For some reason the last three posts did not show up unless I was logged into the admin account — I only noticed this today. It seems to have been caused by an issue with a cache plugin for wordpress. So you should be able to see the last few weeks of posts now.
Too bad it’s just my slow crawl through Shining Force III but I’m on the last stage so we’ll be moving on soon!
Still not quite done, but this post will go to the end of chapter 5.
Chapter 4 starts with a “save the NPC” mission — what’s nice about SF3 is that you can control the NPCs so you don’t feel like you are having to fight against stupid AI. Another weird thing is that there is a thief among the refugees, and if you want all the bonus items you have to intentionally get the thief killed by moving him into the enemies. I lost one villager but decided not to retry. Mainly I just moved the villagers towards my troops and used the monk to hold off one of the enemies.
The next stage is pretty annoying. There are these lightning towers that can damage both you and the enemy, but where they shoot is hard to tell and predict, so I just took damage as I moved forward. There’s also a ruins with an optional robot character you can get, but it’s frustrating as well.
You have to use Zero to reach two switches (which don’t even look like switches on the map) that open doors for the rest to go through. If you don’t have Zero ready, or do the switches in the wrong order, you may run out of time to reach the thieves and the robot character.
The next stage has King Dominate’s “Rainbloods” fighting against the enemies; you can mostly ignore them but you do have to be careful because the enemies will still attack you if they can. You also have to freeze an area of water to cross over, but the person that actually does the freezing can’t cross before it melts so you lose that character.
This next stage sucks. You have to use ship cannons to attack the cannons of the other ship; the rest of your guys can’t do anything except fight a couple of bird enemies that will visit, and just sit and get hit. What was especially dumb about the stage was that after the first person I had in front of the cannon died, the NPC Donhote moved into that spot to attack an enemy. He would not move at all after that, or use the cannon, so I lost the use of that cannon for the rest of the battle which made it impossible to destroy all the enemy cannons.
Fortunately you do not have to destroy them all to move on to the next stage, it’s just some bonus XP. Chapter 4 ends with a battle on the ship itself — some of the grunt enemies on the stage are quite difficult but the boss himself isn’t too bad and a lot of the enemies won’t move even if you are in their range.
Next you have to break out your guys from prison using only 3 characters. First off it’s hard to find the secret door to get to the prison — you have to remember a scene from the beginning of chapter 1, and given how complicated the town map is for this I had to use a video walkthrough to find it, and even then it was difficult (see my Grandia posts for my hopelessness navigating 3D maps).
Once in the prison, you have to steal a key from the enemy, then one by one open up the jail cells. The freed people have to first go to a table to get their stuff. There are reinforcements that come out of two doors; they are fairly limited, but I still found it easier not to free everyone, just to free enough people to go towards the boss. (There’s a bug you can exploit in this stage also; if you use Return in this battle any items you used will be back in the inventory. You can use this to get lots of stat ups or tons of money)
The next stage has multiple maps; first you have to kill all the outside enemies then go into the big mansion and beat the enemies there. Once again the enemy AI is a bit weird and they won’t always go for you when they can, and King Dominate is there with some soldiers to draw some of the enemy attacks.
Now for the next 4 or 5 stages, you have King Dominate with you, and if he dies it’s game over. For the most part this isn’t too problematic since he tends to move slowly and not jump into dumb places. What it does is slow down the game a lot — the game is already slower than it should be with the unskippable animations but having all these NPCs makes it crawl more.
This next stage starts the appearance of these tank-like shooters (you also get one on your team).
The last chapter 5 stage is in a cave against some bosses — this is probably the most dangerous stage for King Dominate but as long as you don’t rush all your guys forward immediately it’s not too hard to protect him.
David is completely useless at this point; I can’t even level him up enough to make him useful so he’s benched. Hevda dies in one hit to everything but she can still cast some useful spells so she’s fine.
I’m partway through chapter 6 so I should almost certainly be done with this game by next weekend; it’s taking me much longer than I wanted it to.
The rest of chapter 2 is not too bad. Chapter 3 takes place mostly in this wooded area that has a very annoying map to traverse, especially when you retreat and have to make your way back to the battle.
