Langrisser Millenium WS: The Last Century (ラングリッサーミレニアムWS THE LAST CENTURY), 3/9/2000

Although the Langrisser series proper ended with V, Masaya continued to develop a few more Langrisser games though I don’t know how much (if any) the original development team was involved. The Dreamcast Millenium game was a strange action-strategy hybrid, but this Wonderswan game is in the style of Langrisser 1 and 2.

I don’t know if the storyline is directly related to the other Langrissers. It does have the swords Langrisser and Alhazard in it, but I didn’t see any obvious connections to the other games beyond that. It may just be that I don’t have a great grasp on the Langrisser lore, though.

The game is entirely in black and white, of course. Fortunately the text is a large, readable font. The graphics do sometimes interfere with the gameplay — it can be hard to tell exactly where your characters can move because the highlighted ranges blend in with the background. I had this problem with SRW Compact 1 as well but they had solved it by Compact 2.

The interface as a whole is not as good as it could be. You can get the needed info without too much trouble, but the game doesn’t have the auto-moving troops (I forget when that was introduced), the equipment interface is more annoying that it needs to be, and the battle sequences with no animation are a little confusing to figure out since you get no information at all about what happened, you just have to look at the HP of the units afterwards (especially chaotic during enemy turns).

The story is pretty similar in style to previous games. It plays out over 17 stages, with one single branch in the story. I didn’t do both routes so I’m not sure exactly how the story changes — the way the choice is framed, it does not sound like this is a drastic story change along the lines of the “Imperial” route of Der Langrisser. But I’m not sure. (I did find one Japanese blogger reviewing the game who said there was basically no difference; it results in you joining one of two sides but regardless, the other side plays the same role in the story and you get the same final boss.)

The main character is a 15 year old boy who farms with his mom. Some thieves attack to steal their animals, and after fighting them off it turns out that the boy is actually the prince of a defeated kingdom and that his “mom” is not his real mom, but the remnant of the Imperial guard of that kingdom. So the boy has to go out on a quest first just to beat the bandits, but gets swept up into a larger plot involving two sisters who are trying to prevent an ancient weapon from waking. It’s all pretty typical stuff with nothing too surprising but it works as a standard RPG plot.

The gameplay is pretty much what you would expect from the older Langrissers. It’s completely turn based and on a grid. They’ve added a few new types of units (the thief/straight sword, and monk/fist units) so the compatibility table is a bit more complex. But they don’t have any monsters, so I guess it works out to about the same in the end.

Perhaps due to system limitations, you only have 5 commanders with a max of 4 units each. The enemy forces tend to be small too. The map design is not as varied and complex as L1 or 2 either, with most missions just being you vs enemies on a flat map. Only a few of the maps involve any kind of obstacles.

The game is quite easy. The beginning parts can pose a bit of a challenge here and there, but it seems to be easier and quicker to level up than in the other games and once you reach the MC’s third class (much less the optional King class), the game doesn’t offer much challenge anymore. The enemy AI is also not especially smart in some cases; there were multiple maps where the commanders of the enemy units acted before the rest of their troops, and came in and attacked someone who killed them from full HP on the counterattack.

In the end, this game is notable as the last hurrah for the traditional Langrisser style (going even back before the real-time experiments), but the game is so short and easy that it’s not going to feel particularly fulfilling to people who are itching for more of the classic gameplay, especially when combined with the black and white graphics and often clunky interface.

Having said all that I should put in my usual caveat for handheld games from this era. It can be somewhat unfair to judge them now because a big advantage of these games at the time was that you could play them away from home, or even just in your home but without having to be in the TV room (or take up the TV someone else might want to use). So even if the games were simpler and shorter than the main console games, they were still often worth playing. But that advantage doesn’t exist anymore unless you insist on playing everything on original hardware.

Aura Battler Dunbine (聖戦士ダンバイン 聖戦士伝説), released 3/4/2000, released by Bandai

Dunbine is a 1983-4 anime series by Yoshiyuki Tomino, about young man who is summoned to an alternate word Byston Well to fight a war in the small magic-mechs called Aura Battlers. I’ve never seen the series although I’m quite familiar with it from its repeated appearances in Super Robot Wars. There will be spoilers for the series in here if you care about a 40 year old anime being spoiled.

Rather than directly following the story of the anime, the game involves a new person from Earth as a main character, who gets summoned to Byston Well and then soon ends up as the king of one of the small countries. All of the characters from the original series appear in the anime and the story can roughly follow the path of the anime although there are numerous branching paths.

The two major story branches are the “Law Route” in which you fight against Drake Luft (as in the series), and the “Chaos Route” where you join him. Within those routes there are 4-6 endings for each one, although some of them seem to be slight variations of each other.

There are a lot of choices you make during the game, although it’s hard to tell how many of them are actually affecting things or whether they are just slightly changing the next battle’s layout.

There’s no good walkthrough for this game (you can find one if you use archive.org but even it doesn’t cover everything) so I just made whatever choice I felt like. I ended up getting the ending that is basically the TV series. I opposed Drake Luft. About 2/3 through the game, the event happens from the series where a character named Jacoba Aon sacrifices her life to expel all Aura Battlers from Byston Well to Earth, and the rest of the series takes place on Earth. The series ends with virtually all of the characters being killed in a climactic final battle, although I remember reading that there’s some indication that their souls might go to Byston Well. This is clumsily handled in the game; after the easy final battle where no one on my side died, there’s this vague ending narration that would be incomprehensible if I didn’t know what it was supposed to be describing from the anime.

