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.
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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. It was almost a year ago that I played through the original SaGa on the Switch trilogy collection like this. I wasn’t exactly not enjoying my time with the first hour or so I dipped into SaGa 2 at the time, but I was just too burned out on SaGa to play any more of it at the time. With my recently playing through Romancing SaGa, I felt it was high time I fill the gap in my play history and experience the game that came between the two. It took me roughly 30~35 hours (my best guess) over the course of a week to play through the Japanese version of the game via the Switch collection without using the speed up features the collection provides.
Like with SaGa 1, the second game’s premise is one of gods and legends. Long, long ago, the gods scattered seventy-seven hidden treasures throughout the world (MAGI in English). They were objects of great power, and it was said that whomever collected them all would become the new god of the world. Many have tried throughout the ages, but none have succeeded. The opening of the game finds you, the main character, asleep in your room until you’re suddenly awakened by your father. He gives you one of the hidden treasures and leaps out the window into the night, on a journey he never returns from. Flashing forward a good few years, you decide to pick three of your closest friends and leave your tiny village on a quest to find your long lost father and see just what is it he’s been getting up to all these years. Even after playing through the Last Bible GameBoy games a couple years back, I am still routinely surprised at the length and quality of RPG stories on this console. While it’s hardly something textually to rival 16-bit contemporaries, SaGa 2 is quite a competently done little RPG that feels like it’d be right at home on an 8-bit console. The dialogue writing is funny and clever, and the story paints an interesting and engaging picture of the dangerous effects of self-interested leaders and the damaging effects they can have on the world. Even though your four player characters are just generated by you, the little quips and story beats surrounding especially the main character were ones I found very fun, and this game is definitely more than just its mechanics (as I’ve always viewed this series to be). On the topic of that created party, just like in the first SaGa, you create a party of four adventurers to go out and save the world. Also like in the last game, you have several races with very similar functions: Humans (who are the all-rounders of the game and excel in physical weapons), Espers (who are similar to humans but learn spells), Monsters (who don’t have natural stat growths and instead change into defeated enemies by consuming their meat after battle), and the new addition of Robots (who also lack natural stat growths and instead have their stats defined by the equipment they’re presently carrying). Monsters are still of dubious usefulness, and that was reflected in my party choice of two Espers, a Human, and a Robot, but Robots are a neat and interesting new choice as physical weapon users. However, though the pieces you have to play with seem very similar, the actual implementation of these systems is *drastically* improved. Just about all weapons still have weapon durability, sure, but no longer do Humans only stat-up by using items bought in stores, and no longer are Espers’ power levels subject to random stat growths and reductions. Instead, Humans and Espers now always have a chance after battle to have their max HP increase, and their strength, defense, speed, and magic power have a chance to increase based on the weapon(s)/move(s) they used in battle. Using a speed-focused weapon has a chance to raise your speed, using a spell has a chance to increase your magic power, and so on. Using higher value weapons against higher powered targets gets you a better chance to level, so if you do like I did and grind exclusively against wimpy enemies, your final play time will likely look a lot like mine XD. Additionally, Espers no longer randomly lose and gain *any* spell like they used to either. Now it’s always the bottom spell on their list that’s replaced, and they always tell you when the spell is replaced as well, so you no longer need to constantly check your Espers’ stats and spell list after every single random battle like you had to in the first game. However, even if you don’t play it safe and grind like I did (I reckon I did like 15-ish total hours of grinding), the way stat growths work is still decidedly imperfect. Battles tend to be quite short, so each character will likely get one turn, if that, and so you’ll likely be focusing on one stat at a time whether you intend to or not. This means that characters who happen to be slower (like my male Esper party member) will likely end up significantly weaker than their peers who happen to go first, and that’s especially true with just how dominant magic once again is through the first half or so of the game. Speed is also essential to win these rocket-tag battles (bosses and otherwise), and going back to grind in a safe place for speed and/or magic power will almost certainly be a part of your playthrough as it was in mine. While the basic quality of life features have been improved *massively* compared to the first SaGa, just how non-linear and imperfect an experience grinding can be is nonetheless still quite frustrating, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for calling SaGa 2 crushingly boring at times as a result. It’s something that comes with the territory for lots of these old 8-bit RPGs, and it’s something that is something you just need to have to accept you’ll have to deal with upon starting this game. It’s something I certainly appreciate Romancing SaGa’s stat growth systems much more after experiencing, for sure, but while I didn’t exactly have a bad time with this game (as the grinding is mindless and simple enough that it made for a fine background activity while doing other stuff), this isn’t exactly a quick and breezy time I’d see myself playing through again any time soon. The aesthetics are very much like SaGa 1’s, but they’re still very nice. Background effects in environments are very nice, and the monster sprites in particular are incredibly charming. I can’t begin to count how many times I took a screenshot of a remarkably goofy looking enemy and sent it to my friends to giggle about how great and/or weird they looked x3. Something else not to be overlooked is the music. Though there aren’t terribly many music tracks in this game, the tracks that are here are really good (with the final boss’s theme being a stand-out favorite I immediately shared with several friends~). SquareSoft once again shows why they were some of the best in the business by saving new and more dynamic tracks for when they’ll have the most impact. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. As far as 8-bit RPGs go, this is probably near the top of the pile as far as base enjoyability goes. Sure, it does have some pretty bad grinding problems, but given how many common problems of 8-bit RPGs (such as a love for instant-death magic) that this game lacks, this is a much easier game to recommend than most from its era. If you’re interested in something a bit out of the ordinary and don’t mind some turn-based RPG grinding, then this is a great game to spend your time with. However, if you’re someone who prefers a more straightforward RPG experience and doesn’t have much patience for grinding, then this game is definitely not going to be the one to make a believer out of you ^^;. I’ve had this game for almost a year now, and I picked it up around when I was playing through the GameBoy SaGa games last year. I only made it through one of them, at the time, so the other SaGa games I had, their SFC counterparts included, got put on the back burner for an indefinite period of time. After finishing Secret of Mana a couple weeks back, I was in the mood for more Super Famicom stuff, and I finally managed to jazz myself up enough for something new that I decided it was high time I try this game out (whether I’d completed the GB SaGa trilogy or not). My final playtime on my save was somewhere around the 35 hours mark, but between resets, redos of stuff, and the frankly dubious accuracy of that in-game timer, I’d much more strongly believe my play time was closer to 40 or even 45 hours to finish the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
