After really loving Hero Senki a few weeks ago, I was really excited to get to this game, the next in the Gundam & Kamen Rider & Ultraman crossover JRPGs. Not only was it a different company helming the project, but it was Arc System Works! Them guys that make Guilty Gear! Sure, this was a long time before they made that stuff, but I was pretty confident I’d be in for an interesting time if nothing else. Well, now that it’s all over, with my heavy use of save states (for saving time, more than anything else) as well as maps online, I’m just glad Gaia Saver was mercifully short compared to Hero Senki XD. It took me most of the weekend, so some 15 or 18 hours (this is yet another game that doesn’t count playtime) to play through the game via an emulator in Japanese.
Gaia Saver: The Ultimate Hero Operation is, as the title implies, a big operation to save the world! The world is in incredible peril. Under assault from Neo Zeon forces, Shocker’s Army, and all sorts of hostile aliens, the Earth’s livability and population drop significantly day to day, week to week. Earth’s last hope is an alliance of heroes (the Gundam, Kamen Rider, and Ultraman fellas that make up this game’s crossovery premise) who are gonna fight against all the odds to save the world! Your party rotates a lot as the story demands it, but the playable Gundam pilots are Amuro and Seabook, the Kamen Riders are Amazon, Super 1, and Black RX, and the starring Ultras are Ultraman, Ultra Seven, and Ultra Leo. Not that any of it matters, of course. This game’s story is the first primary piece in the absolutely amazing disaster of a game that is Gaia Saver. Characters in your party, and really all throughout the story, are barely characters. When they do get lines, they act wildly out of character, and it’s pretty clear that the scenario writers had almost no familiarity with the properties they were adapting beyond the very basic premises of each. The story is entirely original, and doesn’t really follow arcs or what have you from any of the adapted shows, but that just serves to even more drive home the vapidness of the story you’re going through. The story itself is *incredibly* dark, with hundreds of millions or billions of people dying and large amounts of the Earth becoming uninhabitable (often as a result of your actions), but the tone set by the graphics and music doesn’t compliment that at all. The actions you’re doing that’ll have those consequences are also almost always so poorly telegraphed that you’d have no idea there were even consequences for them at all, making them fairly poor as far as moral choices in games go. I did manage to get the best ending for both remaining population as well as Earth condition (albeit barely), and it was honestly really not worth the effort Xp. That brings us to the general design as a whole, which is similarly pretty damn embarrassing not just for a game from 1994 (the same year that gave us stuff like SMT2, FF6, and Mother 2), but as a follow up to Hero Senki. Case in point is how, in contrast to just how good and forward-facing the “consult” feature in Hero Senki was in reminding you where to go (and just having generally very good signposting), Gaia Saver has chronically horrible signposting. Massive swaths of the game are no better than a point & click adventure game in just how aimlessly you’re expected to wander around hoping to bump into the next NPC you’re meant to talk to. There’s a ton of asset reuse, even in dungeons, so they’re rarely hard to navigate, but that copy-paste philosophy is extended to towns as well, filling them with scads of useless NPCs and rooms they can be in for you to hunt for the next bit of plot within. There also aren’t even dedicated shops, and merchants don’t update, so finding just where to buy stuff in any given town, if it has a shop at all, it also a huge pain. Had I not used a guide for this stuff (as well as which decisions made the fewest people die/Earth get damaged), I’m positive it would’ve taken me at least another five or six hours of wandering around lost as heck just looking for the next NPC I’m supposed to talk to (providing I even realized I’d talked to the right person). And that’s especially thanks to just how awful the encounter rate is, which really adds a lot onto the playtime. Speaking of the random battles, let’s move on to the battle system itself, because it’s also absolutely awful and worth elaborating on (for what little there is to elaborate on). In short, Gaia Saver is an auto-battler, but it’s a 1994 SFC game instead of a modern mobile phone game. The game defaults each turn in battle to your 1-4 turn-based little fellas just picking their own best moves for that turn (no true auto-battle), and for the