Looking for something noncommittal and not very hard to sink my teeth into before I started playing another game with a friend the next day, I remembered that this existed on the Switch Online service. Of course I had no reason to believe it’d be a *great* game, being a licensed game on a console with no small amount of dire licensed games, but I’m a sucker for 2D Zelda-style action/adventure games, and there was really only so long one as easily available to me as this was going to escape being played by me regardless of how good or bad it was XD. It took me 4-ish hours to beat the English version of the game via the Switch Online GameBoy service (with moderate use of rewinds and save states).
The story of the game presumably follows the story of the film on which its based. The Quest for Camelot is a film I’m honestly completely unfamiliar with beyond a general awareness that it’s not very good, so I can really only assume that Kaylee’s quest to avenge her slain father, defeat the evil usurper Ruber, and save King Arthur and Camelot is reasonably close to the film. Either way, it’s a very forgettable story told quite clumsily. There are some neat pixelated renditions of shots of the films in between walls of text that exposit between stages, but it’s still just “this thing happens, so do this thing. Okay on to next location to do another thing” over and over until the end. I certainly wouldn’t expect a great story out of a GBC Zelda clone if it were licensed or otherwise, really, but just how clumsy and overly wordy this game’s narrative is definitely makes it start veering towards an active negative on the game vs. being something comfortably simple and ignoreable. At the very least the adventure has quite good signposting, which is certainly more than I can say about a fair few other 2D Zelda clones I’ve played over the years. The gameplay is no better than the story. It’s frankly pretty easy to say that it’s even worse, or at the very least a fitting counterpart to the inelegance of the writing. In the broad strokes of things, it’s a pretty shameless copy of 2D Zelda games like Link to the Past, Link’s Awakening, and the Oracle games. Tons of items and design concepts are copied outright, though that copying unfortunately doesn’t extend to the actual design of the combat and levels. The game is broken up into several stages with action and puzzles (if you can call them that) leading up to a boss fight. Movement feels awkward with the game’s large sprites, enemies are rudimentary and often move too fast to hit properly, and your sword’s length is pathetically too short to hit things with reliably (in keeping with the grand tradition of bad Zelda clones). It even has tons of padding via fetch quests! In addition to enemies being hard to hit (and bosses being miserable damage sponges), the actual world design is dreadful, and the game has some of the most irritating instant-death jumping puzzles I’ve seen in a game like this as well as a serious aversion to enemies ever giving the player health pickups. It’s not the most incompetent 2D Zelda clone I’ve ever played, sure, but that’s damning with faint praise with just how low a bar that is XD. The presentation is also quite weak. The graphics take the path of many subpar portable games and opt for big, more detailed sprites that then consequently make the action harder to parse because you don’t have enough room on the screen to see yourself. Additionally, the graphics that are there are pretty ugly and often poor representations of their film counterparts, with the main character often looking nothing like the character even on the front of the game’s own box. The music is also just embarrassingly poorly done. The game has like 3 or 4 music tracks total, and they’re painfully simple and half-baked for a GBC game from 1998 even compared to what composers were accomplishing on the original GameBoy nearly a decade earlier. The biggest and most hilarious music issue, however, is now no non-gameplay scene actually has any music at all. I thought my Switch had crashed, but nope, no errors. The company splash screens, the title screen, and ALL of the text-wall “cutscenes” have 0 music of any kind, meaning you don’t even get music at all until a minute or two after you’ve booted up the game XD Verdict: Not recommended. There are certainly more unenjoyable licensed games on the GBC, but again we’re back to damning with faint praise XD. Even on its best day, this game is tuned overly difficult and aggressively mediocre, and your time is simply better spent on other things. The GameBoy is no stranger to great action/adventure games, and there are even more at least decent ones than there are great ones, so I have no idea why you’d pick this thing to play over the piles of better ones unless you had genuinely nothing better to do with your time at all.
0 Comments
This is a game I actually learned of via a Twitter account I follow that posts old Japanese video game commercials. This is a licensed tie in for an OVA series from around the same time, CB Chara Go Nagai World (with the “CB” being read “chibi”), and the footage from that used in the commercial was eye catching to say the least. It looked like a fun enough game from the brief amount of footage I looked up of it, and while it wasn’t a super common game online, it was thankfully one that I was able to score for cheap, at least. It took me a bit over 5 hours to complete the game on original hardware with extensive use of a guide video to show me where to go next.
