Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 (ファイアーエムブレム トラキア776), released 9/1/1999, developed by Intelligent Systems, published by Nintendo

At long last, we have reached the final Super Famicom game I will be playing (final in terms of chronology). It may seem strange that this game came out so late in the lifecycle of the system (the PS2 was released 6 months later!) but there is some logic behind it. Nintendo had started a service called “Nintendo Power” (no relation to the US magazine) that was kind of a resurrection of the Famicom Disk System kiosks. You could bring a writeable cart into stores and get games on those carts for affordable prices. Depending on the size of the game you could even get multiple games at once. The games were mostly older SFC games, both third party and Nintendo, but some new games were coming out as well.

Fire Emblem was one of the last new games released for the system — in a way you could say it was the last “real” game. The only games released later than FE5 were four Picross games, a Picross ripoff game, and the visual novel Metal Slader Glory: Director’s Cut (a remake of a Famicom game). FE5 did get a real cartridge release in January 2000, making it the last new cartridge game released for the system. These cartridges are hard to come by, usually in the $400 range on ebay (which still is not as expensive as some SRPGs I skipped buying).

The game is primarily known for its high difficulty level, and for being the final Fire Emblem game that Kaga Shouzo worked on.

The storyline takes place during Fire Emblem 4’s story. I don’t know how much connection there is between the stories though — this may be entirely a “gaiden” storyline that doesn’t impact the main narrative much (obviously they couldn’t make any big changes).

The gameplay seems like a return to the “classic” FE style although at this point you could argue there was yet no classic style. In any case, the system is basically FE3’s, with some new elements and some additions from FE4. The major new gameplay elements are:

• Gaiden chapters – This becomes a standard feature of the series. By fulfilling certain conditions you can unlock optional maps.
• Fog of War – Some of the maps have limited visibility; you can see more by using a Torch item.
• Capture – There is a new stat called “build”; if your Build is greater than the enemy, you can “capture” instead of attack. If you reduce the enemy to 0 with the Capture command you take the enemy, and on the next turn you can take their equipment before releasing them. The capture attack is less effective than the regular attack, and if you are carrying someone that halves most of your stats — I overlooked these things when I initially read about the system, which hurt me until I figured out what was going on.
• Rescue – This is basically Capture but for allies. You can get them out of harm’s way with this.
• Escape – This is an alternate goal that replaces the usual one of getting Leaf to the throne/castle. You have to get your party all to a certain point on the map. Leaf must escape last, or any remaining troops on the map will be “captured”.

So here we go. I am using my usual Fire Emblem rule — I check walkthroughs for factual things like how to get the gaiden chapters and secret characters, but not for strategy advice. I also make one save state per map that I can go back to if I lose a character.

Stage 1

The first few stages are not especially difficult, so it’s a good way to get used to the system. I captured a lot of units in the first stage (one of the villagers even tells you to do this), because I had heard resources are at a bit of a premium.

Stage 2

The second stage requires you to save all the houses (except that one in the image that starts destroyed) in order to get the first Gaiden chapter. As with stage 1 this isn’t especially difficult, although I did have to reload my save state after Marty died trying to capture a level 10 pirate.

The biggest issue I had was with the boss, who I could barely hurt. However, I was reminded by the FE discord that the Light Sword and Fire Sword cast spells as their range 2 attack (the party doesn’t have a mage or healer at this point). I think this was a new feature in FE4 that I had forgotten about in the 4 years since I played it. With that it was easy. (Actually I think this is stage 3 rather than 2…)

Stage 2x

This is the first fog of war map. I decided I would just play recklessly the first time so that I could get a feel for how the stage was laid out…but it turned out this worked fine and I didn’t need to restart. I used one of the two torches I got in the stage to widen the field of view. You can also get some additional people on your team.

Stage 3

You want to return the 4 captured children here to their homes (using the Rescue) command, so that you can get some later bonuses. The main thing you want to do is defeat the Bishop near the boss before turn 10 so that he does not go for the chests and start casting nasty spells at you.