As the opening cutscene explains, long, long ago, there was nothing but darkness and turmoil in the world. The three gods of death let havoc reign, and life was nearly impossible. That is until one day, the father of all gods, Elore, put a stop to it. Wielding the power of the ten destiny stones, his chosen human heroes forced the gods of death to stand down, and peace to come to the world for the first time. However, one god of death did not back down. Saruin, the strongest of them, refused to surrender, and only at the end of a long, bloody battle was he finally sealed away, though it came at the cost of the life of Elore’s chosen champion of men. That’s really all you get to set the stage for the very interesting and unconventional story that is the first Romancing SaGa. Though its graphics make it feel like a rom-hack of Final Fantasy IV, the actual gameplay and narrative design of Romancing SaGa is incredibly ambitious and unique for the January of ‘92 (at least on consoles, anyhow). You have your choice of eight different potential starting characters, and after naming them, you drop into their story. A brief introduction to their tale will see you (usually) set on a brief opening quest that shows how they start adventuring around the land, but there isn’t much in the realm of “plot” to Romancing SaGa 1, at least not in the traditional sense. Trading more traditional narrative design elements (or at least their execution) for freedom of choice, the “Free Scenario” system means that you can, and are encouraged to, play Romancing SaGa however you want, really. If you want to explore a location, go there! If you want to recruit a party member, do it! There’s even a sort of in-built morality system, and certain quests and events will happen differently depending on how you’ve led your life on your adventure up until this point. While there are certainly quests and bits of story here and there, it’s almost all entirely optional save for your opening quest and however you end up learning of where the final boss is hiding. I started as the pirate captain Hawk, and after being betrayed and cast out of Pirate’s Coast with his first mate Geraha the lizardman, we traveled the land fighting monsters, hunting for treasure, and righting wrongs where we could. But a lot of that adventure happened just because of where I happened to be at particular times and who happened to be with me. The narrative design of Romancing SaGa 1 allows for a really impressive amount of emergent storytelling for the time, and even though it might not be everyone’s cup of tea, it was a really cool experience that is certainly something novel in the SFC’s early library. The way that Romancing SaGa 1 achieves this degree of freedom and world progression is by something the Event Rank system (or at least it was called that by the time of the PS2 remake). After every battle you fight, the world’s event rank will tick up by one point, and once the event rank gets high enough, certain things start to occur. Higher rank quests will open up, lower rank quests will go away and/or auto-fail, and the monsters of the world will gradually be replaced with stronger replacements as the world ticks ever closer to Saruin’s resurrection (which happens at about 880 battles, for those curious). This is both a strength and a weakness of the game’s design depending on what kind of experience you’re looking for. If you’re looking for emergent gameplay and carving out your own adventure regardless of what happens, then you’re likely going to like the Event Rank system quite a bit. However, if you’re the type of player who MUST see everything in one playthrough and really hate missing out on ANYTHING, no matter how trivial, then this is likely going to drive you crazy and make you have a miserable time. It’s up to you which one of those you’ll end up being, but I’ll end my explanation of the Event Rank system with a bit of advice I found on a Japanese guide site when I was looking for advice just starting out. This game lets you have any kind of adventure you want. Instead of worrying about what you’re missing, before you start looking up any more detailed guide or what not, just do your best to lose yourself in the adventure, and follow fate’s thread wherever it leads you. It’s what the game was specifically designed for, and you’ll end up having a much better time if you play it that way. This is how I approached the game, and I can say without a doubt that it made my time with it far, far better as a result~. Being a SaGa game, the actual RPG mechanics of it are certainly unconventional, but I honestly found them to be quite straightforward and simple once I had the hang of them. It may seems strange at first to have no world map in a game from this era, just picking a new spot on the map to go to once you’ve learned about it in game will become second nature to you very quickly. It will get you in the habit of talking to everyone you see, which will not only help you unlock new areas, but it will also help you bump into new quests much easier too~. While we’ve thankfully discarded the weapon durability system that the GameBoy SaGa games love so much, we’ve expanded the way that Espers would randomly gain stats to a much larger gameplay system. While your party of *six* will indeed have chances to gain weapons on their respective levels and spells only when they’ve used that particular weapon or kind of spell in battle, all of their other stats simply have a random chance of leveling up at the end of each turn-based encounter. Depending on the background you give your character at the start, there are some *slight* leveling biases for different characters and backgrounds, but there is generally nothing one character can do that another can’t. While it’ll certainly take a fair bit of time (time you don’t have, since you have that event rank to worry about) to re-spec someone very skilled with an iron sword to start being a back-row magic user, there’s nothing actually stopping them from doing that and getting good at it just like a caster who’s been doing it since the start of the game. This all amounts to a gameplay experience that is very flexible towards adapting to how you want to play the game. If you’re being conscious of your event rank, of course, there are certainly some best practices to follow, though. Weapon skill level often matters a lot more than your character stats (and stats don’t affect bow damage at all), so sticking with one weapon for a very long time is a really smart and good way to play the game, because even just unequipping a weapon (of which you can eqiup like six at a time) will reset your skill level on it. Armor and defense are VERY important, as this is largely a game of rocket tag. Tanking an enemy hit and then attacking back hard enough that they go down in one or two turns is the recipe for winning most tough encounters, so prioritizing armor over weapons is a very smart strategy. Party members are largely interchangable outside of certain quests that are tied to particular ones, so using someone for whatever role you may need them to fill at the time is a perfectly fine solution, and you don’t need to hunt around everywhere looking for a perfect fit if all you need is a warm body to sling spells and wield a bow. A lot of the freedom in this game can seem extremely foreboding, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for feeling that way, but what makes that MUCH easier to deal with (especially compared to the PS2 remake) is that this game is ultimately just not very difficult. As long as you’re following best practices and not just playing badly, you don’t need to play anywhere remotely close to “optimally” to actually have a fun time and have a chance at beating the game. You actually have all the time in the world to go to the final dungeon in the end, so grinding up at the end of the game until you’ve got the best weapons and armor money can buy is a pretty smart idea once you’re there (and it’ll be a fair bit of grinding, admittedly), but it’s very easy to have a fulfilling and fun adventure just like I did without needing to have a character building walkthrough open the entire time. A guide can be helpful to point you towards those best practices I mentioned and help poke you in the right direction for a quest, sure, but there is absolutely no need to let the freedom of the game stand as an obstacle in enjoying your adventure. The degree to which you can experiment and party build is intimidating, no doubt, but the game does a really good job at setting you up for success to the point that just wandering wherever the wind takes you is still a perfectly valid and fun way to enjoy your adventure without feeling like you’ve created a part that can’t possibly complete the game. The presentation of the game is quite nice, but it’s still an early-life SFC RPG at the end of the day. The music is just the quality you’d