I actually hadn’t even planned on playing this any time soon, but, going through my Switch and doing my usual checking of the new games on the Switch Online retro services, I found that I’d completely forgotten that this got added to the GameBoy service! One of the few classic Castlevania titles not on that collection that Konami released a few years back, this was a great excuse to finally play through this and see what the last GB Castlevania game is all about~. It took me about an hour and a half to play through the Japanese version of the game with my Switch Pro Controller without using save states or rewinds at all.
Legends follows the story of Sonia Belmont, the original first of the Belmont clan, as she goes through Dracula’s castle to put him down for the (at the time) canonically first time. You bump into Alucard along the way, but it’s a pretty straightforward and simple story that you’d expect from an action game on the original GameBoy. Konami eventually struck this from the canon, and I imagine it was a combination of them wanting to make a larger, grander “The Saga Begins!”-type game later via Lament of Innocence alongside how the little writing this game does have is a bit embarrassing in retrospect (like how in their one conversation together that we see, Sonia is not only Alucard’s protégé but also implied to be a romantic interest for him ^^;). As is, it’s an inoffensive and funny story that does more than enough to set up the action at hand, much like its many classic Castlevania brethren. But stories, silly or no, really aren’t why we go to Classic-vanias after all. We’re here for gameplay! And this game, while certainly not the strongest of the Classic-vanias, is a pretty darn good one! Across the game’s five (or more, if you find the secret stuff, which I did not bother to do <w>), you’ll trek through Dracula’s castle fighting monsters and bosses along the way. Nothing surprising there. Reusing the same formula (and likely the same engine) as Casltevania Adventure, you’ve got your whip that has two upgrades with the second one being a fireball, but this game mercifully decides not to downgrade your weapon upon getting hit like Adventure does. The weirdest part of this game is how it handles sub-weapons. Instead of finding them throughout stages, you get a new one every time you beat a boss, and you can select one from the pause menu whenever you like. You also have a “Burning Mode”, which gives you temporary invincibility alongside a doubling of whip strength once per life, and it’s a HUGE help for the harder fights and sections (especially Dracula). Beyond just the very forgiving addition of the burning mode, boss and level design is overall pretty solid while still trending towards the easier side. There are a few traps or mean-ish placements of enemies here and there, but playing carefully should see you past most obstacles on your first or second try regardless. Even with that, the game’s approach to dying is very kind too. Losing all of your lives and continuing puts you back at the last door checkpoint you went through exactly like just losing a life normally does, making this a very nicely forgiving Classic-vania, and a better game for it, in my opinion. It’s certainly not going to set your world on fire, and it might be a bit too easy if you’re a super fan of much harder, meaner games like Castlevania 1, but if you want something a bit more along the difficulty of a classic Mega Man game like I tend to prefer, then this is a great time to play through. Aesthetically the game is very nice for a late-life original GameBoy game, though it’s hardly the nicest thing in the world to look at. You have lots of big, nice sprites and I never found it difficult to tell what I was looking at, but it’s not a particularly pretty game one way or the other, even if it’s not exactly ugly either. There is some slowdown as a result of all of the detail on the sprites and backgrounds, though it mercifully never really affected gameplay negatively. I usually appreciated the bullet time it provided, more than anything XD. While the graphics may be a bit middling, the music is however excellent. It’s largely a collection of classic Castlevania tunes, and these are some absolutely delightful 8-bit GameBoy renditions of them. Granted, you could quite fairly fault the game for lacking much originality in its soundtrack, I still think that the quality of the reused older songs more than makes up for it, especially in such a bite-sized Castlevania package~. Verdict: Recommended. While it’s not a particularly stunning game one way or the other, I found this to be a really fun one! The wrinkles in its design don’t put it *quite* as high as the second GB Castlevania game for me, but if you’re a fan of 8-bit action games and/or Castlevania, then this is a game you’ll likely quite enjoy spending an afternoon with as I did~.
