Monthly Archives: May 2025

JRPG 29/30 – Haja no Fuin (FC/SMS)

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Haja no Fuin (覇邪の封印), released 10/18/1987 for Sega Mark III and 10/23/1987 for Famicom, developed and released by Sega (SMS) and Ascii (Famicom)

This game was originally released for computers in 1986, then ported to consoles in 1987. It came out for both the Famicom and the Sega Mark III (the Japanese name for the Master System). Both versions look rather different but from what I can tell, they are essentially the same game. This is the first of only three RPGs for the SM3, and it was released in the US as “Miracle Warriors: Seal of the Dark Lord.” So there are already two detailed playthroughs of it: one on RPGConsoler, and one (surprisingly) on CRPGAddict‘s site. The Famicom version is closer to the original computer version than the Sega version was.

The game contains most of the aspects that are common in these early RPGs: you start out plopped down in the middle of a map without much idea of what to do, you get very few hints on how to progress, and you have to spend a while just figuring out where you can go without instantly dying. I may be wrong about this, but I believe that at the very least this game does not have vital hidden things that are nearly impossible to find without a guide.

This is the main game window. The bottom left is the map — one of the changes in the Famicom version is apparently that you can see farther but I’m not sure of the details. You can’t see what is actually in each square until you step on it; then it will show a town/cave/etc in the top window. The top window is also where you see if monsters are there.

So a lot of what you would need to do at first is map out the world to see where the various castles, towns, and other points of interest are. The Famicom version, at least, came with a big world map:

This does not, of course, show everything’s exact location in the game, but it gives you at least some way to get your bearings. The Sega version (at least the English port) also comes with a map but the is different — I . One big change in the Sega version is that you can see the towns and castles on the inset map in the game, whereas you can’t in the Famicom version even if you have discovered them. This makes the Famicom version more annoying to explore and travel in.

When you encounter a monster, you get this image. You can hit A to encounter it, or just move on. However, some monsters will attack automatically without letting you choose. (This is also different in the Sega version)

In the battle, you attack with a character (eventually you have a party of 4). Attacking makes both you and the enemy take damage, and the attacking character gains XP. You can keep doing that until the monster is dead, or you can try to flee — fleeing always works, but you might take some damage from the enemy when you do it.

You can also encounter non-monster characters. You can still fight them, but you lose reputation, which has various effects on the game. You can try to talk to them, and they can give you tips or just turn away.

You start with 10,000 money, which seems like a lot, but it doesn’t go as far as you might think. Most enemies do not give you money, and you have to spend money both to heal and to repair your weapons and armor so that they don’t break. I think it would be possible to get yourself into a situation where you have to start over because you have no money, although I suppose you could try to get out of it by killing some of the good characters for their money.

You start on a castle where you get a quest to find Kosama for advice, although of course there is no indication of where she is in the world. There’s actually very little that you have to do in order to win the game; most of your activity would be to explore and do optional things to strengthen your party. Once you have your four party members you can take on the final boss.

I found Kosama but then basically stopped there. This game does have a unique style of gameplay that you may find more interesting than a Dragon Quest clone, but it also comes with a lot of awkwardness and difficulty in finding out what to do. My impression is that the Sega version is a lot friendlier and easier to play.

SRPG 111 – Ogre Battle 64 (N64)

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Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber (オウガバトル６４), released 1999年7月14日, developed by QUEST, published by Nintendo

This is the first Ogre game I played — my brother had an N64 and got this game. He had played the original OB but for some reason I never did. I really liked this game, and possibly based on that I really could never get into the original game. But it seems like a lot of fans had the opposite reaction: they liked OB but found that OB64 was simpler and less strategic in many ways.

Matsuno Yasumi, the creator of the original Ogre Battle and Tactics Ogre, was not involved in this game, which may account for some of the fan disappointment as well.

The story is considerably richer than the original game, which didn’t really have much of a story. Here there are story sequences before and after each map, making it more of a Tactics Ogre style game in that respect. The game is marked as “Episode 6”, thus putting it between the original Ogre Battle, and Tactics Ogre. But my impression is that there are not strong story connections between the games.