The story is original from the OVAs, to the best of my knowledge, but it’s a very silly super-crossover of Go Nagai franchises nonetheless. You (the heroes, Devilman and Mazinger Z) are informed that laughter has suddenly disappeared from the world, and everyone is going mad (quite literally) as a result! This can only be due to the sudden vanishing of the mysterious power known as “Gag”, and it’s your job to get it back and bring peace and laughter back to the world! It’s a story as unserious as it is silly, and that’s all it really needs to be. It’s a fine enough reason as any to get a bunch of Go Nagai created characters interacting and being weird with each other, and it does a perfectly fine job at that. The mechanics, on the other hand, do something significantly less than a perfectly fine job of anything. They’re so borked, frankly, that it’s difficult to even pick a place to start talking about them, but I suppose starting with the overall gameplay design is a good a place as any. The game is an action/adventure game, and a sort of Mystical Ninja (Ganbare Goemon) clone of sorts, with beat’em up-style 3D-ish sections intermixed with more traditional 2D side-scrolling sections. There is virtually no signposting of any kind, which is unfortunate (especially in the increasingly massive and maze-like later half of the game), but not unheard of for the time. Sure, it was becoming much rarer on the Super Famicom to have a game like that compared to how common they were on the Famicom, but it’s hardly an inexcusable design decision for the time (despite how vexing that kind of thing can be either way). The big thing that makes this so much worse of a problem than it already is, however, is that the game controls *terribly*. Movement is very stiff, and having an unused face button while nonetheless requiring a double-tap to run is something I’m quite famously not a fan of. On top of that, the delay on your inputs is very noticeable, particularly for your attacks. You have a punch button and a kick button (with the jump button being only adjacent to the punch button, making jump kicking very awkward), and the delay for the punch is bad, but the delay for the kick is nearly twice as long as that. This makes the at times quite tricky platforming very annoying and awkward, sure, but it also makes combat utterly miserable. Enemies are very fast and are very tanky. They can also nuke your HP down VERY quickly, and you get staggered almost immediately from virtually all attacks, which means you’re usually taking *three* hits before you actually get any invincibility frames. The game has a real problem with luxury animations on your already terribly delayed punching, kicking, and ducking, but just how long the animations are for when you toddle around after taking damage make already frustrating and unsatisfying combat a really miserable slog. All isn’t completely lost, however, as this game has vaguely River City Ransom-like stat upgrades you can acquire by using consumables you pick up throughout the game. Even if, in an interesting albeit somewhat annoying twist (given how awful combat feels even when you’re winning), bosses are actually immune to your attack upgrades and take just as many hits to kill no matter how much power you have, grinding up some stats can make normal enemies far less of a burden, at the very least. However, of course, this can’t be anything simple or fun. You, the player character, actually can’t carry any money. Instead, the game has a minion system, where killing a certain special type of enemy will recruit them as one of your minions. You can then send them as a gofer to go buy you an upgrade or healing item, or you can send them on a part time job to go earn some money to buy yourself upgrades at shops. There are various types of minions, with different ones having different multipliers on how much money they earn as well as different amounts of starting cash, but not much of that matters given that their main mechanic is waiting for them to come back. Your minions won’t stay bossed around by you forever, and unless you’re blowing a lot of cash on giving them food to keep them happy, they’ll buzz off after a job or two. You actually have no wallet yourself, so that’s their cash you’re blowing, and there isn’t really a great way to keep your minions both useful and happy, so the best strategy I found was just using them until they left, and then going to one of their spawn points to pick up more minions. Shops and minions get increasingly hard to find and access as the game goes on, though, and my winning strategy was just to grind up 20+ kick power (it’s the most common kind of attack upgrade vs. punch power ups which I found to be much rarer) and 24+ defense power (enough that even the final boss will only be doing 1 pip of damage at a time) and some 18-ish max HP right at the start of the game. However, as mentioned earlier, all you can do while they’re gone is just wait for them to get back. I reckon I spent some 2 hours doing almost nothing right in the start of the game simply getting strong enough to take on the rest of the game, and with how tough the challenges that followed actually turned out to be, I was happy I took the time to do it! This brings me to frankly the most difficult to excuse part of the whole game’s design. While the game mercifully has infinite lives & continues, and dying just brings you back to the start of the room you’re currently at, this game isn’t particularly short. This is a game that has a ton of grinding for stats, a fair bit of difficult/annoying platforming, and a lot of wandering around totally lost looking for where to go next if you’re not using a guide (all while trudging through the dreadful controls and combat). Keep in mind that it took me over 5 hours to beat this game even WITH using a guide on where to go next at every given opportunity, and I’m far from a novice at action games or platformers. Despite all of this, this game lacks any way to actually continue your progress after turning the console off. There is no save system, no passwords, no nothing. You beat this game in one sitting, or you don’t beat it at all. Even with how bad everything else is, this is some incredible insult to injury, as it would’ve made playing this even back in the day an awful chore, and it deserves complaining about now just as it would’ve back then. Aesthetically, at least, the game is up to the standards of what I’ve come to expect from licensed early SFC games. The graphics are very nice realizations of the chibi characters they’re meant to be. Even as someone only really familiar with the super robot connected side of Go Nagai’s work, it was still always fun seeing just how a new character would be portrayed. Sure, there aren’t many animation frames, and those which are here are sometimes unwanted (like the luxury frames as you wind up a punch or a kick), but the sprites and environments look very nice for the time, and they still hold up well now. The music is also fairly good. There’s nothing super special to write home about, granted, but it fits the action well and it was never annoying to listen to, even in my hours standing around the first area waiting for my gofers to get back. Verdict: Not recommended. If you hadn’t predicted what the verdict of this review would be by the end of it here, I have done a very poor job of explaining just how awful it so often is to engage with this game’s systems ^^;. This is a game I only really beat out of a feeling of obligation given that I went through the trouble to buy it physically, but the only real fun came from managing to overcome the BS it so often throws at you. I’d struggle to recommend this to even the biggest Go Nagai fan, as even then, I’d say it’s much more worth your time to just watch a longplay on youtube rather than actually subject yourself to the game itself. Still very much in the mood for old RPGs after SaGa 2, I got right to work on completing the last of the GameBoy SaGa games. I bought this collection on Switch well over a year and a half ago, and I figured it was high time I actually finished the darn thing x3. I didn’t know much about this game going in other than that it wasn’t really a SaGa game beyond the title. The creator of SaGa had already been pushed on to Romancing SaGa by this point, so the team that put this together were largely the team that would go on to make Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, and this game was something of a prototype for that game in many ways with how much they share mechanically. At any rate, after all of the wikis I’ve needed to consult and countless stats I’ve needed to keep track of playing other SaGa games recently, I was honestly happy to have something more straightforward to play XD. It took me around 15~20 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game via the Switch SaGa collection over the course of a week (without using the collection’s speed up features).