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After playing/suffering through Secret of Mana a few weeks back, this was still nonetheless a game firmly on my radar. No matter who I talked to about it, this was a game basically universally agreed to be flat-out better than SoM. Where SoM is the experiment, Seiken Densetsu 3 (or “Trials of Mana” as it’s known these days) was the fully realized product, a capstone for the series at the tail end of the console generation. SoM was a game that I did not enjoy very much, to say the least, but there was just so much room for improvement, I couldn’t help but be curious about its immediate successor here. I played through Duran’s route (paired up with Angela and Charlotte), and it took me about 31-ish hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
Very similarly to the first two Seiken Densetsu games, SD3’s story revolves around the seeming end of the world. A long era of peace is coming to an end, and the forces of darkness gather. The Mana Tree has begun to wither, and the sword of mana at its base will decide the coming fate of the world. Unlike the previous two games, however, you have your choice of protagonist this time, and it really meaningfully changes the narrative depending on whom you choose. There are six choices, and there are three pairs among them of characters who have stories that relate to one another (for example in my run, Duran and Angela share a route, so there were extra story scenes for me between the two of them in addition to little glimpses of Charlotte’s route here and there). The overall content of the game doesn’t change super massively, but the final dungeon or two of the game as well as some earlier areas are affected by it, giving a neat incentive to replay the game for those who would be so inclined. The actual narrative itself is sorta trying to do something interesting, but it ultimately falls a bit short. They’re trying to tell a story about how, at the end of everything, bad and selfish actors will nonetheless try to devour the corpse of the old order to try and come out as kings of a wasteland rather than try and fix things for the better. It’s interesting, especially how, depending on your route, which of these competing enemy factions comes out on top changes. However, the pacing of the story just doesn’t really allow the narrative to do much with this beyond having an interesting premise. While there are certainly attempts for character arcs too, they don’t super tie in with that larger premise very well, and the narrative is casting *such* a wide net that it struggles to really get very deep into anything. It’s not bad by any means, and it’s got some fun and well done moments for sure (like how much of Duran’s route is just Star Wars XD), but it falls quite short of other late-SFC SquareSoft games in terms of how well its put together. The reason that it just doesn’t have time to craft much story is no doubt because this cartridge is PACKED with so much game otherwise. With over a dozen major areas and almost twenty dungeons (or like areas) with bosses to match and bunches of enemies too, this game has so much in terms of present graphics and mechanics that it’s no surprise there wasn’t much space to fit more story into things. That gameplay in question is absolute derived from Secret of Mana, and they’ve thankfully taken a lot of big strides forward in making the systems present work a lot better. You’re still a group of three party members (who slowly accumulate over the first few hours, so if you’re trying to play with a buddy, they’ll be waiting a while for their turn to play still, unfortunately), and being able to choose your group of three at the start gives you a wide degree of choice of what your prospective party will look like. There are certainly good and bad choices to make (foregoing anyone with any kind of meaningful support or casting magic is probably a bad idea, for starters), and I chose my party on a recommendation that it generally made for the easiest of the three playthroughs, but it’s very cool that there are so many options for you to engage with here. They’ve also improved the camera and allied AI significantly. Now that the camera focuses on player 1 all the time and the other two party members don’t *need* to be on screen, the basic gameplay of things is SO much better that it’s easy to look past the game being bumped from 3 possible human players down to only 2 (though I played it alone, for the record). Unfortunately, as much as things have been improved significantly, there is a LOT that is still meaningfully flawed, and in many ways I found this game to be meaningfully worse to play than Secret of Mana. For starters, there’s the normal melee combat. They’ve ditched the visual of power bar charging from SoM, but the whole “charged swing” mechanic is still present. You can no longer swing between full charges, but now you know that every swing you’ll do will always be at full power. Those charges also come more quickly, and the combat is a lot faster as a result. There’s even a super meter your normal attacks charge than you can unleash for a stronger tech attack after enough normal bashings. However, I found this to be a very painful double-edged sword. While combat is faster, yes, it’s also far harder to parse. Your characters are a lot better at attacking what you want them to attack, sure, but this means there’s basically no reason not to mash the normal attack button constantly because you’re going to want to just be smashing stuff as fast as you can. I found combat to be even more boring than in SoM if only because it felt it was even more mindless now. There was no reason at all to think about anything other than just staying near the enemy, mashing the button, and keeping as much attention on your health as possible to heal when needed. You REALLY need to keep tabs on your health as well, as the faster combat and JUST how powerful enemy spells and attacks can be (not to mention how brutal the level curve is, but I’m getting ahead of myself there) make it so you can die VERY fast, and there were a good few game overs I got where I barely had any idea of when our health had even gotten that low. Additionally, this button mashing combat ends up dismissing a lot of the mid-battle popups almost immediately. While most of these don’t ultimately matter, as it’s not like you can react to incoming enemy attacks anyhow, these popups are actually what determine a lot of the pace of combat given they’re the big limiter on when spells and techs can be used. Unlike Secret of Mana, where spell casting time was effectively non-existent, spells now have casting times of a sort. You’ll need to wait your turn until enemies are done casting their spells, sure, but you’ll also need to wait until the loads of status effect popups from various spells and attacks have gone past as well before you can finally do things. Not only does this make healing mid-fight harder, as you’ll often be ambushed by a much longer wait to your next very needed healing spell than you thought you would, you actually can’t even bring up the item/spell ring menu while one of these popups is on screen. You cannot pause the game in any sort of menu while one of these popups is on screen, in fact, and