I managed to get in one more game for this month's TR, and it happened to be another SMT spin-off, and by the same company that made SMT: Devil Children as well! That said, as you may've noticed in the title, this isn't actually even an SMT spin-off. Coming out only a scant couple of months after SMT 1 in 1992, this is old enough to be a Megami Tensei spin-off, not a Shin Megami Tensei one! However, no matter which part of the series it claims to spin off from, this game has a TON setting apart from the proper SMT games. It took me about 17 or so hours (or at least I guess, since this is another game that doesn't count playtime) to beat the Japanese version of the game on a real cartridge via my GameBoy Player.
You play the main character (canon name El, but you name all three playable characters at the start) just graduating from Zodia's academy of magic, but such is fate that just as you graduate, trouble strikes and monsters start attacking in much more viscous ways than before, even trapping the new trainees on the nearby trial mountain! So begins your quest to figure out just what's driving the monsters so wild as well as what's trying to destroy the world, while also picking up another couple of human heroes along the way. The story isn't nearly as philosophical as its contemporary MT or SMT games, but it was surprisingly deep for what it is. I'll admit that I had a fair bit of trouble keeping proper nouns all sorted (still not sure if it's like, the planet named Gaia or the planet's life force named Gaia or what), but the mystery of just who is to blame for it all, the Zodians or the Gaia Masters, as well as why they're even doing it, was engaging and fun in a deeper way than I expected for a GameBoy JRPG. One final note, other than how I quite liked the dialogue writing as well, is that I have absolutely no idea why it's called "Last Bible". That appears to have absolutely nothing to do with the story or the framing device, and is a 100% ass-pull of a title XD The mechanics are, like Devil Children eight years later, an attempt to make the more standard Megami Tensei formula much more forgiving and easier in an attempt to make it appeal more to kids (even down to how they're explicitly not demons, they're monsters, as if there's a difference :b). Much like the SFC SMT games, you go around getting in random battles with monsters, and if the monsters are close enough in level to you (in this case, your level + 5), you can convince them to join your side via a negotiation conversation mid-battle. The monster negotiations are easily the worst in one of these games that I've played though. There's only one or two conversation trees, and whether or not the monster joins you is down to whether or not you happened to pick the right sequence of yes/no answers from them. More easily, however, is that you can also have one of your AI companions negotiate with them instead, which effectively just puts it down to a dice roll, meaning that although manual negotiations are frustrating in a way few other games in the series manage, being able to auto-negotiate like that makes it easier than it's ever been (and it's not hard to see why they made auto-negotiating the standard way the games work by the time you get to Devil Children). The battle system is also very SMT even down to the balancing. While the game is certainly easier than other SMT games, it still ain't super easy, and the difficulty curve, particularly in the beginning, can be pretty brutal. Thankfully, leveling up is a pretty quick process, even though money is earned very slowly and keeping a good cash flow can be a really big problem quite frequently. The way grinding works reminded me a lot of early Dragon Quest in how it can be the solution to all life's problems despite how the game's systems can at times be quite technical. Having a good composition of monsters on your team is really important, but even then, you don't need to try THAT hard to get good random ones out and about, as there are some optional special ones you can get that are REALLY good and perfectly fine to take with you to the end game like I did. The only other big and consistent problem which impacts basically the entire game, particularly around your monster composition, is that keeping your party healed is a really tough thing to do. Your inventory is VERY small, items don't stack, and healing spells are uncommon and very expensive even in the late game. Bosses tend to be quite easy, only being a little harder than normal encounters if harder at all, but just getting to them in any state ready to fight them is the biggest challenge in the game. Thankfully, the game is pretty forgiving around this as well beyond the aforementioned "grinding solves everything eventually" approach. Dungeons are not first-person, unlike normal SMT games, and are done top-down in the very familiar Dragon Quest-style. They also tend to be quite short, and you can even both save anywhere AND fuse & summon demons anywhere. The game doesn't even have true game overs, as when you die you just lose half your cash (ouch) and get kicked back to the last inn you stayed at. The game certainly isn't a cakewalk, but it's a great conversion to handheld that really respects your time in a way other SMT games don't. It even has a mode that lets you connect to a friend's GameBoy to battle against their monsters! I couldn't test that, of course, but it's still neat that a game so many years before Pokemon was doing something like that in such a similar way. The presentation is quite surprisingly nice given that it's a relatively early GameBoy game and that this is one of the first games this team made. The monster sprites are really well-detailed, though this admittedly does come at the cost of the game re-using monster sprites pretty frequently. Those reused monster sprites look exactly the same as well, and that's even more of a bugger when these double- and triple-duty sprites are sometimes even found in the same dungeons. It makes it so you need to pay attention to enemy names a fair bit more, but combat is often so simple (just auto-attack everything to death) that it isn't a huge mechanical problem at the end of the day. The music is also surprisingly nice, with quite a few really good tracks out of the relatively small soundtrack. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. For a '92 GameBoy RPG, this is a pretty darn fun one if you're into retro JRPGs. It's not aged the best compared to most contemporary stuff, so it's difficult to recommend if you aren't into retro RPGs at all, but if "easier SMT that plays more like Dragon Quest" sounds like something you'd be a fan of, this is well worth checking out! It even has an official English release on the GameBoy Color, Revelations: The Demon Slayer, so it's pretty painless to check out as well~.
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Also known as "Revelations: Persona" in English, this was the next game chronologically in my journey of playing through the early SMT games. Where Devil Summoner keeps SMT If's more grounded setting and stakes while throwing away the spirit guardian system, Persona famously turns the spirit guardians into its titular system and runs with that instead! I usually just put the English title for the games I beat on here that have them, but in this case, the game is so different between Japanese and English that I felt it was more appropriate to put the Japanese title there instead. I played through the Sebek (normal) route, and it took me about 55-ish hours to beat it with the good ending playing a real PS1 disc via my PS3.
