Known in English as (very confusingly from the Japanese perspective) “Pokemon Stadium 2”, this, the third Pokemon Stadium game, has been one I’ve owned in some form or another for ages. I’d always written off all of these games as just too hard to bother with trying to ever finish to the point I saw the credits. Too much time to train up a team alongside historically having neither a working Transfer Pak nor the gen 1 and 2 games to use to do this stuff properly. However, with my recent Pokemon mania of playing through Pokemon Gold as well as having a Transfer Pak and even a copy of Pokemon Green as well as a link cable, I decided it was time to funnel my current N64 mania into a new mission: Finally reaching the credits of a Pokemon Stadium game. It’s sorta impossible to really try and calculate a “completion time” for these games, as I used both of my completed saves of Pokemon Green and Pokemon Gold to acquire and train up Pokemon to use in this thing, and that isn’t even counting the time I spent playing the game itself. At the very least, playing the Japanese versions on real hardware over the course of about a normal work week, it took me about six or seven days to get through everything with the teams I’d put together as well as using various rental Pokemon (as well as guides on how best to use them XP).
There really isn’t any story to speak of for any Pokemon Stadium game. They’re really just Pokemon battle simulators that have a bundle of single-player content as well as a free battle mode along with some mini-games if you’re hanging out with your friends and want something fun to do. The battle mechanics for those multiplayer modes are also very clever. Your moves and Pokemon are actually hidden behind what are effectively spoiler windows unless you decide to show them, so your opponent has no idea what Pokemon or moves you’re picking despite the fact that you’re both using the same screen to play. Up until this point, the most time I’d actually spent with this game was by far concentrated in the mini-games, and while they’re indeed really fun, they’re never gonna help you reach the credits XD. As far as the single-player content goes, you have two main areas: the Gym Leader Castle and the Stadium. You’ll need to clear all of both areas to see the credits, and there’s actually an even harder version of everything you can unlock *after* the credits, but beating the first round of content was so hard, I had no intention of playing the second round if I had already reached the credits XD In the Stadium, you have four tournaments, with two of those having four divisions (for a total of ten cups of eight battles you’ll need to clear to win this). You have the four divisions (which are basically difficulties) of the Nintendo Cup, which is any Pokemon allowed from levels 50-55. Then there’s the Little Cup, which is only Pokemon of level 5. There’s the Ultra Cup, which is Pokemon leveled 1 to 100 ( though all of your competitors have only level 100 Pokemon). Finally, you have my personal favorite, the four divisions of the Challenge Cup, which is basically a card draft type of tournament. You’re given a random team of six Pokemon, and it’s your job to try and use them to win the next eight battles with them. That one is great fun! I trained up my own team to beat the Nintendo Cup, and then I had to use rental Pokemon (ones the game pre-provides for you to use, but are generally less good than any team you’d properly prepared yourself) for the Little and Ultra Cups. Those last two were easily the hardest and roughest parts of the game and not only because I had to use rental Pokemon. It’s largely because, if I hadn’t, grinding up a suitable team for both would’ve taken untold hours of work, and I had no interest in doing that. By and large, the stadium section is really good fun for the fun parts while being pretty miserable in the worse parts due to the RNG that’s required to win. Granted, that goes for any time you’re going to be using rental Pokemon in this game, but the Little Cup having so little room for error (as you’re all basically minimum level) means that it’s mostly an exercise in getting lucky enough to win no matter how well prepared you are. The Gym Leader Castle is exactly what it sounds like, for the most part. You have the eight gym leaders from Johto as well as the Elite Four + Champion in little mini-gauntlets, and beating the gauntlet will clear the stage. There are two or three normal trainers before the gym leader themselves, but those trainers are usually so easy that they feel like something of a waste of time before the actual challenging gym leader. There are even the Kanto gym leaders to fight afterwards, but they’re generally a lot easier and also have no gauntlets to go through. This ends up making it feel very much indeed like playing actual generation 2 Pokemon, where Johto is the actually challenging part, and your run through of Kanto is more like a victory lap XD. Unlike in the stadium cups, where beating a round without having any Pokemon get KO’d gives you a continue to use if you fail, there are no continues in the Gym Leader Castle, so it can be pretty unforgiving. The one nice thing about the Gym Leader Castle is that you can use whatever Pokemon you like in terms of both actual Pokemon as well as their respective levels. The AI trainers you fight against all have Pokemon of the same level as your highest Pokemon, so just bringing in a team of level 50 Pokemon (likely even the same ones you’re using for the stadium’s Nintendo Cup) makes this a very fun and challenging trial to overcome. Overall, the single-player content’s design is a very mixed bag. If you’re using rental Pokemon, winning is often simply down to just getting lucky enough. That then goes double for the more poorly designed tournaments like the Little Cup. Even if you’re using a team you trained up yourself, just getting unlucky can mess you up way harder than in normal Pokemon games, as these games actually mirror official tournament rules in that you don’t get a choice to swap out Pokemon when you KO one of your opponent’s Pokemon. Another very annoying difficult spike is from how you bring a team of six, sure, but then you choose only three of them to actually battle with (and so does your opponent). This means you can have an immaculate team prepared, but since you just got unlucky with your three picks verses what your opponent picked, you’re super dead anyhow. Pokemon is always a game of luck, to no small degree, so this stuff admittedly *does* go with the territory. Picking unluckily can screw over your AI opponents just as much as it can with you, of course, though I’m not about to admit that they don’t cheat sometimes here and there in knowing what you’re going to do before you do it. Team building is also fun, but it’s also very strategic. This is tournament rules Pokemon, and if you’re going to build your own teams in the GameBoy games, you need to build teams to win, not just ones with Pokemon you like (because the AI is absolutely here to win, no bones about it ^^; ). If that’s your kind of deal, then the single-player content here will likely be a good and challenging time, but if this all sounds dreadful, then it’s likely you’re going to have more fun just messing around in the single-player mode than actually trying to finish it in any respect (which, in my opinion at least, is the far more fun option to take XD). As for the presentation, they absolutely knock it out of the park. The announcer over Pokemon matches makes things feel very silly and extra high energy, and the music is a ton of really fun renditions of tracks from the GameBoy games. The actual visuals are quite limited, of course, as this is largely just a battle simulator, but the Pokemon do look pretty damn good. By the end of your time with this game, you’ll be able to very well appreciate just why nearly half the credited developers on this are 3D modelers for the Pokemon XD. All 250+ are animated and rendered in delightful detail, and watching them fight and use their moves is always really fun. I’d actually never registered my own Pokemon to be used in one of these games before, despite having played them in some form for over 20 years now, and I really do have to say that it was an absolutely thrilling experience seeing my lads I’d spent so long training up burst onto the screen in 3D. The presentation does exactly what you’d hope it’d do, and it’s awesome. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While the multiplayer content is super fun and enough of a reason to check this game out all on its own, the single-player content is difficult enough that it is likely to really turn off completionists. It’s usually well polished, and certain parts like the Challenge Cup tournament are such unique game variants that I’ll just replay on my own for fun, but the luck required to actually overcome the difficulty present in the hardest tournaments is really just more trouble than it’s worth. At the end of the day, this is a very easy game to recommend to just try out and play, but it’s a much harder game to recommend you try to beat.