frantically mashing the X button hoping that you’ll by some miracle be able to heal eventually is a very common part of gameplay, particularly in the back half and when you’re under-leveled. Being under-leveled is another very common thing in this game, frankly. Your overall character level now dictates your strength far more (for both melee and spells), and with how powerful magic is for your enemies, having the HP to tank their attacks and the physical strength to kill them quick are the main determiners of whether you’ll win or lose any given encounter. While they’ve thankfully gotten rid of the requirement to grind up individual types of magic, the experience curve is so awful that you’ll need to stop what you’re doing and start grinding very frequently once you hit about 25% or so through the game. I joked at one point during my playthrough that the gameplay loop was roughly 1 to 2 hours of progression followed by 1 to 2 hours of grinding, though I quickly realized that my joke reflected the actual gameplay loop far more than I realized it had. Sure, not needing to grind spells anymore is nice, but this game still has SO much grinding in it that it’s really hard to say the grind as a whole has improved any. I’d reckon at least 10 of my 30-ish hours are grinding, and that number is honestly probably too low. Secret of Mana was at its absolute weakest when it was hard, and this game being by and large much harder is doing nothing to help cover up those weaknesses. The only real solution you have to overcome that is just more hours of grinding. Even then, you’re not getting to the point where you’re making the post-grind fighting more fun, you’re more so just making cumbersome, unsatisfying combat go by quicker and/or be possible to win in the first place. Ultimately, this game still suffers very badly from the main issues that plagued Secret of Mana so much. We’ve combined a 2D Zelda-style action game with a turn-based RPG, but we’ve kept few of the best parts of either. All of the moving around and swinging your sword in combat feels meaningless after a while because so most attacks (both yours and theirs) just can’t be dodged in the first place. Your positioning on the field of battle is almost entirely performative, so the main gameplay mechanics are just mashing the attack button, casting spells as soon as you can (though this game still suffers from lacking enough MP to get much use out of magic for more than half of the time you even have magic), and keeping as high a tab on your health/status effects as possible so you don’t get insta-mulched. Combat consistently struggles to be fun as a result, and bosses even more so. Just like back in Secret of Mana, bosses are the worst excesses and features of normal combat’s issues magnified, but now it’s even worse because this game is so much harder. Where SoM’s bosses were either pushovers or arduous slogs (though both were always boring), now we have almost entirely arduous slogs even when they’re not too hard. You’re always on the lookout for a boss or even normal enemy with a move that auto-counters techs or spells leaving you instantly dead after two-chained powerful spells you have no way of surviving or healing between, and that’s an even worse gameplay loop once you factor in the popup problem before AND how bosses often slow down the game so badly that your button input reactions are even less responsive and difficult to access than they already were. Even if the final boss that took me 40 minutes to kill is a big exception, bosses being something I basically never enjoyed and always dreaded reaching was absolutely not an exception. Struggling to find the fun is a very persistent aspect of playing this game, especially when there’s effectively nothing to do but the horrible slog of combat. While most games (RPGs, adventure games, or otherwise) from this era have very little in the realm of side content, this game genuinely has virtually nothing to do outside of story progression. Even something as simple as chests full of fun or valuable loot, or any loot at all, are something almost totally absent from this game (I counted maybe six total chests or findable items between all towns and dungeons I went through, and they always had normal consumables in them). Sure, it’s great that you can carry WAY more normal consumables now instead of SoM’s limit of 4, and it’s also great that the chests normal enemies drop no longer drop nearly such hilariously lethal traps, but we’re still left with the fact that there’s really never any need to explore in this game beyond just looking for the path forward. The lack of side content wouldn’t be such a bad thing in a vacuum, but with just how badly combat struggles to be enjoyable paired along with an often not terribly present or engaging story means that combat being effectively the ONLY thing to do makes this game wear out its welcome far sooner than it otherwise might’ve. While the findable (and missable) weapon upgrades in SoM were a badly thought out mechanic, the lack of even anything as simple as that to hunt or explore for does not do this game much of a service. If you don’t love the cruddy, plodding combat, there’s sage little else here worth sticking around for, at least mechanically. Aesthetically, this game does its SquareSoft lineage proud, at least. Just as you’d expect from a SquareSoft game from ’95, the music is excellent and so are the graphics. This game is made up of an incredible amount of environments and very well animated characters, enemies, and especially bosses (even if they can slow down the game an annoying amount sometimes). While there’s a lot mixed or negative you can say about this game, the graphics and music are absolutely not one of them. Verdict: Not Recommended. While, on paper, this game may seem like a significant improvement over its predecessor, in practice I found it to be a game I enjoyed just about as much if not even less. If nothing else, this game did a lot to convince me that Secret of Mana’s whole thing of “2D Zelda-type game with turn-based RPG combat mechanics” isn’t simply something SoM gets wrong, and instead it’s just a fairly weak premise for an action-RPG full stop. It’s got a lot of neat ideas and features, and it’s certainly beautiful, but it just doesn’t come together into a fun gameplay experience. If you LOVE Secret of Mana, you might well enjoy this, but if you were skeptical of either game or didn’t SUPER love SoM, this is one to stay far, far away from. 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 a game I’d heard a lot about as a kid, and I even bought it on the Wii Virtual Console well over a decade ago. I played a bit of it, but found it too awkward and difficult, so I put it down and never ended up returning to it. I’ve tried it once or twice again since then, but it’s never really gelled with me, and I’d grown quite the negative impression of it over the years. Listening to some friends talk about their experience with the Mana series convinced me, though. I’d owned this game long enough, and I was going to sit down and finally finish this thing! Playing on my Super Famicom Mini, it took me around 19 hours to beat the Japanese version game without abusing save states (though sometimes using a walkthrough).
