As a huge fan of 2D Zelda-like games, this is a game that’s been on my radar for a good while, but I’ve just never gotten around to looking at it. My girlfriend happened to mention it offhand a week or two ago, and it jogged my memory and my interest about it enough to finally sit down over the past few days and play through the darn thing. It took me about 10-ish hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without abusing save states or rewinds.
The game opens with a flashback, where the main character is being told of his lineage before his father sets off on a journey that he clearly expects never to return from. We learn of an ancient clan of dragon warriors whose job it was to safeguard the world from darkness, and that you are one of that clan. However, the dragons have seemingly completely disappeared, and your father is going off on a quest to hopefully find one and fulfill your clan’s proud destiny. Upon waking up from this flashback dream, our hero is at a bar in the present, and they learn of a local job to hunt down dragon scales from a nearby abandoned fortress. Seeing it as a clear opportunity to fulfill his father’s wishes, he takes it up at once, and so begins our journey to find the dragons and (of course) ultimately save the world. The story isn’t really what you’d expect for the depth action/adventure games often had by 1994, but it’s nothing bad, just unambitious. Our silent protagonist has a handful of fellow adventurers that he pals around with, and their dialogue writing along with miscellaneous NPC dialogue is all quite entertainingly written. The twists the narrative takes are interesting enough, but it’s really not the reason to show up (as it were). Compared to other Enix titles and especially SquareSoft titles around this point in the SFC’s lifespan, Brain Lord doesn’t really have a bad story so much as it just fails to stand out from the crowd. It’s not a strike against the game per se, but it’s just one more thing that makes the game that much less novel or interesting to go back to in 2024. The gameplay is a pretty straightforward top-down action/adventure game. I’ve been calling it a Zelda-clone personally, but it honestly has so much more action than adventure that it feels like its drawing from inspiration outside of Link to the Past, at the very least. You’ve got five BIG dungeons and not much of an overworld to speak of, and 4-ish big bosses to fight along the way. You don’t really get traversal tools or anything like that. It’s just going through dungeons solving puzzles and fighting enemies in a not too complicated fashion. The only really novel mechanic are the fairies you can find as well as buy in some stores. You can have up to two out at a time, and they’ll either attack enemies around you or provide passive benefits like lighting up an area or increasing your attack power. Additionally, while you only get stronger from certain stat boosting items and new weapons/armor, monsters will occasionally drop EXP balls for your *fairies*, and that’s how they level up. Sure, there are a few weapon types, but the range on the sword is SO nuts that I never found any reason to use anything else (though at least they tried, I guess). Dungeons don’t really have puzzles, as such, beyond just finding keys and then the appropriate door to take them to. Overall, that signposting is usually pretty good, outside of how massive some dungeons are that can make it difficult to remember where a locked door or now-breakable block even *is*, but that’s really the whole of it outside the block pushing puzzles and platforming puzzles. Those block pushing puzzles are frankly pretty damn tough, and they’re such brain-benders that it’s allegedly what inspired the title “Brain Lord” in the first place. They’ll probably annoy some, but I like these kinds of puzzles, so I enjoyed them at least x3. The jumping puzzles were far more annoying to me, but as far as Zelda-clones with platforming go, I found the platforming in this far more bearable and fun than the stuff in Terranigma or Beyond Oasis at least. Ultimately, while the moment-to-moment gameplay is fun enough (if a bit too easy), and I certainly enjoyed my time with it, it’s an experience that, much like the narrative, really struggles to be memorable. The presentation is overall pretty good, if (again) a bit unimpressive for a 16-bit console in ’94. Anyone who’s played 7th Saga will likely find the human sprites looking quite familiar, and that’s because it’s from the same devs as that. Sprites are big and pretty, but they’re not *so* big that they make actually navigating spaces onerous, which I certainly appreciated. The music is pretty darn good. It’s not like, stand-out amazing, but there were quite a few times where I was going through a dungeon or overworld area and said out loud, “damn, this track really rocks!”. Verdict: Recommended. I wavered a lot whether to give this an outright recommendation or a hesitant one, but I think this game is overall solid enough that it deserves an outright recommendation. Comparing it to one of these that I played relatively recently, I’d say I enjoyed this game about as much as I did Crusader of Centy. While it doesn’t have the novel design or aesthetics of that game (the highs, you could say), it also lacks the most irritating parts of that game’s ambition (which you could call the lows). Brain Lord jumping and block pushing puzzles may drive some batty, and it doesn’t have a ton that makes it truly stand-out or memorable, but it’s a very competently put together game that I had quite a good time with. While it may be a bit generic, if you’re a fan of 2D Zelda-style games, I think this is still a game you can pick up and have a quite fun weekend with even if it probably won’t be an experience you’ll remember for years afterwards.
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Like I played through the first Frog Detective game earlier in the week with my friend on stream, we did this game a couple days later as well~. It took us about 2 hours to play through the game with her and I reading the voices for the characters (her as the frog once more, and me as everyone else).
It's in effect the same as the first game, but a bit bigger and a bit better. It's a first-person adventure game just as the first one was, and you talk to folks to figure out the items they want to complete the puzzles associated with them. It's a very simple thing, but that just makes it an even more effective medium to convey the silly story, which it is! The puzzles are a bit more complicated, and the writing is a bit more fun and funny than the first game. Verdict: Recommended. It's not gonna sell anyone who wasn't a fan of the first game, but it's a very nice sequel that expands on the first game's strengths in a way I found enjoyable. This one was so fun to do, it's got me looking forward to the next one even more than the first one did~ ^w^ This is a game a friend told me about months back, and I couldn't help but be intrigued. I'm a sucker for Pokemon clones thrown together back during the original Poke-mania boom, and one I'd never heard of, released in English and by Capcom no less, was too tempting an offer to pass up! That said, in my usual fashion, I found a copy for 500 yen and then proceeded to sit on it and never get around to playing it for like half a year, but the important part is that I got to it eventually! XD. It took me around 12 or so hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware (via my GameCube GameBoy Player).
