Monthly Archives: August 2018

SRPG Game 4 – Langrisser wrap-up

Langrisser (ラングリッサ―)
Release Date: 4/26/1991 (PC Engine version 8/6/1993). Mega Drive version released in English as “Warsong.”
System: Mega Drive/PC Engine (later remake for Saturn and Playstation)
Developer: MASAYA
Publisher: Nippon Computer Systems

Image result for ラングリッサー PC

FACTS

  1. Turn type: Player turn/Enemy turn
  2. Maps: Medium to large. Terrain gives bonuses.
  3. Character Customization: Each character has a branching class path.
  4. Character Development: Standard XP level system. At level 10, character automatically upgrades to a new class, although the player can choose which one to advance to. The four “main” characters have secret classes in the PC Engine version.
  5. Party Size: You have at most 9 leaders, of which 4-8 can be sent out on each map. Each leader has up to 8 nameless grunt soldiers under them (fortunately the game has an auto-move system for the grunts if you don’t want to move them all individually).
  6. Equipment: Each character can equip one item (which includes armor, weapons, or items).
  7. Game Flow: 20 stages, one after another, no repeating stages or multiple paths.
  8. Saving: Permanent saves only between levels. At least in the PC Engine version you can do “memory saves” during the stage at any point, which go away when you turn off the power.
  9. Death: The nameless grunts all disappear at the end of the stage whether they die or not. In the Mega Drive version, a leader who dies is dead permanently. In the PC Engine version, they are simply removed from the stage with all their grunts.

IMPRESSIONS 

This game is probably easiest to compare with Fire Emblem, since they came out around the same time and are both the beginning of long-running franchises. I think I probably enjoyed the two games about the same — there are a lot of rough edges and the storyline barely exists, but it’s still reasonably fun. Langrisser is far less frustrating than FE because of the ability to save and load your game as many times as you want during the stage. I believe this is in the original Genesis version as well although I’m not sure. The lack of permadeath in the PC Engine version also lowers the difficulty a bit but not as much as the save/load.

The soldier hiring is a nice aspect of the game and makes it feel more like you’re commanding large forces than Marth’s band of 20 or so. The use of the “command zone” strengthens the feeling of the squads. The designers thankfully included an auto-move option for the soldiers so you don’t have to manually move 40-50 units every turn.

My biggest problem with the game is that I never felt like I fully understood the system. You can see attack and defense stats, but it’s hard to predict what that will actually mean when the fight starts. There are modifications based on level, terrain, compatibility of units, and remaining HP. All of that means that I had way too many experiences where I just had to save the game, try an attack, and then reload when I saw it didn’t work as I expected.

The next Langrisser game will come up in 1994; I’ll be curious to see what changes have been made (although some of the I->II changes were already done for the PC Engine version).

One point of interest is the CD-ROM technology. I’ve done about 25 games now on PC Engine between this blog and my other one, and there’s a wide difference in how companies actually use the capabilities of the CD system. CDs are cheaper to produce than carts/cards and may entice buyers, so there was an incentive to use the system. Games like the Tengai Makyo series made great use of the system with lots of voiced dialogue, cutscenes, and orchestral music tracks played off the CD. Others barely used it at all, with just a token animated intro. Langrisser is between the two — the music is high quality. There are some voiced cutscenes before each map but the total amount of voice and cutscene is maybe 5-10 minutes (plus the closing credits with the vocal song).

Next up will be another PC Engine game, this time one that was originally made for the system rather than a remake. The packaging advertises the cutscenes and story so we’ll see how it compares to this.

SRPG Game 4 – Langrisser (Stages 16-20)

Scenario 16 – In the Darkness

The dragon from scenario 15 fled wounded, and Ledin chases after him to his cave, to deal the killing blow. This stage is 5 player squads vs quite a few enemies, but many of them start far away from the heroes, and the dragon is directly ahead.

I actually decided not to grind this stage for XP and instead went for the dragon right away — I still ended up killing about half the enemies on the board. There’s a chest that has a Dragon Slayer in it, that works only for this stage. Tyler got it, but Ranger Namu did so much damage it wasn’t necessary. And thus the Dragon goes down. A soldier finds a tablet with some old writing on it, that says Bozel tried to envelop the world in darkness but Sieghart, the king of Elsreed, used the power of Langrisser to seal away the darkness in Velzeria. Since Bozel is back, we need to do the same thing.