0 Comments
Literally translating to “My Summer Vacation”, this is a game I’ve had some greater or lesser interest in for well over a year now, but it took me this long to actually find a copy for sale in Book Off XD. Before playing it, I honestly didn’t have much idea of what it was about at all. I knew it was some kind of life sim taking place over a young boy’s summer vacation, and I knew it was lauded very highly for its writing, but that was really it. Sure, the later releases were easier to find, but I wanted to see where the series started! X3. It ended up taking me around 13 or so hours to play through it on real hardware.
Boku No Natsuyasumi is the story of the titular character, Boku (which can be a first-person pronoun for a boy/man and is sometimes used as a cutesy nickname for a young boy, but in this case it’s just used as the character’s name) and his summer vacation the year he was nine years old. His mother was about to have a baby, so his parents arranged for him to stay with his aunt’s family as to give his parents some breathing room during that period. His aunt’s family, the Sorano family, are composed of his aunt and uncle as well as his older cousin Moe and his cousin of similar age Shirabe. The opening narration says simply that this was a summer whose events he has never forgotten, and that actually brings me to an interesting point in and of itself. Our opening narration is done by an older man speaking from Boku’s perspective. The narrative is specifically framed as an older man (likely in his 40’s, much like the game’s creator was at the time this was made) reflecting upon his childhood. This framing device makes clear what otherwise might be a little more buried in the subtext: this is first and foremost a nostalgia piece, and a reflective one at that. Though the topics in this game aren’t anything M-rated that a kid couldn’t or shouldn’t see, the audience for this game is absolutely an adult one. Boku No Natsuyasumi is a game about looking back at your adolescence, about a time when you had no responsibilities of the harsh adult world, and not just getting to go through them again, but being able to reflect on what it means to do so. That’s not to say that Boku’s summer break is entirely devoid of interesting or impactful happenings, quite far from it, but I hesitate to say much more about the actual events (or possible events) of the story because this is a game I think it makes much more sense to simply experience yourself. The actual gameplay of BNNY is relatively simple as such things go. Though this game is most easily described as a life sim, I think it fits the mold of an adventure game much more easily. There are no stats or survival elements to worry about, being that you’re just a grade-schooler staying up in the mountains with your extended family, but you do have various chores you can be responsible for and other activities you can do. You can explore the mountains, talk to your family, fish in the ponds and streams, or catch bugs (to either preserve in your bug catching kit or use to battle other kids in beetle fights), though there honestly isn’t a ton more than that. Granted I had a lot of fun exploring, trying my best to partake in story events, and also catching as many bugs as I could, but this *is* just a rural Japanese home in the 70’s. There’s not a massive amount to do, but making the best of your month off from school is what this game is all about. You don’t really *have* to do anything: It’s your summer vacation, so make the best of it the way you see best~. The presentation is very simple but also homey in a way that fits the game very well. People are relatively simple looking 3D models that almost resemble a child’s drawings of people, but I found that to be both charming as well as come off as very intentional. You have a picture-diary that you write in every day to save the game, and Boku draws people just as they appear in the game. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to assume that, because we’re going down his memory lane, we see the people in his life as he remembers them through his drawings. Aside from that, the game is basically all those good old 2D pre-rendered backdrops that PS1 rpgs and adventure games love so much, and being a quite late-life PS1 game, they all look very nice. The sound design is also very well done in this game, having overall very little music save to underscore very important scenes/events, and most of the soundscape is just the background sounds of living in the Japanese countryside. The game is also fully voice acted, with all spoken dialogue (and even a fair bit of the narration) being voiced very well. The aesthetics work together with the writing beautifully, and I couldn’t possibly imagine the game not having all the VA to help bring the story to life the way it does. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a truly excellent game and easily one of the best games on the PS1, to my reckoning. This is one of the earliest examples in games history of a game where I can point to and say “this is a game that is making art in a way that only a video game can.” This is sadly also a game that’s unlikely to get a translation anytime soon (largely because of all of the oh-so-common in the PS1 era videos with voiced dialogue but no text over it), and it’d honestly be a very hard game to translate at the best of times, in my opinion. There’s a lot here both culturally and historically that you’d need to be quite familiar with Japan in the first place to really take in in the way you probably should, so any would be localizer would have an extremely daunting task on their hands. Regardless, for those who can understand the language and enjoy story based games, this is an all time great of the generation that is absolutely not one to miss out on. This is a game I picked up for 500 yen *ages* ago during a different N64 kick of mine. Finishing up Pilotwings 64 the other day, my friends in the voice chat I was in were talking a bunch about racing games, and it got me thinking of this yet unplayed N64 racing game I had lying around. It seemed like the perfect time to finally pop this game in and give it a proper shot. While it’s certainly not as famous or talked about as Rareware’s other N64 racing title, Diddy Kong Racing, it’s nonetheless a Rareware game from back then they made nearly nothing but hits, so it seemed high time I finally check it out. It took me about 7 hours to get platinum or gold rankings in almost every normal non-mirror race (which I didn't bother with), and I did it in the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
Though a racing game, Mickey’s Speedway USA actually does have a narrative to it. Displayed through the confusing choice of late 90’s computer GUI interfaces, we see Mickey going outside to play with Pluto, only to find a note. The note is from the dastardly Weasels, and they’ve stolen Pluto and his diamond-encrusted collar and are driving cross country with him! They even send you picture postcards they’ve custom made as you go through the game of the Weasels torturing Pluto at different locations, and it made for an extremely uncomfortable and very badly aged attempt at humor ^^;. At any rate, Mickey hits up his friends as soon as they can, and with the help of Professor Von Drake, they get into go-karts and start doing races to get good enough at driving to catch those Weasels and rescue Pluto. It’s a weird narrative with some very badly aged aspects to it, but it’s a fine enough excuse for a racing game, I suppose XD The game itself gives you the choice of six racers with three actual stat variations between them (Mickey’s stats are identical to Donald’s, for example) with another three unlockable throughout the game. You then have five different cups of four races each, and you have three CC ratings to play each race at. While getting the highest score total in one will get you a gold trophy, getting first in all four races gets you a special platinum trophy. Platinums are usually