Chapter 2 takes the women to the next outlying area of the kingdom, which is a desert land. This is annoying because touching the desert does damage, and you have to cross the desert to reach the dungeons you need to. You get shoes later in the chapter that protect against the damage, but not at first.

Bonus fanservice

I noticed that in this section the SNES version has an extra floor for the dungeon; there are several places in this game where the SNES version’s dungeons are larger or an optional dungeon becomes required. Once again the heroes defeat a corrupt barracks commander as the Cutie Kamen group.

The boss of this section, the fire spirit, is in a volcano, so first we have to go get an item to freeze the lava to enter the volcano. This involves a Sphinx, who fights and then does a quiz.

Each question you get right gets you a treasure chest, and if you don’t get them all you get warped back to the beginning and then can try again up to a limit of 3. I believe that after that you get the item you need regardless of how many questions you got right. They are pretty difficult questions about history and literature; I got lucky guessing some of them and knew some other ones.

Then it’s on to Fire Pressea, who use a lot of hit-all magic. The Fire Sailor Outfit is good, as are freeze/water techniques.

Now Chapter 3, where we have a big bridge that’s broken and requires some elven shoes to fly across. The elf with the shoes doesn’t trust us humans, though, so we have to save the elf’s daughter from yet another corrupt commander. Time for another cutie kamen segment, although this time they parody the Mito Komon movies.

Then the elves also decide to improve our half-elf child’s magic abilities, which requires them to wear sheer clothing.

Then it’s off to the air tower to beat the boss, where there are invisible platforms you have to traverse.

She’s not a tough boss, especially now that the little elf girl has a strong mass heal.

Chapter 4 is in a water area, so the boss is the water follower:

We first have to deal with some slavers (Cutie Kamen style). The water lady doesn’t like them either because she wants to capture all the girls herself. Here, we get the “King Sailor Outfit” which you equip to make the characters naked, with special poses:

Does this flag my blog?

Also one of the characters leaves temporary for a personal vengeance, which is annoying because now one of the parties is down a character.

The water tower has the boss, and once again she slinks back to Dynaster having accomplished nothing:

Chapter 5 is the last chapter, and we’re back at the capital city to save Minerva’s parents. First off, we get tricked with fake “Dragon Armor”, which is the most powerful armor. This is how they think the “most powerful armor” is supposed to look:

That looks like it provides great protection against monsters. Anyway, it’s cursed, and now that means that until we can get it removed, it provides the lowest possible defense, making this chapter a bit harder. Eventually after many sequences and dungeons we find the sage who can remove the dragon armor.

He also reveals that Dynaster is actually Minerva’s sister, who was given to him as a baby based on a prophecy that said she would bring ruin to the kingdom. He trained her as a wizard but then she turned evil because she was so upset about how the king treated her.

So now let’s head back and deal with Dynaster! The last place is two fairly large dungeons but they’re not too bad. Healing items are plentiful in the game so you can just beat everything up.

She’s not that bad. By now my technique was just to have Tua block until she’s needed for healing, then the other two people attack.

Oh no, the sage was the secret enemy!

Dynaster helps out against the sage but it’s the same technique. Then there’s a final final boss:

Apparently the SNES version has some special transformations for this fight but not the PCE one. Same technique.

A fanservicy ending scene where Dynaster decides to go out on her own instead of staying in the castle. Minerva follows!

Despite all the fanservice this is a fairly good game. The battle and levelling system is fun and everything goes quickly. You don’t need to grind. The visuals and voice are great. When I get to this game on the SFC I’ll play a bit of it just to see how it transferred over but I would definitely recommend this game.

Princess Minerva (プリンセスミネルバ）
Released 3/25/1994, River Hill Soft

 
This is another game that started out for Japanese PCs (in 1992) and then had ports to both the PC Engine and Super Famicom. The SFC version has a translation patch. It seems like it’s mostly the same game except that some of the dungeons are differently laid out (and they added some new ones). The PCE also has voice and some animated cutscenes that are not in the SFC version.

I’ve noticed a trend that the Japanese computer RPGs don’t just copy Dragon Quest II but usually have some innovation in the system — it doesn’t always work, but at least they tried. Princess Minerva is no exception. It also has a large amount of fan service — I don’t know how much of this survives into the SFC version, but I probably can’t even provide some of the PCE version pictures unless I want the blog to be 18+.

The game opening tells us that Princess Minerva got bored and decided to form a Royal Bodyguard of all women, so 8 different women joined up (who represent all kinds of common fetishes — loli, china dress girl, BDSM chick, etc) Of course they wear armor that makes no sense:

The game opens with them all in a bath.

Minerva is bored, but just then an arrow shoots through the room with a letter, from someone named Dynaster, who has sent out her minions to all the areas of the kingdom, turning girls into monsters. She challenges Minerva to stop her, and thus the quest begins.