Scenario 17 – Velzeria, the Forbidden Land

The collected heroes
The collected villains

 Ledin and his forces head to Velzeria to seal the darkness away again. The title of this mission is different from the Genesis version and there seem to be other changes as well, mostly to bring Bozel and his underlings into the story earlier than in the Genesis version.

Nicholas starts by taking over Chris’ mind, causing her and her troops to attack us. This stops when we take out Nicholas, so I did that as soon as possible.

There are a lot of flying enemies in this stage that fall to archers. Nicholas and Nyaga are both here — in general spell casting has gotten a lot more annoying since they can use spells from far away that affect a large range. But I also have Heal 2, Healing, and other spells that make it fairly easy to recover. I’ve started equipping Orbs on both Jessica and Chris every battle, increasing their MP by a lot as well as their range.

Scenario 18 – Velzeria

Time to invade Velzeria. This is Nagya’s last stage — he has some new Stone Golems he hope will protect him. They are quite annoying and hard to damage, but they don’t do much in return. Eventually I managed to have Namu take him out. Other than that I’ve just been trying to max the classes of my guys — Chris is now a Princess so all that’s left is Jessica’s Sage class. The other ones I don’t care so much about.

After the battle, an army is massing outside to fight, but Lance decides to stay behind and deal with them while we take on Bozel inside.

Scenario 19 – Illusionist

This is Nicholas’ last hurrah. Like the other stages there are a lot of spellcasters in here that do wide damage to a lot of people, so Jessica, Chris, and Ledin’s heal spells are effective. Other than that, by this point in the game it’s pretty much the same tactics every map. Archers are particularly good, I find.

Scenario 20 – The Seal of Darkness

The last stage, and fight against Bozel.

Same deal as before — lots of healing to take care of the spellcasters. I divided my forces into two to clean up a lot of the squads, focusing on the leaders when I could. Sadly Jessica did not make her final class, but it wasn’t necessary. Bozel went down easily to Namu equipped with the Langrisser. Then Chaos appears. Bozel was trying to bring him back, but of course Chaos wasn’t going to be controlled by Bozel and is now fighting us.

As with all other enemies, Chaos has 10 HP. A combination of Namu, Ledin, and various spells were enough to make a quick end of him. Like many RPG villains he says he can’t die because he’s in the hearts of men, and he’ll be back later blah blah blah.

Now as with Fire Emblem, there’s a brief section showing what everyone does and their final class.

Jessica doing alchemy

Namu training

Chris and Ledin get married.

Finally there’s a vocal closing song, which actually is not that common on the PC Engine even though the technology supports it. At the end, there’s a screen that shows your total turns.

So that’s Langrisser — the PCE version is more different from the Mega Drive version than I thought it was, but that’s fine. The series will return in 1994 with Langrisser II.

SFC Game 28 – Moryo Senki MADARA 2

Moryo Senki MADARA 2 (魍魎戦記MADARA2)
Released 7/16/1993, published by Konami

There have been a lot of “2” games on this blog — Jungle Wars 2, Metal Max 2, and Silva Saga 2, with Seiken Densetsu 2 coming up in a bit. This game is part of a large franchise called the “MADARA project” that involves manga and video games on several platforms, and other media. The original game is for Famicom and has a translation by Aeon Genesis — they are supposedly working on this one as well but as of yet there is no patch.

I haven’t made a lot of progress but I thought I would make an update anyway, to at least introduce the game. The opening has an old warrior coming to a shrine of some sort.

The forces of Miroku are ravaging the world, and there’s not much left they can do. But a woman appears from the flames.

She assures the warrior that there are chosen ones who will soon be coming to fight against Miroku.

That’s our main character, a punk rocker. In the manual his name is Han, but if a default name is not provided in the game I use Kurisu instead.

Kurisu meets his friend Subaru outside his house, and she drags him along after school to a seemingly haunted house nearby. She’s a budding journalist. Of course there we fight monsters, which are called “Mouki” in this game.

