequently if you’re on something you only have once chance left to succeed on. But these pale in comparison to the poor signposting for the game’s mystery stuff. It all adds up to a game that isn’t fun to play wrapped up in a story that’s very difficult to find much enjoyment in on top of that. The game’s presentation is at least a fine followup to the first game. While I don’t love all of the new songs, they’re by and large very nice evolutions on the overall soundtrack of the first game while bringing back a bunch of old favorites like the Steel Samurai theme. The graphics are also very nice. While there are honestly a few too many returning characters for my liking (it makes things feel a little stale after a while, but that’s a much more personal issue than anything else), the new characters have fun and well animated designs, and it’s just as enjoyable as ever to watch them strut their stuff. It just makes me wish it was all in service of stronger writing and game design, I suppose ^^; Verdict: Not Recommended. I went back and forth for a good while on the verdict I wanted to give this game, but a conversation with my partner (who is played through this alongside me and disliked her time with it even more than I did) really helped clear things up for me. She asked if I’d recommend someone just outright skip this game and go right on to Ace Attorney 3, and I honestly couldn’t think of a reason to not answer ‘no’. The story isn’t particularly important to later Ace Attorney games, and both mechanically and narratively it’s just a generally quite unpleasant time. There’s enough other far better Ace Attorney out there that your time is simply worth better. Even for someone like me, who has played AA games after this and know how much better they are, I struggled to find the motivation to continue on to the third game because my time with this game was just that bad. If that doesn’t speak to how difficult this game is to enjoy, then I don’t really know what can ^^; I last played through the original Ace Attorney trilogy (plus a handful of the other ones) back in 2015, a bit before I started writing reviews or properly cataloguing what I played in any respect. My partner, however, has never played them before. She loves visual novels, and she’s really wanted to play more of them together, so we decided to play through the original Ace Attorney trilogy together~. However, while she’s playing the trilogy via her 3DS, I opted to take the weirder route and play the GBA originals, and this is the first of those~. There are some meaningful differences between this original version and its DS counterpart, so I opted to title it with the Japanese title here rather than the English port’s title for the sake of clarity. I really have to just guess at how long it took me to beat it, as this game doesn’t keep track of playtime at all, but I reckon it took me about 15 or so hours to play through all four cases. I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware, but via my GameCube’s GameBoy Player rather than a normal GameBoy Advance.
Gyakuten Saiban is the first story of the now famous video game lawyer, Phoenix Wright (or, as he’s known in Japanese, Naruhodo Ryuuichi). This game follows him through his first six months or so as a lawyer along with his assistant Ayasato Mayoi (aka Maya Fey) and his rival Mitsurugi Reiji (aka Miles Edgeworth), and the trials and tribulations (pun intended :b) that ensue as a result. As far as its greater themes go, the ones more delivered in the game’s text revolve around never giving up and believing in yourself regardless of how desperate your situation is. Then there’s also the overriding theme of the setting, which is one very heavily inspired by the real life realities of the justice system in Japan, that being that the justice system is one nigh explicitly constructed as a system of performative punishment and cruelty rather than one concerned with finding any modicum of “truth” or “justice”. Even beyond more narrative analysis-type stuff like that, it’s a really exceptionally written game! This is a series rightfully famous for the excellent quality of its English localization, and the original Japanese works fantastically too. Fun and funny characters carrying out genuinely touching and dramatic stories. It’s kinda nuts to even think that this is the main writer’s first go at game writing simply because it’s *such* a well put together and paced story. It’s a very cold take to say that the Ace Attorney series is really well written, of course, but it’s something that’s absolutely worth repeating due to the sheer quality of the text at hand. Ace Attorney is a really well written series, and this first entry really knocks it out of the park as a great story-focused adventure game. As far as the mechanics go, there are likely few people who’d be reading this who would be unfamiliar with them, but such assumptions are never how I try to write these little essays. The gameplay of the game’s four cases (five cases in later releases) is roughly divided into two sections. First, you have the investigation sections. These are somewhat adventure game puzzle-type sections where you go around crime scenes and talk to characters to gather information and evidence. Sometimes you’ll need to use the cursor to investigate bits of the background or present evidence to characters to get them to comment on them, but these are sections that are ultimately linear in their design. There’s a right way to do them, and all doing things the “wrong” way will accomplish is getting you stuck until you find the right way forward. The other half of the game are the courtroom trials, where you’ll cross examine witnesses and present evidence to