Author Archives: kurisu

Final game list (SFC)

I started playing Akazukin cha-cha, but I don’t think it really qualifies as an RPG. It’s more of an adventure game with a small number (around 7) of fixed RPG-style battles. There are no levels, instead you just gain stats at pre-determined points in the story. Apparently it’s considered a good game for fans of the manga or anime series, but I will leave it to others to cover the game.

So what this means is that we have come to the final list of games, the remaining 9 games I have to play. I will be taking a break around Christmas time, so I think I should probably finish this up around March or April of next year, although it depends on how long all the games are. Here’s the full list of games, with the bold ones being games I will actually play.

  • Wizardry Gaiden IV: Throb of the Demon’s Heart
  • Monstania – It was not clear to me whether this is an SRPG or not, so we’ll find out now.
  • Marvelous: Another Treasure Island – This is an adventure game, not an RPG.
  • Dragon Quest III – I could skip this as a remake but I believe I will play it.
  • Madou Monogatari I (PCE) – The final PCE game! This was released very late in the system’s life, and also came out for the Sega CD pretty late also.
  • G.O.D.: Listen to the voice telling you to awaken
  • Dragon Knight 4 – I played the Playstation version of this.
  • BUSHI Seiryuden: Two Heroes
  • Milandra
  • Gunman’s Proof – This is a zelda-style game that does not qualify as an ARPG for me.
  • Dark Law: Meaning of Death
  • Solid Runner – The last game I will play!
  • Mini shiku Let’s & Go!! POWER WGP2 – This is a racing game for the most part; it has some parts where you can talk to people and buy things but this is not enough to make it an RPG.
  • Wizardry I-II-III: Legacy of Llygamyn – Since this is a remake of Western games I will skip it.
  • Fire Emblem Trachia 776 – I will actually play this, but it will be once I reach 1999 in the strategy RPG playthrough, not now.

SFC Game 121 – Daikaiju Monogatari II (Finished)

At this point we have all the party members (the first four were my endgame party):

  • Kurisu, the hero of the fire shell and main character — you have to use him. He can cast fire spells and do sword techniques.
  • Shamuru, a catwoman thief. She can steal things which is nice, but can also use some helpful spells, particularly Powered (attack up). She is also important for one point where you can do some nice levelling.
  • Kupikupi, who has the best healing spells. By the end of the game he can cast a full party heal spell and a full party “restore conditions” spell for fairly cheap, and can contribute some attack spells as well if necessary.
  • Millie, the robot (who used to be your dog). Strong attacks, and also nice all-attack abilities that involve various elements.
  • Pot, who was also in the first game. Has a number of summon spells that you gain from various events — unfortunately a few of the best ones are only available with the real-time clock system (I had the same problem that I did in Tengai Makyo Zero where the clock never synced or advanced when I wasn’t playing).
  • Baboo, who uses boomerangs. I didn’t use him much.
  • Baltes, the warrior. I also didn’t use him much.
  • Poyon, who learns spells from enemies like Blue Magic. I barely used him.
  • Ruimella, who has decent healing and support spells. I used her some but I generally found Kupikupi to be more useful.
  • Gabro, who joins fairly late and as such I didn’t use him much. He seems like he could be useful with some elemental powers.

Next up is “kimoi” town, where the townpeople’s souls are being extracted by Jarama (who of course is being controlled by the evil Dark people). To clear this part we have to bring a certain kind of water to a holy spring, and the god then allows us to enter the realm of the dead as spirits so that we can clear out the monsters.

Beyond the mountain there is a creepy bone dungeon.

And finally we defeat the Phantom Queen (one of Dark’s underlings), and recover the 5th aura stone along with freeing Jarama. She can stop random encounters but only once, for a short time, recharged when you stay at an inn. So pretty much useless.

The final aura stone is in a mechanical fish in the sea.

This is an annoying dungeon because the visibility is very poor, and of course you are facing encounters every 4 steps. But in the end we recover the sixth aura stone, although then Dark tries to kill us in the sea monster. We rush to an escape capsule, but are now stranded in the sea.

Fortunately our small dragon comes to save us, and with the six aura stones he is able to power up into a full size dragon that can be flown around the world. At this point, you can go to the snowy islands at the top of the map where you encounter two sets of enemies that give huge amounts of XP and gold. In a fairly short time I was able to get as much money as I needed for the rest of the game, level up to the high 30s, and steal “Angel Medals” which offer a huge increase to attack and defense. This allowed me to keep the “no encounter” code on for the rest of the game and still manage to beat all the bosses. (However, this area is only available at this short window)

Now we have to fly up to the castle in the sky, where the heroes display their usual stupidity and give the aura stones to the queen, who turns out to be a clone made by Dr. Doan (Dark’s servant).

Now we rush to the temple in the sky land to stop Dark from using the aura stones, but of course we’re too late — once we arrive Dark destroys us with one hit and then activates the aura stones to capture power for himself.

Dark activates the stones, making the sky land crash to the ground and doing huge damage to the land. Many towns are displaced or destroyed. In this section of the game you are basically trying to recover your team members, find the 4 shells (which were lost during the crash), and also free the Dragon so that we can fly up to Dark’s lair.

Once this is done, it’s time for the final dungeon. You have to use two parties here, switching back and forth with the Y button to open up new areas until both of your parties arrive at the top. Then your B party stays back to fight Beauty (the last of Dark’s underlings) while the A party with Kurisu goes for Dark.

