Thank you for visiting; this is a blog that chronicles my playthroughs of various games. Feel free to respond here to introduce yourself, let me know what your favorite SRPG is, whatever.
I have two finished projects here: a playthrough of (most of) the Super Famicom RPGs, and a quick review of (most of) the PC Engine RPGs. You can see the list of games from the links on the top bar.
Currently I am playing strategy RPGs in chronological order, and at the same time playing other games — sometimes old RPGs, other times any game I feel like playing.
I generally update on Saturday or Sunday.
If you are only interested in certain types of posts, you can filter by categories (see the bottom of the sidebar). The three categories are Strategy RPGs, Super Famicom RPGs, and PC Engine RPGs.
Wachenröder (バッケンローダー), released 8/6/1998, developed by TNS, published by Sega
Game 100! This is the second to last Saturn game I will be playing. It takes place in a steampunk like world, an island that has been cut off from the rest of the world by some kind of mist that keeps people in.
The game begins with a very dark backstory for the main character (Lucian); he’s born in a slum in one of the six districts of the island, where there is a heavy water treatment plant that fills the area with pollution and magnesium. His little sister is one of many who suffer from a wasting disease that prevents them from being able to go out into the light. Eventually he decides to enter some kind of tournament to earn money for her medicine, but while he’s out registering for it, she dies. He vows vengeance on Sword Master Duran, the leader of the area. The game then switches to 4 years later, when he is wandering around aimlessly.
Lucian soon meets Carol, a woman who is also looking for Duran — but Duran is soon overthrown and forced to flee for treason, which brings a bounty hunter into the party as well who is looking to get the money for Duran. The plot proceeds from here, involving the mysterious “forest dwellers” who seem to have unusual technology, the six “sword masters” who rule the areas, and the secret of a disaster that sunk a nearby island.
The story is fairly good, and has voiced dialogue for a good part of it. It’s a bit short and the ending is cursory but overall it’s entertaining. There are a lot of names in the game that are taken from real stuff, like Titus Groan (the hero of the Gormenghast books), Fatboy Slim, and Franky Zappa.
The story is partly narrated by Verbet, a blind woman who also appears as a character in the game, and partly just regular story sequences.
The game is the usual player/enemy turn. Each character begins with 99 action points, that can be used to move, attack, and use special moves. Any AP left over can be converted to “cool down”, which is important for the overall attack system.
It doesn’t look like I got a screenshot of it, but all the weapons are these chainsaw-style motor weapons. You can choose a power between 1-5 for each attack, or use a special attack, or a super-special attack. These all add heat to your weapon, which you have to cool down — weapons will cool down automatically between turns based on the temperature and weather, but you can also redirect leftover AP to cooling down. If your weapon gets too hot, you will overheat and will not be able to act for a few turns.
A lot of stages also have switches that you need to manipulate to raise and lower barriers, open gates, and such.
Some characters have guns or bows that can make ranged attacks, but most are just “sword” attacks.
The system is interesting and fun to play with, but the game is extremely easy — one of the easiest SRPGs I’ve played. You usually only have to take on a few enemies at a time, and you can defeat them with powerful attacks and then cool down before fighting the next ones. There are only a couple of stages that require any thought beyond just basic move-attack, including the final stage which is slightly tricky (but still not that hard.)
You never upgrade your weapons in any way but you can equip three items to each character. The item equip is a bit confusing because you have multiple slots (head/arm/foot/etc) but it’s not always clear why certain items can only go in certain slots. There are shops before some of the stages.
Overall I would say this game is OK. The world is interesting and the atmosphere of the game is appropriately grim and grey, while still offering some interesting things outside of the typical “ruined city” cyberpunk situation. The story is serviceable and has some nice parts, but it’s too short and the ending is rushed (I wonder if they had to accelerate the development because the Saturn was in its waning period). The system has some good ideas but the game is so easy that it feels like you don’t often have to get particularly in-depth — in particular, the potentially interesting question of having to trade off attack power vs. heat often makes no difference because you can use powerful attacks and then just have other characters fight while you cool down. About halfway through the game you start getting the Sword Masters in your party, and they are far more powerful than your other characters.
In a way this is similar to some other late-system games I’ve played (like Energy Breaker) that seem to have been a bit rushed because they wanted to get the game out before the system was no longer viable…although I don’t know if that was the case here.
Go-jin Senki (鋼仁戦記), released 8/6/1998, developed by Santa Entertainment, published by Tonkin House
After suffering through Light Fantasy I and II, I was not happy to see Tonkin House’s name pop up with this game. While this game is nowhere near as bad as those, it’s still not a particularly good game and I didn’t finish it in the end. However, there is a translation patch so you are free to try it for yourself.
The setting is Kunagami, a world that is basically medieval Japan but with mechs called Goujin that are controlled by human spirits. The story begins with the king of Himuka, Raioura, attacking the Kuchina tribe’s village and slaughtering most of the inhabitants. One of them, Isamaru, is taken to a prison but is freed by Lakan, one of Raioura’s underlings who has defected to stop Raioura from his plan to take over the world. The story ends up involving not only Raioura, but evil demons and another member of the Kuchina tribe.