Secret of Mana follows the story of a young boy who, when playing in the forbidden area behind his tiny village, discovers a mysterious sword calling to him. Pulling it from its place in the ground, he finds the world around him suddenly filled with monsters! After fighting his way back to his village, the villagers accuse him of inadvertently starting the end of the world by pulling the blade from its place, and they quickly banish him forever. So starts the journey of our intrepid young hero who soon meets both a young girl and a strange fairy who also come along for the journey. Secret of Mana’s English story is a further truncated version of an already very cut down story (as this game had quite a hectic development cycle). The original Japanese version that I played does have a bit more character to the dialogue and certain details are a little more fleshed out, but it still bears the scars of the some 40% of the story they allegedly needed to cut to get this final product out the door. There are a few themes or interesting (or even surprisingly heavy) plot beats here and there, such as how the empire ends up falling or how all three of our protagonists are missing parental figures in their lives. There are some very strange parts here too, such as the “Republic” only having a king as its government, or some NPCs complaining about how the empire used to be so good and peaceful until the war 15 years ago despite an empire, by its very nature, being a political entity founded upon an idea of inherent supremacy above subjugated groups (and there’s very little to suggest that these NPCs are being ironic or speaking from misguided viewpoints). Regardless, by the halfway point, it all just feels like a rush to the finish as nothing is really dwelt on enough to form much of any larger cohesive messaging. The story isn’t bad, per se, but it’s certainly nothing special, and unlike a lot of other SquareSoft games from this time, the story really isn’t a big reason to come to this game. The gameplay is part turn-based RPG, part 2D top-down Zelda game, and it frankly manages to miss most of the fun aspects of both. The gameplay as a whole is what I found the most difficult aspect of the game to tolerate, and this was quite the slog for most of the game, even after I’d gotten more to grips with the combat past the few several hours. Your melee attacks function via a charge system, and you’ll need to wait several seconds between strikes if you want your attacks to have any power at all. However, just hitting the enemy isn’t enough to land a strike. For both you and the enemy, you have innate hit and dodge percent chances, so it’s actually a dice roll behind the scenes that dictates whether a well aimed and charged melee attack will hit. On top of that, enemies (especially bosses) have very unclear hit boxes, dodge animations, and invincibility frames in between their animations and attacks, so combat is often a very messy rinse and repeat exercise of slowly pummeling an enemy in between periods where they happen to be invincible. It makes for a really unsatisfying combat experience that makes every fight feel like an endless waiting game until you can get lucky enough to kill your opponent, and that’s especially frustrating for the enemies that continuously spawn full-health copies of themselves. While the boy can only use melee attacks, the girl has defense and support magic, and the fairy has attacking and debuff spells. Sure, magic attacks (both yours and the enemy's) never miss, but it takes so long to cast them and the enemy is invincible during them that most of what they do is just slow the already dull combat down to an awful crawl. Additionally, your own reserves of MP are very limited for a large chunk of the game, so this makes using it to fight normal enemies a very unwise choice, especially with how invaluable magic so often is for fighting the very annoying to hit bosses. Even when you have the MP to actually use spells effectively without worrying about running out of juice, you need to spend time grinding up spells levels to make them actually effective. While your normal attacks and stats increase just by killing enemies, and the level and money curves of the game are pretty reasonable as long as you just kill most things you see, magic only levels up by repeatedly using that specific type of spell a bunch of times. You’ll REALLY want things like your ice and moon spells at max power as much as you can, so that means going to an inn, resting, going to a battle area to spam you spells until you run out of MP, and then doing it all over again until the spells you want are maxed out. It cumulatively takes hours, and there’s just nothing fun about it for how necessary a part of the gameplay loop it is. Weird design choices like this abound in this game. On the lower end, you have annoyances like how necessary armor is, so should you miss a merchant (or should a merchant be hidden from you in an out of the way location) and you miss the next armor upgrade, you’ll start getting absolutely mulched with just how tough the next area’s enemies are. Then you have your consumable items, which you can only carry four of at a time, so your healing and such are really reliant on your magic because you just don’t have the pockets to carry around large amounts of healing candy. That in and of itself isn’t much of a problem, balancing-wise, and you can always find more items in chests dropped by enemies. These chests, however, THEY are where the problem lies, as they are just so vindictively mean as to be pointless. Whether you have space for the item inside or not, a chest disappears once you open it. You’re likely going to be conserving your items anyhow, so most chests will have useless stuff you need to throw away anyhow or just useless equipment you out-leveled ages ago. A lot of the time, however, chests are trapped! This can range from a little punch to the face, to health-bar shredding poison effects (particularly nasty in the first half of the game), or even instant death for the character who opened the chest! You only can carry four revive items at a time, remember, and you don’t get the revive spell until almost the very end of the game. This makes opening chests dropped from monsters a proposition so dangerous as to be pointless. Anything