The ending screen then says “Game Over”; I don’t know if it always does that or if it simply indicates that I got a bad ending.

The (now deleted) site I mentioned above did seem to include all the endings, some of which are better than the TV one. The most intriguing ending is one that you can get by not using any aura battlers during the game and doing some other things, which results in your characters not being sent to Earth with the rest of the characters, and eventually living in peace in Byston Well. I suppose this could be considered a good ending? In another one, you can defeat Drake and Bishott before the “expel aura battlers” event occurs, which is another way to have a more peaceful ending.

Overall, though, the story seems kind of thin — so much of it is just “OK now which target are we going to attack” without much development of the characters or situations. This may have been necessitated by the high amount of variation in what characters you would have on your team, what the alliances would be, etc.

Your entire force starts out as these dragon things which I don’t remember from SRW (probably because they are not mechs). Once you progress in the game a bit you can start buying and developing aura battlers. There are something like 60 different ones you can get, but this aspect of the game is pretty clunky and undeveloped. The story mostly forces you to go to specific places so your opportunities to buy ABs are very limited, and it’s not particularly easy to find new ones to develop either. I hardly developed any mechs throughout the game, relying mostly on the ones that the game gave me. It just didn’t seem worth the money or trouble to try to get that system working.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) you don’t really need to develop any mechs because the items you can equip on the mechs are extremely powerful and can easily make even the Dunbine or other early-game mechs competitive at the end of the game. I spent the majority of my money on these items — you can also buy some new weapons as well but I pretty much ignored this too. You can always build up more money by going to the local forest for a free battle but this didn’t seem necessary.

The battles are also pretty disappointing. There isn’t much care put into the map design; mostly it’s just your force against a group of enemies all put together like the image above, and you have little to do but just move towards them and fight head-on.

The game is on a speed-based turn system, so speed is a good attribute to increase via items. You can move and then attack — one thing that I didn’t realize at first is that you have to manually change your facing at the end to make sure you are in the right direction to use attacks. Ideally you want to attack them from behind, of course. You can counter, dodge, or block (although some options will not be available depending on distance and facing).

You have an Aura point meter that goes up as the battle proceeds, and you can use that to do special attacks. I didn’t find the special attacks did all that much more damage than the regular hits.

Occasionally you also have these one-on-one combats. First off, the two images above are the regular image and then the second has 4x internal resolution turned on, which makes the sprites look a lot better.

In these one-on-one combats you just wait until the turn bar glows and then you can hit circle to choose a command (I think if you let it fill up completely it does more damage). You might have to move into range if you want to use a melee attack. These also were pretty basic and boring because the animations take so long; as long as your main character’s mech has enough good items on it it’s hard to lose any of the fights.

On the whole I found this game fairly disappointing. The battle system is not developed enough to make it fun to go through all the stages, and the mech development is limited. The story is OK but as I said above, too reliant on long stretches of plot development that is little more than “here is where we should go next”. The multiple story paths and possibilities for endings are interesting and do give the game some replayability if you want to go that route. The “no aura battler” thing would be very tough.

Summon Night (サモンナイト), released 1/6/2000, developed by Flight Plan, published by Banpresto

This is Flight Plan’s other major SRPG series after Black/Matrix. It basically consists of 6 core games plus a bunch of spinoff titles. Summon Night 3 was the game that really made me an SRPG fan rather than just a Final Fantasy Tactics fan. Before that I had tried Fire Emblems, Tactics Ogre (plus gaiden), and FFT Advance, but I was never able to get into any of them. Then when I lived in Japan I randomly picked up Summon Night 3 from the local game store; I had never heard of the series and could barely find any information about it online but the cover looked interesting. We’ll get to SN3 later, for now, let’s look at the first game in the series.

In contrast to the dark, complex world of Black/Matrix, the tone of Summon Night is a bit more “cute” and friendly, although the storylines themselves usually have a fair amount of seriousness and dark stuff in them. As usual for the series you begin by choosing your main character, with a choice of 2 men and 2 women. The first game’s main character is a Japanese high school student who is accidentally summoned into Linbaum, the world of the game. As far as I know this is the only game in the series that uses this trope.

The element of the game that drew in the most fans was the detailed and distinctive character designs, along with the fully voiced dialogue. After arriving in Linbaum, the MC is accosted by this kid Gazel who tries to steal her money, but eventually joins their house, where a bunch of kids live. We learn that the city is controlled by some rich people and there is a huge income inequality in the city.

It turns out that the MC was summoned to the world by some kind of botched summoning attempt. The first part of the game involves her trying to figure out why she was summoned there and hopefully find a way home, and then of course she gets swept into a larger plot that eventually involves the fate of the world.

The “summoners” in the world are people that can use a “rite of contract” to use Summonite Stones of five different colors on certain objects. This gives either an item, a “miss”, or a summon creature. The creature will then be bound to an item which can be equipped by anyone to use the spell. These summoners are associated with various factions (such as the “blue” or “colorless” faction). For this game, only the MC can do the rite, as a product of whatever botched ritual brought her to the world.

During the “adventure part”, you can move to various locations. If there is a character there, you will have a conversation. The ones that move the plot along are marked EVENT. From time to time there will be a space that has no character but has some kind of secret event; most of these involve optional characters and such.

On the whole, this is the strongest part of the game — the characters are memorable and interesting, and there’s a good mix of lighthearted character development and more serious plot stuff.

You can experience some boredom because all of the story is done through these sequences like in the image above, with any “action” being done just by sound effects or description. It’s a visual novel style that isn’t to everyone’s taste. But I like it fine. Also the text is done in a nice, readable font.