large, large majority of situations (including bosses), just mashing that button until combat ends will get you out of it perfectly fine. It wasn’t until chapter 6 of 8 that I had to intervene and use some healing items to get through a boss battle, and the remaining four or five bosses in the game I had to do similar for. And that’s all just assuming you get lucky enough for your attacks to hit in the first place, since accuracy of attacks (especially for bosses, but for normal enemies too) is absolutely horrible. My rough guess would be that 40 to 50% of all attacks miss, with that number going down against very weak enemies, and going substantially up (closer to 60% or higher) against certain tough enemies and bosses. It’s just one more thing that makes combat a miserable chore and not engaging at all, since even sweeping enemies is difficult to enjoy when so many attacks will just do absolutely nothing. It’s never fun, especially when you’re fighting later bosses, for seven or eight attacks in a row to just miss (and I wish that were as rare an occurrence as it probably sounds like). HP even completely refills at the end of battles, so no need to worry about what that does either. MP doesn’t auto-refill, but it does refill when you level up (or walk over a stone circle on the map), and even then, I’m not 100% sure what MP even does. My guys seemed perfectly capable of still casting “spells” even when they were totally tapped out, but they may’ve been a little bit weaker? Even what stats do is fairly confusing. They have weird names like “courage” or “friendship”, and it’s extremely unclear what tons of stats do at all. It’s also very confusing what equipment or items do. Items don’t have a description outside of shops, and it’s also not possible to tell who can equip what items until you just test it out in your inventory (and absolutely nuts thing for an RPG to have in 1994, imo). There isn’t even UI to indicate what effect your new equipment has, as the only way to do that is to look at your stats, write down what they all are, equip the item, and then compare the numbers. Mercifully, just leveling up (or simply stockpiling more healing items) seems to usually be more than enough to get by without caring much about equipment, and the game doesn’t even have treasure chests or side quests to get you extra stuff if you wanted. But it’s yet another confusing waste of time in a game that seems to be primarily an exercise in frustration and misdirection. As described earlier, the aesthetics of the game do nothing to help the tone or plot, and they for the most part aren’t even particularly nice or coordinated on their own. There are maybe 5 music tracks in the game, and they’re all hopelessly generic and forgettable the moment you stop hearing. The music that’s playing in the area you’re in even resets every time you enter a door, so even though virtually every town has identical music, you’re gonna hear the first few bars of the town song SO many times as you scour buildings for necessary NPCs over and over. The general color palette of the game isn’t very nice, and the over-world sprites are also noticeably uglier on the whole than Hero Senki’s were. Even the quite pretty opening cinematic is strange and wrong in how it shows a bunch of Heroes that will supposedly feature in the game (Rider Man, Alex Gundam, Gun Cannon), only for literally all of them to not only never appear in the game, but never even be mentioned. The singular strong point of the game is that the battle sprites and animations are quite nice. Enemy sprites are big and detailed, though they generally lack any animation and also very confusingly have American comic-style “Woosh!” and “Shoot!” effects in English to indicate they’re attacking. Your party NPCs are also very nice looking, and their animations have a fair few little flourishes here and there that make battles at the very least look cool, even if they’re a boring chore to experience. Verdict: Not Recommended. As if there would be any doubt I’d not recommend this after reading this far ^^;. Gaia Saver isn’t quite the worst game I’ve played this year. I’m not sure it’s even the worst SFC JRPG I’ve played this year, as the first Knight Gundam Monogatari game being nigh incompletable it’s so poorly balanced just about takes the crown in that regard. However, it’s easily still one of the worst games I’ve played this year and one of the worst of these mecha/crossover games I’ve ever played. While Hero Senki is a neat curiosity worth checking out for fans of the properties involved, Gaia Saver, mercifully lacking any sort of English translation, is one to stay far, far away from unless you simply must experience how boring and frustrating it is for yourself.