As the story indicates, you have 9 party members. You organize them in groups of 3, and in a random encounter it randomly picks one of the groups, with the top one the most likely. Although having 9 members might seem cumbersome, the interface for equipping and buying things is very clean and easy to use, and makes it smoother than a lot of the games I’ve played that only have 3 or 4 characters. This also means you can make greater use of everyone’s magic and skills, partly because the drain is spread around to all the units, but also because tents and sleeping bags are fairly cheap (and can be used in dungeons).

Each character has five different areas to gain XP — Sword, hand-to-hand, magic, priest, and elf. Each character has their own specialty; you can see Minerva’s percentages in the shot above. When you gain XP in a battle, the percentages determine the chance of that XP going to a particular skill. So Minerva has a 50% chance of the XP going to Sword, and only a 15% chance of it going to Priest. When any of the bars fills up, the character gains a skill level and an overall level. The skill level determines learning new skills and magic, and also what armor and weapons can be equipped. The overall level raises the stats, HP, and MP depending on what kind of level was gained (e.g. a priest level gets more MP than a Sword level). There are a few caves in the game where you can drink water to change the percentages, but these are not common.

Battles are vs. 1-4 enemies (all the enemies are girls, often nude or scantily clad). You can attack or use abilities, do a combined attack, and the last option is to repeat the actions from last turn, which is a convenient addition.

The skills can take either MP, SP, or TP.

When you equip a new armor you get a picture:

That’s probably the least revealing outfit there is; they provide a lot of “cosplay” type outfits like china dress, school swimsuit, leotard, and even “King’s Outfit” which is a naked pose. The PC Engine was definitely the main target for this kind of game.

The game is divided into six chapters; I’ll just cover chapter 1 on this initial post and then do the rest in the next one so that people can just see an overview of the game if they want. The first four chapters are in the outlying areas where Dynaster sent her minions, beginning with Dream Navi in the Duchy of Tselmat.

The first small quest is to save the commander of the town guard, who is is a small cave. The reward is supposedly 1000 gold, but when we return he acts like he has no idea what we’re talking about.

For the boss battles, you either pick a team, as in this case:

Or for the big boss battles you can choose any three characters.

Whenever Princess Minerva has to deal with one of these evil thieves or commanders, there’s a parody of Cutie Honey and other magical girl series where everyone transforms into Cutie Kamen fighters.

The commander is no problem, and then it’s time for a bath scene at the inn.

But Dream Navi appears, and kicks the heroine’s butts by confusing them in her dream world.

But in usual villain fashion she doesn’t kill us here, but tells us to meet her in the No Entry Tower, which is through the No Entry Forest. This requires some intermediate quests to figure out how to make it through the forest, but once we do, it’s on to the tower. Fortunately the tower has a recovery spring in front (the walkthrough on GameFAQs makes me think this is not in the SNES version).

Finally at the top of all these dungeons is Dream Navi. 

Minerva, Mizuno, and Bluemoris are weak to her confuse attack (the ones in the bath scene), so as long as you pick other people than that it’s not too bad. Potions are cheap and you have a ton of money in this early section.

Dream Navi then goes back to Dynaster and announces her failure, and gets punched out of the screen. On to the next land, and chapter 2!

This is definitely one of the best PC Engine RPGs I’ve played to date; despite being a fanservice game they actually took time to make a decent system and a clean, usable interface. Good for them!

I’m going to structure this post as more of a review than an account of my playthrough — at times I’ve considered that the whole blog should be like that; one initial post covering the first few hours of gameplay and story in detail, followed by a review post. This is partly because it’s easier to write, but also I notice that when I read other blogs like CRPG Addict I find myself mostly interested in the first and last post, and tend to skim the middle posts unless I’ve played the game and know what he’s talking about. In some cases (like Dragon Quest V) I’ve found a lot to write about in each post, but often I struggle to say much because the gameplay is so repetitive and the story is not that interesting.

Anyway, back to Xanadu. First, the gameplay.

The game’s 12 chapters are mostly structured around the same idea. You warp into a church in the area, and then have to solve a problem in the area to be able to move on to the next place. This involves a great deal of running back and forth from place to place. The NPCs and towns do have a lot of life, with memorable people whose dialogue changes as the game progresses. It reminds me a bit of the Trails series in embryo. It’s also an interesting touch that you knock on the doors to the houses instead of just blundering in.

The backtracking gets excessive at times. You will find yourself having to talk to person A, then go all the way out to a cave or area to talk to person B, then go back to A again, and then once again back to B. This to me is the weakest aspect of the game and I’ve seen Japanese players complain about it as well. The only thing that saves the game from being unplayable is that the travel speed is very fast and you can buy Wings to warp back to the towns (which are trivial to afford after the first few chapters).

Another issue is that it’s often not clear what you’re supposed to do next. There are a lot of places where you have to talk to a specific person or go to a location to make the next plot event happen, but sometimes they don’t give you any real clues. You’ll stumble upon it eventually because the areas are fairly small, but I found this game a lot more tolerable with a walkthrough.