not harmful from them is almost certainly useless, and anything harmful from them is SO bad as to be a potential catastrophe. Outside of messing with the player, it is totally beyond me why the trapped chests are in the game at all, and they feel like a very half-baked mechanic. One of the most annoying mechanics, however, are your AI party members. Your party members don’t *have* to be AI controlled, granted, and if you’ve got some friends, they can hop in and take control of the other characters. You can even press Select and switch between them on the fly if you’d like. However, there are SO many compromises to the rest of the gameplay to accommodate these party members that I frequently found myself wishing that they weren’t there at all, and I simply had one character who had all of these spells and such. On the level of outright compromises, there’s first the camera. The game needs to accommodate two or three people potentially playing the game at once, so it can’t just focus on one character all the time. As a result, you need to get VERY close to the edge of the screen to actually scroll it, meaning you’re quite vulnerable to enemies just off screen “seeing” you first and working in a cheap shot before you can react to it. This makes the already slow, plodding combat and exploration even more slow as you’re force to very frequently tiptoe forward lest you get ganked by an unlucky enemy placement. On top of all of that, your AI allies have some very mixed pathing abilities. This means you’ll very frequently be swapping control to them or going back and forth as you try to un-stick them from whatever pillar or bush they’ve decided to take the wrong path around. While I do appreciate how you can adjust their AI on scales of how aggressive you want them to be as well as the distance they should keep from enemies, I found that I was nonetheless babysitting them constantly while I tried to get them close enough to actually aggro on enemies (or pull them away from things they’d decided needing to be killed at once). Sure, you can go into their respective AI menus and swap which preset they’re fixed to depending on what you’re fighting or where you’re exploring, but that involves going into the tedious menu system. To facilitate the simultaneous RPG multiplayer, you’ve got an unconventional menu UI where a ring appears around each player. You can press Y for the one of the player you’re controlling or X for one of the AI’s menus, and there is nothing quick or simple about going through these things. It’s not the worst thing in the world, sure, but it’s very quickly a huge pain in the butt to have to constantly change their AI behaviors, so I usually didn’t bother. This even extends to just changing your own weapon as well. The game has eight different weapons you can use, find upgrades for, and level up in proficiency in, but you NEED to go into your respective ring menus if you want to change which weapon you’re using. This wouldn’t be such a huge annoyance if you didn’t need to switch between the sword, axe, and whip so often to cut down particular barriers or cross certain whip-able gaps. Given that not one but *both* shoulder buttons are completely unused for normal gameplay, it is absolutely beyond me why they didn’t just let you hot-swap between weapons using R and L. If I had to guess, it’s probably down to some programming hurdle that couldn’t be overcome, but no matter what the actual reason is, it doesn’t make switching weapons any less annoying. The gameplay experience of Secret of Mana isn’t a particularly difficult one most of the time, but good gods is it boring. Mechanic upon mechanic piles up to make an experience that feels as unrewarding as it is frustrating. The only times it feels particularly great is when things have gotten *so* simple that you can just breeze through enemies because you don’t need to deal with the most annoying design decisions at this particular moment. The aesthetics of the game are decent enough for 1993, but they’re nothing special, and as is also the case with the writing, they certainly bear the scars of something that was in development for so long. Sprites are relatively nice looking, but animations are often very simple for both players and enemies alike. Despite this, the game still gets quite bad slowdown problems, and only 3 enemies can ever be on screen at a time lest the game slow down to an impossible crawl. That can even turn into commands for your AI allies to use spells getting eaten while their AI and the gameplay action catch up from whatever was happening at the inopportune moment you decided to fire. The music is at least pretty good. That’s one area where even a much rougher gameplay experience like this doesn’t let you forget that it’s a SquareSoft game. It’s a nice silver lining to a very dark cloud. Verdict: Not Recommended. There were times where I was enjoying this game okay, but those times felt more like happy accidents than actual high points of design. The general pieces of the experience of Secret of Mana make for a consistently boring and frustrating gameplay loop that is very hard to recommend to really anyone. Like Shining Force that I played a couple years back, this is one I can kinda see why people may’ve enjoyed it back then, but even still, the problems it has are so great that it’s kinda hard to believe it didn’t have more detractors back then. Even if it was great back in its day, Secret of Mana is a game that has aged like milk in the sun, and it’s one you’re far better off avoiding in favor of one of the better games in its series. Somewhat continuing all of the Pokemon I played last year (though without the looming responsibility of using the Pokemon within them to beat Pokemon Stadium games XD), this is a game I played a TON when I was in grade school. It’s also, however, a game that I never played through with a proper Pokemon team of six, and it’s also a game that my partner really wanted to parallel play together. This made for a great opportunity to give this a replay for the first time in nearly 20 years, and seeing my partner’s experiences in her version of the game was also a really fun time~. It took me about 33 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware (with a team of Blaziken, Claydol, Sharpedo, Plusle, Skarmory, and Shiftry).