The story is told through a combination of VN-style narration and normal speech text boxes. The story is the best part of the game — while it’s not a masterpiece of RPG narrative, it’s interesting enough that I had some interest in how the plot would turn out in the end.
The game flow is a series of fixed battles with no alternate paths. You can retreat from most battles (keeping your XP and money), and you can do practice battles on any battlefield you’ve cleared so far, if you need to grind. The party limit is six, and you get a lot more characters than that. At first I was trying to use all of them but eventually I just focused on a small party.
The graphics in the battle are weird — they are polygon 3D figures on a normal 2D map. It doesn’t look that good and it slows everything down a lot.
Each character has a certain number of AP. Abilities take AP — in theory the attacks that take more AP are more powerful, but the system seemed poorly implemented because you can have a 16 AP attack that only does 10% more damage than a 4 AP attack (sometimes there are extra effects also, but the effects aren’t always good, like knocking a character back).
Characters recover AP between turns, but not very much — 1 at the start, but as you level you can recover a bit more.
A huge problem with the system is an inability to take back your movement after you do it. In general, the UI is plagued with issues — for instance, you often can’t check what abilities do, and you can’t see characters’ statuses in the screen where you are choosing who to send to battle.
Characters come in three types. “Generals” have two equip slots, one for a weapon and one for a magatama that gives a magic attack (or heal). Then there are fighters and spellcasters, that just have one slot. In general I found that the fighters were nearly worthless; I used all my generals and then spellcasters (one attack, one heal), and then filled the sixth slot with a fighter.
That leaves the Go-jin. You start with one, and get two more as you progress. A lot of effort was put into this part of the system — each mech has five equipment slots, and you can buy and equip a variety of weapons. Characters have specific skills that let them get extra effects out of the weapons (such as being able to attack everyone adjacent, or firing multiple shots). However, there are two aspects of the system that completely hamstring the gojin and make them essentially unusable in many stages.
Choosing a weak vs. moderate heal
The first issue is that people in Gojin don’t gain experience. Instead, any experience gained by the gojin is distributed equally to other characters. This means you have to constantly be switching around your characters (and the weapons).
But the much bigger problem is the “berserk” issue. Each map has a certain “power density” that adds each turn to your gojin’s counter. When that counter reaches 100, the gojin goes berserk and can no longer be controlled. I saw the enemies use things that (slightly) lowered their gojin’s counter but I never saw this. The main issue here is that so many of the battles are very long, with tons of reinforcements, that any gojin you send out are guaranteed to go berserk. I just stopped using them because of this, and I noticed that someone who did a complete playthrough on youtube did the same thing.
Another big issue with the game is that you can’t save during battle, and it’s pretty easy for the enemies to overwhelm you (they take a lot of hits to bring down and nobody can tank). I used save states, but even then I found the game tedious.
Eventually I got to a point about 70% of the way through the game where I was saddled with an NPC operating on bugged AI (she would only move next to the enemies and not take any actions), which took up a slot and left me with only 5 guys. I hit yet another stage with waves upon waves of reinforcements, and I finally decided that I was no longer interested in struggling through the slow battles and flawed system to see how things turned out. I probably should have given up a lot earlier but I tried to stick it out.
Next up is game #100! It’s Wachenroder, the second-to-last Saturn game for me to play.
I need more time on Go-Jin Senki, so I decided to spend a day getting the five(!) bad endings in Elie.
The main triggers for these endings involve the “extensions” you can get if you fail to make high-level items by the end of year 4. There is something with the contests as well, as I mentioned in the last post — the ending conditions seem to be based on a combination of items you made and your school ranking.
To get the 1 year extension, make a level 3 item but don’t 4 item, or have a class rank between 200-249.
To get the 5 year extension, you have to not make a level 3 item, or have a class rank lower than 250. Getting either extension locks you out of any of endings above 8.
Ending 12: Get the 5 year extension, and then do not make a level 4 item by the end of the 5 year extension.
Ending 11: Refuse the offer of an extension (leave school)
Ending 10: Get the 5 year extension, and then make a level 4 item.
Ending 9: Get the 1 year extension, and then make a level 4 item.
Ending 8: Fulfill the Ending 9 or 10 requirements, and have a popularity of -50 or below, and a reputation of 700 or above.
The worst ending
If you want to get all of these on a file that you’ll actually use for other things, the best thing to do is play normally until you are ready to make a level 4 item — you should be able to do this early enough that you can still lower your class rank by skipping all the tests.
So I started a new file, and played as well as I could for the first year. I wanted this file to be usable later for some of the other endings, so I made sure to do the Marie points correctly, and also I used save states to make sure than any level up Elie gets, she gets at least a point in either STR or DEF.
His expression shows you might lose popularity if you turn in that item
One thing I was able to do more efficiently in this game is the alchemy level and requests. I didn’t understand the way the “rich people” requests worked at the beginning. They get you a lot of money, and some of them can be completed with fairly easy to acquire ingredients — you can look at the guy’s facial expression to see if you are turning in good items or not. If you turn in basic items you will still get the money, but it may lower your popularity. I am not entirely sure what level of popularity you need to try for — there don’t seem to be any endings that require a specific high level of popularity, but it’s possible that if it gets too low you will miss out on important events. In any case, I don’t find that doing some “bad” requests will affect things too much.