Most of the chapters end with a “night conversation” where you can talk to someone and increase their friendship level. There are a few different endings that are at least partly based on the level, although it seems to be less restrictive than the later titles.

Now for the battle gameplay. The first game is basically the same as 2-4 in terms of overall play.

Each character has a class, and several upgrades they get when they reach a certain level. The class determines what weapon you can equip, and what kind of summon stones you can equip (out of the 5 colors). There are three equipment slots.

The battles are done with height and facing, on a player turn-enemy turn basis. For counterattacks, you can freely switch between “block” or “counter” at any time on your turn (for any character). Later games add additional reactions, but this game only has the two.

If a character reaches 0 hp they are removed from the battle. There is no immediate penalty, but like the other games, there is a hidden value that increases when you make bad choices or when people die in battle. If it gets high enough, you get a bad ending. From what I saw in a walkthrough, the bad ending value is high enough that you are unlikely to get this ending if you aren’t losing your whole party in each battle.

One of my favorite things about this series is that the XP is not awarded individually to characters. Instead, at the end of the battle you get a lump sum which is then spent to level up members.

There are free battles you can do in addition to the event battles. This allows you to build up money and XP but also to use your Summonites to get new summon gems. There are also additional rewards for clearing free battles (like equipment or accessories you can’t get any other way).

The battle system has good points and it’s fundamentally the same system as the other games, but there is a big problem in the balance, which they didn’t fix until the third game.

This game has very sharp stat or level scaling in its combat formula, so that just 2 or 3 levels of difference can make it hard for a character to be effective. This means on the one hand that if you put all your experience into 2-3 characters, you can clear the whole game with very little trouble. The game gives you a lot of characters, though, and if you want to play with a full party of 8 (plus using the new characters that come in), the game does not give you enough XP through the story battles to make this viable. And the free battles give you so little XP that you will have to do a ton of grinding to make this effective.

Summonite stones are also pretty hard to get, making it difficult to experiment with the items to find the various spells you can learn.

This is a problem in Summon Night 2 also, but they addressed it in 3 by making it easier to earn XP and money through the free battles, and also putting in a system in the game that rewards you for not overlevelling. This system was put into the DS remakes of 1 and 2.

There is a button combo you can press that lets you put in various names for your MC to change things, and one of them (おっさん) gives you x2 xp. This is probably the best thing to do if you actually want to try to preserve any challenge or skill in the game, but as it is, unless you’re willing to spend a ton of time grinding free battles, it’s better to just enjoy the story and make a super main character.

There are some optional characters, a few side events, and some minigames, but a lot of the replayability that the series is known for didn’t come in until the later titles.

So while this is a decent start to the series, it’s unfortunate that the first two games are more fun as visual novels than actual games.

I am now done with the very long 1999. As usual it’s time to pick a game of the year, which always seems like more trouble than it’s worth.

Looking through the list, Growlanser is definitely the game I enjoyed the most, and it was significant as the first of these real-time “action” SRPGs that I actually liked. In terms of significance, Fire Emblem 5 would be a worthy nomination as the last Kaga FE, the last significant Super Famicom game, and also a game that is well known among FE fans. Super Robot Taisen 64 has one of my favorite SRW stories.

I feel like it has to be Growlanser. So the full list now is:

1990: Fire Emblem 1991: Langrisser 1992: Just Breed 1993: Super Robot Taisen 3  1994: Langrisser II 1995: Riglord Saga 1996: Energy Breaker 1997: Final Fantasy Tactics 1998: Houshin Engi 1999: Growlanser

Now on to 2000. Fewer games than 1999 by quite a bit. There are also six systems represented, including the first PS2 game. The Playstation remains the main SRPG console but I think this is the last year that’s true of.

1. Summon Night (PS) – I’m a huge fan of this series, but the first two are not great.
2. Aura Battler Dunbine (PS) – I’m familiar with this series from SRW.
3. Langrisser Millenium WS (WS) – Unlike the Dreamcast game, this is an actual traditional Langrisser style game.
4. Rayblade (PS/DC) – This is Winkysoft’s attempt to make a SRPG amidst (or after?) their feud with Banpresto. I’m not sure which version I will play. From what I have read the DC version has some marginal improvements, but the PS emulation is much better.
5. Super Robot Taisen Compact 2-1 (WS) – As usual, I won’t be playing this again. Same with the other SRWs, although I will make posts on them.
6. Brave Saga 2 (PS) – Sequel to Brave Saga from last year.
7. Super Robot Taisen Alpha (PS)
8. Ogre Battle Prince of Zenobia (NGPC) – This is in the style of the original OB and is the second (and last) SRPG for this system.
9. SDGGG Gather Beat (WS) – This is the first SDGundam G Generation game that has a full crossover storyline.
10. Ningyou no Rakuin (PS) – Apparently a horror/Lovecraft game.
11. Dungeon Savior (GBC)
12. Velvet File+ (PS2) – This is the first PS2 game I’m playing. Since the start of this blog in 2017 I have been using the same Acer laptop to play almost all the games, and it’s handled everything up to now fine. Last year I tried to play Suikoden III and the laptop could not handle some parts of the game, so it may be that I’ve reached the limit of what it can handle. But we’ll see, maybe this isn’t as resource intensive.
13. SRT Compact 2-2 (WS)
14. Ring of Red (PS2) – This one seems borderline but I will try it.
15. Brave Sword (PS)
16. Gungho Bridage (PS)
17. ZOIDS Empire vs Republic (PS)
18. Juntai Taisen (GBC)

Some I will not be playing:

• Digimon Cathode Tamer (no character advancement)
• Seikai no Monsho (no character advancement)
• Kakurenbo Monster Tactics (I guess)
• Favorite Dear (not SRPG-style battles?)
• Atelier Elie/Marie (GB) – I will wait until 2001 to cover along with the WSC and DC remakes.