The gameplay is broadly similar to the first game. The size of the squads is increased from 3×2 to 3×3. The maps on the whole are smaller, meaning that the focus has shifted away from trying to protect towns. Probably the biggest change deals with my biggest annoyance in OB: In the first game, if you beat a squad’s leader, they rocket back to the home base at top speed, and the instant they touch the base they are immediately revived to full strength. OB64 probably goes too far in the opposite direction; here when you beat a squad’s leader they become frozen or flee randomly away, meaning that defeating the leader is effectively defeating the squad in most cases. I think that they could have found a happy balance between these two extremes.

There are other changes — they introduced this “centurion” system which is nearly useless due to the limitations put on it and the low strength of the squads. Squads have “tiredness” values and they have to camp every so often to recover. Other small changes develop the system from the first game.

The battles work the same way as the first game — each character carries out a predetermined set of moves, and then whoever did more damage “wins” the battle, with the loser getting pushed back. What moves characters will use depends on where you put them in the formation.

I decided not to replay this whole game because it’s rather long and there are other games I want to get to in 1999. Also I found it hard to map the N64 controls to my Dualshock 4 in a way that felt natural.

Please share your opinions in the comments if you played this or OB, but my impression from reading both Japanese and English sites is that people who were big fans of the original game found this game a bit disappointing because the gameplay changes on the whole made the battles easier and less strategic (although the beginning of the game is a bit harder). I had the opposite reaction because I played OB64 first and really liked it.

This is the effective end of the “main” OB series games. There are two more side games: Prince of Zenobia, and Knight of Lodis. After KoL in 2001, the only other activity has been two different remakes of Tactics Ogre. I’m not sure what the status of the series is or why they never made a new main game after 1999. By this time Matsuno had already gone to Square and worked on Final Fantasy Tactics, and after that did work on FF12 and FF14. Matsuno did join the development team for the 2010 remake, but perhaps he is no longer interested in extending the series (or there’s no more audience for it).

Sorry for another short entry of a game I’m not really playing — next week is also going to be like that (Haja no Fuin for the Famicom), but then there will be a full post on Real Robot Sensen. Doing this gives me a bit of a buffer so I don’t need to write a month of posts on one game like I did for Vandal Hearts II.

JRPG 28 – Ultima: Exodus (FC)

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Ultima: Exodus (ウルティマ 恐怖のエクソダス), released 10/9/1987, released by Pony

This is the first Western RPG to be ported to a console. It’s a port of the third Ultima game, released for PC in 1983. I remember playing this at a friend’s house as a kid — we didn’t really know what was going on and never got very far. I then got into the Ultima series as a whole later, and while I played a bit of the computer version, I didn’t get very far then either. It’s not an especially good game, as might be expected from such an early RPG, and the Famicom port doesn’t do much to address the game’s flaws. I’m not going to play it much, especially since there are a number of high quality playthroughs in blog form already. Particularly:

Instead, I will write a bit about the Japanese release in particular, and also where it fits into the history of JRPGs that I’ve been looking at. In some way I realize this is a bit artificial — technically this game is the first console RPG to have a party of 4 characters (and one of the few multi-character games at all up to this point), but that’s not all that relevant because within two months, there is Final Fantasy and Wizardry. It’s not like people at the time were playing these games exactly in their release order.

The party of 4 characters with class choosing is something that is not in too many games of this era (although as I said, Wizardry and Final Fantasy are only a couple of months away).

I do believe this is the first grid-based pseudo-SRPG style turn based battle system, and I don’t know when the next game with this style of battle comes out. It makes the battles slow, but I suppose it provides more depth than just button mashing.

It fits in with most of these early RPGs in that a good portion of the game is just wandering around figuring out what you are supposed to do. It has first-person mazes in addition to the top-down exploration of the world map and towns. The advancement system is unusual, with levels only giving you HP (and increasing monster difficulty); you have to find shrines where you can buy stat upgrades. A lot of the game is just building your stats slowly in this way.