SaGa 3’s story is very involved and complicated right out the gate. Years ago, a large pot appeared in the sky and began to pour water and monsters out into the world. Within a couple of decades, the world was completely submerged underwater and monsters had destroyed anything that was left afterwards. In a hope to prevent this awful fate, three young heroes were sent back in time to train for the day they’d be able to try and save their doomed world. Their leader, Dune, is our main character, and our story begins on the day their training is complete and they set out on their quest. The story honestly goes tons of weird places after that, and there are tons of other named NPCs and places throughout the story that you’ll need to keep track of throughout your time-hopping and dimension-hopping adventure. Heck, the other three player characters all have names and roles as well! That said, none of it really matters much. The story is quite complicated compared to the previous SaGa games on GameBoy, sure, but not to much end. It’s a story where a ton of Stuff (TM) occurs, but it’s mostly just for the sake of giving the player a Next Location to progress on to. A decent deal of it is probably me playing this in Japanese rather than English, but I found the story quite difficult to follow, myself, though I gave up caring all that much about it pretty quickly. The dialogue writing is pretty flat, and beyond that, it’s a pretty bog-standard good vs. evil story that happens to have a somewhat novel setting for the time. While that’s not exactly a point against it, it’s not really a point in its favor either. The mechanics are indeed much more straightforward than a typical SaGa game, and they’re downright nearly as simple as they could possibly be, quite frankly. You’ve got a party of four members, two physical attack-focused and two magic-focused, and you gain experience points from leveling and a level up will give you a general boost to your stats. It’s damn near as simple as a turn-based RPG like this comes, honestly. There are some annoying nuances and lacking of information regarding what strengths weapons actually have, but nothing terribly unique for the time. To give the game at least a little credit, however, it does try to have *some* SaGa-y mechanics by adapting the monster system from the previous two games. While you can’t have any monsters in your group like you could in SaGa 1 and 2, you can instead have your human and esper party members eat meat or use robot parts dropped by defeated enemies to transform into monster hybrids and cyborgs respectively. Eating the opposite type you currently are will turn you back to normal, and there are some dedicated purification spots to do it at as well if you’re having trouble with that. Becoming a monster or cyborg makes your equipment act differently as well as gives you some special abilities (that are different from spells) depending on what you’ve turned into, and they even shift around your base stats to boot. Neat as all that is, it’s a pretty poorly implemented system that I never engaged with much. Even if you don’t eat more meat or equip more cyborg parts, you can still shape shift after a random battle into a new form, meaning you can’t reliably maintian a particularly useful monster or cyborg form should you find one. It makes your party plagued with unreliable side-grades and down-grades in how it affects your stats and max HP, and I found it a perfectly viable strategy to just ignore that stuff the entire game and stick with a more stable normal form party. I’ve got to give a little bit of credit where credit is due for implementing such an involved system in the game, but I really wish they’d gone through the extra effort to make the stuff actually feel like it was worth using at all. The presentation is, at least, quite nice and doesn’t let down its predecessors. The music compositions aren’t quite as nice, in my reckoning anyhow, but it’s still another GameBoy RPG full of good music. The graphics are also quite nice, and while there weren’t any as stand-out memorable as there were in SaGa 2, there were still a lot of neat, silly bad guy sprites to fight along the journey. Verdict: Not Recommended. This isn’t a bad game, per se, but it’s one I find basically impossible to recommend you spend your time with. The story is dull, the mechanics are bland, the signposting is quite bad, the difficulty is quite easy, and it’s not particularly outstanding in its presentation either. You might not have a bad time with SaGa 3, and the mechanics might frustrate you a bit less than SaGa 1 and 2 on the GameBoy did, sure, but at least SaGa 1 and 2 (for all their faults) were novel and interesting in many ways. SaGa 3 may’ve been perfectly acceptable when it came out, but I think it’s very hard to justify spending time with in 2024 unless you simple must experience every SquareSoft game that’s out there out of pure intellectual curiosity. 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. 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. 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. Continuing replaying through the original releases of the original Ace Attorney trilogy, next up on the list was of course Gyakuten Saiban 2. Now while it has been like eight or so years since I last played these, there were still at least a few things about this game in particular that I remembered quite disliking. A few puzzles in particular I remembered the solutions to, even all these years later, just because they stumped and frustrated me so badly back in the day xD. I overall remembered not really liking the game nearly as much as the other ones I played back then, but overall I still remembered it being mostly fine. It took me a bit over 20 hours (probably, as this game doesn’t count your playtime at all) to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware (that being my GameBoy Player).