In the first academy contest, I did as well as I could (I got 7th place, which is fine). By the first month of the second year I had learned the recipe for Megacraft, a level 4 item that is pretty easy to make (you just need 4 crafts, the ingredients can be found in the nearby forest).
At this point it is easy to get endings 12 through 9:
12: Rest until year 4 8/30. Take the 1 year extension. Rest a year, take the additional 4 years, and rest all 4 of them.
11: Rest until year 4 8/30, and quit school.
10: Rest until year 4 8/30. Take the 1 year extension. Rest a year, take the additional 4 years, make a megacraft, and then rest the remaining 4 years.
9: Rest until year 4 8/30. Take the 1 year extension. Make a megacraft, then rest the remaining year.
Ending 8 takes a bit more effort. It’s easy enough to get your popularity down below -50, just by repeatedly taking jobs and either cancelling them or letting the time limit run out. However, to maintain your 700 reputation, you can’t just rest for years because your reputation will drop. You have to rest for a few months, then take some more jobs (even if you cancel or fail them, your reputation will still go up), and repeat. It’s not particularly hard but it requires some attention. Also make a megacraft. In this ending, Ingrid is very cold to Elie, telling her that she graduated but to immediately leave her office because she’s busy. Elie goes back to her home town, realizing that she’s too unpopular to keep going in Salburg.
Finally, I wanted to see if I could get the cheesecake ending since it’s the last ending I had that didn’t have a movie associated with it. It seemed easy enough, you just have to use Blend Alchemy to make a high ranking cheesecake. I could never get it to work with the recipes I found online, but I finally saw that your alchemy level needs to be high as well. So I reloaded one of my late saves from before, and was able to successfully make the cheesecake. I rested, refused the Maister Rank extension, and Elie opened a cheesecake shop (they should have at least had a picture for this ending.)
I’ve now gotten 8 of the 13 endings. The remaining 5 all have movies and are good endings. I don’t know if I will get all of them, but I’m at least going to get ending 0 (what might be considered the “best” ending). We’ll be back to this at the end of 1998.
Atelier Elie (エリーのアトリエ〜ザールブルグの錬金術士2〜), released 12/17/1998, developed and published by Gust
This is actually at the end of 1998, but I decided to do a first run-through of the game now, and then I will return to it later. After the unexpected success of Atelier Marie, Gust seems to have immediately started developing a sequel. It came out about a year and a half after Marie, so it’s no surprise that the game is very similar. It takes place in the same town as Marie, with many of the same places and characters. The main character Elie, like Marie, is a struggling student hoping to graduate the alchemy academy.
The new gameplay elements are minor. This is the first game to allow you to affect the quality of an item (this time by changing the formula), although the quality has relatively little effect on the game in comparison to later entries. You can also do “original” crafts where you can choose any items you want to combine, although you have to get reasonably close to pre-set formulas to be able to get items. Elie’s levels are now split into an Alchemy level and an Adventurer level.
What is different is the scope of the game, which is larger than Marie. Marie’s seven endings can be gotten in one playthrough fairly easily (maybe with a bit of backtracking to old saves). Elie has 12 endings, and they are different enough that it would be hard to do them in one playthrough. There are more items, and more events. On the whole it is still fairly simple compared to the later entries but it’s more robust than the first game.
The main character Elfill (Elie) is from a rural village. She had her life saved by an alchemist (Marlone/Marie) and now her goal is to become an alchemist herself and reunite with Marie. The basic gameplay is the same as Marie — go out and gather ingredients, make items, and get money by fulfilling requests in the bar. As you level your alchemy you get access to the academy library and you can make more items, and by hearing rumors in the bar you can access more gathering locations. There are a number of events that either activate at certain dates or seasons, or when you get someone’s friendship level up high enough.
Every year on 8/1 there is a contest at the academy, where you have to craft an item, answer quiz questions, and then try to break a barrel without damaging the contents within. After the contest you can check the next day to see how well you did. To get the best endings you have to do pretty well in the contests. Beyond that I am not entirely certain what the effect is — in my experience it seems like if you skip a contest entirely you get a bad ending regardless of your other conditions, and that doing poorly in the contests does not affect the game unless you are going for one of the top endings. But I am not certain about either of these things.
One of the early events I saw was Shia’s wedding (she is Marie’s friend from the first game; the “best” ending of that game has you crafting a medicine to cure her illness).
One of the rivals of Elie in the academy school is Aizel, who I recognize from Atelier Viorate (one of the top Viorate endings involves her). Here she’s just a student, though, under the tutelage of Helmina, who I gather also shows up in some other Atelier games.
I played without a walkthrough for a while; the “regular” ending is as easy to get as in Marie. All you have to do is make a level 4 item, which I had already done by about halfway through the second year. After that you can just rest until each year’s 8/1, do the contest, and then Elie will graduate and set up her alchemy shop where Marie’s was.
