Story/Characters: The party characters barely exist — they have names but virtually no backstories at all, and basically no dialogue in the game. Even the ones that do have backstories that sound interesting aren’t really used much.

The story is probably the best part of the game, which is saying very very little. Overall it’s not very good, but the Masho generals have little storylines surrounding them which involve the Pange they are keeping (e.g. jealousy, vanity). For 1993 it’s an average RPG story, which means by overall standards it’s not very good.

World: The world has an overworld, which is generic fantasy, and an underworld, with more steampunk style trappings. It’s OK.

Game Flow: This is what sinks the game from “below average” to “terrible.” Almost every decision they made in game balance was bad. There are way too many random encounters. The grunt enemies are too difficult and give too little XP and gold. Healing magic and items are limited. The dungeons are long. Your spellcasters have too few HP. The lack of strategic options means that your strategies are very limited, and mostly involve grinding or avoiding encounters.

 
System: This is the usual A-M-I-D. If you’ve played any RPG from this era you know what to expect.

Side Quests/Optional Content: None.

Interface: There’s a unified use button, but the buying interface is annoying because they separated the pay counter from the shop itself, which serves no purpose. The battle interface is interesting — you set your commands for everyone and then pick “attack”; you can just change the ones you want to change so it’s a bit faster. There’s also an autobattle, but getting out of the autobattle was not clear to me. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

Graphics/Sound: As people pointed out in the threads, the graphics look like RPG Maker — that’s fine for this era, but nothing special. The music is OK.

All in all, this ranks down in the worst games I’ve played so far, along with Cyber Knight, Fist of the North Star 5, and Light Fantasy.

Next up is Elnard, better known to English players as The 7th Saga. Because some changes were made in the English version I had once thought to play this to see the difference, but another blogger has already done this, so please go read their post — it’s quite interesting. That means the next game up is Dragon Squad Danzarb, although first I’ll be playing the PCE classic Tengai Makyo II, often considered one of the PCE’s best games.

After my first mandatory week of “play it as if it were on console,” I pulled out most of the stops for a game this high on the crappiness scale. I’m using snes9x speedup, following a walkthrough, and I even used a cheat code for max gold. I’m hoping that will cut down some on the grinding time. There’s also a “level 99 in one battle” code but I’m not going that far. I’ll be interested to see that with this unlimited money code, can I beat the game without any actual grinding, just fighting the battles I encounter in the dungeons and on the world map? (Answer: no)

Recieving the Light of Lazes to open up the blocked town

After levelling up to 17 or 18 it was time to beat Gorlia, the boss of the overworld. Even at that level he casts an all-hit magic spell that does over half my HP, and the priest’s healing is not enough to keep up with that. So basically we have to guard and heal until he runs out of MP. Even then his attacks do huge damage and the best I can heal is 80 HP (items only 30 HP, so useless). There’s a lot of luck in this fight and boosting up defense and attack stats. Then I used a combination of attack spells and the fighters’ special attacks, even though they can only use them once. Ralph and Liz only gain TP at certain points in the story, not from levelling.

Gorlia

Now that he’s gone, it’s time to head down to the underworld to defeat the 6 generals and Galba, and seal all the Panges. Once you enter the underworld you can’t come back to the surface, and can never buy certain items again (most notably the Sun Shards which avoid encounters). So I stocked up with 99 Sun Shards and as many Life Winds as I could afford. I only ever ended up using about 30 of the sun shards and only 2 Life Winds.

99 sun shards, 14 life winds

In the underworld, we meet a resistance movement that wants to overthrow the Masho (generals) and Galba, but it will be up to Ralph to actually do it, of course. This is the point where I used the unlimited money code, so from this point on I was able to keep 99 of the healing items and the best equipment — not that this helped a whole lot.