The final stage has a 31 floor castle that puts the Darm Tower of Ys to shame; this is possibly the longest and trickiest final dungeon in any game I’ve played (Ao no Kiseki had a pretty long final dungeon too). Overall when you think about how short the Ys games tend to be, this game has an impressive volume.

The combat is Ys style. As I mentioned in the first post, the distinctive feature here is leveling up your weapons and armor. This means a lot of sitting in place letting the enemies beat you up, but eventually you’ll have a strong enough armor to survive everything in the chapter.

Death is interesting. If you get to 0 hp with no healing items, you turn into a ghost. This actually lets Arios fly freely around the map (through walls, etc), but cannot interact with anything or use stairs. Sometimes this is actually helpful in a dungeon to figure out where you need to go to get to the stairs or item, but you have to make your way back to the town where the priestess can revive you. But this means that there is no such thing as a game over.

I found the side-scrolling action scenes to be the weakest part of the game. There are only two healing items in the game — one that heals 1000 HP and the other that heals you fully. The full heal elixirs are very rare until the final chapter where you can buy them (for a huge price). So you rely mostly on the 1000 HP heals. In the early chapters, you can easily get enough of these that the action stages are trivial. You just run through them and let the items heal you, and the bosses go down without much trouble as well.

But there’s a rather sudden change from this to the point where your HP is too high for these items to be worthwhile. Then the action stages are very difficult. There is no invincibility frame, which means a wrong move can cost you half or more of your HP. I used a lot of save states in these scenes; I would not have had the patience to go back to the church to get revived over and over again. The second to last one is by far the hardest — I would actually recommend that you use all of your elixirs against the boss; you’ll get more than enough in the last stage to make it through the final action stage (which is significantly easier, especially considering how easy it is to make it up to 999,999 HP). Now, I’m not all that good at action games so it’s possible others won’t have as much of an issue with this.

The graphics are serviceable but a bit disappointing; the PCE is capable of better, which Falcom will deliver in Xanadu II next year. The cutscenes between stages are not as good as the ones in other games like Emerald Dragon.

The music is good as usual for a Falcom game. It’s unfortunate that all the music outside of the cutscenes are chiptunes, but they probably didn’t have the space to make CD audio for all the BGM they wanted to use.

The story is fine. It relies on a lot of old cliches — chosen descendant, legendary hero, age-old evil, etc. There’s not all that much about the overall main plot that’s unfamiliar (although the earlier chapters have some interest). What Falcom does do right here is flesh out all the party characters better than most games are doing in this era. They don’t just join your party and then never talk again. This, coupled with the rich (for this era) NPC dialogue, makes the world seem more alive.

Overall this is a decent game for the period. I’ll be interested to see what changes or improvements they make for Legend of Xanadu II.

Next up will be a return to Super Famicom with the game Kabuki Rocks (after Majin Tensei II on my other channel).

Kaze no Densetsu Xanadu (風の伝説ザナドゥ)
Released 2/18/1994, published by Falcom

This game is part of the long-running “Dragon Slayer” franchise by Falcom. The title Xanadu first appeared as the second Dragon Slayer game, which CRPG addict did a review of (although he didn’t like it). For a while I thought the PC Engine would be a remake of that game, but it’s actually an entirely new title. Falcom normally did not develop console games, relying on other companies to make ports of their games to various consoles. But here they actually were behind the development, and of the 1995 sequel.

There is a fan translation in progress, but I believe it is stalled for a long time over the voice acting to dub the cutscenes.

It looks and feels like a combination of Legend of Heroes and Ys. The main gameplay is the top-down “run into the enemies” style of Ys, but each chapter ends with a side-scrolling action section that recalls the earlier Dragon Slayer games. This game also carries over from the older Xanadu the system where each weapon and armor has its own experience level. When you get a new weapon or armor it typically starts anywhere from 30-50% power. So if the sword has a max 100 power it might start only at 50. You level up weapons by attacking, but not killing, enemies (so once you start killing enemies in one hit, you can’t level up the weapon on them anymore). You level up shields and armor by taking damage, although eventually enemies in an area won’t be able to harm you anymore.

This system results in a rather comical growth in the numbers — the first weapon has a max power of 12, the strongest weapon has a max power of 598,000. The game also does not have experience levels; you gain HP from resting and from getting hearts from enemies.

The game is divided into 12 chapters, each of which takes place in its own little area usually with a couple of towns and dungeons. This game is well known for having a lot of running back and forth between places talking to people, and it’s not always clear who you are supposed to talk to or why. I definitely think this game benefits from a walkthrough.

The main character is Areios, a knight commander in the kingdom of Ishtar. He begins shipwrecked on a small island. His goal is to get back to the kingdom, but while he’s waiting for the boat he decides to solve a problem happening in the island. Two towns, which produce different kinds of alcohol, are rivals, causing a bunch of problems.