expect from a SquareSoft game, of course, and the graphics look pretty enough in their FFIV rom-hack sort of way, but it very much has the “we built an 8-bit game on a 16-bit console” vibe that early SFC RPGs like FFIV and FFV have for sure. My favorite part of the graphic design is how they do the text when people talk, though. Speech bubbles of appropriate sizes pop up directing out of the particular person talking, and it’s a very fun and creative way to show who’s talking without needing to make the player remember a bunch of names or whatever, even if it’s just some random NPC talking at you. The game is also a biiiit buggy here and there. While it’s not a *huge* problem most of the time, there are absolutely places where the instability of the game soured my experience a bit. The biggest example was, when I used a powerful summon item to beat a particularly mean and tough mini-boss near the end of the game, the colors went all weird, and the game froze after the end of the next cutscene I completed. After resetting the console, I went to load my save only to find that my save file, File 1, was deleted! Thankfully my backup save in File 2 was safe, but as successive attempts and trial and error showed, using that summon (on that boss at least) created a RAM issue that wound up deleting a save file in addition to crashing the game. It was such an incredible insult to injury that I could do nothing but laugh at the time (especially since my backup save was so close to that one), and this was the only bug anywhere near this serious or gameplay affecting that I ever encountered, but it was also clearly SUCH a major bug that there was no way I couldn’t mention it here. While that particular instance will likely never happen to you, never forget to save early and save often (and in multiple places!) should you ever decide to play this game on original hardware. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While this is a game I quite enjoyed, this totally falls into the category of “7/10 game that certain people will really love and others will absolutely hate,” as you probably picked up from reading the review. If my explanation of how to follow best practices and how best to lose yourself in the narrative piqued your interest, then this is a game you might well enjoy a fair bit like I did! However, if a lot of those systems sounded nightmarish and my reassurances did little to assuage your worries, then this is probably one worth staying away from. I honestly didn’t really think I’d like this game very much, and that this would be a game I quietly trudged to the end of because I don’t like not finishing games I spend money on, but I was really pleasantly surprised at just how much I enjoyed with my time with it (and proud of myself for actually sitting down and finishing it in the first place XD). Romancing SaGa is definitely not a game for everyone, but for those willing to give it a chance, it’s a novel and ambitious entry in the SFC’s library that will give you an adventure like just about nothing else on the system can. This is one of a handful of games I backed on Kickstarter well over a decade ago and just never got around to properly playing. My girlfriend of the time and I used to play games like this, very artsy, colorful stuff, all the time back then, and this was one we just never got around to playing together back then. This is a game that's pretty poorly documented online (being a not super stand-out indie game from a decade+ ago), but with how short the HowLongToBeat time on it was, I figured I might as well sit down and finally finish the thing. Playing with a controller, it took me about an hour and a half to finish the English version of the game while getting like 20 out of 50 collectibles (though I more often than not wasn't really trying to find them, admittedly ^^;).
Pulse is the story of Eva, a girl living on a tropical island who has set out to do the trial that all members of her village do to enter adulthood. Eva, however, has generally been kept from ever attempting this, and from her family's perspective, for a very good reason: She's blind. Only able to "see" the world when it's illuminated via pulses of sound in the environment, she nonetheless sets out on a boat to do the trial, and ends up completing a lot more than that in the process. Pulse isn't a super world-changing game narratively, but it's still a well enough written story. It can be a bit hard to follow at times with just how experimental and odd the storytelling can be, but it's still a nicely written tale of facing your fears and not letting other people decide what your limits are. Gameplay-wise, Pulse is something between an adventure game and a walking simulator. You navigate the world in first-person, and you're really just getting from one end of the level to the next. While there is some platforming and even a stealth section or two to hide from monsters that live on this island, the actual interactions with other entities is (thankfully) quite a small part of the game. Aided by furry little critters called Mokos (which are the only thing that Eva can completely "see" no matter where they are in the level), you can toss them around to solve puzzles or just create pulses to see the world with to progress forward. Really, just navigating levels in and of itself is the game's biggest challenge for the player, as just seeing what's around you can at times be extremely disorienting with both how your "sight" works as well as how levels are designed. The stealth sections involving monsters kinda sucks, but it's short enough that it's hard to give the game too much flak for it. It's quite frustrating sometimes to just find the path forward, but that's also kinda the entire point of the game. If you're playing Pulse, that's the exercise you've signed up for, so while it may be awkward and fiddly, it's hard for me to knock the game *too* badly for just doing what it sets out to do ^^; Aesthetically, the game is very pretty if a bit too simple looking at times. The sound design is quite well done, but, kinda like I expressed in the previous paragraph, the beautiful world can at times get in the way of actually playing the game. It's quite hard to explain how the visuals in Pulse work in only text, but you don't use echolocation. If a sound is happening in the world, that part of the world is visible due to the sound pulses emanated off of those surfaces. This isn't echo location, however, as it's very easy to "see" something through a wall because that wall isn't illuminated with pulses but the thing beyond it is. The Mokos are cute and the concept of "a world through the eyes of a blind girl" is a super neat one, and it makes for a very visually striking and unique little adventure, but if you're sensitive to flashing lights or lots of quick changing colors, this might be one to steer clear of, because it can get *very* disorienting at times in some stages. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Pulse isn't a bad game, but it's a very particularly made one. It does what it sets out to do to an OK degree, but what it's setting out to do is in and of itself going to be something that is only appealing to certain kinds of players, and with very little replay value and such a short play time, this is one that will likely be a difficult to justify purchase for many. If reading this review has made you curious about it, I highly encourage you to check out a video or two on Pulse to get a look at just what it looks like, because it's a super neat concept for a game, and it's not like Pulse fucks it up completely or anything. Pulse is a game made for a very specific kind of person, and while I may not be that person, I think there is still a lot of interest to be found in this title for the right kind of gamer. Closing out the Quintet trilogy of action/adventure games on the Super Famicom that I started last year, I finished Terranigma just at the start of the new year~. Now, unlike Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia (two games I really loved), Terranigma is a game I knew almost nothing about but have heard great things about for years and years. As long as I can remember, this has been held up as one of the best games on the Super Famicom, as well as one of the best games that never made it to North America. Finally getting a good excuse to play this game in particular was one of the biggest reasons I started playing through the Quintet trilogy in the first place, really. Regardless of any other feelings I may've had on this game, it was very interesting to finally get a taste of the game that people have been praising for all these years. It took me about 17.5 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without abusing save states.