The resistance

However, this part of the game was at least reasonable. You get 80 HP healing items at this point, and with 99 of those it’s actually possible to explore a dungeon while fighting the battles along the way. But you never get any better healing items, so after a while it becomes pretty much impossible. When regular grunt enemies have all-attack spells that do 120-150 to each person, or attack for 200, it doesn’t take much math skill to see that 99 items that heal 80 hp aren’t going to last very long with the high encounter rate. In the last third of the game, I used the technique of using Lumies’ “no enemies” spell to get any treasures in the dungeon (most of which are worthless) then if there is a boss, use the Sun Shards to reach him. There’s a good levelling place that works well even to the end of the game, so I would do my levelling there and then take on the bosses.

At this point I was also following a walkthrough step by step, including telling me how to get through the dungeons — some of them are extremely long with multiple confusing passages, so this cut a lot of time off the game.

The first of the Masho is Geeter, who rebelled against Joshua castle and deposed the king. He has the “faithless” Pange; all of the generals have some emotion that matches with their Pange. The first step is to get a mine cart so we can use all the underground railroads to travel between cities. This involves some fetch quests, the worst one being a 17 floor dungeon(!!!). It’s not that hard with a walkthrough, but many of the reviews of this game mention this dungeon as the breaking point for the players. With the mine cart we can now travel to other cities.

Off we go

The deposed king of Joshua Castle gives us the secret way into the palace, and Geeter is soon defeated.

Geeter

Next up is a pair of masho, Badish and Radish. Their town considers them heroes, and supports them. We have to convince the townspeople that we just want to check up on the resistance base, and they finally let us through. Of course Badish and Radish are behind the attack on the base, and defeating them yields the Betrayal Pange. The strategy against these double bosses is often tricky because they can kill anyone in one round. It’s a combination of luck, buff items/spells, and using the fighters’ special moves to at least take out one of them before you get completely annihilated. The healing isn’t really enough to keep up with the damage so it can be pretty tough.

Badish and Radish

Next up is Gash, a fake priest that has stolen girls, although it doesn’t say what he’s doing with them. Defeating him releases the Ambition Pange. One of the girls was dead, though, and her mother tries to kill herself when we return to tell her — fortunately someone stops her.

Gash

I was so tired of the game at this point that I didn’t really get the story here — it had something to do with two people who wanted to get married but are now dead, and some ceremonial jewels involved in their wedding. But I think I had to talk to more townspeople to get the full story. Anyway, the Masho is Sone Jina, who gives the Jealousy Pange.

Sone Jina

The last Masho is Eizel, who has the Vanity Pange. You need all the diamond equipment to fight him; I of course used a walkthrough to find the stuff but it seems hard to find without it. Maybe the townspeople gave some clues, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this was yet another case where people have to buy the official guidebook to finish the game.

Eizel

Now with all the Pange sealed inside Ralph’s orb, Dragon Lazes calls the party to a shrine where he opens the way to the final dungeon, where Galba awaits. I used the previous dungeons to level to 38 and then used Sun Shards to go through the entire dungeon with no encounters. As the game hinted earlier, Galba is Ralph’s father, and apparently also the father of Liz and Teo, although I don’t know where that came from. He believes that he’s been doing the will of Dragon Lazes and Dragon Digbodinon (the dark dragon). At that point, Digbodinon orders him to kill the party.

Galba

I think I was overlevelled because he wasn’t very hard. I spent a few turns just increasing attack and healing, and then continued to have Lumies increase attack while the fighters used their special attacks.

Once Galba is defeated, for some reason that removes Digbadinon’s influence although they don’t really explain why. Lazes praises the party, and reveals that Lumies was sent with the party because Lazes didn’t trust humans, since they once betrayed him. But now he sees humans are trustworthy and goes into a long sleep, leaving the world in the care of the humans. He reminds us to not just believe in what we can see. The final scene is Galba joyfully greeting his children. Why? I don’t know, it just ends right there.

The family reunited

All you get from this point is the credits, and then an odd “results” screen that shows how many times you pressed each button:

X, L, R, and select do nothing in the game.

Then a more typical results screen, showing number of saves, inns, deaths, etc. 1390 is the number of encounters I had, and that’s with my heavy use of “no encounter” items and spells.

