SD Gundam Knight Gundam Story: The Great Legacy (SDガンダム外伝 ナイトガンダム物語 大いなる遺産いなる遺産)

In the mid-80s, they started to release various toys under the name “SD Gundam,” which referred to a “super-deformed” and anthropomorphic style, which you can see in the box cover above. From there, a line of SD Gundam Knight Gundam mechs and characters were released in the Carddass system, a vending machine that dispenses collectible cards. These were intentionally based on Dragon Quest and featured various Gundams and characters redone as fantasy-world heroes. This was followed by manga and games featuring these characters. Three SD Gundam Knight Gundam games came out for the Famicom.

The game under discussion here is essentially a Super Famicom compilation-remake of the Famicom games. It’s not a straight port because it makes changes and adds additional content from the OVAs and such, but at its core, it’s a remake.

The game has (to me) a strange feeling because it’s so derivative of Dragon Quest in almost every aspect of the game. Even the music reminds me of Dragon Quest. But this is partly because the original materials were intentionally based on Dragon Quest.

But this also embodies the worst aspects of the tedium of many Famicom-era RPGs. Your characters can only hold 8 items each (including their equipment), and there is no bag to hold extras. Items don’t stack, so each herb or antidote takes one slot. You meet enemies that poison you right off the bat, and it’s hard to make it back to town with your low HP if you get poisoned. Tank learns cure poison at level 4, but until then it’s rough. You can’t see the stats of equipment without buying them. Despite the 8 buttons on the controller there’s no search/talk default button, so you have to do that from the menu every time.

Another Famicom-like feature is the brutal difficulty. You basically have no choice but to grind levels near the first town. If you venture too far north or south, or try the cave to the northwest, the first encounter you meet will slaughter you. At the beginning even many of the fights around the town are hard, because of the poisoning enemies and the slimes that split into multiple slimes.

It’s amateur hour

The opening scene has a story introduction in English. You see this in old Famicom games sometimes (Zelda is a good example), partly because displaying Japanese characters was still in a primitive state. As you can see, Satan Gundam wants not only to kill all humans, but to deport them as well.

The title screen

The game is divided into 4 chapters, each one roughly corresponding to one of the OVAs or Famicom games. The game begins with King Revil and his daughter Frau (both characters from the original Gundam) watching a meteor land, which turns out to be the Gundam, who has lost his memory. Revil makes him a knight and sends him out to defeat Satan Gundam.

Knight Gundam’s status screen, with a full inventory

You also get Tank (based on the Guntank) who is a magician. Since the game gives you no direction, you wander out of the castle and begin fighting enemies.

Three Goblin Zakus

The battle system is essentially Dragon Quest, with Dragon Quest-like enemies and spells, just renamed. The one unique system is the Carddass system, where you can go to vending machines in item stores and get cards, which then can be used in battle. But you have to get through some of the game before you can actually call out the cards, so I wasn’t able to see this. For some reason they removed some cards that were in the Famicom game but left space in the collection album, so you can’t collect 100% of cards.

I’m not sure what happened to my character sprites

The caves work like they did in Dragon Quest I, with darkness obscuring much of your view unless you have a torch or light spell. I was not able to venture very far into the cave without getting slaughtered.

Ys III – Wanderers From Ys: This is not a good game, but it does have a nostalgic value for me. I was able to borrow a Turbo CD from a friend and played a bunch of games, but Ys 1-3 blew me away. This was pre-Super Nintendo and here was a game with unbelievable music played directly off the CD, and animated voiced cutscenes. The voice acting in retrospect is not great, but as an 11 year old it was good enough. Ys III is the worst of the bunch though, and the SFC port is worse than either the original PC game or the Turbo CD one. Play Oath in Felghana instead.

Zenic Reverie covered this game.

Story/Characters: I suppose by the standards of the Famicom games that came before it, this isn’t bad. But it promises so much and delivers so little. The characters are thin. Most of them barely have any dialogue, and the ones that join you have almost no motivation or characterization. Only Fana gets some dialogue and story, but it’s very basic.The story has some development but with such a potentially interesting setting, they could have done better. This is especially disappointing because from what I can tell, the PC-98 game that preceded this (Digan no Maseki) was heavy on story and character.