Faselei! (ファーゼライ！), released 12/22/1999, developed by Sacnoth, published by SNK

A new console for this project, and another attempt by a company to make a handheld system. As with pretty much all the other handhelds created before this, it was never able to successfully compete with the Game Boy, or even the moderately successful Wonderswan. From what I can see there were only 93 games ever relased for the system, which includes some re-releases and stuff like “portable reversi [othello]”. It was first released in 1998, but the Color version was released about six months later, and it was discontinued in 2001 when SNK went bankrupt.

There are two SRPGs for the system — this one (which is borderline), and Ogre Battle Prince of Zenobia. This game was actually released in English, although only in the UK — the planned US version was scrapped when the American SNK offices were shut down, although apparently the release copies were already produced and some escaped into the wild. Even the Japanese version sells for over $100 on ebay.

I played the game on the Ares emulator (a project started by the late Near/Byuu, but continued now by other developers).

Overall I would say the game is not bad, but it feels very limited — it has a lot of good ideas, but it’s almost like a proof-of-concept demo for a larger game that’s going to be developed later. (I don’t have many screenshots because I forgot which button I mapped screenshot to, and I kept pressing a different button)

The graphics are of course limited by the system, but I do like that the story sequences have backgrounds, and there are a number of cut-in pictures.

The music and sound are also limited by the system; it’s not bad, but nothing special.

The story is a rather familiar setup — the “Faselei” of the title is a mercenary group that is fighting for rebels against a stronger kingdom. We have the usual rival of the main character, as well as an eventual outcome with much larger stakes than the civil war. But all of this is done in only 13 stages, so there’s not a whole lot of development with any of it. They do the best they can, I think, but it can’t help but feel too short.

The system is pretty interesting, and I would like to see it be used again. Your characters are in mechs called “Toy soldiers”. You can buy parts, including weapons, backpacks (for items), computers, etc. Unfortunately you only control one character and so can only mess with their mech. Your ability to buy new parts and mechs is determined by your experience level. I think this is the only effect of experience, which you only get from story battles. On the other hand, you can do free battles for money (and once you reach level 5 you can also get items from the free battles that unlock the strongest mechs).

The equippable weapons depend on the mech, but include different types of melee weapons, missiles, and rifles. They have limited durability/shots, but the items you can store in the backpack can refuel those, and also recover health.

The computer is where you assign “chips” which determine that actions you can take. The number of chips you can assign to a mech is determined by the computer, while the number of actions you can take is determined by the mech itself. The chips include movement (green), attack (red), defense (blue), and miscellaneous (yellow).

Each turn, you are able to take as many actions as you have AP. You can use the actions from the chips you have set, and each action can be used as many times as you want (subject to ammo limitations and such). All the actions are then carried out simultaneously with the enemy. So you have to try to anticipate what the opponent will do, so that you can avoid their attacks or get within their range. You start out limited in your actions (for instance, to move left you have to first do a Left Turn and then Forward), but later you get more AP and better types of action.

If you run into another unit, whoever has the better FGT rating pushes the other back, dealing damage. The damage can be pretty severe in the case of tanks and other large units like that.

The enemies drop items, but you have to land on the items to get them. In the top picture here I’m moving forward 1 space to get the item, then using my rifle (weapon 1) to beat the structure up there, then going backwards, turning right, and going forwards.

The interface to control all of this is pretty good. As you put in the commands, it shows you what the effect of them will be (so you can make sure you are moving in the right place, ranges of weapons, and it will show you if you’re trying to move into a solid object you can’t pass) The customization menu is also better than some games I have played.

The map design is fine, the maps have different win requirements as well as different maneuverability. Often there are reinforcements so you have to decide when to use your limited resources and what items to bring. The balance is OK too although the “heat” command (x3 damage for your next attack) is mandatory near the end. I was able to beat the final bosses just at the limit of what I could handle, which I suppose is fine for not doing any free battles. If you get the hidden mechs I think you would be even better equipped to handle those stages.

So as I said in the opening, this is not a bad game (although only barely SRPG) and it’s worth a play, although don’t expect too much out of it, particularly the length of the game.

1999 is finished! On to 2000, although next week will be the retrospective post.

Ouka Houshin (央華封神), released 12/16/1999, developed/published by ESP, MediaWorks, and EXE Create

This is a game based on a tabletop RPG, by the same people who did Sword World and Record of Lodoss War. Those games were based on Western fantasy standards, whereas this game is based on Chinese mythology, and especially the Investiture of the Gods work that also provided the basis for Houshin Engi.

It’s the kind of SRPG that I’m not overly fond of; along the lines of the Dragon Force/Brigandine style of game. In contrast to those games this does have specific story battles, but for my taste there’s still too much repetitive fighting against random enemies that are emanating from castles or other structures. This is always my biggest issue with this kind of game.

I do like the graphics. The characters have a nice design, and fortunately they did not try the 3D polygon style that never works. The maps allow for enough rotation that you can see what’s going on, with the exception of the city maps which are very hard to navigate.

Music and sound: The music is appropriately Chinese-themed. The important story dialogue is voiced.