188 treasure chests opened

To put it simply: this game is horrid. The developers should be ashamed for releasing this and charging money for it. My timer at the end of the game was 30:35, and that was with the unlimited money, step-by-step walkthrough, and basically bypassing a third of the dungeons with a walkthrough and “no encounter” spells/items. I can’t imagine the torture of playing this game on a real console without all this help — and without the speedup key. My timer showed 30 hours, but with snes9x’s speedup I was able to do 90 minutes of levelling in about 15 minutes so the actual time I put in was far less.

Fuck you.

Dual Orb (デュアルオーブ)
Released 4/16/1993, published by I’Max

Fuck.

This game was not released in English, is not a port, and I haven’t played it before. Also there is no translation patch (apparently the hacking is very hard because of some issues with the text pointers). That means I have to play the game to the end. And it’s one of the worst I’ve played so far — probably down with Light Fantasy, Cyber Knight, and Fist of the North Star 5. It really comes down to one thing: game balance. There are too many random encounters, the monsters are too strong, and give too little XP and gold. This game has the worst balance problems of any game I’ve played up to now, except perhaps for Romancing SaGa. Nothing else in the game — the story, characters, etc. do anything to lift this game from the shit heap.

So according to my rules, the first week I have to play with no emulator tricks, and minimal walkthrough use. That will be this post, then I will move to Snes9X so at least I can do a fast speedup (I can only get about 2x speed with higan, with snes9X on this game at least I get 18x speed)

The opening tells you that this is a world of fairies, dragons, talking animals, etc, although the dragons are only in myth, and everyone is scared of them. Our hero is Ralph.

Can you tell who the hero is? Probably not. It’s the blond dude.

What a pathetic looking hero, with a pathetic name. I know that Western names don’t have the same resonance to us that they do to Japanese people, just like a Westerner might not realize that “Nakamura Taro” is basically “John Smith” in Japan. But Ralph?

Anyway. Ralph has to finish his training with Aleitos by going to the nearby holy mountain. There, he hears a voice from a great warrior, telling him that he needs to seal holy orbs to beat Pange. It turns out Ralph’s father also went out adventuring 15 years ago and never came back.

Ralph, the hero

 The combat system is basic AMID.

Ralph vs slugs, I forgot to equip his weapon and got a game over

Fortunately there is an autobattle, although exiting it seems difficult — sometimes I can get it to stop, sometimes I can’t. The main difference with this system is that you first select the character’s actions (by going to the bottom part of the screen, then the picture will switch to whatever they’re doing, and then go to “attack”. As others have pointed out, this is a pointless change that is hard to get used to. The shops are also odd — you first pick out everything you want, then go pay for it at a separate counter. I guess they were trying to make it feel different, but why don’t you spend time making parts different that actually matter?

Every time you load a save you get a little summary and reminder of what you’re doing, not very helpful though

The first part of the game is not so bad. The first task is to find the other 3 party members who have the same mission as you. A starter dungeon has Ralph’s father’s short sword and some other good equipment in there, so that’s the first destination.

Why was it stored here?

The random encounter rate is high, but healing herbs are cheap so I bought 20 or so and was able to get through without too many problems. Next up is a place where goblins have stolen all the children. After getting the second party member, Tio (a healer), it’s time for the Goblin cave. This dungeon also is not too bad — the 30 HP healing herbs quickly become too weak, but at this point in the game they’re cheap enough that it provides an easy source of healing. Tio, as usual for bad games like this, has MP that are way too low. But he has a good attack.

After beating the goblin boss and rescuing the children, the third party member, Liz, joins.

Saving the children

Liz is another fighter, but not as useful as Ralph because she can’t equip very strong armor. Next up is a village of fairies, who don’t like humans because one stole their fairy key. Of course we offer to go find it, and once we do, the fairies now are OK with us, and one of the fairies joins as the 4th and final party member. Lumies is a magic user, and virtually useless. Her attacks do 1 damage for the most part, and MP is so limited in the game and the random encounter rate so high that it’s basically impossible for her to use spells.