Terranigma, or as it's known in Japanese, "Tenchi Souzou" (lit. Creation of Heaven), is the story of Ark. A young man living in the secluded forest village of Crystalholm, his whole life changes one day when he breaks down a forbidden door and finds Pandora's Box (and its resident scrimblo, Yomi) inside it. This sets off a chain of events that sees the elder of Crystalholm sending him on a grand adventure through the underworld. First, a mission to restore the continents of the overworld, and then a quest to guide the newly restored world to life again by saving its residents' souls. It's a story that, in its broader strokes, is very similar to the other two games in this trilogy, and in many ways it honestly feels like a strange midpoint between Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia. However, that comparison is good as much as it is bad. Actually, scratch that, it's actually much more bad than it is good ^^; Terranigma isn't written by the same person who did Illusion of Gaia (weirdly enough, Illusion of Gaia seems to be the only game that person has ever written, actually). It was written by the same writer as Soul Blazer along with a co-writer. Now however well their writing may've worked for a relatively smaller game like Soul Blazer, it really does not work nearly as well for a much larger game like Terranigma. The narrative pacing of this game is absolutely dreadful, with massive swaths of the middle of the game (I'd say from like the 20% mark to the 70% or 80% mark) having little to nothing to do with the overall themes or premise beyond "it's something else for Ark to do to restore the world or just progress through the map". That in and of itself isn't usually a bad thing, mind you, as not every game needs to be this grand epic that tells a meaningful story. Terranigma, however, IS trying to be this grand epic that tells a meaningful story, and just how many characters and thematic beats it tries to cram into its last leg comes off very poorly with just how little time we've had to get used to these characters and what they believe in. Even Ark himself, present through the entirety of the game, comes off as a really weirdly written character because he just so infrequently actually gets lines to give his character any sort of meaningful depth over the course of the narrative. There's a kinda sweet love story in here somewhere, and I think there's even something about the nature of good & evil and the cyclical nature of history and the universe, but it gets so confused and hurried at the end that I honestly had a lot of trouble trying to figure out what this game was even going for. Part of that is due to the game's own clumsy writing, sure, but part of it is also that a LOT of this game just feels like a far more poorly done rendition of Illusion of Gaia's story. That game actually had a well paced narrative with characters slowly and thoroughly developed throughout it, and the lack of that narrative writing ability really hurts Terranigma's overall story (not to mention makes it look very poor by sheer comparison in the first place). Terranigma also has some pretty bad issues with casual racism (particularly towards African Americans and First Nations Peoples) as well. This is something Illusion of Gaia kinda struggles with, but it's WAY worse here. It's hardly the worst instance in the world, granted, and it's certainly not the biggest issue the writing has, but it was so distracting that I couldn't leave it unmentioned here. At the end of the day, though, Terranigma just isn't a very well told story. The bones of the narrative are largely just a poorer replay of Illusion of Gaia's story, sure, but that didn't need to be its death knell. It could've been a perfectly fine story just living here as a vacuum separate from its predecessor, but even divorced from its lack of originality (within its own series), the lack of care and attention in how the story itself is executed causes a lot more harm than any amount of copying Illusion of Gaia's homework ever could. On a gameplay level, we're kinda stuck between good and bad here as well (though more so leaning towards bad in a lot of ways that matter). In a vacuum, this is (seemingly) easily the best playing of the trilogy. The ways Ark can jump around, dash through enemies, use his run button (which we finally have) to zip from place to place, it all amounts to a game that feels very nice to play around in compared to the previous two games in the series, both of which felt like you were in some way locked to a grid. You also have a neat magic system where you find blue crystals (Magirocks in English), and they act as a sort of total mana. You buy magic rings at vendors (you have a money system now!), and how many Magirocks you have dictate how many total rings you can carry around. One ring is one use of that spell, and once it's spent, you get thost Magirocks back to "spend" again, not unlike spell slots in something like Dungeons & Dragons. We have lots of big, impressive bosses to fight, and there are tons of different weapons and armors to collect to give yourself different elemental damage & status effect resistances and strengths. However, despite just how far this laundry list of mechanical advancements may make it seem like we've come since Illusion of Gaia, these successes start to fall apart under closer scrutiny. A lot of areas are quite close quarters, so your nimble character doesn't feel like his speed in combat is particularly useful compared to how fast his enemies are. Boss design in particular is quite bad, frankly, and I cannot begin to count how many bosses (including the very first one) not only did MASSIVE amounts of damage compared to enemies in their area but also had quite unclear methods on how to even damage them in the first place. Dodging attacks, getting nuked down in seconds, and waiting very annoyingly long times between opportunities to be able to hit the boss at all are something that plague the fights in this game terribly, and that goes especially for the dreadful final boss. The bosses in this game aren't so much "not fun because they're so difficult" so much as they are "not fun because they're often just as boring as they are frustrating", and that's not something I can even begin to say for the other two games in this series (at least in their Japanese versions). None of this is helped, of course, by other bad choices or clumsy implementations of other mechanics. The jumping is a "neat" new mechanic, sure, but that doesn't really solve how the platforming in this game just overall kinda sucks. Walking on (or god forbid walking onto) ropes is an overly fiddly experience at the best of times, and most of the jumping that *is* here is either barely necessary or far more frustrating than it needs to be. The painstaking put together magic system is also just basically useless as well. Rings don't cost *that* much, but they cost more than enough that they'll add up very quick with how limited their uses are. They're generally also very ineffective compared to just pummeling things to death, and they're often not too useful for bosses either. On top of all that, unlike the previous two games, enemies