Metal Walker takes place on a secluded island called the Rusted Land. 50 years ago, there was some horrible experiment gone wrong that made a huge explosion and destroyed a ton of the island. Core Metal, the main focus of the island's research, is still very valuable though, and core hunters from all over come to the island hoping to make their fortune while avoiding the dangerous metal monsters, Metal Busters, that roam the island. You, the main character Tetto, are on the island with your core hunter father when you're suddenly separated by a metal buster attack. He draws the monster away, leaving you with only your robotic Metal Walker companion Meta Ball for protection and company. Upon waking up, you realize you've been rescued by some kindly folk on the island led by the eccentric Professor Hawke. With the aid of his Pokedex-like wrist watch device, you set out to the island with Meta Ball at your side to find your father and discover just what mysteries the Rusted Land still holds. The writing is overall just Fine (TM). It's really nothing special, and though it's quite hilariously dark at times, it's still just a kids story at the end of the day. It feels very much like a copy of lots of other "boy goes on an adventure to do The Thing"-type stories that were EVERYWHERE in the 90's, Pokemon-clone or otherwise, and it's not a particularly inspired one of those. The dialogue writing is cute, and it the story does a fine enough job of setting up the action at hand, but it's nothing to care much about on its own. The gameplay is a very weird thing, and it's what attracted me to the game in the first place. My friend described it as, "Pokemon meets billiards", which prompted the same confused response from me then as I imagine it's eliciting from you now XD. Basically, random battles take place with Meta Ball and from 1 to 3 metal busters on a board. There are various types of board that can spawn depending on where you are in the game, but they all have walls to bounce off of as well as an exit hole for you (or the enemy) to aim for if you want to flee. Much like a billiards (or golf game, to use a likely more familiar example), you pick a direction, gauge the power of your shot, and send Meta Ball pinging into your enemies. If he's the one to initiate the hit, they take damage, but if they're crashing into him, he takes damage, and getting knocked to 0 health means you lose. There are some other side systems, like finding various core metal elements via boss fights that allow you to transform Meta Ball into new and stronger forms, and there are also items you can toggle on and off to spawn in battle. For your different forms, they're generally just stronger versions of what you already have, but there's also a rock-paper-scissors mechanics where water beats air, air beats land, and land beats water, which is also relatively important to take into consideration (especially for boss fights). Items range from power ups to traps that can hurt you, with both being clearly identified by the former being balls of the light and the latter being skulls. There are even terrain changing items as well to boost certain types of player. While your selected items deploy on your turn and your enemies on theirs, either of you can use items picked up (both power ups and traps), so caution is necessary to succeed if you wanna live, as some of those traps are super dangerous. Lastly, you have money you can use to buy items. Unlocking more items to buy is done by enemies getting scanned in battle, and to do that, you need to bring analyzer items into battle and bump enemies into them, and then take that scan data to shops to unlock the items. It's all a LOT to take in, admittedly, but it's ultimately a lot more straightforward than it seems at first blush. Unfortunately, it's also a lot more clumsily put together than it might sound at first blush (or perhaps its exactly as clumsy as it sounds here, idk XD). While there are issues with encounter rate being too high and Meta Ball's world-map traversing powers being annoying to use, the game's biggest issue is that the balance is overall quite poor. What type an enemy is is often unclear and matters SO much that you're basically instantly dead in harder fights if you happen to have brought a bad type with you. Items are also really poorly balanced, with some like the attack dropping item or the "touch it and you lose *several* turns" item being SO overpowered that there's really no reason to consider using anything else in bosses. The game is also quite grindy, and I had to grind at the start for over an hour just to have a Meta Ball powerful enough that he could comfortably take on the enemies in the starting area without fear of dying after just one or two battles. This all wraps around to the game's premise just not being a terribly strong concept for a video game. The Meta Ball transformations are a neat concept to mirror Pokemon's HM system, but there's too much direct power scaling, so there's really no reason aside from type disadvantage to not use a 3-tier Meta Ball as soon as you have him available (outside of drastic type disadvantage). Items are also generally not very useful for random battles, and so they become more of a chore avoiding the enemies' stuff than your own, especially with how long random battles can take with their lengthy power up and damage animations. Another really big problem is that the GameBoy's hardware just really can't handle the level of precision that you'd really want for a billiards game like this. You only have 16 different angles you can shoot your ball in, and that really severely limits how you can battle. Sure, depending on the weight and movement stats of your respective Meta Ball vs. your opponents', you can fly and ricochet further when struck, but the very low number of possible angles you can actually fire at makes battles start feeling very same-y very quickly. The mechanics are OK enough for a quick single-player RPG experience, I suppose, but they're a far cry from being anything possible to make something meaningfully better than Capcom already made with this. The game's presentation is about what you'd expect for a GameBoy Color game by '99, but nothing really special. The top-down overworld is pretty and nice looking enough, and the music is fine but overall not terribly memorable. The real highlight of the game's aesthetics are the Metal Walker designs themselves, so if you're a fan of cool looking, very mechanical/non-humanoid robots, then this game will have a lot of fun art to look at for you at least. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This isn't a bad game, as far as GBC RPGs go, but it's a decidedly quite flawed one. I wouldn't really stay it's particularly worth checking out unless you've got a deep curiosity for Pokemon-clone games like me and/or the strange nature of the gameplay makes it sound like something that worth picking up. For all the things you can say about Metal Walker, one thing I cannot deny is that it's a very novel premise for a game, and that's something that neither quality nor the passage of time can take away from it. How much that actually makes it worth playing, however, is gonna be up to you, at the end of the day. A close friend of mine recently invited me onto a Twitch stream with her, and she said this would be a great game for the two of us to play together~. I'd never heard of the game before, but she turned out to be super right! She controlled the game, but it's so straightforward that, like with the VNs I've played with my wife at the helm, it's barely different from me controlling it myself, so I'm calling it beaten for me as well <w>. It took us a little over an hour to play through the English version of the game while reading out all the voices together on stream~.