The third Pokemon game starts and plays out very similarly to the previous two. You’re a young person (you get the choice of a boy OR a girl this time, carrying forward the trend started in Crystal) going out on an adventure to become the regional Pokemon League champion. You arrive in the Hoenn region having just moved there from Johto to here where your father is a gym leader, and you quickly set off on your quest to be the best like no one ever was. It tries a few new things with the narrative writing, like how we’re not fighting Team Rocket anymore or how there are a few more characters with a *little* more meat to them, but it’s by and large very similar to how these games had always been up to that point. That absolutely isn’t a bad thing, mind you, as I certainly don’t mind a Pokemon game with a thread bare story if it’s otherwise fun to play, and this one absolutely fulfills the being fun to play. Gameplay-wise, it’s still Pokemon. You catch them, you train them, you fight trainers, win badges. It’s something you’re almost certainly already well familiar with by now, and the third generation of Pokemon doesn’t really rock the boat too much on the fundamentals and plays very similarly to the first two generations. That said, while some of the more fundamental problems with Pokemon still haven’t been cleared up yet (most prominently, the stat a move scales off of is still tied to the move’s type and isn’t particular to the move itself), there are a LOT of quality of life changes as well as general polish to the design that makes this game WAY easier to go back to than its GameBoy predecessors. The game as a whole is so much easier to play now. You still have an inventory limit, yeah, but it’s far larger than Gold & Silver’s was, and inventory management is far less of a constant burden. You also no longer need to swap your Pokemon boxes manually, so you can catch Pokemon to your heart’s content without ever needing to worry about running out of space in your computer. Lastly, while it’s still not perfect, the running shoes are a VERY welcome addition to the bicycle to make getting around a lot faster and easier. Sure, it sucks that you still can’t run inside, but being able to zoom around in outdoor areas really helps the pace of the gameplay significantly. As for the topic of polishing design, the overall experience has been fine tuned very significantly from the previous game, and a lot of more burdensome design choices of past games have been either ironed out or removed entirely. On the topic of the latter, wild Pokemon no longer run away from you unless they’re one or two very special cases, which makes catching Pokemon FAR less of a burden than it once was. Additionally, while there are still 8 HMs in this game, far less of them are actually needed to progress, so you need to spend a lot less time worrying about juggling HM users or trying to find space for crappy moves in your team. The biggest and most important change, however, is not only all of the new Pokemon, but all of the new moves. We’re still not quite there yet, but the moves added in these games make SO many Pokemon types SO much more viable now that they actually have move sets. Poison and bug types are still SOL, sadly, but most other types with really weedy move sets (especially dark types) are finally far more usable than they’d ever been, and the game balance is SO much better for it. We’ve still got some important stuff to clean up, but we’re at least at the point where Pokemon isn’t just fun to play, it’s easy to play, and that’s a milestone worth celebrating in and of itself. Just about every main line Pokemon game is a big presentation upgrade, and this game is no exception. With the power of the GBA, Pokemon look bigger, better, and more detailed than ever before. The GBA’s sound chip is infamously under powered compared to the graphics, but this game still manages to have a really fun and memorable soundtrack either way, even if it’s not the best the music would ever be. Verdict: Recommended. There are still some quality of life features and design shortcomings that make Pokemon games from this era a chore to go back to compared to more recent entries, there’s no doubt about that, but the advances we’ve made by this point really cannot be understated. If you’re looking for some retro Pokemon fun, this is a really good game to sit down with, even if all the kinks in the series still wouldn’t be ironed out for another game or two. 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. Continuing on with the Super Famicom's Quintet trilogy, this was the obvious next choice to play after Soul Blazer. Now this is a game I actually have played some of before, but I only got like a third of the way in and it was a LONG time ago. I'd also heard a lot of things over the years about how much worse the English version was vs. the original Japanese one (in a very standard mood for an Enix-published title), so I was very interested to see what the original version was like. It took me about 12 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without abusing save states.