New people join here. First up is David, who is not very good (apparently you should wait to promote him until level 14 and he gets a bit better). We’re going after his lover Hevda; this is apparently a reference to David and Hevda, an Israeli singing duo from the 1970s who were quite popular in Japan.
The next battle is probably the toughest of the game so far. Hevda is controlled by the enemy and if you want her to join your team you can’t kill her, so you have to leave her to use Freeze on your guys. There are also a bunch of spellcasting units clustered at the end that can lay waste to your force. The boss moved ahead to cast a spell on Medion, and thanks to that I was able to sacrifice the majority of my force to keep Medion alive long enough to kill the boss (ignoring the other enemies) to end the battle.
Hevda is not very good either (at least for now), her HP and defense are so low that she often dies to one hit of anything, which makes it hard to keep her alive long enough to actually do anything useful.
This NPC “Don Hote” (I guess a reference to Don Quixote) accompanies us for a while as we head down to the shores to cross at low tide. The final chapter boss is a big kraken. Julian joins here as well, and can come with items you left him with in chapter 1.
For the most part I’ve thought SF3’s graphics are decent given the other examples of this kind of polygon graphics of the period, but that Kraken monster is pathetic — it’s at RONDE levels of garbage.
It has the most HP yet and Zero has to use an orb on him to remove a barrier. Only one character can move close enough to do a range 1 attack, but with a combination of spells and ranged attacks he wasn’t too tough (he had some AoE attacks that could have been quite damaging but he tended to aim single hit attacks at Medion instead).
So this is only about half the game; I’m hoping to finish the game by next weekend but we’ll see.
I played a bit more Grandia but I think I am going to abandon it; if I were more than 1/3 through it I might tough it out to the end, but I just don’t like dealing with the 3D maps. In addition to that I find the battle system often feels sluggish, having to wait for all these spell and move animations to finish before you can keep playing.
So it’s back to Shining Force, then I rolled more random games. The first one I had already played so that will be the next old game (Seiken Psycho Calibur), the second one was a game called Jade Cocoon for the PS1, which I guess did come out in English.
Shining Force III Scenario 2 (シャイニング・フォースIII), released 4/29/1998, developed by Camelot, published by Sega
This is part two of Shining Force III; in system, graphics, etc it’s exactly the same as Scenario 1. The story here is focusing on Prince Medion and takes place at the same time as Scenario 1. In both that game and this one I found the plot a little hard to follow because of the parallel stories.
The game starts out very similarly to the first scenario; I thought the first few chapters were mildly challenging, at least in Shining Force terms. As usual the game is generally low difficulty because you can always retreat and try again, and even if your main character is killed and you get a game over, you keep all the XP you earned.
We start with the usual Shining Force group — the main prince character, a centaur lance user, a mage, and a cleric.
You can carry over your save file from Scenario 1; it will keep some flags that change what characters you can get, as well as making it so that some of the treasures are no longer available (because Symbios’ party already took them in part 1).
After the first 2 scenarios there’s (I guess optional?) centaur archer and fighter; it took me a while to find them because they are in a basement that looks like the HQ. I was also supposed to be able to get an additional character in the next town from doing something in scenario 1 but I guess I didn’t do it — I have a vague memory now that I was not able to save one of the characters because it was too difficult.
Battle 3 has the first ruins map; these are the same as in Scenario 1. You have to first acquire the map to the ruins and then once you enter it, a thief will appear. Some of the chests in the ruins can be opened, others you have to let the thief take the treasure first, then attack the thief to get it for yourself. If you use Return to escape the battle or get a game over, you don’t get a second chance (I’m not sure what happens if you use Return before you even open the ruins).
The next few stages are pretty easy; Battle 5 has Valiant as a boss but he didn’t really put up that much of a fight for me despite his spells.
Next up is this annoying port town where you have to maneuver around boxes and in and out of houses to go anywhere. The battle itself has a cannon shooting at you; it doesn’t hurt you but it knocks out parts of the walkways so that you have to go back and head a different way. It takes a while but only a few enemies are there at a time so it’s not so bad. You can save Stella (which isn’t hard since she won’t come towards you to attack) and I guess that will affect things in Scenario 3.
Since they took the ship we needed, now we have to go through this hidden cave. Hazuki the ninja joins up here.