try and catch the contradictions in their statements to help prove your client innocent. This is where you could say the real “gameplay” of the series comes in. Keeping everything that’s happened in the case, or at least that which relates to the testimony at hand, will be invaluable in these sections, as the game isn’t terribly hard overall, but getting good at seeing the logical connections between the evidence and testimony is a skill that you’ll develop over time nonetheless. It’s great fun if you’re a fan of logic puzzles, and they’re very fun stories even if you just look up all the solutions online. Presenting evidence that doesn’t actually prove anything will earn you a penalty, and it’s five strikes and you’re out. A really nasty feature of this GBA original is that, should you run out of penalties and game over, you don’t return back to the start of the current trial as you do in later versions of the game. If your client is found guilty, you start the WHOLE case over from the start. These are not very short trials, with the later two being quite long even if you know exactly what to do, so that’s a pretty brutal penalty, and I’m glad this game is the only one in the series to do it. These games have really fun pacing and well written stories, and needing to button mash your way through potentially literally hours of prior investigations and trials just to get back to the third day’s trial you game over’d on REALLY sours that experience. Presentation-wise, this is another factor that the game absolutely gets a slam dunk on. This is a quite early GBA game, coming out roughly half a year after the console itself did, so the music, while good in this original iteration (especially the Tonosaman (aka the Steel Samurai) theme~), is clearly limited by the GBA’s own hardware as well as the industry’s general unfamiliarity with it at this early stage in the GBA’s life. The graphics, on the other hand, kick absolute butt. Being a visual novel, the presentation is kind half the game here, and it’s a factor that this game does not neglect the slightest bit. From main characters to minor characters, from the investigation field to the court room, everyone you meet is brought to life with larger than life expressions that make the whole cast a really memorable one. The way the game delivers text is also very clever, utilizing text size, scroll speed, occasional auto-progression, and even screen shaking to compensate just about as well as you possibly could for a lack of voice acting. If anyone would ever need evidence of how visual novels can be meaningfully different from just reading a book or watching an anime, this is a very stellar example of just how well you can deliver a narrative like only a VN (i.e. an interactive experience) can. Verdict: Highly Recommended. While I might not necessarily recommend *this* particular version quite as highly as other versions (due to just how nasty that aforementioned game over mechanic is), this is a really stellar visual novel/adventure game. While Capcom certainly does love porting games simply for the sake of it, this is a game that has absolutely deserved to have been ported to death and back. It’s as stellar now as it was when it came out over 20 years ago, and it’ still a load of fun to play even if you’re like me and you aren’t generally a huge fan of visual novels. Returning to playing PS1 RPGs, I decided to pick up one that a fair few of my friends have talked to me about for years, Legend of Dragoon. This was a game I’d loosely heard of in the past, but not one I’d ever really seen anything about in particular, so I went in more or less completely blind. It was also during the course of this game that I learned of the PS1’s very own VMU equivalent: The PocketStation! It took me around 7 or so hours (which is my best guess) to play through Moguuru Dabas, and it took me around 65 hours to play through Legend of Dragoon itself. I played the Japanese versions of both on real hardware. I wanna cap off the intro here with a special thanks to my good friend Anna for gifting me the PocketStation! For reasons I’ll get into later, I likely couldn’t have beaten the game without her generosity! ^^;
Legend of Dragoon is the story of a young man named Dart. Upon returning to his hometown in the middle of a much longer journey, he’s first accosted by a dragon and then finds his hometown reduced to a charred ruin by the invading armies of the neighboring empire. Saved by a mysterious woman named Roze, Dart sets off on a journey to save his childhood friend Sheena from the evil empire. Along the way, they’ll become intertwined in a much larger world-saving plot involving the truth behind their world’s legends, its dragons, and the titular dragoons. While the writing and story have a STRONG first impression of being just an off-brand Final Fantasy (at times it really feels like outright copying ^^;), the game thankfully manages to outgrow and outshine that impression very strongly over the course of your adventure. Handling themes like the evils of colonialism (both material and psychological); the relationships between legend, truth, and propaganda; and the trials often necessary to grow beyond past traumas; this is a game about how the past (be it distant history or just a few years ago) will always shape and mold the present, but we need not let it define the future. That said, the writing is still far from perfect. The character writing, particularly of your main party, is very strong and well done. However, that makes it only all the more noticeable how your last party member, defined largely by racial stereotypes, has comparatively poor character development when compared to the other six. Be that as it may, I