Atelier Elie (エリーのアトリエ〜ザールブルグの錬金術士2〜), released 12/17/1998, developed and published by Gust

This is actually at the end of 1998, but I decided to do a first run-through of the game now, and then I will return to it later. After the unexpected success of Atelier Marie, Gust seems to have immediately started developing a sequel. It came out about a year and a half after Marie, so it’s no surprise that the game is very similar. It takes place in the same town as Marie, with many of the same places and characters. The main character Elie, like Marie, is a struggling student hoping to graduate the alchemy academy.

The new gameplay elements are minor. This is the first game to allow you to affect the quality of an item (this time by changing the formula), although the quality has relatively little effect on the game in comparison to later entries. You can also do “original” crafts where you can choose any items you want to combine, although you have to get reasonably close to pre-set formulas to be able to get items. Elie’s levels are now split into an Alchemy level and an Adventurer level.

What is different is the scope of the game, which is larger than Marie. Marie’s seven endings can be gotten in one playthrough fairly easily (maybe with a bit of backtracking to old saves). Elie has 12 endings, and they are different enough that it would be hard to do them in one playthrough. There are more items, and more events. On the whole it is still fairly simple compared to the later entries but it’s more robust than the first game.

The main character Elfill (Elie) is from a rural village. She had her life saved by an alchemist (Marlone/Marie) and now her goal is to become an alchemist herself and reunite with Marie. The basic gameplay is the same as Marie — go out and gather ingredients, make items, and get money by fulfilling requests in the bar. As you level your alchemy you get access to the academy library and you can make more items, and by hearing rumors in the bar you can access more gathering locations. There are a number of events that either activate at certain dates or seasons, or when you get someone’s friendship level up high enough.

Every year on 8/1 there is a contest at the academy, where you have to craft an item, answer quiz questions, and then try to break a barrel without damaging the contents within. After the contest you can check the next day to see how well you did. To get the best endings you have to do pretty well in the contests. Beyond that I am not entirely certain what the effect is — in my experience it seems like if you skip a contest entirely you get a bad ending regardless of your other conditions, and that doing poorly in the contests does not affect the game unless you are going for one of the top endings. But I am not certain about either of these things.

One of the early events I saw was Shia’s wedding (she is Marie’s friend from the first game; the “best” ending of that game has you crafting a medicine to cure her illness).

One of the rivals of Elie in the academy school is Aizel, who I recognize from Atelier Viorate (one of the top Viorate endings involves her). Here she’s just a student, though, under the tutelage of Helmina, who I gather also shows up in some other Atelier games.

I played without a walkthrough for a while; the “regular” ending is as easy to get as in Marie. All you have to do is make a level 4 item, which I had already done by about halfway through the second year. After that you can just rest until each year’s 8/1, do the contest, and then Elie will graduate and set up her alchemy shop where Marie’s was.

At this point I looked at a guide to see what endings there were. I was hoping I could get what seems to be the “best” ending, but I had already messed up some flags that would make it very hard — in the end I was not able to activate an event and I couldn’t get the best ending.

The battle system is nearly the same as Marie — there’s some kind of weather effect but it rarely seemed to do anything.

To find Marie, you have to raise the friendship of one of the companions (a dancer, who I didn’t get any screenshot of apparently). If you have activated a few of the Marie-related flags, she will eventually tell you about a coastal town you can go to, although it takes a month to travel there.

Once you get here, it opens up a bunch of new gathering locations, and you can pay 100 money to have the items sent back to your home town. You can’t do any crafting here, though. It seems that Marie has left here to go across the sea to a different town, but no ships are going right now because of a sea monster.

By seeing some events related to a woman in this town, she will eventually agree to let you use her ship if you can beat the monster.

The monster is powerful but if you use a sleep medicine on it, it won’t wake up at all and you can defeat it with a few shots of the ship cannon.

Elie then reunites with Marie in the town there, and you can hire her for your party. However, to actually get the ending associated with this, you need 8 out of the 11 possible “marie points” from various things throughout the game. I had already messed up 3 of the points, so theoretically I could still do it, but there is an event that can give you a point that I was never able to get to activate correctly.

