Langrisser Millenium WS: The Last Century (ラングリッサーミレニアムWS THE LAST CENTURY), 3/9/2000

Although the Langrisser series proper ended with V, Masaya continued to develop a few more Langrisser games though I don’t know how much (if any) the original development team was involved. The Dreamcast Millenium game was a strange action-strategy hybrid, but this Wonderswan game is in the style of Langrisser 1 and 2.

I don’t know if the storyline is directly related to the other Langrissers. It does have the swords Langrisser and Alhazard in it, but I didn’t see any obvious connections to the other games beyond that. It may just be that I don’t have a great grasp on the Langrisser lore, though.

The game is entirely in black and white, of course. Fortunately the text is a large, readable font. The graphics do sometimes interfere with the gameplay — it can be hard to tell exactly where your characters can move because the highlighted ranges blend in with the background. I had this problem with SRW Compact 1 as well but they had solved it by Compact 2.

The interface as a whole is not as good as it could be. You can get the needed info without too much trouble, but the game doesn’t have the auto-moving troops (I forget when that was introduced), the equipment interface is more annoying that it needs to be, and the battle sequences with no animation are a little confusing to figure out since you get no information at all about what happened, you just have to look at the HP of the units afterwards (especially chaotic during enemy turns).

The story is pretty similar in style to previous games. It plays out over 17 stages, with one single branch in the story. I didn’t do both routes so I’m not sure exactly how the story changes — the way the choice is framed, it does not sound like this is a drastic story change along the lines of the “Imperial” route of Der Langrisser. But I’m not sure. (I did find one Japanese blogger reviewing the game who said there was basically no difference; it results in you joining one of two sides but regardless, the other side plays the same role in the story and you get the same final boss.)

The main character is a 15 year old boy who farms with his mom. Some thieves attack to steal their animals, and after fighting them off it turns out that the boy is actually the prince of a defeated kingdom and that his “mom” is not his real mom, but the remnant of the Imperial guard of that kingdom. So the boy has to go out on a quest first just to beat the bandits, but gets swept up into a larger plot involving two sisters who are trying to prevent an ancient weapon from waking. It’s all pretty typical stuff with nothing too surprising but it works as a standard RPG plot.

The gameplay is pretty much what you would expect from the older Langrissers. It’s completely turn based and on a grid. They’ve added a few new types of units (the thief/straight sword, and monk/fist units) so the compatibility table is a bit more complex. But they don’t have any monsters, so I guess it works out to about the same in the end.

Perhaps due to system limitations, you only have 5 commanders with a max of 4 units each. The enemy forces tend to be small too. The map design is not as varied and complex as L1 or 2 either, with most missions just being you vs enemies on a flat map. Only a few of the maps involve any kind of obstacles.

The game is quite easy. The beginning parts can pose a bit of a challenge here and there, but it seems to be easier and quicker to level up than in the other games and once you reach the MC’s third class (much less the optional King class), the game doesn’t offer much challenge anymore. The enemy AI is also not especially smart in some cases; there were multiple maps where the commanders of the enemy units acted before the rest of their troops, and came in and attacked someone who killed them from full HP on the counterattack.

In the end, this game is notable as the last hurrah for the traditional Langrisser style (going even back before the real-time experiments), but the game is so short and easy that it’s not going to feel particularly fulfilling to people who are itching for more of the classic gameplay, especially when combined with the black and white graphics and often clunky interface.

Having said all that I should put in my usual caveat for handheld games from this era. It can be somewhat unfair to judge them now because a big advantage of these games at the time was that you could play them away from home, or even just in your home but without having to be in the TV room (or take up the TV someone else might want to use). So even if the games were simpler and shorter than the main console games, they were still often worth playing. But that advantage doesn’t exist anymore unless you insist on playing everything on original hardware.

Aura Battler Dunbine (聖戦士ダンバイン 聖戦士伝説), released 3/4/2000, released by Bandai

Dunbine is a 1983-4 anime series by Yoshiyuki Tomino, about young man who is summoned to an alternate word Byston Well to fight a war in the small magic-mechs called Aura Battlers. I’ve never seen the series although I’m quite familiar with it from its repeated appearances in Super Robot Wars. There will be spoilers for the series in here if you care about a 40 year old anime being spoiled.