Now the enemy force destroys one of the towns you were at, but this opens up a tower that was in there. It hides a necklace that the mayor in another town will trade for a ship. Then, an enemy general named Golin takes over the large town of the land and there’s a barrier around it. Ralph learns that this barrier went up 2000 years ago and that the Light of Lazes was used to break it down. By finding three pieces of the hero Saladin’s equipment, the people who guard his grave will give us the Light.

This is where the game goes off the rails. The three dungeons with the Saladin equipment can be done in any order, but they’re all difficult. The monsters here do anywhere from 1/3 – 2/3 of your HP with one hit, and many have multi-hit spells. If you get unlucky someone can be killed from full HP. Revive items are too expensive to regularly use. The dungeons are also large and have lots of encounters.

The full party

The only saving grace here is that you can buy Sun Shards for 150 g that eliminate random encounters. So I just did some grinding to buy better equipment (which doesn’t help much), 99 heal herbs, and as many Sun Shards as I could. Using these I was basically able to blitz all the dungeons and recover the Saladin equipment without too many encounters. None of these dungeons have bosses, which makes that possible.

The barrier

At this point I had reached the first week point, so now I can use walkthroughs and snes9x. Apparently the next boss inside the barrier is very difficult and the site I found recommends level 17-18 (I’m at 14 right now). The first thing I did was go back to the previous dungeons and get any stat up items I missed, as well as the rare revive items and MP+ items. By the time I did that I was at level 16. The enemies inside the barrier give a fair amount of XP so I’m hoping I can grind to 17 or 18 quickly with the speedup key. One other concern is that once I beat this boss, I will never be able to buy any Sun Shards or revive items for the rest of the game. I have 99 sun shards but I want to buy as many Life Winds (revive) as I can before this point. Yet another example of annoying, pointless game design.

Ralph.

Story/Characters: This is fairly weak, but what game from this era isn’t? The plot is mostly linear and fetch quests, with a strange twist at the end that I don’t remember much preparation for. The characters have sketched backgrounds and once they join your team they don’t talk much.

I guess I’ll mention here what was in comments a few posts ago: the English version of this did indeed change Dank’s portrait and sprite, which must have looked too close to blackface or older stereotypical depictions of African-Americans. You can see both versions here. Perhaps Dank being a thief character also worried them.
  
World: Regular fantasy — I guess the most distinctive thing about it is the different races. There are wolfpeople, moles, underwater fishpeople, flying people, dragons, and…the black people. Like most enjoyable RPGs, there are inaccessible places that you need to wait until you have later powers or characters to be able to visit, and you get the ability to fly everywhere at the end.
 
Game Flow: It’s funny that a review I saw said the random encounter rate was “insane”; compared to a lot of the other games I’ve played from this era it’s quite reasonable. There’s an auto-battle, and once you get Dank you can run from most fights. So it’s not too bad. The main irritation for me is the slow walking speed.

For the most part it’s clear where to go next, but there are a few places where I don’t understand how you’re supposed to know what your next goal is or how to get there. Sometimes I did notice that a single random villager gives a clue so I guess I should listen to classic RPG advice and talk to everyone. 

System: Mostly standard A-M-D-I. This is one of the only games I’ve played so far where you have more characters than can be in battle at once and you can freely switch them (I think Maka Maka had that as well, but that’s about it). You can even switch them during battle, which is helpful.

Each character has their own ability when you put them at the front of the party, like being able to dig in places, turn into a bird and fly, etc. This is a good way to have some variation.

I also like that you can see the HP of the enemies. The bosses have an extra unspecified amount of HP after you reduce them to 0 to keep some uncertainty.

Side Quests/Optional Content: There are two endings, and some hidden treasures and transformations. Nothing major, but there is something to do if you want to go poking around.

Interface: Quite good. You can see the strength of weapons and armor before buying them, and how much they change your characters! The item limit is quite generous. You can assign commands to all the buttons, so that one button can instantly take you to use items, or spells, or whatever.
 