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Though I didn’t quite realize it starting out, with this game ends my journey through the Super Robot Wars games released on the original PS1 (granted I didn’t play F and F Final on this console, they were still released on it!). I’d originally heard, way back like when I was actually playing through the F games and thinking about playing more of these games, that Shin wasn’t very good and that it wasn’t worth playing. I figured after playing the glacially slow and very much a SFC port SRW 4S, that this would be a similar sort of slog before I got onto bigger and better SRW things released after the turn of the millennium. Imagine my surprise when this turned out to be something I enjoyed so much! Sure, it ain’t perfect, but it’s a game I’m super glad I played at any rate. I played through both routes to get the secret final mission after them, and doing that all on real hardware probably took me about 70 or 80 hours over the course of 2.5 weeks (as we are never allowed to have playtime counters in these things no matter what console generation we’re in, it seems XP).
Shin SRW’s story (as the name implies) is an explicit departure from the series’s narrative up to that point, with a whole new continuity and a bunch of new appearances. Not only do we have Gaiking and SPT Blue Layzner making their first appearances in the series, but we also have the first console appearances of G Gundam and Victory Gundam (those last two taking up a lot of the narrative in their respective parts). When it comes to U.C. Gundam stuff, we also get some interesting laser focusing on specifically Char’s Counter Attack rather than as the first three series as a whole, and lastly we even get the debut of SRW’s second original series-within-a-series: The SRX Team (who are written quite differently as to how they’d appear in later incarnations). The game also has design very similar to SRW EX’s scenario system, but instead of completely separate scenarios that take place over the same period of time, you have a route split around 6 mission in that determines which of the next 30 missions (i.e. the rest of the game) you’ll experience. All of these interesting focuses on particular series in ways that don’t get done again on top of that design choice make this game have a very cool style all its own, and I absolutely loved it. While it’s hardly high art with meaningful themes beyond the bits of the stories that it’s adapting, it’s a thoroughly entertaining romp in ways that the other WinkySoft SRW games really aren’t, and I thoroughly enjoyed playing through both halves of it. Shin Super Robot Wars (also called Neo Super Robot Wars by the game itself, for whatever reason) was released after SRW4 and SRW4’s remake(s) via F and F Final. It was originally intended to be the start of a new sub-series within SRW (as some hints dropped in the secret final mission very heavily (albeit bittersweetly) imply), but as the project that would become F and F Final ballooned in scale, it was decided that this would simply be a one-off as to pool resources more wisely and not confuse customers as to which series they were partaking in. Part of that division of resources is why this game’s writing feels so different to the WinkySoft games both before and after it, as this wasn’t written by the usual writer (who was apparently feeling a bit burned out at the time), but instead by WinkySoft’s president himself. He did a bang up job, in my personal opinion, as especially with the original characters, this game is oozing with funny moments and personality. I especially loved how clueless and not always on top of everything the main antagonists were by the nature of their overconfidence. It made for a dynamic that you very infrequently get to see in SRW games like this. While I wouldn’t call it a tragedy that we never got any more games in this sub-series, this was a super fun experiment that stands on its own really well, and it’s still at least a bit of a shame that WinkySoft never got the chance to try this again. Mechanically, we’re both far improved on where we were in SRW 4S, but also noticeably behind where we’d be by SRW F. As far as the basics of upgrading weapons individually as well as stats with money, pilots being unique from their units, spirit abilities that each unit has, basic SRPG Fire Emblem-ish gameplay, that’s all still here. This is still very noticeably SRW, so no surprises there. On the incredibly important point of loading times (given that this IS a 1996 PS1 game), they’re better than SRW 4S (thank gods), but they’re still not amazing, and you also still can’t skip or turn off battle animations yet. You can at the very least tell that we’re playing a game designed from the ground up for the PS1, as everything for navigating around the map is just so much nippier and faster than SRW 4 was. Map design is also a fair whack better, though you can really feel them struggling to get to that 35 mission counter with how incredibly short some missions are (and the underwater and truck defense missions are AWFUL, even if they aren’t too long). While it’s nice to have some shorter missions for a change in this era of SRW, these are SO short it’s pretty obvious that they’re just padding. This game is also quite easy. It’s not *too* easy, and it’s far from how mean SRW F and F Final can be, but for