Category Archives: PC Engine RPGs

PCE Game 41 – Alnam no Kiba

Leave a reply
Fangs of Alnam (アルナムの牙 獣族十二神徒伝説)
Released 12/22/1994, published by Right Stuff 
 

 

Right Stuff is the developer responsible for a few other games I’ve played (Emerald Dragon, Alshark, Sword Master). This game takes place in a world with humans, and then 12 tribes of demihumans (who transform into beasts) who are treated as lesser beings by the humans. One day mysterious beings called Shishimura appear, and threaten the humans. The Empress of Alnam, Marien, calls on representatives from the 12 tribes to come to the capital. The main character is Genbu, studying sword use under Ouken. Ouken is supposed to be the representative, but he’s killed by one of the Shishimura trying to protect Genbu, so Genbu goes in his place.

The game begins with an extended cutscene; as is common for these late PCE games, the scenes are well done.

The battle system is pretty simple. You can choose “attack” or “beast attack”. Everything you do uses Qi, which is a bit annoying at the beginning because everyone’s Qi is so low that even just doing basic attacks quickly exhausts your supply. The problem is made worse by this game’s ridiculous random encounter rate, one of the worst I’ve seen (it may even be worse than The Last Battle although this game’s areas are much smaller).

 

But the much bigger issue than this is that the game is full of bugs, almost at the level of Maka Maka. There are numerous graphical glitches here and there, but also a large number of bugs that cause freezes

Some examples of the bugs:

  • The strongest fire spell freezes the game (even if enemies cast it).
  • The strongest weapon (the Fang of Alnam of the game title) sometimes has negative attack power due to a bug.
  • Bosses are frequently absent; you have to leave the dungeon and come back (if it’s the final boss you have to reset)
  • There are other bugs where when you enter or exit places, or use stairs, you get stuck and have to reset
  • For two characters, if you level them up too much before a certain point in the game it will always freeze during a cutscene
  • Characters appear and disappear, or have the wrong face portrait
  • There are multiple places where after a cutscene, if you try to backtrack instead of moving on, you get stuck and have to reset

There are a lot of other minor graphical glitches as well. For some of the bugs you can save your game in a bugged state where you can’t win the game, and since there’s only one save slot you would have to start over.

Once Genbu reaches the capital, he’s ignored and insulted by most of the humans but eventually reaches the Empress, who tells everyone about the Shishimaru and asks for their help. Throughout the game Genbu will work with various representatives to deal with the Shishimaru and also figure out his place in the world.

 

Most of the sites I looked at praised the story and visual scenes, and in fact the game was remade on the Playstation as an adventure game with no RPG elements. A sequel RPG came out for the Playstation in 1997 and there was supposed to be a third game, but Right Stuff went out of business before that could happen.

Given the high encounter rate, basic battle system, and the bugs, I didn’t see any need to play the game beyond this point. It’s a shame because the visuals do look good and there is potential in the game. It has a good interface and everything plays quickly and smoothly.

Next up will be the final SFC game for 1994, Dual Orb 2.

PCE Game 40 – Record of Lodoss War 2

Leave a reply
Record of Lodoss War 2 (ロードス島戦記2)
Released 12/16/1994, published by Hudson
 

  

This is the second of the two Lodoss War PC Engine games; you can look back at the post I made on the first one for general information about the series. Like the first game, this is based on one of the computer games, which itself is based on the second group of Lodoss stories. The main character of these is Spark, with a new party of his own (although some of the characters from the original stories appear as well).
 

 

What I appreciated about the original game is that it seemed to capture the tabletop RPG origins of the franchise better than a normal RPG. There are not many random encounters, and you don’t win them just by mashing buttons. Most of the XP you get comes from finishing quests rather than killing monsters, and you don’t level up that many times during the game. It had a different feel from the typical RPGs of the time, and to me it was similar to the Sword World SFC games (especially the first one) in this respect.