The only thing that tripped me up here is that after a while, 2 bandits will appear and head for the houses to destroy them. If you leave a couple of guys down there it’s easy but I didn’t do this, so I had to reload state a bunch of times to figure out how to block them from destroying the houses.

Stage 4

This is where the difficulty ramps up a lot. I think I reloaded more times than in any other FE stage I have played, and I had to completely restart the stage. A big issue was that (as I mentioned earlier) I completely overlooked that capturing halves your attack, and that if you are holding a unit, most of your stats are halved. This meant I was playing at a huge disadvantage, and once the discord let me know about this it became somewhat easier.

You start with most of your guys in prison, with no equipment. This makes the stage tricky because while you can get some items out of the chests (including whatever Leaf had), there aren’t really enough to go around unless you planned in advance.

While you are doing this, reinforcement spearmen come out. One thing I learned about here was “Capture baiting” — if you have a unit with no weapons, the enemies will capture them, and that will halve their stats and you can fight them more effectively. There are two issues though. The first is that the enemies will try to escape the map, and if they do, you lose the character (at least for a while). The second issue, which I did not know until later, is that the enemies will take any items that the character has, except for some rare/unique items. I ended up losing a fair amount of stuff due to not knowing about this (including a Rapier, an Elfire book, a thieves’ pick, and probably some other stuff).

Once things are under control, you can let the 6 citizens loose and they will start escaping the map. You need all six of them to escape to get the next Gaiden map.

After all of that, you’re still not done, because the route to the Escape place at the top has more guys in it. I was very fortunate to have an Armor Killer I could give to Fergus, but even so I had to load state a lot. I cannot imagine playing this game having to restart from the beginning of the stage if I lost a character here. But eventually I got everything to work out right, and I finished the stage.

Stage 4x

I was warned that this was a difficult stage, and I can see why — you start out with 4 mages and 4 armor knights heading straight for you. I feel like I got lucky in being able to deal with it on my first try; I did not have any particular strategy but somehow I managed to have everyone survive. Probably some lucky dodges and unit placements that were inadvertently good.

After that the rest of the stage is pretty simple — you do have to be careful of a mage that’s hiding in a room and an armor knight with a Devil Axe. Reinforcements come, but you have Sety as an NPC that is basically invincible and can deal with them all.

That’s where I will end this post — I’m up to stage 8 at this point but I’m not going to be able to play much for a few weeks. There won’t be a post next Saturday but then after that weekly updates will resume.

Puyo Puyo Gaiden: Puyo Wars (ぷよぷよ外伝　ぷよウォーズ), released 8/27/1999, developed by Compile.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a Gameboy game, 1995’s Another Bible. The big change in the meantime was the release of the Game Boy Color in 1998. Nintendo had apparently experimented with color handhelds since 1992 but they weren’t able to make one that was battery efficient and cost effective enough to make the release worthwhile, so they shelved the project. But by 1997, the developers were beginning to tire of the aging Gameboy, and the release of the Wonderswan challenged the Gameboy’s dominance and made Nintendo go back to developing the GBC. From what I can tell, the GBC was essentially based on things they had already made years before, but could now be done more cheaply. Meanwhile, they worked on developing the Game Boy Advance, which was released in early 2001.

Nintendo made the wise decision to have backwards compatibility with original GB games, as well as preventing 3rd party developers from simply re-releasing their old games with some new splashes of color — if you were going to rerelease an old GB game in color you had to also add some extra content to it. This prevented the system from facing a glut of lazy re-releases of old games.

Some games (like the one I’m reviewing here) were made to work with both Game Boy and Game Boy Color, while others required the GBC. I’m not sure whether the GBC-only games generally had superior graphics. I have eight GBC games on my SRPG list but a few of them are remakes and I’m not sure whether a couple of them actually qualify as SRPGs or not.

