Funky Fantasy (ファンキーファンタジー), released 12/13/1996, developed by Yoshimoto Kogyo

It’s hard to know what to expect with a game called Funky Fantasy, and when you see the character designs it doesn’t inspire confidence:

The game was developed by Yoshimoto Kogyo,a large media conglomerate that manages mostly comedians and comedy groups, although they’ve been branching out in recent years. All of the characters in this game have faces of comedians or entertainers that were managed by the company at the time — I have no idea how popular or well-known the people were at the time (or still are).

The story is basically a string of parodies, cliches, and gags — the princess Bunny Muno (above) has lost her kingdom and has to gain allies and fight to get it back; that’s pretty much the whole story — even the few twists or developments are just parodies. The game is also pretty short, with only 16 stages. The parodies draw from a wide range of sources, and there are probably a lot I missed. I noticed Gundam, Sailor Moon, Evangelion, Dragon Quest, Ninja Hattori, and even Sakura Taisen and Langrisser:

So we have a game produced by a comedy entertainment company, using weird character designs and a plot mostly centered on gags and parodies. Surely this must be a terrible game? Well….no. I can’t say that it’s particularly good, but the designers didn’t just copy other SRPGs. There are a lot of new gameplay elements and innovative features. I wonder if the non-traditional background of this game gave it both potential and ultimate disappointment — the fact that this wasn’t a major game development studio allowed them to avoid simply making a clone of other SRPGs, but they didn’t have enough experienced staff to actually implement their ideas in a balanced and satisfying manner. This is just a guess, though.

The rocking horse thing there is the White Base parody, your main ship. Bunny controls it and is a summoner. The way you get your people on the board is to combine them with monster types and send them out.

Each character has a class (with a promotion at level 10). The combination of the character and the monster will produce different skills — for instance if you combine a Ninja with a Centaur Lord, the unit will have the Steal skill from the Ninja class, as well as a ranged attack from the Centaur Lord. The stats of the unit will be a combination of the character and the monster.

If a unit is defeated in battle, they can be re-summoned as long as they have life points remaining (the candle on the picture above). However, summoning costs MP, and the higher level the monster, the more MP it costs. You gain MP every turn, 2 MP for each of the magic circle pentagrams you control on the board. You gain control of a circle by moving any unit onto it, and it will then remain under your control until an enemy unit goes on it.

The enemy often has a summoner as well, and so they’ll be trying to capture the magic circles as well. If there are named units on the enemy side they will also have life points — often the goal of a map is to either reduce someone’s life points to 0, or kill their summoner and then kill them. However, the enemy summoners can bring out an unlimited number of grunt units; they still cost MP but don’t have life candles. This is one area I thought they made a mistake on in the game; too often it’s impossible to actually reach the summoner because they can just keep pumping out endless numbers of units, and it’s difficult to actually advance and make progress in the stage.

When you make an attack, the units to the left and right of the attacker, and left and right of the defender, all participate (up to 6 units total). Confusingly it’s not 3 vs 3 but can be 5 vs. 1 or 4 vs 2 as well, despite what the picture might look like above. Characters on the attacking side can participate in the attack even if they have already used their turn to do something else (like shooting, casting a spell, whatever).

I think that if this were the entire game, it would be quite difficult due to the unbalanced nature of the enemy ability to do unlimited summons. However, there is one more aspect to the game — the card system.

Before each battle, you form a deck of 60 cards from your total stock of cards. These cards include ones that increase your attack for the battle, increase defense, do damage to enemy units, increase movement speed, steal cards, and others. Using the cards during the stage does not permanently use them up; they’ll still be in your stock when you make your deck for the next stage. The enemy also has a deck of cards. Each turn the side will draw 2 cards from their deck.

You can use as many cards as you want on a turn or before a battle. Often when you have your first encounter with the enemy, they’ll unload all their attack cards on you, making it basically impossible to win unless you have an “absolute defense” card.