Beauty is the hardest fight in the game — she uses a move almost every turn that has a chance of confusing everyone, and then your party members kill each other. Even using the cure-all spell of Kupikupi it’s hard to avoid this. Fortunately if you lose with your B party, the A party takes her on instead. Even so I had to try 6 times before I could get enough luck to defeat her.

Dark’s three forms, by contrast, are a cakewalk. Kupikupi can just Sun Shower every turn to fully restore HP, Robot can exploit elemental weaknesses, Kurisu attacks, and Shamuru supports.

Afterwards, Kurisu has to go back to Earth (leaving Millie behind since she’s a robot now), and everyone else goes back to their lives.

Overall this game is OK. The random encounter rate is a serious problem — if someone could develop a code that halves the encounter rate that would improve this game immensely. The storyline is acceptable but relies on a lot of cliches (particularly the “haha, the heroes are too weak to deserve to fight me! Here is my underling to fight” and “there’s no way the heroes survived that, they must be dead.”)

We’re down to 10 games (9 sfc and 1 PC-engine)!

SFC Game 121 – Daikaiju Monogatari II (Part 1)

Daikaiju Monogatari II (大貝獣物語II), released 8/2/1996, developed by Birthday, released by Hudson

This is the sequel to the 1994 original — there are some of the same characters although I believe this is not a plot sequel, it’s just a new story with some of the same elements. As in the first game, the Fire Shell has to be used to summon someone from Earth to help fight off enemies.

The gameplay is mostly the same as in the first one as well. We still have the punishingly high random encounter rate, the “helpers”, the basic magic system, equipment, etc. This game added a clock-based feature like Tengai Mayko Zero, although it has very little effect on the game (and apparently drained the battery quite a bit). You no longer recover MP/HP on level up, which makes the game a bit more fraught in the dungeons. I made occasional use of a no encounter code, mostly when there were puzzles in the dungeons (I find it very annoying to try to do dungeon puzzles when a random encounter is breaking your concentration every few steps).

This time our big bad is “Dark”, who is trying to take over Shell Land.

Kurisu and his dog Millie are transported from Earth, but something goes wrong during the process and Kurisu ends up alone, and is immediately attacked. Fortunately Princess Rumiella from the nearby castle finds him and brings him back.

We are also introduced to Baltes who has a crush on Rumiella, and Baboo (who was in the first game, but as I said I don’t believe this is a plot sequel — I think it’s just reusing the same assets). The basic structure of the first 2/3 or so of the game is that Dark (the big baddie) is sending out his underlings to find the six Aura Stones, while we travel around and fight the underlings, recovering the stones.

The battle system (and even the graphics) are basically the same as the first game. You can still set up “strategies” to have people use certain moves automatically, although this game doesn’t have that extremely helpful move that puts the enemies to sleep with no MP cost. And since you no longer recover MP on level up, that means that more often than in the first game I was just doing attack with everyone.

The first location is north of the king’s castle, where Megaloking is using captured humans to dig up the aura stone.

This operation is a success; beating Megaloking and freeing all the villagers, and getting the aura stone. Unfortunately Dark, though his evil spying ways, has recognized that Baltes is in love with the princess, and decides to use nefarious tricks to turn Baltes to their side.

Baltes thinks that the hero kurisu has taken the princess from him and that they were making fun of him, which allows the next of Dark’s generals, Mushking, to use spells on him and turn him to evil. To reach Mushking we first have to recruit an ally who can cut the trees in our way (he can also remove boulders from other places to reveal hidden treasures).

Once Mushking is defeated, we find the second stone, although Baltes decides to go out on his own to train so he can overcome the weakness of his heart that allowed him to betray the party.

Next up is a strange sequence involving Jodan, a clown that captures people and turns them into pigs. He also likes to collect unusual animals, including a few people that should be in our party! Poyon, Kupikupi, and the main character’s dog (who I named Millie) are ale here. The game switches to Poyon and Kupikupi, who free the dog, beat Jodan, but only the dog escapes.

The dog and Kurisu are reunited then, and Millie tries to lead us to the others. This is an annoying desert section — this is an example of a dungeon where I turned on the no-encounters code because finding my way around in the place was annoying. There are sandstorms that carry you around, but the places are invisible and it’s hard to figure out how to get through it. This leads us back to Jodan’s circus again, where we finally free the others (plus a thief named Shamuru, who is another party member).

Next up we can find the third aura stone in the Antlion lair, another annoying dungeon that I used no encounters for.

Here we find the evil scientist Dorn, who has revived Megaloking to fight again. Fortunately Megaloking is a chivalrous dude who gives us the aura stone when we beat him!

Now the Sand Scorpion, a big machine controlled by Dorn, heads for the nearby city to explode. We try to stop it, but in the end Millie (the dog) pushes Kurisu off the Scorpion and sacrifices her own life to stop it.

Some kids bring Millie back to a scientist who is developing a robot (Dr. Spanner). Spanner tries to do what he can, but the next day he tells the kids that he couldn’t save the dog and buried him nearby. Now the robot activates (we’ll learn soon that the dog was put into the robot, so now Millie is the robot).

The next section is done with the robot alone. She’s easy to use because if you buy 99 bomb items she can use a powerful attack on all enemies to kill them in one attack. The job here is to go to the crystal castle, where Dorn is using Gabro, one of his underlings who is still basically a baby. The robot Sonia is taking care of him.

