After really loving Hero Senki a few weeks ago, I was really excited to get to this game, the next in the Gundam & Kamen Rider & Ultraman crossover JRPGs. Not only was it a different company helming the project, but it was Arc System Works! Them guys that make Guilty Gear! Sure, this was a long time before they made that stuff, but I was pretty confident I’d be in for an interesting time if nothing else. Well, now that it’s all over, with my heavy use of save states (for saving time, more than anything else) as well as maps online, I’m just glad Gaia Saver was mercifully short compared to Hero Senki XD. It took me most of the weekend, so some 15 or 18 hours (this is yet another game that doesn’t count playtime) to play through the game via an emulator in Japanese.
Gaia Saver: The Ultimate Hero Operation is, as the title implies, a big operation to save the world! The world is in incredible peril. Under assault from Neo Zeon forces, Shocker’s Army, and all sorts of hostile aliens, the Earth’s livability and population drop significantly day to day, week to week. Earth’s last hope is an alliance of heroes (the Gundam, Kamen Rider, and Ultraman fellas that make up this game’s crossovery premise) who are gonna fight against all the odds to save the world! Your party rotates a lot as the story demands it, but the playable Gundam pilots are Amuro and Seabook, the Kamen Riders are Amazon, Super 1, and Black RX, and the starring Ultras are Ultraman, Ultra Seven, and Ultra Leo. Not that any of it matters, of course. This game’s story is the first primary piece in the absolutely amazing disaster of a game that is Gaia Saver. Characters in your party, and really all throughout the story, are barely characters. When they do get lines, they act wildly out of character, and it’s pretty clear that the scenario writers had almost no familiarity with the properties they were adapting beyond the very basic premises of each. The story is entirely original, and doesn’t really follow arcs or what have you from any of the adapted shows, but that just serves to even more drive home the vapidness of the story you’re going through. The story itself is *incredibly* dark, with hundreds of millions or billions of people dying and large amounts of the Earth becoming uninhabitable (often as a result of your actions), but the tone set by the graphics and music doesn’t compliment that at all. The actions you’re doing that’ll have those consequences are also almost always so poorly telegraphed that you’d have no idea there were even consequences for them at all, making them fairly poor as far as moral choices in games go. I did manage to get the best ending for both remaining population as well as Earth condition (albeit barely), and it was honestly really not worth the effort Xp. That brings us to the general design as a whole, which is similarly pretty damn embarrassing not just for a game from 1994 (the same year that gave us stuff like SMT2, FF6, and Mother 2), but as a follow up to Hero Senki. Case in point is how, in contrast to just how good and forward-facing the “consult” feature in Hero Senki was in reminding you where to go (and just having generally very good signposting), Gaia Saver has chronically horrible signposting. Massive swaths of the game are no better than a point & click adventure game in just how aimlessly you’re expected to wander around hoping to bump into the next NPC you’re meant to talk to. There’s a ton of asset reuse, even in dungeons, so they’re rarely hard to navigate, but that copy-paste philosophy is extended to towns as well, filling them with scads of useless NPCs and rooms they can be in for you to hunt for the next bit of plot within. There also aren’t even dedicated shops, and merchants don’t update, so finding just where to buy stuff in any given town, if it has a shop at all, it also a huge pain. Had I not used a guide for this stuff (as well as which decisions made the fewest people die/Earth get damaged), I’m positive it would’ve taken me at least another five or six hours of wandering around lost as heck just looking for the next NPC I’m supposed to talk to (providing I even realized I’d talked to the right person). And that’s especially thanks to just how awful the encounter rate is, which really adds a lot onto the playtime. Speaking of the random battles, let’s move on to the battle system itself, because it’s also absolutely awful and worth elaborating on (for what little there is to elaborate on). In short, Gaia Saver is an auto-battler, but it’s a 1994 SFC game instead of a modern mobile phone game. The game defaults each turn in battle to your 1-4 turn-based little fellas just picking their own best moves for that turn (no true auto-battle), and for the large, large majority of situations (including bosses), just