what you want for unlocking new characters, but there’s actually a tenth character waiting for anyone dedicated enough to both have the GBC version of this game alongside the tech to connect it up to this game via an N64 Transfer Pak. Pain in the butt special unlock conditions aside, it’s overall a very familiar formula for anyone who’s played a kart racer before. However, while this game has some special aspects to it, I think it ultimately doesn’t impress too terribly for a game coming out as late as 2000 (some 3-ish years after Mario Kart 64 and even a year after Crash Team Racing). At least for me, I’m not a huge fan of different characters with different stats, at least not like this. The unlockable characters in particular feel like pretty straightforward power upgrades, and there felt like very little reason to use older characters once I’d unlocked even my first new one. The tracks themselves are okay, but they’re both a bit barren as well as being very short. Most of them have very little in the way of obstacles or interesting sections, and you’ll get through all three laps of most of them in less than two minutes, and you’ll likely be looking at sub-minute times for many tracks on anything above the lowest CC ranking. This is, of course, with the exception of the last cup's tracks. First of all, to even unlock the final cup, you need to find a hidden car part in each of the four previous cups, and those things are hidden quite well to impossibly well, and finding them without a guide back in the day must've been absolutely miserable. As for the cup itself, it REALLY feels like they were compensating here for how relatively uninspired the previous tracks mostly were XD. They're *packed* with narrow corridors with slow-down parts on both sides and so many bottomless pits that the CPUs fall off of them constantly. Generally weak track design was a very big sticking point for me in a lot of this game, and even though I'm not the biggest Mario Kart 64 fan, I found myself wishing for its track design quite a lot during my time with this game. As for the CC rankings themselves, I hesitate to call them “difficulties” as such, either, as honestly the CPUs appeared to more or less always be playing just as well. They seem to be more difficult the more difficult the tier of cup you were challenging was, but outside of that, they never seemed to be more intelligent or better at the game whether I was on the highest or lowest CC ranking. Those CC rankings themselves are also no joke. The CC rankings in Mario Kart change your speed, sure, but to be perfectly honest, I never even realized it until very recently because the changes in speed never felt that great. In this game, it is absolutely impossible to ignore just how great the speed difference is, because you’re going like twice as fast even just going between the first and second CC rankings (though there honestly felt like much less of a jump between the second and third rankings). It’s an interesting idea, sure, but it just doesn’t compensate for much when the game seems to lack drift boosting and is also generally laden down with poor AI and fairly mediocre track design. The number of players is also something interesting. Six players feels a little small for a kart racer, though with tracks this small perhaps it just works better? It also easily could’ve been a technical concern, as this game’s framerate is REALLY good, especially for an N64 game (though perhaps it just feels that way because I’d just come off of playing Pilotwings 64 XD). It likely also needs that framerate for JUST how fast it has you going on the highest CC ranking, of course. But even still, it's a blessing in disguise, ultimately, that you have those smaller player numbers. Six players including yourself might also feel like a small number because this game just generally has a very lackluster item pool that is at the same time very poorly balanced. You have equivalents of Mario Kart’s green shell, a crappy red shell, a good red shell (which is very rare and is like a blue shell for specifically the guy ahead of you), an oil slick that’s basically Mario Kart’s banana peel, a turbo boost that’s one of Mario Kart’s mushrooms, a rain cloud that slows everyone and keeps them from using items, and an invincibility item like the power star in Mario Kart. The thing with the power star item in particular is that these tracks are so small that if *any* AI gets them, it's basically an "I win" button for them, since particularly on harder tracks it's hard for it not to be something that gets them so far into the lead that you have no chance at all to win. It can be extremely disheartening to be doing well on a later track and then just get victory robbed from you by an invincible jerk at the last second, and it makes the already frustrating final tracks in the game that much more difficult to put up with. At the very least the game *does* have an in-game infinite retries of a track cheat to get past this crap reasonably XD. Overall, the item pool is just yet another way where this game feels like more mediocre and far less polished Mario Kart 64. Like the track design, it's not the worst I've ever seen, sure, but it's not exactly justifying my choice of kart racer compared to the N64's more famous entries in this genre (which this game is so blatantly copying). While the execution may be mediocre, the presentation is far less so. The story scenes are very well animated an illustrated, and the characters themselves look awesome. Unlike a near-launch title like Mario Kart 64, you and your fellow racers are actually 3D models, not just 2D sprites, and they look great too. I never play Goofy, and I certainly don’t like losing, but it nevertheless always makes me smile to see the way his ears flap in the wind behind him when he passes me, just like they do in the cartoons~. Additionally, while they weren’t redubbed for the Japanese release, the characters also have quite a few voiced lines of dialogue they’ll shout (a bit too often, frankly) as you race. There are a lot of generic ones, of course, but there are also a really surprising amount of ones particular to specific character interactions, and it makes for a very unique feeling racing experience on the console. On top of the generally good to very good music selection for the game (if you can hear it over all the mid-race racer chat), and the presentation is easily one of the strongest things this game has going for it. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This certainly isn’t a bad game by any means, but it’s just really not impressive enough to really go out of your way to try and hunt down. For big Disney fans, I’m sure this will be a really cool and fun time, but as far as kart racers go, this is a thoroughly mediocre one even for the time, and that goes double for a console like the N64 that has SO many excellent racing games of all stripes on it. It's also quite a tough and relatively frustrating one if you're going to try and see the credits, though I'd say that there's plenty of fun to be had without seeing the credits, of course. This is certainly a neat entry in Rareware’s history, but for all but big Rareware, Disney, and/or N64 racing fans, I wouldn’t really say this is particularly worth going out of your way to acquire or go out and play for any reason beyond engaging with it as a curiosity. While I’ve played the Mario 64 to all 120 stars some four or five times now, until now I’d never so much as owned, let alone played, Pilotwings 64, the other launch title for the N64. After finding it at Book Off for 100 yen a few days back (and myself having a 100 yen off coupon), I felt it was high time to correct that gap in my play experience. It took me about 7 or 8 hours in total to get gold badges on all of the normal stages sans the last rocket belt one, and I also got silver (and sometimes gold) on all of the extra games as well to unlock all of the content. I did it on the Japanese version of the game, and I played it all on real hardware.