That’s as far as I got this week. I’m going back to Grandia this coming week, and hopefully with Easter and the NCAA basketball tournament (nearly) over I’ll have more time to play.
Grandia (グランディア), developed by Entertainment Software Publishing, released 12/18/1997 for Saturn and 10/26/1999 for Playstation
This is a Playstation-era RPG that I’ve always heard good things about. It started out on the Saturn, and from what I understand the development team had also mostly worked on the Lunar series prior to this. From what I can tell, the Playstation port is essentially the same thing as the Saturn version; there were a few graphical changes and some bugs were fixed but there was no extra content or major upgrades.
The initial backstory involves godlike spirits called the Light Winged Ones using the power of the Spirit Stone to give blessings to people, but when the humans decided they wanted to become Winged Ones themselves, that darkened the spirit stone and broke it into seven pieces. Adventurers have sought out the ancient technology of the “Angelou” civilization that the Winged Ones used, but thwarted by a giant wall called the “End of the World” they’ve basically failed.
Our main character is Justin, a 15 year old who has a mom who was a former pirate but now runs a restaurant, and a deceased father who was an adventurer. His dad gave him a stone that he believed to be one of the seven Spirit Stones although most people now think that the spirit stones and Angelou are just legends. The beginning of the game involves Justin and his 8-year old friend Sue doing kid stuff with town bullies and such.
My biggest problem with this game by far is the 3D maps. I find them extremely difficult to navigate, and I am constantly getting lost, wandering in circles, and being unable to see where I can go. This game really needed an inset minimap — you can press select in town to zoom out like this:
But personally I do not find that sufficient to navigate the areas, and the dungeons don’t have that (they have designated spots where you can zoom the camera out). I’ve always had issues with 3D games; I was never able to get into Super Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time because I could not deal with the 3D environment.
Because of this it took me a long time just to clear this initial section where you are running around town trying to find things. In any case, once this is all done Justin wants to go to the nearby Sult Ruins to find out things about Angelou, and the museum curator gives him an intro letter to let him do so.
First we have to go through the Marna Road, and this introduces the battle system. Enemies are encountered on the map (symbol encounter) and you can get a surprise attack or be surprised. I believe that once you beat an enemy symbol it only reappears if you leave the map entirely, but I could be wrong about this.
The battles themselves are done in a kind of combination real-time and turn-based system. The bar at the bottom right shows the enemies and your characters, and they move right on the bar at a speed determined by their Action stat. When they reach COM you can give them a command, and then once they reach the end of the bar they will take the action. Being attacked can stop your bar movement temporarily or even return you more to the left (known as IP Damage). You can run into problems of stunlocking and being stunlocked, but I have only had this happen a few times so far.
The speed of Command->Action depends on the move, and the more you use moves the faster they will go off. A character who gets attacked when they are between COM and ACT will have their action cancelled and they’ll suffer IP damage. If they get hit when they are at the right of the bar but haven’t done their action yet they will be Countered for additional damage, but they will still get to do their action.
The basic actions you can take are Combo (two attacks; if you kill an enemy you will do an attack on another one), Critical (slower attack but can cancel enemy moves), Magic/Skill, Run, Item, Defend (either defense+ or evade+), and Look (see enemy stats and what they are doing).
Each character has weapon levels, and they gain XP from the levels by doing attacks or moves in battle. Levelling up the weapon levels gives you stat bonuses (i.e. a sword level gives +1 str and +2 speed), and if you reach certain levels you will unlock new moves.
For magic, you have to find a Mana Egg which you then take to a shop and use to give one type of elemental magic to a character (Fire, Wind, Earth, Water). There are three levels of magic spells each with their own spell point pool, and there are combinations of elementals as well.
So there is a lot going on in the fights. Overall I think it works fairly well; it feels fast paced and gives you more to do than just mash one button.
In the ruins we are introduced to three army women adversaries (Mio, Nana, and Saki); they’re also at the ruins searching for something on the orders of Mullen. They are part of the Garlyle Army, and they’re searching for some final piece to advance their nefarious plans.