Narratively this game is a straight up sequel to the last one. While the first game covers Phoenix Wright’s first year as a defense attorney, this game covers his second. Miles Edgeworth is replaced with the daughter of one of the first game’s antagonist, Franziska Von Karma, and Phoenix gets a new sidekick in the form of Maya Fei’s little cousin Pearl. However, despite this game having the exact same writer/director as the previous game, the writing is *so* aggressively inferior that for years I thought for sure it had to have been written by someone else. The issues are really so widespread and varied that it’s hard to pick just one place to start, but we may as well start by taking a look at our new cast. Maya ends up actually spending a lot of this game occupied with other things (whether of her own will or otherwise), so Phoenix’s main partner is Pearl for roughly 2/3rds of the game. This isn’t a terrible problem, really, as Pearl is cute and funny, but she’s also just a weaker copy of Maya in most ways. She’s silly, she’s not very worldly, and she can summon Maya’s dead big sister Mia (which is super creepy, given that they still give her huge boobs with cleavage even though Pearl is an eight-year old), and she just doesn’t have the chemistry with Phoenix that Maya has. The one case that Maya is actually around for the entirety of really helps drive this point home as well. However, as much as Pearl is a sorta wimpy replacement for Maya, the much worse addition to the cast is our new prosecutor, Franziska Von Karma. Over the course of the first game, Phoenix and Edgeworth have a relationship that covers the span of the entire story. Thanks to Phoenix, Edgeworth slowly realizes that his world view of “victory at any cost” is a harmful one, and that he can very much use his talents as a prosecutor for something other than just getting guilty verdicts. Edgeworth becoming a better person through his relationship with Phoenix is easily one of the biggest strengths of the first game’s narrative. Franziska, on the other hand, is a VERY underwhelming replacement for him. Morally, she is nearly exactly the same as Edgeworth in the first game (victory at any cost), yet even then she barely has any character arc to speak of, and that which she does have is very poorly done (giving her the whip back at the end is also one of the most astonishingly misguided bits of character writing I’ve seen in a while, hot damn). She is more or less narrative dead weight and just Edgeworth’s hype woman, warming his seat until he can make his triumphant return in the game’s finale. She feels very disposable as a result, and she’s mainly just a conduit for the game’s very poor sense of humor (that sense of humor being that being cruel and mean to people is always funny, which comes off far more often as mean spirited than funny). This, in turn, is a factor of the game’s larger problem with how it writes its women. Women are never allowed to be as complicated, flawed, or even straight up evil as their male counterparts. This is, to a degree, a problem that the first Ace Attorney has as well, but it’s MUCH more of a problem here. Whenever a woman is evil or bad, it’s always underlined with this ultimate reveal of them actually being scared, weak, vulnerable, etc. While it’s not like men are never emotional, absurd, or foolish in Ace Attorney 1 and 2, the fact that they get to be more than that while women don’t is very difficult to ignore for me. Women seem to always be written with this underlying assumption that they are fundamentally caring and sensitive creatures, and it means that their writing is fundamentally hamstrung from the start. AA2’s misogynistic approach to how its female characters are written isn’t the explicit cause of why I say the writing is bad (any more than the racist caricatures or the profoundly toxic attitude towards suicide are), but they’re part of the larger structure of why the game’s writing is so weak. The game largely being focused around female characters who are then written so poorly means that the story is very flimsy as a result. This game lacks any meaningful meta-narrative that covers all four cases (with little it does have being confused and contradictory nonsense), and Franziska being such a paper thin bench-warmer of a character is a very big reason for that, in my eyes. It would be one thing if AA2 was just a less well realized story than its predecessor. It might even be something I could look past. But with its combination of poorly written and very distasteful characters, it’s a mish-mash of bad taste and weak writing that makes for an experience that is as difficult to care about as it is just generally unpleasant to go through. This is also not helped at all by the game’s relatively weak case design either. We still have the same formula of more linear investigation sections alternating with the court room trial sections, but this game spices up both in very meaningful ways. First of all, the investigation sections are spiced up with the psycho lock system, which is basically just adding cross-examination sections to the investigation sections to make them a bit more than just reading text. Then, you have the trial sections, which are varied up by the changing of the penalty system. In the first Gyakuten Saiban, it was five strikes and you’re out (and in the original GBA version, you had to start from the very beginning of the case if you struck out, not just from your last save point). From this game forward, we have more of a health bar system, with different errors taking away larger amounts of health (and that includes several penalties that are simply an instant death if you get them wrong). Both of these new mechanics are mired terribly by the generally bad signposting and illogical design that are peppered through the entire game. From the first case through to the fourth one (which, from its writing to its puzzles, is one of the weakest cases in the entire series, at least for me), you have at least one puzzle per case that is very unclear on what it wants from the player. Whether it’s down to an unclearly worded question or down to a completely illogical deduction you’re forced to make (with cases 2 and 4 having the worst instances of illogical nonsense, with number 4 having one that I’m still not sure of the logic behind reading it in either English or Japanese). It makes a game with an already weak narrative that much more weak on top of all that, as it’s very hard to care about a mystery or its deductions when the solutions seem so arbitrary. It easily turns into a