Persona 1 (as I'll be calling it from now on for the sake of brevity) follows you, the main character, as well as several of your friends as you all do a ritual after school to try and summon a "Persona" demon. Well it works, and you wind up getting hurt, but only briefly. But after you wake up and go to the hospital to visit your sick friend Maki (who has a chronic illness that keeps her in the hospital a lot), she suddenly has a turn for the worse and while she's in the ICU, the hospital gets all jumbled around and demon filled! From here, things get more and more demon-y until you're forced to make a soft-choice on which of the two main story paths you'll follow. One is the Ice Queen, which is a time-limited quest that follows Yukino (another friend of yours) and was cut out of the American localization of the PS1 version, and then there's the normal Sebek route which follows Maki, and that's the one I took. Your quest with Maki always includes her, yourself, and your friends Mark and Nanjou-kun, but (much like in SMT If, this game's predecessor) you also get a chance to bring along a 5th party member, three of whom are quite easy to get and one who requires a very specific sequence of events to get (and he's the one I got). Granted I only saw Maki's route, but overall I really enjoyed the writing. This game is still very much a descendant of SMT If more so than it is the previous SMT games, and that can be seen from broader things such as the high school setting to more granular details like the reasons the main bad guy is doing what they're doing. However, the spins they take on those things here evolve those concepts significantly, and it very much feels like a brand new adventure and not some retread. You're very much a tertiary part of the story, and honestly so are Nanjou-kun, Mark, and your 5th member. The real main character is Maki, and the rest of you are just supporting members of her story. However, that's not a dig at the writing at all. The game does a really good job of making Mark and Nanjou-kun in particular feel like meaningful and fleshed out characters despite the fact that they never really get any sort of character arc. The only real sore thumb of the bunch is you, as you're given front and center attention very often despite mostly not saying much and effectively doing no more than Nanjou-kun or Mark, but you're the main character, so of course you're the most important by default. That's really my only complaint with the writing though (aside from some light transphobia with the people who run the casino, who are very Atlus-brand casual transphobia). Maki's story may be difficult to see the genuine ending of (getting the true ending requires answering some fairly innocuous questions correctly, and it's for prompts like that that I used a guide), but the ride there is full of well-written dialogue that is fun and engaging all the way~. Where I have more, and it's a LOT more, complaints, is with the mechanics of Persona 1. While SMT If was in many ways a rushed-out mess of a game, with poorly thought out new mechanics stapled onto the skeleton of SMT 2, Persona 1 is a very bold attempt to build on those new systems in a whole new way. However, there is a lot more passion here than polish, as those more developed systems are very often developed without really considering how the rest of the game functions around them. To start off with one of the game's few mechanical silver linings, however, they removed the requirement for guns to have limited ammo, so you can once away blast away to your little heart's content~. To get down to proper business, though, here's thing from which all other problems arise: The leveling system. It's not the most intuitive place, I know, but it really is the one thing that, if fixed, the rest of the game would benefit massively from. Instead of summoning monsters, SMT-style, you have a party of five members who summon personas made by fusing the monsters you befriend. These five party members have two sets of experience points: points for general levels, and points for persona levels. The prior gives three stat points every level up to assign to five skills just like most SMT games have (although all of your non-main character party members have theirs assigned automatically) as well as dictates what demons you can befriend, as you can't befriend a demon higher than the party's average level. The latter dictates the maximum persona you can have assigned to you, and persona levels are gained by using your personas more in battle instead of normal weapons or guns. That all sounds simple enough, but where it all falls apart is that EXP in both cases is divided out based on who participated the most in battle (which is generally about doing the most damage, but can also be around support spells used). What this means in practice is that a grindy game gets even grindy-er. There aren't many personas in the game, ultimately, so getting new ones that your character can actually use can be tricky and time consuming as you grind persona levels to just be at a high enough level to use a new persona you've fused (and then you've gotta hope that the character's alignment is the right one to be even able to use the tarot type of that persona, which isn't indicated to the player at all and even the manual just tells you to figure it out via trial and error). Even weak demons can fuse into high-level personas though, so your early game is really brutal because getting new usable personas at all is really tricky even with a lot of demons to fuse. Demons also tend to be much higher level than you, so if you want to recruit new demons to fuse into personas at all, you'll be grinding a LOT to get your party's average level up to even have a chance to recruit the demons you're encountering, as going back to early-game areas is almost always impossible due to story progression. These problems are bad already, but they're made even worse because of the way EXP is distributed. Powerful characters (be it due to either good weapons, guns, or persona spells) are just going to keep skyrocketing in levels compared to their friends because they're doing all the damage. This is even further compounded by the range system used in the game. This game tries to put a new spin on the two-tiered row system that SMT used by having both your and the enemy's party be on 5x5 grids and having your weapons, guns, and spells all bound by where you're standing on it. Sometimes that means enemies have a harder time hitting you with mean, close-range instant-death spells, but it more often means that due to how the enemies spawned or how they happened to die, one or more characters simply need to wait and defend because none of their attacks are in range to actually hit the enemy. And of course, what game with an annoying range system would be complete without a total lack of information to the player on ANY move or weapon's range capabilities? The UI overall is pretty awful for 1996, and that's outside of the woefully inadequate weapon and spell information described earlier (although at the very least they tell you what power level and how many times they hit). They don't just let you not compare weapons in shops to what you're currently using, they don't even let you see who can use what item in the shop. They also don't let you look at your current persona level when in the persona fusing Velvet Room, so if you wanna do that, you've gotta go back out and check it, and then go back in and hope you remember (and the same goes for various other persona stats and player stats and such). The shop comparison stuff in particular is absolutely inexcusable for that period in gaming, as it'd been the standard set over five years before, not to mention one actually met by Devil Summoner which had been released a year earlier. The terrible disrespect for the player's time doesn't end there though. The difficulty curve is terrible, with the first boss easily being one of the hardest in the entire game, and other awful difficulty peaks continuing here and there from that point (particularly if you're going for the good ending, as there's a lot of extra content beyond where the bad ending stops). Dungeons are also quite large even pretty early into the game, and they very rarely have save points anywhere but very close to the start. You do, however, have a constant mini-map instead of having to use the Mapper spell, and they've even made it much larger. However, what that also does is make dungeons effectively navigated entirely by mini-map, and it makes the first-person dungeons feel pretty pointless in general. It's no surprise that this is the only Persona game to have first-person dungeon crawling, as it just works really poorly here. They've also removed dungeon-escape items and your singular save-anywhere item from Devil Summoner, so exploring dungeons is once again far more time consuming and far more dangerous. Making all of that EVEN WORSE (I realize I say that a lot in this review, but it's worth mentioning every time XP) is that this game suffers from something that tons of early CD-era JRPGs suffer from in how damn long battle animations take. Particularly for persona attacks and enemy animations, battle animations take FAR too long, and battles are far too dangerous to ever safely use the auto-battle command. This means that a game that already has an awful EXP and money grind amplifies that by having battles that can take super long due to their awful difficulty and the animations that take