There really isn’t any narrative to speak of in Pilotwings 64. Perhaps there’s some in the manual or something, but there’s certainly none in the game at the very least. Regardless, the premise is perfectly clear without it. You’re here to get your flying certification! Well, certainly not a pilot’s license, as you never actually fly any planes, but something similar no doubt with all of the time in the air you’re doing XD. You have your choice of six characters (who are only cosmetically different save for some very small exceptions) to go through all four tiers (Beginner, A Class, B Class, and P Class) of three activities: Hangliding, rocket belt-ing, and gyrocoptering (which is like a plane a bit, I suppose). Each class of activity has one to three tasks you need to complete, and each task has a score of 0 to 100 for you to go for, and depending on your total score, you’ll get a badge rank at the end (average of 70 is bronze, 80 is silver, 90 is gold, and all 100’s will get you a perfect score badge). Additionally, getting silver or better in all three activities of a rank will unlock a respective Extra Game activity to try out (which are cannonball, skydiving, and Jumble Hopper). Getting a silver or average in each of the three ranks of a respective activity will even unlock you a free flight mode for one of the game’s four different maps, so you can do victory laps to your heart’s content~ (quite literally). It’s a very simple game, to be sure, but it’s good fun! Being a launch title, it’s not hard to see that Pilotwings 64 was a game explicitly made to carry on the legacy of the original Pilotwings on the Super Famicom. The N64 version is here to show off not just the console’s 3D capabilities for vast, open spaces, but it’s also here to showcase just what precision you can pull off in a vehicle using the N64’s snazzy new joystick tech. If you’re just here to see the credits, all that takes is getting bronze or better in each class of the main 3 activities. But if you’re like me and really wanted gold ranks, it’s going to take you a fair bit longer, and it’s also likely going to be a fair bit more frustrating to boot XD The gyrocopter controlled the most intuitively to me, as it’s basically a plane in how it has acceleration and tilt and such. This isn’t anywhere as sim-like as an Ace Combat game, but it’s certainly closer to a flight sim than something like Star Fox 64 is. Hangliding was what I found consistently the hardest, as relying on only thermals to blow you upwards and having no other method of acceleration makes not only the flying challenges difficult, but it also makes landing very difficult to, as you only have one shot to get that approach correctly. Rocket belt missions usually weren’t too hard, but they easily have the hardest final challenges in the P Class rank. Landing will usually be your biggest challenge, as taking off is the easy part, but rejoining with the ground is harder. Landing, after all, isn’t just an important part of flying, but it’s also usually 30 to 40% of your score (both the accuracy of your landing on the bullseye or runway as well as how smooth a landing you did). I wasn’t nearly out of my mind enough to go for perfect scores, but I’m sure someone dedicated enough out there is going to have a whale of a time trying to get Pilotwings 64 completely perfected. The Extra Game activities very much feel like the extra content that they are. They’re neat ideas using the existing physics and locations in interesting ways, sure, but they’re also pretty much one-trick ponies compared to the main three flying activities. The very oddly named Jumble Hopper is a pair of super jump boots you need to use to jump to the designated space as quickly as you can, but landing in water loses you points, and landing on too hard a slope or hitting an obstacle will send you flying and also lose you a TON of time. Skydiving has you trying to align yourself with your fellow divers five times before making a hangliding-like landing on a target. Cannonball is easily the worst of them for my money, as it has you trying to use angles and an NES Golf-like power meter to hit a distant target. It’s just trial and error, and it’s both the most easily mastered of the activities in this game while also easily being the most frustrating and least fun. Like I said before, they’re a neat distraction, but they’re definitely not worth of main activity status. The game overall runs just about as well as it needs to. You don’t need to have very well adjusted eyes to see that the framerate is struggling REALLY bad a lot of the time, but the game is thankfully tuned well enough that this shouldn’t usually be a problem. The only place I’d say it’s possibly a problem is in the hit detection, as there were quite a few points where I effectively went through (literally) target rings instead of actually passing through them in a way the game recognized. It is my hypothesis that the really bad framerate was very likely either causing that collision issue, or at the very least it made it harder to judge than it should’ve been where the target I was aiming for actually was. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but it’s just one more frustrating part of an already often frustrating game, and the fact that tasks lack a quick-retry button just makes it all the more of a pain to retry when you mess up (particularly for the four minute+ missions later on in the game). The presentation is pretty darn good for what it is. The music has a lot of fun tracks that fit the air of chill flying very nicely. It also has some of what I can really only call Banjo Kazooie-style weird tracks that add some strange if not unwelcome levity to their respective missions. The graphics are quite simple of course, as you’d expect for a launch title of this era, but they’re stylized enough that I think they hold up just fine. Verdict: Recommended. While it’s not an all-timer like Mario 64, that’s some really stiff competition as far as launch titles go. On its own merits, while it may not be the most content-rich game in the world (for those of us who aren’t score attack maniacs), Pilotwings 64 is still a really fun little game. For framerate and ease of access reasons, it may be more appealing to play a more modern port of this game (such as on the N64 Switch Online service), but the N64 version is still plenty fun. Even for someone not super into flying games like me, I had a quite good time with it, and I reckon you probably will too~. After playing through the Shadow Hearts series earlier this year, this game was an absolute must-play on my list. Being effectively Shadow Hearts 0, there was just no way I could go through all the effort of playing through the PS2 Shadow Hearts games and just ignore where the whole series started. I’ve had this game for a few weeks now, and this last weekend was the first time since I bought it where I haven’t been otherwise occupied with another longer game, so I felt it was high time I finally got to seeing the last Shadow Hearts game I hadn’t yet seen~. It took me around 14 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game and get the best ending, and I did it all on real hardware.
Koudelka takes place in a tiny Welsh town of Aberystwyth, our titular character breaks into a mysterious old monastery and comes across a near dying thief, Edward. After a rocky meet and greet between the two of them as they fight off the monster that nearly took Edward’s life, they explore further into the monastery and come across the suspiciously nice caretakers of the place and eventually a third companion, a Bishop named James. The three of them must brave the horrors of the monastery and put the things haunting there to rest, or die trying. It’s honestly a bit hard to give much of a summary, or even an intro, to Koudelka’s story without feeling like I’m either going far too into detail or skipping over far too much. Though an RPG, Koudelka’s story almost feels more like a stage play in how the characters interact with one another, and the VA just adds *so* much to an already stellar script. As you venture further and further into the mansion, the larger narrative of what took place there slowly unfurls, and what you’re left with is an excellently told story of identity, tragedy, trauma, and discovery. The VA is actually as excellent as it is because, in an extremely strange move for the time, Sacnoth actually got the voice actors together on a stage and had them read their lines to one another almost as if it were an actual play. That’s why Koudelka has such long, meaty, and well-acted cutscenes that feel like they’ve been taken out of a stage play: They almost literally have been xD. It all adds up to something really excellent, and even though I had already had this game introduced to me as one with an excellent narrative, I found it absolutely lived up to the hype. Though it’s a short game as far as PS1 RPGs go (especially for a 4-disc PS1 RPG), it’s easily one of the best written games on the system, as far as I’m concerned. Mechanically is where Koudelka is a bit more of a mess ^^;. Now I’d heard that Koudelka was something like a mechanical disaster, and I found that to be quite far from the truth. The actual systems at play here really have very little wrong with them, but there’s just so much chaff here that it can be very overwhelming at times. Koudelka is part turn-based RPG and part survival horror. On the latter, we have a game that feels a *lot* like we’re going through Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion or some equivalent thereof, with the whole game taking place inside