still think that the good manages to outshine the bad more than well enough to let the game be one of the better written RPGs I’ve played on the system. Unfortunately, despite its narrative successes, Legend of Dragoon leaves a LOT to be desired on a mechanical level. The main head behind this game was the same guy who did the battle design for Super Mario RPG on the SNES, and a lot of the turn-based battle system feels very much like a far more ambitious version of that game’s systems. However, the main battle systems being a series of timing QTEs for your main attacks always felt far more finicky than it should’ve been. The UI design of those QTEs is far less precise than something like we’d see in Shadow Hearts a couple years later, and the lack of a precise area to aim for really makes it a frustrating system to engage with. There are more advanced combos (called “Additions”) you can equip for your normal physical attacks well, but longer combos are not only harder to execute properly with their button timings, but they also open you up to counter attacks from enemies. As we’ll get to in a bit, this is already a game where healing is very difficult, so opening yourself up to even more damage never felt like a very good trade off, and I stuck to shorter, more reliable Additions the entire game. One of the main reasons that healing is quite so difficult is down to the game’s dragoon system. Instead of having magic normally like most other RPGs do, your characters normally have no spells or magic. Instead, they have dragoon forms that they unlock over the course of the story. As you deal normal attacks, you’ll gain SP, and getting enough SP allows you to transform into your dragoon form. Better Additions give better damage and/or SP as well as you improve them, so that’s one reason beyond just damage to try out the harder Additions (if you’re so inclined). Every 100 points of SP allows for one turn in your dragoon form, and you increase your dragoon level to gain more spells and better stat modifiers while in that form once you hit certain (invisible) thresholds of your total ever gained SP. All that said, you ONLY have spells within your dragoon form, and getting into your dragoon form not only takes the time of racking up that SP, but you can also only do it within battle, meaning you absolutely cannot cast spells outside of battle. Additionally, while some fraction of total EXP gained in battle is distributed to your non-active party members, you only gain SP while actively in battle. This means that non-active members gain no dragoon levels at all, and in a game that’s already this hard and has this slow of a leveling curve (grinding one level can easily take over an hour if not several), you REALLY don’t want to be experimenting with your party make up very much because you’re only going to be punished for it. Your party of seven feels almost uselessly large a lot of the time, because not only are your new party members basically always without a dragoon form for some period (meaning they’re not gaining any dragoon levels if you use them), but that also means that’s less experience that your main/strongest party members aren’t getting too. I stuck with Dart (whom you’re stuck with no matter what), Albert, and Roze the whole game, and I don’t regret it one bit, no matter how cool the other characters may be. On the whole, Legend of Dragoon’s mechanics feel extremely poorly thought out. Having your only real form of attacking being normal attacks when you don’t have a limit break form to break out just makes battles feel like a contest in getting lucky enough that the boss doesn’t decide to just mulch you with a few repeated nasty multi-target attacks. You have attacking items, sure, but they take up very valuable inventory space, but that is extremely nonviable in a game where not only do you have virtually no healing outside of healing items (you can heal 10% of your HP if you block, but that’s almost always a useless amount), but you also need to face bosses who, from almost the very start, can often cast up to three very nasty status effects. How do you heal these status effects? Well, there are THREE different items that cover different ranges of status effects, and that’s not counting the items you’ll need to have to heal MP or revive downed party members. All of this is supposed to fit into a puny inventory of only 32 items. While the narrative may be among the best on the console, the mechanics of Legend of Dragoon make it something far less, and they’re so rough that they make the game tragically difficult to recommend as a result. This is a good a time as any to mention that the Japanese version, while it lacks the poor translation of the English version, is overall significantly more difficult of the two versions of this game. Enemies and especially bosses have anywhere from 20 to 80% more health than their English counterparts, and you also earn roughly 3 times *less* money from encounters. While your main source of healing is items, so rationing your healing items accordingly is an extremely important part of your gameplay strategy, they don’t cost *that* much. Being that poor in the Japanese version basically just means that you’ll be forever unable to afford the super armor and helmet sold in certain shops which cost 10k each. I’ve seen tell online that the reason that the English version has so much more money is because you don’t have the PocketStation game to earn money in, but I would disagree with that to a point, as in my experience playing Moguuru Dabas is roughly just as fast a way of earning money as just doing random battles (generally speaking). However, what Moguuru Dabas DOES get you is special items for completing