someone looking for something to cut their teeth on, they’re really not gonna find that here. I enjoyed the difficulty as it was, but I certainly would’ve preferred something at least a little harder. On the topic of more just outright bad things, we’re tragically still chained the item acquisition system from SRW 4, though this is mercifully the final game to have it. You still need to either look up a guide to where items are hidden in invisible places in each map, or use the Search spirit ability to find any equippable item. While it’s still the case that every unit across the board can only equip 2 items at once instead of it being specific to each unit like it is starting in F, we do get the small mercy of significantly more units having Search in the first place. Another annoying holdover from the earlier games that is again the last game to have it is that support units still do not get EXP from healing or refilling ammo (that’s another innovation that F brings to the table). It’s not awful, as the game is easy enough that you don’t really need dedicated healing or ammo refilling units anyhow as opposed to just using spirit abilities for that stuff, but that they even went as far as to give healers only 1 or 2 charges of healing before they’re tapped out for the battle (unless you’re gonna waste a reload charge on them) just feels so unnecessarily mean on top of all that. It’s not like healers were particularly good or even a little bit useful in SRW 4, so this nerf of an already bad unit type is nothing but baffling to me. Aesthetically, it’s generally quite nice although a pretty mixed bag. We’re clearly no longer using glorified SFC tracks like we used to be in SRW 4S, and a lot of the arrangements here are really good (especially the original tracks), but a few are arranged so strangely. Very familiar classics like the Getter Robo theme or the Mazinger Z theme (they’re in damn near all these games so any SRW fan would be very familiar with them) are arranged in a way that makes it sound like one instrument is doing the melody amongst a smattering of backing tracks (like they just took out the vocal part and replaced it with an instrument). It doesn’t sound awful, but it pales pretty hard in comparison to other versions they’ve done of these themes they’d do very shortly after (or even had done on the SFC). Even some of the newcomers to the series like Trider G7 have themes with this One Instrument Syndrome, making it even all the more perplexing as to why they chose to do it like this. While the music may be a mixed bag, graphically it’s basically all positives. As the final SFC game had also done, we’ve abandoned the iconic super deformed style (and by loose extension, the SD Gundam license) and all of the included robots are just drawn with their normal proportions in their normal styles. Some robots like the Shin Getter Robo look pretty weird, but most of them look really good. We also have a lot of very nice animations for the time, with neat little flourishes like with how the Layzner does its punches on the small end, and really cool high-detail cutaways for a very significant amount of the super/special moves (like Mazinger Z’s Breast Fire or the Shining Gundam’s Shining Finger). I was very skeptical of the lack of the SD style going in, but it had me sold on how nice it looks pretty quickly. We even get some cool pre-rendered 3D cutscenes for one or two of the super robot combining sequences, which is a neat extra aesthetic treat~. Verdict: Recommended. As a strategy game, I’m not sure this is necessarily the best of the WinkySoft games, but as an overall product (particularly in regards to the writing), this may be my new overall favorite of their tenure over SRW. The interactions between and during missions had me in stitches more times than I can count, and I had a ton of fun relating them to friends after (and even ones who aren’t into mecha stuff just about always enjoyed them x3). The gameplay is fun and mostly well designed, and even though the rough edges with certain missions and the whole need to Search for items makes this hard to Highly Recommend, this is still one very worth playing if you can deal with the loading times and battle animations (and of course if you can read Japanese ^^;). This isn’t exactly a Super Robot Wars game, but it’s also not exactly *not* one either x3. It’s a game I learned about from the friend who introduced SRW to me, when they were explaining to me the sort of precursor series to SRW, Compati Heroes. A crossover not between mecha shows but between Gundam, Kamen Rider, and Ultraman (other hallmarks of Japanese TV), Compati Heroes has a wide range of genres and games across various Nintendo systems, and it happens to contain several JRPGs. This JRPG in particular was actually made by WinkySoft, the very devs who headed the first decade or so of SRW games, and has some interesting connective tissue to SRW in certain ways (they even jokingly reference it by name a few times in the later SRW SFC games). As a big SRW fan, it absolutely piqued my interest, to say the least, and I hunted down a ROM of it to play rather than fumble around hoping a physical copy’s save battery still worked. It took me about 34 or so hours to complete the Japanese original version of the game (with virtually no save state use at all, for reasons that will become very apparent very soon).