Illusion of Gaia is the story of Temu, a young boy who lives in a coastal town and spends all day hanging out with his buddies. He's always had strange, telekinetic powers, but he's a kid like any other, and as soon as he's able, he's vowed to go out and find his father who disappeared a year ago when he left town to search for the Tower of Babel. After the kingdom's princess flees to his town and hides in his house, he and her become fast friends, and before they know it, the king has imprisoned Temu and they've all started onto a grand adventure to save the world. In grand Enix fashion, I've heard many times over the years that this is a really poorly translated game in its English release. I've heard it described as outright nonsensical, even. The Japanese version, on the other hand, is actually a surprisingly really well written story. It's a really thoughtfully written tale about growing up, and I really loved how it tackled themes of discrimination (and while not perfect about it, it's a lot better than even a lot of games now get these sorts of things, frankly). Illusion of Gaia is a story very concerned about life, death, and just what you spend the one life you have doing. Life is never a completely pretty thing, and good people do bad things all the time for all sorts of reasons. What sort of life you lead and what you get from it, as well as what you do to others, is what paints this grand tapestry we call life. It's got some similar execution problems to Soul Blazer in how it doesn't always use music as well as it could to set certain scenes, but the story was nonetheless a really excellent one, and it's easily one of my new favorites on the console. It's just a shame it's nowhere remotely as good in the English release ^^; The gameplay is once again a sort of Zelda-like, but with generally stiffer feeling combat as well as a transformation gimmick. Temu can turn into the dark warrior Freedan at save points in dungeons (and even another transformation much later into the game), and the respective powers of the different transformations are used to solve puzzles in dungeons. The boss and puzzle design isn't quite up to par with something like Link to the Past or other 2D Zelda games, but it still makes for a quite fun action game even if the adventure parts are more centered around the story writing than the exploration in towns and dungeons. Speaking of which, there are significantly more towns in this game than in the last one, but they're largely for painting scenery and for telling the story. This is still a game with no money system, and you also don't level up with EXP like you did in Soul Blazer. Instead, clearing all of the monsters in a room gets you an upgrade to your max health, your attack power, or your defense power, so there's a hard limit to how great your stats can get in this game. There being no money also means that there's a hard limit to how many healing items you can get, and I've heard many a tale of how important it is to save your healing herbs in the English version to be able to deal with the harder bosses (which are MUCH harder in that version than in this one). The Japanese version, at least, had quite a nice difficulty curve to it, and while it's a bit harder than Soul Blazer and has no option to grind for power (though you can grind for extra lives, for whatever that's worth), this version should be eminently completable, especially for people familiar with the genre. The presentation here is once again very good. The graphics are very pretty, and each location looks very distinct. NPCs and monsters are also very expressive and cool looking respectively, and the UI on top of the screen that shows monster and boss health is super appreciated for a game like this. While the UI design may've moved on from just copying Actraiser, the quality of the music is thankfully still just as strong as ever, and Illusion of Gaia has a soundtrack very befitting of its legacy. Verdict: Highly Recommended. At least for the Japanese version, this is a game I can't recommend enough. It's a real shame that the English version is so much poorer, because it's honestly one of the strongest games on the system when it's actually written the way it's supposed to be. The action may not be the strongest on the system, but the story more than makes up for that (despite the imperfections and casual racism ^^; ), and this is absolutely a game worth checking out for action/adventure and 2D Zelda fans. Known as "Soul Blader" here in Japan, I've been meaning to get to this game and its two sequels for quite some time now, and a simple sort of Zelda-like was just what I was in the mood for after all of that N64 playing earlier in the month. I honestly had virtually no idea what this game was even like, but its reputation was good enough that I was willing to take the chance regardless. It took me a bit under 8 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without abusing save states or using a guide.
Soul Blazer tells the story of a heavenly guardian come down to the world to set things right. The great demon lord Deathtoll was summoned by humanity, so the souls of just about every living thing have been sealed away by his dark minions. It's your mission to head down there and set things right again. While the story's presentation is quite of its time (that being quite simple and without much use of scene-setting music), it's actually a surprisingly well written story dealing with how there can always be hope in the world despite how eager humanity can be to march towards its own demise for personal enrichment. It's not exactly the best story on the Super Famicom or anything, but it was one I enjoyed nonetheless, and it's nice to see a more well considered story in a Zelda-like like this. While I do call this game a Zelda-like, it's honestly much more like Ys 1&2 and Gauntlet had a baby that was then raised by Actraiser XD (which makes some degree of sense, given that this was made by the guys who made both Ys 1&2 and Actraiser). It's a top down action game much like Gauntlet or Dungeon Explorers, and you go through dungeons killing all the monsters in an area. Upon killing all of the monsters out of a certain spawner, the spawner will explode all on its own, and walking over it will destroy it and free the soul of the being trapped in it. Upon returning to the town of that particular area (of which the game has seven), you can talk to these beings (be they people, animal, or plant) and receive information, goodies, or just a simple thank you. This game has no money, so your goodies you find generally fall into being either new equipment (armor, swords, or spells), or just the power gems that you collect to power your spells. It's a pretty simple gameplay loop overall, but it's one that works really well regardless. It'll probably be a bit of an easy game for some (though the English version is a little bit harder), but I found its challenge to be juuuust