place. This isn't really the hardest SMT game up to this point (that's easily SMT If, which has far more inexcusable crap in it), but it's easily the one that will wear you down the worst with just how miserable the grind in it is. One of the only more neutral changes to the whole formula is how demon negotiations work in this game compared to previous ones. Where prior games had more of a conversation between you and the demon, now each character has four actions they can do to try and interact with the demon. Each demon has some combination of the game's eight personality traits, and depending on that combo (and also the phase of the moon and also just RNG in general) the monster will get a rise in a different one of four emotions indicated in the upper left of the screen: rage, happiness, terror, and interest. Interest is the one you want if you're trying to recruit them, happiness will often get you free stuff, and terror will often make them flee, but rage will get them more hopping mad to kill you than ever, so you've gotta be careful. This makes for a system that's not worse or better than the old one so much as it is just different, because the real change it brings to the table is that demon negotiation is FAR more about simple trial and error than it used to be. It's a bastard learning which moves with which characters work to interest which demons, but once you know those things, they'll work virtually every time. You can even do like I did and just get fed up and look up what different monsters respond positively to online, since there's nothing random about a particular demon type's personality distribution, so you can very easily talk your way past really hard enemies if you so choose. It helps give Persona just one more thing to make it stand out from SMT, and it also ultimately makes the game a bit more forgiving and easy in certain ways, but it's still just "different" rather than "better", and it will probably depend on the player for just how much they find this system appealing compared to the traditional way SMT had done things. With all the mechanical woes, it's nice that at least the presentation, like the writing, is also generally quite nice, even if it is a mixed bag at times. The music is pretty darn good and very funky, with the character themes being particularly good. It's overall not quite as good as Devil Summoner's soundtrack, but it's still got some real boppin' tracks. The only downside is that the encounter rate is SO high in this version of the game that you rarely hear any music in dungeons other than the singular battle theme that they use for every non-boss encounter in the game, and while that song is a pretty good one, it gets old after a while, and the game really could've benefited from some more battle themes. The graphics are VERY pretty though. The dungeons look nice, but the isometric NPC areas are very pretty as well as NPC portraits themselves. The real star of the show is the monster animations, though. Overly long as they may be, they gave a ton of beautiful attention to detail in bringing these monsters from unmoving front-facing sprites to moving isometric enemies, and the love and care put into those sprites and animations were the start of the visual show for me. The differences between the Japanese original and English localization are numerous and in some cases very infamous. Most notable among the hall of infamy is how they made the character models look "more American" in trying to de-Japan-ify the game, and making certain characters look more white and they even went as far as to make Mark black in the English version. The other notable thing in the Japanese version is that it's an even more grindy mess than the English version because the random encounter rate is *even* higher in this version. Granted both versions still have awful cash flow problems, but that's something that makes this version of the game that much harder to recommend despite it not suffering from all the writing issues the localization has. Verdict: Not Recommended. Honestly, had I played the Super Famicom SMT games without save states or rewinds, most of them (particularly SMT If) would've been not recommended as well, but this game wouldn't even be saved with save states or rewinds. While I may have enjoyed the story, the mechanical road you need to take to get there is just so damn brutal and grindy that I think most people are going to find it VERY hard to justify the time investment unless they are a HUGE fan of SMT and just have to see the early parts of the series. You're going to need a lot of patience and willingness to put up with old game nonsense to make it through this game's meanness, because it's mean EVEN for an SMT game. I didn't ultimately hate my time with the game, sure, but this is one you better be darn sure you're up for before taking the plunge, because you're going to have a very rough ride otherwise Xp This is another VN that my girlfriend and I played through together. It's a shorter one, so we got through it in only 5 hours in one sitting, but it was something still very worthwhile despite the short length~.
You play an unnamed space pilot in the far future who gets a job to go out to the recently re-discovered generation ship, the Mugunghwa, that went missing a very long time ago. Your job is to retrieve the log data, particularly about the AI on the ship, and bring it back. Simple enough. Upon getting to the ship's interface, you meet the ship's AI Hyun-ae. Her text parsing feature has been worn away by time, so your forced to communicate through you answering binary prompts she gives you, as she does her best to help you complete your mission by bringing you old ship logs. The gameplay mostly consists of reading the logs and talking to Hyun-ae about them as well as also talking to the ship's other AI, Mute, about them. It's a very interesting story that's both a cute romance (if you so choose) and an intriguing mystery. It's a super small cast of active characters; being just you, Hyun-ae, and Mute; but slowly learning about the world of the ancient past that the ship's log discuss is loads of fun. We got the ending where you leave the ship with Hyun-ae, but it has several other endings including one that plays with the nature of a VN being re-playable, which is just the kind of thing I love. The dialogue and character writing is very good, and the art is very pretty to boot, though there isn't a ton of it, ultimately. This is a very bite-sized game in many respects, and that goes for not just the run-time but the presentation as well. It does just what it needs to, and it fits the aesthetic of "interfacing with a really old space ship via a terminal" very well~. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a really well put together little story. If you like sci-fi and history stuff and also enjoy a good mystery to unfurl, this is a great way to spend an evening~. The primary way my girlfriend and I do dates is by playing VNs with one another over Discord, and this is one such VN that she recommended we play together. We read out the voices while we play, so it tends to take us a bit longer than just reading it in your head would, so it took us some 15 hours to get through this over the course of a few weekends. We played it in English and got the best ending~.
Heart of the Woods is a story about Maddie and her best friend Tara during a quite tense part of their relationship. Maddie has decided to leave the paranormal-focused YouTube show they've worked on together for years and it's caused a lot of strain in the relationship, and they're doing one last big outing together before Maddie leaves the show, taking a trip across the world to the remote Scandinavian village of Eisenfeld to visit a fan who claims there are all sorts of supernatural occurrences there. It's a game with a pretty small cast, mostly just being Maddie, Tara, Morgan (the fan they're visiting) and a couple others, but I like stories like that, so it's no big deal. The story does hop perspectives around fairly frequently, but it mostly centers on Maddie and Morgan, jumping to people who aren't them only very occasionally. The writing has a few typos here and there, but it's a very sweet love story. It's also a very queer (by which I mean LGBTQIA+), and a good one of those at that. The mystery of what's going on in the town is also told in an engaging fashion, and although there isn't a *ton* of interactivity, there are a few choices you get to make that dictate just how things end up once you've wrapped up your battle against the supernatural. The art is very pretty, and has a lot of fun, subtle touches to how its done even though there isn't a ton of it. Worth mentioning on that note is how good the music is as well, as it does an excellent job of setting the mood~. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Heart of the Woods is an excellent and delightful queer romance VN. If that's your kind of thing, then this is absolutely worth checking out. For this month's TR theme about playing handheld entries in traditionally console-based series (and vice versa), I decided to give SMT: Devil Children a go~. All I really knew about it was that it was Atlus's Japan-only take on Pokemon, but outside of that nothing. It ended up being a really interesting take on SMT, and the design changes and innovations to make it work like a Pokemon-style thing would made for a neat experience. It took me around 15 hours to finish the game's main story via my GameCube's GBA Player.