stages, so that makes for a nice segue into talking about the PocketStation companion game! Moguuru Dabas is a game starring Dabas, an eccentric merchant who you bump into around halfway through disc 1. After you meet him, you’ll gain the option to download Moguuru Dabas to your PocketStation and get yourself items, money, and special equipment by playing through it. Just like a Dreamcast’s VMU, the PocketStation has its games downloaded onto it like memory card data, and all 72kb of Moguuru Dabas live on there for you to pop out of the PS1 and play to your heart’s content. Dabas has 5 stages to dig through, with not just money, but also mushrooms, bones, and gems to find as he goes. There are caves he can find (and your radar makes finding the much easier), and you won’t know what’s inside them until you enter them. Sometimes, it will be a treasure room with items or money. But those aren’t for Dabas, of course. They’re to transfer back to Dart & friends! Other times, you’ll find a cave with a Minint dwelling in it, and they’ll convert your mushrooms into more max HP, your bones into more attack power, and your gems into cash as well as fully healing you! In most caves, however, you’ll find a monster to fight! Monster fights are very simple, as a game with only 4 directional buttons and an action button would make them. Dabas and his opponent move back and forth automatically, with your 4 directional buttons all being a block button, and your action button swinging your pick axe to attack them. Enemies guard treasure chests full of money, items, or health for Dabas, and the bosses at the end of each stage guard a special chest as well. That special chest has a particular piece of equipment in it to send back to Dart! Some highlights are an accessory that halves all incoming magic damage, one that halves all incoming physical damage, and one that halves ALL incoming damage. With loot this good on the table, playing through Moguuru Dabas is a pretty obvious choice for an enterprising Legend of Dragoon player. You can do it whenever you want, and despite there only being five stages (at which point you see the credits), you can just restart and play through again for the same prizes again, if you’re having enough trouble in Legend of Dragoon itself. I only played through it the one time (only actually finishing it one room before the final boss of LoD XD), but I had a lot of fun with it! The graphics are simple but very charming, and it’s a very pleasant little gameplay loop. The only music it has is over the credits screen, but that’s to be expected for a machine with such little data and power at its disposal. The only bummer is that you *do* need to return to home base (the PlayStation) after very stage completed to activate the next stage being playable, so it’s a somewhat inconvenient companion app at times, but given that all you lose for dying is being sent back up the hole you’ve dug a bit, you could always just die on purpose to continue your Dabas adventures on the go however much you want~. The one place where Legend of Dragoon doesn’t slack a single bit is its aesthetics. Over 100 people at Sony Japan Studios spent three years an 16 million dollars developing this game, and hot damn does it look like it. The music is quite good, yes, but the graphics look incredible, and a lot of that is down to a deliberate focus away from the prerendered CGI cutscenes so popular in RPGs at the time. This means there are a ton of really gorgeous in-engine animations both within battles and outside of them that just never stopped looking awesome the whole way through this game’s four discs. It does have some CGI cutscenes, which look nice enough, but the in-engine cutscenes, from more dramatic chase and battle scenes to more subtle mid-conversation reactions from characters really make this story come to live in an incredible way. This beauty sadly does come at the cost of battles taking quite some time. This game is no stranger to quite noticeable loading times even mid-battle, and those luxuriously animated fight scenes do make battles take quite a bit longer. Just how long animations (especially for spells) take is one of the main reasons the average completion time is like ten hours longer on the Japanese version of the game, and it’s also another major reason that grinding takes SO long to do. The final boss alone took me just over an hour to kill between his spell animations, my spell animations, and the 60,000 HP he has in this version of the game (vs. his 42,000 in the English version). I think overall that battles do move at least a *bit* faster than earlier PS1 games like Final Fantasy 7 or Persona 1, but it’s still quite noticeable, and it’s very difficult to ignore just how lengthy battles and animations take no matter how pretty they are ^^; Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. No matter how fun Moguuru Dabas is, the roughness of the mechanics of the main game can really not be ignored. They’re less of an issue in the significantly easier English version, granted that does come at the cost of a worse translation. Be that as it may, however, the story and presentation are good enough that this is still a game some will find very much worth playing. It’s hard but far from impossibly difficult, especially in English, and if you’ve played most of the other biggest RPG hits on the PS1, this is still something I think is worth checking out. I overall enjoyed my time with it, and I’m glad that I played it, even if its battle systems drove me crazy for a good portion of it XD |
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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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