I had initially planned on two posts, one covering disc 1 and the other disc 2. However, I think the story is too long for me to cover it in detail, and I’m not sure there’s much purpose to a short description of each chapter. Instead I will just talk generally about the story in this post.

As I said before, the game takes place among these high schoolers (this is Maria, their English teacher and homeroom teacher — her full name is Maria Alucard. Aren’t people wise to this trick by now?). All five of the core characters discover that they can call on a certain “power”, and they sometimes have memories of past lives (or maybe their ancestors) in the Edo and early Meiji periods.

The other characters that join also have the same power, which manifested at the same time in a previous year.

The story as a whole is episodic in nature. The episodes often play off of common superstition or urban legends, such as groups of crows attacking people, or water demons. The enemies even include Lovecraft’s Cthulhu demons (explicitly so, not just ones that resemble them) and Neo-nazis. There’s also a lot of mythology and historical occultism, as well as feng shui and other Chinese mystic practices. It seems sort of like they just threw everything into the pot.

On the first disc, it becomes clear that all of the incidents are centering around a group called the Kidoshu, headed by a mysterious figure that is also a high school student gifted with the “power”. Many of the enemies in this section are normal people who have been gifted with (or forced to take) a demonic power that even turns them into Japanese-style ogres.

The final episode of the first disc involves the fight against Kozunu, who is the leader of the Kidoshu.

However, it’s probably not a huge surprise that this is not the real final enemy (since you have another disc to go). Kozunu was being manipulated by someone else.

Disc 2 begins with some interval stories — a class trip where we fight against yakuza trying to shut down a traditional village, and then a shrine festival where we fight the lingering spirit of the disc 1 boss.

The final wrapup of the storyline involves the attempt to release a sealed dragon (sealed by the ancestor of the main character, and protected by other ancestors or past lives of the other characters).

The final fight is pretty tough — you have to defeat these balls, but the dragon (who can’t be attacked) can hit you with a huge area attack.

In addition to this broad storyline, there is a lot of high-school stuff and little side stories to amplify the bare outline. One thing I did not manage to get was the date “Christmas event” in chapter 20; it involves a lot of flags and specific things that I didn’t know about. However, it sounds like on the extra disc (which I’ll get to in 1999) you can see the events even if you didn’t fulfill the conditions.

I’m actually not quite done with the game because once you finish, there are several Gaiden chapters that fill in some gaps of what went on in the game.

Overall I am going to give this an A because it did hold my interest to the end. The battle system has some flaws but is overall interesting. I think my biggest complain with the battle system is that you often don’t get much time or leeway to fight; instead you end up having to finish the battles in 2-3 rounds because the enemies can do so much damage that you can’t afford to let them survive for very long.

I would recommend this game if you like visual novels. I think that if you are not so much a VN fan, the battles alone may not keep your interest.

As I said above, there’s an extra fan disc in 1999, and the series continues in 2002 with a second game set in the Meiji period with the ancestors (or former lives) of the main characters. There was supposed to be a third game that would have taken place in between the two, but for whatever reason development was cancelled.

Next I am going to play Ys VI — I was looking back over some old posts and I mentioned in my Ys V review that I bought the game for PS2 about 20 years ago but never played it. Now seems like a good time. I will then try the next Famicom game (Mirai Senshi Jarvas, which is supposedly a kusoge so I probably won’t play it for too long). The next SRPG is Langrisser V.

Tokyo Majin Gakuen: Kenpucho (東京魔人學園剣風帖), released 6/18/1998, developed by Shout Design Works, published by ASMIK ACE

This game is part of the “Tokyo Majin Gakuen Kiden” franchise, which includes two Playstation games and then a bunch of remakes, fan discs, and adaptations. There was intended to be a third game for the DS announced in 2008, but for whatever reason it never came out.

Kenpucho was especially popular, generating drama CDs, anime, novelizations, manga, as well as a fan disc add-on.

I’m going to do three posts on this game. This post will be an overview of the system. The next post (on Wed.) will be disc 1, and the last post (next weekend) will be disc 2.

The game is essentially a combination of a visual novel and a strategy RPG. You spend most of your time in the visual novel part, but the SRPG part is decently implemented and is not just a lazy add-on.