Graphics/Sound: The music is fairly well-done although not top class. The graphics are servicable — they’re better than the “RPG school” graphics a lot of games from this era has but still not quite at the level of later SFC games.

Overall a good game, probably the best game I’ve played on the blog next to Dragon Quest V.

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Next on my list is Taiko Risshinden. I’m having a tough time telling if this qualifies as a strategy RPG under my definition. Even when I played a little bit of it I couldn’t tell, although I don’t think it does. Since it’s a port of a computer game anyway I’ll skip it, which means that next up is Dual Orb, a game that does not have a high reputation.

After destroying the Dark Dragon weapon, Maneelo is given back his “merchant jewel” which allows him to transform into a big fish. Now I can cross some areas under the ocean that I couldn’t before. With no clear direction I just looked for any place I could surface, which put me out at the Wind Village, where everyone was acting strangely, apparently due to a flower spewing out pollen above. It doesn’t affect our characters, so we go into the cave to face the first of the Four Kings, Kyura. He turns us all tiny, and now we have to go help some mice beat cockroaches.

Far too realistic

I’m not sure what the point of this section is, but somehow the mice reward you with medicine that makes you big again. Unfortunately Kyura has turned one of the townspeople into a monster, and Dees requires some toad saliva to heal him. At this point I took a side detour to pick up the second set of transformations for the main character, then got the toad saliva (which requires giving him a bug). Now we can heal the villager, stop Kyura’s plans, and restore the village to normal. The grateful townspeople fix the bridge, and Kyura comes up for his final fight.

As usual, all the enemies turn into monsters

The next location is a town of moles. One of them is sick and we need to find a dream mirror to go inside and help him — this requires going to the Music Kingdom where they only speak in music. The moles give me something to understand them, and the Wind Village has a flute that I can use to speak.

The Queen

The queen or princess of the Music Kingdom wants to hand over the Time Key to Judas because she’s so obsessed with him. We can’t really stop her, but we can peek in on her when she’s in the bath to get a secret code to steal things from their chests (I swear they asked me to do this!!)

16 bit erotica

Now with the dream pillow it’s time to enter Mog (the mole)’s dreams. This is a trippy part of the game where you have to find parts of Mog’s personality, especially the “heroism”, which finally lets you beat a boss inside the dream and escape.

An annoying field in the dream where gas comes out to stop you

Now with Mog in the party I can dig up these signs that I saw around the world. There are also dragon plates on various areas but I never figured out how to move those (looking now, I needed to find some transformation for Dank that would have let me remove them; I never did that.)

Next up is the Spring Village. I’m looking for the Heaven Key although I’ve forgotten why I want to collect these keys — it’s what I’ve been doing most of the game but I don’t remember actually being told why. Maybe I just forgot. Anyway, in the Heaven Tower, the next of the Four Kings, Siegmund, sends us into a dream world.

The Heaven Tower

The dream world has another tower. Several of the dungeons in this game have annoying features in them like stepping on circles that make the walls invisible or spin the dungeon around. I’m not a big fan of these kind of tricks; it seems just to add frustration, not fun. Finally at the top of the tower we face Siegmund.

Siegmund

He has a strange sprite in that it starts as just a few huge pixels, but resolves more and more into a shape as you damage him. He also switches back and forth whether he takes damage from magic or physical attacks, so the main character can’t just stay transformed the whole time. I also switched out Dees for Bilda when necessary.

Next on our journey is Cham village, where time has completely stopped. One guy is still walking, and wonders if the Time Tower nearby is the cause. Indeed at the top of the tower is Carla, the next of the Four Kings.

A warp puzzle in the tower, which is better than the BS disappearing walls

She immediately warps us out of the tower. Back in Cham, though, her childhood friend Elan decides to go to the tower by himself to talk her out of her evil ways. Time to go through the tower again (sigh) and fight Carla. The fight doesn’t last very long, though, since Carla sends us out of the tower with her timespace powers and retreats to a nearby castle. Now Elan tells me where to get a fruit that Carla really likes, and with that we enter the castle, confront Carla, and Elan is able to recall happier days with her as a child. Unfortunately the fourth king Goda shows up and kills Carla, but somehow by using the Time Key, Cham’s time starts again and Carla and Elan are reborn as children. Who knows.