The combat system is automatic. The enemies and characters move around the screen and attack. You can pause the action to select targets (although it’s a little clumsy) or cast spells, or use items. But mostly you just watch everyone attack each other. I suppose this is a step up from just mashing the A button, but if the designers are going to automate everything maybe they should stop and think whether they can increase the strategic options of combat so that it’s not just mashing A. Visually the combat reminds me of something like Star Ocean, but you can’t directly control any of the characters. You can set a HP percentage for each character where the combat will automatically stop so you can heal them. It’s a smooth system but once again, it does seem a little odd just to watch everything happen.

Inside the mansion we find monsters, but also books that mention previous fights against Miroku by heroes long dead (Madara and Kirin, and their descendants). I don’t know if these are references to the previous game or just lore for the series as a whole.

There’s a boss Bishogau, who seems to recognized Kurisu and Subaru. It’s not especially hard, although I was worried about running out of heal items — I couldn’t find any way to rest. There’s a broken sword on the second floor that increases Kurisu’s attack a little bit. But Bishogau went down, and we received a mysterious pendant that’s just like the one Subaru has.

At the bottom of the house, Kirin and Madara appear in illusionary form — apparently Kurisu and Subaru are their descendants and its now their turn to beat Miroku (how original). We need to find Sakuya-hime first, though. Kurisu is not interested at all, but this does fit with what Subaru has read in old documents her grandfather had. She wants to go to a shrine the next day nearby that is related to Sakuya-hime.

Kurisu’s house

The next day, Kurisu can’t find Subaru, and so goes to the shrine on his own. Subaru is waiting there for him, but once they get into the shrine it turns out she’s an imposter who turns on him and attacks along with another Mouki. But Kurisu is able to kick them both to death.

The enemies had another pendant — now that Kurisu has three pendants, Sakuya-hime appears and takes him to the other world where he will fight Miroku, although he’s only interested in saving Subaru, who has been taken to the world by Miroku’s agents. Sakuya-hime takes him along through a dimensional portal but Miroku attacks along the way, dropping Kurisu into a forest, where a man named Kara finds him and takes him back to his house. His wife Saria takes care of him. It turns out that Kara is also from another world (perhaps Earth?) but has lost his memory. Kurisu heads out to a nearby village to ask the chief if he knows anything about Subaru.

But the chief is unwilling to talk to any outsiders, at least while the Mouki are ravaging the countryside. So we go to a nearby tower to beat the monsters there. They completely kicked my butt at first and I had to grind quite a few levels to survive the tower. I hope this isn’t a pattern throughout the game.

Once the tower boss is gone, the chief is willing to talk to us but really doesn’t know much. There’s a Sakuya-hime shrine nearby but it’s empty — he suggests talking to an old sage in a cave to the north. Unfortunately the cave is under attack by a rabbit-like creature named Jato. Jato sics his minion on us.

But we manage to clear out his minion, and Jato runs away. The chief tells Kara that in his passage to this world he was separated from his dark side, leaving only the light side behind. He sends Kara out to fight his dark side and reunite his two parts — Kurisu will meet him again, but possibly as an enemy. Now the sage tells Kurisu again he’s a chosen warrior blah blah, and sends him off to the next kingdom over to look for Subaru.

That’s all I played — it’s a small part of the game but it’s an OK game so far. I hope the battles will be more interesting when I get more people and some magic.

SRPG Game 4 – Langrisser (Stages 11-15)

Scenario 11 – Dalsis Castle

Barely halfway through the game and we’ve already reached Dalsis Castle, where Digos is. So obviously he’s not the final boss of the game. This map is very different from the Genesis version both in the enemies and the layout. All of your guys start at the bottom of the screen and you basically have to split into two sides.

I tanked the stage at first because I didn’t have the right division of units. Once I paid more attention to which units were on which side and assigned my soldiers appropriately, it was much easier. I was still struggling to level up Namu, who had fallen way behind.

Partway through the stage, monsters appear at the top of the screen and start attacking the stage boss. Ledin realizes these are here because Langrisser has been unsealed. The boss doesn’t last very long against the monsters, but since the win condition is for Ledin to reach the top of the map we still have to take them out.