The main way that the VN aspect is done is through the emotional responses, which you can see above. By pressing the directional keys (for negative responses) and the buttons (for positive responses) you can choose how your main character responds. For instance, in the above picture you are meeting Kyouichi for the first time, and he says “we’re in the same class, so let’s be friends.” On the left side, you can get angry at him, be sad, respond coldly, or react with uncertainty. On the right side, you can react happily, you can react with love, with friendship, or you can simply agree without any particular emotion.

What these responses actually do, though, is a bit hard to tell. There are no branching story paths, extra stages, different combats, or anything like that. As far as I can tell you will be in this core friend group even if you are constantly angry or cold to them, and the instruction manual doesn’t indicate that the friendship levels do anything in combat. It will change the immediate response they make (and perhaps the people around them). In some cases you will get some items by making certain choices, and outside of the core 5 people, there are a large number of extra characters that join if you are friendly to them.

From what I can tell, “friendly” is basically the default response and if you responded that way in every case, you would end up with the majority of the extra characters and scenes. So I think this response matrix is more for just trying to define your avatar in the game for your own purposes, rather than as a true strong gameplay element. If you are a complete asshole to everyone you might just have the main 5 characters and it would be interesting to see if the game could be completed that way without grinding (I think it probably could).

I think the art is pretty good and they went with a more VN-style of art than anime. The dialogue is not voiced, although the characters do have small voice clips (like greetings), and in-battle voices for their attacks.

The game is made up of 23 chapters across two discs. Each chapter has one or two battles in it. After the third chapter you can also go into the “old school building”, which is essentially a grinding dungeon — you do 5 levels at a time, and once you clear a set of 5 levels you can start from there next time. Or you can repeat the first levels, because if you stay in the dungeon without leaving, you get bonus XP for your next 5 floors.

At the end of each chapter, you can choose activities for each of your characters except the main character, which will change their stats.

The choices are club activity, study, rest, have fun, and talk. The last one just lets you talk to the person and change their friendship level. The other four have effects that differ per character, but in general Study is going to raise spirit (for magic attack/defense), rest will raise HP, have fun will raise movement points, and the club activity differs for each person.

Of course movement points are a big thing you want but as you can see in the picture above, “have fun” always lowers stats as well (though different stats for each character). This makes a big difference per character — I found that some characters I could do “have fun” almost every time without a huge drawback, whereas other characters seemed to give up a lot to do it. You can choose activities for all your people, even ones who didn’t participate in the combats for that chapter. (One thing I don’t like is that once you’ve chosen an activity you can’t change it).

The battles take place on a 3/4 grid view that you can’t rotate, although there is a button that will show you where everyone is if they are hidden behind an obstacle (fortunately this is rare).

You always begin with your core 5 characters, unless there is a story reason why some of them are not there. Some battles will have additional characters that are dictated by the story, and then you can fill that out with the extra characters — usually to a maximum of 10 but sometimes it’s lower.

The core characters will be there at the start, and the extra characters come in at round 2. You’ll be able to place them where you want, which can help a lot.

The game then goes in a player turn-enemy turn system. You can do your characters’ actions in any order and even take part of a character’s turn and then switch to another person. Each person has action points. Walking takes a certain number of points based on the terrain, and it costs points to change facing as well. Each attack or ability costs a certain number of points as well. There are no limitations on how many times you can use an ability each battle (i.e. no MP or TP), it’s just up to whether you have the action points left over to do it.

Each character has a “field of view” that affects their attacks — in this case Daigo can use his moves on people to the front or sides of him, but not back. Right of that is a 3×3 grid that shows where the character’s weak points are (red is weak, blue is strong). If you look at the list of attacks to the right, you can see what part of the grid they attack, which you want to line up with their weak points. Each move also has a strength, an action point cost, and a range (although the range is just where you activate the move, it’s not about the area of effect).

All of this makes it rather complicated to tell which attacks will be effective (there’s also an elemental system), mercifully the designers show you the damage that will be done with the attack so that you don’t actually have to think it all out on your own. Many of the moves also have knockback effects; if you knock a character into another character, they will both take some damage.