The story is pretty thin on the whole — there are so many characters that few of them are given any depth, and the story doesn’t really rise very far above “stop the evil people.” Your team is made up of sennin (basically Daoist sages who have gained magical powers through their austerity and other spiritual devotions) coming to Earth to deal with evil beings who are corrupting the world and trying to bring back some evil presence by hatching an egg. They needed a lot of characters because of the way the system works, but it may also have something to do with the source material. The left person in the first image above is sort of a main character, but even the main character isn’t really all that well developed.

The basic idea is that you need to cleanse the Yin energy from all the locations and restore the Yang.

The system involves an overworld map and battles.

The overworld map consists of a number of points, some of which are villages and others are caves/shrines/etc. The yellow places have been cleansed to Ying, and the blue are Yin. The lines coming out of them show connections between Yin or Yang points. You can make several different groups of out your characters and go around to the places (most of them also have Sage powers that can fast transport). If you go to a place that is Yin you may have to fight a battle first, then you can cleanse it. When you cleanse the right places you get the connection lines and this gives you toku, which basically acts as money. Enemies will come out of certain Yin places and try to recapture the areas, although if you cleanse enough places in an area (or maybe complete story events) the Ying level will turn to “MAX” and then the enemies cannot take it over anymore.

Additional places open up as you cleanse certain areas and complete certain story battles.

This all happens in real time, and your characters are not automatically healed after battle. So you do sometimes need to spend time waiting in order to recover their MP or HP.

The battles are pretty standard SRPG grid battles; characters have their own types of weapons with different ranges and areas, and there is a fairly complicated magic system that I never quite figured out — using the spells is easy enough but the way you learn them involves gaining levels but also something that you gain from cleansing the various places. But some characters learned huge amounts of magic while others learned almost none, and I was never entirely sure why this was.

On the whole the game was difficult to figure out, and this is partly due to things being needlessly complicated, and issues with the interface. The instruction booklet is not very clear on many parts of the game. I didn’t figure out how to buy things until near the end of the game (you have to use the power to go back to the clouds and then buy things from the sages), and even then how to equip things was not straightforward. I did eventually figure it out with a combination of the instruction manual and the game itself, but managing all the different groups wasn’t very fun either.

The map design is mostly generic; there are only a handful of actual story battles.

Finally, the balance. Without fighting a lot of extra battles (i.e. waiting for guys to come out) it’s hard to keep your levels even, and it’s much easier to just use a single group for most of the tasks, and have some side groups to deal with some of the generics. On the whole I didn’t find the game too challenging until near the end, when the unique enemies started having a lot more power and the ability to cast very damaging spells that sometimes hit the whole map (you can get these too).

But the final battle was a different story and a situation that has become familiar to me now. It represents a huge leap in difficulty; the boss has multiple places that you can damage it but they keep changing, and it has very damaging attacks. I looked at a video of the boss and they were much more highly levelled than me. So I thought I would grind a bit, but it turns out that once you get to the point where the final boss is revealed, you cannot fight any more battles, so you’re stuck with whatever team you have at that point (unless there was some way to train that I never figured out). So that’s where I stopped — I think this is the 5th or 6th game that I have had to stop on the final battle.

So as I said above, I still don’t really like this kind of SRPG.

Gate Keepers (ゲートキーパーズ), released 12/16/1999, developed by ESP, published by Kadokawa Shoten

This is a franchise that started with this Playstation game but also had an associated manga, anime, and light novel. The anime was one of the last projects of Shiozawa Kaneto, who died suddenly during the creation (he only played a guest character in one episode).

This struck me as a pretty lazy harem product. Neither the plot nor the characters are particularly well developed, and the gameplay is not great either. It’s certainly much better than Seirei Shokan, but I can’t help feeling like they were mostly relying on the harem-series angle to get people interested in it.

The game begins with a vocal song and animated intro (I wouldn’t be surprised if this was reused in some form in the anime). There are other short animated sections as well. Aside from this, the graphics are serviceable.

I’m not necessarily the right audience for this but I’m not sure how much the girls in the game would appeal to harem-series fans.

They look OK but they have this 90s-anime feel to them that’s a bit outdated now.

The in-battle graphics aren’t bad either, although they can get in the way of seeing things — fortunately the game gives you a button you can push to temporarily take away all the graphics so you can see where everyone is, although even then I sometimes found it hard to tell exactly where I needed to move to attack a unit. On the whole I would say this is a decent example of this middle-late period of Playstation games.

For music and sound, there is a lot of voiced dialogue, and the seiyuu lineup is pretty good for the period. One thing that I never like is the lack of voice for the main character — I know this is normal in visual novels and this kind of game (I guess so you can imagine yourself as the lead?) But in all the animated sequences the MC does have a voice.

The story involves a group of “Gate Keepers”, who can call on things from some alternate world to essentially use magic. The main character is an average high school student who is recognized by this secret international organization that gathers Gate Keepers (who of course are all kids, at least the ones in this game) to protect the world against “Invaders”. Each Gate Keeper is associated with a different Gate which sets the type of powers they can use.

The basic story of the game involves efforts by the Invaders to take over the world, that then center on a human named Kageyama Reiji that is working with the Invaders. The game takes place in the late 1960s for some reason, and begins with a scene where Reiji uses his gate magic to kill a bunch of soldiers in the Vietnam War (and the suggestion I think is that this ends the war).

The main interest of the game, I suppose, is the different girls; of course you can develop friendship levels with them and get special endings (romantic, perhaps, although I didn’t get such an ending) with the girl you like the most. As usual, they represent a range of common character types — the shy, morose study girl, a few foreigners, an athletic girl, a child (sigh), an airhead, and such.