Gabro is kidnapping children to play with. Sonia isn’t quite sure that’s a good idea, and she eventually grows close to the robot (Millie) because they’re both automata. Eventually Dorn comes in and kills Sonia, which upsets Gabro. In this section you have to switch back and forth between Gabro and Millie in order to progress in the dungeon, until we eventually catch Dorn (who escapes). But we have the 4th aura stone.

After this whole sequence the game switches back to Kurisu, and you can immediately go back and get Millie robot in your party. Two more aura stones! That’s where I will stop for now; hopefully I will have the game done by next weekend.

SFC Game 120 – Lennus II

Lennus II: Apostles of the Seals (レナスII 封印の使徒), released 7/26/1996, published by Asmik Systems

This is the sequel to Lennus, which came out in late 1992 and was released in the US as “Paladin’s Quest” (a name that has nothing to do with the game itself). The sequel was apparently plagued by development delays and was intended to take 2 years rather than 4 to develop. The end product is one of the longer SFC RPGs; it does seem like they allowed this game to take the time it needed to take rather than artificially cutting off development like they seem to have done with some of the previous games.

I have not played the original Lennus, but I understand that this is a direct plot sequel, and a number of the characters from the first game re-appear, as does the word Lennus. The game system is also essentially a modified version of the first one.

The game begins with Pharus appearing and being hailed as the savior of the world — this temple has been built to await his coming, and he is now supposed to bring about the Grand Unification. Pharus has no idea what this is and none of the priests seem to know either, but we need to get 4 gems from this underground land of Undel and then put them back in these slots in the temple. The entire game runs on these fetch quest setups — 4 gems, then 8 seals, then the 8 seals again, the the final boss. There’s not a whole lot of plot development other than at the points between these quests.

Like the first game, you have 3 hireable characters in addition to Pharus. There are 8 different categories of spells, and each character has a different combination. For the main character, you start out being able to choose just one, but as you gain more elementals from temples around the world, you can equip more until you hit a maximum of 4. You can switch the elementals at specific places in town, and also using an item.

Each character has a level for each element from 1 to 8 that goes up by beating monsters — the monsters release elements when they die which can add XP to a person’s element level. Moving up the levels doesn’t seem to result in new spells, it just strengthens what you have.

As in the first game, you use HP rather than MP to use spells. But since the spells don’t cost that much, outside of the very beginning of the game you almost never have to pay any attention to how much the spells cost.

There are no healing spells; all healing is done through “bottles” that hold 9 uses each. How much the bottle heals is based on the type of bottle. You can refill them in town — for some reason there are refilling shops that charge 50 gold per bottle, but using an inn fills all bottles for free so I don’t know why you would ever use the refill shop.

The interface is kind of interesting; all the commands are entered through the directional pad. If it weren’t for needing to hold down a button to run fast (ugh) you could play the whole game with one hand.

Also like the first game you can attack with any piece of equipment you have on, although I never found this to be useful.

As Pharus collects the 4 gems, a shadowy figure keeps appearing with a distorted voice; it seems like he’s telling Pharus that he should not get the gems and that the unification will be bad, but he can’t communicate clearly enough (and there’s no way to advance the plot without doing it).

Once the gems are collected and restored to the temple, the four continents of Undel begin to merge — this is catastrophic and the priests beg Pharus to stop it, but there’s nothing he can do. He is carried away in a pillar of light to Eltz, another part of the world. Here, an underling of Granada tells him that he only did one part of the Grand Unification, and that Granada will carry the rest out. Everyone on Undel will die as a result, but that’s basically Pharus fault, isn’t it? Mwahaha

The enemy curses Pharus to turn everyone into stone, but Petro (who was the face talking to us in Undel) directs us to a nearby Purification Shrine that can remove this problem. The next part of the game takes place mostly in the large city of Niguren, with several different sections, a downtown, and outer areas. Basically you first have to reach Petro’s Castle.

Petro tells us that Granada revived Pharus specifically to initiate the first part of the Unification, since normal people would not have been able to do it. Grand Unification means the destruction of all life in the world, but it can still be stopped if Pharus can get seven seals.

This fairly lengthy section of the game involves getting the 7 seals from in and around Niguren. Each seal has its own small story but they don’t really contribute to the overall narrative in any way. I switched out most of the starting companions here for new ones (although you can use a “scent of alcohol” item to re-recruit them if you need to). There are people in Niguren with max level elements, as well as the Gubo’s Fist spell which is very useful if you can raise the caster’s heaven element. Max level heaven element users can do huge damage to all enemies.

Once Pharus gets the 7 seals, Petro tells him there’s an eighth seal, which is back in Undel. Returning there, Pharus finds that most of the inhabitants have died but that the survivors have moved to one city. The high priest of the Pharus temple is getting drunk in a bar, wishing he had killed you as soon as you were born. From there, Pharus descends into a fire cave to get the eighth seal.

Unfortunately as a consequence, the rest of Undel sinks into the lava, killing all the inhabitants (Pharus really did a lot of bad stuff to the poor Undel people!) But undeterred, Pharus continues on to fight 4 of Granada’s underlings together.