When we reach the bottom, Justin’s spirit stone activates — it turns out that his dad did indeed give him a real spirit stone, and a mysterious woman named Liete appears, telling Justin to find Alent which is on the New Continent. So after escaping from the Garlyle women and Mullen, Justin decides to go to the New Continent. There’s a fetch event here where we have to clear out a mine of monsters to get a passport from an old adventurer, and then Justin tries to leave in the morning on his own, without telling anyone. But his mom realized what he was going to do and left a letter, and Sue sneaks on to the ship.
Also on the ship is Feena, an adventurer who is considered the best adventurer in new Parm. When the ship they are on encounters a “ghost ship”, Feena allows Justin and Sue to tag along to solve the mystery of that, which turns out to be just a big kraken:
Feena’s fire spells are deadly against the monster, and it goes down pretty quickly despite the tentacles. Now Feena sees that Justin and Sue have some real adventurer qualities, and tells them to visit her at her house.
In New Parm, Justin tries to join the adventurer’s guild with an introduction letter from his mom, but it turns out the head of the guild is the son of the old leader, and this guy is a complete tool who refuses to pay any attention to Justin. They go visit Feena, but then the new leader guy kidnaps Feena and tries to marry her by force. Of course we go save her.
We manage to save Feena, although she’s pretty worried about pissing off the adventurer guild because you can’t do adventures without their permission. But Justin helps her see the silliness of that idea and she tells the leader to screw off. She joins up with Justin to search for more information about the Angelou and try to bypass the World’s End, even though she’s skeptical that any of this is real.
First goal is the Dom Ruins, where Justin hopes he can learn more about the Angelou the same way he did at Sult Ruins.
Dom Ruins is a big place where you have to keep going back and forth between sides of it…I still find the maps hard to navigate.
The ruins boss was another enemy I didn’t find too hard, powerful spells and moves took it down pretty quickly.
After this, we do indeed get more information from Liete — it seems that Arent is on the other side of the huge wall so Justin is going to have to try to get past there. On the way out we find a child who is hurt on the ground; we try to help but it, but it needs some special herb to heal so this is another side fetch-quest. Once the herb is recovered, the child recovers but can’t speak to us because we don’t understand the language. Just then, then the Garlyle military shows up again. Apparently they’re the ones who hurt the child; they are chasing the “demi-human”(? I guess? I don’t know how the english translation deals with 亜人) for some reason. We’re all captured and set to be executed.
However, Mullen’s underling Leen appears to free us, or at least set things up so we can escape. On the way out, we have to fight each of the three military women.
They are all really fast and can often act multiple times for each action of yours. Saki was the easiest, I think. Nana is a little harder because she uses these yoyo attacks that hit a large area and are able to do IP damage so that it’s hard to get turns, but even so I was able to beat her fine. I think Mio is the hardest because you can get stunlocked if she decides to keep spamming her balloon move (that puts people to sleep) and the stungun move. But if you can start cancelling her attacks and get a bit lucky it’s not so bad.
We escape on a train, and the child (Rem) gives us some tree nuts that let us communicate with him. Unfortunately, the military is on the move.
But Justin manages to uncouple the train and disable the brakes so that the military people are sent forward while they can escape. Justin and the rest head for Rem’s village, hoping for some information.
This is as far as I got; it seems like this is only about a quarter of the way into the game. I think overall it’s fun but the 3D maps are really annoying. I believe that I will play Shining Force III this coming week and then return to Grandia the week after that.
Sakura Taisen 2 (サクラ大戦２), released 4/4/1998, developed by Red Company, published by Sega
This is the sequel to the original Sakura Taisen, which I covered earlier — the game is essentially the same as the first one so I won’t go over the basics again. There are only a few new features in the battles. There are combination super moves (which I never found useful), and then if two of your characters are both in range of an enemy there’s a random chance that they will join together in a combo attack. Finally, Ogami can change the overall tactics of the group which raise or lower move, attack, or defense. This last one is the only new feature that I found really changed the in battle tactics.
Ogami has been away from the theatre troupe for a year, and now he is back to meet his one true love Sakura. But of course new enemies threaten Tokyo. All of the girls from the first game return, along with two new ones.
Orihime is a half-Italian woman who seems to hate all Japanese men. Her mech has an area of effect attack although it does not target the spaces immediately adjacent to her.