Between stages you can buy cards for your stock, as well as weapons and armor for your characters. Eventually I sunk most or all of my money into damage dealing cards, which I think are the best way to get through the later stages.

I found this game quite difficult in the beginning until I learned some of the peculiarities of how the system worked. Stage 5 is a big wall because there’s this Kraken that you can barely hurt; you need to figure out cards and magic by this point.

Even afterwards, the game remained fairly challenging until the last 5 stages or so when I could make a deck that was 2/3 damage dealing and “draw more cards” cards. I would then rely primarily on those cards to hurt the bosses, along with fire spells and ranged attacks. I don’t think I did any regular attacks after stage 10. For units, I thought the most useful were the Ninja (who can steal enemy cards) and the spellcasters. The best monster was the Centaur Lord because of its 5 range attack.

There were some elements of the system that I never fully understood. Sometimes I could not use my spells or abilities and I wasn’t entirely sure why.

So in the end I can’t really say this is a good game, but at least it tried something new. I would have liked to see a followup that refined the system, but there was never a sequel and I don’t think Yoshimoto Kogyo made any more strategy games.

Here’s another Playstation game, this one trying to use the power of the console to do something that couldn’t have been done on older systems.

The back of the package for this game and the instruction manual make it clear what the goal of the designers was — to make a game that felt like playing an OVA (original video animation). The game has over an hour of anime sequences stretching over three CDs. However, maybe this goal was prophetic as to the ultimate quality of the game itself. Anyone who has watched anime OVAs from the 80s and 90s knows that they were often rushed and incomplete, being made primarily to support manga that told the full story behind it, or perhaps to springboard to some other project. An hour of anime is impressive for a game, but when it’s the primary vehicle of the storytelling, it’s not enough.

Designer VING does not seem to have done all that many video games; at least I can’t find any information about them beyond this game.

The manual gives the backstory: 2000 years ago there was a thriving culture on Jupiter. The Cor Del group started out as an environmental protection agency, but later developed weapons to protect the planet. The nobility feared its power, and there was a civil war. After a long war, the Empress Freya sent her young child Lavis to Earth, but the capsule malfunctioned and landed on the Moon instead. In the end, the nobility won the war with a powerful weapon, and Cor Del retreated to outer space.

2000 years later (in 2008 — so this huge war on Jupiter was in 8 AD?), the descendants of Cor Del, calling themselves the Baskil Empire, have returned suddenly to attack the solar system. The main characters are part of the force that fights them (despite the title, “Harukaze Sentai V-Force” doesn’t appear in the game at all).

The anime sequences are well done; they clearly put a lot of effort into them and I would say they are as good as the anime that was coming out in the period (granted, the resolution the PSX can produce is lower). The main characters are three sisters of the Aoi family — Kagetsu, Natsuki, and Mizuki, as well as Natsuki’s childhood friend Yukina. Their father runs a weapon development company that helps make the attack planes they use.

The first stage is just Natsuki against 3 enemies by herself, followed by some reinforcements and then other units show up. On every stage you have mostly nameless grunt units, plus the main girls. Only the main named characters can gain XP and levels.

On each turn you can move and attack (in either order). Some units (especially ships) can do 2 or even 3 attacks in a turn, although still just one move. You can’t take back your move, which is quite annoying. There are also “option” parts you can use to do things like repair, or raise evade/hit.

When you attack, there is a little anime sequence showing the attack.

This was an interesting decision and probably limited the number of different units they could have. I turned the anime off. Another weak point of the gameplay is that the attacked unit can’t dodge or counter, just sit there and take the hit.

If any of the main 4 girls dies, you get a game over. This becomes a big problem because the units you have are quite weak, and can be defeated in 2-3 hits for the most part. Hit rates are high for the enemies. So you find yourself needing to inch forward slowly, using the unnamed characters as shields — or you can just use save states. This is what I did; I’m not a big fan of having to restart an entire stage because I made one wrong move, particularly in a game that isn’t all that great to begin with.