right for me as a veteran of the genre. Even if you are having a hard time, you gain experience points from killing monsters, and there are always monsters that aren't connected to spawners that simply respawn when you enter and leave the screen, so simple EXP grinding to power up more is always an option if you're having trouble~. The presentation of the game is really stand-out excellent. As mentioned earlier, we're taking a LOT of stuff from Actraiser, as almost all of the sound effects and even significant bits of the UI seem to just be copied directly over from Actraiser. Heck, even the way enemies get stunned slightly after hitting them is right out of Actraiser XD. Thankfully, not only is the Actraiser stuff very good and functional, so reusing it here is hardly a problem, but we also got a banging soundtrack too! This game's soundtrack was awesome, and there was barely a new area I got to where I didn't say out loud "oh hell yeah, this song rocks!". The graphics are also very pretty, though they're certainly of the time for a '92 SFC game. Verdict: Highly Recommended. With a nice little story and really fun and balanced gameplay, this is a super easy recommendation. If you like 2D Zelda-type stuff at all, then this will likely be a game you quite enjoy, and you don't even need to be super good at these sorts of games to beat it. An awesome action/adventure game to spend a weekend with, if there ever was one~. A game you probably are more familiar with under the title of "The Game of Life," that board game is actually popular enough in Japan to have received Japan-specific editions as well as video games (of which this is one). I hadn't planned on picking this one up, but I'd heard it was quite neat and happened to find it at Book Off earlier in the month, so I figured I'd give it a try. Upon reflection, I actually had probably heard of the Taito-developed game released a year or so earlier, so I hadn't actually found the sick score I thought I had, but I bought what I bought, so I figured I might as well see what makes it tick XD. I played the game on real hardware, and I went through three games (two short, and one long) and spent about 11 hours doing it all, though I managed to win only the last of those games that I played (the 5+ hour long one).
There is no story to speak of, as this is a pretty straightforward adaptation of the board game. The additions present are largely in the execution of the gameplay experience, but the story is still the same. You start as a baby, and this game follows you through school and work all the way to the end of your life, and at the very end King Yama judges your soul and you get to see which part of the afterlife you end up in. It's just a board game, though, so it really doesn't need a story. The story is one you put together yourself as you rage at your friends for how much bullshit luck they happen into XD The actual gameplay is really just The Game of Life, though it is a very noble attempt at trying to make that (bad) board game more interesting. You spin the spinner, you get good events and bad events, you decide to go to university or not and you get a job, you can get cards to use when you want. It's nothing that different from many versions of the game, at least as far as the base mechanics go. For the more advanced stuff, they've put in a small handful of mini-games which you get to play now and then to upgrade your stats. That's right, there are stats in this version, smarts, body, style, and morality, and you'll need higher stats to both get certain jobs as well as get promotions in those jobs. You can also get married and have kids (if you get lucky enough to land on the romance spaces and get lucky enough events with them), and you can also buy things like pets or real estate or find things like skills or items, though this is still The Game of Life. At the end of the day, everything comes down to money, as that's the game's only real method of totaling up your scores, and that's really where a lot of the faults come into play. Now when we start talking about faults, we can't really ignore that, at its core, The Game of Life is a pretty boring board game. You can make little decisions here and there on how to use the special cards you find, what job to pick and when to change careers, and which path to take on the small handful of tiny forks in the road, but this is a game largely defined by how lucky each player gets and not much else. This isn't helped by just how badly the AI is at playing the game. They make utterly nonsensical choices constantly outside of cards with specific targets (which they always use to target the person in 1st place). They never buy real estate, and that's often going to be the metric that decides who wins, so they're actually really hard to lose to once you know what you're doing (especially because your standing only takes into account your current cash-on-hand total, not your net worth, for whatever reason). It's also really easy to get trapped into cycles of debt that are nearly impossible to get out of, as the game makes it VERY hard to get out of debt with your debt growing by 10% every payday regardless of your salary. I could list a bunch more little problems here and there, but it all comes down to that playing by yourself is awful, and the way the game works overall makes it not terribly fun to play with friends either. It has procedurally generated boards, and you can even make your own boards and make your own characters to play as, both of which is quite neat. However, on my copy, character creation simply doesn't work, so take that for what you will. Games also take like 2+ hours to play at the absolute shortest, so even if you're just playing with one other person, get ready for the long haul if you're playing this game. That's right, it's not just boring, it's also VERY long too XD The aesthetics, at the very least, are very nice. The 2D animations that play for your character during the good, bad, and otherwise events are very charmingly put together and it's always fun to see what weird nonsense is gonna befall your poor little fellas. The music isn't anything special, but it fits the tone of the game just fine, and the mini-games in particular have very fun little songs tied to them. Verdict: Not Recommended. While this may be about as noble an attempt as is possible (outside of the nearly useless AI) to make The Game of Life an interesting and fun experience, but there's only so much that you can polish a turd XD. It's a neat curiosity on the N64, but it's also just such a crappy time that it's not worth much more than being a neat curiosity, and your time is probably better spent playing any of the other myriad of party games that are on this console. 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. |
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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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