The graphics are somewhat disappointing, but serviceable for the game. The music is good but unfortunately it’s almost all chiptune music instead of the CD-quality music that Falcom used to such good effect in the Ys games. The only voiced sections are the short cutscenes between chapters.

The action scenes are not too bad; the enemies do a lot more damage than the ones in the normal areas, but you get to shoot a wave out of your sword.

If you equip the healing items, you get restored 1000 HP when you get to 0, so that makes the action scenes fairly easy — even if you don’t really figure out the boss patterns you can just sit in front of it and attack and you might use a couple of heal items, but that’s easily replaced.

I’m up to chapter 3 now, so I’ll say more about that in the next update. The story is not bad, and the NPCs and towns are memorable. Overall this is a pretty good game although the fetch quest nature of the gameplay can get somewhat annoying.

Star Breaker (スターブレイカー)
Released 2/10/1994, developed by Ray Force

Star Breaker is one of three RPGs developed for the PC Engine by Ray Force. The first, Startling Odyssey, was a cookie cutter RPG that I covered briefly some time ago. They followed that up with Startling Odyssey II, but Star Breaker came between them. I can’t find much more information about the game than this.

I’m going to try giving a bit more detail about the game by blogging while I play rather than taking notes and writing the post later.

The opening narration tells us that in the year 2550, humanity has expanded into the galaxy, fought two huge wars with “non humanoids” and then created the Alliance Army, which both protects humanity and also keeps the peace in the galaxy. The main character is Harry, who serves in the 7th fleet. He’s testing out a new type of fighter, the Pegasus. He engages the warp, but there’s some kind of error and he’s blown into another dimension, and then shot down, crash landing on a planet.

He awakes in a room in a castle, unable to understand what people are saying. But a woman comes out, who calls herself Princess Aria.

She uses telepathic means to help him understand the language and also to learn about him. Apparently he’s been shot down by the Doran, who are enemies, and he’s on Menalis planet. She asks him to talk to her father the king. Now we get to control Harry.

The status screen looks pretty typical (I assume ESP is the magic of this game, and PP will be for the psychic/magic characters).

I explored the castle, finding some basic equipment to outfit Harry. The king had basically nothing useful to say, so I went down into the basement to see how the Pegasus is doing. Apparently they can’t fix it, but the Pegasus tells me that if I can find some parts from the Doran ships, it should be possible to repair it. So we’ll have to infiltrate a Doran base nearby.

Surprisingly (or not) Aria begs to come along, and the king lets her, also sending the ship technician Oregano.

Aria has a healing spell, and Oregano has Antidote. They also have some battle spells. The PP they have looks very low, and I’m afraid this will be yet another game where you really can’t use magic because it’s so limited. Time to go out to the castle town.

Oregano and Aria came with equipment, so I just gathered information — the most important was an old man who told me to look for a guy named Baki who could help us with getting into the Doran base, and gave us a music box. Now for the world map.

Usually at first I try to get in a fight right around town to feel out how difficult the encounters are.

There’s an auto battle; given my resources now I think I’m pretty much limited to attacking and healing. The enemies took a lot of hits to take down, but they gave 9 XP and my guys only need 19 to raise a level so I’ll gain one or two levels before moving on. I generally don’t like grinding but often it’s important right at the beginning.

The level ups turned out to be pretty significant; they provide full heal of HP and PP, and the stat gains are high. At level 2 I started exploring a bit beyond the area, and soon reached level 3. I also bought better equipment for everyone.

Of course you can’t see what the stats of equipment are. It’s 1994! Final Fantasy VI is coming out in two months!

The next town, Soreid, gave me some information. I’ll need to take down a shield to make it into the Doran base, and the mine nearby has been taken over by Doran. Baki turns out to be the mine leader, but he’s drinking in a bar. They want me to bring his wife to the town to restore his confidence. This is in another town, but my guys are now strong enough to beat the random encounters in this area with no problem.

The music box I got in the first down plays their wedding theme, and she agrees to go with us back to Baki. He lets us know that the shield generator is in the mine, and gives us some dynamite to help out with that.

The mine has the same enemies as outside, so my level 5 party had no difficulties, especially after finding some equipment upgrades for Oregano and Aria.

There’s no boss fight, so I destroyed the shield generator with the dynamite.

On the way out, I met this nasty enemy, who I think is just a random monster. But everything heals him except Oregano’s attack spells.

Now that the shield generator is gone I can head north to the base. The cave leading to the base had the same enemies as before, so I got through there fairly easily, moving up one level in the process.

The base is nearby. The monsters seem mostly the same, but I did encounter these nasty frogs, who use all-attack spells and can’t be hurt by most of my attacks.

Aria was at 7 HP so that was close. Now inside the fortress there is a tantalizing save point that I can’t get to yet:

But it was easily reached by going up those nearby stairs. Proceeding through the fortress, I eventually found the C Module I needed, but then a boss appears.