On stage 2 we have to help another squad destroy a mothership. This stage allows you to choose your weapons and Option before you start. I always made sure I took a Repair Kit as one of the options. For weapons, you do need to think about the choices; the weapons are good against either ground, sky, or “large ship” and have different hit rates, damages, and bullet amounts. The motherships on your side can resupply and repair you with a command on their turn.

I finished this stage fairly quickly and wondered if I should have spent more time beating all the enemies to level — in the end I don’t think it’s necessary. The game’s only challenge comes from the “main character dead = game over” system, and a few levels isn’t going to help that much.

Now let’s appeal to our young male audience some more:

The first four stages don’t have much in the way of plot progression, it’s just fending off various attacks by the enemies. There are a lot of named characters on the enemy side but most of them get very little development. You can check a database of characters from the main menu to see more information about them.

On stage 5 we head into space, and learn that Natsuki has dreams of a mysterious boy; there seems to be some connection between them due to their shared Jupiter descent. Stage 6 and 7 are fighting off the enemies around the moon, and then we finally head to Jupiter. Even though the Aoi girls are still inexperienced, the losses to the Earth side have been so heavy that they don’t really have anyone else.

On stage 7 you get left without the ships so you have to do the stage with no repair. Also, Yukina feels called to Jupiter

Jupiter has some ruins that they investigate, and one of the enemies (Gaichi) is investigating on the enemy side. Gaichi realizes that all the people who were sent to the Solar System are just disposable pawns.

They find some kind of plate which seems to resonate with Natsuki, but then they have to leave. Stage 9 is very long; you have to move Natsuki and Yukina in their bikes through a stage while defending them with other units. The two main people move really slowly. In Stage 10 you have to lure a mothership onto a base to blow it up and destroy the ship. Then in Stage 11, Natsuki has a vision from the Jupiter plate and a mysterious mech comes out.

It’s piloted by the boy that Natsuki saw in her dreams, and he tells Natsuki that Yukina is actually Empress Freya’s daughter, who was found in cold sleep and raised as Yukina. Gaichi decides that if that’s the case, she needs to protect Yukina, and switches sides.

Stage 12 has you destroying some large supply centers. The centers have 3 attacks each and can gang up on a person and kill them, so it takes some caution. The characters are in upgraded ships by this point so I no longer felt like things were quite as precarious as early in the game.

In Stage 13 we have to move one of the girls in a bike with no weapons to a place on the map where she can drop a bomb, and then escape. It’s a long, slow stage but not especially hard.

In stage 14 the enemy Emperor shows up. Something starts to go wrong with the Jupiter mech and Ikos (the pilot) loses control over it.

In the final stage we end up having to shoot down the mech, killing Ikos. Then the Emperor appears — Gaichi is actually his daughter. We have to destroy the Emperor’s ship, then the Emperor’s mech that appears (I was able to do this in 1 turn so I’m not sure how hard it is).

In the ending scene, the Earth people destroy a warp gate so that the enemies can’t bring more forces as easily. But it’s revealed that the Emperor was simply a clone of General Zai, who is eager to use the data provided by the Emperor’s attack to come back in greater force and conquer the Solar System. Obviously this is the setup for some kind of sequel which was never done; there were rumors that one was being developed for the Dreamcast but it didn’t happen.

Ultimately I can appreciate what they were trying to do with this product, but it’s just hard to make this kind of thing work. I don’t know of any game for any system that makes extensive use of anime scenes the way this does — probably because it costs a lot of money to do that, and then you have less to spend on the other parts of the game. 15 stages is way too short; the story has potential but no depth, and could have easily been a 30-40 (or even more) stage game. Too many of the characters are undeveloped other than their profile entries. The gameplay lacks depth the same as the story.

I agree with one closing comment I saw on a review of this game — shouldn’t this have just been an anime?