So I went ahead and stopped with the “Maister Rank” ending, which you can get by fulfilling some not-so-difficult conditions. This gives you an extension of two more years and allows for the three “top” endings, of which one is just getting the Maister Rank and doing none of the other conditions. Elie graduates the academy with this top honor and decides to go back to her hometown to start a new life there.

I managed to get three of the 12 endings (a bad ending, the “normal” ending, and the Maister Rank ending). I don’t know if I am going to play this game to get all twelve of the endings, but I would at least like to retry to get the Marie-related ending that I didn’t successfully do this time. Along the way I will see if there are other endings I can pick up, although as I said, it’s not as easy as it was in Marie to do this.

One other thing that’s in the game are love events that can set Elie up with some of the characters; I didn’t really do this at all. This is partially because a lot of the love-related flags conflict with the Marie flags.

I’m planning on making another post to just list the endings and conditions, partially for my own benefit (although I suppose since there is a translation patch for the PS2 version this could help someone). I will probably then return to the game once I actually reach December 1998 in the SRPGs and give it another try. Other goals i might try are crafting all 200 items, and getting all the event pictures.

(Actually I may not need the post with the endings…)

Chester Field (チェスター・フィールド ～暗黒神への挑戦～), released 7/30/1987, developed and published by Vic Tokai

This is another early action/RPG hybrid for the Famicom, and it pretty much continues the pattern of involving more frustration than fun, despite having a lot of potential.

The first mystery is that when you turn the game on, it labels it as “Episode II: Challenge to the Dark God.” As far as I can tell, there never was an Episode I, but maybe there was a fad at the time for doing things like Star Wars Episode IV. Here’s a story summary copied from Moby Games: “The Kingdom of Guldred has been invaded by General Guemon and his dark forces, who have killed their king. A brave knight named Gazem fled for a paradise of sun and pleasure named Chesterfield Island with the deposed queen and their daughter Karen. But Guemon’s forces were right there and sunk their ship, killed the queen, abducted Karen and left Gazem for dead. Fortunately for Guldred, Gazem barely managed to breathe the kingdom’s sorry plight to a brave knight named Kein before he died. Now the fate of Guldred rests on Kein’s broad shoulders…”

The game plays out over eight stages, although you can travel between them (in a somewhat cumbersome way). The hero Kein can jump, duck, and attack. He begins with 100 HP and can get up to 200 by healing with items, resting at an inn, etc. You get XP for beating the monsters, and each stage you can level up twice (so by the end of the game you can be level 16). You also earn money that you can use to buy weapons, armor, and shields.

Each stage has some sort of dungeon you need to go through. On each stage you need to find an item as well as defeat the boss at the end of the area. The outer areas of the stages have houses that you can visit to get hints, or buy things.

The game plays decently, although the movement Kein is a bit stiff, especially when you try to turn him around. You can get passwords from the inn, and if you die you lose half your money and go back to the beginning of whatever area you are in, but you keep any XP or items that you got.

There are two big problems with the game that make it not really worth playing, in my opinion. The first one is that there are a lot of pits that cause instant death (including ones that require you to jump on small moving platforms). This is common from the action RPGs of this era — Zelda II, Castlevania II, Getsu Fuumaden, and other games all have them, I suppose because pretty much all side scrolling action games of any type had them. But it’s annoying to have 200 HP but then have to go back to the beginning of the area because you couldn’t hit a jump on a tiny platform.

A second problem is that the dungeons are extremely difficult to navigate. This is the map of the second stage. You have hidden pits (and the outer areas and other places often have hidden areas in the ceiling or hidden walls you have to find). There are also loops at the side, and a lot of one-way passages. This makes the map hard to navigate because all the screens basically look the same, and it becomes really difficult to tell whether you are in a new area or whether you looped around.

As with the pits, this is typical of games of this era. I would love to read any kind of history or interviews with designers of this period to know what they were thinking when they made the games. Reviews often criticized these games for being too difficult so it’s not just that it was a different time and nobody knew any better. Maybe they were just too limited in the ways they could make a game challenging or take longer for the player? (Or as I’ve said before, they just wanted to sell strategy guides)

Another complaint I saw from Japanese players is that for some reason the opening and ending text is in English. There’s a video of the game on Youtube titled “Chester Field: You Need an English Dictionary to Play.” The comments are all saying “This is nostalgic” but then “This was impossible to clear without a strategy guide” and “I started up the game and had no idea what I was doing.”