He uses a nasty all-attack and some big attacks, and my healing can’t really keep up (both Aria’s healing spell and the Heal Ampures I’ve been getting from fights and chests) heal less than a single attack from the boss. I died the first time so I guess I’ll try one level up and see if he’s easier at level 8. Harry had gotten a move that takes 1/8 of his HP off, but it seemed to do almost the same damage as a basic attack, so that’s not worth it.

This was sufficient to beat him. Of course he blows up the base, and then takes off in a ship, which goes over to destroy the castle.

Making my way into the castle, I learn that the King has been captured, and agree to go after him, so it’s time to fix the ship.

The ship is soon fixed, and Harry decides to stay in this dimension for now to help Aria find the king. They take off, and head to space station Ios. This is a neutral area with many Doran soldiers. There’s a shop which seems to have things for the ship, but they’re way too expensive.

The next destination seems to be the other planet in this system, Rimurus, so I head over and land there.

This menu indicates that there is some sort of space combat, but it’s evidently not a major part of the game.

And I land on Rimurus.

—

That’s where I’m going to stop this game. As I’ve said before, PC Engine games have to clear a higher bar for me to play them beyond a few hours. By far the biggest surprise in this blog has been how slow developers other than Square and Enix were to innovate. Final Fantasy VI comes out two months after this game. It’s just stunning to me that at this late of a date, it’s still acceptable for studios to be publishing RPGs where the gameplay is essentially Dragon Quest II. 

This game also makes fairly poor use of the PC Engine; there was one voiced sequence at the beginning and some of the music is off the CD, but it’s mostly just the same as you would see on the Super Famicom.

Next up will be Xanadu, an original action RPG by Falcom for the system.

At the end of the last post we had retaken Durgwand Castle from Ostracon. The next main goal is to defeat the demon king Garcia, who is (appropriately) in the Demon Castle. We hope that the Priestess of the Sea, living in the Kasha Islands can help us. On the way, a researcher named Warumaru helps restore Hasram from the black crystal that Ostracon trapped him in.

The Priestess of the Sea tells us that we need the Mountain Priestess’ help as well as various ancient documents that can be recovered from nearby caves. As we explore, Garcia’s troops attack us to stop us from getting that power. Once all the documents are recovered, the Priestess gives Tamlyn a “teleposta” (without explanation, and it can’t be used) and a secret message.

Now it’s on to the Mountain Priestess, and along the way we actually have to fight Garcia himself.

Fortunately the priestess helps us out, and Garcia flees after we beat him up. Now on the Mountain Priestess, whose temple is right next to the Demon Castle. Garcia kills the priestess but she opens up the way to his castle.

The castle is a very long dungeon with a whole bunch of boss fights. This is really where I felt the tedium of the game.

Eventually, we come to Garcia himself.

Who really is not that hard. Tamlyn has learned this laser beam spell that does an enormous amount of damage, and when she can use that rather than healing it makes the battles go a lot more quickly. If only I could get her to use that instead of healing the other NPCs!

Now once Garcia is beaten, the game’s not over yet. He reveals that it was the Hors people that summoned him and had him get the Avesta. We’ve been hearing about the Hors throughout the game — they created the world, they were called gods, etc. And Tamlyn reveals that she herself is a Hors, as she uses the Teleposta to take us out of the crumbling Demon Castle.

So while the world celebrates the defeat of the Demon King, the party decides to continue investigating to see what the Hors are up to.

After a few quests we manage to get through a cave to the land where the Hors live. A bunch of them confront the party, but after realizing that Tamlyn is the princess, they take her and throw the rest of the party in jail.

It turns out that Tiridates, the Prime Minster, has taken control of the government after the king’s death and Tamlyn’s disappearance. He wants to use the Avesta to attack and conquer the outside world. Fortunately a faithful knight Jessil rescues everyone and we prepare for the final assault. The final dungeon is not very long and has a lot of really good equipment for everyone.

First we defeat Tiridates, and then he turns into the demon Zandig, who had been controlling his body. Zandig is not very hard with Tamlyn constantly laser beaming him for thousands of damage a turn, and he goes down quickly.

Now the power of the Emerald Graces restores the Emerald Dragon, who seals away Zandig. Atorushan decides to stay in the human world with Tamlyn, and the game ends.

—

Overall I found that the game got pretty tedious as it went on. The story is fine, and the visuals and music are great. There’s lots of voiced dialogue, and the animated sequences are well done. The ability to talk to your characters (by pressing start) is a good touch that fleshes them out a bit.

The real problem is the gameplay. At first I felt like the encounter rate was reasonable and the battles were enjoyable. But eventually I got tired of every battle being the same thing — you just run into monsters, and maybe use a healing item every so often. Tamlyn has a lot of interesting spells but you can’t control her use of them at all (and because of the way the battles work she tends to use a healing spell most of the time). I think this is an artifact of the game being made originally in 1989.