Scenario 12 – Twin Castle

Time to beat Digos. His Emperor class is actually not that good compared to some of the other leaders, and his Armor Soldiers are not especially effective. Sort of an anticlimactic end for him.

Getting to him is a bit challenging, though. The two sides of the castle are separated, and you can’t control who starts on which side. The enemies are totally different from the Genesis version so I had to start, write down the enemies, then restart and assign appropriate underlings. Once I did that it wasn’t very hard, and Digos was taken down by horsemen.

Now we have recovered the Langrisser, but there’s still 8 stages left. The Langrisser itself is an equippable item that increases stats quite a bit.

Scenario 13 – The Town of Statues

Ledin reaches a town where Basilisks have turned everyone (including Lance!) into statues. The Basilisks will also stone us. The maps are diverging much more from the Genesis version than before — from here on out the story is the same, and each map is the same general idea, but the maps almost all have very different enemies, and often different layouts as well.

I was getting annoyed by the Basiliks turning my guys to stone so I just beat their leaders as quickly as possible.

There are ants as well, and slimes. The ants go down fairly easily to archers and the slimes are the last hurrah for the Guardsmen, who I gave to Jessica.

Lance joins the team afterwards, although he vows to even things with Ledin afterwards, if they both survive.

Scenario 14 – Wolfpack

This stage has probably the biggest divergence from the Genesis version I’ve seen — as with the Genesis version there are a lot of werewolves in the stage attacking the townspeople. But there’s also a guy named Nagya with some skeletons who seems to have some control over the situation.


I used Monks for the first time in the game to deal with his skeletons. The werewolves made it to the church where the civilians were hiding and started killing them, but it takes too many turns for them to kill them all so there was never any big concern that they would die. Even though you can only send out 4 squads here it’s not that hard.

Scenario 15 – The Cry of the Dragon 

Nagya is back again here, guarding a temple where the Efreet will come out to fight against the Grand Dragon, who is your main opponent here. Fortunately the civilians flee to the bottom left of the screen so they’re in no danger.

Once again, only 4 squads. I tried Monks again but they were ineffective against Nagya’s troops so I tried again with 3 archer squads and Ledin with Griffons. The archers were quite effective (especially Chris — I don’t understand why her underlings are always so good). The enemies come in off the lake but I hid in the mountains.

Once Nagya is defeated, the Efreet comes out and starts fighting against the Dragon. But he refused to come in from the water so I had to go out and fight him. I finally got Ramu to her secret class, the Ranger. Rather unusual class; she has good stats but can’t have any troops. Chris was also able to rank up to Princess. Now the only major character I have left to rank up is Jessica. She had fallen behind but I was able to get her up to High Priest in this level. Rather odd that for the secret classes, Chris has to go to Archmage and Jessica to High Priest — you would think it’s the reverse.

The future of this blog

I am now officially caught up with the PCE games, so this blog will return to being mostly SFC games with an occasional PCE intruder. The PCE library continues pretty regularly through 1994 but then drops to just a handful of games in 1995 and a single game in 1996.

Now that I’m caught up here and doing my new blog (This Map is Completed!), here are a few notes about this blog going forward.

  • At one time I had mentioned playing PSX and Saturn games. I’m no longer going to do this. It’s possible I might do a one-off when I get to 1995 just to see what the competitors were doing, but that’s it.
  • I’ve had a buffer, but since I’m switching back and forth between the two blogs, it’s unlikely I will keep the “every Saturday” update schedule here. If there’s no update here on Saturday, it’s because I’m updating the other blog. (Langrisser is taking me longer than I thought it would, so it’s unlikely there will be an update here on Saturday.)
  • I am no longer going to do strategy RPGs on this blog. Instead, when I get to an SRPG, I will link to the other blog or put a placeholder here for later.

At the rate I’m going this is still probably a 10 year project so we’ll see if I’m still around in 2028 to finish Thracia 776.

SRPG Game 4 – Langrisser (Stages 6-10)

I got so into the game sometimes I forgot to take screenshots…sorry.