vicious cycle, where, because you just stop caring about the mystery or the story, it’s that much harder to solve the deductions that are actually doable because you just keep doubting yourself that this logic is actually logical along the game’s strange lines. There are other meaningful problems too, of course. For example, this version of the game lacks any mid-section hard save points as well as a speed-up feature of any kind, so failure is punished by wasting a LOT of your time redoing stuff you’ve already done. You also can’t restore health any way other than succeeding in breaking a psycho lock, so if you’re having trouble in the middle of a court section, you might need to replay through a LOT of content very frequently if you’re on something you only have once chance left to succeed on. But these pale in comparison to the poor signposting for the game’s mystery stuff. It all adds up to a game that isn’t fun to play wrapped up in a story that’s very difficult to find much enjoyment in on top of that. The game’s presentation is at least a fine followup to the first game. While I don’t love all of the new songs, they’re by and large very nice evolutions on the overall soundtrack of the first game while bringing back a bunch of old favorites like the Steel Samurai theme. The graphics are also very nice. While there are honestly a few too many returning characters for my liking (it makes things feel a little stale after a while, but that’s a much more personal issue than anything else), the new characters have fun and well animated designs, and it’s just as enjoyable as ever to watch them strut their stuff. It just makes me wish it was all in service of stronger writing and game design, I suppose ^^; Verdict: Not Recommended. I went back and forth for a good while on the verdict I wanted to give this game, but a conversation with my partner (who is played through this alongside me and disliked her time with it even more than I did) really helped clear things up for me. She asked if I’d recommend someone just outright skip this game and go right on to Ace Attorney 3, and I honestly couldn’t think of a reason to not answer ‘no’. The story isn’t particularly important to later Ace Attorney games, and both mechanically and narratively it’s just a generally quite unpleasant time. There’s enough other far better Ace Attorney out there that your time is simply worth better. Even for someone like me, who has played AA games after this and know how much better they are, I struggled to find the motivation to continue on to the third game because my time with this game was just that bad. If that doesn’t speak to how difficult this game is to enjoy, then I don’t really know what can ^^; A few months back, my partner picked up One Piece Odyssey, the new One Piece RPG, and I watched her play through just about all of it. It got me thinking about One Piece a lot again, and as a bit of a joke, I picked this game up so I could play a One Piece RPG alongside her x3. Schedules got busy, though, so it ended up being quite some time before I could actually sit down and play this with her, and this last weekend I finally saw the bugger through to the end. It took me some 20-ish hours (the game doesn’t count playtime) to beat it in Japanese on my PS2, and I didn’t touch the post-game content at all.
The story premise for this is actually something my partner and I theorized about the potential of when I was watching her play One Piece Odyssey. You’re not playing as the Straw Hat crew, the licensed characters from the show. You’re playing as an original character alongside them on an adventure. I don’t wanna *be* Luffy, I wanna go on an adventure *with* Luffy, so to speak. You play as an original character plus two original friends (a boy and a girl) of theirs on a pirate adventure to collect all six legendary gold fragments of a mysterious treasure. The Straw Hat crew are also out to find them, but they’re attacked and split up from each other in the intro cutscene by a mysterious and powerful new enemy. After your rag tag crew is rescued by Ussop, you set out to help reuinte the Straw Hat crew and find all the pieces of this legendary treasure! As for where this game takes place in the One Piece story, it’s a side-story taking place in between them defeating Aaron and going to Loguetown (and the post-game involves them meeting Chopper, I believe). As a general piece of writing, it’s really nothing special, and it’s paced pretty terribly. There are some fun fan service-y segments like when you meet up with Buggy (still missing his body parts after his fight with Luffy) that made me laugh quite a bit, but overall the game is really wanting in that department. It’s cool just how much VA they got in the game, but it’s just not hitting the mark of a licensed fan service-y game like Banpresto is so good at doing. The writing is definitely *the* reason to play the game, but between the game getting in the way of itself and the generally lackluster pacing on top of that, it’s far less than stellar, and it’s honestly not enough of a draw to recommend the game on these merits alone (unlike a game like Super Hero Operations, which I played earlier this year and is from only a year or two before this). Mechanically, this *is* technically an RPG, but in a more loose sense. It’s more like an adventure game composed of various mini-games with some vague trappings of an RPG like leveling up and getting equipment. There are six different locations in the main game (with another one or two in the post-game), and each of these is one big isometric map that you sail around on completing objectives. These objectives are usually indicated to you via your compass’s needle, but often times you’ll need to just sail around and try your best to find whatever it is you’re looking for (and the game isn’t particularly interested in reminding you of what that is if you forget, not that the directions you have are all that helpful very often anyhow). A lot of this, especially around the game’s midpoint, devolves into a ton of somewhat aimless scavenger hunting, and it is DRAINING to say the least. The game has a TON of padding around making you either aimlessly or even not aimlessly sail around the world back and forth between different locations, and it’s the biggest culprit when it comes to how bad the narrative’s pacing is. This game would be a lot better if it were 30 or 50% shorter. That is *just* how much padding we’re talking here. The other activities you do along your scavenger hunting and sailing around the map are different forms of fighting. The