Unfortunately they have captured Petro, and as usual for dumb RPG heroes Pharus trades all 8 seals for Petro’s life….and the enemies don’t even free him, they just take the seals. Fortunately Petro has left us a message to seek out Media (from Lennus 1) in a floating fortress, who can help us out. Media tells us that we are descendants of gods who created the word, some of whom wanted to watch over the humans, others (like Granada) who want to destroy the world. Unification will put all the lands into one and make a new sun. We need to go to find someone else who can help us in the sea.

Finally you get a world map, although it’s missable if you’re not careful.

The purpose of this part is to gain access to the gravity tower and eventually go to Lennus, the continent from the original game. The underlings of Granada have set up shop here and we can recover the seals. This part of the game has a lot of locations and random NPCs from the first game; of course I wasn’t able to appreciate most of that connection.

Once we recover all the seals, it’s finally time to confront Granada. Unfortunately in the meantime, Lennus has merged with Eltz — Unification has almost occurred. Back in Petro Castle we can take a transport to reach the Throne of the Gods, where Granada awaits.

We have to beat Granada twice. The first time, Petro and Medea help out, and heal the party before the second fight. Unfortunately Granada escapes on a spaceship, but with Petro and Medea’s help we can follow (it is also revealed here that Petro is Chezni, the hero from the first game).

At the end, Granada tells Pharus that they are essentially the representatives of the two opinions of the gods, and that how things end up depends on who dies in this fight — if Pharus dies, his energy will be released, completing Unification. If Granada dies, Unification will be stopped. Time for the final battle.

After the fight, you can talk to a bunch of companions and NPCs, and then Pharus joins Chezni and Medea to travel back to Raiga, where they originated. They want to bring the hope to Raiga itself so that whatever caused all this trouble on Lennus and Eltz can be healed at the source.

Overall this is a decent game. The plot could be structured a little better and there is some grinding you have to do sometimes, but it’s generally a fun game. And would definitely be worth a play for anyone who did Paladin’s Quest, to see the connections between the games.

SFC Game 119 – Star Ocean

Star Ocean (スターオーシャン), released 7/19/1996, developed by Tri-Ace, released by Enix

This game was developed by people from Wolf Team who had left to form their own unit after being dissatisfied with the development process of Tales of Phantasia. The game pushes the SFC to its absolute limits, boasting a 48 megabit cart with a special compression chip that allowed for more graphics storage. It also used a method to quickly swap in voice clips to allow for a large amount (for a SFC game) of voice in the battles. It’s definitely a great looking game, and the music (by Motoi Sakuraba) is good as well.

On the other hand, there is a lot of evidence that the development of the game was rushed — the Roak section seems to represent just the first part of the story they were trying to tell but consists of about 70% of the game. There are places where it seems like things had to be quickly cut out or shortened last minute, dummied out places in the game, and such.

The emulation process of the game is also a narrative in itself. DeJap did a fan translation of the game in the early 2000s, but the S-DD1 compression chip at the time could not be emulated. So the hackers who worked on the translation, together with the zsnes team, simply used a process to feed the compressed files through the chip and then save them as a “graphics pack”. You had to download this pack and use zsnes (or later snes9x) which had been specifically hacked to load the graphics from the pack.

One of byuu/near’s big goals for bsnes was to eliminate these kinds of hacks. The first step was “high level emulation”, where tests were used to figure out what the S-DD1 chip was doing, and code that into bsnes. Therefore you no longer needed the graphics pack to play. Later, byuu used the services of an anonymous engineer to use some process to extract the S-DD1 chip’s inner workings, and now you can get the sdd1.cpp file which is simply the code that is on the chip.

To insert a personal anecdote here, byuu and I happened to be living in the same city when they were working on this, and I had a super famicom unit that I wasn’t using anymore. We met up for lunch and I gave him the sfc — I know they used it for the extraction of one of the chips but I don’t think it was the S-DD1. I think I’m one of only a few people in the sfc/emulation area who actually met them in real life.

I remember trying the game out at the time but I never played it much. I think the random encounter rate was too annoying, and I also could never find a control pad that worked well enough to make me want to play it. I did play the PSP version later but also never finished that. Now I finally have finished Star Ocean. (On the other hand, I was totally obsessed with Star Ocean 3 to the point where I probably put in 300 or so hours in the original and the director’s cut combined.)

The game begins with a fully voiced (in English!) opening sequences where a federation ship sees a planet get destroyed. The game then moves to the planet Roak, which seems to be a low-tech planet. This sets up what seems to be the standard for all Star Ocean games — although the game involves spaceships and future technology, the majority of the game takes place on a pre-modern civilization planet.

We are introduced to some of the main characters — Ratie, Milly, and Dorn. They are part of the defense force of Kratus town. After defending the town from some thieves, Milly’s dad sends a letter telling them that the town of Coule is suffering from some kind of epidemic disease.

The battle system is real time like Phantasia, but here it’s on a battlefield rather than just a linear screen. Also in contrast to Phantasia your other members can actually fight rather than hiding behind Cless all the time. To attack you just pick a target with A, then hit A to use a physical attack or L/R to use abilities assigned to those buttons (either short or long). I found that most of the time physical attacks were perfectly fine.

For the most part the difficulty level is low; you can stun enemies pretty easily and the encounter rate is high enough you should be levelled enough to beat most enemies. The exception are monsters that can turn your characters to stone; I found these were always potential game overs and that I had to immediately run away to have even a chance of not getting a game over.