Frog Detective is a series of short first-person adventure games. You walk around an environment talking to people and grabbing items, and it's honestly something much closer to a visual novel than it is something like Portal or even The Stanley Parable. In this one, our detective is solving the mystery of a haunted island (as you could probably already tell from the game's title x3). It's pretty fun! The narrative is a short, silly story, and the gameplay is light enough that just about anyone could do it. It's a very simple-looking game and there isn't much music, but it's such a bite-sized piece of fun that the aesthetic becomes much more of a feature than a bug (so to speak). Verdict: Recommended. If you want something cute and fun to play either by yourself or with someone else, this is a really good option to do it with~. Especially if you can find it for cheap, this would be a great option to gift to a little kid to help them get into video games if they're only just starting out being able to read and/or work out first-person control systems. Not the funniest or most exciting thing in the world, for sure, but a fun time that more than justified the price of entry. I tried to play the PS2 remake of this several times when I was younger, and I could just never stick with it. It was paced too slowly, writing was too boring, and the combat was just awful. I bought the PS1 original ages ago around the time I moved here meaning to give it a shot, but never really felt up to it until now. Well now I've finally sat down and played through the first PS1 Tales game, and it's given me a lot of valuable insights as to why I disliked the PS2 version so much (even if this also wasn't exactly my favorite thing ever). It took me around 33-ish hours to beat the Japanese version of the game playing on original hardware.
The story follows a young man named Stahn, who is discovered as a stowaway on a dragon airship and quickly forced to work upon the crew realizing that he's just some idiot and not a spy. However, once the ship is attacked my monsters, he discovers a mysterious talking sword, and as they fall to the ground in their escape pod, his grand adventure to save the world begins~. The game's writing is okay, but decidedly flawed. On its better aspects, the game has a fun sort of vibe almost like a 90's fantasy road trip anime. There's not a lot of meaningful dialogue, but the comedy bits are well written and the dialogue itself is well written. On the more negative sides, the game's pacing is still quite slow (especially in the back half), the false conclusions really hamstring the story, and the narrative overall is badly wanting in terms of focus. They end up coming down a bit too involved in societal issues to have satisfying closure with the more generalized "the world isn't worth destroying just because there are bad people in it" ending they settle on, and a lot of the more interesting characters and aspects of the plot slowly get weeded away until it's just against some random Big Evil Guy (TM). There's a lot of potential, granted, and it's a frankly frustrating amount of potential with just how good a lot of the societal critique that's present actually is. However, we only have the game we have, and what we have is a very mixed bag. It doesn't really stick the landing for its own story, but it's not hard to see how Tales games after this had far better stories with how close to being great this game so often comes. The gameplay will be very familiar to anyone who's played an older pre-3D Tales game. It's the old Linear Battle System the series is famous for, with an ARPG that sees you fighting against random encounters on a 2D plane as you go along your RPG adventure. The fundamentals are fairly strong, but like with the story, the devil is in the details. Dungeons have some neat puzzles, but some puzzles are incredibly tough and dungeons are also quite long with only one save point at the very end. While combat often feels very fun and quick, the game's balance is sadly quite rough. Enemies and even bosses struggle to ever be much of a challenge, and the only time combat really gets tough is when you're fighting annoying packs of enemies with lots of powerful AOE spells. Adding to that is that, while your ability as Stahn to really be aggressive and dictate the flow of battle is strong, that is your best and only real way to fight, as your AI partners are far too unintelligent to be much use a lot of the time. Even adjusting their AI behavior, I struggled at all points to actually get them to be as aggressive as I wanted them to be, particularly towards the enemies I actually wanted them to fight against. This is all not that much of a problem though due to the more favorable parts of the game's balancing. The game's EXP rewards are quite generous and the encounter rate is quite high, so I honestly felt over-leveled nearly the whole game as a result without even grinding deliberately. Your natural MP healing after battle is also VERY generous, so just using your healer's heal spells to heal will make it so you really never need to worry about healing with items and running out as a result. They're systems that, while frustrating, are still thankfully fun, but their design blind spots are not difficult to spot, and it struggles to be truly satisfying with just how easy things basically always are. The aesthetics of the game are very nice. The music is very good, and the character designs are delightful as well. Especially in battle, the characters' and enemies' animations are really well done and pretty, and the special moves and spells have beautifully done pixel art. The voice acting is also good, but it's weirdly sparsely used. Most of the game's voice acting isn't in battle when characters do battle cries to announce moves, but in skits that happen on the world map. However, these aren't like later Tales games where there's a button prompt telling you to hit Select or something to see the skit. Instead, you need to just stand still on the world map for like 8 or 9 seconds before the scene triggers. There are over 200 of these things, but the game doesn't tell you they're there at all, and even realizing they're there is very hard to do by accident. Unless you come across that page in the manual that mentions them (which I did confirm is indeed there), you'd likely never notice they're there at all, which is a real shame for something they clearly put so much time into. Verdict: Recommended. This game is far from excellent, but it's still a pretty good game. The pace of the adventure usually makes up for the less than perfect writing, and the action generally remains fun even if it is largely satisfaction from being powerful rather than overcoming genuine, well-designed challenges. While the following game in the series improves on these mechanics a lot, it's still well worth playing the original Tales of Destiny if you're a fan of the series and want to see its roots. It certainly doesn't meet the high bars set by its successors, but it was very fun seeing the seeds of where all that later excellence came from~. Looking for something noncommittal and not very hard to sink my teeth into before I started playing another game with a friend the next day, I remembered that this existed on the Switch Online service. Of course I had no reason to believe it’d be a *great* game, being a licensed game on a console with no small amount of dire licensed games, but I’m a sucker for 2D Zelda-style action/adventure games, and there was really only so long one as easily available to me as this was going to escape being played by me regardless of how good or bad it was XD. It took me 4-ish hours to beat the English version of the game via the Switch Online GameBoy service (with moderate use of rewinds and save states).