Death is not permanent, although if your main character dies you get a game over (ugh). Anyone else that dies it just lowers their friendship value — as I said before it’s hard to know exactly what effect this has. The only place you want to make sure you don’t do this is when you have guest characters in the battle that might join your party later. I already missed out on one character because he died in the battle where he was a (controllable) guest.

I’ll end this post with some info on the four core characters (aside from the main character). They’re all 3rd year high school students so they’re 17 or 18.

Misato Aoi is on the student council; she has healing and buffing moves in battle for the most part. She seems to be the basic default love interest for the main character.

Sakurai Komaki is a more tomboyish person who uses a bow in battle.

Daigo is a martial arts fighter; he’s also very serious and restrained.

Horaiji Koichi is on the kendo club and is constantly flirting and has a very free personality.

The basic story involves these people discovering that they have supernatural abilities and getting drawn up into various supernatural events. I’ll go into the plot more and introduce some more of the characters in the next post.

If you didn’t see my last post, there was a problem with a cache plugin that made the previous couple of weeks unviewable to anyone not logged into the admin account (i.e. everyone but me, which made me not see the problem), so you may need to go back further to catch up.

In the first battle we’re still protecting King Dominate. He takes a somewhat unpredictable path and most of the enemies don’t move until you get near them; even so I never found that Dominate himself was in much danger. This is similar to the battle in scenario 1 with the Queen Worm.

Next up is this stage where you have to navigate these platforms that rise and sink every few turns. It slows down the battle a lot. The only plus is that Dominate won’t really move beyond the first area, and so the only enemy that will go after him is one harpy thing that can be easily dealt with by his entourage.

After this we reach the last town and can finally use the blacksmith to make some nice weapons. I didn’t have much money at this point but that soon changes.

The next stage is rough. You have a bunch of initial enemies to deal with that are made somewhat annoying by having to go down a narrow stairway. But the big problem is the boss. These enemies will not move until you’re in their range, and then they all come at you and cast damaging spells. Resist would help but Hera wasn’t high enough level to use it — honestly I’m not entirely sure how I did it in the end; I kept getting screwed but then one time I guess my positioning was just lucky and most of my characters survived long enough to use Aura and take out the spellcasters. Once it’s down to just Deathhelen it’s not very hard.

After this stage, the ancient ruins open up which are pretty much the same as in the first game although I didn’t find it quite as easy to level. I got my main party up to the 13-15 range, which also earned enough money to get a bunch of blacksmith weapons. There are only two more stages left after this.

This second to last stage is annoying. You are forced to split your team into your main squad, and then your leftover characters who will be headed by David. Your main force holds off endless reinforcements on a different map while David’s squad deals with enemies inside the tank, ending with a 330 hp boss than regenerates 20 hp a round. Your normal David squad will only be a few characters, so what you have to do is either level them up to a ridiculous point, or use a character called Puppets that you get from the town bar, who can capture monsters in the bonus dungeon.

Personally I consider this bad game design. I don’t mind the team split, but they should let you split the team however you want, rather than forcing you to use this tiny squad that you have to supplement by grinding the bonus dungeon. In general I’m not a big fan of games that let you freely choose your characters for 95% of the game but then have one stage where it’s suddenly “surprise, you have to use the characters you didn’t level at all!”

In any case, once I went back to the bonus dungeon and recruited a Queen Worm, two Hydras, a skeleton knight, and a Wyvern, the stage wasn’t too bad.

The final stage is considerably easier than this, as long as you don’t send Medion out ahead to get killed. You first have to fight Symbios’ side characters from the first game, who for me were all very weak and could mostly be taken out in a hit (although I did get Medion killed from full HP by a lucky critical move, which is why I am glad to use save states on successive battles where you can’t save). Once that team is gone, you just have the two final bosses with two weak grunts — Yasha can cast level 3 spark but Aura was able to deal with that pretty easily.

So that’s SF3 part 2. To be honest I did not enjoy it as much as scenario 1. I thought that a fair number of the creative battles they tried (like the ship cannon one, or the split party one I mentioned above) were not well designed, and especially since you still can’t skip battle animations the turns seem to go pretty slowly.

We’ll finish up Shining Force III later in 1998 with scenario 3.

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.