respawn as soon as you leave and re-enter a room now, so using a big magic spell to forever-kill a difficult enemy isn't a consideration anymore either. Factor in as well that the level design and signposting are awful, so you're going to spend a LOT of time being lost and re-wandering around areas over and over. I reckon I spent about 4-ish hours in total lost over several points before I just looked up a guide for it, and I recommend following a guide for this game in general, frankly. To top it all off, the game even has a DREADFUL stealth section full of guards who use have random patrol patterns in areas almost always clearly not actually designed for stealthing (as they're often reused from other castle areas in whole or in part), and it's no small miracle that I managed to get through that section as quick as I did without using save states. On the whole, I found Terranigma's gameplay thoroughly mediocre. It's hardly the worst on the system, sure, but it's a huge pile of bad-to-just-okay implemented systems that do a lot more harm than good compared to the more simple but polished experiences offered by its predecessors. Aesthetically, at least, this game is very very nice. It's a Super Famicom game from 1995, and damn does it look like it. From environments to NPCs to enemies to bosses, this game looks absolutely incredible, and for all the other bad things I can say about it, the graphics are outstanding. The music is also quite good, but it leans more towards atmospheric tracks than the previous two games. It's not a bad soundtrack, but it's my least favorite of the three, at the very least. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I wish I could only chalk up how hard this game is to recommend on sheer disappointment. I had heard a lot of great things about this game over the years, and with how much I enjoyed the previous two games, I was excited for a grand crescendo to a great trilogy. But with how bad stuff like the boss fights, signposting, and stealth section are, there are much larger caveats to recommending this game than simply "well it's not as well executed or written as the previous ones". Terranigma is a very pretty game, but it's just not a very good one. While it may not be an outright bad game, you'll honestly be better served playing one of the many other better games in this genre on this platform than trying to have a Just OK time trudging through this game's missteps. I've played quite a lot of Star Wars games over the year, and I've been something of a fan of Star Wars for quite a long time too. In my head, I always knew that this game was quite popular, so I've been meaning to play it for absolute ages, but it's only now that I've finally gotten to playing it. I'm not the biggest fan of flying games, but given that this was more arcadey than sim-like, I figured this would be okay for me. It was clearly okay for me enough to beat it, at least! XD. It took me about 9 hours to beat the game's 16 missions, and out of those I got 3 silver medals and 6 bronze medals. I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
Rogue Squadron is the story of the titular squadron, who are a fighting unit in the Rebellion and then in the New Republic in the Star Wars expanded universe. This game has four chapters, with the first three having five missions and taking place in or around the respective first three Star Wars films, and the last chapter 4 only having one mission and taking place well after the 3rd film. You usually play as Luke Skywalker and it's following side stories around him specifically. The writing is nothing really amazing or exceptional, but it all makes for a fun time. This game exists to facilitate fun Star Wars Stuff, and the story does a very good job of allowing that. The gameplay is a more arcadey approach to a flight sim. You play in a series of missions with their own specific objectives, and sometimes those objectives evolve and expand as you progress through the respective mission. Your flying is far from complicated as far as flight sims go, but it's a lot more complicated than something like Star Fox 64. There are even some upgrades you can find hidden in some missions to empower your arsenal even further. They're quite hard to find and generally very well hidden, so I'd recommend a guide to find them, but there was no way I was ever going to beat the game without them. I'm not the biggest fan of this kind of game, and I'm also not super familiar with this kind of game in general, but with my limited experience with these kinds of things, I found it fairly well designed. That said, there are some design choices and hardware limitations that really harm the overall experience. The missions have basically no checkpoints outside of 4 respawn extra lives you get. Player information is also quite poor, as you only ever know your own health. The health of the thing(s) you're guarding, where objectives are at all, or even where missiles/shots are coming from is never made clear and it can make it very difficult to survive missions, let alone complete them. On top of all that, the very often poor framerate really makes the whole experience that much more frustrating than it already is. None of these are totally game breaking problems, but they definitely show just how badly the game has aged, and it'll all likely make for a very frustrating time for people more used to more recent (and better optimized) flying games. The presentation of the game is, like the story, perfectly suited to facilitate fun Star Wars Stuff. All the ships you fly and fight against are just like they are in the movies and such. The voice overs and VA are good quality, and the sound-alikes they got for the characters from the films sound spot on. It's a bit of a shame that there's no Japanese VA, because I can only imagine how difficult it is playing a flying game while hurriedly reading subtitles, but at least that's something you can justify by saying that it makes it more like the films if we keep the original English voices. The music is also taken largely right from the films, and the presentation is really just what you'd want from a space-flying N64 Star Wars game. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While I will fully admit that this just isn't a game for me, the technical issues of the hardware its on make it a pretty difficult game to recommend. If you're a fan of flying games or a BIG Star Wars fan, you very well might find this game a lot of fun, but if you're just looking for some casual Star Wars fun on the N64, this game is probably going to be quite a difficult game to get through, and it's likely going to be a pretty tough time to find fun with it as well. Continuing my journey through the weird and wild pile of N64 games I picked up earlier this month, I decided to give a go on this one I picked up fairly spur of the moment. I hadn't originally planned to get this, but it was so cheap that I figured heck, why not take a chance on a weird anime game. It's not like the N64 has terribly many of these, after all, and this one is even developed by HudsonSoft! It took me around 2-ish hours to beat the game and unlock all the characters on original hardware.