one the game has the most mechanics around (buying equipment, accessories, and leveling up) are the roulette-based 3v3 fights with other pirate crews. Weapons you buy in shops not only have procedurally generated stats in accordance with their weapon level, but they also determine the layout of this roulette (they use the word “roulette” but it’s more like a single-wheel slot machine) timing mini-game . How many hits (and how strong they are), how many misses, and what extra modifiers (like buffs for your team, debuffs for the enemy, and even whether or not you’re hitting a single target or the whole enemy team) are determined by your weapon. I generally found that combos (by hitting the right mark for it) are the way to go, and more damage makes the roulette spin faster, so slower weapons like bats and knuckle weapons are really the only sensible way to live. As a result, most weapons I found were basically useless, and vendors swap what they sell constantly, so it was mostly just a game of going from vendor to vendor on each map and seeing if they happened to have a better version of what I already had. These 3v3 fights are probably the best thought out part of the game, but even then, they’re far from perfect, and they also don’t have enough sprites in-game to have you fight anyone but generic enemies (generally composed of the same sprites you could’ve potentially used for your non-main character original pirate crew). How you actually fight big name bad guys like Arlong or Krieg are in several forms. First you have ship battles, which aren’t very special, but they’re the most fun of these sorts of fights. You’re shooting their cannonballs out of the air and shooting specified spots on their ships in simple rail-shooter segments, and while it’s not amazing, it’s a fun enough change of pace. Then you have what I’ll call the word battles. This is how you fight giant sea monsters (by hurling big furniture off of the deck of the ship at them) or big bosses (via your list of silly special moves) by picking a word from a procedurally generated list, and the longer the word, the more damage you do. There’s a little bit of strategy here, as you’re trying to hit them down to about exactly lethal, as if you overshoot they’ll likely get back up and not actually die, but you also effectively can’t die yourself in these segments, so it’s mostly just silly, flashy fun, and they’re a clever and efficient way to give the player fights against big bosses as well without making a ton of bespoke assets for it. The biggest loser of these extra modes is what I’ll call the choose-your-own-adventure fights. There are three of them, and they’re conceptually the Straw Hat Pirates fighting against big enemies and you’re picking moves for them from a binary list each time. Picking the right option will progress the fight down a particular dialogue tree, making this a glorified visual novel segment. However, the big problem here is that there is almost never any indication of what move is actually the right move. Even moves that “do damage” (there are no health bars in this segment) might not actually be the correct move because it’s not progressing the dialogue trees the right way. These devolve into trial and error slogs of just trying to select the correct choice to let you be free of this awful mess. These are so bad and unintuitive (not to mention I couldn’t really find guides for them on the Japanese internet even) that they alone are what make the game completely unrecommendable. I wish that were not the case, but they were so miserable and so devoid of actual mechanics that it’s just impossible to overlook them in any meaningful sense, especially in a game that’s already such a mixed bag with the good struggling very hard to outpace the bad. Speaking of mixed bags, we also have the game’s presentation, which fits that description to a T. The graphics, when they’re there, are generally either pretty okay 3d models (outside of the rail shooter segments which look better) or visual novel-style segments. The VN segments use a ton of art from the show and manga (as well as some completely original stuff), and while here and there they’ve picked some quite uncanny screen caps of the crew, it generally looks quite nice, and the Straw Hat crew in particular have a TON of different sprites they’ll use for different attacks or emotions. The audio quality also isn’t great, being a PS1 game, but quite a large amount of the dialogue is also voice acted, at least for the licensed characters. It’s honestly quite impressive just how many of them (some of which have barely any lines) they managed to gather the voice actors together to get them to record for this game for. While it’s not exactly Atelier Marie, where literally all spoken dialogue is voiced, it’s still a remarkable amount of story-important dialogue given voice. The music, though, is extremely basic and not very good. It’s all incredibly forgettable and doesn’t really scream “One Piece” at all, and it’s an unfortunate low point for a game with otherwise quite competent presentation. Verdict: Not Recommended. Even for the most die hard One Piece fans, I think this game is going to be a really tough pill to swallow compared to the sheer amount of far more competent One Piece games out there. Sure, it’s an original story, but it’s so underwhelming and poorly paced that even that can’t save it, especially with how downright awful or boring so much of the gameplay often is. I’m glad to have it out of my way, but at the rate we’re going, this is probably going to be the worst game I play this year. Of all the licensed Japan-only games you need to know Japanese pretty darn well to actually play, this is one you can very safely skip. As I was out of Mario Party to play (at least of ones I could acquire cheaply, easily, and stream to Discord were concerned), a friend of mine recommended this game to me. I had never even heard of Crash Bash (or Cash Bandicoot Carnival, as we call it over here), but as luck had it, we actually had a copy available locally for cheap, so I snapped it right up. I was very curious to see what Sony’s attempt at this formula was, even if it wasn’t actually made by Naughty Dog themselves. Though I have certainly given my friend an earful for pushing me towards this in the first place, I eventually conquered the trial and tribulation and saw this game through to the end of its story mode. The game doesn’t keep track of play time, but I reckon it took me 7 or 8 hours at least to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware playing as Crash.