one building and tons of fixed camera angles to navigate it through. It honestly is presented so much like a survival horror game that it threw me off when the game didn’t have tank controls XD. Though even while the game has no actual action combat (not even quick time events) to speak of, the puzzle solving and inventory management you’ll be doing is going to feel very familiar to anyone who’s played any of the PS1 Resident Evil games, though the puzzles themselves are very rarely all that difficult, thankfully. On the RPG side of things, we have something that doesn’t have any great analogue, because it’s got mechanical aspects of games from Seiken Densetsu (which the director/composer/writer previously worked on) to even things like the first Persona game and SMT stuff. There’s a lot to cover, but lets start with your characters themselves. All three of your characters are actually functionally identical. They all have access to the same items, equipment, and even spells. The only differences between them come down to how you choose to level up their stats. Koudelka’s stats start her out as a good spell caster and Edward’s make him an obvious melee user, but there’s nothing saying you can’t stick it out and make Koudelka your brawler and Edward your caster. Is it sub-optimal in the early game? Absolutely. But it’s not actually mechanically going to be any better or worse, so you have a lot of wiggle room there. All of that is down to how leveling up works. In a fashion very much like how Atlus loved designing their progression systems back in the 90’s, you get no base stat upgrades upon leveling up. Instead, you get four points to plop into any of your 8 stats that you want. Strength, vitality, and dexterity are your melee-focused stats (being physical-based power, defense/HP, and accuracy), with intelligence, piety, and mental being their magic and MP-focused counterparts. Agility is how fast you are (and more speed is more turns, very much like something like FFX would later do stuff, just with no visible progress bar), and luck is just sorta “makes you a lil’ better at everything”. It’s certainly intimidating at first, but it’s all explained in a very straightforward fashion, and the level curve is also very quick once you make it off of disc 1, so even changing your mind and grinding out a few levels to take on a boss you’re struggling with isn’t actually that big of an ask either. But then we get to the clutter, you see. First we have the battle system, which is this weird grid-based thing that plays like an easier/better designed version of Persona 1’s awful grid stuff. Then we have the spells themselves, which you get more of as you beat more bosses. You also start with a buff spell for each of the 8 stats, and MP is going to be something of an issue regardless, at least in the early game. On top of all that, you also have your spells being able to upgrade, and they do so in a very Seiken Densetsu fashion (use them enough and they level up), and you need to use them a LOT of times to level them up. You also have no money or shops in this game, so all weapons, accessories, and armor need to be found either in the environment or as drops off of enemies, and a very unlucky run can leave you really hurting for that stuff *especially* in the early game. Did I mention your weapons can break? Sure, your guns will run out of ammo, that makes sense, but *all* melee weapons will eventually break, so even if you’re building proficiency levels (again, very Seiken Densetsu) in one weapon, if you can’t find any more of them, you’re going to need to swap to something else. At least you’ll always have your fists, if nothing else, but the fickleness of weapons is a very big worry, particularly in the early game, with how difficult they are to acquire. However, ALL that said, the big thing I realized is that almost none of it actually matters. Koudelka is one of *many* RPGs I’ve played that have a lot of systems that just ultimately don’t matter nearly as much as you might think they do at first. Heck, it isn’t even the only Shadow Hearts game to struggle with that XD. Spells leveling up? Sure, it takes a while, but all it gets you is better AOE on them, and that AOE is almost never actually useful. The only real change gained from spells leveling up is that they’re going to cost more from there on out, which is a pain, but very manageable. It’s especially manageable with just how quickly you level up most of the time, with everyone getting a level every 3 or 4 battles in most cases, and every level up comes with a free full heal. Even save points give full heals too, meaning that grinding and combat are pretty easy after the first hour or so because magic is your main source of damage, and MP is a resource very easily acquired. The position system? It’s ultimately pretty inconsequential beyond using one of your melee people to body block the enemy from getting too close to your back line, but even then, magic and guns (things many enemies have too) have no range limit, so it just makes sense to have everyone have good magic and physical defense all the time anyhow. The buffing spells are also very numerous, sure, but the game is ultimately just not balanced in a way that encourages you to use them at all. I finished the entire game never using them once, and I reckon you’d only really have to if you were trying to kill the optional super boss the hard way. Koudelka overall is just a quite easy RPG after the first hour or so (making it a little SMT-like, in that way), and so a lot of the systems that could be game breaking or experience ruining with their reliance on RNG or grinding are just actually not problems, at the end of the day. Honestly, the biggest criticism I can give of Koudelka’s RPG systems are that they’re quite so easy that they feel a little boring at times, and loading times also take long enough (though far from the longest on the system) that grinding can take a while should you choose to do any. Well, all that as well as the final boss itself being quite a step up in challenge from most other fights in the game (in another very SMT-like move), so it may be worth looking up how to snag secret weapons like the Gargoyle Killer like I did if you wanna make your time with it a bit easier x3 The aesthetics and presentation of the game are absolutely phenomenal, at least for the time. As mentioned earlier, the voice acting is all excellent as well as being all in English even in the Japanese version I played. I got one little bug with audio cutting out during one of them (sadly TwT), but that is thankfully something that does not appear to be present in the international releases at all. The music is very groovy and great too, and it really makes battles and exploration feel just as intense and fun as they should do. The visual design is also very good, with our main characters being very distinct and well designed (if a bit weirdly overly horny in the case of Koudelka herself ^^;), and the monster design is very diverse and delightfully creepy (as Shadow Hearts 1 would continue to be after it). There are many in-game cutscenes but also a handful of pre-rendered CGI cutscenes too, and I imagine those combined are the reason for why such a short game manages to take up four discs of space XD. Regardless of their data size, however, they still look very good, with the monsters that show up in them being particularly good looking and wonderfully uncanny in their designs. Verdict: Highly Recommended. I do want to open this summary by saying that if you’re someone who really loves mechanically deep RPGs first and foremost and story is very secondary to you, you’ll probably have a rougher time with Koudelka than I did. That said, the mechanics themselves may be messy, but they still made a game that felt just challenging enough as I went through it to still be something I enjoyed doing. The writing is also something I cannot praise enough, which is something you’ve probably got a pretty good idea of if you’ve read this far XD. Koudelka may be an odd ball of a game, but it’s regardless an absolutely exceptional one. If you’re a fan of games with strong themes and good character writing, then Koudelka is absolutely not one to miss out on. It’s got a little bit of retro clunkiness to it here and there, but it is more than worth looking past to reach the rest of just how well put together this adventure is. As far as I’m concerned, Koudelka is easily one of the best RPGs, if not one of the best games full stop, on the PS1. This is a game I’ve seen around in Book Off and such for super cheap for years now, but I’ve never really paid it any mind. It was only a few days back that I actually sat down and looked up what this game actually was, and much to my surprise, it’s a Mario Party-clone by HudsonSoft!? Now, to be more accurate, though Hudson did co-develop it, so far as I can tell, the main developer was Bandai, and this shares virtually no staff the series that would eventually be Mario Party (as this came out in 1997, one year *before* the first Mario Party). Regardless, seeing how weird and bad these types of games can be is something I love doing, and it just so happens that my partner also is a huge Tamagotchi fan, so snagging this for the 100 yen it was going for was an absolute no-brainer. This game doesn’t really have a single-player mode as such, and you can actually view the credits whenever you want in the options menu, so I just played until I won a round and called this one “beaten” (and then played a few more rounds after that for good measure). I spent about 4 or so hours playing it on real hardware.