Reni is from Germany; everyone thinks she’s a man at first but it turns out she is a girl. Her attack is like Sumire’s but it’s a 3-range rather than just 2.
The first stages proceed along the same lines as the first game — they’re a chance to introduce the new characters, revisit the old ones, and introduce the enemy group. This time the group is five demon-like characters headed by “demon mask”, called the Black Five.
In these first stages there’s not a whole lot of information about what the enemy’s goal is; they are doing everything for a certain unnamed person, and their main aim at first seems to be just to eliminate the Flower Battalion. In the first set of stages we manage to kill two of the five (Kasha the fire obsessed guy, and Suiko the ice person). At the same time, the Battalion is facing pressure from the army. One of the higher ups in the army (Kyogoku Keigo) does not like the group and uses political pressure to cut the funding, although we manage to reinstate it later.
Eventually these two strands come together as Kyogoku tries to take over the government with the help of the Black Five. However, we manage to thwart the group and Kyogoku commits suicide after the rebellion fails. After this there is an entire chapter that has no battles. For me, Ogami went to visit Sakura’s house but I think that’s because my love value with Sakura is the highest — I wonder if there are different scenes for all the different characters.
But of course the game is not over yet because there are still 3 stages. In the first game there was also this kind of double plot, but the second part went into some pretty bizarre places. The story this time is a little more grounded, I suppose. It turns out that Kyogoku did not actually die, and all the battles in the first part really had nothing to do with overthrowing the government. They were actually to gather power to revive an ancient flying fortress called Musashi that Kyogoku will use to cleanse the capital and rule over it as a new emperor.
But we use the revamped airship from the last game to make it to the Musashi. It turns out that the Demon Mask is Sakura’s dad, who has been revived by Kyogoku.
After a tearful reunion he helps us defend against Kyogoku’s attack but dies again in the process, and then we have to get to the main room to destroy all the power generators. Eventually Kyogoku ends up getting absorbed into a big robot called Shinno that serves as the final boss.
The game ends with Ogami getting promoted but then sent off to France on assignment which sets up for the third game.
Overall, I think the story was enjoyable enough. It had some similarities to the first game but I liked the links to the Kouma War that had been mentioned before and the new characters were interesting. The gameplay wasn’t as interesting. One reason I’m doing SRPGs instead of just strategy games is that I like to have some control over the development of your characters, and here it’s basically just fixed upgrades (along with the trust bonuses from the adventure part). I still don’t like how you can waste time wandering around to empty locations during the free time sections. I think I have to give this game a B rather than the A rating I gave to the original game; I don’t think that means that ST1 is a better game than ST2. I think it’s simply that I was more interested in ST1 because it was new and a shorter game overall, and it’s in a genre that I’m not going to like as much as true SRPGs. I will play the third one, though.
For the next game, I wanted to play a PS1 RPG so I asked Karkalla‘s discord for suggestions. The first one was Grandia, a game I have always heard about, so that will be next. However, Grandia seems like a rather long game so I think what I am going to do is switch off between that and Shining Force III Part 2 each week.
Märchen Veil (メルヘンヴェール）, released 3/3/1987, developed by System SACOM
For various reasons I was not able to play that much in the past couple of weeks so I’m still not quite done with Sakura Taisen 2; I don’t think that game needs two posts so I will do another early RPG this weekend.
Märchen is a German word meaning “folktale” and was borrowed into Japanese; the “veil” in the title refers to a fictional race or monster type in the game. This game was originally released in 1985 for the PC88, and then ported to a bunch of other systems, including the Famicom Disk System in 1987. Unfortunately this is only half of the game, Märchen Veil II came out for computers but was not ported, so console players can only see half of the story.
You start out by creating a save file just like in Zelda.
You then are presented with the “Visual Stage”, which gives you the story, although it continues off what must have been the introductory story in the instruction manual. It’s fairy tale like, fitting the title — the main character is a prince of the lake kingdom, and after going through many trials he earned the love of a princess. But a wizard didn’t like this and teleported the prince away, changing him into a monster called a Veil. The prince finds that he has his sword as well as a bracelet that the princess had given him, and he sets out to find his way back to the princess.