The first problem in this opening sequence is one that reoccurs throughout the game — there’s too much backtracking, and there’s no town warp item or spell. Also the complexity of the graphics make traversing the dungeons more annoying than it should be.

Eventually all the people of Coule are turned to stone, including Milly’s dad. Dorn is also infected Milly and Ratie try to get some herbs to help but instead they run into Ronix and Iria who have beamed down from a ship.

They’re here investigating a bioweapon that has apparently been developed from the blood of people on Ratok, this planet. There is a very long story sequence where we learn that the Federation is at war with Lezonia, and Lezonia is making the bioweapon. But Lezonia is being forced into this by some shadowy third power. The characters go to the Time Gate (I think this is borrowed from the Star Trek episode “City on the Edge of Forever”) and go back to Ratok 300 years in the past. This is where the majority of the game takes place, although as I said earlier I suspect that this is due to development limitations rather than the original intent of the story.

The basic idea of the Ratok section is to get four items from the four kings of the world, then enter the “demon world” to take on Asmodeus. Although something went wrong in my playthrough because Asmodeus was never actually introduced, the characters just suddenly said our goal was to beat him — I think I missed an event, perhaps one that wasn’t supposed to be optional.

You can recruit a number of characters, some of whom are mutually exclusive. There are also “private actions” in towns — your characters will split up, and then you can activate sub events by finding them in town. I didn’t really do any of these.

When you level up, you get skill points that you can spend on a large number of abilities. Some of these affect your combat, others let you identify items or do item crafting. I didn’t do much item crafting because the things necessary are only available in specific towns (and once again you can’t town warp). I understand that if you know what you are doing you can make really powerful items and weapons. But as I said before, I didn’t find this necessary.

Eventually it is revealed that the Roak people are actually from the legendary continent of Mu on Earth, who were somehow taken to Roak when a meteroite hit the Earth. They eventually find Asmodeus, who still extracts the blood sample from the Roak people (since we can’t change history), but at least we are able to take some things from the lab to make an antidote. Milly and Rati return to present Roak and use a vaccine to cure all the people who have been turned to stone, and Ronix and Ilia go back to their ship.

This is where the story and pacing go off the rails. I have a feeling the rest of the story was supposed to be a more significant part of the game, but as it is it’s just crammed into the last 15% or so. For no clear reason, a ship from Fargett (the mysterious 3rd power) appears and demands a surrender, but Ronix is allowed to use the time gate to bring back the Ratie, Milly, and the 300 year past characters and go beat the Fargett ship. It turns out that they are also descendants of Mu.

I didn’t think the final boss was very hard. It was easy to keep him stunlocked and my attacks did a lot of damage. Now after this, everyone goes back to their homes.

So overall this is an impressive technological display of what the Super Famicom can do. And I wouldn’t say it’s a bad game. But the development problems really show, and the annoying amount of backtracking coupled with the high encounter rate can be tedious (although you can use an ability called Scout to reduce the rate).

I believe that Tri Ace immediately started working on Star Ocean 2 and my understanding is that game is a bit more polished than this one. I’d like to play it some day.

SFC Game 118 – Traverse Starlight & Prairie

Traverse: Starlight & Prairie (トラバース スターライト&プレーリー), released 6/28/1996, developed by Pandora Box, released by Banpresto

This game is a spiritual sequel to Soul & Sword, which I played (much) earlier on the blog. Both games share the same general idea — virtually the entire game is open world and optional, and rather than having an “ending” you can stop the game at any time. In S&S you did this by leaving the island, and in this game you do it by marrying someone. There is no real storyline although both games have a sort of “best” ending that you can get by completing most or all of the events in the game. The idea is that each playthrough creates its own story, so I will tell the story of Kurisu, with some gameplay notes in brackets.

Kurisu’s mother died in childbirth and his dad then fell into drunkenness. When kurisu is 14, his dad sends him to get liquor from the bar. Sonia, a childhood friend who works there, is reluctant to give more alcohol to drunken dad, but she’ll do it if kurisu can bring her some flowers from a nearby mountain.

The character creation as done by a goddess asking you questions

Kurisu fights his way up the mountain and finds the flower, but it starts talking and complains when he tries to pluck it. Feeling bad for the flower, Kurisu goes back without getting it, but Sonia gives him the liquor anyway.

Later in the night, a man breaks into the house, wanting to steal the “Holy Sword” that Kurisu has always had with him — he claims that he’s a prince of a defeated kingdom and that the sword belongs to him. Kurisu tries to fight him off but loses badly, but the guy isn’t able to get the sword away.

Kurisu wakes up in a cave — the guy (Bullmore) tried to bring Kurisu with him but fell into this cave. Kurisu is able to climb up the vines but Bullmore is too heavy, so Kurisu goes up to get help — eventually he pulls up Bullmore by a stronger vine.

Once he saves Bullmore, he decides that there’s no reason why he should stay in his village anymore, and decides to go on an adventure with Bullmore. Sonia tags along. [This is the end of the required stuff before the real game starts]

Kurisu reaches the main continent, and looks at a map showing all of the towns in the continent.

He decides to travel around the world to the towns, seeing what kind of adventures he can find there. [The game has a real-time system as you travel; apparently it ends in 10 years regardless. Once you find a town you can then choose to ‘teleport’ there (really just omit the actual walking, it still takes days)]

Kurisu travelled the world. He found one dying girl whose favorite toy musician set had come to life and gone on a journey, but she wanted to see them one more time. We agreed to try to find them. Kurisu also found a girl whose father made “fakes” of paintings to hang in other museums, but somehow a major painting had been replaced with the fake. So we had to sneak into the place and switch them back.