The story setup for CB is kinda weird, but ultimately not super important. Aku Aku (the good totem fella) and Uka Uka (the evil totem fella) are arguing in their little hangout in the heavens about who among them is better. They decide to determine it once and for all by summoning representatives from down on Earth to duke it out in a series of games (and since there are way more bad guys than good guys, Aku Aku is allowed to take two bad guys for two even teams of four). Whomever you pick will need to fight and win their way through four worlds of games and beat the bosses at the end in order to see your team the winner. It’s not ultimately a very important story, given the genre of game it is, but it’s cool that they went through all of the trouble to design and craft the cutscenes for it, as they’re charming in that very Crash Bandicoot-y way that the PS1 titles so often had. It’s a more than adequate premise for the gameplay at hand to take place, and it does its job well. Though this was recommended to me because of all of the Mario Party I was playing, it is decidedly not really much of a Mario Party clone as such. It’s more like Microsoft’s Fusion Frenzy, in that it’s a competitor to Mario Party via being a party game based around mini-games rather than outright trying to do its own spin on the Mario Party formula like Sega’s Sonic Shuffle. In each world, there are a series of games you need to win in order to get the trophy from that game, and you’ll need the trophy from all 22 games in order to see the credits. Be the first to win that game 3 times among you and the CPUs, and you’ve got yourself a trophy. Then, after the trophy, you’ve got a diamond and a power crystal (in very Crash Bandicoot fashion) to win as well, with certain numbers of each being needed to unlock boss fights. The diamond is generally gotten by winning a round within a time limit, and the power crystal is gotten by winning a round under some kind of challenge mode or handicap. There are eventually ankhs to win from each as well, which usually just involve winning normal rounds consecutively, but they’re only required for unlocking post-game content (which I didn’t really bother with). It’s a fine enough formula, but the mini-games themselves are the real problem here. World 1 has 4 games, 2 has 5, and so on and so forth. The way this actually works isn’t just about numbers though. Each successive world has one totally new kind of game, with the others being new spins on the games that the last world had. This means that if you’re like me and you despise the 4-player pong game that’s in the running since world 1, you’re gonna keep on playing versions of that over and over if you wanna see the credits. A lot of my complaints here ultimately are only important if you’re playing the single-player mode, but given that the PS1 only has 2 controller slots natively, most people who are playing this are going to be doing it without a multi-tap, so they’re going to have some computers to deal with. The computers are just too unbalanced in too many games. This is especially true for the pong game (including the boss fight based on it), but too many games are just too random in either their execution or difficulty balance to actually feel all that fun when you’re forced to be the first to win 3 rounds. It even feels like there’s an internal difficulty switch at times that will just dynamically make the CPUs go from playing nearly perfectly to utterly embarrassingly after you lose enough times. I imagine this wouldn’t be quite so bad for a party game with a bunch of friends, but as a single-player experience, it is a terribly frustrating experience. The boss fights are just versions of the normal mini-games but modified to be fights against bosses from the Crash trilogy. They’re usually okay, and they mercifully have checkpoints, but the good bits they *do* have are not nearly enough to offset how frustrating the normal mini-games can be (especially with how miserable the final boss’ pong section is). The presentation is quite good, but nothing super special. I wanna say most if not all of the assets are just taken from the original Crash trilogy games and modified with new animations or some new models here and there, so it’s a very familiar feeling thing. The arenas for the games themselves are usually okay, if nothing impressive, but quite a few suffer from some significant camera issues where it’s just too hard to see yourself too often. The music is very forgettable, but it fits the games its in well enough I suppose. Verdict: Not Recommended. I suppose on a desert island with friends, if this was all you had for entertainment, you could get by on it, but as a single-player experience, Crash Bash made me wanna do nothing but bash crash my head through my desk XP. Not nearly enough time and attention was paid to polishing the games to make them actually fun and balanced, and the whole product suffers for it as a result. A special shout out to my friend ButtercupBandito for recommending this to me, but I’m afraid I don’t think I’ll ever be picking up Crash Bash for any reason again other than to sell it back to the Book Off I bought it from XP Continuing to play a bit more Mario Party in the evenings to unwind and indulge in some nostalgia, I played through a bunch of Mario Party 5 over the past couple weeks. This was the first GameCube MP I had as a kid, and I remember not liking it nearly as much as my N64 ones. Until replaying it now, I had always chalked that up to the orb system just being bad compared to the old item systems. However, with how much fun I had with the orb system in MP6 a few weeks back, I knew that couldn’t truly be the only flaw between the GameCube and N64 games. I did my best to set aside those childhood biases and go into this with a fresh mind. I played through story mode and then a few maps (as many as I could stand ^^;) against normal and hard CPUs before I called this one beaten. I played the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
The conceit of MP5 is that it’s all taking place in the realm of dreams. Therefore, the star spirits from the first Paper Mario are (strangely) here to guide you through it. The story mode consists of doing miniature versions of the normal boards, competing in mini-games against mini-koopas and trying to rob them of their coins to knock them out of the match and keep Bowser from destroying that dream (the board) that the map takes place in. It’s another conceit that’s more than fine enough to get the job done, and while it’s a little stronger than MP4’s birthday party theme, it still don’t quite approach MP3’s “drawn into a pop-up book” theme. The mechanics though, ohhhh the mechanics. You may’ve noticed in the intro that I said I only played *some* maps of normal party play instead of each of them at least once like I had with Mario Party 6 and 4, and there’s a good reason for that ^^;. While I have certainly confirmed that the orb system is not the only reason that MP5 was less fun than the N64 MPs when I was a kid, I got so, so much more than I bargained for. Starting