At this point I looked at a guide to see what endings there were. I was hoping I could get what seems to be the “best” ending, but I had already messed up some flags that would make it very hard — in the end I was not able to activate an event and I couldn’t get the best ending.
The battle system is nearly the same as Marie — there’s some kind of weather effect but it rarely seemed to do anything.
To find Marie, you have to raise the friendship of one of the companions (a dancer, who I didn’t get any screenshot of apparently). If you have activated a few of the Marie-related flags, she will eventually tell you about a coastal town you can go to, although it takes a month to travel there.
Once you get here, it opens up a bunch of new gathering locations, and you can pay 100 money to have the items sent back to your home town. You can’t do any crafting here, though. It seems that Marie has left here to go across the sea to a different town, but no ships are going right now because of a sea monster.
By seeing some events related to a woman in this town, she will eventually agree to let you use her ship if you can beat the monster.
The monster is powerful but if you use a sleep medicine on it, it won’t wake up at all and you can defeat it with a few shots of the ship cannon.
Elie then reunites with Marie in the town there, and you can hire her for your party. However, to actually get the ending associated with this, you need 8 out of the 11 possible “marie points” from various things throughout the game. I had already messed up 3 of the points, so theoretically I could still do it, but there is an event that can give you a point that I was never able to get to activate correctly.
So I went ahead and stopped with the “Maister Rank” ending, which you can get by fulfilling some not-so-difficult conditions. This gives you an extension of two more years and allows for the three “top” endings, of which one is just getting the Maister Rank and doing none of the other conditions. Elie graduates the academy with this top honor and decides to go back to her hometown to start a new life there.
I managed to get three of the 12 endings (a bad ending, the “normal” ending, and the Maister Rank ending). I don’t know if I am going to play this game to get all twelve of the endings, but I would at least like to retry to get the Marie-related ending that I didn’t successfully do this time. Along the way I will see if there are other endings I can pick up, although as I said, it’s not as easy as it was in Marie to do this.
One other thing that’s in the game are love events that can set Elie up with some of the characters; I didn’t really do this at all. This is partially because a lot of the love-related flags conflict with the Marie flags.
I’m planning on making another post to just list the endings and conditions, partially for my own benefit (although I suppose since there is a translation patch for the PS2 version this could help someone). I will probably then return to the game once I actually reach December 1998 in the SRPGs and give it another try. Other goals i might try are crafting all 200 items, and getting all the event pictures.
(Actually I may not need the post with the endings…)
Zanma Chou-ougi Valhollian (斬魔超奥義ヴァルハリアン), released 8/6/1998), developed by Datt Japan, published by Kamata & Partners
I will be playing 3 more Saturn SRPGs (there are a few more for the Saturn but I will be playing them in other versions). When I was checking out information about this game I saw that it was only 16 stages so I expected it to be a quick play, but each stage takes several hours so it was longer than I thought. Surprisingly this game has a translation patch, making it one of the few 1998 games that can be played in English (it’s also the first Saturn game I’ve encountered that is too expensive on ebay for me to buy it right away). Frequent and longtime commenter cccmar is listed in the translation patch credits as a “major tester”.
The story is pretty light. Not only is it only 16 stages but each stage only has a bit of dialogue before and after the stage. It’s a serviceable story and has some twists, but I don’t think it would make you play just to see how the story turns out. I wanted to say a little about the story but I didn’t make any notes and I can’t find any description of the story online..it has typical elements of “beat the evil enemy” and some surprised betrayals and reveals.
The basic gameplay is standard player turn-enemy turn. You can move, attack, and use special moves (the “ougi” of the title).
Each character has a certain amount of SP that rises as they level (I think 5 is the max). You learn several regular ougi (costing either 1 or 2 SP) and one “super” ougi that is basically a boss killer move. Most of the characters will learn this around level 20-23, with the four magic users at level 25.
For equipment, you have a weapon, armor, and three accessory slots. There are treasure chests in the stages, and between maps you can buy equipment from a merchant that travels with you.
You can turn off animations
The main distinctive feature of the game are the combo attacks. You can have two characters participate in a single attack. As they do this, their “combo level” will rise, making their combos more effective in certain ways.
Each stage is quite long; the maps are large and you are typically presented with 30-40 enemies (sometimes a bit more). There is a basic strategy that works on most stages — enemies will mostly stay put unless you either enter their range, or reach some point on the map. Once you see enemies move towards you, you can just wait out of their range and try to draw them into a narrow area, and then take them down. The enemies tend to be pretty powerful in general, and you can’t rely on anyone to tank. Characters with high speed can often dodge the enemy attacks which is useful in drawing the enemies in without dying.
The only way to recover HP is with the ougis — most characters have a heal move, and two characters have area heals. In the beginning stages you usually have to use most of your SP for heals, but once you can rely on Tea and Rilfy to heal, you can spend more SP on the area effect attacks which help a lot. The super ougis are mostly for boss killing.
If the main character reaches 0 hp it’s game over (UGH), if anyone else goes to 0 they will have to sit out the next map unless you use a revive skill (which brings them back with 0 SP). Generally you do not want this to happen since you need your whole force to make the maps go smoothly.
You can save any time, so often you have to retry turns several times until you can get everyone in the right position so that no one dies.