This game actually *does* have a narrative of sorts despite such a thing being so generally unnecessary in a party game like this. Professor Banzou, the man who discovered Tamagotchi, is brooding on a bridge, cursing his bad luck with the ladies despite the great discovery he’s made. All of a sudden, a tiny spaceship full of Tamagotchi (in the middle of fighting over food) fall down from orbit and crash into his head, knocking him into the river. As he’s shouting at them for hurting him, he’s struck with a brilliant idea, and runs off to his laboratory to begin work. A week later, he’s developed a new type of Tamagotchi House, a large-size one that can accommodate four Tamagotchi at once! And such is the excuse for why four Tamagotchi are about to compete to see who can grow up the fastest in this giant new Tamagotchi house XD. It’s a very silly story and not really necessary to make the game work or anything, but it’s very charmingly animated (not to mention totally voice acted, which is pretty darn impressive for the N64 in ’97), and it sets up the action just fine. The actual gameplay of Tamagotchi 64 (as I’m going to be referring to it here for the sake of brevity) is certainly Mario Party-ish in that it’s a four-player board game with mini-games as well, but it’s ultimately not *that* much like Mario Party (and is a lot more like later Tamagotchi party games would be, as it so happens). Your goal, as eluded to earlier, is to be the first to completely grow up, which here means to fill up the power meter four times. The game has only one board, and the four of you go around this board by rolling a die and landing on spaces. There are spaces that just make your power meter go up and down, ones that give you special item cards to use whenever you want, and even ones that activate a mini-game for you all to play, but no matter what you land on, you then get to take care of your Tamagotchi. Just like the little PDA-like toys, Tamagotchis have food and play meters that need to be taken care of, and when they’re sick they need curing, when they’re bad (refuse to eat or play) they need scolding, and when they’ve pooped you’ve gotta clean it up. This is used by expending caring points, and you get a big refill of caring points by passing Go at the start of the board (or by landing on special fitness spaces). While it’s all a bit complicated when you write it out on paper like this, it’s actually quite self-explanatory in practice. You generally want to feed your Tamagotchi when it’s hungry because that’s an easy way to get power points, and the play option (while costing less) activates a simple mini-game that can be lost, earning you nothing. Keeping your play and food meters high means you get more power points (I think?), and it’s just generally good for keeping your Tamagotchi happy and growing. However, despite how simple the gameplay actually is, the devil is reallly in the details here, and this game has some *very* stiff problems when it comes to its execution. While there are little things like the lack of a pause button that just sorta generally suck, the main issue with this game is that a *LOT* of your ability to win is based on how lucky you’re getting. Where you’re landing will dictate a lot of how much you’re growing (or not growing), and how good your luck is there will determine the pace of the game a LOT. You don’t have a star to purchase like in Mario Party to aim for, so that really focuses a lot of the game’s momentum on turn-to-turn gameplay. This means it can feel really discouraging if you’re just having awful luck and/or the other players are beating up on you a lot (with card-items or other such things). Compared to something like Mario Party, where there’s a (usually) skill-based mini-game at the end of every turn, mini-games in Tamagotchi 64 are very rare, as they require landing on a special space to activate. This isn’t even mentioning how the mini-games themselves may not be awful, but they do suffer very badly in a non-multiplayer environment. The CPUs are just SO impossibly good at so many of them that it feels pointless to even try a lot of the time (and these CPUs also lack any difficulty selections either). The icing on the cake there is that not only do the mini-games have no practice option, but they also don’t have a prompt to go past the instructions screen to start playing them. That instructions screen is only on screen for 3 or 4 seconds, so you better read and understand them quick if you wanna actually have a chance of winning! <w> Summing it up succinctly, there just isn't a lot a player can do to actually affect their chances of winning. Just *so* much of the game is simply down to luck that it makes you wonder why you should even try when you're losing. By that same token, the games are so generally short that you really may as well try, as the other players may soon tumble into the same bad luck that's been ruining your time for the past however long soon enough XD. I have my suspicions that there's an internal catchup mechanic where the computer will give good fortune to a certain player to make it so the end game has a *bit* more tension to it, but that's just a hypothesis, really. While simply getting lucky enough may be fine for a very simple children's board game, it makes for a very unsatisfying gameplay loop for a video game (especially playing by yourself against CPUs), so if you're going to have a really fun time with this one, friends are very highly recommended. The presentation, at least, is very well done. Not only are the opening and ending cutscenes voice acted for Professor Banzou and his assistant Mikachu, but the game has a great and pumping soundtrack too. I can’t help but watch the intro every time I boot up the game because the music is just so much fun x3. It even has a vocal track that plays during special scenes, which is an achievement in and of itself for the N64. The graphics are also really good. They’re very evocative of both the general art style of Tamagotchi as well as of the little digital pet toys themselves (with the play-command mini-games even having bleep-bloop sound effects to go with them just like the digital pet toys do x3). The game’s screen has the board game down below and a little view to the pets themselves up top, and watching their idle animations (from feeling hungry to just playing around in a giant udon bowl) while they wait for their turn is absolutely adorable. Every Tamagotchi has bespoke animations for those little idle bits as well, so it really makes them come to life in a way that fits the setting perfectly. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This isn’t a bad game, and I definitely feel I got my money’s worth for the 100 yen I paid for it, but it’s definitely difficult to recommend at the end of the day. The relatively unsatisfying gameplay loop combined with only a dozen or so mini-games and just a singular board to play on means that the game starts to feel stale quite fast. While what’s here isn’t necessarily awful, even on its worst day, that doesn’t really change how there are still much better options on this console for party games in a board game style. If you’re a big Tamagotchi fan or a big Mario Party fan, then this one might be worth checking out, but if you’re more of a casual party game fan (and especially if you have no one to play with), then this is probably a game that’s going to end up giving you more frustration than fun at the end of the day. This was a game I picked up on a whim after finding it for just 100 yen at my local Book Off. The cover looked neat, the pictures of it on google looked cool, and the handful of old review scores I found for it were positive on both the English and Japanese side of things. Even if it ended up being terrible, it was still just 100 yen at the end of the day. My final game-clock was 2.5 hours, but that doesn’t seem to count times in pause menus or cutscenes (of which there are many) at all, so I’d reckon my actual time with this game was something closer to like 4-ish hours. I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
The year is 2096, and humanity has been colonizing the solar system for many decades now. Several days ago, the titular Beltlogger 9, a research and mining station in the asteroid belt, sent out a distress signal, and nothing has been heard from them since. You play as Sergeant Patric Salu (that’s how they spell it <w>), the singular surviving member of the beta assault team of the small military contingent sent there to figure out just what’s going on in this research station that is clearly not what it seems to be. Bursting with cutscenes and voice acted dialogue, Beltlogger 9 is really pushing the limits of what storytelling in games could be in 1996 with this relatively new CD-based format. Tech-wise, nothing it’s doing is particularly new or special, of course, but it regardless uses what it has very adeptly. I’m not sure I’d go *quite* as far as to call this an outright horror game, but they’re definitely taking a lot of inspiration from sci-fi horror films of previous decades to create the atmosphere of grim isolation the game takes place in. It’s a relatively short story, but it does a lot with its small cast and quick pacing. It didn’t have quite as dark an ending as I was predicting (or as its genre conventions would otherwise lead you to predict it would), but I really liked what they did with it either way. It’s a well told story with a nice and interesting moral at the end, and a good story is certainly not what I was expecting from a PS1-developed Quake-like game from 1996. Now while I haven’t played Quake myself, I’m more than familiar enough with id’s shooters to know that Beltlogger 9 is quite clearly going for that style of gameplay (at least in the broad strokes of things). It’s a sci-fi 3D FPS game that’s largely