a bit positive, the mini-games are once again quite strong. I’d say they’re easily stronger than most of MP4’s, and even a good few of MP6’s, but a few too many of them are a bit too random for my liking (and the hard mode AI cheats a bit too much, be it in mini-games or die rolls), they’re one of the strongest points of the game. Getting into more explicitly negative stuff, it’s honestly hard to pin down just one thing to start with because so many issues relate so heavily to the others. If I had to summarize it as quick as I could, though, I’d say the principle problem with MP5’s design is that money simply doesn’t matter. This may come off as a bit odd of a statement, given that money to get stars is the whole point of Mario Party, but I’ll do my best to explain why in a shorter answer than I so often gave friends who asked why I was so frustrated with this game while I was playing it XD. First, let’s get into the orb system. As I explained in my MP6 review, the orb system replaces the item system used in earlier games, and this is the first iteration of it. You get orbs from capsule machines placed around the board, but you don’t get to pick which one you get. You just get a random one (which isn’t necessarily a problem in and of itself). The bigger problem is that orbs are kinda useless the large majority of the time. In later MP games, using orbs that have hostile effects mark territory as yours. It’s your space, so if you land on it, nothing bad will happen, but if an enemy lands on it, then the bad thing will happen. In MP5, there is no such system. In MP5, you either spend a fee to use the capsule on yourself immediately, or you can throw it on the board up to ten spaces in front of you for free. If someone lands on that space, then the effect of the orb happens to them. Though it’s kinda cool that you can either use on yourself OR throw any capsule in the game down on the board (including ones you’d never do that with, like mushrooms for more die to roll or a Flutter to take you straight to the star), it’s ultimately an awful system because there’s no reason to use so many of them. It’s an incredible gamble to throw down an orb with a negative effect, because you might land on it that very turn, and there’s no guarantee an enemy will *ever* land on it. There are far too many orbs and far too many of them are flat-out useless like this, so it’s ultimately a really poor replacement for the old item system. There are also no shops to buy orbs at in the game, so the money you spend to use your randomly acquired ones on yourself is really the only “cost” associated with this orb system, and since the large majority are ones you’d never want to use on yourself, it’s pointless. And that’s a nice segue into the board design of MP5, because in a word: It’s awful. But it isn’t awful in the way MP3 and 4 have awful board design. It’s honestly kinda fascinating how this is a whole new way to make boards just as awful and pointless-feeling. As stated before, because there are no shops, only random orb getting points, the only thing to ever go for on the board is the star. There’s no reason you’d ever go anywhere else, and there are no alternative game modes for acquiring stars dependent on the board (as MP6 introduces), so the boards are really just a challenge to see who can roll the highest and get to the star. There’s no strategy present of any meaningful sort. The orb system also has a knock on effect that they contain basically ALL normal board effects (from chance spaces to coin & star-stealing chain chomps to even the koopa bank), so the boards themselves are incredibly barren save for a few boring happening spaces. And these boards are also HUGE and very cumbersome to get around. If you’re rolling low, you’re not going anywhere, since you can’t even buy a mushroom in a shop to get a boost of speed or something (since there are no shops where you’d do such a thing). These massive, barren boards have nothing to do on them but chase the star, and that’s why money is so useless. Even if you’re running the table and winning every mini-game, what does it matter? Even just the blue spaces your opponents land on between the vast distances between themselves and the new star location will likely be enough to buy the star when they get there, so the fun mini-games end up feeling utterly pointless too. Why even try in them if the money they give matters so little? You could say that you’d want to do them to get coins for the bonus stars at the end of the game, but that’s also a pointless-feeling exercise. This is the first (and mercifully last) MP game to not just have a mini-game star (most coins won in mini-games) and a coin star (highest maximum coin total in the game) bonus star awarded at the end of the game, but to also have the coins you win from battle mini-games count towards the mini-game star. In earlier games, battle mini-games (where everyone has to put in a bunch of money and the first and second place winners of the game get to split the prize pool) could be a fun equalizer for people a bit farther behind. In this game, since battle mini-games aren’t even spots on the board, they just randomly replace 4-player mini-games at the end of a turn, you simply get huge, game-altering (often RNG-focused) games that can far too radically alter the outcome of the game. You have so little agency in the board game part of the game, that those bonus stars at the end matter a LOT for who is going to win, and it feels pretty bad to have one or both of the mini-game & coin stars snapped up by someone who happens to win a huge prize pool on the very last turn even though they’d been doing poorly the rest of the game. MP5’s boards are lousy for different reasons than MP3 and 4’s, but the source is the same: Players have too little agency to affect the outcome of the game, and that makes it a boring and frustrating experience. Presentation-wise, this game is thankfully at least in this regard a step up from MP4. Gone are tracks of spaces floating above ugly masses of 3D with vaguely-themed textures. Now we have proper 3D spaces that hold these boards, and it makes the whole game so much more appealing to look at as well as making each board just feel that much more like a real space (or as much as a Mario Party board can feel like one, at least :b). The music is also once again very nice & Mario Party-ful. No real complaints there. Verdict: Not Recommended. Mario Party 3 has sat at the bottom of my ranking list of console MP games for a long time, but I think MP5 has just about taken its place. MP5 is a bold new direction for the series in many ways, and it’s trying a lot of new things. Heck, it even brings back duel mini-games! But it fails so aggressively in implementing these new systems that it makes for a frustrating and boring time whether your game is 35 turns or only 15. You can do better than this with virtually any Mario Party game, so if you wanna get your retro Mario Party on, you’re better off looking just about anywhere else. |
Categories
All
AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
|