There are a few maps where this basic strategy doesn’t work:
Stage 3 begins with new characters on their own in the middle of enemies so you have to rush up to save them; it’s hard to do this without anyone dying but with repeated attempts it is possible.
Stages 7 and 9 have summoning circles that Dark Cardinals can move onto and summon enemies. Stage 7 is particularly rough in this regard, you have to go quickly and face a lot of enemies to get there early enough (Rilfy’s teleport magic helps). Stage 9 is more forgiving; you need to get to the first one quickly but the Dark Cardinals by the other two won’t start moving until you get closer to them. I believe that the circles do run out of enemies eventually, but not until they summon 40 or so (on top of the 40 starting units).
Stage 10 you don’t have Rilfy so you need to be more careful with your heals.
Stage 13 seems hard at first with the separated parties, but it’s something of an illusion — the boss and his entourage begin moving towards you at the start of the stage, but stops after a few turns. So you can turtle up near the castle with the starting party (I also lost a mage on the other side and revived her with the MC for an additional unit)
Stage 14 – I think they may have made a design mistake here; you can get in the boss’ range near the starting point so you can take the boss down with a few super ougis and not have to deal with the majority of the stage — a welcome relief this late in the game.
Parts of the game seem underdeveloped to me. There are only 16 different enemies (not including bosses), and I think these are all palette swaps of 4 basic types. The same bgm is used for all the stages except the final one.
I have a feeling that most people are going to find this game too slow-moving and unrewarding. It’s far from the worst game I’ve played, but it does require a lot of patience (or just queue up a ton of podcasts).
Chester Field (チェスター・フィールド ～暗黒神への挑戦～), released 7/30/1987, developed and published by Vic Tokai
This is another early action/RPG hybrid for the Famicom, and it pretty much continues the pattern of involving more frustration than fun, despite having a lot of potential.
The first mystery is that when you turn the game on, it labels it as “Episode II: Challenge to the Dark God.” As far as I can tell, there never was an Episode I, but maybe there was a fad at the time for doing things like Star Wars Episode IV. Here’s a story summary copied from Moby Games: “The Kingdom of Guldred has been invaded by General Guemon and his dark forces, who have killed their king. A brave knight named Gazem fled for a paradise of sun and pleasure named Chesterfield Island with the deposed queen and their daughter Karen. But Guemon’s forces were right there and sunk their ship, killed the queen, abducted Karen and left Gazem for dead. Fortunately for Guldred, Gazem barely managed to breathe the kingdom’s sorry plight to a brave knight named Kein before he died. Now the fate of Guldred rests on Kein’s broad shoulders…”
The game plays out over eight stages, although you can travel between them (in a somewhat cumbersome way). The hero Kein can jump, duck, and attack. He begins with 100 HP and can get up to 200 by healing with items, resting at an inn, etc. You get XP for beating the monsters, and each stage you can level up twice (so by the end of the game you can be level 16). You also earn money that you can use to buy weapons, armor, and shields.
Each stage has some sort of dungeon you need to go through. On each stage you need to find an item as well as defeat the boss at the end of the area. The outer areas of the stages have houses that you can visit to get hints, or buy things.
The characters remind me of the Golgo 13 NES game, which is also by Vic Tokai
The game plays decently, although the movement Kein is a bit stiff, especially when you try to turn him around. You can get passwords from the inn, and if you die you lose half your money and go back to the beginning of whatever area you are in, but you keep any XP or items that you got.
There are two big problems with the game that make it not really worth playing, in my opinion. The first one is that there are a lot of pits that cause instant death (including ones that require you to jump on small moving platforms). This is common from the action RPGs of this era — Zelda II, Castlevania II, Getsu Fuumaden, and other games all have them, I suppose because pretty much all side scrolling action games of any type had them. But it’s annoying to have 200 HP but then have to go back to the beginning of the area because you couldn’t hit a jump on a tiny platform.
A second problem is that the dungeons are extremely difficult to navigate. This is the map of the second stage. You have hidden pits (and the outer areas and other places often have hidden areas in the ceiling or hidden walls you have to find). There are also loops at the side, and a lot of one-way passages. This makes the map hard to navigate because all the screens basically look the same, and it becomes really difficult to tell whether you are in a new area or whether you looped around.
As with the pits, this is typical of games of this era. I would love to read any kind of history or interviews with designers of this period to know what they were thinking when they made the games. Reviews often criticized these games for being too difficult so it’s not just that it was a different time and nobody knew any better. Maybe they were just too limited in the ways they could make a game challenging or take longer for the player? (Or as I’ve said before, they just wanted to sell strategy guides)
Another complaint I saw from Japanese players is that for some reason the opening and ending text is in English. There’s a video of the game on Youtube titled “Chester Field: You Need an English Dictionary to Play.” The comments are all saying “This is nostalgic” but then “This was impossible to clear without a strategy guide” and “I started up the game and had no idea what I was doing.”
Anyway, I don’t think this is really worth playing now.