Other than that, the world seemed at peace — Kurisu did not encounter a single monster on his travels. Most of the towns he visited seemed to have no problems, and the villagers had little to tell them. Even going to the three parts on his map labeled “quest” did not good — the places were either closed or locked.

After travelling for nearly a year, Kurisu decided that the entire world had not much more to offer than his starting island — he had more adventure getting the flowers from the nearby mountain than he had in the 35 or so towns he had visited since then. And travelling all that way with Sonia, he decided that everything he needed for life was in his hometown. He proposed to Sonia, who accepted.

Bullmore wasn’t happy that we never helped him revive his kingdom, and went off on his own. And Kurisu lived happily ever after.

So that was my experience playing the game. It was boring as all hell — I am not exaggerating in that description above. I played the game for several days and found almost nothing to do. I barely know how the battle system works; the characters have skills but I never used them because I didn’t have a single fight after the first island.

I checked Japanese reviews and they all said the same thing — this game is impossible to play without a walkthrough because it’s so difficult to find any quests, and the quests themselves are often inscrutable without help. I couldn’t find a Japanese walkthrough but there is one on GameFAQs.

Not only are the quests hard to find, but there is a hidden “karma” value that cannot be seen, which affects quests you can get. If you want the true ending by completing all quests, you have to make sure your karma is at certain values (high or low) when you do certain things. Some quests won’t activate, others will activate but if you don’t have the right karma value you won’t be able to finish the quest in the right way to count for the true ending.

I could have followed the walkthrough, I suppose, and done all the stuff. But it seems silly to me that you should need that help just to find anything to do. Since I technically finished the game, I’m fine in putting this one aside and moving on to Star Ocean.

SFC Game 117 – Gulliver Boy

Gulliver Boy (空想科学世界ガリバーボーイ), released 6/28/1996, by Bandai

I covered a previous game based off the anime for PC Engine. That game pushed the PC Engine to its limits to include lots of full motion video, and in general seemed to be a decent game. This one, on the other hand, is a lazy shovelware IP project that can be finished in a few hours, including grinding levels.

Unlike the PC Engine version, the story in this one is introduced in fairly brief story segments that don’t introduce the characters or story particularly well — you can follow the basic plot thread but you constantly get the feeling that there’s more fleshing out of everything in the source material.

The system also shows signs of being rushed — you can only see your current XP level by resetting the game and looking at the load game screen. There’s a robot combat mode that is only used once. The “dungeons” are often only a few screens long. There’s no real exploration; when you finish one area you just get taken to the next area automatically. While it’s not necessarily a bad game, it’s definitely one that you would feel cheated spending full price for in 1996.

The battle system is action RPG style. You can switch between the three characters you have during the game. Gulliver attacks with his Maken Glove, which takes a bit to regenerate. He also has “discs” that use his disc power but have stronger effects. Misty in the early game uses spell like abilities, and then later gets a boomerang-like circle she can attack with. Edison throws bombs; he’s not a great character but is necessary to destroy the enemy lairs that otherwise will spawn endless enemies.

When you are controlling one character, the others will recover HP and also their special ability meters will recover more quickly.

There is one place where you will fight in a robot for just two battles.

There is no money or equipment; you find a few items throughout the game that can heal you or restore gauge.

The game is not terribly difficult for the most part, although you can die pretty quickly if you’re not careful or are behind in levels. The way you gain levels is that when you beat enemies, they will sometimes drop these colored bars that give 10 XP to the character who the color matches. Although if you level too high, the area’s monsters will start giving 1 XP instead. Some bosses give 100 xp bars that can go to anyone. My characters were only at level 10 at the end of the game.

The story is difficult to follow but it seems to be essentially a greatly stripped down version of the first half of the anime, ending with the fight against Hallelujah. But a lot of side characters are missing and there is almost no establishing dialogue to help people who haven’t seen the series.

Unless you are a huge fan of Gulliver Boy I don’t recommend this game — if you can read Japanese I would recommend the PC Engine (or Saturn remake) over this.

SFC Game 116 – Arabian Nights

Arabian Night: King of the Desert Spirits (アラビアンナイト 砂漠の精霊王), released 6/14/1996, developed by Pandora Box, published by Takara

This is a game that was on my radar before I even started the blog just because of how good it looked — it’s a nice example of late SFC era graphics. I knew that some people had reviewed it negatively because of the short length and high random encounter rate, but I wasn’t sure how accurate the criticisms would be. Having played games like Last Battle that have absurd encounter rates, I’m used to having to speed up through battles, run a lot, or even use no-encounter codes (this is something I would have never done in the early days of the blog but I have softened considerably to doing this. I still haven’t done it on that many games though).

In the end I think both criticisms are fair. I finished the game in less than 10 hours, and that was including a number of optional events you have to do to get the true ending. I did use a no encounter code for some of it, although you get an ability at level 19 that can 100% escape from battles. The encounter rate is high, but that’s paired with dungeons that are needlessly large, and the fights themselves often take a fair amount of time.