The system alternates between the battles and the conversation parts. For the conversation, the characters are all in a school — it’s a real school but it also serves to hide the command center of the Gate Keeper force, so that the GKs can all make it there in an instant if they need to. So you can choose where you want to go in the school to talk to the various girls. Sometimes they might not be there and then you go somewhere else (like the gym or nurse’s room). You might also get a choice of what to do. I don’t believe that going back to the same girl more than once ever does anything but I could be wrong.

You only have a limited number of places you can go (unspecified) before the alarm will go off to send you to the next battle

I didn’t look at a walkthrough to see what choices were good or what I should do. This ended up unfortunately with my highest friendship rating being the Chinese 11 year old (or something) above. Fortunately I did not get a high enough value to trigger the love scene, but I did have to hear from one of her classmates this very creepy dialogue about what is attractive about her. It sounded more like what a creepy adult would say about a child rather than what an actual 11 year old would say.

Once you beat the game you can access an extras menu that shows you a completion percentage which I guess measures how well you did with each girl, and the better you do the more extras (images and such) you unlock. I had 0% with every girl except that Chinese girl who had 66%; I guess I didn’t pick the right options for the others.

There are one or two battles per chapter (the whole game is pretty short, I finished it in 12 hours). Unfortunately you can only send out the main character and at most 2 girls (sometimes just 1). This is especially annoying because there are no free or side battles, so you pretty much have to concentrate on just sending out a core party. So you barely get to use any of the characters — I guess their idea is that you replay it several times (the save slot has a three-digit counter for how many times you’ve cleared the game), but I’m not going to do that. I generally sent out Jun (who has a gun) and Fei (the Chinese girl) because her gate attack could hit everyone on the screen.

Each character has their own weapon; you don’t equip anything but the weapons have different ranges and powers. The MC has both a gun and katana.

The system is player/enemy turn. You can move and act. The actions are attack, Gate, and jump (up to a higher area). The main character can also call in help to heal or status restore — this is unlimited but it takes the MCs turn and because you have so few characters you can’t rely on it to get you out of every jam.

To use the Gate powers, you first choose to open that character’s gate. You then see a number appear over the character — this is the remaining power of the gate. It goes down by 1 each turn, and then every Gate power you use takes some amount of energy (ranging from 0 to at least 5). Once it hits 0 the gate closes and cannot be opened again for that battle. Personally I would have rather seen a system where the gate energy can recover and be opened again — the system as it is seems too limited, especially in battles with multiple sets of reinforcements or when the enemies are spread all over the map. On the whole I think the battle system has good ideas, but the tiny party size and very limited use of the key power of the game makes it feel rather thin. Halfway through the game you get the ability to summon a mech by combining the power of the MC and one girl, but that basically reduces your party size to 2 because the girl you pick can’t do anything except move until the mech goes away.

If the MC reaches 0 hp it’s game over; if one of the girls reaches 0 hp you lose friendship value with them and they are out for that map.

The way the XP is done is weird. Enemies will often drop gems that give between 1 and 10 xp. 10 xp moves you up a level. But you have to get the gem before it disappears, and the last enemy you beat drops a gem but you don’t get it, even if it’s the boss and it gives you a 10 xp gem. Characters that did not join the battle get 5 xp for each one, which is not enough to keep them competitive.

For map design, there is some variety in the maps. Some of them are in the air like above (although it makes no sense because despite being in planes, everyone still retains their core attack types and ranges). Height and obstacles play a big role. There are a number of unique enemies with their own challenges.

The balance is not great. As I said above, the lack of any free battles means that if you didn’t focus all your XP on a few characters you are screwed. Moving up a level restores your HP — if it weren’t for this I think the game would be nearly impossible because all of the enemies in the game hit hard, from grunts to bosses. A lot of the grunts have their own powers and area attacks, and the bosses can sometimes hit from all the way across the screen. Losing even one character reduces your combat potential by 1/3 and so you can’t afford that at all unless you are almost done with the map.

The interface is fine, and I mentioned the extras above (the unlockable things from getting the friendship levels with the girls).

On the whole I wasn’t a big fan of the game. The harem part didn’t interest me, and the gameplay wasn’t good enough to make it interesting. The real problem, as I said several times above, is the severe limitations of the battle system.

Kukuroseatoro – Eternal Eyes (ククロセアトロ 〜悠久の瞳〜), released 12/2/1999, Developed by Tamtam, published by Sunsoft

Here is one of the few 1999 SRPGs released in English. The English released dropped the main title (which I think is from ancient Greek) and just called it “Eternal Eyes” (the subtitle). It was not reviewed very well among either Japanese or American players, which isn’t a big surprise — it’s a mid-tier SRPG that is short, easy, and not very well developed in any area of the game. It’s perfectly playable but not really worth it unless you are really committed to playing all the games released in English.

The graphics are OK. The text is readable, they have some nice pictures for some of the story sequences, and they didn’t try the crappy polygon or 3D graphics.

The music and sound weren’t all that memorable. No voicing of the dialogue.

The story involves some kids who are descended from the “kukuroseatoro”, a kind of puppet master who can animate puppets into various kinds of beings and then use them to attack. The story is mostly a string of cliches that we’re all used to now that includes killing all of humanity to save it from endless war and stuff like that. There are some OK moments but on the whole the story develops slowly and you fight a lot of battles between story sequences.

The system is basically two aspects — the puppet system and the battles. For the puppet system, you gain various elemental stones in battles which you can use to create new puppet monsters, or to teach the monsters new spells or upgrade them (4 upgrade ranks total). The upgrade system is quite complex, with a total of over 100 possible monsters. The first upgrade just takes one stone (and a certain level), then the second upgrade takes two more stones of specific types, then three, then four. The problem is that what types you need are dependent on the upgrade path you are following, and there’s no way to tell what the correct stone options are. So you would just have to keep trying a bunch of combinations until you finally come across the right one, and for the fourth level upgrade that means you need to find the exact right combo from 6 stones times 4 choices, which is a lot.