Scenario 6 – Attack on Baldia Castle

After burying Volkoff, Ledin comes back to retake his castle; King Ilzack is presumed dead, so it’s sort of a hollow victory

The team gets split into two sides, so it’s important to have a balance of units in this stage to take care of the Dark Elves (archers), Soldiers, and Horsemen. In the end I didn’t find this stage very hard. Even the Lord on his throne doesn’t have much against the whole team — this tends to be true in these games, that once you get control of the battle by beating most of the units, the last few (even a boss) aren’t very hard. I’ve found that a lot of times you can beat a boss just by throwing all your underling units at it because even if they die, as long as they do at least a point or two of damage it reduces the boss’ effectiveness and makes it easier for the succeeding troops to do their jobs.

Chris is surprisingly effective as a direct fighter. One of my biggest problems with this game is that I feel like combat is unpredictable in many ways. There are some general guidelines as to which units are good against other units, but sometimes I think I’m going to do well and get my ass kicked, while other times I assume I’m not going to do anything and have a huge victory.

Scenario 7 – The Hero of the Fort

Ledin decides to chase the units fleeing from Baldia and try to fight them all the way to Digos.

Albert the Knight is defending a fortress against attack. From what I saw in the Genesis version you do actually have to go quickly, but for me Albert never even came close to being under threat of dying (which loses you the stage). This was a hard stage, though.

Albert defending the castle

The most difficult part of the stage for me is the Lizardmen. They’re quite powerful — in the water I had trouble even attacking them with Tyler (Crocodile/Serpent Knight with Mermen). If you lure them onto the land they’re still formidable opponents, and you have to cross a bridge to get to the main area. They don’t necessarily like coming towards you until you start crossing the bridge.

A useful spell is Zone, which cast on a leader, removes the bonuses they give to their units. These bonuses are often quite substantial. Unfortunately Zone can fail, but since you can reload the save, you can just keep trying it.

There are also reinforcements of Lance and another unit, all with Horsemen. I had Ramu with Elves, which are not very useful on the stage as a whole but once the Horsemen come out they can do good damage.

Scenario 8 – Pursuit

I found this to be a pretty straightforward scenario; a mix of units to deal with the varieties of enemies, and I was fine even with Lance and his reinforcements.
 
Scenario 9 – The Rapids of Warus

This scenario is annoying. The top and bottom half are separated by a large water area that most units (Tyler excepted) cannot cross at more than a square or two at a time. You first have to deal with lizardmen that come towards you — it’s frustrating to me that Tyler is unable to fight them directly with his Mermen. Instead I just had to draw them on to land and take them out with Horsemen from other guys.

What Tyler is good at is taking out enemies that charge at you across the water, which in this stage is mostly just Lance’s reinforcements. Other than that, it’s a matter of taking out the Lizardman and the reinforcement Kraken, then taking everyone over the water at a snail’s pace, and finishing off the guys at the top.

Scenario 10 – Castle on the Lake

At least this time they give you a bridge to cross. There are Elf and Soldier reinforcements so I left some appropriate units behind. First job is to draw the Lizardmen onto land, although only one group will come at the beginning. The others will sometimes attack on the bridge and sometimes not; it’s hard to tell what influences that.

After reaching the castle itself, it’s the same basic enemies as the previous stages.

Ledin reached his hidden Hero class, so this is my team now:
Ledin – Hero
Chris – Bishop
Jessica – Bishop
Namu – Lord
Tyler – Serpent Knight
Albert – Knight
Thorn – Grand Knight

Namu is seriously falling behind in power so I need to work on her. She, Chris, and Jessica have the hidden classes (Ranger, Princess, and Sage respectively). I still have 10 more stages to attain those classes.

I’m not saying a whole lot about the story because up to this point there really isn’t much — Ledin escapes the castle, recruits some troops, comes back and retakes the castle, and goes to beat Digos. There’s little dialogue beyond what you are doing next, and not much character development.