The story of the game presumably follows the story of the film on which its based. The Quest for Camelot is a film I’m honestly completely unfamiliar with beyond a general awareness that it’s not very good, so I can really only assume that Kaylee’s quest to avenge her slain father, defeat the evil usurper Ruber, and save King Arthur and Camelot is reasonably close to the film. Either way, it’s a very forgettable story told quite clumsily. There are some neat pixelated renditions of shots of the films in between walls of text that exposit between stages, but it’s still just “this thing happens, so do this thing. Okay on to next location to do another thing” over and over until the end. I certainly wouldn’t expect a great story out of a GBC Zelda clone if it were licensed or otherwise, really, but just how clumsy and overly wordy this game’s narrative is definitely makes it start veering towards an active negative on the game vs. being something comfortably simple and ignoreable. At the very least the adventure has quite good signposting, which is certainly more than I can say about a fair few other 2D Zelda clones I’ve played over the years. The gameplay is no better than the story. It’s frankly pretty easy to say that it’s even worse, or at the very least a fitting counterpart to the inelegance of the writing. In the broad strokes of things, it’s a pretty shameless copy of 2D Zelda games like Link to the Past, Link’s Awakening, and the Oracle games. Tons of items and design concepts are copied outright, though that copying unfortunately doesn’t extend to the actual design of the combat and levels. The game is broken up into several stages with action and puzzles (if you can call them that) leading up to a boss fight. Movement feels awkward with the game’s large sprites, enemies are rudimentary and often move too fast to hit properly, and your sword’s length is pathetically too short to hit things with reliably (in keeping with the grand tradition of bad Zelda clones). It even has tons of padding via fetch quests! In addition to enemies being hard to hit (and bosses being miserable damage sponges), the actual world design is dreadful, and the game has some of the most irritating instant-death jumping puzzles I’ve seen in a game like this as well as a serious aversion to enemies ever giving the player health pickups. It’s not the most incompetent 2D Zelda clone I’ve ever played, sure, but that’s damning with faint praise with just how low a bar that is XD. The presentation is also quite weak. The graphics take the path of many subpar portable games and opt for big, more detailed sprites that then consequently make the action harder to parse because you don’t have enough room on the screen to see yourself. Additionally, the graphics that are there are pretty ugly and often poor representations of their film counterparts, with the main character often looking nothing like the character even on the front of the game’s own box. The music is also just embarrassingly poorly done. The game has like 3 or 4 music tracks total, and they’re painfully simple and half-baked for a GBC game from 1998 even compared to what composers were accomplishing on the original GameBoy nearly a decade earlier. The biggest and most hilarious music issue, however, is now no non-gameplay scene actually has any music at all. I thought my Switch had crashed, but nope, no errors. The company splash screens, the title screen, and ALL of the text-wall “cutscenes” have 0 music of any kind, meaning you don’t even get music at all until a minute or two after you’ve booted up the game XD Verdict: Not recommended. There are certainly more unenjoyable licensed games on the GBC, but again we’re back to damning with faint praise XD. Even on its best day, this game is tuned overly difficult and aggressively mediocre, and your time is simply better spent on other things. The GameBoy is no stranger to great action/adventure games, and there are even more at least decent ones than there are great ones, so I have no idea why you’d pick this thing to play over the piles of better ones unless you had genuinely nothing better to do with your time at all. In my ongoing quest to clear through the remaining WiiWare games I’ve got on my Japanese Wii while I’ve still got it hooked up, this was the next thing on the list. This is a game I firmly recall hearing from many places was easily one of the best games on the WiiWare store regardless of region, and although it’s one I recall putting like half an hour into many years back, I didn’t remember much of my time with it. On top of all that, it’s also interestingly one of Grezzo’s first games, the studio made by the guy responsible for the Mana series, so this seemed like a fitting thing to play this year after all of the Mana games I’ve played earlier in the year (regardless of how much I didn’t enjoy them XD). It took me around 4.5 hours to play through the game to the credits on real hardware.