mashing that button until combat ends will get you out of it perfectly fine. It wasn’t until chapter 6 of 8 that I had to intervene and use some healing items to get through a boss battle, and the remaining four or five bosses in the game I had to do similar for. And that’s all just assuming you get lucky enough for your attacks to hit in the first place, since accuracy of attacks (especially for bosses, but for normal enemies too) is absolutely horrible. My rough guess would be that 40 to 50% of all attacks miss, with that number going down against very weak enemies, and going substantially up (closer to 60% or higher) against certain tough enemies and bosses. It’s just one more thing that makes combat a miserable chore and not engaging at all, since even sweeping enemies is difficult to enjoy when so many attacks will just do absolutely nothing. It’s never fun, especially when you’re fighting later bosses, for seven or eight attacks in a row to just miss (and I wish that were as rare an occurrence as it probably sounds like). HP even completely refills at the end of battles, so no need to worry about what that does either. MP doesn’t auto-refill, but it does refill when you level up (or walk over a stone circle on the map), and even then, I’m not 100% sure what MP even does. My guys seemed perfectly capable of still casting “spells” even when they were totally tapped out, but they may’ve been a little bit weaker? Even what stats do is fairly confusing. They have weird names like “courage” or “friendship”, and it’s extremely unclear what tons of stats do at all. It’s also very confusing what equipment or items do. Items don’t have a description outside of shops, and it’s also not possible to tell who can equip what items until you just test it out in your inventory (and absolutely nuts thing for an RPG to have in 1994, imo). There isn’t even UI to indicate what effect your new equipment has, as the only way to do that is to look at your stats, write down what they all are, equip the item, and then compare the numbers. Mercifully, just leveling up (or simply stockpiling more healing items) seems to usually be more than enough to get by without caring much about equipment, and the game doesn’t even have treasure chests or side quests to get you extra stuff if you wanted. But it’s yet another confusing waste of time in a game that seems to be primarily an exercise in frustration and misdirection. As described earlier, the aesthetics of the game do nothing to help the tone or plot, and they for the most part aren’t even particularly nice or coordinated on their own. There are maybe 5 music tracks in the game, and they’re all hopelessly generic and forgettable the moment you stop hearing. The music that’s playing in the area you’re in even resets every time you enter a door, so even though virtually every town has identical music, you’re gonna hear the first few bars of the town song SO many times as you scour buildings for necessary NPCs over and over. The general color palette of the game isn’t very nice, and the over-world sprites are also noticeably uglier on the whole than Hero Senki’s were. Even the quite pretty opening cinematic is strange and wrong in how it shows a bunch of Heroes that will supposedly feature in the game (Rider Man, Alex Gundam, Gun Cannon), only for literally all of them to not only never appear in the game, but never even be mentioned. The singular strong point of the game is that the battle sprites and animations are quite nice. Enemy sprites are big and detailed, though they generally lack any animation and also very confusingly have American comic-style “Woosh!” and “Shoot!” effects in English to indicate they’re attacking. Your party NPCs are also very nice looking, and their animations have a fair few little flourishes here and there that make battles at the very least look cool, even if they’re a boring chore to experience. Verdict: Not Recommended. As if there would be any doubt I’d not recommend this after reading this far ^^;. Gaia Saver isn’t quite the worst game I’ve played this year. I’m not sure it’s even the worst SFC JRPG I’ve played this year, as the first Knight Gundam Monogatari game being nigh incompletable it’s so poorly balanced just about takes the crown in that regard. However, it’s easily still one of the worst games I’ve played this year and one of the worst of these mecha/crossover games I’ve ever played. While Hero Senki is a neat curiosity worth checking out for fans of the properties involved, Gaia Saver, mercifully lacking any sort of English translation, is one to stay far, far away from unless you simply must experience how boring and frustrating it is for yourself.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
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
|