So the opacity of the system is an issue, but also the large number of potential monsters are not that useful because you can only take 2 units into battle and any new puppet starts at level 1. So there is very little motivation to try all the various combinations to find new monsters, especially given how easy the game is. You can break the game wide open by looking at a walkthrough to get the level 4 monsters, which renders the entire game a cakewalk (especially if you aim for the strongest level 4 monsters).

But even if you didn’t do that, a pair of rank 2-3 monsters is enough. You level very quickly, and you can do grinding if you need to. You’ll be in the 90s by the end of the game regardless.

Aside from the monsters you have the main character, who just attacks. Everyone’s equipment can also be upgraded, and items can be bought as well. The MC can use bows and spears too, but I just stuck with the more powerful swords.

The map design is generic; mostly just small repetitive maps dotted with enemies. Each “chapter” is organized around a single dungeon with a bunch of floors; there might be a boss at the end but otherwise it’s just a bunch of generic enemies.

The balance, as I said before, is not great. The game is way too easy. The individual puppets aren’t really that distinct from each other — they use different spells but a lot of them are similar and there’s no real reason to use more than a few of them.

The interface is OK. For the extras, you do have a book that collects all the different puppets you can create. But filling this up would be quite a slog, I think. Even if you used a walkthrough to know what all the combinations are, you would have to do a lot of grinding to get all these level 1 puppets up to the point where you can upgrade them, and then also get the correct stones you need to do it. The whole game took me 8 hours to beat. I have a feeling that filling up the puppet book could take 3-4x that much, or maybe even more.

This game doesn’t deserve the 1/10 ratings it has on GameFAQs but it’s not very good or memorable.

Vermilion Desert (バーミリオン・デザート), released 12/2/1999, developed by Riverhill Soft

This is a real-time strategy game with some RPG elements. I didn’t play it very far because it’s one of those games where you mostly just watch the action occur without really participating much. It’s also for me a textbook example of how not to introduce a game system to the player.

The story basically involves a world in a large war, and the main characters are part of an elite mercenary band called Silver Fox. The characters within the organization seem to have their own backgrounds and goals — there’s one woman who is apparently hiding her aristocratic (or elite) past, and the main character (of sorts) has lost his memory but is recognized as the “grim reaper” who survived a number of annihilation of his squads. The youngest character is 24 which is unusual. I didn’t get far enough to see how the story develops, but I saw reviews praising it.

The story is fully voiced and well presented, and from what I’ve read it’s apparently a strong point of the game.

In the first mission, you can’t control anything — you just watch your three squads progress to their predetermined locations. If they encounter enemies they will fight them, but all you can do is use “support” items like healing and some bombs (which are helpful against tanks).

The inset map shows you the whole area. You can switch easily between your three squads, with their information on the right. That arrow will change depending on whether they are fighting, disarming a trap, waiting, etc. The blue bars are the current HP of the members. This part of the interface is fine and makes it relatively easy to see what’s going on and to switch between your squads.

So after you’ve just watched a mission without really interacting, the game now throws the entire system at you at once. Because of the relative lack of control during the missions, the main thing you do in the game is set up your squads before the mission and set their movement.

You can set your characters into as many as five squads. Each character has several pieces of equipment, and they can take on one of six jobs that weight their performance towards a certain aspect (like disarming traps, or shooting, or melee fighting). You can also do training, where you pay some money and choose one of your characters as the instructor, and then a type of training, and this raises your stats (in a way that is not particularly clear to me).

The problem with this is that it’s way too much — maybe it’s just my personal preference for this kind of game, but I don’t like going from a tutorial(?) mission where you can’t control anything, to suddenly having to put 10 characters in squads and manage all their equipment and training. It doesn’t help that the interface is confusing; it’s amazing that as late as 1999 a game has a shop interface where you can’t see how the stats of the equipment compares to what your characters have equipped, and with 10 characters to outfit it’s especially annoying.

The instruction manual doesn’t provide much help, especially with the opaque training. One site I saw said that it makes it much easier if you do training “until you are sick of it” (it takes an annoying amount of time to watch useless animations to do the training). But neither the game nor the manual give very much information about how you should choose your trainer, or what the various training options do.

As I said this may just be my own preferences, but faced with this situation I just don’t want to play the game. But I did decide to do some random training, assign more or less random jobs to people, and then try the second mission to see how it went. The main thing I did was buy 99 healing items and give max healing items to each person.

Before the mission, you set your squads up and then decide how they will move (by selecting those points). For each point-to-point movement, you can decide whether they will go full speed, scout (for enemies), ready an attack, or search (for items). You can hit Y to bring up information about where the traps and enemies supposedly are on the map, although there cane be unforeseen complications.

You can change the orders during the mission, so you’re not set in what you do.

After that you just watch them move and fight. Once again you can change the orders or use “support” items but that’s it.

This is also a huge mission; there’s a large overworld area and then a 4 floor building. The tanks are especially annoying but I guess you should probably use support bombs to deal with them.

I quit during this second mission. I can’t tell whether this is a bad game or just a game in a genre/style I don’t like. But I really had no desire to play through the whole game when most of the game is just watching your guys move and fight without any input from you.