Our story follows our main character, who can either be a Mii of your choosing or the default in-game model named “Yuu.” On a quest to prove your worth as a warrior, you come to a land that is explicitly stated to be a world “like feudal Japan, but also like the more distant past as well as the future”. This very silly and irreverent attitude carries on throughout the game, and it follows you all the way through your quest as you’re quickly wrapped up in helping Princess Tomoe to squash a rebellion in the country (by a character whose name is literally the word for rebellion X3). It’s a story that’s exactly as serious as it means to be, which is to say not at all, and it’s delightful. A very funny and silly story that sets the stage for our ridiculous action very well, and I had a very fun time reading through it all~. That ridiculous action is stage-based and almost feels like a Wonderful 101 predecessor. You start with yourself and a buddy, that buddy lending you their weapon. You then go around the stage thwacking other baddies to get them into your increasingly long conga line of dudes, and any stronger ones with weapons can have their weapons borrowed just like you can from your main buddy. There are three weapon types, swords, hammers, and lances, and among the various types of them, they have different combos on top of each weapon type having its own line attack (which is activated by swinging the Wiimote). However, not all is so easy, as your enemies can thwack the guys following you and steal them right back! Thankfully for both you and them, though, the head of a line is only truly vulnerable when their line is completely destroyed, so you’ve gotta be getting thrashed to actually die. The much easier way to game over is by failing your present mission, which will usually be the result of the buddy you gotta protect dying. There are 40 stages between you and the credits, with more generic randomized missions filling the spaces between the story missions you hit at every multiple of five. During those randomized missions, you can recruit procedurally generated extra buddies as well as get accessories to bring into battle to power up your stats and line attacks. Your buddies even have personalities and will dislike some mission types and like others. Doing missions they like will get them bonus stats after battle, but doing too many ones they dislike can actually make them leave your group forever! Given that you can’t re-pick a buddy after you’ve done it, and you only see the mission types after you pick them, there may be times you need to pick a harder mission even to save the buddy you’ve got with you so you don’t risk losing them forever. On top of all of that, the procedurally generated non-story named bad guys you fight can even form rivalries with you, slowly getting stronger as you encounter them more and more. Eventually you can have “showdown” mission types appear, and if you win against them, that super powerful enemy will now be a buddy of yours! There are some slight drawbacks here and there. Some mission types are much harder than others, and given that your buddy is also your weapon, an unwise choice of buddy can make your next mission much harder if it turns out their weapon type is a bad match for the map you’re dumped into. There also aren’t too many maps in the game, with the same handful of 4 or 5 story maps being reused over and over with some slight variations in environmental objects. That said, it’s hard to see the lack of variety as much of a problem given how quick and breezy the missions are. There’s even a high score table in the game that keeps track of your highest rank reached, as though there are save points every 5 stages in the main story, you can keep going in the post-game and play as many of those non-story missions in a row as you possibly can for the highest score you can muster! All in all, it’s a really cool gameplay loop, and it’s super cool to have what’s basically an action rogue-lite (though we wouldn’t’ve called it that back then) on the Wii for such a cheap price digitally. The presentation of the game is very well done too. The music has some really fun and rockin’ tracks, with the boss themes being some of my particular favorites. The graphics are also simple but very clever in how well they get emotion out of the characters they’re using. Because Yuu, the main character, can also be a Mii, this means that basically everyone in the game is animating and emoting with Mii-like proportions, and it’s remarkable just how much variety they have in these despite the limited pieces they’re working with. The story characters are super fun and expressive, but the degree to which Grezzo makes the Mii-like characters emote makes it no surprise that Nintendo tapped them for projects like 3DS Streetpass games or the more recent Miitopia, as they’ve shown an incredible aptitude for it for quite some time. Verdict: Highly Recommended. While it takes a bit of getting used to the controls and the best practices in how to play, this is a super fun game! It absolutely deserves its reputation as one of the best games on WiiWare, as its gameplay loop expertly captures the most of what was possible with the relatively small file sizes you were restricted to for that system. If you’re a fan of action-based rogue-lites, this will certainly be a major pain in the butt to track down (let alone play if you don’t know Japanese ^^;) these days, but if you’re willing to go through the effort, you’ve got a super fun time waiting here for you~. These are games I bought years and years ago back when it was first announced that the Wii’s eShop would be shutting down. I held on to the Wii that I bought them on (the very same Japanese Wii I bought during my visit way back in 2013), and they’ve just sorta been on my plate, ready to be gotten to whenever I’ve felt the burning urge for more Mystery Dungeon. After playing and enjoying Chocobo Dungeon 2 so much, I felt it was high time I booted one of these up and finally played through it. I wasn’t originally going to play through all of them, but I figured, eh, why not just play through each as long as I had the Wii up and I wasn’t hating my time with them, so I just played through all three. I played through Flame first, and then Storm, and then Light, and it took me a combined 25-ish hours to do it all via the Japanese versions on real hardware.