corridor-based, where you explore one stage at a time (22 in total) looking for keys to doors, finding new weapons and passive options to equip, and fighting the nasty robotic enemies that come your way. You also have a shield you can manually activate to guard yourself when you’re not firing, and while it’s not the hardest thing in the world, it does take some practice to get used to switching between raising your shield and counter attacking against more aggressive enemy types. You have 5 different weapons (a rifle, a laser, a missile launcher, a heat-seeking missile system, and a big AOE bomb super weapon) that you can switch between on the fly as well as find new variants of that switch up things like fire rate and power. You can also find stuff like health and energy upgrades, miscellaneous items, audio logs of the crew, and even upgrade bits to simply make your existing weapons stronger. Those extra optional passives are no joke either, as they can do anything from make your energy weapons take less energy, your energy itself recharge faster, or even let you run WAY faster. What it comes down to is that exploration generally feels very well rewarded, and I always wanted to see what was around the next corner (even if it was just a new enemy to mulch my face off XP). The game isn’t *that* hard, ultimately, though for someone relatively inexperienced with FPS games (especially pre-analog stick aiming ones like this), that was very much appreciated (though it’s certainly worth pointing out that this game’s English-language cousin, BRAHMA Force: Assault on Beltlogger 9, *does* have a significant difficulty boost compared to this version that I played). The bosses were easily the toughest general parts of the game, but those were also some of the coolest parts for sure as well, and new boss fights were always a treat to encounter if only to see their mechanical designs. The mechanical designs and presentation in general are really good in this game. A large reason for the former is that they actually got one of the major mechanical designers for Z and ZZ Gundam to do the robot designs for this game, and it really shows with just how striking they look (with the final boss being a particular favorite of mine). The music is also very fun, with the bosses having some great tracks to fight them to, and the general ambient music making for a great creepy atmosphere to explore the base in. Having to use R2 and L2 to look up and down just added to that whole vibe of “in an awkward battle mech in a weird place” too~. The game is still visually absolutely an early-life PS1 3D game (complete with the texture warping in the walls that that kind of thing entails), but it really rocks the look, imo, and it made for a really fun time~. Verdict: Recommended. Even though this sort of thing is generally quite far from my genre of choice, I ended up having a really great time with it! It’s worth keeping in mind that the localizations are a fair bit harder (and less fair, from the sounds of things), and I can’t speak to the quality of the localization either, but in Japanese at least, this was a really cool sci-fi action game with a story I really enjoyed my time with. If you like sci-fi or just FPS games and you don’t mind having to use pre-analog stick aiming controls, this is a really fun and short game that’s really worth checking out~. Recently, some friends of mine have been playing (or replaying) through a bunch of old Pokemon games, and it really got me in the mood to play some myself~. They had been talking a lot about how generation 2 in particular was a really weak generation with a lot of really annoying design decisions. It’s been at least 15 or more years since I last played through Gold or Silver myself, and I certainly didn’t remember it being that bad when I was a kid, so Pokemon Gold seemed like a great fit to scratch the Pokemon itch I’d been feeling. It took me about 25 hours to beat the Elite Four and the Champion, and then it was around the 36 hour mark that I beat Red at Mt. Silver. I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware via my Super GameBoy (with my team being composed of Golem, Typhlosion, Magneton, Alakazam, Slowbro, and Pidgeot).
Being a Pokemon game and such an early one, there isn’t a ton of story here, and the story really isn’t the focus of the game, but what’s here is certainly interesting in several respects. Taking place in the Johto region, the one adjacent to the west of Kanto (where the first game takes place), this is the rare Pokemon game to actually be a narrative sequel to the previous one, taking place three years after it. It’s hardly high art, and a lot of it is no doubt due to cuts that were required as a result of trying to fit all of Johto AND all of Kanto onto one lil’ GameBoy cart, but it’s nonetheless very interesting to see not just all the new places, but how all of the old, familiar locations in Kanto have changed too. As with how the first generation of Pokemon had it, it’s a fun and light guide through the new region along your trainer’s journey to be the new best trainer around, and it does that job very well~. As for the base mechanics, Pokemon is still very much the same as it was the last time around, save for a few additions or changes here and there which have varying degrees of significance. On the more light side of things, the new gimmick of an in-game clock give us both events related to days of the week as well as a day and night cycle. It can be a bit of a pain to wait for the right day of the week to get a particular item or to wake up early in the morning enough to catch a certain Pokemon, but it’s not all that important most of the time, and it adds a good bit of extra flavor to the experience. As for more significant changes, the new Pokemon (just about 100) do a good job of helping flesh out some types that were underrepresented in the last generation, and a bundle of new Pokemon moves help expand out on several types who had woefully poor move pools in the last game too. It’s hardly perfect, as there are still a good few types who are nearly nonexistent or totally useless, but the introduction of dark and steel types (as well as re-balancing how some other type interactions work) have done a lot to break psychic types’ stranglehold on the greater strategy of Pokemon. Another significant addition to that effect is that “special” is now two stats, “special attack” and “special defense”, and that means that a lot of preexisting Pokemon are either now a lot better or a fair bit worse as a result of how they’re more or less resistant/adept at using special-aligned attacking moves. We’re still a couple generations away from solving the bigger problems with types and special/physical attacks (move category is still dependent on type and not yet linked to the individual move instead as it would be in Pearl & Diamond), but this is a good step in the right direction that adds a good deal of strategy beyond mere type advantage. The bigger changes and issues with Pokemon Gold (and Silver), however, are present more in the nature of its execution rather than how the mechanics work on paper. A large amount of strange and questionable design choices end up making this game feel very awkward and overly convoluted compared to games before and after it. Most prominent among these issues is how the distribution of Pokemon (and the types thereof) is handled. Many Pokemon (both strong and weak, both old and new) are not in Johto at all, but in Kanto (meaning they’re found in the later third of the game, and after the Elite Four, one of the game’s biggest challenges). Additionally, evolution stones, which are used to get many water, grass, fire, and electric type Pokemon to their final and strongest evolutions, are virtually nonexistent. The only way to get them is through a rather obtuse method once in Kanto or through being very lucky with certain very poorly signposted RNG mechanics involving specific NPCs back in Johto. Kanto as a whole has an incredible paradoxical nature to it. On one hand, it was absolutely purposeful to put it in here. After the credits roll for defeating the Champion, going over to Kanto gives you new story events and unique NPC sprites to see, tons of new music to listen to, and a ton of new Pokemon to catch. That’s all saying nothing of just what an incredible programming challenge fitting Kanto on the cartridge alongside Johto was in the first place, of course. On the other had, it feels like a serious afterthought with just how poorly balanced it is. You’re likely already going to have a somewhat difficult time with the Elite Four with just how much higher level they are than you are that point (roughly level 40 to 50), and yet the first five gyms you’ll encounter in Kanto have Pokemon that average around level 35, making them an absolute joke to any trainer who beat the Elite Four to get there. Wild Pokemon are also generally incredible low level, the levels they would’ve been in Pokemon Red & Green, so you aren’t getting challenging encounters anywhere other than the last three gyms and the final battle with Red. Going through Kanto is still fun and interesting, of course, but it’s difficult to ignore just how strangely balanced the whole experience is. Looking back at your initial adventure through Johto, a lot of the new Pokemon are just very poor at doing what they’re meant to do, and the change to the special stat means that a lot of old favorites that were great before are now awful because their stats have been gutted. By the same token, it can be very discouraging to find a favorite Pokemon only to realize later that they require an evolution stone to evolve, so they’re just really not worth using. It’s very easy to end up feeling quite boxed in to only a few actually viable Pokemon due to the statistic shortcomings of some and the inability of