Hero Senki tells the story of the world of Erupisu, a world of three large continents who *do* have real names but whose nicknames became so popular that they’re basically the only ones used anymore: The Gundam Continent (a land of mobile suit use), the Rider Continent (a land that developed cyborg tech), and the Ultra Continent (where the Ultra folk live). But peace escapes the world of Erupisu. Terrorist organizations across the world threaten innocent lives more and more each day, and the main governments of the three continents (The EUGO Federation, the Rider Republic, and the Kingdom of Light) create an international counter-terror unit called ZEUS (Z Extraordinary United Space) (Yes, that first letter really is just the letter ‘Z’, not a word) to combat it. These members of ZEUS are your main party of three, Amuro (from original Gundam), Kamen Rider Black (from his titular series), and Ultra Seven (also from his titular series), as they set out on their heroic and odd adventure to bring peace to the land. Now unlike with Super Robot Wars, where with advice from my friend and just having played so many of them, I have a pretty good familiarity with the series being represented there, neither I nor my friend can say the same with Ultraman or Kamen Rider. We have some familiarity with more modern Kamen Rider series (especially her), but we know heck all about Ultraman outside of the base conceit, so it was really diving into the world of the unknown starting this game. That said, it was still really enjoyable! The humor and writing are very reminiscent of WinkySoft’s SRW games, with lots of cute references and jokes that work well with or without knowledge of the represented series. Even though original Gundam, Kamen Rider Black, and Ultra Seven get main stage, characters from many series of each make some greater or lesser appearances as NPCs or as your constantly rotating (due to plot) 4th party member. Assuming that the way they use Gundam is the same way they use the Kamen Rider and Ultraman licenses, they’re not so much recreating scenarios from the shows they’re from (as SRW so often does), so much as using them as pieces in a wider, weirder fan fiction, and it’s really fun. It’s hardly high art with much to say in terms of its overall themes (or at least much to say all that well), but as far as silly crossover entertainment, I think it does a bang up job of being a silly, fun, and even sometimes dramatic adventure that can be enjoyed even with only passing knowledge of the series at hand. Mechanically speaking, Hero Senki is a *very* simple game compared to its contemporaries. Now this isn’t something like the first SFC Knight Gundam Monogatari, where it feels like a glorified Famicom game but made in 16-bit (thankfully), but the mechanical depth at play is nowhere even close to other 1992 SFC releases like Final Fantasy 5, Dragon Quest 5, or SMT1 (or even Knight Gundam Monogatari 2, for that matter). That said, that design approach feels very purposeful and in-line with how WinkySoft usually made their SRW games. Even though the balance might not always be brilliant, the main focus with mechanics is accessibility. They’re going for an experience that most readily brings the crossover fun of the writing to the audience, and in that regard I think they execute really well (even if, as mentioned, the balance is a bit all over the place at times). As far as what those specific mechanics are, they’re pretty bog standard JRPG in most regards. You have those 3 party members who are more permanent (save for when they get separated for the handful of solo-ish sections in the story), and then the rotating 4th party member. Mobile suits tend to be fast and tanky but not very strong, Kamen Riders are strong but squishy, and Ultras are slow but very health-full and are your attack and healing casters. The main 3 guys have a weapon and an armor (just the one) you can change out as you find or purchase more, but they’re basically just flat upgrades (and your 4th guy’s equipment can’t be changed ever). If one costs more, it’s just better. There’s no status effects or debuffs to worry about with your team, at least. Some enemies can sometimes inflict statuses on you, but even then, they inflict those statuses very infrequently, so while the hold limit on a single kind of item is only 9, that number will rarely be a problem outside of healing items. Each fighter has a special skill that they can use, but they’re so specific and often weak that you’ll rarely use them if ever. They also have special skills that cost TP (they’re basically spells), and the one weird mechanic the game has is that you can’t heal TP at hospitals, only HP. The only