Jikuu Yuuden Debias (時空勇伝デビアス), released 11/27/1987, developed and published by Namco
This is another side-scrolling action RPG. One notable thing right from the start is that the game came with this code wheel that is supposed to help you choose the correct doors throughout the game. If you don’t have the wheel you should not try to play the game without a walkthrough because you will be wandering randomly a lot, and that wasn’t the intention of the game.
The story is the usual basic one — a spirit or god called Aaron brings the ancient hero Debias back and sends him out to save the kingdom from the enemies.
The game has gold that you can buy equipment and items with, but no experience levels. The “spirit” and “tech” amounts are both used for the final choice on the right menu, “Aaron”. By using this command you talk to Aaron and can do various things — ask for hints, find out if you missed key items, warp back to town, exchange a life segment for a healing item, and such. Some of these choices involve that code wheel I mentioned above.
You start in a town. Make sure you use the “talk” command because you can attack the townspeople; killing them subtracts Spirit. There is a day/night system, so if night falls you will have to fight off monsters until it becomes day again. The first task is to talk to the king to get the specifics of your quest and some money. After buying some basic equipment it’s off to the first area.
Your character can do three different types of attacks, plus jump, which helps against the various enemies. However, this is the second area:
I died 15-20 times trying to get through this area. Missing a jump is a death and when you get hit by those bats, most of the time you get knocked back into the pit and die. Dying halves your gold and Tech. This is where I decided that I wasn’t going to play much of the game (that and the lack of the code wheel).
I think there is some interest in this game with the Aaron system (especially if you have the code wheel), but I just didn’t want to deal with the jumping.
Faxanadu (ファザナドゥ), released 11/16/1987, developed and published by Hudson Soft
This is another game in Falcom’s “Dragon Slayer” series. At this point there were four games in the series. The first game had been released for a (now) obscure system (the Epoch Cassette Vision), and the third and fourth games had come out in Famicom ports. The fourth game also was released in English as “Legacy of the Wizard”. Xanadu and Xanadu II (which were considered both the second game in the numbering) had yet to come out for a console.
Originally Faxanadu was supposed to be a port of Xanadu, but by the time it was released it had deviated so far from the original game that it was given the name Fa (from Famicom) + Xanadu and had become its own game. Faxanadu was released in English — I never played it but I remember seeing it in Nintendo Power magazine.
Romancia and Legacy of the Wizard are not really RPGs to me; Romancia is more of just a side-scrolling action game and LotW is perhaps an “adventure” game instead (or whatever genre you want to label it). I think Faxanadu is closer to those games than “real” action RPGs, although the line between an action game and an action RPG is very fuzzy.
Faxanadu does have XP levels, but they have virtually no effect on the game — they don’t increase any stats. When you die, you are returned to the last church where you got a password. Your money is reset to a value that is determined by your XP level. This seems to be the only effect of your level other than the odd fact that winged boots last for shorter times as you level up.
(Incidentally, the original Japanese version has actual churches with a cross outside and a Catholic-style crucifix (with Jesus’ body on it) behind the priest. Both of those were removed and the churches are referred to as “guru houses” instead. This is an example of the type of censorship that Nintendo required in the 80s and 90s.)
This is the Japanese version
The game has a few weapon and armor upgrades, but only 4 of each. There are also a few magics that you can acquire. Some of these are bought at shops, others are found around the maps.
The game is roughly divided into 3 areas, and you access the next area once you finish some task (for instance, to get to the second area you have to restart three fountains). I think this is a game that could be reasonably finished without much help — there are a few tricky parts that have non-obvious solutions but nothing on the level of checking every stone or tree to see if there is a secret.
To fight, you basically just have attack, jump-attack, and using your magic. The number of enemies is fairly limited so once you learn each pattern it’s a bit easier, although the fighting system sometimes seems rather limited.
Probably the most annoying part of the game are the jumps; you often have to do running jumps that require fairly precise timing, and if you fall down you have to repeat the whole area again. This isn’t so unusual for 1980s action games but it can be frustrating.
The storyline is a typical “save the world from the demons” story. What is impressive about it is that the text actually uses a lot of kanji — this is something that you don’t see much of in Famicom games, and even late into the Super Famicom era you see some games that aren’t using as much kanji as this. I’m not sure what it was about this game that encouraged them to do this.
On the whole, this is definitely one of the more playable games of this early Famicom era. I played about half of it; the lack of RPG elements made me not want to play that much more but it’s not a bad game for the time period at all.
Artelius (アルテリオス), released 11/13/1987, developed by published by Nihon Bussan
This game reminds me of Zoids — you walk around an overhead map and then when you encounter enemies, you get taken to a first-person action screen where you shoot the enemies.
The game begins with the story in English (one walkthrough I saw said that step 1 is “read the Japanese story from the game manual”).
You then go through a little introductory sequence where you become a cyborg and assign your stats. I evenly divided them but this is not what you should do — STR is the most important attribute.
You can save anywhere, but it costs 10 money (grr).
The main screen looks like above. You wander around, and when you encounter one of those balls, a fight begins.
The fights don’t have a whole lot of strategy — you just move the aim around and shoot the enemy until it dies. If it shoots at you, there is no way to dodge. The big issue is that if your STR is not above the enemy’s Shield rating, your attacks do 1 damage each. You will still kill them eventually, but it takes a while.
Basically all you do is wander around and move up levels. There are some shops but they just sell items that go away after a while.