Epica Stella (エピカステラ), released 7/30/1998, developed and published by Human Entertainment
There aren’t many SRPGs from this era with official English translations, but here is one. More surprisingly I actually played the English version (I’ll say why in a minute). The translation was done by Working Designs, who brought their usual “creative” translation efforts (including some unfortunate casual homophobia).
I started out playing the Japanese version.
Each character has a mech, and three equipment slots (weapon, jewel, and accessory). The jewel item can grant magic-type powers, while the weapon (and mech) grant general attack abilities. All of the power are based on the character’s stats — the attacks and spells work off the base stats with equipment bonuses, whereas the various “innate” abilities only work off base stats. When a character levels up, they get 3 points to spend on any abilities (with no automatic raises in any stat).
The big problem with the game is that neither the manual nor the game give you any information whatsoever on what the stat requirements for moves are, and this is a game where the difficulty ranges from cakewalk to impossible depending on how you spend your stat points. A further problem is that if you search the Internet for advice on how to distribute the points, you can find advice that is not well suited for people playing the game for the first time — they will say things like “DEF is a trash stat that you don’t need to put points into” or which may be true from the standpoint of a very experienced player who knows exactly which skills to get and how to cheapshot the enemies, but can get a beginner into hot water.
In any case, I followed bad advice (plus some of my own mistakes) and reached a point at about stage 7 where I simply could not beat the stage no matter what I did, because my units were too weak and didn’t have the right skills. Typically in this case I will just move on to the next game, but I decided to restart using the English version. I switched to the English version primarily because it adds animation skip, which the Japanese version doesn’t have.
Another curious thing about the English version is the “assist” bonus:
The English version shows a bonus you get to your attack based on how many other characters you have adjacent to the enemy. This bonus is not shown in the Japanese version nor is it mentioned in the instruction manual, and I’m really not sure what is going on here. Did WD think the Japanese version was too hard and actually add this system in? Or was it a hidden thing in the JP version that they simply hacked the game to display?
On this playthrough, I followed a fairly simple procedure for stat growths — I kept everyone’s stats pretty even, except for POW which I had 2-3 points above the rest. I think that if you do this, you’ll get a pretty decent team for the whole game. If you also look at a list of abilities, particularly the character-specific and elemental abilities, you can go for those and make your team even more powerful.
One playthrough of the game is 20 stages long, but there are 56 stages in the game. There are three separate routes, and one branching path on the “main” route. There’s a place from the main menu where you can see the total number of stages you’ve played, and a record of how many mech animations you’ve seen. Another curious thing is that in the Japanese version, these stats update automatically as you play, but in the English version you have to use this “load stats” command in the menu (which is not in the JP version). Many places recommend that after each stage you play, you quit to the main menu and use that load stats to make sure everything gets recorded. I wonder why that developed in the transition between the JP and EN version.
I only played the main “Kingdom” route, which is the basic expected storyline — you are fighting for the small kingdom against the big empire, and the main villain is someone in the Empire who is trying to use the power for his own greed. I don’t know much about the other two storylines (which people refer to as “Empire” and “Ruin”), but I would be interested to hear from people who have played them.
The turns are done on a speed basis. There seems to be some uncertainty over whether having a high AGL makes you take more turns — a lot of places say that it does, but I’ve also seen that people have used cheat codes to show that it doesn’t. In any case, on your turn you get 100 AP. You can move and then use one attack or power. The moves take AP based on the terrain, and the attacks/powers have a cost in both AP and TP (which I think may stand for “tiredness points” although the manual doesn’t say — in the English version they changed it to “FP”). When you end your turn, any AP you have left over reduce your TP. If your TP ever hits 100, you become frozen and all attacks have a 100% chance to hit (and there is no option to counter).
Managing TP is one of the key aspects of the battle system. You gain TP not only for using your moves, but also if you defend against an enemy attack or counterattack, you will gain TP there as well. So the goal is not to let your own characters’ TP get too high, but you want to try to freeze the opponents (particularly the bosses). There are certain attacks (like Turbulence) that make this much easier.
The other key is making use of back attacks and ranged attacks. A back attack cannot be defended against or countered. Range attacks often cannot be countered either — the enemy will usually defend, but that raises their TP/FP.
This game has the very annoying “Main character 0 hp = game over” element that I always dislike in games, but if anyone else dies they just lose morale and exit the battle. Every character has a morale value relative to every other character, but I’m not clear on whether this has any effect other than on the main route, you need a certain amount of total morale to avoid the bad ending. There’s another feature that I wasn’t really sure about either, the “emotion system”.
The diamond below the stats there is supposed to indicate the emotion of the character, and that can affect attack, evade, and other things. But I have no idea what causes it to change or how much of an effect it has — I just ignored that aspect for the game.
Overall this was an enjoyable enough game. I didn’t like it enough to do the other two routes. The story is a little thin, although the multiple paths do add some replayability. I think what most bothered me was just the opaqueness of the system (particularly in the Japanese version). Of course if I had been in Japan when this came out I would have just paid the $15 or so for the strategy guide to find out what everything actually did.