World: The world is a constructed ship-planet with a mysterious god and two warring races that don’t know why they’re fighting. Once again this is an interesting setting that was mostly squandered. The explorable world is quite small, and you don’t learn that much about the different races even if you talk to everyone. Perhaps they meant for players to be familiar with the novels? I don’t know how popular they were in 1991.

Game Flow: You make decent progress until the latter half, when the game pads out the length by requiring you to go back to many previous areas twice. Revisiting old places isn’t always bad, but when there’s nothing new to find there but a single locked door, it gets old quickly. 

System: The system is best described as a bare bones RPG system with a veneer of complexity. There are a lot of unusual options — you can capture monsters and then call them up later, you can do a counterattack, and there are three different ways to run. But none of these really have any purpose since they are less effective than simply attacking, or too much trouble. 

The game shares a problem with many RPGs of this era — magic is generally pointless except for healing and in some boss fights. The magic users have too few MP to use magic in the random encounters, and MP heal items are very rare. Even in the boss battles, you have to save your MP for healing, and the magic users do OK damage with their attacks.

What all this means is that just for fun you can try to do various things, but in the end the most effective tactic tends to be just mashing attack.

I also complained enough about the status effects in earlier posts as well.

By far the worst thing about the system is the critical hits. I don’t know what they were thinking giving any monster the ability to potentially do more damage than your characters’ max HP. Anyone can beat the final boss just by getting lucky and doing 4000 damage with one hit. This is a mess.

Side Quests/Optional Content: As far as I know there is none.

Interface: I complained about the interface enough in the actual posts — the short version, it sucks. For the long version refer back to my rants at the top of posts 4 and 2.

Graphics/Sound: This is one area where this game is actually pretty good. As you can see for yourself in the many screenshots I posted, the graphics are not simply the slightly upgraded Famicom graphics we’ll see in several upcoming games. The world could have used more color variation, but other than that I don’t have much complaint. The music is also a high point of the game. I posed the title music in the last post, but here are a few other good tracks:

• Gate of Time

• Boss battle

• Gavana Temple in Edon

Despite my harsh evaluation, this game must have made an impression on early Super Famicom players because it seems like a lot of Japanese players who grew up in that era have a fond memory of this game. Maybe it would have been worth it in 1991 when it came out, but in 2017 there’s no real reason to play it.

My first game on this blog comes to an end. Once I was using a walkthrough and lots of emulator speedup and Monster Repellent, it was fairly smooth sailing.

At the end of the last post I had been given the task of finding 5 orbs to enter Coldan. One was in the cave of treasures, 3 are in previous dungeons and towns, and the last is in the Bavaris capital. There, you have to help a random mother who is giving birth:

I don’t really know what purpose this serves.

But then you can get the last orb and head down into the temple to open the door. Once there, General Doran, who let you rescue Fana earlier, joins you. He wants to know the truth about why Bavaris and Mayoor have to fight each other.

Finally, a non-magic user! Also this is what the Bavalis look like.

Coldan

The door to the control room

A two part battle, here’s the second part

Array Blue

A gap spannable by a hand bridge

Zuul form 1

Zuul form 2

Zuul final form

Gavana

Now Ryuu has the choice to leave GDLeen and return to Earth, or stay. Fana asks if you’re really going to leave her — you have a choice, but until you choose to stay, she just stares at you and you get the choice again.

And thus, Ryuu became a dweller of GDLeen.