This game doesn't really have a story, as such. For those unaware, B-Daman is a Japanese toy series that's all about little toys that fire marbles at other little toys (basically). It dates back to the early 90's, but it's never managed to gain much traction outside of Japan. Your main goal here is to beat all three ranks of the JBA B-Daman tournament, and you have a roster of characters from the Super B-Daman manga series to play as to do it. They have some banter with each other between stages (like in a fighting game), but overall there's just really little story here in the first place. However, it's hard to call that much of a bad thing for what's basically a glorified mini-game collection, and it sets up what it needs to do just fine. The actual gameplay is split across two main modes. On the battle mode, you have a 2 to 4 player mini-game that's something quite close to the block falling game from Kirby 64's multiplayer mode, where you move around a floating board packed with obstacles and try to bump each other off into oblivion. It's honestly really fun, and it definitely would've been the mode I played the most if I'd had this to play with friends as a kid. On the other side of things, you've got the single player mode which is also effectively a dueling mode if you're playing with another player. These consist of 11 different one-on-one mini-games, and each tier of the three tournaments just consists of beating AI opponents (of increasing difficulty) in three, seven, or all eleven of them. Their quality is bit of a mixed bag, but they're overall quite solid, and most of them would feel right at home in something like Mario Party 3's duel mode mini-games. Against another player, they'd all be quite good fun, but against the AI, the biggest issue is that there are some games they're good at and some games they're awful at, and if you picked a character with bad stats in a particular field (as each one has their own stat pool) some games are really horribly difficult to clear with certain characters. This reviewer's humble recommendation is to pick someone with an even balance in everything so you won't get screwed over by a game you happen to have bad stats for, since the AI will never be playing games they don't have good stats for (as each AI character always plays a certain game when you face them). The graphics are quite good and fun for what they are. They're very anime of the time, but they capture the style of the original art well. It has a very Mario Party vibe to it (though this game does actually predate that series by a little bit) from the mini-games to the music, and it's all around a really competently done thing. Verdict: Hesitantly recommended. This is honestly a really hard one to recommend, but also a really easy one. If you have friends to play it with and have a menu guide, this can be a pretty fun time! It sucks that you've gotta get through a decent bit of the story mode to unlock a lot of the duel mini-games, but they're still plenty fun for what they are. The biggest sticking point is that there's so little content that you're far better off just playing one of the three Mario Party games on the system. What's here is generally good fun, but there's so little of it that you're probably going to be left wanting, and I imagine for virtually anyone reading this that the license attached to it isn't going to be much of a pull factor for you anyhow ^^; Known in Japan under the hilarious title of "VIOLENCE KILLER: Turok New Generation", after I finished The first Turok, it was logically time to progress onto the other one that came out here. I wasn't a *super* huge fan of the original Turok, but I had more than enough fun with it that I was looking forward to this one, especially since I'd heard this was the better of the two. While my first impression wasn't amazing, I ultimately ended up having a pretty good time with it, especially after I finally ditched the super sensitive aftermarket joystick that I was using for Turok 1 and actually used a proper N64 controller for this one XD. It took me around 25 hours to complete the normal difficulty of the Japanese version of the game on original hardware using a guide a couple times and without using any cheats.
Where Turok 1 had almost no story in the actual game, Turok 2 has a fair bit more. Going away from the more mystical aspects of Turok and towards the more sci-fi parts, this starts a new holder of the title of Turok getting summoned to the Lost Land to save it (and the universe) once again. An ancient alien entity called the Primagen is attempting to destroy the universe with the help of several clans from across space and time, and it's up to Turok to stop them. It's pretty standard for the time and really nothing special, as basically all of the story here is just exposition, and when it isn't it's sequel baiting XD. That said, I do have to give massive props to Acclaim for actually dubbing the game into Japanese! This is the only western-developed game on the N64 I know that did this (and it wasn't super common on the PS1 either, in my experience anyhow), and I definitely want to give credit where credit is due for another excellent localization for the region when most companies barely bothered. Ultimately, the story is fun and good enough for what it's here to do. It's here to facilitate fun dinosaur & alien shooty-bang action, and that's just what it does. The gameplay of Turok 2 is fairly similar to the first game but also VERY different in a lot of ways that matter. On the more similar end, we have a shooter with several levels (6 this time instead of 8 like last time) with three bosses + a final boss. In each level, you have to collect a number of keys to unlock more worlds, and there are oodles of guns you can find and use to kill the oodles of enemies that are here to mess you up. On the somewhat different side, we now have mission objectives to complete in each stage, and you can't leave the level until the mission objectives are all complete. You also have holy eagle feathers to find to use to unlock special talismans that bestow special powers. However, all of that extra stuff is *effectively* just keys with extra steps. The mission objectives may as well just be more keys with how it's just more finding hidden stuff, and the talismans can only be used at certain points to access content you need to access (usually) anyhow for progression, so even though Turok 2 is dressed up like a more complicated game, this is just as much a key hunt as the first game. The level design overall is by and large better and more forgiving than the first game. There's a LOT less first-person platforming, thank gods, and there are also certain ammo and health points in each level that respawn resources infinitely, making it a lot less scary to go hog-wild with your big, fun guns than it ever was in the original Turok. That said, a key hunt is still a key hunt, and if you didn't like it in the last game, you're very likely not going to like it here either no matter how much better polished the level design is. The guns and such are switched up quite a bit too, but in ways that aren't obvious at first. We've toned down the number of weapons and also made UI improvements that make switching between upgrades to old guns as well as different ammo types WAY easier in a way that's really good. Certain guns like the mini-gun (or what approximates it in this game, anyhow) have also gotten HUGE buffs in power while others like the super OP grenade launcher from the first game have gotten insanely huge nerfs. Explosive weapons on the whole were things I found almost completely useless with how wimpy they were, and that was a big disappointment in just how much it limited my arsenal. On the topic of guns though, the big reason I had to switch to a controller with a proper joystick was because this game actually gives you a crosshair to aim with! This game on the whole requires you to have FAR more accuracy than the first game did, so it's a good thing it does. While there *is* still auto aim (which you can turn on and off whenever you want in the options menu) that is very helpful, things like