many others to evolve. Numerically speaking, almost all of the electric, grass, water, and fire types you’ll find in Johto need an evolution stone to evolve, and only one or two (if even that) end up being reasonable to use at all. The types used in many of the new gyms as well as in the new Elite Four make certain types like Grass feel ultimately quite useless, and the game, while not being *that* hard as far as Pokemon games go, is left with some oddball balancing issues as a result (and the relatively slow leveling curve doesn’t really help matters either). These aren’t fatal problems for the overall design of the game, but it just ends up making the overall experience feel a lot more frustrating compared to earlier or later Pokemon games. The presentation is, as one would expect for Pokemon games of the era, absolutely excellent. The new music is great, and the new takes on old tracks in Kanto are really well done too. The graphics are also excellent, with the new Pokemon art being really well done while having a much more unified style than the first games had. While I do miss the charm of just how weird and disparate the original first generation art was, it’s hard to be upset with new sprites that look this dang nice~. The game looks great in color, of course, but I do want to mention just how surprised I was by this game’s Super GameBoy compatibility. The SGB’s interaction with black cart GameBoy games (that being ones that are in compatible to be played on an old monochrome GameBoy as well as are proper color games on a GameBoy Color) is super variable with some games not using it at all, but this is easily one of the most impressive uses of the hardware I’ve come across. While the overworld you’re walking around in is virtually always in some shade of color-tinged monochrome, battles are actually entirely in color. It’s not a perfect recreation of how the game looks on a GBC, but you’d be hard pressed to spot the difference most of the time. I thought I might be longing for the color that a GameBoy Player or similar GBC-like device would add as I played this on my SGB for the novelty of it, but I was very pleasantly surprised with just how much effort clearly went in to making this game be an impressive color experience for SGB owners as well~. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is a really weird one to recommend, because your mileage is going to vary a LOT depending on how tolerant of the shortcomings in its execution you are. The second generation Pokemon games are absolutely not bad games by any stretch, but a lot of their weaknesses are most prevalent in comparison to their sister Pokemon games. While this is a fun game that I quite enjoyed my time with, it’s really hard to argue that I wouldn’t have probably had just as good if not better a time with virtually any other Pokemon game due to just how generally better designed they are. This is absolutely a Pokemon game worth checking out for fans, but if you’re someone who’s more tepid on the series, then this is very likely you’re going to find is worth skipping even if you’re generally okay with the poorer quality of life features found in these old GameBoy RPGs. Bringing my time with the original Ace Attorney trilogy to a close, I finally finished up with the last of the GBA games. I certainly remembered enjoying this one significantly more than the second game when I was younger, but with how much I’d clearly forgotten about the second game, I didn’t want to assume that I’d remembered this game anything close to accurately either XD. That said, I ended up really enjoying my time with it. It took me about 25-ish hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware via my GameBoy Player.
This is the third game focusing on the adventures of our titular Ace Attorney, Phoenix Wright. Introducing yet another new mysterious prosecutor, Godot, this entry brings the trilogy to a close by wrapping up the major plot threads left by the previous two games. Those who read my review of Ace Attorney 2 will be no stranger to just how much I disliked the writing in that game, and I was very much prepared for this game to ultimately be just as much of a failure as that one. No matter how positively I remembered this one, there was no telling how much bad stuff I’d missed in my last playthrough eight years ago. Thankfully, my memory was by and large quite accurate! While this game’s writing certainly isn’t perfect (with the homophobic stereotype character and some more than slightly problematic age-gap relationship stuff being stand out examples to that point), this game seems to really go out of its way to improve on basically everything the second game suffered so badly with. Returning characters are lessened down significantly, and those who do return do so for reasons that feel important and relevant to their characters. Women overall are written WAY better in particular, and they feel much better represented with a much better depth and variety of character than they had had in the previous two games. The sense of humor has been tuned far better in this game as well. While we’re not completely free of comedy through cruelty for the sake of cruelty by any means, it is *far* less prevalent as a source of comedy than it was in the last game and it lets the better written humor shine that much brighter. The fundamentals of writing are also thankfully back to a familiar strength from the first game as well. This game has a much stronger and more deliberate meta-narrative running throughout it, and it leads to a much stronger conclusion as a result. With major themes of what it means to trust someone and what who we fight for says about who we are, you can really tell that this game had a lot more time and effort put into it than the last game managed to. While it’s certainly an unfortunately flawed game in the places that shine less well, it was still a narrative I enjoyed a lot and feel was really well done. While it may have lower lows than the first game did, those lows are not only quite infrequent, but they’re easily outweighed by just how frequent and high the highs of the narrative are. The mechanics and puzzle design have also thankfully been polished up very significantly since the last game as well. There really aren’t any new mechanics, with the health bar and psycho-lock systems and such returning just as they were in the second game, but what is here has been polished up VERY significantly since the last game, and they’re far more fun as a result. The signposting and overall logic have been improved to the point that I never even needed to look up the solutions to any puzzles to make it to the end of the game~! (Something I was at least a little proud of myself for). A big reason why the puzzles in this game are *so* much better, though, is that we have finally gotten a reasonable save and penalty system. Where the second game only had temporary saves mid-chapter and hard checkpoints only between chapters (so if you died, it was back to the last checkpoint, which could be more than half an hour before where you’re at), this game finally makes those temporary saves become their own hard checkpoints, effectively giving you the ability to save and load at will. This means you have much more leeway to trial-and-error your way past a difficult puzzle you’re stuck on, and it’s far less frustrating to hit a puzzle you just can’t quite solve. Another feature that makes the whole game just better is that we *finally* have a speed-up button for the dialogue. While it isn’t an outright skip button, holding the B button to make text fly by was SUCH a badly needed feature, it’s kinda amazing that it took them three games to add it ^^;. Be that as it may, it’s still better late than never, and this game is far better for its presence. The presentation is still very much the GBA, but this is the GBA of 2004, not the GBA of 2001 and 2002 as the first two games had to deal with. As a result, not only do we have some of the best looking and strongest designed character sprites we’ve ever had (and a lot of my favorite character designs in the trilogy at that), but we also have SUCH better music as a result. The earlier games didn’t have bad music by any means, but you can really tell that the guys at Capcom have gotten a *lot* more comfortable with this hardware over the past couple of years with just how much more technical these tracks are. Songs like Tigre’s theme and Mask Demasque’s theme are easily two of my favorite tracks in the whole trilogy, but they’re standing atop a mountain of other great songs on top of that. My only real complaint about the aesthetics are that we’re reusing *quite* so many things from game to game that older music and especially sprites can kinda stand out and look less than nice compared to the nicer newer stuff (Mia’s original sprite in particular is one I’ve never been a huge fan of, and it looks even more rough next to just how nice everything else looks here). Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a sequel to a quality that the original Ace Attorney really deserved. With as wonderful a presentation as ever and writing to a quality either at or better than what they’d ever done before, this completely blows Ace Attorney 2 out of the water, and that’s absolutely not just because of the mechanical touch-ups for quality of life features. Had I played a version that had the extra fifth case added to the first game, perhaps I’d feel differently, but with the versions I played and the language I played them in, this is definitely my favorite of the original trilogy on GBA. It might go without saying at this point in the review, but this is absolutely not a game to miss out on if you like logical deduction puzzles or are just a visual novel fan in general~. |
Categories
All
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
|