The game was actually released with quite a lot of effort in Japan. Richard Garriot visited Japan to do an autograph event, and there was an associated pop song called “Compass of the Heart” by Hidaka Noriko. People might recognize her as the voice of Akane from Ranma 1/2, Near from Death Note, or Noriko from Gunbuster.

She’s also an NPC in the first town:

I’m Hidaka Noriko. Have you bought my records?

Apparently the dialogue in general was changed quite a bit and there’s an actual ending sequence, but overall the game is a close port of the PC version. You might think that this was attractive in the days where there were very few RPGs available, and maybe it was to some players. But as I mentioned above, I played this when it came out in the US and did not think it was particularly fun.

SRPG 110 – Vandal Hearts II Chapter 3 and 4 (PSX)

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I finally finished the game. Overall the strategies I mentioned in the previous post worked for most of the battles. I didn’t find any of the remaining game exceptionally challenging.

Just some notes on selected battles:

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This battle isn’t especially hard but the narrow gangplanks make it difficult to deal with the spellcasters and bow people easily.

One interesting option you can use that I didn’t mention before is this:

It shows you the move/attack/spell ranges of all enemy characters who have not yet acted. This is good to use when you are trying to draw the enemies into your range without getting hit — another thing you can do is move one character into the mage’s spell range (after they have moved) and then move them out on your first turn to waste the mage’s spell.

One thing you also start encountering here are status effect casters; the ones that can use Minimize and Sleep are especially nasty — as I said in the last post, it’s difficult to deal easily with status effects.

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This battle has a lot of flying units and mages, and since the boss flies, it’s easy for her to get into a position where you can’t attack her with many of your units. By this time I had 3 characters with fly armor.

41

I didn’t get an image of this somehow. This is probably the most difficult battle in chapters 3 and 4 — you have to fight 3 bosses, and there is a knight way at the back of the map who can use Reanimator twice to bring back one of the bosses. At first I tried to get flying units out there to kill the knight but it didn’t really work, so in the end I just killed the bosses as they approached, and let the knight bring them back. They come back with half their HP and less MP than before — I lost over half my units, but I did manage to beat it in the end.

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This is another one I didn’t get an image of. The only thing that is hard about the battle is that the main character starts much closer to the enemies than everyone else and since it’s up several tiers, it’s hard to get him out. If you just give him a flying armor it’s not that bad, though.

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Because you have to fight Godard you might expect this battle to be fairly difficult but I didn’t think it was. His spell is fairly damaging but once you eat the damage, you can beat him quickly.

This battle is potentially challenging because of the mage and bomb thrower up on a high tier, but if you take all of your guys to the right of the map they can’t hurt you. Doom will charge you eventually and you can deal with him like any other boss.

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The revived Godarl has 999 HP and 999 MP but since he’s by himself, you can just surround and kill him. I think he only got off two spells and I was able to completely heal from the first one.

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The final battle is surprisingly easy. There are only 4 stationary enemies, and two of them can only attack with range 1. It seems like maybe the big head should have had an attack, or maybe allow it to revive any defeated enemies so you have to beat them at the same time, or something like that. As it is, this is one of the easiest battles in the game.

There are four separate endings — I got ending B which is an OK ending; none of the endings are super positive but it’s better than the C or D ending.

To get the best ending you need to answer “Make Amends” to Adele, “You Protect Her” to Clive, and you need to have the Vandal Hearts sword near the end of the game. In addition, if you obtained 100% of the weapons in the game there is an extra scene at the end which also gives you a code for “advanced mode”. In this mode, all of the enemies come at you right from the beginning on every map. If you get the best ending again, then you get a special message from the developers.

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Overall I enjoyed the game — the weapon system was interesting and the storyline overall was good. Objectively speaking I’m not sure the simultaneous movement system is really all that good, but it does give you a different kind of strategy than you are used to, in trying to anticipate the enemy AI to get the most effective results on each move.