Unfortunately the second game walks most of this back. Random encounters are now more along the lines of a regular RPG, most of your XP comes from them, and you’ll end up auto-battling the majority of the encounters. Level ups are also much more frequent, and you can now grind levels and money in a way you really couldn’t in the first game.

 

After the opening movie, the game begins with Spark, who is a knight in training. King Kashue (who I believe is from the original party) and Slayn are in the palace, and charge Spark with the mission of figuring out what’s going on with the Flame Tribe, who seem to be plotting a rebellion. Evidently Spark should be the head of the Flame Tribe but I’m not entirely sure what the backstory is there. Specifically we’re supposed to head to Hilt and Hebun towns.

The towns are “select a building” type

 Spark is on his own at first. While looking around for the towns I hit level 5 and bought most of the good equipment; there are other towns that have better equipment to the left. Hilt was easy to find; there some ruffians attacked but with all my equipment and levels it was fine. Hebun is on the right near the desert; here we’re attacked by Flame Tribe nomads (easy fight as well).

Spark heads back to Kashue to report. For now, Kashue is interested in settling new areas, particularly the dangerous Fire Dragon Hunting Zone — Spark is supposed to deliver a secret message to Raiden port town to enlist the help of the people there. Spark also gets his first companions, Garack the fighter and Ald Nova the magician. They’re a bit lower leveled and have bad equipment so I got them some better stuff and then went to Raiden.

 

The mayor of Raiden seems to be having trouble with bad dreams; it turns out he’s being affected by a succubus. This was still the age where nipples are acceptable in games/manga.

booba

Anyway, after the Succubus goes down, the mayor pledges to give whatever money Kashue needs, and we also get a new party member, the thief (scout) Lyna. At this point we can go to the guild and take on submissions. I did all three — recovering a child from a cult, clearing out thieves from the town, and delivering weapons to a nearby town. This gets some additional XP (the rewards from the quests themselves are quite low but you fight monsters along the way, and there are some good weapon and armor upgrades).

 

Now back to Kashue, where Dark Elves are attacking. After they’re beaten, it seems that the expansion into the Fire Valley has begun, but the new threat of the Dark Elves means it’s time for Spark to head south to Valis.

This is where I stopped. For me, this game is a downgrade from the first one — it’s by no means a bad RPG (it’s in the top class of the PCE games) but I miss the more tabletop RPG feel of the first one.

—

I’m playing Sakura Taisen for my other blog but I’m on the last stage so I will most likely have a Daikaiju Monogatari post up next Saturday. If you want to see what games are coming up, you should look at the completed games list, where I put in all the games I’ll be playing up to the end of 1994.

PCE Game 39 – Startling Odyssey II

5 Replies
Startling Odyssey II (スタートリング オデッセイ2 魔竜戦争)
Released 10/21/1994, developed by Ray Force

 

This is Ray Force’s third (and final) game for the PC Engine. SO1 was a basic, cookie cutter RPG. SO2 is another basic, DQ2-clone RPG. It is more polished than the first one — the graphics are better, there are more voiced cutscenes, the interface is cleaner, and the game as a whole moves more quickly. So if you like old-school, basic RPGs this one is probably not bad. There’s even a translation patch, although it probably doesn’t translate the voiced cutscenes.

As usual with this kind of game, I have very little to say about the gameplay. You buy the best equipment you can afford, use auto battle for most fights and hold down a speedup key, and go through dungeons and open chests and find the boss or goal. Rinse and repeat.

The game starts with some kind of magician or researcher causing demons to come into the world, and then the main character Robin killing a Chimera with one hit. He’s well known in the kingdom for being the Blue-Haired Knight

Back in the capital city, Robin talks to the king’s daughter, who is his half sister. He gets a new mission to head to Neria town to the south and see what’s the matter there, taking his two best knights with him.

The townspeople say they saw a dragon, and going through the cave we come across the room where the magician from the opening was summoning the monster, but now it’s gone. So back to the castle…where it turns out monsters have overrun the castle and killed the king. Robin’s sister has gone on ahead to try to seek safety, so we follow her through the underground passage.