A place where you can heal for money
There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of depth to this game — I played for a while and never really found anything interesting. There are warp gates but you need a certain “weapon level” to enter some of them. From what I can see in a walkthrough, the majority of the game is just going in these gates to find passwords to open other gates, and to gain enough levels to be able to enter the future gates. There seem to be only a tiny number of things you actually have to do to finish the game. This combined with the very repetitive battle system makes this a pretty unappealing game. The Japanese reviews I saw of it weren’t very complimentary either.
Saiyuki (西遊記), released 11/11/1999, developed and published by Koei
This game is something of a spiritual successor to Houshin Engi which I played last year. They both are based on classic Chinese novels but essentially tell a new story. Saiyuki (Journey to the West) is one of the most famous novels in the Chinese tradition and is well known in Japan; its influence extends to tons of media, including Dragon Ball. As you can see from the image above, this was actually released in English.
The basic story of the novel (which I actually read in English translation last year), is that the monk Xuanzang takes a long trip from China to India to bring back Buddhist scriptures. He is accompanied by several supernatural companions, most notably Sun Wukong, the Monkey King. The novel is basically a series of episodes: usually it starts with Xuanzang being captured by demons, and then the other companions have to rescue him and defeat the demons.
Rather than follow this episodic structure, the Koei game essentially rewrites the entire storyline. You start by picking a male or female Xuanzang. She then receives the mission to go to India by Guanyin (same as the novel), but the purpose of her going is unclear. She gathers many of the same companions as in the novel, but there are some additional ones (I think they may come from the novel as well, they just aren’t primary companions).
Xuanzong’s mission is to pick up these divine spirits along the way and put them in her staff, and then bring them to the Thunder Temple (which is where Xuanzang gets the scriptures in the original book). Along the way, they are opposed by Demon Spirits which want to get the staff for their own purposes. Their motives are also unclear at first but eventually the antagonist is revealed, and the usual world-destroying plans.
The storyline is serviceable but nothing exceptional. The characters get some development, but mostly the main characters rather than some of the optional characters you can get.
The game is divided into 4 chapters. Once you move on to a new chapter you can’t go back to the previous areas.
While you are in a chapter, you can move around to the various towns and places. You won’t find any random battles unless you take a job in the pub which has you delivering objects to various places for money. If you do that, there is a chance you might get attacked by monsters or bandits. You can also fight in dojo in each town.
So there are opportunities to raise levels and money, except in the final chapter. Once you move to chapter 4 you can no longer access any shops or grinding opportunities, which is frustrating.
The battles are speed based (although each person gets one turn before another one gets two). Height and facing count, and there is elemental compatibility as well. One really nice feature is that when you choose an attack, it will show the expected damage that every unit on the board will take from that move. However, that expected damage does not include any modifiers from elemental/height/etc so there is some uncertainty.
If Sanzou (Xuanzeng) goes to 0 hp you get a game over. For the most part this isn’t a huge deal since there’s a lot she can do without engaging the enemies. Her main power is to summon the spirits you gain during the game, which stay for 3 turns. They affect the stats of everyone (or restore HP, etc) and they also give Sanzou herself a 0 mp attack move she can use. The other characters are simply removed from the battle if they reach 0, and will return afterwards.
With the exception of Sanzou, every character can also turn into a huge beast form. They get a lot more HP and can use some very powerful attacks, but once they use up a certain number of points of attack they go back to regular form. You get more total points by levelling up a general “beast level” after each battle.
Each character has the usual armor slots. Their weapons are fixed and can only be upgraded by paying money at blacksmith shops in the town. Additionally there are 8 slots for magic spells and accessories. The spells depend on the elemental levels of each character, which increase with level ups as well as from using the same spell over and over. I’m not sure whether the elemental levels affect the damage or general use of the spells themselves.
Visually the game is fine. The character portraits are large and detailed, and the map sprites are fine. The 3D maps can be rotated and the angle changed. Every so often it becomes a bit difficult to see where characters are but most of the time it’s OK.
The difficulty of the game for the most part is relatively low. I did have to grind some at the end of chapter 2 — there’s a 3 part battle at the end and my levels were a bit too low to deal with it.
Chapter 4 (the last one) is annoying because there is no shop, so if you enter there and it turns out you are low on equipment/items or your levels or too low, you just have to restart a save from chapter 3. Because of this I did a fair amount of grinding before I went in. I thought I was fine because it turned out the battles in chapter 4 were relatively easy — particularly once I learned how good the Stone magic is (it’s basically instant death).
The final battle is a different story though.
Various reviews of the game call it “ridiculous” and “unfair” and I can’t disagree with that. You have the central head and 6 surrounding arms. All of them can use AoE spells. The first problem is that it becomes very difficult to keep Sanzou alive because there’s nowhere safe to go. In general it’s hard to keep pace with the damage the boss does. I tried a bunch of times, both ignoring the arms and going solely for the head, and also trying to take out the arms first. I could not beat it, and so this is yet another SRPG that I stopped playing at the final boss.
From looking at some walkthroughs and videos, I missed an optional spirit that is powerful and also some good hidden equipment. My levels didn’t seem that much lower than some of the others but I’m not entirely sure what the issue was. It’s possible that if I just kept trying I could beat it — you can make saves at any point in a battle so I guess you can just constantly save until everything goes right. But I decided to just move on instead.
Other than that final battle this is a decent game but make sure you have the best equipment possible for your 6 primary guys and enough items before you go into chapter 4.
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Next up is Growlanser, but I won’t be playing that until after new year’s. I am going to queue up some Famicom game posts for December and I will most likely play Dragon Quest IX over the christmas holiday.