way to regain TP is through very rare (almost) impossible to buy healing items, or just doing attacks in battle, with small amounts regained for normal smacks and 10 times that amount for getting a kill. This makes refilling your TP amount after a boss fight a real pain, but it does mean you can generally grind or explore in most dungeons, but that’s if you’d even care to explore. The game has a weird loot and EXP curve, being generally more stingy and harder at the start and getting more forgiving as you go on, but the very small amount of equipment in the game means there’s almost never anything valuable in treasure chests. They will rarely have an item that will slightly increase a stat permanently, or in the end game you might even find a super good equipment item, but for the most part what you’re finding in chests is really underwhelming. The dungeon and enemy design themselves are generally pretty good, and it’ll be pretty rare that you really feel unprepared or under-leveled for the challenge at hand with just how tough what you’re fighting is. Bosses are usually quite fairly designed, but their difficulty is honestly all over the place. This isn’t helped by what I think is a willpower mechanic (not unlike their SRW games), where taking more damage in battle will cause bosses to get higher and higher attack and defense as the fight goes on, but then at a certain point those gains just suddenly reset for reasons I really could only barely guess. Willpower as a whole was an entirely inscrutable mechanic for me, so that’s all I can really chalk it up to. The game is overall easy and simple enough that it’s just a shame there’s no auto-fight feature in the battles, as it would’ve been really appreciated for how simple most random encounters are. The puzzle design is really good too, with things being really well signposted, and the pause menu even having a “conference” button, where your guys will talk about what you’re meant to do next to give you a good kick in the right direction if you’re having trouble or forgot what to do. It’s not full-proof, but I’m pretty impressed that there was only one ever puzzle that I needed to look up the solution to online. These are all story-important puzzles though. This is a game with surprisingly almost zero side content, and I searched high and low but only ever found two tiny things that could be at all described as optional content. This isn’t a problem, per se, and means they could focus more on making a well crafted, linear narrative, and that focus really shows with how generally good the difficulty curve and narrative pacing are. Overall, the game really does feel like it was made with approachability being the core importance of its design, from the linearity to the difficulty of combat to even how there are no save points: You can just save anywhere! Aesthetically, the game looks about as you’d expect for a 3rd party SFC JRPG of this era. We decidedly don’t look like a glorified Famicom game anymore, and it really looks and feels “next gen” for the time. The battle animations on your characters are pretty elaborate for the time, and there are a really impressive amount of enemy units even taking into consideration all of the recycled stronger versions of guys that just have slightly changed names. The music isn’t super varied (with a whole one battle theme + one more for the final boss), but is overall good. At the end of the day, though, as with WinkySoft’s SRW titles, it’s not hard to see that representation of aspects of the included series was a really serious priority, and damn does its how with the sheer amount of sprite art in this game. Verdict: Recommended. This is a pretty darn solid game. Other than the rough difficulty and kinda dragging gameplay (with a bit of grinding needed here and there), I really don’t have much I could really complain all that seriously about. The main barrier to a high recommendation here is the nature of the product, as if you’re in the market for a more technical JRPG or have active disinterest in the series being represented in the crossover, you’re probably going to find your time with this pretty darn boring. But if you’re okay with a more simple JRPG and you have an interest in (or just have an open mind for) the crossover silliness, there’s a lot to enjoy with Hero Senki. This is also a game that has a fan translation in English (granted I can’t speak to its quality or lack thereof), so this is one even readers of this who don’t know Japanese can go and enjoy should they so choose ^w^ |
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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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