The other problem is that it can be hard to tell where to go next. You often have the name of where you’re supposed to go but it’s not always clear where that is, especially when you have to backtrack and remember which one of the 6 similar forts you visited is the one you’re supposed to go to.

I’ll try out the Super Famicom version when I get there (in 1995) to see how that version goes. My other blog has a good number of SFC games coming up so be sure to check that out as well.

Emerald Dragon (エメラルドドラゴン)
Released 1/28/1994, published by NEC

This is a port of a computer game originally released in 1989 for various computers. It was then remade for the FM Towns, a computer designed for multimedia and games. The game was then remade for the PC Engine in 1994, and finally the game was remade again for the Super Famicom in 1995.  The SFC version has a translation patch.

The game begins with you controlling the dragon Atorushan on the island of dragons. They haven’t been to the mainland Ishburn for thousands of years because of a curse on dragons there. A girl named Tamlyn washes ashore, and grows up with the dragons.

There is a lot of voiced dialogue, and animated cutscenes (of the usual PCE type). Eventually Tamlyn decides to go back to Ishburn, and Atorushan gives her part of his horn so that she can call for help if necessary. A few years later he decides to go looking for her, and the White Dragon elder at the same time would like him to investigate the curse of Ishburn. Apparently the land is overrun by the Demon Army controlled by the Demon King Garcia. Atorushan gets the Silver Scale which allows him to become human, thus avoiding the curse.

Atorushan looks for Tamlyn, but she has gone to help a magician Bagin try to keep a golem from being reborn. Atorushan goes to find her, but falls into a trap and ends up in a cell with Tamlyn. After a reunion, they head to Bagin, who then releases the golem for them all to defeat.

The battle system is fairly simplistic. You only control Atorushan, The number by the character shows their remaining “action points”, which are used to move and attack. Usually an attack consumes 4 points, but different weapons can use more or less. The other characters move automatically; you can tell them who to attack but that’s it. I would have appreciated a little more control, but the AI is fairly good. The spellcasters seem to have unlimited MP, but there’s no way to even see what spells they have.

One feature that seems to have been added in the SFC version is the dragon ability, where you can use the Emerald Graces (of which the Silver Scale is one) to transform Atorushan into a dragon; this takes most of his HP because of the curse, but does a big attack. If this is in the PCE version, I can’t find a way to use it. The system is simple, but since battles are fairly quick it’s not a huge deal — I certainly prefer this to just mashing “attack” in a typical RPG battle.

Once the golem is taken down, Bagin joins us as we continue to fight the demon army. The next destination is Elbard Castle.

This game, like Ys, has no world map but different screens where the towns run continuously into the wilderness. You can get maps that will show the surrounding areas, as above. It can be somewhat frustrating to find out where to go next. If you press Start you can see your party talk to each other which will usually remind you of where to go next, but it’s not always clear which direction that is, and sometimes you have to remember between several forts or towns.

At Elbard, we clear out a traitorous noble, and then the prince (Hasram) joins the party.

Atorushan and Tamlyn are the only characters who can level up, so the other characters join and leave fairly frequently. Hasram joins us to launch an attack at Zama Fortress, along with Falma. It seems to be controlled be a guy named Ostracon but he’s gone, so we take out his lieutenant Barago instead.

The game is not especially difficult. I think this Barago fight was one of the few that gave me any trouble — as usual for a game of this period, there really isn’t much strategy to use, so it’s just a matter of having the necessary levels and healing items.

As we move on, we hear about a cave that supposedly has dragon spirits.

It does indeed — this is the Silver Dragon, who created the Silver Scale that Atorushan is using. There are five of these “Emerald Graces”. Unfortunately the Emerald Dragon itself is dead, but legend says that if we can unite the five Emerald Graces a miracle will happen and the forces of evil will stand no chance.

Now while all this was going on, Bagin has left the party and charged ahead on his own. He left a letter saying that 20 years ago he tried to get the Purple Gem (one of the Graces) with a friend, who died. To make up for that, he’s going to kill Gomes, a demon terrorizing Nanai Village. So we’ll set out to catch up with him.

Nanai is not an easy place to get to — it requires help of the American Indian knockoffs of this game, the Dardwa people. Along the way we have to go through several other fortresses and towns, including a meeting with Ostracon himself.

Atorushan wounds him so he flees, leaving one of his minions behind to fight. Eventually we reach the Dardwa, but because of their rules, they refuse to let us find the way to Nanai village. However, the son of the elder, Yaman, decides to guide us there. He is thrown out of the village by his father…but I guess we can get to Nanai.

At Nanai, we learn that Gomes is demanding sacrifices from the villagers. To deal with this RPG cliche we head off to fight him — only to find that he’s managed to take out Bagin.

Bagin reveals that he was originally in the demon army, but that a friend helped him escape (who was Falna’s father). He gives us the Purple Gem, and we can pay him back by beating Gomes. He also powers up Falna, who is fairly useless — I think at least now she has more spells, but she tends to just run and attack instead.