 
Robin’s two knights have to push him away and collapse the corridor when they’re attacked by dragons, and Robin goes on himself. Attempting to continue his escape a bridge falls away, sending him into the ravine.

He wakes up later in the care of Julia. He’s been out for three days and is only now recovering. But when monsters attack the town, he heads out even in his weakened state.

The PC Engine allowed for more violence and sexual content than the Super Famicom. Anyway, this reopens Robin’s wounds and he has to rest for a while more, but after he’s healed he finds out that a child in the town is sick and needs a special item (the wing of an animal) to heal him. Julia joins him and they go out in search of the wing. They have to beat a boss:

And then find the wing and cure the child. At this point Robin decides he needs to continue on his journey (to find Patricia, his sister) and Julia decides to come with him.

This is where I stopped. As I said in the intro, this is a playable DQ2 clone — if that’s the kind of game you like this is a better game than other examples of the style. At the same time, I really would like to see them doing something innovative in 1994. Even Dragon Quest itself didn’t make any true DQ2 clones.

PCE Game 38 – Megami Paradise

Leave a reply
Megami Paradise (女神天国)
Released 9/30/1994, published by NEC Home Electronics

 

As you might expect from the title and the PC Engine’s library, this is a fanservice RPG with a lot of girls — aspects of the game remind me of Princess Minerva. It’s based on some kind of reader-participation game that ran in Dengeki PC Engine. These games seem to have been popular in the 1990s but I’m not clear on exactly how it worked. I think it’s sort of like a Choose Your Own Adventure or Lone Wolf style game that you can create characters and play on your own from the magazine. Along with the game there was a manga, OVA, and this PC Engine RPG.

 

The story and setting is silly. The main character is Rinrin, studying at the Megami Academy to become a Megami (goddess). When she gets there she comes across the “MegaQ” orbs that the Academy guards, and not knowing what they are, throws them away, hits them with baseball bats, etc. and scatters them around the world. She then begins her registration to enter the school, but they learn about the “disappearance” of the MegaQ orbs. Rinrin has the help of Pop, a fairy, and is sent to go find them. Also sent out are the four goddesses of the school — Lulubell, Juliana, Lilith, and Stacea.

 

Opposing them is the student council, who is secretly working for the Yamamama (Darkness Mom), who wants to find the MegaQ to take over the world.

 

There is a lot of voiced dialogue and cutscenes. It may seem obvious since that was the PC Engine’s selling point (especially in late 1994), but a surprising number of games only add a tiny amount of this content to the game.

The first part of the game is entirely in the school. The student council sends out a message to all students that they should beat up Rinrin for going against the council, so the first random encounters are students from the tennis club, anime club, soccer club, etc.

The combat system is standard RPG except that all attacking is done through spells (which cost no MP). Each character can have 4 spells, which are learned by finding sunflowers that will teach them. One annoyance for me is that there’s no way to tell what each spell does, although the names have some onomatopoeic clue. However, this is an interesting system.

I found the first part annoyingly difficult. Since it’s just one character, you basically have to level up a lot. As usual the balance is way off; the bosses are much easier than the random encounters so if you can just survive to the bosses you’ll probably win.

The first area involves going around to the different school buildings, beating up the leaders of the clubs, and getting keys to the next area. There is a shop in the main building that sells outfits and items. Outfit changing requires you to go to a changing room, then you can equip different things. Each one has a “beauty” value and then raises one of three stats — goddess, defense, or speed. I think goddess is attack. I’m not entirely sure what the “beauty” value does, but the in-game explanations indicate it’s important to always have that as high as possible. Even a better defensive item, if the beauty is less, might not be as good.

 

You can unlock special skills by equipping certain pieces of clothing, or by combining certain outfits. Apparently you can also get cutscene pictures this way as well. 