There are three versions of Devil Children, but the two that were originally put out were Red Book and Black Book (very much leaning into the Pokemon-ness of it all with having multiple versions). They each have a different but similar story, and Red Book's is about a 5th grader, Mirai, searching in the makai for her missing father after being attacked by a weird demon at school. The story is a remarkably interesting and involved one, given what I expected. It does a great job of making an SMT story still series and focused on Chaos Vs. Law (or in this case, Devils Vs. Angels) in a way that softens the presentation down to something kids could gel with but without too heavily cheapening the messaging. Mirai is a great character who is very much a kid but also doesn't take any nonsense from people she thinks are trying to take advantage of her. The protagonist of Black Book even features heavily in this as well. The two stories are largely parallels of one another, but they're different enough that I'm actually considering hunting down a copy of Black Book (or the third game, White Book) to see what that take on the story is. The mechanics of Devil Children are where things really get interesting. It's very much "what if SMT was Pokemon", but the way in which that is achieved makes for a unique if somewhat roughly balanced experience. Mirai herself doesn't fight, and instead has befriended demons do the fighting for her. Her first demon is a Griffon named Bell (the other main characters get different main monsters), and this mascot main monster will be with you and an important character for the length of the game. Beyond that, you have six more monsters who can be loaded into your Devilizer (a little pink pistol with a pentagram on the side) as well as eventually another three (and eventually again six) more monsters in your King-izer. The battles are two vs. two, and with Bell automatically taking the front spot of the Devilizer (although not counting as one of its six occupants), your demons emerge in the order they're loaded into each gun as they're KO'd. It's not a revolutionary system by any means, but it's a cool spin on the Pokemon formula in an era before those games had 2-on-2 battles of any description. You also have SMT's trademark demon fusion mechanic, as your demons don't gain levels like a Pokemon would. In order to get stronger demons, you need to take them to the research center and fuse them. Something that makes this game somewhat unique among SMT games is that not only can you have more demons than just the ones in your party (they go in a PC, just like in Pokemon), you can actually have more than one demon of the same type, however. If you fuse two demons of the same type (or ones incompatible to make some greater fusion), it will power-up the first demon selected with slightly stronger stats and sometimes stronger spells. This consumption of other demons is also how your mascot-companion (in this case, Bell the Griffon) levels up in power. Outright stronger demons or demons that just have stronger abilities are often most useful than trying to slowly upgrade already good monsters like this, but it's a cool feature to extend the life of already useful demons. It's a neat system for a Pokemon-type game, and it succeeds at being different enough from something like Dragon Quest: Monsters' monster breeding to feel like something new from that as well. My only real complaint is that this game really could've used a compatibility chart for fusions like the console games have. Testing one demon after another countless times just to see if you have any new fusions possible with the new demon you befriended gets old FAST, and not having to do that would've been nice. Thankfully, the UI goes pretty quick, and you can even speed up fusion animations in another very player-friendly bit of UI design. The demons themselves fight very similarly to how they do in the Super Famicom SMT games (no demon loyalty mechanics like the Devil Summoner games, mercifully). They can do normal attacks, do magic attacks for MP, and also do special moves at the cost of HP. Something also very much like SMT is the balancing of the game. Your monsters are just as strong as the things you're fighting, and just like in basically every other SMT game before this, you're incredibly vulnerable to getting the tar kicked out of you in the early game because you just don't have the tools and resources to keep fighting yet. This is a balancing issue that's more or less resolved by the time you beat the first real area of the game, but given that this is something that's supposed to be competing with first-generation Pokemon, just how tough the game often is, particularly right at the start, came off as a very strange design choice to me. Something a bit different from the console games, however, is that, due to how the human of the group isn't a fighter, it's the demons who both use items and do the demon negotiations. It's a very simplified system compared to the console entries though. It's just a roll of the dice to see if the demon you picked to negotiate gets a positive reaction out of the target demon, they'll almost always join you (although they'll rarely give you money or an item instead). Given how often you'll be recruiting repeat demons for the incremental power fusions and normal fusions, just how well this has been streamlined is one of my favorite changes to the formula that this game brings to the table in the spirit of making it more fast-paced and Pokemon-like. Another big highlight of the game is its presentation. Almost 300 demons (with basically no palette swaps at all) from the normal SMT games are here in adorably re-imagined super deformed chibi versions and they're a delight to discover. All of the art, from the cutscenes and character art to the super colorful and popping environments are super well done and really impressive for a black-cart GBC game. I almost wish I had a normal GameBoy to play this on, since I'm really curious to see how all of this translates to being played in monochrome. The music is also quite nice, being a fun mix of quite Pokemon-y tunes but having a bit of SMT flare to them to make them more than just wannabees. Verdict: Highly Recommended. It has its flaws (and sadly lacks a fan translation), but this is a super fun and solidly put together game. The art is great, the story is fun, and the gameplay is addicting (and even has a pretty darn tough post-game to toy around with too, if you want). It's a little short, but it can be gotten for super cheap. If this ever gets a fan translation or if you can read Japanese, this is definitely a GBC game worth checking out if you're a fan of SMT, Pokemon-style games, or just RPGs in general. This is a game I bought AGES ago to bridge the completion gap of Tales games I'd finished (it was the singular one separating Tales of Symphonia from the others that I'd finished). It was also very importantly another Tales game that was never localized, which made it extra interesting for me to dive into. Taking advantage of my current Tales binge session, I finally sat down and played this through to the end, and wound up with a much more positive opinion on it than the other three times I'd bounced off of it quite so hard XP. Now this is a PSP game, but it's very much a port of the PS2 version via all the info I can find about it online. The only real differences are graphical accommodations for the wide-screen PSP as well as a few new skits. It took me around 42 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on my PSTV.