This game, of course, is part of the Puyo Puyo franchise (itself an offshoot of the Madou Monogatari franchise). By the time this game came out, there were four main Puyo games, and a number of spinoffs, including the Nazo Puyo franchise, as well as a Mystery Dungeon-like game. Unlike all (or most?) of those games, this SRPG game does not involve the familiar characters like Arle, and it takes place in a completely different world. I am not familiar enough with the Puyo franchise to know if there are any connections between this game and the main series, but there aren’t any obvious ones (the Pixiv article on this game suggests there are some).

In the setting of the game, the puyos ride in mechs called Tectors. These Tectors can be upgraded, and equipped with weapons and accessories, although most weapons have some kind of level requirement to use them.

Once a puyo reaches a certain level, they can combine with others. Each puyo can be a Center, Left, or Right element. The Center elements are limited to a few characters, and most others are L or R. At first you can combine a Center with either a R or L to make a double, and later when they level up more you can combine L-C-R to make a triple. The interface is a bit annoying because you can’t upgrade the mechs without undoing the combination and then recombining them, which means you have to then reequip the items.

There are 620 different Tectors you can get, which are entered in a collection book. You get prizes for reaching a certain number. I only collected about 30 during the game — the number of individual units you can get in the game is fairly limited, and so I guess those 620 are all just from various combinations.

In addition to the story characters, there are two other ways to get additional puyos. The first way is that the main character can do a Convince on certain units — you can tell which ones because they will be unique units on the stage, and they won’t have the same “angry puyo” look that most of the enemies have. The second way is to do various “Nazo puyo” stages during the game. These present challenges, such as “defeat all enemies in 2 turns”, and clearing them gets you a unique puyo — I think most of these cannot be combined or upgraded, and they are somewhat bizarre in operation.

Battles are on the player phase-enemy phase system. Each unit has a certain number of AP — usually 2, but occasionally 3 (or more in the case of the nazo puyo bonus units). 1 AP can be used for a move or attack, in any combination.

Some attacks have elements. Each character has 5 elements which can range from 0-5, affecting both their attack and defense. You can raise your puyo’s elements by using Cologne items. You get these for clearing the stages in low turns, which will also give you a money bonus. The money is used in the main character’s home to develop new weapons or upgrade mechs. You can also upgrade the entire research facility to unlock more weapons and accessories for purchase, to a maximum of rank 9.

You can replay stages as many times as you need to — stages have items you can find on them, mostly in obvious places. If you replay a stage the boss probably won’t be there but you’ll still be able to pick up any items you missed (and level your characters if you need to). There is also a battle arena that I didn’t use.

I cleared the game in about 12 hours so it’s not very long if you don’t spend that much time building up your team — by the end I was basically relying on 4 combined units.

The story is surprisingly serious given the game’s origin. It uses a number of these inset graphics which I always appreciate and wish they had done more of in retro games. The story takes place on Planet Gaia, where Puyos and humans once lived in harmony. But scientists discovered how to use the devastating Puyo Energy contained in a single puyo to create weapons, and soon they created weapons that could destroy the planet. But the gods used their powers to remove Puyos from the planet and erase their existence from people’s minds.

But generations later, people discovered images of these Puyo in ruins, and were able to recreate the Puyo, which once again became a pet. Then one day a scientists was searching for “wild puyo” (that had been released by their owners who got tired of them) and found the main character in a capsule as a child. He raised the boy as his son, and when the game starts, he’s a 12 year old who enjoys battling Puyo in arenas. The rest of the story basically ends up as a “destroy the world to avoid it from developing puyo weapons again” with some hidden backstory of the main character and such. It’s nothing revolutionary but it’s not bad.

Overall this is a perfectly serviceable game — it has the usual limitations of a handheld system from this period, but there’s enough content to make it worthwhile, especially if you enjoy trying to fill up the collection book or do the arena battle. The Nazo Puyo dungeons are a nice callback to the Nazo Puyo games.