Eventually I made it to the student council room and faced Rouge, one of the 4 followers of Yamimama. She brought out a Mazinger Z ripoff to fight, but with repeated healing and attacking it was fine.

Rinrin gets the yellow MegaQ (that talks to her and raises her stats). Now Rinrin is sent out into the world to find the other MegaQs, but she takes off in balloons and gets sunk by a storm.

She washes onto a beach and meets Kurisu (the dude you name at the beginning of the game). In the next town, all the 4 goddesses are there and you can pick 2 of them to join your team. There is also a way to warp back to the school so you can use the sunflowers to get spells for the new members.

 

This is where I stopped. I guess this is an OK RPG for this era; the spell system and outfitting are interesting features, and you can progress in the game fairly quickly. There are a lot of well known VAs (well known for the 90s, at least) and a good amount of cutscenes and voiced dialogue. The silliness and fanservice will probably turn a lot of people off, though.

PCE Game 37 – Xak III

Leave a reply
Xak III: The Eternal Recurrence (サークIII ジ・エターナル・リカーレンス)
Released 9/30/1994, developed and published by Micro Cabin 
 

  

This is the final game in the Xak series, which had three main games and two side games. As I said in my previous post on the game, it is clearly modelling itself on Ys: an action RPG with meaningless short name for the series, and a first game split into two parts.

As with the previous games, Xak III began as a computer game and was later ported to PC Engine. From what I could see on Youtube, the port is pretty faithful although the computer version had a stat called EP in addition to HP and MP, I don’t know what that is and don’t think it’s in the PC Engine version.

The first two games had the Ys-style “run into enemies” system, but this game has you press the button to attack. The port is disappointing like the original games’ was — there is hardly any voice or cutscenes throughout the game, not even at the beginning. I actually wondered if there was something wrong with the copy I had but the first cutscene doesn’t happen until a bit through the game and there are only two more (a very brief one near the end, and then the ending scene). However, this might be good because surprisingly this game actually has an English translation patch — they don’t do anything with the voiced cutscenes, but they don’t add much to the story and you can almost guess what’s happening in them just from the pictures.

The game is quite short as is typical for ARPGs of this era (the youtube playthrough is 6h30m). However, it does conclude the story of Xak, as Ratok takes on the third evil general (having beaten the other two, Badu and Gospel, in the previous games). The question of what happened to Ratok’s father is addressed as well, and there’s sort of a conclusion to Pixie and Frey’s stories too. You could definitely play this without playing the first two, though, since anything of importance in those games is repeated here.

The graphics in the dialogue scenes are not bad.

The opening scene is the bloodiest thing I’ve seen yet, where this dude comes into the castle and kills the King, ripping his head off. The princess then says he might as well take her head too, and he rips it off, leaving both heads on the throne. The PC Engine generally allowed more explicit content (in both violence and sex) than the Super Famicom did.

Like the last game, this game has jumping puzzles, but they’re nowhere near as annoying as the previous game — for one thing, you don’t die if you miss the jumps, and the graphics make it much easier to see where the platforms are and where you’re supposed to jump.

There’s also a dragon riding part again, but it’s quite easy.

Unlike the first game, you get companions in this game — most of them are from the other games (Frey and Ryun, for instance). They just run around and fight on their own, and are actually relatively helpful unless they die — you can’t change screens without reviving them.

 

Overall the game is easy. There are some parts (particularly near the end) where the grunt enemies hit hard, but the bosses can almost all be beaten just by mashing the button and taking hits — as with the previous game, it’s easy to level because the amount of XP you get from the enemies never goes down. You can also buy tons of healing potions since there’s nothing else worthwhile to spend money on.

There’s a lot of laziness in the interface and presentation — you can’t see stats of items at all, so you have no idea what to equip (I can’t believe we’re still seeing this at the end of 1994). You can “teleport” back to any place you’ve been with no explanation for why. There’s no real backtracking or exploration, it’s more like a series of stages.