PCE Game 22 – Tengai Makyo Fuun Kabuki-den

Tengai Makyo Fuun Kabuki-den (天外魔境 風雲カブキ伝)
Released 7/10/1993, published by Hudson

Here we are with another Tengai Makyo game. It came out just one year after TM2, and stars Kabuki Danjuro, one of the characters from that game. It has a lot of returning characters from both of the previous TM games, so if you’re a big Tengai Makyo fan I imagine this is a great game. For me, it’s not. The gameplay has not changed at all, so this is still basically a system from 1989, which is showing its age in 1993 compared to other games on both the Super Famicom and the PC Engine. The irritating inventory limit (one of the most severe of any game I’ve played so far) is still around, and the combat is still pretty basic. They changed the look of the combat to a side-view FF4 style, but this doesn’t change the system at all. It also doesn’t help that I find characters like Kabuki annoying, and so I’m not especially keen to play a game where he’s yelling at me the whole time.

As with the previous games, this game has a lot of cutscenes, voice work, and good music. It opens with Kabuki acting in a performance, saving some women.

Later that night, Orochimaru (from TM1) sends a letter asking Kabuki for help, and then visits him in person. Apparently the Daimonkyo from the first game are back, and Orochimaru wants Kabuki’s help in defeating them.

Kabuki refuses, until that night when all the women in Kyoto disappear. Now he’s interested, and vows to get them back and defeat the Daimonkyo again. The first task is to break into Joko’s mansion; he has usurped the rich Tycoon’s seat (from the first game) and allied with Daimonkyo.

A combat

Eventually Kabuki makes it into the mansion and fights Golden Gambie. Once Kabuki beats him, Gambie loses interest in serving Joko and leaves…causing Joko immediately to surrender.

Now on the way to the next place, I got three game overs from random encounters, and that was as much as I wanted to play the game. The second half of the game is in London, which sounds interesting, but I just don’t like the game system enough to play it more. If you liked the first two games and are fine playing the same thing again you’ll enjoy this. 

Tengai Makyo will next appear on this blog in quite a while when I get to Tengai Makyo Zero in late 1995. It will be interesting to see how a franchise that banks so much on the presentation will handle the shift to the Super Famicom, and whether they’ll finally update the game system.

I am now caught up to the SFC games! This game will return to being mostly Super Famicom from here on out. I’ll make a post in a few days about how things will go.

(Actually I noticed that the next game on the list would be Langrisser for PC Engine, which I am playing on my other blog strategyrpgs.blogspot.com — an interesting coincidence!)

PCE Game 21 – Tenshi no Uta II Part 2

I left off last week on a cliffhanger, where the heroes are going to confront Ramiam in the castle. Now that we have the Sero Ark, we can fly to the castle, although we have to do some fetch quests first for a key and some other things. In the castle, we find the other Ark (Agnea) parked beneath the surface. After beating a monster inside it, the Ark starts to break down.

Farn is able to stop it and get it under control, but this hurts him and he has to stay behind while we go to confront Ramiam. He is waiting deep in the castle, with King Ragnakarn and Riana trapped in a sphere behind him. But once Ramiam uses the Lucifer Cells on Ragnakarn, this seems to restore Riana’s memory, and she remembers her purpose and breaks out of the sphere, rejoining the group as we fight giant Ragnakarn. Once defeated, Shion appears and tries to kill Ramiam, but three Demons from the upper world (who may have been in TnU 1) come and take him to the surface.

Unfortunately Farn has to stay in the exploding Agnea to prevent the Orichalcum from causing a huge reaction that could destroy a continent. So we tearfully leave him behind and head out in the Sero to the initial tower from the beginning of the game, where Riana will take us to the upper world.

Raphael appears and once again refers to Riana’s “judgment”, but leaves as we all float up to the surface world. The party finds itself in the world of the first game, in Penzance Village. Now that they have a map, it’s easy to see that it’s England.

Riana and Fate are the only ones here; the other ones are hopefully on the surface too but we don’t know. Immediately we are tasked with taking a girl named Tiara to Montgomery Castle. The person who gives us this task is none other than a very old Enya, one of the party members of the first game.

It seems that it’s been about 100 years since. Now once we leave the village, there’s a cutscene where the main character from the first game, Kearu, shows up.