The game begins with the djinn Ifrit being defeated and enslaved by a wizard of some kind named Suleiman (the person next to Ifrit there is one of his underlings, Majnun). He becomes Suleiman’s servant for a while, but when Suleiman’s house is attacked by some mysterious power, Suleiman splits Ifrit’s power into 8 spheres that fly off to different areas, and Ifrit himself is trapped in a ring. When Ifrit grants 1000 wishes, he will be freed.

Time passes and Ifrit grants 999 wishes, so he only needs one more. A young girl named Shukuran finds the ring, and her wish is to bring peace to the land. Ifrit is kind of annoyed because granting money or power is easy, but this is going to take a while. So he’s going to have to actually go out and solve the world’s problems, although Shukuran has to come along too because he can’t move very far away from the ring.

The basic game involves finding the 8 spheres to restore Ifrit’s power, and then defeating the enemies behind the problems. To get the true ending, you have to also gain the power of the nine djinn who served under Ifrit when he was his original self. This is a typical situation where the true ending is difficult or impossible to get without a guide; some of the djinn join automatically in the story, and others just require you to go to an optional area. But a few require you to make specific dialogue choices that are not clear (in some cases it’s not even clear that the choice you are making has anything to do with recruiting a djinn). There’s one dungeon where you can take two different paths — the left path is what moves the story ahead, but if you do that it blocks off the right path which has one of the djinn recruits. Another one makes you find an item that is completely hidden without any clues. I personally don’t get as annoyed by this as some people do because I don’t mind using a guide for the true ending, but I can see why people find this frustrating.

The main distinctive feature of the battle system are the Cards. You get cards from beating enemies, and they can be used in battle before a turn starts. Their effects last for 3 turns, and include damage, stat increases, nullifying special defenses, etc. A card can be cancelled by playing a higher level card, and enemies use them as well. Even if the enemies don’t do much damage, if they play a big damage card you have to get rid of it or take a lot of pain.

You have only three characters during the game. Shukuran will gain spells once you start forging alliances with the nine djinn. Ifrit gets spells when you recover the jewels containing his power. Harty, the third person, gets abilities from levelling up (including the all-important Escape at level 19). Frustratingly there are no healing spells in the game except for one of Shukuran’s djinns, so most of the healing is done through items. This increases the annoyance of the random encounters since the monsters are often tough and can do a decent amount of damage (especially with the cards).

There’s not a great deal of story to go through; a lot of it is just finding the spheres and getting the djinn in events that don’t really advance the overall story.

Eventually it turns out that Majnun is the one who caused all the chaos, because of how much he resented humans for trapping Ifrit and taking away his power. I believe that if you don’t fulfill the secret ending conditions, the game ends here. If you did, you learn that the Earth Mother Goddess tricked Majnun into acting this way. Suleiman knew that she was going to arrive and trapped Ifrit somehow to let the djinn build power over time to deal with her (or perhaps the journey Ifrit had to take strengthened him).

Once you beat the Earth Mother Goddess, you have the choice to release all the djinn or keep them trapped with their items; releasing them is the “best” ending but there’s actually not that much difference between them.

This game is OK, and worth a play if you can deal with the high encounter rate. The graphics are really nice and the music is decent as well. There is an auto battle which helps with the tedium as well.

Next up is Gulliver Boy which I have already beaten (it took 2 days) so that post will be up next week and I have a nice cushion as I start Traverse: Starlight and Prairie.

SFC Game 115 – Dark Half

Dark Half (ダークハーフ), released 5/31/1996, developed by Weston, released by Enix

This game tried a lot of interesting new system ideas, but ultimately I didn’t like it.

The idea of the game is that you switch off between two protagonists — one is Falco, a hero, and then Rukyu, the Dark King. 1000 years ago, six heroes defeated Rukyu. He is now out for revenge against them, whereas Falco hears of the Dark King’s revival and gets caught up in the attempts to stop his evil plans.

The game takes place over 7 days. For the first 6, you switch off between Ryuku and Falco, and the 7th day is the final chapter. The two protagonists work differently, but have some similarities.

Both characters have “soul power” (at the top left) which goes down with every step you take, and for Rukyu it powers his spells. If it hits 0, you get a game over. The dungeons have a lot of traps that are designed to steal your soul power or make you walk a bunch of extra steps. The save points give you 500 soul power back but you can only use each save point once, and there aren’t very many of them. This makes the game quite frustrating to play if you want to play it straight — I used save states.

Rukyu has demon/monster allies — starting in the second day he can use the Dark Gate to capture monsters. This powers up his spell levels but also allows the monster to join the team. The battles are on a grid, but you can’t control the monsters at all, even general AI settings. Also Rukyu cannot move or attack, only cast spells. So even if a monster comes right up to him (like in the image above) all he can do is sit there and take the hits. Healing also doesn’t work on him; all you have is a small amount of HP you recover at the end of each fight.

For Falco, you have human companions. You get scrolls from defeating enemies that can be used as spells, and also “Chaos Orbs” that increase stats. There is no normal levelling system. You can control your allies and Falco but you can’t move freely, you can only choose who you want to attack — this is annoying because the spells have areas of effect but you can’t actually move your characters into specific positions to take advantage of them.

Because of all of this, the difficulty level is quite high if you want to play without any assistance. If you know some tricks you can make it somewhat easier, but there are still some frustrating boss battles where the enemies seem to get 5 or 6 turns for every one turn of yours. The most powerful equipment is also hidden in random areas on the map.