This is not an especially good game, but it’s not terrible either. That being said, the Ys games that were coming out around this time weren’t all that great either (except for Dawn of Ys, I suppose). But somehow Ys was able to continue on to the present, but Xak never produced another game after this. I’m not sure if that had to do with Micro Cabin itself, or the sales of Xak relative to Ys.

PCE Game 36 – Alshark

Leave a reply
Alshark (アルシャーク)
Released 8/26/1994, port developed by Ocarina Systems

This game was initially released on computer in 1991, and this port was done 3 years later (along with one to Mega Drive CD). The result is similar to what we’ve seen with previous computer games ported to PC Engine — an old fashioned and somewhat peculiar system with voiced cutscenes. It’s frustrating to see the designers spend all their effort on adding in the voiced cutscenes, but do nothing to address the interface issues. 

The original developer of the PC game was Right Stuff. It seems to have been their first game. They went on to make Emerald Dragon (which I played earlier), Sword Master (which I played on my SRPG blog), and Alnam no Kiba (which I’ll be playing later). They struggled after 1994 and went bankrupt after releasing their last game in 1998.

The main character is Shion. At the beginning of the game, a mysterious comet or asteroid has come down nearby and his dad goes to investigate, telling Shion to stay home. But Shion rounds up his friend Shoko and they decide to go see what’s up.

 

They grab one handgun from Shoko’s house and head out.

The battle system makes it look like there will be some sort of grid or positioning system, but it’s just a normal RPG system and the way everyone is represented on the battlefield has no purpose. Whether it’s a hand-to-hand attack or a gun attack the position doesn’t matter. It’s the usual Dragon Quest II system.

Reaching the asteroid area, Shion and Shoko see Shoko’s dad with some of the Imperial troops (who are the villains of this game). Shoko’s dad seems manaical and they kill Shion’s dad and the other humans, and then leave. As Shion’s dad is dying, he tells them to find Scrap Joe who will help them out. Heading back to town, they find that Shion’s mom has run away from home, so they chase after her, taking the house robot Saru for help.

After picking up a few items from shelves, I headed down to Hamack, hoping to find Scrap Joe.

Scrap Joe is in a garbage dump near the town, along with a bunch of robots that attack. Once we find him, he’s an ornery old cuss. But once he knows who he are, he changes his tune — it turns out that he was close friends with Shion’s and Shoko’s dads. So he agrees to help, and shows us his ship that he’s outfitted himself. It turns out Shion’s mom headed off planet so we’ll try to save her.

 
We manage to catch up with the ship that took off from the planet, and get onto it — Shaina (Shion’s mom) is there, captured by the Jagma Forces which are the elite troops of the Empire. Maon (Shoko’s dad) is also there, ranting about some great mission he has, and that even his beloved friends couldn’t be allowed to stop him. He’s found some great power. We might have all been killed but a woman named Milets comes in to rescue us, and Shaina is freed. Maon leaves, telling us not to interfere anymore.

Milets takes us to her ship, where we join her in doing missions — the first one being on a nearby planet Zajil. We use Joe’s ship, and he has a menu:

Using “scrap” that you get from beating enemies, you can upgrade the ship’s components as well as make weapons and armor for your group.
 

Now we can fly the ship through space. I found this part very hard to navigate.

 There is a map but it’s difficult to understand, and there aren’t any landmarks to help you know where you are. Every so often you get in a fight, where you just watch the ship shoot the enemy until it dies. Just wandering around I gained a bunch of levels because the enemies could barely hurt me. Eventually it turned out that the planet I needed to go to was really close to where I had started, but you move so fast that you blow past it in a second if you aren’t inching along.

This is where I stopped playing. The story seems potentially interesting and some of the gameplay elements might work, but it just feels like a 1991 game and with the PC Engine I’m not interested in a game where I’m just going to be holding down a turbo button for every fight.

Next up is Mother 2/Earthbound!