After beating Lucifer in the first game, Kearu was cursed to live forever until the Lucifer Cells are all gone, which has become his goal. For reference, here’s what he looked like in the first game:

Raphael also shows up, listening in and hearing that Lucifer Cells are in the upper world as well.

Fate and crew continue to Montgomery, where the King decides that Fate is the one to fix what’s going wrong in the upper world as well — at the moment, this is constant rain that won’t stop (I can sympathize with this right now!). Of course as is normal for RPGs, we need a ship. This involves a fetch quest and then we can take a one-time trip to Ireland. There, at Cork Castle, we’re told that if we get a Eureka Flower (the first quest in TnU1) and offer it to the gods from a high sacred place, that can stop the rain. Fate’s party gets help from a young knight (really a boy) Alef, who is the descendant of another TnU1 character.

Alef tells us about Kearu, especially that if he manages to cleanse all the Lucifer Cells, he will die himself, but that’s still his goal. A nearby cave has the Eureka Flower, which acts as an unlimited heal item. At the top of the tower where we hope to offer the flower, the priest Marius returns, unfortunately taken over by Lucifer Cells.

Once he’s defeated, this is the last of the Lucifer Cells, so Kearu will now die.

Claire, the Angel from TnU1, comes to welcome his soul to heaven.

Now there are some side events you can do that I’ll skip over. The main goal next is to get an actual permanent ship, now that the rain has stopped. Along the way we pick up Dewey and Ranzo from the lower world (Dewey was saved by Fate throwing the sword into the portal). However, what we end up getting is not a ship but an airship!

You can visit the pool from the end of the first game where Claire’s father spoke to her. This time it’s Claire that speaks to you. Now we’re at the endgame. In order to reach the Devil Castle where the final confrontation will take place, we need two swords to cut through a barrier. One is found in a sea temple. At the top of the temple, after recovering the sword, Raphael appears.

It turns out that the rain was actually send by the Angels from the heaven world to destroy humans — this was the judgment that Riana was supposed to announce for the humans. Raphael tries to take Riana away and move forward with destroying the world.

But Fate cries out for Riana, and she’s able to reject Raphael’s influence and stay with Fate. This is the “choice of the fallen angel” of the title, and Raphael seems to accept her choice.

Unfortunately, this is where my playthrough ended. The other sword is found in a cave. When you reach the cave, an event is supposed to happen that opens the entrance. I could not get this to happen. I looked for anything I could online. I pored over the single walkthrough that exists carefully, and went back multiple times to various places, talking to everyone and doing things the walkthrough mentioned to see if anything would happen, but I could not get the event to happen. This could be an emulation bug. More likely, there’s some small thing I missed that the walkthrough (and diary) writers did without realizing it was necessary to open the cave.

Fortunately I can use the play diary to at least see what happens in the story. The Devil Castle opens with the two swords, and the party heads through, fighting the three subdemons that had taken Ramiam away. Once you reach Ramiam, all the rest of the party members (except Fahn) show up, and you get to freely pick 3 of them to fight Ramiam Satan, the final boss.

Once you beat Ramiam, he tries to capture Riana again, but Shion kills him with the Magic Sword he grabs from Fate. The ending scene has the wedding of Riana and Fate. Fate thinks he sees Shion for a moment, but he disappears — was it an illusion? The end.

So this is not a bad game. The story is decent, especially for 1993. The gameplay is braindead but that’s to be expected — at least with the speedup key it’s not annoying. I just wish I had been able to actually finish the game!

SRPG Game 4 – Langrisser (PCE) (Stages 1-5)

OK, let’s get this started.

Scenario 1

As the introductory story indicates, Ledin begins in the castle Baldia, under attack by the evil forces of Digos. The goal is simply to escape the castle with Ledin. I feel like this should have just been a cinematic scene rather than a stage — it’s odd to make the first stage one where you basically can’t do anything. There are entire walkthroughs on GameFAQs for how to actually beat the enemies, but I didn’t want to start out using that much help so I just stuck around for a few turns to let Jessica get some Xp and then left.

Ledin, buying soldiers


Your other character is Volkoff, who is the Jeigan character of this game. He’s very powerful but cannot gain any XP or class change. Rather than trying anything fancy I just bought no soldiers and escaped.