I was a little surprised to see most of the reviews I found on the game positive (although maybe for a game as obscure(?) as this those are the only people motivated to write the reviews). I thought more people might complain about the fact that you mostly just watch things happen, but maybe people thought the limited orders and setup you can do is enough to be fun.

Shin Masou Kishin (真・魔装機神 PANZER WARFARE), released 11/25/1999, developed and released by Banpresto

Masou Kishin was originally developed for the Super Robot Wars franchise, starting back in 1992 with SRW 2. That game introduced Masaki in the Cybuster and Shuu in the Granzon, and the instruction manual had the embryo of the setting — Masaki’s Cybuster was created in the underground kingdom Langran from a mix of magic and technology, and Shuu’s Granzon was created using technology from the alien race of “Guest.” This setting continued to be developed through the succeeding games, with EX taking place in Langran, Guest themselves appearing in 4/F, and finally a standalone game in 1996.

Apparently this game was intended to be the sequel to the 1996 Masou Kishin game. But the relationship between Winkysoft (who had developed most of the SRW games) and Banpresto broke apart for some reason, and so this game was made instead. It completely changes the setting and characters, keeping only the names and designs of the 4 main mechs. Winkysoft released their own Masou Kishin-ish game in 2000 called Rayblade, while Banpresto used Masaki and crew in SRW Alpha and Alpha Gaiden. After that the franchise was silent until 2010, when Winkysoft again teamed up with Banpresto to do a remake of the 1996 Masou Kishin game. They then released three more Masou Kishin games in three years, finishing the original storyline.

Panzer Warfare moves the setting to a new alternate world. At least in the part of the game I played, there is no longer any connection to Earth. The Masouki (lesser mechs) and Masou Kishin (the main 4 strong mechs) are created out of technology derived from the “Arm of God” that suddenly appeared in the world. I didn’t finish the game so I don’t know what the ultimate reveal is for where this Arm of God came from.

Strangely when you turn on the game, you get the OP and an ad for the TV anime that Banpresto made as well, but that has nothing to do with this game (it’s yet another alternate setting for the Masou Kishin).

Anyway, the review. The graphics are serviceable; you can see the in-battle animation above (which fortunately you can turn off).

The sequences have decent looking pictures, and there are a fair number of scenery pictures as well to illustrate the scenes.

The maps are overall OK. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell exactly which hex the enemies are on but it’s not to too bad.

The music was unmemorable; the sound is underwhelming. There is only a tiny amount of voiced dialogue, similar to what the SRW games were doing at the time.

The story relied on familiar elements but seemed good. The main character, Keigo, is a Masouki pilot in training, and his training is interrupted by both monsters attacking, and the assassination of the king of the neighboring kingdom. This starts a war between the two kingdoms although it’s being controlled from behind the scenes by someone with a more sinister motive.

The system relies on a hex map. The overall system is broadly similar to the SRW games with a few key differences. The first one is that switching your facing takes movement points, and which attacks you can use depend on the facing. You can also fly, which gives you more movement and also lets you use your melee attacks against flying enemies. The downside is that you can only move forward in about a 30 degree angle.

This system makes certain attacks much more useful than others. In particular, the attacks that cannot be used post movement, and also can only be used to front-facing enemies, means that the enemies can just move behind you repeatedly, taking away that attack.

Rather than energy, attacks depend on Prana. The more powerful an attack is, the more prana it uses. Having a low or high prana also affects the damage of general attacks. Spending a turn without attacking will restore some prana depending on your stats.

When you level up, you can put points into various stats. I put a lot of points into the prana stat that raises your SP to cast seishin (and gives you better prana recovery). I also did Luck which helps the activation of your sword cut/block skills, and then dodge/evade. I seemed to be doing decent damage so I didn’t put many points into attack….this was a big mistake and resulted in me getting stuck about 2/3 of the way through the game.

Another aspect of the system is that the enemies can cast seishin as well. This often means that you can’t leave any units alive on the EP or they will just get healed (often to full HP).

There are no items or equipment.

The map design is OK. Most of the maps are just enemies that come towards you and you have to beat them, without any particular complication. Some of the maps take place on an alternate world (where the monsters are coming from) but that doesn’t make a big difference.

The balance is not great. At the beginning, your masouki are fairly weak, especially the side characters. But then about stage 10 or 11 you get the Masou Kishin which are much stronger. Despite what some sites said, I didn’t find that it was laughably easy at this point — it certainly wasn’t hard, but you do have to deal with the healing enemies.

But, the game is a stage-by-stage flow with no alternate or repeatable stages, nor can you use the game over trick that is common in SRW to get more XP. So this means the designers should be careful not to make stages that can be unbeatable if you didn’t develop your forces in the right way…and they weren’t careful.

This stage gives you a very limited time to kill these 4 enemies before the bomb goes off. You only have Cybuster (plus an NPC, but she doesn’t really help). All 4 enemies have heal seishin, and there is an additional healer at the top of the map that can Friendship everyone to full health. Every walkthrough and video I watched said the same thing — you just use a hot blood Cyflash to kill them all. Which probably works if you were a normal person and put more points into the attack stats than I did. But given that I didn’t do that, I see no way past the stage — if I do the hot blood cyflash, they’re all back at full HP the next round, and the time is so limited that I can’t take them out individually or exhaust their seishin points. Even if I take out the friendship user at the top, the individual units still have their own Trust healing seishin.

Do I deserve some blame for being weird with my character building? I guess so but I think it’s more the designers’ fault for making this kind of stage.

The interface is fine for the era. There are no extras as far as I know.

Overall this was a mid-tier game even before I got stuck. The system has some interesting ideas but they often create more frustration than fun.