Like virtually all Pokemon releases, there were three versions of this with almost identical stories. It follows the adventures of a small Pokemon adventure team in either the Pokemon Village, Pokemon Beach, or Pokemon Garden (depending on the version you’re playing), though the layouts of each are exactly the same. Oddly enough, these are basically the only PMD games where you don’t play an actual main character, and you can swap who your team leader is immediately too. Being WiiWare games, these don’t really have the file sizes to have much in the way of long story content, and they don’t push the envelope on that front. They’re short, simple stories that have some fun dialogue, but are ultimately pretty forgettable, especially when compared to their far meatier handheld counterparts and their quite good stories. The stories being weak aren’t exactly a bad thing in a vacuum, but it’s definitely something that’s going to underwhelm and disappoint any big PMD fan who went out of their way to track these down to play them in this day and age, that’s for sure. The gameplay of each is pretty straightforward Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. You have a team of up to four Pokemon, you go through procedurally generated dungeons to complete rescue requests you pick up on the billboard in town, and you can recruit Pokemon if you’re lucky enough upon recruiting them. There aren’t many dungeon types, but given that it’s all procedurally generated, that’s not a terribly huge deal as long as they have all the Pokemon, and shockingly enough, all 493 Pokemon that existed at the time actually *are* available to recruit into your team for anyone crazy enough to get all three games and play them that obsessively. The big gimmick of these games that makes them stand out from the other Mystery Dungeon-type games (though I’ve heard one or two have dabbled in it since) is the Pokemon Tower mechanic. After the third dungeon has been unlocked, you’re taught how to do the Pokemon Tower, which involves finding a hole in a dungeon, and then being able to stack your Pokemon in a tower up to four Pokemon tall. Pokemon towers are VERY strong, as not only do the two to four of them share a combined health bar, but if the Pokemon at the base uses a special move, everyone in the tower can use one too. Not only that, but the Pokemon not at the tower’s base get to use their moves *for free*, so they don’t actually even consume PP as they’re doing it. Pokemon come in 4 size rankings, and you can only stack a maximum of two Pokemon of the same size on top of one another, so building a team that’s both strong and readily stackable is an important part of any successful Adventure Team. Pokemon towers are extremely powerful, which is why your enemies will do them too, but that’s kinda where the game’s issues begin. Pokemon towers are SO powerful that not being in one is basically an invitation to die. The start of a dungeon is always the most dangerous part, since if you don’t find a hole to stack in quickly, you’ll be hunted down and killed *very* fast because the enemy tower’s move chains are exactly as devastating as your own. On top of that, there are hidden traps on the floor of the dungeons that will unstack you, and even weather events at the start of a floor that will ALSO unstack you completely. In a normal Mystery Dungeon game, these sorts of things wouldn’t be so bad, but given just how crucial your tower is to staying alive, you’re relying a LOT on the traps’ RNG to not screw you over at any given time unless you want to grind a LOT. These games being somewhat content poor also lends to them being pretty bad with the grinding they require to see the credits (and just do new content full-stop, really). The penultimate and especially the ultimate story dungeons are REALLY significant jumps in difficulty from the previous dungeons, and you’ll likely need to be doing a couple hours of grinding to get your team to a place where they actually have a chance to survive to the end. Survive is actually the key word there, oddly enough, as these games actually have no bosses. Likely a factor of their light story content, it’s not a problem per se, but it’s just one more thing that makes them feel like the budget titles that they are. Lastly, a weird thing these games have for a PMD game that’s actually something they share with Chocobo Dungeon 2 is that your Pokemon can actually evolve anywhere at any time as long as the right requirements. For your own Pokemon, it’s kinda neat that you don’t need to wait until some special post-game area unlocks to be able to evolve your Pokemon, but for your enemies it’s a different story. Just like in Chocobo Dungeon 2, if one of your allies gets taken down, the enemy that did it will evolve immediately to a stronger form. That’s not quite so bad in a well balanced game like Chocobo Dungeon 2, but it’s very often immediately a death sentence in a game like Pokemon where an evolution can theoretically make an enemy jump up in power some 15 or 20 levels in an instant, and there’s virtually nothing you can do about it. It’s not as big an issue overall as the poor level curve or the RNG that dictates the survival of Pokemon towers, but it’s just one more aspect that makes these games feel unfair and frustrating (even for RNG-dictated games like Mystery Dungeon ones). The aesthetics are overall just fine. They use the character models from the Pokemon Ranch and Pokemon Rumble Arena games, so if you’re a fan of those, you’ll like these, and if you’re not a fan, you’ll not care for them. The areas are bright and colorful, and I thought the game looked quite nice, and it’s honestly always hilarious watching your Pokemon hop on top of each other and make scared little faces as their tower teeters back and forth XD. The music is very solidly OK, but it’s nothing special. The game’s presentation is good-to-serviceable, and I’d have a hard time finding outright faults or strengths in it unless someone has extreme feelings on the Pokemon Ranch art style one way or the other. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Even as poorly balanced and frustrating as these games often are, I did have fun with them. Even with each new one I started, despite the annoyances of when I wasn’t in a tower, it was hard not to feel a satisfying rush of power once my Pokemon had towered up and I could start raining hellfire down on my enemies once more. There aren’t exactly a wealth of options for console-native Pokemon Mystery Dungeon experiences, and if you REALLY must have one, these are perfectly serviceable for a fun enough time in a Mystery Dungeon game on your Wii. That said, it’s really just damning with faint praise. Any fan big enough to be even considering hunting these and their English patches down to play these days will definitely be familiar with the better made PMD games, and it’s impossible to not be constantly comparing these to their far superior handheld cousins. If you’re a big fan of Mystery Dungeon games and want something a bit quirky and different and don’t mind some poor balancing, then these could certainly be a quite fun time. However, if you’re someone who’s a big PMD fan and you’re hoping that these will be some secret, lost entries as great as the contemporary Explorers Of games, then you’re going to be really disappointed with these, and you’re better off avoiding them. I played the first Chocobo Dungeon nearly two years ago, and though I liked it, it didn’t really leave me hankering for more Mystery Dungeon stuff despite running out to pick this up in the midst of my playthrough of it x3. Now all this time later, the mood for more Mystery Dungeon has struck me at last, and I have finally seen this game through to the end. It took me a (surprisingly short) 12-ish hours to get through the Japanese version of the game playing on real hardware.