Rather than directly following the story of the anime, the game involves a new person from Earth as a main character, who gets summoned to Byston Well and then soon ends up as the king of one of the small countries. All of the characters from the original series appear in the anime and the story can roughly follow the path of the anime although there are numerous branching paths.

The two major story branches are the “Law Route” in which you fight against Drake Luft (as in the series), and the “Chaos Route” where you join him. Within those routes there are 4-6 endings for each one, although some of them seem to be slight variations of each other.

There are a lot of choices you make during the game, although it’s hard to tell how many of them are actually affecting things or whether they are just slightly changing the next battle’s layout.

There’s no good walkthrough for this game (you can find one if you use archive.org but even it doesn’t cover everything) so I just made whatever choice I felt like. I ended up getting the ending that is basically the TV series. I opposed Drake Luft. About 2/3 through the game, the event happens from the series where a character named Jacoba Aon sacrifices her life to expel all Aura Battlers from Byston Well to Earth, and the rest of the series takes place on Earth. The series ends with virtually all of the characters being killed in a climactic final battle, although I remember reading that there’s some indication that their souls might go to Byston Well. This is clumsily handled in the game; after the easy final battle where no one on my side died, there’s this vague ending narration that would be incomprehensible if I didn’t know what it was supposed to be describing from the anime.

The ending screen then says “Game Over”; I don’t know if it always does that or if it simply indicates that I got a bad ending.

The (now deleted) site I mentioned above did seem to include all the endings, some of which are better than the TV one. The most intriguing ending is one that you can get by not using any aura battlers during the game and doing some other things, which results in your characters not being sent to Earth with the rest of the characters, and eventually living in peace in Byston Well. I suppose this could be considered a good ending? In another one, you can defeat Drake and Bishott before the “expel aura battlers” event occurs, which is another way to have a more peaceful ending.

Overall, though, the story seems kind of thin — so much of it is just “OK now which target are we going to attack” without much development of the characters or situations. This may have been necessitated by the high amount of variation in what characters you would have on your team, what the alliances would be, etc.

Your entire force starts out as these dragon things which I don’t remember from SRW (probably because they are not mechs). Once you progress in the game a bit you can start buying and developing aura battlers. There are something like 60 different ones you can get, but this aspect of the game is pretty clunky and undeveloped. The story mostly forces you to go to specific places so your opportunities to buy ABs are very limited, and it’s not particularly easy to find new ones to develop either. I hardly developed any mechs throughout the game, relying mostly on the ones that the game gave me. It just didn’t seem worth the money or trouble to try to get that system working.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) you don’t really need to develop any mechs because the items you can equip on the mechs are extremely powerful and can easily make even the Dunbine or other early-game mechs competitive at the end of the game. I spent the majority of my money on these items — you can also buy some new weapons as well but I pretty much ignored this too. You can always build up more money by going to the local forest for a free battle but this didn’t seem necessary.

The battles are also pretty disappointing. There isn’t much care put into the map design; mostly it’s just your force against a group of enemies all put together like the image above, and you have little to do but just move towards them and fight head-on.

The game is on a speed-based turn system, so speed is a good attribute to increase via items. You can move and then attack — one thing that I didn’t realize at first is that you have to manually change your facing at the end to make sure you are in the right direction to use attacks. Ideally you want to attack them from behind, of course. You can counter, dodge, or block (although some options will not be available depending on distance and facing).

You have an Aura point meter that goes up as the battle proceeds, and you can use that to do special attacks. I didn’t find the special attacks did all that much more damage than the regular hits.

Occasionally you also have these one-on-one combats. First off, the two images above are the regular image and then the second has 4x internal resolution turned on, which makes the sprites look a lot better.

In these one-on-one combats you just wait until the turn bar glows and then you can hit circle to choose a command (I think if you let it fill up completely it does more damage). You might have to move into range if you want to use a melee attack. These also were pretty basic and boring because the animations take so long; as long as your main character’s mech has enough good items on it it’s hard to lose any of the fights.

On the whole I found this game fairly disappointing. The battle system is not developed enough to make it fun to go through all the stages, and the mech development is limited. The story is OK but as I said above, too reliant on long stretches of plot development that is little more than “here is where we should go next”. The multiple story paths and possibilities for endings are interesting and do give the game some replayability if you want to go that route. The “no aura battler” thing would be very tough.