I’ve thought more about how long I’m going to play each game. Here’s one rule I’m going to use — normally I am not going to make use of walkthroughs (unless absolutely stuck) or emulator features. But if I’ve played a decent amount of a game and it’s getting boring or frustrating to the point where I’m wanting to move on, I’ll first switch to using a walkthrough more and even some save states if necessary. Which is where I am with GDLeen. I detailed some of the problems with this game in the last post, here are some more:

• Your inventory is extremely limited, particularly the usable items like healing salves, stat restorers, etc. You can only carry 6 types, and even among those types you’re limited in the total number of what you can carry. One space has to be taken by “cliff ropes” to progress in some of the caves, so you’re down to 5 types of items.
• When you take an item from a chest, the game will tell you you’re carrying too much, and you have the option to discard something. But there’s no indication what type of item you just picked up, and it’s not always clear whether something is a “various”, a “combat”, or a “tool”. You only get one chance — if you discard something and you still don’t have space, you lose the item permanently.
• Because of these factors, status effects can be brutal. If Ryuu is asleep, petrified, etc., you can’t run from the fight. It can be hard to heal the status effect because you might not have enough items to heal him. You can use a Mole Call to escape from the entire dungeon. If you finish the fight and Ryuu is dead or petrified, you have one chance to heal him, if you can’t do it, the game treats it as a game over.
• So with these status effects added to the instadeath criticals, any fight can result in a game over regardless of your stats or preparation. And the encounter rate is very high, with a slow walking speed.

Anyway, at the end of the last post Fana had left to tend to her mother. Unfortunately that village gets attacked and she is (once again) captured, so we have to go after her. We go to the Temple of the Sun in the capital of the Euredona, where a priest named Luna joins our party.

She has the same spells as everyone else

Luna is necessary because we need her power to open the Cave of Darkness, where Fana and several other women have been taken by followers of Zuul. The Cave is long and has a lot of treasures, as well as places where the ceiling falls in on you. This can result in gold, enemies, damage, or even healing (via water that comes out).

The worst part is the slowness of the messages telling you what happened

At least the cave has some different views to add some atmosphere.

You have to use ropes to descend through holes in the cave as you go. The monsters aren’t all that hard, unless they come out with the status effects I was talking about earlier. Here’s an example:

Who dares to meddle with the sacred sacrifice!

Is this the only fight in the game with a background?

Unfortunately even after defeating them, the girls fall through a hole, leading you to another boss fight against a dragon with three heads, which must be defeated one by one.

Oh no, this fight has a background as well.

And then we save Fana and the others. Luna leaves the party, so she was just a Fana substitute. Are we ever going to get a party member who is not a magic user?

Returning to the village, we learn more about what we have to do next — it’s a multi-part fetch quest.

We must recover 5 heavenly stones to get to Coldarn

But after this, we next have to go back through all the previous dungeons. I had noticed locked doors in them, and now with the magic key I can go back to each one and open the door to get one of the orbs. There may be one new dungeon in the Bavaris capital, which I did accidentally go to when I was blundering around looking for the Cave of Treasure. But my next destination will be three previous dungeons to pick up the orbs. Time to replenish my supply of Monster Repellent and get going.

Oooooooooooooooo

The second boss fight

The Gate of Time

We must find Tal Ho!

 In Edona we learn that in order to meet Gavana we have to make it through Coldarn, but the Messenger of Gavana there will block us if we don’t have the qualifications. The only one who has those in the area is Tao Ho the magician (another one!?), so it’s off to find him. Edona is pretty big and has a number of shops, so I made sure to upgrade everyone’s equipment and buy a lot of Monster Repellent to cut down on the random encounters somewhat. A bizarre feature of this town is that there are random encounters in it — GDLeen doesn’t seem to believe in safe places.

The only shop with a toilet.

I had forgotten about the old RPG problem of townspeople blocking your way.

Tao Ho is in the Grande Ruins, so it’s off to find him. The dungeon is run of the mill, but once we fight through a lot of encounters and grab treasure chests, Tao Ho is there…and sends us on a fetch quest back to the town for a magic book in a tower that’s in Edona. He’s trying to save a girl beyond the door but can’t get through.

Thanks a lot, Tal Ho.

 The tower is another monster-filled dungeon that has more chests and random encounters, but eventually we reach a boss guarding the Spellbook:

“Foopy”? Presumably there’s a better way to romanize that.