Chocobo Dungeon 2 picks up some time after the first game, and Mog and Chocobo have moved on from that village in search of new treasure. Coming across a strange dungeon, they venture inside only for Chocobo to get launched out while Mog is locked inside! Chocobo is found by a kind young white mage named Shiroma, who sees him go back into the dungeon, only to find Mog just as he’s causing the whole dungeon to blow up and sink into the ocean! This is just the beginning of the epic tale that will find Chocobo, Mog, and Shiroma in a grand quest to save the world! (or at least the local village). It’s a simple story, sure, but it’s a really nicely done one! Compared to how simple the writing in the first Chocobo Dungeon was, this game’s characters and setting really come to life in a way the series had just never done before, and the game benefits a ton from it. Never did I think a silly Chocobo-themed Mystery Dungeon game would get me to tear up, but here we are X3. It’s a very sweet story about the value in supporting and trusting in others, and its cool to see that it’s the legacy of these games being quite well written goes back this far! The gameplay is very much what you’d expect from a Mystery Dungeon game for anyone familiar with them. For those unfamiliar, in modern terms, we’d call them rogue-likes in the traditional sense, with you moving around a grid in a procedurally generated dungeon, and the enemies only move when you move. This game is a bit like the original Chocobo Dungeon, Chocobo Dungeon 2 is much less close to a “true” rogue-like than its predecessor was. CD2 is a HUGE step forward for the series away from the old style and towards the new in more than just its story. In earlier games, we had one big dungeon that would reset your level every time you left and came back (i.e. died), and you’d sometimes get to keep some armor and weapons, but just as often, you were back to square one when you died. Chocobo Dungeon 1 has a bit of permanent progression in how you can unlock little benefits via sidequests (which this game also has), but Chocobo Dungeon 2 moves that bar WAY forward in just how much bigger and more player-friendly the systems in this game are. First of all, we no longer have one big dungeon! Though you do effectively go through several dungeons twice, there are quite a few dungeons you’ll need to go through with each having its own boss to fight in Chocobo Dungeon 2. You also no longer lose your levels upon leaving the dungeon! All levels you get in Chocobo Dungeon 2 are permanent, and I ended up finishing the game around level 43 myself. On top of that, you can find spell tomes in dungeons to cast elemental magic with, and the more you cast a particular type of magic, the higher your reading comprehension level (and therefore magic) level gets as well! That said, stats aren’t everything in this game, and losing your stash of items (from your piles of tomes you’ve been hoarding to your preciously upgraded armor and weapon) can REALLY suck. However, while you do lose *everything* upon death in this game (where iirc Chocobo Dungeon 1 let you keep at least the armor and weapon you were wearing), you thankfully get to still keep a good chunk of your cash to restock once you get back to town. You can also easily use an easily bought item to teleport out of a dungeon in this game and, if you made it far enough, you can go through a tiny dungeon to get right back around where you left off. This makes supply runs a lot easier, even if these mini-dungeon shortcuts are things you have to do solo. Needing to do them solo is something special in this game as well, as this is also the first game to give you an NPC buddy following you around in each dungeon! The NPC party member you get can’t use items and will vary depending on the dungeon but having that extra bit of muscle can really be a life saver, and learning to utilize your partner’s power well is as crucial as learning to use your own. As an extra fun bonus, you can even dip into the options menu and have a buddy control that NPC instead of the CPU controlling them! Their AI is pretty darn good and reliable, honestly, but it’s still a super cool 2-player mode that you can use basically whenever you want~. All the new good stuff is nice and all, but this is still an early Mystery Dungeon game, and it does really show it. This game has some really mean bits and unpolished bits of design compared to later games like the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games many folks reading this are likely a lot more familiar with. It cannot be stressed enough just how awful a death usually is. While nothing you’ve found can truly never be found again, needing to find that stuff again, particularly your weapons & armor, can be a TON of work if they were highly upgraded. Not only can your weapons and armor (not to mention all of your precious piles of spell tomes and throwable magic rocks) disappear upon death, your weapons and armor have durability and can BREAK mid-battle if they take enough punishment. Your NPC ally’s stats scale off of your own level, but those weapons and armor are often the difference between life and death, and the village store selling literally no armor or weapons ever also makes it a real pain to go and find a fresh weapon and armor in your next venture into a dungeon in the early game. The lack of polish isn’t all bad, though. The reason I keep mentioning those precious spell tomes is because they’re a very valuable and, most importantly, very powerful way of dealing with enemies without putting your squishy birdy self in harm’s way. Going through the first few floors of a particularly tricky dungeon and hoarding all of the tomes you can is an excellent strategy for basically the entire game. While that on its own won’t take down every boss, of course, it’s a nice thing to have to get over particularly hard bits, even if it does feel a bit too overpowered at the end of the day. The aesthetics of the game are very pretty. Once we finally got bona fide 3D on consoles, we really stopped seeing many games use pre-rendered 3D graphics. Chocobo Dungeon 1 had pre-rendered 3D for its graphics, and its sequel really ups the ante in just how good they look. Monsters both friendly and otherwise look very pretty and cool in their chibi-styled designs and animations, and dungeons have very different flairs to them that make even re-going through a familiar location feel like a brand-new experience. The music is also excellent, and this is another title from this decade that shows off, yet again, why SquareSoft’s music team was and is still so heavily lauded in the industry. Verdict: Highly Recommended. The systems in this game aren’t perfect, but they’re a HUGE step forward from where they were even just one year earlier with the first game, and even if there are some still overly punishing things here and some weirdly overpowered things there, they all add up to a very fun experience that make even a game as old as this fun and approachable for players old and new alike. The graphics are great, the music is incredible, and if you’re a fan of rogue-likes (or even just if classic Final Fantasy creatures all cute & chibi sound like a good time), then this is absolutely one you don’t wanna pass up on. This is a series I’ve heard praise for for almost as long as I’ve been actively looking into retro gaming stuff online. The steep price of the English copies combined with so many other RPGs to play had always kept me away from actually starting them, but the creator’s recent passing got me thinking it was about time I finally get around to seeing just what all the fuss is with this Suikoden stuff. It took me about 30-ish hours to get the best ending (collecting all 108 Stars of Destiny) in the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