Each of the eight stages has one of these “visual stage” at the beginning. In 1985 this was quite unusual; most RPGs and adventure-style games had no developing plot at all, and only a handful of games even had any dialogue in the game. For consoles, the two Dragon Quest games did have a lot of town dialogue, but even DQ2 doesn’t have all that much of a developing plot. So I suppose this was a selling point of the game at the time (of course by modern standards the cutscenes are pretty thin).
Then the action part begins. The original computer version operated on multiple screens like Hydlide and Zelda, but the FDS version has a scrolling map. It doesn’t scroll very smoothly, and the whole game is a bit choppy and sluggish.
It also follows the general pattern of the action-RPG-adventure hybrids from this area in that the difficulty level is pretty high and a lot of the content is hidden in secret areas with no hints. It’s not as bad as some games, but if you don’t use a walkthrough you will be wandering around a dying a lot before you figure out what is going on.
Your weapon is a sword that shoots things out of it. If you find additional hidden swords in the levels you can increase the number of projectiles (and maybe the power?) You get more hearts by killing certain monsters that drop fairies, and if you collect 4 fairies you get a heart upgrade. Refilling your health can only be done by finding full heals hidden in the stages, or sometimes beating enemies or destroying things on the map will give you a small refill.
There are a fair number of items in the game, like boots that make you walk over rough areas without slowing down, or a cape that lets you finish the first stage by flying over one area. But there are a lot of places on the map where you fall into a pit if you walk into it and you can only escape by mashing the attack button. There are other times where I suddenly died without really understanding why.
In the first stage you have to walk off the right side of the map, taking you to this weird area with random things shooting everywhere. If you get the cape above you can then finish the stage.
Once you reach that castle, it’s time for the second Visual Stage.
The prince meets Phoebus, who can’t help him but tells him to seek Neptune — this will require beating a monster, though.
Fortunately the monster has a safe place you can stand in (near the top) where you can just shoot it without dying.
That’s as far as I played — this is a pretty bad game; even in 1987 it was not reviewed very well. It’s nice to see that contemporary reviewers also complained about things like inscrutable secrets and high difficulty because it feels then like I’m not judging the game unfairly from a modern perspective. Even if you did want to play it for the “visual stage” aspect you only get half the game unless you hunt down Märchen Veil II for a computer system.
Next week will be the Sakura Taisen 2 post, then I am playing Grandia. I may have mentioned this before, but I basically missed the entire PS1 era of RPGs with the exception of the Final Fantasies, Xenogears, and Chrono Cross. So I do want to try some of these well known titles as well.
Esper Dream (エスパードリーム), released 2/20/1987, developed and published by Konami
This is the next early JRPG, another Famicom Disk System game. It’s an action RPG, but I think it’s the best of these early action-RPG-adventure hybrid games I’ve played next to the original Zelda. It also fully qualifies as an action RPG under my original criteria, having both experience levels, equipment, and exploration.
There are two big things that make it a better playing experience than other games of this early era. First, the game ramps the difficulty up slowly, it doesn’t immediately drop you in a place where you are going to die in 5 seconds if you don’t immediately figure out the system (which is true of Hydlide, Valkyrie, and Deadly Towers). Second, the game doesn’t rely on hiding everything in random places with no hints as to where anything is. It would be perfectly doable to finish this game without a walkthrough.
The story is fairly simple and mostly just in the instruction manual. The main character is brought into this dream world (perhaps from the real world?) to use his psychic powers to save the mayor’s daughter Alice, defeat the demon Geerasauzan, and return to the real world. You begin in Brick Village, which has the mayor (who saves your game), a few shops, and entrances to each of the five worlds. Once you walk around and gather some information, you can go to the first world. One of the few issues with the game that still reflects the early era of video games is that the five worlds have a definite order of difficulty that you should do them in, but there’s no indication of that in the game, you just have to try them out to see which ones you can actually do.
The first world is a computer-themed one. Once you enter the worlds, you see paw prints on the ground. Some of them are fixed in one place, others will appear and move towards you. When you hit one, you get taken to a separate screen for combat.
In the separate battle screen, you move around and shoot at the enemies. At first that’s all you can do. You can also escape from battle by shooting one of the wall segments (randomly chosen, but it will turn red) and then escaping through there.