Tales of Rebirth follows the story of Veigue, a sullen young man who accidentally froze his childhood friend solid a year ago during a mysterious event known as Ladras' Sunset, when many such powers suddenly awakened in people across the land. He's one day approached by a mysterious pair, Mao and Eugene, who use their own Force powers (no relation to Star Wars, which in this game's defense calls "The Force" something else in Japanese) to help free his friend only for her to be taken away just as quickly by a squad of the royal army. Thus begins Veigue & Co's journey to first solve the mystery as to why the crown is abducting young girls as well and eventually to save the world. Now it's very not obvious from that plot intro, but this is a story just as much about Tales' usual character-focused narratives as it is about race. The world of Tales of Rebirth is populated by Hyuma (effectively humans) and Gajuma (effectively beast folk), and the emerging racial tension between the two groups is a major through-line of the story and its themes, particularly after the first act ends. Now for a JRPG from 2004, I think this game gets most of its stuff right. It isn't overly optimistic in its portrayals of race relations and how rifts can be healed, and the nuance with which it handles the character's own personal struggles and prejudices is done in a way I found agreeable and realistic. While the story is indeed about race, it's also just as much about themes of personal identity and self-reflection as much as it is about examining one's cultural assumptions and prejudices. Where the race stuff (in a way) holds up less well are in trying to map anything about the game's internal setting to real-life equivalents. There really isn't anything systemic about the racism in Tales of Rebirth that is in any way analogous to the world we live in. Now while that can certainly be seen as a failing of the narrative, it came off to me as much more of a deliberate choice. Writing fantasy stories as analogies for real-life racism comes with all sorts of new, weird complications that often bring in tons of contradictions, and this story seems to have been very specifically crafted with that in mind. Hyuma and Gajuma could be seen at first as an allegory for colonizing nations vs. colonized ones, but too much of the setting doesn't match up to that for those to really make any sense as a framing device. Hyuma and Gajuma exist on relatively equal ground as the story begins and progresses, the spoilery origins of their prejudice don't make sense when mapped onto real-world causes (and I would argue are obviously not meant to), and the ruling family of the kingdom are Gajuma, to only name a few of the scads of details about Tales of Rebirth that make it difficult to draw direct real-world parallels to. This game's story is more of a tale designed to get the audience to examine the racial biases and discrimination in their own lives and to take personal or community action beyond that, rather than a story that explicitly gives views on how the real world should/could be changed. While I think (or at the very least, would like to hope) the conversation on race has since moved on from more personal flaw-focused topics, I think Tales of Rebirth still manages to provide interesting and engaging (if not original) characters and scenarios that feel earnest in how they're crafted and portrayed.The characters are well written and charming, and the pacing of the story is also well done. It's far from the best that the series would do, but it's definitely well on the road to where it would soon get to with entries like Vesperia. Granted, I think it was more for money and marketing reasons that this game was never localized (they had just put a lot of cash into Tales of Symphonia's localization, and they probably wanted to push the series in the West as a 3D one rather than a 2D one), but given the difficulty in making quality stories about race at all, let alone how difficult that kind of thing is to localize, I think it was a blessing in disguise that this game never got localized back in the mid-2000's ^^; Mechanically, Tales of Rebirth is a bit of a complicated game compared to a lot of the other 2D Tales games, of which this was one of the last (coming out right after Symphonia, the first 3D entry in the series). It has the same Linear Battle system that the other 2D Tales games use for its combat, but instead of just one 2D plane between you and your opponent, you have three planes you can toggle through (very much like how Little Big Planet would eventually do it). You also don't have an MP system in this game, instead having artes that charge up over time to both be more powerful and be able to be immediately chained together as to not break your combo. This has several consequences on battle. First, there aren't really healing spells, per se, so post-battle auto cooking and healing items are super important for keeping a healthy party, as mid-battle combo-based healing is a difficult and unreliable way to heal (not to mention one I never really understood at all XP). Secondly, it also means it's really easy to get caught in a pincer between enemies or let enemies sneak back to your casters if you aren't careful, so very aggressive, melee-heavy parties and play styles are highly rewarded. This is also definitely one of the harder Tales games I've played, as most of the non-MP system ones have been, and that's partly because of the lack of healing spells but also because battles can just get so chaotic if you let things get out of control. It's definitely not my favorite mechanically, but I found it fun and an enjoyable challenge. The presentation is really pretty. A PSP game blown up on a TV via the PSTV is certainly gonna look a bit grainy at times, but that doesn't stop the pre-rendered backgrounds in cities and dungeons from looking damn good. The final dungeon in particular has some really beautiful scenes in its town and final areas. The 3D on the overworld doesn't exactly impress, but it looks as nice as it needs to. The voice acting is excellent, and the music is also very nice, as would be expected from a Tales game of the time. Verdict: Recommended. It's definitely not the most engrossing JRPG I've ever played, and it's certainly not my new favorite Tales game, but I enjoyed my time with Tales of Rebirth. It's not a game I'd say it's a tragedy for that it never got a localization or a fan translation, but if you find yourself playing it and you're a fan of what Tales usually brings to the table, there's a lot to enjoy here for sure~. Around the time that I beat Castlevania 64 earlier this year, a friend of mine mentioned off-hand how as bad as that game was, this game, Nightmare Creatures, was even worse. Now I would describe Castlevania 64 as a not so much "awful" so much as "fairly maligned" game. Not as bad as all the hype pumps it up to be, but definitely deserving of a less than stellar reputation. Now something even more troubled than THAT, I had to see, and so I've been quietly hunting for this game ever since. I finally stumbled upon a copy recently, and so I made room in my busy schedule of playing Tales games to spend an afternoon and evening playing through it XD. It took me 5 or so hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware (albeit that real hardware was my PS3, so I wouldn't have to use a wired controller :b).