head shots are now possible, and dynamically damaging enemies for different point values depending on where you shoot them can make them explode and die in all sorts of lovingly animated ways. However, that also brings about another big problem. The new "damage based on where they're shot" thing is ultimately more trouble than it's worth for my money, as it mostly just lead to enemies sometimes dying in just one shot, while other times they'd take half of the max ammo for a gun to kill because the game just decided that they hadn't been hit in quite the right way for whatever reason. It's a neat idea, but on the N64's hardware just doesn't allow for the degree of accuracy you'd need to really have a system like this pay off. On the subject of hardware, this is also a good time to bring up just how bad the slowdown can be, because especially when you're moving fast and there are a lot of enemies on screen (which happens quite often), it can be REALLY hard to actually tell what's going on because the framerate just tanks that badly. This wouldn't be *so* bad if actions weren't linked to framerate, as you'll often start moving more slowly while enemies get slowed down less, making the player get punished by taking more damage whenever the framerate starts to dip. It's not a game-destroying problem, but the framerate and inconsistent damage stuff were both things that annoyed me very greatly the whole game, and it's something even the most fun and powerful guns in the game couldn't fix. Graphically, Turok 2 is quite a nice looking game. We're firmly into the mid-life of the N64 by this point, and we've also got the RAM expansion pak to play with, so Turok actually has some really nice looking resolutions to play with if you've got it. Oddly enough, the resolution actually gives you more to *see* on screen, as it effectively zooms you in if you're on low resolution mode, and even more oddly, your resolution mode doesn't seem to have any impact whatsoever on improving the framerate (sadly). Enemies are animated and designed really well, and all six levels have very unique and cool looks to them too, and I also loved the music. There are some really wild picks for the songs in this game, and it's overall a really diverse soundtrack compared to what I would've otherwise expected, with some levels having stuff that sounds like it'd be right at home in a Zelda game, and others sounding like they've been pulled right out of a Rare platformer. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. As much as this absolutely is better than the first game, and it does pick up a fair bit once you hit level 3 or so and start getting some access to bigger and more fun guns, this game has way too many issues to recommend very confidently. Just how difficult it is to aim as well as how frustrating the framerate issues so often make combat makes this a far more frustrating time than it really feels is necessary. The newer remaster is honestly SO different that it's frankly closer to a modern reimagining than a simple remaster, but it takes these pieces and does things that are so much more geared towards a modern notion of a fun time with an FPS that it's really hard to recommend not just picking up the newer remaster unless you're a really big retro FPS fan and simply must see what it's like on the original hardware. The Turok games are ones I’ve heard about but seen very little of for ages and ages. Up until now, the only thing that I really knew about this game was that I’d heard it had some quite annoying first-person platforming in it. In my recent haul of a pile of N64 games, this and its sequel were to of the quite cheap N64 games I’d gotten my hands on. I always love to see how western games localized for Japan end up looking, and especially given that only these first two Turok games (while not Rage Wars nor Turok 3) ever made it over here, that made it even more tempting to pick these up and see what they were like. It took me around 17 hours to get through the game on normal difficulty. I played through the Japanese version and used no cheat codes while playing on real hardware.
The actual IP for Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (or as the game was called here, “Space Time Soldier: Turok”) was actually originally from a comic that started in the early 50’s. Upon learning that this was a property originally created in the Golden Age of comics, that made everything about it make a LOT more sense XD. You play a Native American dimension-hopping warrior that carries the name (and title) of Turok. It’s your job to protect the universe from all manner of danger that may threaten it, and in this case, it’s the evil Campaigner who threatens the safety of the universe. His aim is the legendary Chronoscepter, an artifact so powerful that it was broken into 8 pieces to keep it from ever falling into the wrong hands. It’s Turok’s job to traverse the Lost Lands at the edge of the universe and stop the evil Campaigner in his quest for universal domination! That’s the story as well as I can remember it, at least, as it’s not really very important. Virtually all of the plot is in the manual, and it doesn’t really relate to the gameplay at all. However, this being largely an action-game, it’s difficult to call that a terribly serious problem. We don’t need much story to think about if we have enough things to shoot at, and Turok follows this philosophy very well. The premise and presentation of certain enemies certainly has a not insignificant problem with casual racism, but it’s also nothing that will read as particularly special in that regard for anyone familiar with western media from the 1990’s. It’s certainly not “good representation” by any stretch for any of the groups portrayed in this game, but it’s hardly unique in that regard, so I can only hold that against it so much. The gameplay of Turok is a first-person shooter that clearly takes a lot of cues from stuff like Doom (as so many FPS of the time did) while also injecting some of its own ideas here and there. You have 8 big ol’ stages to travel and explore through as you search for the special keys that unlock successive stages as well as pieces of the Chronoscepter (if you happen to want a big Final Boss Deleter after the end of stage 8, which I did, and it was very appreciated to delete that awful bugger). You’ve got over a dozen weapons to do it with, and there are about a dozen or so enemy types that will try and keep you from your goals. It’s not super novel in the ways it does this stuff (especially with just how many of the weapons feel like they were pulled straight from Doom, even down to which guns share which ammo types), but I say if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Levels are fun to explore, enemies are fun to shoot with your guns, and the boss designs are (for the most part) fairly good, even if their limited AI often gets in the way of them being any more challenging than the normal enemies you have to deal with. The problems that this game *does* have are largely where it tries to innovate. The biggest thing its trying to do towards that effort is have fun in 3D spaces, and that generally amounts to verticality and platforming, and the platforming in this game is pretty darn rough. You not only are locked to a first-person perspective, but you also can’t see your player model. Your biggest savior here is the map that you can pull up that overlays on top of your vision. While you can use that little yellow triangle’s position relative to the edges and platforms around it as a pretty darn good platforming aid, it isn’t perfect. There are plenty of places (both secret and otherwise) where the map just doesn’t show you where the platforms are, and just getting good at vibing out how far you can jump ends up becoming a very important skill in Turok, map or no map. Aside from that, the issues are largely either subjective on my part or just mean design on the game’s part. It’s weird to say, but unlike a game like Doom or what have you, where there are only a fixed amount of enemies per stage, Turok has enemies spawn in but not respawn. What I mean by that is, while enemies will