Back to the main mission of clearing the demon army out of various strongholds, and finding the other three Emerald Graces. Ostracon is continuing to cause problems, and he sets us to fight his third minion, Bashita.

Now we learn that Hasram (who had returned to Elbard) has been taken captive by Ostracon. He traps him in a black crystal, and then asks for the Avesta (a gem in the Dardwa forest) in exchange. Of course heroes being heroes, we have to go get it from the Dardwa Temple. This requires getting more reluctant cooperation from the Dardwa, and making out way into the temple. A fairy there gives some world background, and then we fight a Dragon Zombie to recover the Avesta.

Of course you know the story — the heroes stupidly trust Ostracon to give us Hasram in exchange for the Avesta. Does he?

Of course not, he just crushes the crystal, killing Hasram. So, it’s time to fight Ostracon. He’s not as hard as we might think, but as usual defeating him just makes him run away, and Hasram’s still dead. Now Garcia will have the Avesta — nice job, heroes.

But, now we can continue on with the main mission. We decide, based on some info, to visit a sage Fushrunum who might have some useful information. Along the way, Yaman gets killed by a random arrow.

Kind of a sudden development, but it’s a way to clear the lower leveled character out to replace him with a new archer named Sayoshant. He’s known as a hero so a nice person to join, but he’s mostly interested in recovering his master’s bow from Ostracon. Fushrunum is living in a hermit hut through a cave, and has some useful information about world backstory, but not much else. He also thinks that Hasram is likely still alive.

Now it’s time to get Ostracon for good. He’s in Durgwand Castle, which the resistance movement has already seized. Making our way through, we finally get to Ostracon. He resurrects his three minions, but since they have the same stats they did when you first fought them, they’re not very hard.

Once he goes down, he asks for extra power from Garcia, and becomes a bigger demon.

I think I was a bit overlevelled because I had trouble finding some of these places, and he went down easily. He has no more tricks up his sleeve, so he (apparently) dies, and we recover the bow, and the crystal with Haslam in it.

This is not a bad game, and the music and visuals are great. I just wish the battle system was a little more involved — I’m in the common position of not being able to say much about the battles because they’re all kind of the same. You can only control Atorushan, and his only options are attack or item. I feel like this is a perfectly playable and decent game on the verge of being a very good game.

Sol Moonarge (ソル：モナージュ)
Released 1/7/1994, published by IREM

1994 begins with a PC Engine game. IREM created this game by soliciting ideas from fans in their magazine, but apparently due to problems with IREM, it was delayed several times. Wikipedia says that few copies were sold but it’s available on ebay for a low price so I don’t know if that’s accurate.

The game begins with a montage showing various scenes and characters.

Then the game begins with the hero Soreil, the first one in that collage above. I don’t know why his nose is so long; there’s no explanation in the game but maybe in the instruction manual? Anyway, Soreil is a knight and his mother delivers a message from the king, who sends him on a mission to find Sarj, a seer who is missing from the castle along with the Sword of Light.

The graphics are large and colorful; I would say that’s one of the strong points of this game despite the design of the main character. Unfortunately it suffers from the usual drawbacks of a very high random encounter rate and a cookie cutter AMID battle system.

One distinctive feature is that your level up bonuses are dependent on what you do in battle, but even so the magic users are so limited in MP that they basically can’t be used outside of boss battles. You gain magic by equipping items on characters, and you can select how much MP to spend on the spell to control its power.

Soreil gets a lead on Sarj but then has to save some villagers from a thieves’ tower. This requires a lot of grinding because Soreil is by himself. You need plenty of herbs and antidotes.

Oh, you can also peek in on someone bathing and get the 1990s style ero-graphics:

Do I need to censor this?

As a side note, I wonder when nipples became verboten? There are plenty of 80’s and early 90s anime that have nipples in them but at some point during the 90s (I think) it was no longer acceptable in normal video games or manga/anime intended for kids.

The boss builds up power and then attacks, so you just defend a lot and heal/attack until you win. A girl named Mappy joins you, and she’s able to read some writing in Sarj’s room that says where he went, so we’re off to the northern mountain.

We meet Sarj, who gives Soreil the Light Sword and tells him that they need to protect the Magic Seed because an evil person named Silver is trying to use it for nefarious purposes. Silver shows up and kills Sarj, but not before he can teleport us all away. Soreil is back alone, in the Moon Temple with two goddesses. They immediately get captured by Silver, and Soreil goes after them.

The dungeon design is pretty good; all the dungeons look different and have various special features about them (in this case the gears carry you around to different places).

Soreil beats Silver, but one of the goddesses is captured. Soreil has to nurse the other one back to health, and they fall in love and have a child. Now the story moves ahead 16 years to Soreil’s son Sonia. Soreil has disappeared looking for the other goddess and Silver, who is apparently still trying to use the Magic Seed.