Nightmare Creature's story is mostly told through a lot of backstory in a narrated intro, but it mostly doesn't matter. Back in the mid-1600's, a cult did some evil experiments trying to make the ultimate life forms, but one of their members burned the whole thing down in 1666 (causing the Great Fire) and disappeared into history. Now it's the mid-1800's and that person's journal has resurfaced, and it's up to the two protagonists to stop the evil guy behind it all before his army of NIGHTMARE CREATURES (the game's words, not mine) takes over London (and the world too, I suppose). It's a very pulpy story, and once you actually start playing the game, it more or less totally disappears outside of little blurbs on the loading screens between levels (which actually went by so fast that I never had a chance to read them, but whether that's an issue with me playing it on a PS3 instead of a PS1 or if it's an issue with the game's quick loading times in general, I don't know and don't really care about). The gameplay of Nightmare Creatures is a series of 20 levels (16 levels and 4 boss fights) through a London beset by the titular creatures. The levels do have secret and optional paths in them for extra goodies, but they're generally pretty linear. The controls are tank controls, and they feel AWFUL to play with on the D-pad. This game came out in '97 JUST as the first wave of dual-shock controllers were hitting store shelves (a little earlier than that, in some regions), and I pity whomever tried to play this with just the normal PS1 D-pad. Switching to analogue stick control mostly just maps the D-pad's controls onto the joysticks, but god damn does that make the game SO much more playable. It's a game whose control method takes a good deal of getting used to, and that goes especially for how your character will sometimes auto-lock onto an enemy, and sometimes they won't. Your jumping is also weirdly enough Simon Belmont-style, where moving forward ANY amount does the exact same HUGE jump forwards, while jumping from a standstill does a tiny forward hop. There isn't a large amount of platforming (mercifully), but there is at least one really annoying jump in the game, and the game would honestly be better if there were no mandatory platforming at all. A huge part of the game is also the combat that takes place in each level. You have powerful sub-weapons which you find scattered throughout levels as well as healing items too, but your main attacks will be your heavy and light normal attacks. I played through as Nadia instead of the male character, as Nadia helps mitigate one of the game's most difficult aspects of combat: you are very slow, and your enemies are quite fast. Sub-weapons are far too rare to rely on them for standard combat, so getting good at dispatching enemies with your normal attacks is a must. It's something I stuck to so firmly that I ended up barely using any of my sub-weapons as a result ^^;. Most of combat just boils down to getting at least one hit in on an enemy, preferably when they're close to a corner, and then just pummeling them constantly to stun lock them until they die. Combat is more just a test of your ability to be a little patient with your blocking and then just bash enemies to death. It's tricky until you get the hang of it, but after the first few levels (and the horrid first boss) you probably won't be having too much trouble with combat, or at least nothing that the fairly numerous health pickups can't pave over. The only real selling point of the game is the presentation, which is honestly pretty damn impressive for 1997. Kalypso did their own engine for this, and it's got some pretty bad texture warping problems with the environments, but the atmosphere and look of the world and monsters still holds up pretty well (at least as far as retro games are concerned). An especially cool feature is that you can slice monsters apart as you get better and better weapons, and the degree to which they fall apart dynamically as you happen to hit certain body parts (hands, heads, arms, getting outright cut in half) never fails to be really cool. It makes the janky combat feel more worth it with just how satisfying it is to slice those overly fast, clunky bastards in two XD. That said, the N64 version of the game apparently not only fixes a lot of the texture warping, but it also makes the awful platforming easier, so I would posit a guess that unless the controls map onto the N64's joystick REALLY badly, that's likely the definitive version of the game on console (but that version didn't come out in Japan TwT). Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Nightmare Creatures isn't awful, but it really probably isn't worth your time. It's not terribly interesting or difficult beyond how poorly it controls, but it does have its aesthetic going for it. The big trouble here is that it's a game that isn't very fun to play, can often be frustrating, and you'll get a lot of the aesthetic enjoyment out of just watching a Let's Play or a long play online or something. It's something I'd say certainly isn't as interesting as Castlevania 64, so I'd put it beneath that game for sure, and it's something better off left to only people very interested in janky 3D games from the 5th generation. After a brief hiatus from playing Tales so I could get through another couple of short games I'd been interested in (and so I could actually have the time to go pick this game up ^^;), I made it onto the sequel to Tales of Xillia. I hadn't heard a ton about Xillia 2 other than that it was very weird as both a sequel and a Tales game. I wasn't super duper game to get to it right away, but I figured what better time to play it than right after Xillia 1. It took me about 59 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game with the true ending (and that includes like 8 or so hours of mucking around in the post-game).
The story setup is kinda complicated, but I'll do my best to give a quick summary of it. Xillia 2 takes place about a year after the first game ends and follows the story of Ludgar. Having just failed his test to get into the huge company that his brother works for, he sets off for a more mundane job as a cook when he bumps into Elle, a little girl (and another important new main character). He also bumps into Jude from Xillia 1, and from there they slowly get embroiled in a big "saving the world" plot full of mysteries, murder, dimension hopping, time travel, and more or less the entire cast of Tales of Xillia 1. Tales of Xillia 2 is a very weird game in many, many ways. For starters, Ludgar is a silent main character, and the only one in the entire mainline series of Tales games. In a game that's otherwise very much voiced, it can come across as quite uncanny as you're often talked at rather than talked to. It feels a lot less natural in the beginning of the game than as it does in the end, but it's still a very weird problem to suddenly introduce to your series. The whole reason it's introduced like that is because this game's whole stated theme is about choices, and you as Ludgar get to make choices (both important and unimportant) via the L1 and R1 buttons as those decisions come up in the story. The big theme of the game beyond just "choices" is (I would argue) the choices we make with our lives and what we'll do with them. For many characters, this means how they'll live their lives from here on out, but for many others it means how and why they'll sacrifice their lives so others may live on in their stead. Now, as an overarching theme, I don't think "radical and painful sacrifices are necessary to ensure that younger generations will even have a world to have a future in" is a bad one, but the way the game often does that via glorifying death and suicide rubbed me the wrong way, especially the way one or two characters end up dying. Another weird thing about this game is the story and game's structure itself, which is effectively divided into three parts. First of all you have the 16 main story "episodes" (written by one person who had written for many previous Tales game), then you the Character episodes which focus on a particular party member's development and story (which were written by the person who wrote Tales of Xillia 1's story), and lastly you have the time in between those chapters which aren't locked into any kind of narrative route. Now on one hand, having clear delineations on where you are in the story can be very useful in providing the player with information on what they're currently supposed to be doing and if they're progressing the story or not via their actions. However, this also has a lot of unintended side effects on the pacing and quality of the narrative that I don't believe makes that level of player informational convenience worth it. The main story itself is pretty well done, but it's also pretty heavily flawed. The main cast of the previous game is SO present and involved that Ludgar