When you walk around as Ryuku, you gain soul power by killing the humans in the towns and absorbing their spirits. The dialogue is always interesting when you do this as the humans beg for their lives or else are resigned to their fate. When you are Falco you can come across these dead bodies and take their “light of hope”; if you can collect 90 of them throughout the game you can get the best ending.

Now for the plot spoilers. As you continue in the game with Ryuku, there are hints that he’s not really a “dark king” — ultimately it turns out he is the creator of the world, who was ready to destroy humans because of their sins, but decided to wait 1000 years to give the humans a chance to do better. Now the 1000 years are up and they haven’t done any better so he decides to wipe them out.

Meanwhile on the Falco side, the king who was once one of the 6 heroes has decided to use Ryuku’s ring to control the world himself. Once you complete the first 6 days for both characters, Falco and Ryuku do a final showdown. You can pick which character you want to control for the fight.

I picked Falco because if you have the Dark Gate for him you can kill Ryuku in one use of the spell. I did not have 90 lights of hope so I got a medium ending where Ryuku entrusts his ring to Falco, who becomes the new ruler of humanity but it leaves the question open of how Falco does that. I looked at some of the other endings but they looked equally vague.

As I said in the opening, I didn’t like the game. I found the system annoying and poorly implemented, and the plot was only so-so. It has a translation patch so you can try it out for yourself, if you want.

SFC Game 114 – Treasure Hunter G

Treasure Hunter G (トレジャーハンターG), released 5/24/1996, developed by Sting, released by Square

This is Square’s final game for the Super Famicom. It’s classified by some people as a strategy RPG, for me it’s perhaps SRPG adjacent but isn’t quite there. The game follows Red G and Blue G, the sons of the treasure hunter Brown G who has disappeared seeking something. The brothers go north of their town to look for an “iron bird” that appeared there, which begins an adventure that leads to the usual world-saving quest.

The battles take place on grids like the above. Each character has a certain number of ACT points, which decrease when you take actions. The enemies have colored areas around them, and moving within them takes more ACT points the stronger the color is. Also there is a “grid level” to the whole map which also affects how many points all the actions take.

Overall this is an interesting system. The biggest problem with it is that you cannot take back any move, meaning that if you hit the wrong direction you can end up wasting a large amount of points. The attacks can also go wrong — if you try to attack empty air it won’t use any points, but you can attack your own allies and that will take up points. So you need to pay careful attention to which way you’re facing (you can change with the L and R button).

Each character also has abilities that use up SP. SP go up by levelling and then paying 50 gold to a priest (who also saves your game). After a battle, each character will recover some HP, and you also recover HP when you gain a level (even in battle).

There are two types of defense — F Guard (front) and B Guard (back); often it’s better to attack enemies from behind, although it may take more movement points to get there. Some weapons have 2 range and will hit any enemies/allies in that range. Axes knock enemies into another square and also usually turn them around.

Inventory management is a huge headache. Each character can only carry 20 items, and you get a lot of items so that quickly fills up. You’re constantly having to discard items or sell them — I’ve said this before but I’ve never played a game where I thought it was fun to frequently manage inventory. Inventory space doesn’t necessarily have to be unlimited, but when you are having to do inventory management multiple times in each town or dungeon and after every couple of battles, that’s tedious.

The game also has unnecessarily “cute” ways of doing town services — you pay for the inn and then have to walk to the bed yourself. You buy things by picking up items, then going to the clerk and paying for them, and then deciding whose inventory each will go in (at which point you can’t see the stats or who can equip). There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel like this for something that makes the experience worse.

The graphics are fine — they are a good example of late SFC style. I feel that the sprites are kind of fuzzy and they remind me of Donkey Kong Country; I think I prefer the more typical sharper style of RPG sprite but it’s not a big issue.

There are four characters in your party:

  • Red is the typical sword fighter. He gets a lot of action points and can equip powerful weapons. He also had sword techniques — the “double attack” is particularly useful in boss battles.
  • Blue uses spears or axes. Spears have a 2 range; sometimes it’s one front and one back, sometimes it hits both enemies in range, other times just the one 2 away (depends on the spear). His moves are all trap-laying moves that require enemies to walk over them. I never bothered using them, or any of the items that have the trap effects.
  • Rain is the healer, she uses Chakrams which have a 2 range and can also cast fire spells. But the healing is her main virtue.
  • Pongo is a monkey, who has a wide variety of elemental spells and also uses 2 range boomerangs. His AoE spells are very useful in a lot of battles.

The battle strategies tend to revolve around minimizing your AP expenditure moving, but you also need to get in position to do good damage (especially if you have to attack from behind). Spells can help a lot. Sometimes there are enemies that hide at the back and attack all of your guys or summon people, and so there you have to be able to either beat the front enemies quickly or manage to get around them to the back.

For the most part I did not find the game particularly challenging although there are a few tough battles. There are often heal points in dungeons, and the enemy encounters do not regenerate until you leave the dungeon so it’s not uncommon that you can heal completely after each fight if you need to.

The plot is a pretty basic “collect 7 items to stop the Dark King from destroying the world” plot with only one or two twists. There is some evidence of haste; several characters are introduced that seem like they should be involved in the storyline but barely make an appearance at all.

This game is OK but could have been a lot better if they had a better inventory system. Nevertheless, it’s probably still worth playing for SFC RPG fans, and I believe there is a patch.