Beating the enemies leaves behind gold purses, or more rarely, capsules that restore your HP and EP. Unfortunately you destroy these if you hit them with your attacks.
Once you level up, you gain more max HP and EP, and at certain levels you will learn new Esper powers. You can also buy some of these powers in town, but that’s a waste of money. The first power is a “psi beam” that creates a wave across the screen, damaging enemies. Other powers include a town warp, a brief invincibility barrier, and healing. The powers take EP to use.
You can spend your money on equipment. Unfortunately there are only a few weapon and armor upgrades, and they are pretty expensive, but they help a lot. There are also some items you can buy like keys and items that restore you when you hit 0 hp. You can also find a fair number of items in the dungeon areas, including items that increase the power of your psi beam.
Each world has a boss that leaves behind a capsule you need to win the game.
I went through the first three worlds, but once you get to the fourth world the difficulty of the enemies raises sharply and there are no more buyable equipment upgrades (only one more armor upgrade in the last world). So you pretty much have to rely on the invincibility psi move, which requires a fair amount of EP. This is where you have to do some grinding, and where I decided to stop playing.
But as I said, this is a strong game for 1987 when it was released. If you can look past the disk swapping and the sometimes clunky mechanics, it’s a very playable retro game for someone who likes games from this period. There is an English patch.
There is a 1992 sequel to the game, released at the end of the Famicom’s life. According to Hardcore Gaming, it preserves the basic gameplay of the original but is a huge improvement and refinement. Maybe I will give it a try later, since I’m not locking myself into a chronological playthrough of these early games.
Next week, the Flower Division is back to save the capital again in Sakura Taisen 2.
REBUS (レブス), released 3/26/1998, developed and released by ATLUS
Two Atlus games in a row. This is Atlus’ first SRPG that isn’t in the Megami Tensei franchise, although it still involves summoning monsters. It was localized in the US as “Kartia: The Word of Fate”. In a coincidence, a twitch streamer I follow named Karkalla has just started the game on Friday and should be playing it for a couple of weeks.
The art was done by Yoshitaka Amano, well known for his Final Fantasy illustrations that go against the typical anime style that you normally see in JRPGs. Now that we are in the fifth generation of consoles, Amano’s art can actually be directly used in the game rather than simply providing art for the instruction manuals that isn’t reflected anywhere in the actual game.
The story is presented in an unusual fashion. There are two protagonists with 18 chapters each, but the story is laid out in a total of 36 episodes that weave back and forth between the stories. There is a lot of overlap and interaction between the two stories and they are basically telling two parts of the same tale. You can either play one all the way through and then the other, or play episode order which requires you to switch back and forth between the two. The latter is what I did.
The game takes place in a world that is strongly controlled by a church — the terms “heresy” and “heretic” are constantly used in the game of people who question the church’s teaching, or even non-humans. There are a group of “inquisitors” who are given extra-judicial and extra-national powers to hunt down and punish heresy. The English translation blunted these terms by using “inquirer” and “heathen”. I don’t know if this was a conscious decision or if it was simply ignorance of the translators for what the terms mean. It can be something of a challenge to deal with this kind of thing because Japanese games frequently use terms that were originally coined to refer to the Catholic Church, but they are then applied to any fictional religion that is sort of Christian-like. Translators perhaps want to avoid the strongly loaded Catholic terms to avoid giving a connotation to the terms that they don’t have in Japanese, but I don’t know whether they think of it this closely.
Lacryma Christi, the woman protagonist, is a Holy Knight devoted to the church, with a strong belief in its teachings. She’s the daughter of Cainas, a deceased hero, and is revered as a holy woman. Toxa is the son of a merchant who dreams of being a knight. Both are involved with the local guard of the Crossland kingdom, operating in the Shinon barony. The story first involves fighting against a bandit group, but soon expands to involve a plot by certain people in the church to summon the holy land of Eden.
The story and characters are definitely a strong point of the game. Each character gets a fair amount of time and development, and the overall story is interesting as well. Amano’s art is also memorable in highlighting the characters.
The other worldbuilding aspect that has more to do with the system is Kartia. These are a type of card that people can use to “imagine” things, writing them on the materials to make them appear. They are used for a lot of things in the world, but all of the “texts” are copies of the Originals that can be used for great power, although often at a great cost to the user.