Suikoden is the story of Tir, the son of one of the five great generals of the imperial army. After joining up with the military and just starting out on doing missions for them, his childhood friend’s great secret is revealed. As it turns out, he controls a powerful and ancient magic that the empire’s high sorceress is hell bent on getting her hands on, and he gives it to you for safe keeping before he’s carried off by troops. Fleeing the capital, you eventually end up joining and leading the resistance army against the empire! Such is Tir’s quest to stop the empire and keep the Soul Eater rune out of the sorceress’s hands. Suikoden’s writing is a very mixed bag. On one hand, their opting to focus on side characters rather than a main character means that we get a remarkable amount of great vignettes along our journey to topple the empire. The game is loaded with great dialogue writing and memorable side characters, even if not all 108 of the Stars of Destiny (the guys you’re recruiting) have terribly big roles unto themselves. On the other hand, the story is very badly focused, and not for the obvious reasons you might think a game with 108 recruit-able party members would be. The biggest issue comes down to the whole “topple the empire, stop the sorceress” conceit of the thing. This isn’t so much a story of getting rid of a corrupt, evil government so much as it is a story about stopping the big bad wizard behind it all. The resistance army is really just a means to an end to keep her from getting the Soul Eater rune, and the game spends precious little time actually focusing on *any* sort of political or systemic bent as to why people would want to get rid of the empire. People offhandedly mention how the empire has “changed” in the past few years and that it is cruel *now*, but the whole empire thing seemingly worked out just fine until the sorceress started using it as a means to chase down ultimate power. However, the game still has TONS of moments that are like “so what IS your justice, main character!? Are you even sure you’re on the right side of this war!?”, and they hit really weak when you know for a fact that you’re fighting on the good side, because you’re not the side with the world-destroying sorceress on it. It makes for some very confused larger themes, as it almost seems like the game is going out of its way to exonerate virtually anyone but the sorceress and her most comically evil henchmen as ultimately just good people caught (i.e. mind controlled) in an actually good system that happens to be corrupted by one big bad actor. There are some other pretty significant problems around Tir himself not really being a real character (him being a silent protagonist makes the larger moments of pathos surrounding him pretty weak), but the big thing is just how bad the narrative’s indecision is about how bad the empire is vs. how bad the sorceress is. The moment to moment writing is still fun and I enjoyed it, but the ending was decidedly weak compared to how good that earlier stuff was. I can very easily believe that the games after this are much better (as I’ve always heard that Suikoden 2 is the realization of everything Suikoden 1 was trying to do), but that doesn’t really change how the original Suikoden is an impressive but still decidedly rough first try. The mechanics and combat are overall pretty darn good, or at least satisfying in a way I really enjoy games like this being. It’s a turn-based RPG with a party of six, and a back row and a front row for both you and your enemies. Dungeon design tends to be short and sweet, and it’s really good at not letting the narrative pace get dragged down by overly long dungeons with billions of random encounters. Though all 108 Stars of Destiny aren’t actually usable party members (some of them just provide services for you back at base like adding a weapon shop, for example), there are still a LOT of potential party members for you to use if you so wish. While on that topic, finding the Stars of Destiny is actually a lot more reasonable than I would’ve thought it’d be. Almost (but crucially, not actually) all of them are signposted very well, and it’s actually not that difficult to get nearly all of them without the use of a guide. Three or four of them ARE unreasonable enough to stumble across that I’d still recommend a guide to find them if you’re keen to (it changes the ending a little, though not super meaningfully, imo), but I was very happily surprised at just how easy to stumble across most of the optional characters were. On another very thankful note, the game’s EXP curve is also completely designed around just how massive a potential character pool you’re drawing from. Party members below the current level of an area level up EXTREMELY fast, often getting to rough parity with your other party members in the course of five for ten battles. Additionally, the large party combined with the safety of the back row means you have very safe and efficient way to include weaker guys in your party so they can still level up, which is also a very nice and well thought out gameplay feature. The bigger issue with keeping your party equipped is money. Up until about the halfway point, getting more money is tough, and that can be an issue with how often you’re forced to have certain party members come along with you. Armor costs a boat load if you want the good stuff, and while each party member doesn’t have interchangeable weapons, their respective forever weapon can be upgrade for (a lot of) cash at a blacksmith, which thankfully cuts down on inventory clutter. Magic is a bit of a weird one, as you equip runes on characters at magic shops, and then that character can use the different levels of magic from that rune via a sort of universal spell charge system tied to their character and level (not unlike how spell charges work in early DND or Final Fantasy 1). Magic is both very limited but incredibly powerful, and it’s a similarly nice blend of “simple but learnable” like the rest of the combat is. It’s an overall quite easy game, but it still manages to feel challenging, which is exactly the kind of combat design I like in one of these games. There are two other minor gameplay modes, and they’re duels and army battles. At certain parts of the story, your army will need to fight another army, and sometimes two characters will have a one-on-one duel with bespoke mechanics. Both of these systems, however, are just glorified rock-paper-scissors matches, with the duels in particular being extremely easy if you just spam the defend command (as defending also counters their power attacks to deal massive damage). The army battles are pretty and cool, but being RPS doesn’t make it terribly fun if you’re struggling with one. They’re not too hard, but that doesn’t change how it just sucks to lose when the only real reason you’re losing is just being too unlucky. Getting more Stars of Destiny will give you more and more powerful options in those army fights, so you can tilt the odds in your favor at least a bit, but it’s still something that I wish either had a bit more skill involved or were a bit more difficult to lose outside of just getting lucky enough (as there’s no cutscene skip option, and this game has some lengthy cutscenes at times that you’ll need to button-mash through to get another try at a hard fight). The game’s aesthetics are quite impressive for one of the earliest RPGs on the PS1. Being from December 1995, it’s no great surprised that some of the character models and such don’t have a ton of animation to them, and that the graphics do look a bit muddy in places. Be that as it may, this is still a very pretty 2D game on the PS1. Monster design is fantastic and varied, character portraits are detailed and expressive, and environments are well put together and hard to lose your way in with how both brief and detailed they so often are. The music isn’t *quite* on the level of a SquareSoft game, imo, but it’s *damn* close, and this game has no shortage of really good music tracks, even if the actual track list isn’t too terribly long. Verdict: Recommended. Though it’s certainly not without its flaws, Suikoden 1 is a really quality RPG on the PS1. It’s a bit mechanically bare for those who love really mechanically complex games, and the writing is a bit on the weak side for folks who prefer a better written story, but it does both well enough that I think it’s still a very easy game to have a good time with as long as you’re not demanding perfection from everything you play. If you’re in the mood for a good PS1 RPG, you can certainly do better, but you can do a lot worse too, and I’ve no doubt in my mind that, at the very least, Suikoden 1 will serve as an excellent spring board for its far improved sequel. |
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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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