PCE Game 35 – Dragon Knight III (short post)

3 Replies

So I was going to make a short post about this game but I’m not sure I could add anything to the Hardcore Gaming 101 coverage of it, and CRPG Addict’s series on Knights of Xentar (the English localization). The game is not really worth playing.

The main mystery surrounding this game is why Megatech Software decided to make the changes they did in the localization. In the original DK3, Takeru comes to a town during his journey with no real goal, and thieves accost him. He normally doesn’t like to draw his sword against humans so they’re able to beat him up and take his stuff. In the English localization, he stumbles into town drunk, and the same thing happens. In DK3, he goes to beat up bandits to get his stuff back and figures out that the leader is actually a demon. In KoX, there’s this bizarre dialogue about the bandits coming to the town and impregnating women with “demon seed”. Desmond (the KoX main character) smells really bad and has a tiny penis, neither of which is in DK3.

So why did they do this? My only guess is this. They were trying to introduce the world of Japanese eroge to western players who were totally unfamiliar with it. Perhaps they felt that they needed to make it more crassly comic and insulting to make it less creepy or offputting to an audience who might not have reacted well to a cartoon porn game that took itself (fairly) seriously. But I really don’t know. I also wondered if the localizers themselves found the game creepy and were taking a kind of revenge by translating it this way.

There are two more Dragon Knight games that I will be playing — I will at least start the Dragon Knight 1 remake for PCE which is still another year or so away. Dragon Knight IV is an SRPG that was released for SNES, Playstation, and PC-FX (the followup to the PC Engine). I’ll be playing the Playstation version (which seems to be the most polished remake) on my other blog relatively soon.

I’ve already finished Tenshi no Uta so that post should come out this weekend.

PCE Game 34 – KO Seiki Sanjushi Revival of Gaia Kanketsuhen

Leave a reply

KO Seiki Sanjushi Revival of Gaia Kanketsuhen (KO世紀ビースト三獣士〜ガイア復活 完結編〜)

Released 6/17/1994, Pack In Video

I’ve been in a bit of a slump with my playthroughs lately; the semester has been quite busy and I haven’t had as much time to play. I’m having trouble with Bounty Sword on my other blog and proceeding slowly through Slayers for this one. This will be a fairly short post since I only played this game for a few hours. (I also hate the new Blogger interface)

This is yet another game based on anime, this time an OVA. There were two games based on it for computers; the name “kanketsuhen” sounds like this might be a compilation remake of the two games but I wasn’t able to find enough information on it to be sure. Most of the anime-based games I’ve played so far have not been all that good; they tend to be unoriginal and dull, cashing in on the name value and putting in only a token effort to distinguish the game from any other RPG. I’ve played bad games based on anime (Fist of the North Star 5, 3×3 Eyes, Villgust), and just dull games (Ranma 1/2). This one is closer to the dull variety, although I suppose it’s not noticeably worse than a lot of the other games that were coming out at the time.

Here’s Wikipedia’s description of the series’ basis:

The series is set in the distant future in which the Earth is split in two. The southern hemisphere is placed in another dimension while the inhabitants of the northern hemisphere are able to morph into beast-like humanoids. Eventually the humans of the southern hemisphere, led by Uranus, attack the Beasts.

The Three Beasts, Wan Derbard (Wan Dabadadatta) of the Tiger Tribe, Bud Mint (Baado Mint) of the Bird Tribe, and Mei Mer (Mei Mah) of the Mermaid Tribe, are taken prisoner along with Mei Mer’s companion Tuttle Millen (Mekka Mannen, also of the Mermaid tribe), but manage to escape thanks to a little girl named Yuuni Charm Password. Together they seek Gaia, which they believe to be a fabulous treasure, but they are pursued by Uranus’s minions : V-Darn the vicious mage-knight, V-Sion the warrior woman, and Akumako, V-Darn’s sadistic imp-like partner.

This is exactly how the game starts, so they must be following the original story pretty closely. The opening sequence is fairly long, and the voice work is sadly limited — in the time I played I only saw two voiced sections, an opening cutscene narration, and one cutscene after that.