Bounty Sword Double Edge (バウンティソード・ダブルエッジ), released 7/30/1998, developed by Headquarters, published by Pioneer LDC
This is the sequel to Bounty Sword, a real-time Super Famicom game I covered earlier. It was re-released on the Playstation in 1997 as “Bounty Sword First,” with some changes that made it significantly harder (permadeath being the most notable addition). It also was now labeled as part of the “Bounty Sword Trilogy.” The second game, Double Edge, came out in 1998, but there was never a third game — I’m not sure if this was because of poor sales of the second game or some other reason. I did not finish the game, mostly because I just don’t like these kind of real time strategy games — it still has all the flaws of the first Bounty Sword but somehow I found it even more annoying to play.
The game is called “double edge” because you can choose between two main characters. Both of them have the same goal — to find the 12 rings hidden on this island that has become a battleground for different nations seeking treasures. The male character is Kain, a young (though already burnt out) knight, who is the son of a Dark Knight that uses sword techniques that many feel are obsolete. The woman is Sara, although I don’t know much about her because I didn’t play her route (the instruction manual says she is the widow of a Holy Knight continuing her husband’s work).
The big difference between them is that if you choose Sara, you get a game over if you go over the time limit in a mission, whereas for Kain, you just don’t get any bonus money (as in the first game).
The game is relatively open; you travel around the island with each movement taking one day. The character you do not choose becomes a rival, who moves around themselves, and can find the rings and some recruitable characters before you do. You can get back the rings if you encounter them and fight. Although I am not certain, I do not believe that you can lose the entire game by taking too many days. From what I can gather, a significant plot event happens that divides the game into two halves; I believe the plot event happens at the same day regardless, but that might not be the case.
Some of the circles have battles, some nothing, and some plot events. On many of the dots you can choose “search” to fight a free battle, that doesn’t take a day — I think that if you are going for a “find all rings and companions before your rival” path (which requires knowing your rival’s movements from a walkthrough or previous experience), you would need to do a lot of levelling to make that happen.
Once you start getting the rings, you can use the rings to warp to various places on the island which reduces the number of days you need to spend travelling.
The battle system is fundamentally the same as in the first game. You set vague AI options for the characters and then watch them go fight. As I said in the introduction, I’m not a fan of these systems because you just sit and watch a lot of the time, and I always feel like success is based more on fighting against the system and overcoming its problems than it is on actual strategy. Also, the pathfinding is just as bad as it was in the first game, meaning that you have to constantly enter specific paths just to make sure that your characters can make it across a bridge or get around obstacles.
Each character has special moves; one change in this game is that you start each battle with 0 SP and it slowly goes up as the battle proceeds.
Another addition from the first game are the “void” units, the little robots you see in the earlier screenshot. You assign a void to each character, and although you can give them their own commands they tend to stay around the “master”. You can customize them in the shops or build new ones, and the parts you can assign will weight them more towards distance attacks, close attacks, magic, etc.
In the end, as I said earlier, I just don’t find these games particularly fun. I was able to beat Bounty Sword despite my dislike of the system, but I wasn’t enjoying this one very much. If the battle system doesn’t bother you there are probably things to like about it — the story seems potentially interesting and the “rival” system isn’t bad. But given the number of games I still have to play I’d rather move on to something else.
I’m continuing with my plays of old RPGs as well; this is a post about three games that I don’t think deserve their own post. SRPGs will be back next week.
Zombie Hunter (ゾンビハンター), released 7/3/1987, by High Score Media Work
This game is a side-scrolling action game that has RPG elements. Surprisingly, CRPG Addict did a fairly detailed post on it, so I will just cover the basics. It’s a side-scrolling action game with RPG elements. It’s the only game so far (aside from Druaga) that does not allow any game save or password, so it feels a lot more like just a standard action game.
The game is side-scrolling, however, it has an RPG-style “encounter” system. As you move along, you will hit places where enemies appear and you have to defeat those enemies before you can move on. You can revisit the place to fight the game set of enemies again. The encounters will give you XP, gold, and usually some kind of item as well (I think maybe each encounter has a rare drop item you can get if you keep fighting it).
The items you get include weapons, armor, and heals. The weapons are different types, although all but the base swords will break after a number of uses.
What I found frustrating about the game is that there is no way to heal aside from the items — perhaps if you could do that the game would be too easy, but it means that you’re going to have to practice until you can defeat the enemies without taking that much damage and then grind up gold and such. There are several paths through the game so it has some replayability, but you can go to CRPG Addict’s post for a much more thorough review.
Getsu Fuumaden (月風魔伝), released 7/7/1987, by Konami
To me this game is not really an RPG, although I think you can see it as maybe a spiritual ancestor of metroidvania games. The main character is trying to recover the stolen wave swords after his brothers’ deaths from the Dragon Master. I initially confused this game with Namco’s Gempei Toumaden (which was included later in Namco x Capcom) but this seems to be merely inspired (or a ripoff?) of that game.
The game is divided into a number of areas, that you traverse in a top-down style.
When you go to one of the temples (like the one left of the main character) it’s usually some kind of shop or just an NPC that will give you a hint. The torii-like thing at the top left leads you to a side scrolling dungeon.
Your life (bottom bar) is always max 64. The “sword” (damage) starts at 5, and every time you get to 256 XP it adds one to your sword bar (to a maximum of 64).