Carla and Elan together again

At this point Nina has been aged by the Time Key but lost her memory, and I have to gather materials to get a medicine to restore her. But I’m not sure how I was supposed to know where to find all this stuff — it involves fishing in a specific place and hitting some specific trees. I used a walkthrough but do they really expect you to go all over the world to find this stuff? Or maybe I would have already found it if I fished everywhere and hit trees? Anyway, now that Nina is back, and older, she has a new face portrait and can transform into a bird. This is the typical RPG situation where late in the game you finally get an airship or the like that lets you go everywhere without encounters.

Older Nina

Nina the bird

Now we can go everywhere in the world, including the final area. I got all of Kurisu’s final transformations although I used a walkthrough to do so. The “last power” transforms everyone into a big dragon that does 999 damage with its attack, making the rest of the boss fights fairly easy. But you need this to get the “good” ending. At this point you can also get some good items at the flea market and more of Dank’s transformations but I wasn’t following a walkthrough step by step so I didn’t do any of this. The next real destination is the capital city.

The final transformation

In the capital, we first have to do some fetch questing to activate the elevator, fortunately the slaves in the capital provide some clues on where to go. Once the elevator works, it’s on to the dungeon.

The elevator

The dungeon is not especially difficult, and at the end we meet Zorgon, the leader of the Dark Dragon Clan. Clearly this is not the final fight since Judas and the fourth King are still around. It’s a long battle, though, and the 0 hp state of the boss lasts a long time.

Zorgon

Victory! And Sara, the main character’s sister, returns, apparently not dead.

Yay, we saved the world!

…but she’s actually just an apparition created by Judas. She manages to take all the keys I’ve collected and release Milia, the Goddess of Destruction. I’m not real clear on what’s going on here — was this ever mentioned before in the story? Obviously a lot of RPGs have a surprise final boss but I don’t remember hearing about Milia before. In any case, Judas heads off to a tower, and in the tower Sara, who apparently is now actually alive but under enemy control, turns into a dragon and fights you as “Sister Dragon.”

Sara as dragon

Once she’s defeated, she breaks free of Judas’ control and dies. Now Judas goes to a floating castle along with Milia. The castle has no obvious entrance but there’s a place on the ground where it looks like Mog can dig. This is another place where there’s no clear indication of what to do. You have to go to a woman’s house that you can only access with the Nina dragon, and exchange letters between her and a weapon-loving man from earlier in the game. Eventually he gives us a powerful claw which Mog can then use to burrow into the final dungeon.

The old woman

The final dungeon is not particularly long or difficult. Goda is the first boss, who is easily defeated with the Final Dragon. Judas is up next, as usual turning into a monster.

Judas

Once Judas is defeated, Milia is there alone. She behaves strangely and this is where the endings diverge. To get the good ending, you have to use the Final Dragon transformation which will then get her to reveal her true form.

Milia

True form Milia

The fight is long but not especially hard — in Final Dragon form it’s just a matter of healing with the full-HP restore items every so often and attacking for 999 every round. The ending is pretty short and even after looking at the “bad ending” on youtube I’m still not really sure what makes it bad. They both basically have the same content — you save the world, and everyone goes back home. I guess the “good ending” is a little more detailed and the spirit of Sara congratulates you, but it’s still basically the same ending.

Kurisu returns home

Someone on GameFAQs claimed that one ending leads to BoF2 and the other to BoF3 but they seem the same to me.

Overall that was a pretty good game for this time period. In the overall scope of the entire SFC library it probably won’t end up as one of the top classics, but of the 23 games I’ve played I would rank it second best after Dragon Quest V. Unfortunately next up is another kusoge that is known as one of the worst games in the SFC library…I guess I got a respite with Breath of Fire but it’s back to the grind.