The battle system is fairly standard, but does have a “beast” option. This lets the characters (at least the three main ones) transform into their beast forms and do a powerful attack, at the cost of HP. They also get some sort of machine to allow them to cast magic with their BP, which I think stands for Battery Points. They can be recharged at stations here and there, although they were not common enough and I often had 0 BP — the instruction booklet might have helped more here, but it took me a while to even figure out how to recover them. 

The characters escape their prison not only with the help of Yuuni, but with these beast god-type things that come from the home villages of the characters to fight them. So once they escape, the goal of the game comes to recover these beast gods and find out how to use their power to fight back against the humans. They first head to Wan’s home village, where they learn that the beast associated with the village has still not returned. They head out to a nearby mountain where it has been spotted, and you fight lots of random encounters along the way.

We’re joined by a human who seems to be some kind of prince in disguise; he found us after we escaped from the humans and crash landed with the beast gods. He’s a nice addition because he can equip all the stuff whereas the beast main characters seem only able to equip a weapon and a piece of clothing.

The team does not find the beast god at the mountain, so they head on to the mermaid town where Mei Ma is from. Everyone has fled the town and gotten trapped in an underground area, and we need gunpowder to blow it up. Once we do that, there are still people trapped that need something more powerful than the gunpowder, and it’s time to find this drill machine that should work.

This is where I stopped; I couldn’t figure out where the next town was and this was a pretty run of the mill game of the kind I usually pass over quickly on the PCE. It’s not a bad game and I think if you were a fan of the anime it would be fun, but there are better games on the PCE.

Next up will be another anime-based game, Slayers for the SFC.

PCE Game 33 – Cosmic Fantasy 4

Leave a reply

Cosmic Fantasy 4 (コズミック・ファンタジー4 銀河少年伝説突入編 伝説へのプレリュード)
Released 6/10/1994, produced by Telenet

This is the fourth and final game in the Cosmic Fantasy series for PC Engine. It’s divided into two parts, one which starts the characters from CF1, and the second which stars the CF2 characters. I have not been a huge fan of the series so far, although I was hoping that for this final game they would improve things — particularly the dullness of the battle system and the high random encounter rate.

The main characters are “Cosmic Hunters”, people who go to various planets and solve problems. This game starts out with a section that seems like it’s trying to be an adventure game. You can look at things, talk to people, search, and move.

Unfortunately this section is a waste of time. There are no puzzles, real choices, or even freedom of movement — you just choose each option over and over again until the game lets you advance. Although it does introduce the characters and the basic plot, I don’t see anything here that couldn’t have been done with a normal RPG style. At least if they wanted to do this style gameplay they should have made it less tedious. As usual, there are a lot of fanservice scenes in the game.

Yuu and Saya are the pair from the first game. Their mission this time is to go to a planet and rescue a princess who has been captured. While Yuu goes after the princess, Saya will have to pretend to be the princess so that nobody notices she’s gone.

Once this long opening scene is over, Yuu reaches the planet, and the game switches to the standard RPG mode. Yuu meets up with an old woman who is separated from her tour group, and decides to escort her to the capital — there are a bunch of digressions and side quests along the way.

They actually did change the battle system a bit. That yellow bar fills up and then it’s your turn, although you can wait a bit longer and the bar will start filling up green. I think the more green that fills it the stronger the attack is, but a full green attack is definitely stronger.

Yuu is by himself for this first part of the game. He has a lot of MP which are enough to heal and cure poison as much as needed, especially since a level up restores all HP and MP.

The first little quest is to turn humans in a village back from monsters; it turns out this monster at the top left did it because he was lonely, but in the end the villagers accept him and he can play with the village children.

Next up, we have to recover a healing grass from a dark cave.

Even though these kind of caves are an RPG staple, I’ve never really liked them. You have to blunder around in the dark passages and press random directions to find the hidden passages. At least there are no encounters.