There is no equipment per se; there are some items you can buy and I believe a few of them do increase your total stats or attack, but not really as equippable items. The game is basically just navigating these side-scrolling stages and figuring out where to go on the map to find the items you need to proceed (and the bosses). I was annoyed by repeatedly getting knocked into the pits by monsters, which subtracts a life. If you get a game over you get a password and I think you keep all your stats but lose some money.
I didn’t get this far, but there are also a few first-person maze segments as well, so they were really throwing every genre into the game.
On the whole this feels a lot closer to just a pure action game than an RPG, despite the ability to level up your sword via XP. It’s probably not a bad action game for the time it came out. Interestingly there was a sequel for Switch that came out a few years ago and I believe it got an English translation.
Cleopatra no Mahou (クレオパトラの魔宝), released 7/24/1987 for Famicom Disk System, by Square
This is definitely the worst of the three games. Its only point of interest is that it was Square’s last game before Final Fantasy, and the development team included a number of people who would go on to bigger things (such as Nobuo Uematsu).
The core of the game is a very short adventure game that would probably take less than an hour to finish. The story is about the son of an archeologist who disappeared while searching for the Tears of Isis. The son has to free his father.
The game has the usual adventure commands you expect (move, look, use item, etc).
The only reason the game takes more than an hour to beat is that a clumsy RPG battle system has been needlessly grafted into the adventure game. The battle system is an extremely basic one with even fewer options than DQ1, and whether you are going to succeed or not is primarily based on just what level you are compared to the enemy. Most of your time in the game is going to be spent grinding levels against random enemies to build up your levels to the point where you can beat the few enemies you have to beat, and get enough money to buy some of the quest items you need.
When I play a game like this it always makes me wonder if I am only judging it harshly because I’ve played so many other RPGs, but contemporary reviews were pretty harsh as well. The graphics and enemy animations were well received and the low difficulty level was seen as a plus, but the time wasting encounters and slow speed of the game were criticized as well.
It reminds me somewhat of Tombs and Treasure, an NES game I liked as a kid that combined RPG and Adventure, but that game didn’t require any grinding.
I’ve really found it interesting how many different ways there have been to integrate RPG elements into games. I’ve played 18 games so far of these early RPGs or pseudo-RPGs. Most of them have been action or “adventure”-style RPGs, with two maze exploration and three dragon quest-style RPGs (of which two are Dragon Quest).
Seirei Shoukan: Princess of Darkness (精霊召喚 〜プリンセス オブ ダークネス〜), released 6/25/1998, developed and published by Shoeisha Software Solutions
This game is a lazy piece of shovelware garbage that was obviously put out just to capitalize on people buying things with bishoujo characters on the cover. Honestly I feel like that’s all I have to write about this game, but I will put more effort in than the developers did to write a full post.
Apparently some players think this character art in the cutscenes is good, but it looks awful to me. In any case, this is the opening scene, where the King of Light’s wife gives birth to twins. But the King of Dark attacks the castle in force. A soldier is able to escape with the two twins, but one of them is stolen by one of the Dark King’s forces. The soldier escapes with the other one (Fitt) and cares for him as a son. 15 years later, the son learns that he is the Prince of Light as the soldier finally dies of his wounds.
The rest of the “story” follows him walking down a road, where he just randomly encounters five elemental spirits that make a compact with him, and kills random servants of the Dark King. They reach the old castle and defeat the monster that originally stole his sister. They continue on down the road and meet the sister, who they beat and then she joins the party. They find a mascot character in a forest. Then the road leads them to the Dark King castle where there’s some philosophical discussion about light and dark needing each other but the party defeats him. The whole thing is only 13 stages and can be beaten in less than 6 hours.
The only thing about the game that shows more than minimum effort is the voice acting, which was done by well known (at the time) professionals like Seki Tomokazu, Ogata Megumi, and Hisakawa Aya.
Each character goes in stat order (I guess the WT stat). You have three “orbs” to spend each round to act. You can spend the orbs in any combination you want, but a 3 orb attack is going to be more powerful than three 1-orb attacks. The special moves also get stronger with more orbs. A huge problem with the game is that you can’t move through your allies, which often traps people behind others, especially in the narrow areas that are in most of the battles. You also can’t take back your movement.
“Well,” you might say, “Why not just split up the party so that you don’t get trapped?” You can’t do that because if the spirits get too far away from Fitt, you can no longer control them. This will cause them to either freeze in place for the whole battle, or rush ahead at maximum move into the middle of the enemies.
There are also unskippable battle animations.
If Fitt dies you get a game over, if the spirits die they will come back the next battle and there is a part after the battle where you can increase your “love” points with the spirit by answering a question (which seems to have little effect on the game). Fitt can also use a guard move to take damage for the spirits. The game overall is easy, but if you have trouble you can just retreat (and keep your XP from the fight) and try again.
Outside of battle, there are no towns or shops. You can equip things, and use items.
There is no reason to play this game. Because it’s so short I can’t say it’s my least pleasant playing experience of this blog, but as I said in the opening, it’s an insultingly lazy effort that exists just to pander to the bishoujo fad.