The boss doesn’t really have much threat; with two magic users capable of casting powerful heal spells, the only potential problem is an unlucky critical. Barring that you just beat him up and then take the Spellbook. Time to head back through the whole Grande Ruins to reach Tao Ho again. Once there, Tao Ho pronounces Rood to be useless, and he leaves, so I guess he was just a placeholder character until Tao Ho joins:

Tao Ho

He’s at a lower level and knows fewer spells than Rood. I recognize him from the image in Digan no Maseki, the prior game based on the novels, so I guess he’s probably a prominent character in those books. Now with the spellbook we can open the door and go in to fight Hatty:

These names sound better in Japanese, I think.

Hatty’s a little harder than the prior bosses. He casts defensive and healing spells, and hits pretty hard — I died the first time because I wasn’t healing enough, but the second time I used strength up spells on Ryuu and got luckier with Hatty’s actions, so he went down. He does mention that Zuul followers have stolen the secret treasure of Edona. Now we save the girl and go back to town. Apparently the secret treasure was a Heavenly Rudder, necessary to control the ship, so now even if we can get to Gavana, Ryuu won’t be able to return to Earth. The Edona priest suggests we go find Oro, who knows more about the Gavana legend and might be able to give us another way. Meanwhile someone comes in to tell Fana that her mother is sick, so she has to leave the party for a while to go care for her — she promises to follow us.

The graphics of this game are very dreary, as you might be able to tell from the screenshots. There’s a lot of dull green, brown, and grey. It makes walking through the various areas more tedious than it otherwise might be. From glancing at a walkthrough just to see my progress it looks like this is around the halfway point in the game.

Before getting into the meat of the post, I want to make a few complaints about the interface. At this point we’ve already had many years of RPGs for the regular Famicom, so there’s really no excuse for things like the following:

• You can’t buy multiple items at a time, so for buying a bunch of healing salves you’re back to the FF1 turbo-controller thing.
• The only time you can see the stat value of a weapon or armor is when you equip it. You can’t see it in the stores, or on your status screen. This makes it really hard to know what to buy or equip; I said in my initial post that I wasn’t going to use walkthroughs but I’ll make an exception for dealing with bad interface issues like this.
• This game has the FF1-style “ineffective” system where if you kill an enemy, other characters won’t automatically attack the next one — I suppose this isn’t necessarily an interface issue, it could be a deliberate design decision. But I don’t like it.

On to the post. At the end of the last post, I had just gotten Fana. She has quite a selection of magic spells, although it’s mostly the usual cure/cause status effects, heal HP, and do damage. Unfortunately this game has a very common issue in RPGs. The magicians in this game have too few MP, and there are too many random encounters, to make magic useful outside of major battles. MP-restoring items are rare to non-existent, at least at this point in the game.

They’re suspicious. Capture them!

We hear about a war between the Bavalis and Mayoor, and are immediately captured by Bavalis. Fortunately the Bavalis are stupid, and make it fairly easy to escape their prison — it’s a small puzzle, but it just involves breaking the prison bed and tying a cloth into a rope to escape. Ryuu loses his laser gun and space equipment, but the Bavalis helpfully leave a chest of weapons and armor outside their prison for him to use.

The not-very-well-guarded prison.

The way the Bavalis camp works is strange too. If you talk to any of the soldiers they attack you, but otherwise they just walk around and do nothing. Inside the buildings there are random encounters, but outside there’s nothing. It seems like they should have at least made it if you touch an enemy there’s a battle, but maybe that was too annoying for them to code.

Ineffective guards

At the exit of the Bavalis camp there’s a Mayoor battalion leader named Kalon, He tells us to go to the Mayoor camp, and gives a pass to let us in. Once there, they are quite trusting as they tell us to join the Mayoor army in fighting the Bavalis — I suppose since they just captured us they think we’re allies. They also give us another party member, Rood, who unfortunately is another magic user.

One is enough…

The camp also has the first shops, so I was able to upgrade everyone’s equipment and buy some healing salves and antidotes.