Sonia tries to go to the castle but is blocked; it seems that a seer named Black with the same long nose as Soreil and Sonia has bewitched the king. Sonia has to go to the thief tower again to get a chest that Black is interested in to get access to the castle, but once he does that, Black captures him and a girl, shrinks them, and leaves them as a plaything for the Princess, who turns out to be the other goddess.

She tells us that if we find the magic mirror that Black is using it can turn us back into full size.

The mirror reflects our characters, and when one is reflected that character takes half the damage that is dealt to the mirror. But a lot of healing herbs solve the problem.

Apparently this is about 1/3 through the game. The graphics and the dungeon design are interesting, and there are some notable things about the system. But overall it’s just too grindy and the system fundamentals too basic.

Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys (イースフォー ザドーンオブイース)
Released 12/22/1993, developed by Hudsonsoft

The Ys series has a strange history. The first three games came out for computers, and then were ported to many different consoles. Up until very recently, Falcom did not employ any console programmers, so they always outsourced their console ports to other developers.

Ys IV is an interesting case because there are actually three versions of the game. In 1993 Falcom did not make a computer Ys IV, but instead outsourced the development to two different companies. Tonkin House brought out Mask of the Sun for the Super Famicom, and Hudson brought out a completely different game Dawn of Ys for the PC Engine. Both games were confusingly labelled “Ys IV”. Almost 20 years later, Falcom developed Ys: Memories of Celceta, which was a completely new game in the same setting that is now considered the canonical Ys IV.

Back to 1993, Dawn of Ys is superior to Mask of the Sun in every way. It’s a followup to Ys I&II, going back to the traditional “run into enemies” gameplay and involving a lot of voiced dialogue and a few cutscenes (more of both than Ys I&II had).

This is also unusual among PC Engine CD games in that it actually has a full patch. As I’ve said before, fan translators have a tough time with PCE CD games because, a least in all the games I’ve played so far, they have a lot of voiced dialogue with no subtitles. But for Ys IV someone actually made a full fan dub of the game, plus a translation patch for the rest of the text. So this will be more of an overall review than a step-by-step account of the game.

I’ve wanted to play this game for a long time. I remember somehow knowing about this game when I was a kid, even though it never came out in the US. It must have appeared in some magazine as a possible upcoming game?

The game opens with Adol and Dogi returning to Esteria, where Ys I took place. But he’s only there briefly before he sets out for Celceta where a new adventure awaits. The opening cinematic sequence is like all the PC Engine games; a combination of voice, still pictures, and slightly animated pictures. Some baddies are trying to revive an evil demon of some sort — a familiar sight in RPGs. They fail, of course. Adol arrives in Esteria and soon meets several important NPCs, including Karna.

The battle system, as I said, is the same “run into enemies” as before.

I feel like the screen is a little bit squished; I feel like they could have reduced the size of the border and the HUD at the bottom while still allowing it to be within the PCE’s processing power, but maybe I’m wrong.

If you’ve played Ys I&II you will be in very familiar territory in thise game. I think that after Ys III, Hudson wanted to repeat the success of I&II by making basically the same game in a different setting. The graphics are somewhat better but the game is the same length as I&II, roughly.

At times another character (usually Karna or Dogi) will accompany you. They can kill enemies often in one or two hits, which is somewhat helpful, but it also means they’re stealing your XP.

Because this game has a full translation patch I don’t want to give away too much. The story is run-of-the mill, but the voice adds some memorableness to the villains.

In the first section of the game, Adol is solving various small problems that pop up while trying to figure out what’s going on in Celceta. Eventually the main villains are revealed — the “Clan of Darkness”, who is working with a winged being to revive a lost castle.

At the same time, Adol gains control over the ancient magics of Celceta while learning the backstory of what happened to the land. There’s a neat part where you get to return to Esteria and even go to Darm Tower again, complete with the music from Ys I (fortunately you find a secret passage so it’s nowhere near as long a dungeon).

In contrast to Ys I&II, many of the bosses require you to use the fire or freeze magic to shoot at them. Otherwise as always you have to figure out the attack patterns of the bosses, and when and where you can hit them. Of course, being at the proper level helps as well. There’s a very useful item you can get later in the game that slows your movement but every non-boss enemy dies in one hit. With this item, grinding is much more manageable.

 Overall the playing experience was very smooth. There was only one part that really annoyed me — I didn’t get a screenshot, but you have to make it through an area where jets of flame come up periodically, and if you touch even a pixel of the flames, you die. What makes it worse is that Dogi is following you, and if any pixel touches him then you get a game over as well. So you not only have to learn the pattern but make sure you move so that Dogi doesn’t lag behind and get caught up in the flames. I probably died 25-30 times trying to get through this…and you have to do it twice! Fortunately the second time is without Dogi, but come on.

If you are a fan of the older Ys games, or retro action RPGs, there is no reason not to play this. It’s one of the best from this era.

Ys will appear one more time on this blog, with Ys V for the Super Famicom in 1995.