Next up, the old woman gets kidnapped by thieves, and we have to rescue her. There are two boss fights here, the first against two of the underlings.

Then, we fight the leader. This fight took forever. Sometimes she switches into a defensive mode so you have to wait until she’s out of that or she’ll counter. I was never in danger of losing the fight because I had enough MP restore items, but it took a long time.

Then, Yuu reaches the capital. They won’t let us in to the castle so Yuu has to sneak in with help from some people he is supposed to meet here (that the initial dialogue told us about).

Now I have a party of 4. I was glad to finally get some party members, until I got into a fight. Now we have 4 people’s bars filling up. It’s like the Final Fantasy ATB system, but there are two issues. In FF4, when someone’s bar fills up it automatically switches to them. Here, you have to select them. This is fine, especially since there’s the extra green bar and some characters you might want to leave ready (like a healer).

What is not fine is the enemy turns. Unlike FF4, this is a Dragon Quest like system where everyrthing is done through text boxes showing the hit and damage that you have to clear. I found that dealing with 4 enemies bring up text boxes while also trying to select characters and attacks (which bring up text boxes) was incredibly annoying. After suffering through two battles I was done — presumably I would have gotten used to it after a while, but it was almost the end of the week anyway.

If you like the Cosmic Fantasy series, this is probably the best of the games (assuming the battle system becomes easier to manage after you get used to it). The random encounter rate seems lower, and there’s more speech and CD music. But it’s still not a great game.

PCE Game 32 – Monster Maker: Dragon Knight of Darkness

5 Replies

Monster Maker: The Dark Dragon Knight (モンスターメーカー 闇の竜騎士)
Released 3/30/1994, published by NEC Avenue

Monster Maker is a franchise that started out as a card game but grew to include a CCG, a tabletop RPG, manga, and such. There were a number of video games based on the franchise as well. The first couple of games used card mechanics and apparently were somewhat innovative, but after that they switched to a regular RPG format. I previous covered the third game in the series, for SNES. I thought it had a lot of potential but was hampered by some poor design decisions, and I was hoping for an improvement.

Unfortunately this game is much worse, and is an infamous kusoge for the PCE. It was hampered by a long development delay of 2 years. Even then, when it finally came out it was riddled with bugs, including ones that delete your save games or stick you in impossible to win situations. They even had to include a flyer in the package warning you about one of them. There are also freezes, combats ending for no reason, not being able to move on the world map, and others. Furthermore, the game ends suddenly in the middle of the story with “To Be Continued,” but the sequel was never made. One contemporary reviewer for a PC Engine magazine refused to give it a score because of how unfinished it was.

The early games had a card-based battle system. Monster Maker 3 changed this to regular RPG but did have some positioning elements that made it a bit different. This game goes back to just Dragon Quest II style.

The main character, Laia, is a half-elf who was abandoned and raised in the village of Ferund. She likes talking to the fairies outside of town, but is chased out of town when the town is attacked by other dark-haired elves like her. She is given her mother’s circlet and has to go on a quest to find the truth of what happened and her background.

She quickly gets two kobolds and a fighter named Mary in her party — the Monster Maker title means that there is some monster recruiting element, but like MM3 it’s poorly implemented and not necessary to use.

There’s a fair amount of voiced dialogue with some big name actors, so that’s probably the high point of the game.

In order to reach the elven village, she first has to pass a barrier station. But the leader of the station won’t let her pass until she investigates what’s going on in Derius Castle. At the same time, a dragon egg she got in the mountains hatches, giving a baby dragon.

This is basically where I stopped. The Derius Castle part requires you to go through 3 dungeons with no opportunity to heal or save. Healing items and spells do very little and I could see this was going to take a fair amount of grinding just to get through this introductory part, and with the game’s reputation I see no reason to do that.

After this game, it was 8 more years before Monster Maker 4 came out for GBA. I don’t know how that game was, but this is the last we’ll be seeing of MM on this blog.