be preexisting in stages and more enemies can and will warp in to replace them, it’s seemingly up to the game’s whimsy which enemies happen to spawn and when and where. I can’t count how many times I thought I’d sussed out which enemies in an area would get a replacement spawned in for them after I’d killed them, they’d end up not getting a replacement spawned at all. Thankfully, you can at least hear the very distinct sound of an enemy teleporting in, but that still doesn’t stop the game from enemies spawning or jumping down behind you SO often in ways you could barely expect. This lead to me developing an adaptive strategy, often rushing forward with reckless abandon just seeing what enemies (and traps) lie in wait for me until I died, then loading my previous save so I could more smartly deal with what I needed to and ignore what I didn’t. Figuring that out in and of itself was at first frustrating, but it ultimately became a kind of fun in and of itself. It’s certainly not how I’d prefer to play a game like this (especially with this control scheme), but I’d have a hard time saying whether it’s outright good or bad. However, just how difficult enemies can be to deal with is something that wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem if you were playing on hardware with a bit more accuracy. On something as accurate as a mouse & keyboard I would’ve had a lot less trouble, but with the awkwardness and relative imprecision of an N64 controller, I had a lot more trouble ^^;. Now, part of this is down to me using an aftermarket replacement joystick that’s far too sensitive, so aiming was always going to be a bastard on any shooter I played on this thing. But even outside of that, the auto-aim the game employs for your hitscan weapons can feel very arbitrary in its usefulness, and this is made no better by the lack of an aiming reticle for your guns. You can usually make do with how the yellow triangle that shows where you are on the map, as it’s *roughly* in the middle of your vision, so it’s a kind of makeshift reticle. However, that’s going to really start losing its effectiveness once you need to use non-hitscan weapons like the grenade launcher or the rocket launcher (the latter being so difficult to aim that I virtually never used it). Then there are other issues that arise from the limitations of the controller as well, which really just boil down to “the N64 simply doesn’t have enough buttons”. Using the C-buttons to move and the joystick to aim was always going to be an imperfect solution, but this goes for double when A and B are your buttons to scroll through your weapon wheel. This is a double problem if you happen to be using the left handed mode where the D-pad moves you instead of the C-buttons (which I found woefully inferior due to the precision they want out of the button presses, so I gave up after an hour or two), but not being able to both switch weapons and move (or turn) at the same time makes a lot of encounters against spongier enemies a lot more punishing than they need to be, even if you already know what’s coming. The worst part of all of that is how awful they make strafing side to side. If you double tap left or right, you FLY very far in that direction. I have absolutely no idea why they did this, as there are virtually no spaces large enough where that’d actually be an advantage, and it’s not like your normal strafe and forward move speeds aren’t fast enough already. All this amounts to is a ton of unnecessary deaths off of the game’s MANY narrow bridges over bottomless pits because you dared be slightly hesitant with a rightward strafe (and it’s not even like the game has a multiplayer mode that’d make this more advantageous against other players either). At the end of the day, Turok’s controls are a really mixed bag. To a large degree, there’s not much I can fault it without just wielding 20/20 hindsight like a hammer. Given that you need Z to fire and R (or L) to jump, there’s really no better solution they could’ve used with this controller for switching guns. Perhaps less guns overall (and given how useless so many of them are, I wouldn’t say that’s a bad idea) would’ve helped a bit, and I’d say the level and game design with the platforming sections and enemy spawn stuff also make this just that much more awkward to deal with. That said, this was a still very young genre when this game came out, and there weren’t really enough games that gave you this degree of movement freedom to know that all this stuff was a poor idea. I think it’s still a *bit* too forgiving to just file it all under “well it’s an old game, so it’s gonna have old game jank”, but I do think that Turok is very much like most FPS games from this generation of gaming. You’ve really just got to be ready to hop back into an era when controlling an FPS on a console was still a bold new science being explored, because if you’re not ready for that, then trying pretty much any FPS on the N64 is likely going to be bad idea, dinosaurs or no dinosaurs. Aesthetically, Turok is a very impressive looking game at the time. They used state of the art motion capture technology for the human enemy animations, and it REALLY shows with just how fluid and nice looking their animations are (for both fighting and dying!). It’s a bit annoying still that one or two death animations make it look like enemies are still alive, granted, but overall the care and attention put towards enemy animations was time well spent. Levels are well detailed and varied looking, but many worlds *do* share a lot of textures, so remembering your way around can be a bit tricky. Using your map is essential, because not using it means you’re probably going to get lost quite a bit with just how similar levels can look at times. The music is very nice and fits the mood very well, and the only downside I can start to think about here is the draw distance. The draw distance fog is VERY close by, which can make some platforming quite awkward (especially with how the colored fog can make the map harder to read), but it fortunately only rarely makes enemies harder to fight. 99 times out of 100, you can see enemies before they can see you, and picking them off while they’re still out in the fog can be a very valuable strategy when the environment allows for it. The first footage I saw of this game made it seem like the draw distance issues were going to make playing it a horrid experience, but I was very thankful with just how wrong I was on that front. I can’t say the draw distance (and the slowdown issues that appear when there are a LOT of enemies on screen) aren’t a problem at all, as they obviously are, but they’re far less of a problem than you might imagine they’d be, and they’re way less of a problem than the stuff with the controls or the platforming issues. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Had I played through Turok on PC, I imagine I would’ve liked it a fair bit more (not to mention completed it faster XD). That said, I still had a good time by the end of it. It was very back and forth, with getting used to the controls/platforming and figuring out that often running was a far more valuable strategy than fighting being their own respective trials to overcome, but once I started getting the feel for it, I was having quite a good time despite how difficult the game was. Figuring out how to get past what was in front of me despite the control issues and enemy ambushes turned into a fun challenge all on its own, and I’m genuinely looking forward to playing the sequel (and not just because I’ve heard that it’s such a better game XD). If you’re into retro console FPS or you’re like me and you just want to check out some classic, lauded N64 games, this is one definitely worth checking out. On the other hand, if all that you’ve read about me complaining about the controls and the game design have made you recoil in horror, then this might be one you’re better off trying out on PC (if you end up playing it at all ^^;). |
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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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