In terms of the system, you find “texts” in the stages (either from beating enemies, opening chests, or burning barrels/boxes/etc, or as a stage reward). These texts can be combined to do three primary things, and each use takes one or more of your materials (Silk, Mithril, or World Tree).
Most of the combinations are given to you and you just have to select them, but you can usually add additional texts to increase the power. For the most part the additional texts you add just up the power without any relevance to what the text actually is (each one is a kanji character), but there are a few hidden combinations that can make additional items not listed.
The first thing you can do with the kartia is make equipment. There are no shops in the game so this is the only way to get new equipment other than finding it in a stage. There are six types of weapons, and six armors (two head, two body, two leg/foot).
The second thing you can do is cast spells. It doesn’t look like I took a screenshot of that, but the spells window is similar to the others — you pick a base spell (which are sorted into about 8-10 basic types) and then you can add additional texts to increase the power. The different classes of spells are elemental types, some of which have AoE, can heal, or burn things, raise and lower the ground, etc. There are no buff or debuff spells.
The third thing you do is summon Phantoms (幻獣). These are summoned monsters that can fight alongside you. They come in three basic types, and the types operate on a rock-paper-scissors system (which applies only to the phantoms themselves, not the human characters). They can gain levels and equip things, but if they reach 0 hp they die and cannot be revived. You can summon them before a battle starts, or use certain characters’ turns to summon them during battle (although they appear with their turn already used).
Each route is made up of 18 stages, played back to back with no alternate routes or anything in between the battles (other than story scenes). The only thing you can do between stages is play the Arena, where you are provided with a stock of monsters to fight against a group of enemies. You can’t gain XP here, only Kartia materials. I never used it.
The battle system is relatively complicated with a lot of moving parts. In addition to the RPS system with the monsters that I mentioned before, height makes a big difference in weapons and armor. Spears work better when attacking from below, and axes work better when attacking from above. Helmets protect better against attacks from above, etc. Characters can counter attack unless they are ranged attackers. You can use Quake to raise and lower the ground.
The system has two aspects that I do not like. First, any human character reaching 0 hp means a game over. This means you have to be aware of letting monsters gang up on your guys. Second, the lower a character’s HP, the worse they fight. This is a system that is not commonly used in games, and I never like it when it is. It may be realistic but it’s not very fun.
The Phantoms are a big problem in the game. They are extremely difficult to keep alive. They always start at level 1, and because the RPS system has such a huge effect, it’s very difficult to keep them from getting killed by opposing monsters who have good compatibility with them. However, they are very cheap to summon, so especially early on in the game they can be used profitably as cannon fodder. I never had one higher than level 2, but I wonder how effective one would be if you actually managed to get them to a high level and equip them with some decent stuff.
However, it’s not particularly relevant because after the first 4 or 5 stages, the game is extremely easy. Your human characters quickly reach a level where the enemies can’t do much against you even if they gang up on you, and you can defeat almost any enemy with just a few hits. There are still a couple of situations that are easier if you summon some monsters, and the final bosses take a little bit of strategy (particularly on Toxa’s route), but for the most part you can just send in your human characters with swords and slice through everything.
Which was fine, because I found the system more cumbersome than fun, and so it was nice to be able to enjoy the story without having to worry too much about the battles. From what I can see, my opinion of “good story, meh gameplay” seems to be shared by most of the reviewers in both English and Japanese.
One other aspect that is commented on a lot is that because you can’t repeat stages, many of the Texts in the game are permanently missable. You definitely want to make sure that when possible, you do not clear the stage without getting all the chests and boxes/barrels, and defeating any enemies that are carrying Texts. There are also hidden items in the stages but I didn’t bother with any of them.
So overall this is an OK game, but give it a pass if you insist on having good gameplay — I do wonder what it would be like to play a game where you really try as hard as possible to build an army of the summoned phantoms. I have a feeling it would be more frustrating than anything else. I wish they could have made the phantoms more costly to summon, but have their levels and stats continue — unfortunately the disposable nature of the Phantoms is part of the plot.
The next random game I chose was another SRPG so next week will be Esper Dream for the Famicom Disk System.