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.

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).

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.

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.

Masumon KIDS (マスモンKIDS), released 6/25/1998, developed by System Soft, released by Toshiba EMI

Master of Monsters is a game that initially came out for Japanese computers in 1988 and was ported to a bunch of different systems — the Genesis and Playstation versions came out in English and so are known to some Western gamers. I’ve never played it, but it seems to be a strategy game based on summoning monsters.

This was apparently supposed to be an easier version of the game that was more appropriate for younger gamers who wouldn’t be able to get into the complicated original game. It barely squeaks by as a strategy RPG under my definition but in the end I didn’t play much of it.

The story, as far as I got, involves tracking down four Holy Knights to join your team in opposing the forces of evil. I didn’t get this far, but the instruction booklet mentions that part of the game takes place in the present day, and you see reincarnations of the characters there. That seems like an interesting concept but I’m not sure how well it’s implemented.

The battle system is based on the MoM roots. You have your main summoner character plus any of the Holy Knights you found so far. There are a couple of summon circles on the map, and if your summoner is standing on them you can summon people for your team. One unfortunate decision (that I saw a lot of Japanese reviews complain about) is that each stage has a fixed set of 3 monsters you can summon. It’s different for each stage, and while the monsters can gain levels, no monsters stick around after the battle, so they’re essentially just meaningless grunts. Only your summoner and the Knights preserve their levels. This is what makes it feel to me more like a strategy game than a strategy RPG.

Each stage seems to work the same way. There is an enemy summoner (or two) that starts on a summoning circle, and will use each round to summon monsters to fill any of the 4 empty spaces around them, and then all the monsters will come attack you. Eventually the enemy summoner will run out of monsters to summon.

All of the summons are pretty weak, but your non-summon monsters are not really strong enough to clear the stages on their own (I was able to sort of do it for the first few maps, but not really). I think the intent is that you keep your summoner on the starting circle and summon lots of monsters until the enemy runs out, and then go in and finish him off.

This takes a long time, though, and I think if you played the whole game this way (especially if you didn’t use emulator speedup) you would be looking at quite a long game. Although there is a youtube playthrough of it that seems to be around 20 hours so maybe it’s not as long as I think.

Summoning the monsters requires gems, which you can buy at a shop between levels or recover from battle by stepping on a square where a summoned monster died (you or the opponent). You can also buy spells as well, which is the only thing you can equip on your summoners. The spells have a certain number of uses, and I think when they run out you have to buy a new one.

So this game really wasn’t my cup of tea; I certainly didn’t want to play 31 stages of it. I looked around at Japanese reviews and it seems like a lot of people complained about the same things I did, but I think if you are more tolerant of these kind of “grunts vs. grunts” games you might get more out of it than I did.