and Elle feel almost like fan-fiction-esque self-insert characters. It eventually feels a bit less uncanny, but at the start of the game that weird fan-fiction feeling is present almost constantly. That's even weirder when considering that Ludgar was intended to be the player's avatar, so effectively IS a self-insert but also his own character in a way that just isn't executed on very well. You do pick choices for him, sure, but not even that dialogue is voiced. It's a very deliberate choice for a silent main character and they do NOT hit the mark with it. It isn't an absolute disaster, as I eventually found Ludgar less of a stand-out than he appeared in the first third or so of the game, but I could very easily see people never feeling comfortable with how Ludgar is treated as a silent protagonist. This all extends into further issues with the returning cast and their character episodes. This has to be the biggest if not one of the biggest main casts in a Tales main-series game. Xillia had a relatively modest main (i.e. playable) cast of six as far as more modern Tales games go, but Xillia 2 cranks that number up to NINE with the addition of Ludgar as well as two characters from Xillia 1 who are now playable (and in fairness, had been intended to be playable in Xillia 1 but had to be cut for time reasons). Adding in the unplayable Elle makes that an effective main cast of 10, and while Elle and Ludgar's main story is executed pretty well, the rest of the cast, even with their character episodes, feel very sidelined. Only a couple of them really feel like they have worthwhile arcs to explore, and most of them feel like treading water for the sake of being there. Granted, I still enjoyed doing all of them, but it's nonetheless not difficult for me to say that the cast really could've used some trimming down by two or three characters (or even just had an entirely new main cast all together). Then you have the in-between parts, which are consumed by different optional miscellaneous quests (sometimes with story, often not) and the character episodes so you can earn money to pay off the massive debt you get near the start of the game. You need to pay off the debt in chunks that get bigger as the story progresses, and paying off a singular chunk to open up the next part of the main story is a pretty common way the game will gate progress a little to help pace things out. This is the part that feels the most like outright recycling of content from Xillia 1, from boss monsters to literally nearly every map in that entire game. It's all back for you to explore just like you did before so you can work toward paying off this debt. Now it isn't THAT all consuming a task, so you could earn the money and continue on your merry way pretty quickly if you were so inclined, but it adds so little to the main themes or even the plot that feels like nothing but padding put there to add to the Content of the game despite its short dev time. Ultimately, the narrative is okay, and middling for a Tales game, but an inescapable mess. The story very clearly feels written by two different people, and especially by the two different people that wrote it. The main story being written not by a Tales of Xillia lead writer really shows in how self-contained it feels while also making a lot of the returning cast feel not that important. The character episodes being written by the writer of Tales of Xillia makes a lot of sense given JUST how heavily those tie into characters and plot beats from Xillia 1 without the necessary re-setup of those plot elements. If you hadn't played Xillia 1, the character episodes in this would feel very odd very often because of just how much they rely on your knowledge of events in the first game to give them any weight. It's a game that was made in pieces and feels like it. Those pieces are executed on well enough, but they just don't fit into a functional whole well enough. The character writing and dialogue are still as charming and well done as ever. That familiar element of a Tales game's narrative quality is absolutely still here, but the other issues it has keep it from being something very difficult to recommend to anyone who didn't already play and love Xillia 1. The gameplay of Xillia 2 is ALSO strange on many levels compared to Xillia 1, but the narrative analysis section of this review was so long that I'll try to keep it relatively brief ^^;. In short, this game's mechanical design feels like a refutation of all of the streamlining and fat-trimming of Tales of Vesperia and Tales of Graces' formulas that Tales of Xillia 1 had done. Tons of elements from those games that had been cut or simplified such as item crafting have been re-added, while innovations such as the sphere grid-like level up system, leveling up shops, and party swapping mid-battle have been taken out. They aren't bad changes, per se, but it feels at the very least quite odd to have such a polished product as Xillia 1 followed up on by something that so deliberately walks back so much of the polishing that Xillia 1 put so much effort into. The combat has also been altered significantly beyond no longer being able to swap party members mid-battle (or even outside of towns). Without getting in too deep, most of the changes amount to making combat significantly harder, especially boss fights. A new combat focus around enemy weaknesses and stacking those weaknesses in order to get damage multipliers changes the flow of battle significantly. This is also compounded in its complexity by how Ludgar has not one but THREE different weapons with totally different sets of arts and attacks for each as well as a super form, and that's ALL on top of Xillia 1's battle-link system still being there. This all not only makes Xillia 2 a significantly harder game than Xillia 1 (and most recent Tales games up to that point in general, I'd argue), but it also makes Ludgar easily the most powerful character in the cast. This is extra weird when you consider that this has one of the largest playable casts in a Tales game, but it also pretty explicitly disincentivizes you from trying out other characters (particularly when in so many main story and character episodes, 3/4ths of your party is locked and can't be changed). That's not to say the combat isn't fun. I had a ton of fun with the combat, which I think hits somewhere closer to Graces in terms of general difficulty and technicality, but it nonetheless makes for a very strange followup to Xillia 1 given how much more streamlined and quick-paced that game's combat is compared to this. The presentation is very nice, but there are some unfortunate technical issues. Very much like Xillia 1, the game's art style and character designs are very nice and well done. I streamed this on Discord while I played it, and so many friends had the same surprise that this was a PS3 game with how pretty it looks. The music is also very nice, in the way Tales games so often do it. However, the pretty graphics come with a cost. Especially in the later parts of the game, the graphics just get a bit too hectic for the PS3 to handle and you get quite a lot of slowdown. This wouldn't be a huge problem if not for the fact that these frame rate dips REALLY hurt your input delay, and that can be the difference between life and death in a game with a relatively difficult late-game like this. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This game has a weird curse of being best fit for Tales of Xillia 1 fans but also being such a step down from that game that it's probably going to be disappointing for people familiar with that game. It's still a fine game, and remarkably well put together given that it's the first Tales game they made after Namco Bandai got rid of the dedicated Namco Tales Studio, but that's also kinda damning with faint praise. All of the weirdness isn't bad in and of itself, but it makes it a lot more difficult to get into and appreciate given how closely tied into yet totally divorced it is from its predecessor. If you can find it for cheap, and you've already played and enjoyed Tales of Xillia 1 like me, then this could definitely be worth your while, but if you just never got around to playing this after Xillia 1 and have other more pressing things to play, I think you're not missing out on a ton by passing this one up. Clockwork Knight was my pick for October's TR theme of 5th gen platformers. It wasn't exactly my first choice, but everything else I could think of I'd either already played or is weirdly very rare and expensive here in Japan (annoyingly enough). But this is a game I've been meaning to give another try for quite some time. I tried it briefly back on my American Saturn many years ago, but I never gave a ton of effort or time to beating it. I guess I've gotten a lot better at games since then, since I managed to beat the (mechanically identical) Japanese version in only 80 minutes, but I still enjoyed my time with it well enough.