Scenario 2

Namu the fighter leads us out of the castle while Ledin’s father the king stays behind. Ledin vows to come back and rescue his father later, but he soon meets Chris (Kurisu, a mascot for this blog apparently!), a priestess who is on a pilgrimage.


The stage might seem tricky because you have to protect Chris, who tends to head towards the village at the north. But from what I could tell she’s basically unkillable — her priestesses will get slaughtered but the enemies had trouble doing much damage to her, and she would almost always heal on her turn if she were hurt. I imagine multiple commanders targeting her at the same time could have taken her down but that never happened.

That being said, I did a lot of resets. There’s a “memory save” that you can make anywhere that lasts as long as the power is on, so I reset as often as I needed to to make sure that Ledin got most of the kills. Even giving Volkoff the weak bowmen, he still could often kill everything in one hit. But in the end I was able to get Ledin enough xp to level him to 10 and class up to a Lord.

Hawking and Thorn will come from the top left to steal your XP but I was able to get up there soon enough to at least get the leaders. Hawking recognizes Ledin as the prince and offers to help him recruit troops to take back Baldia castle.

Scenario 3

But that night, the town comes under attack by the same bandits that attacked in stage 2. So this stage is in the town, with a lot of NPC units and townspeople to protect. I probably was too cautious in this stage — I was worried about the townspeople dying (since that loses you the stage if they all die). I killed some troops with Volkoff and didn’t get Ledin as much XP as I could have.

Chris heads into the church and the townspeople follow her there. I think that even with the reinforcements that come in near the church, the doorway chokepoint would have protected enough of the civilians that I could have taken my time and gotten over there to get more XP with Ledin. But it’s not easy when there are 5 hero groups on the map, 3 NPCs, one Volkoff who can’t get XP, and then Ledin. I would have liked Chris to get more XP but all she does is run away.

Scenario 4

An interesting scenario; Ledin is heading back to the castle. Namu has met him in the town and told him that Baldia has fallen, and the King rode out alone to fight the enemies. Ledin decides they need to go through the Spectral Forest to get back in time.

All the monsters are slimes, and your guys can barely damage them. So I sent out the three leaders with no underlings and ran away. In 5 turns, Chris and another dude come in with “Guardsmen”, who apparently use some kind of fire attack that’s effective against the slimes. They’re NPCs as usual, but they can chew through all the slimes. I got a class up for Chris to Bishop.

There are multiple class paths for each character; I’m just going to take the one that leads to their secret new class.

Scenario 5

On the way to Baldia, we meet Lance’s army. This is the first stage that has no NPC player units. All five of the leaders (Ledin, Volkoff, Namu, Chris, and Thorn) are under my control. Thorn has limited class up potential so I want to use him less often.

There are a lot of horsemen in the enemy forces, so I made sure to send Volkoff and Ledin out with Light Elves (who are effective against horsemen). I split my force, sending Ledin and Namu up to the top, and Chris, Volkoff, and Thorn to the right. This is the first stage I really used magic — Chris’ “Zone” magic removed the huge bonuses Leon granted to his troops, and Ledin’s Shield magic helped Namu fight a bit, although I was not able to get her class up.

The idea in that picture is to weaken the enemies with Volkoff’s troops and then kill them with Chris. It worked a lot better than I expected.

After the battle, Lance tries to attack Ledin but Volkoff gets in the way and takes the hit…this looks like the end for Volkoff but we’ll find out next time.

List of games

Someone asked for a list of games in a comment. Here’s a link to the rough list I’ve been working on as a google doc.

It’s complete through 1999. In the “Notes” section:

  • Question marks indicate I’m not sure if it qualifies as an SRPG or not. I’ll make final decisions on these later.
  • “RMK” means “remake” and two stars mean that there’s a remake of that game. 
  • An “x” means that I’ve already played the game so I won’t be replaying it, though I will make a post on it. 
  • The greyed out games are ones I’m not even making a post about, either because I’ve decided they aren’t SRPGs, or because I’ve played another version of the game (e.g. Langrisser for Mega Drive is greyed out because I’m playing the PC Engine version.)