Clockwork Knight was a very early Saturn release and one clearly designed to show off the audio and 3D graphical capabilities. The story is a very simple "knight must rescue the princess" sort of affair, but the added spin is that everything is toys~. You're the titular clockwork knight off to save the princess toy from whatever mysterious evil force in the house kidnapped her and turned a bunch of the other toys evil. It's a very simple story told mostly through dialogue between levels and unvoiced cutscenes, but it does the job it needs to for the kind of game this is. And the kind of game this is a quite short 2.5D platformer. It's only 8 levels with 5 bosses, and I can certainly see why it didn't exactly blow people away when it dropped back in '94/95, and I can't imagine it made Japanese players feel terribly satisfied with their Saturn purchases compared to what the SNES was getting back then. You have some levels with maze elements, but it's ultimately really nothing special. You have a jump, a dash, a short-range melee attack, and that's all she wrote. You can get coins to play a ball-and-cup game between levels, and being pretty good at ball-and-cup games, I was able to get a crap ton of extra lives, so getting a game over was never a terrible concern of mine. That said, the game is pretty tough, especially in its later levels, but a lot of that feels more down to less than stellar stage design rather than a game that's both tightly designed and challenging (not to mention how you completely restart a stage upon death, and more health is quite uncommon). The presentation is quite nice, and is definitely one of the things Clockwork Knight was created to show off. The vocal song that the game opens with is fun and poppy, and the other tracks the game has are also that 90's Sega brand of groovy and fun. The graphics seem to have taken the same approach that Pixar did with Toy Story: if all of our 3D-rendered CGI looks like plastic, why not make a game about toys? The toys have bright, colorful designs that are a delight to the eye and have unique and fun designs. However, the one drawback of that is that the 2.5D art style can at times make hitboxes not terribly clear. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Clockwork Knight is and always has been an okay game, but I don't think it's worth giving time to for most people. There's just really nothing special or unique about it outside of its historical significance to the Saturn to justify slapping down the time or the money to give it a go. If you do give it a go and you like 2D platformers, you'll probably enjoy it well enough, but it's one that, like me, you'll probably put back on the shelf forever and seldom think about again. This is a game some other friends of mine have told me is awful and not worth even looking at for ages, but a few weeks back a bunch of people on the Slack chat were talking about how much campy fun it was, and we all decided to play or replay through it over the course of the month~. I'm not much one for survival horror games, but for the 300 yen price of entry, I was willing to give Blue Stinger a shot even if it was something I ended up hating, particularly with what I'd heard about the Japanese version's different camera. It took me about 9.5 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on normal difficulty on normal hardware.
Released in 1999, Blue Stinger takes place in the faaaar future of 2018. In 2000, a big earthquake on the Yucatan Peninsula causes a ton of it to sink into the ocean, and a new island to appear on top of it. This is believed to be the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, so it's called Dinosaur Island. Elliot, our main character is boating nearby when a weird meteor strikes the island and traps it in a big weird dome. He's attacked by strange monsters that are unleashed from the island, but manages to survive and wash up onto the island. He's found by the foul-mouthed Dogs (that's his name), and the two of them team up to try and find out what's wrong with the island along with radio assistance from a sniper on the island, Janine. The story is a giant campy romp through a pastiche of action sci-fi movies. Having played the Japanese version and seen just how quick and weirdly overly detailed the subtitles are (this game has no Japanese dub, only subtitles, despite being a Japan-developed game), I'd also argue it's specifically an homage to poorly localized American action movies, and that's an element lost in translation to the English versions of the game. Another very fun thing about the game is that the VA is actually quite competently done for 1999, and even better that it's done by a bunch of the same VA folks who provided (or would provide) voices for Sonic Adventure 1 and 2, as Elliot has Sonic's VA, Dogs has Robotnik's (and sounds a LOT like him too), and Janine has Rouge's (and her voice is exactly the same). I got tons of big belly laughs out of just what a pig-headed buffoon Elliot is and what a wise-cracking jerk Dogs can be to him in response. They have great chemistry, and the slightly awkward English they speak only adds to that charm. For someone with a lot of nostalgia for Sonic Adventure 2 like me, the camp value is kinda incalculable, but even for someone unfamiliar with that, there's a ton to laugh at in Blue Stinger. Now I know I opened the review by mentioning that Blue Stinger is a survival horror game, but that's a bit of a fib on my part. The truth is that Blue Stinger is really just an action game with a fixed camera like Resident Evil or Silent Hill uses, at least in the Japanese version. The English versions of the game lock the camera behind your shoulder to help with combat, but I think that also in turn makes puzzle solving a bit more difficult since the camera is now no longer guiding you towards important objects. The combat is ultimately so easy that I don't think it really needed "fixing" like that, and I'd argue the Japanese version of the game is simply the better one, but I think it's not a point super worth debating. The gameplay itself is very survival horror like but with the quality of life features of an action game. You have clunky combat and movement, but also respawning enemies who drop money (only the enemies who drop money respawn) and infinite items you can buy. You could theoretically just grind near the start of the game for untold hours and get all the max health upgrades and items right then. It'd take you a SUPER long time, but you could do it. I found it decent fun to play. It has the same sort of awkward jankyness that all those old fixed camera horror games have (although this is a new level of awkward, as you don't actually have true tank controls and can rarely get screwed by the camera sorta getting you stuck), but the writing really carried the experience for me. The presentation is pretty impressive for 1999. Character models look quite uncanny by today's standards, but it adds to the campy charm for me. The music is pretty unvaried and not terribly impressive, but the monster designs are cool and disturbing (sometimes surprisingly so) and the environments look nice too. Verdict: Recommended. This is going to be a game a lot of people bounce off of, but if what I've described here sounds appealing, I think the game is well worth checking out. It's a game pretty easily picked up for cheap, so it shouldn't set you back terribly even if you end up not liking it. Who knows? It just might end up being one of your favorite Dreamcast games like it was for me~ (granted I have played very few 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
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