Anyway, I don’t think this is really worth playing now.

I’m continuing with my plays of old RPGs as well; this is a post about three games that I don’t think deserve their own post. SRPGs will be back next week.

Zombie Hunter (ゾンビハンター), released 7/3/1987, by High Score Media Work

This game is a side-scrolling action game that has RPG elements. Surprisingly, CRPG Addict did a fairly detailed post on it, so I will just cover the basics. It’s a side-scrolling action game with RPG elements. It’s the only game so far (aside from Druaga) that does not allow any game save or password, so it feels a lot more like just a standard action game.

The game is side-scrolling, however, it has an RPG-style “encounter” system. As you move along, you will hit places where enemies appear and you have to defeat those enemies before you can move on. You can revisit the place to fight the game set of enemies again. The encounters will give you XP, gold, and usually some kind of item as well (I think maybe each encounter has a rare drop item you can get if you keep fighting it).

The items you get include weapons, armor, and heals. The weapons are different types, although all but the base swords will break after a number of uses.

What I found frustrating about the game is that there is no way to heal aside from the items — perhaps if you could do that the game would be too easy, but it means that you’re going to have to practice until you can defeat the enemies without taking that much damage and then grind up gold and such. There are several paths through the game so it has some replayability, but you can go to CRPG Addict’s post for a much more thorough review.

Getsu Fuumaden (月風魔伝), released 7/7/1987, by Konami

To me this game is not really an RPG, although I think you can see it as maybe a spiritual ancestor of metroidvania games. The main character is trying to recover the stolen wave swords after his brothers’ deaths from the Dragon Master. I initially confused this game with Namco’s Gempei Toumaden (which was included later in Namco x Capcom) but this seems to be merely inspired (or a ripoff?) of that game.

The game is divided into a number of areas, that you traverse in a top-down style.

When you go to one of the temples (like the one left of the main character) it’s usually some kind of shop or just an NPC that will give you a hint. The torii-like thing at the top left leads you to a side scrolling dungeon.

Your life (bottom bar) is always max 64. The “sword” (damage) starts at 5, and every time you get to 256 XP it adds one to your sword bar (to a maximum of 64).

There is no equipment per se; there are some items you can buy and I believe a few of them do increase your total stats or attack, but not really as equippable items. The game is basically just navigating these side-scrolling stages and figuring out where to go on the map to find the items you need to proceed (and the bosses). I was annoyed by repeatedly getting knocked into the pits by monsters, which subtracts a life. If you get a game over you get a password and I think you keep all your stats but lose some money.

I didn’t get this far, but there are also a few first-person maze segments as well, so they were really throwing every genre into the game.

On the whole this feels a lot closer to just a pure action game than an RPG, despite the ability to level up your sword via XP. It’s probably not a bad action game for the time it came out. Interestingly there was a sequel for Switch that came out a few years ago and I believe it got an English translation.

Cleopatra no Mahou (クレオパトラの魔宝), released 7/24/1987 for Famicom Disk System, by Square

This is definitely the worst of the three games. Its only point of interest is that it was Square’s last game before Final Fantasy, and the development team included a number of people who would go on to bigger things (such as Nobuo Uematsu).

The core of the game is a very short adventure game that would probably take less than an hour to finish. The story is about the son of an archeologist who disappeared while searching for the Tears of Isis. The son has to free his father.

The game has the usual adventure commands you expect (move, look, use item, etc).

The only reason the game takes more than an hour to beat is that a clumsy RPG battle system has been needlessly grafted into the adventure game. The battle system is an extremely basic one with even fewer options than DQ1, and whether you are going to succeed or not is primarily based on just what level you are compared to the enemy. Most of your time in the game is going to be spent grinding levels against random enemies to build up your levels to the point where you can beat the few enemies you have to beat, and get enough money to buy some of the quest items you need.

When I play a game like this it always makes me wonder if I am only judging it harshly because I’ve played so many other RPGs, but contemporary reviews were pretty harsh as well. The graphics and enemy animations were well received and the low difficulty level was seen as a plus, but the time wasting encounters and slow speed of the game were criticized as well.

It reminds me somewhat of Tombs and Treasure, an NES game I liked as a kid that combined RPG and Adventure, but that game didn’t require any grinding.

I’ve really found it interesting how many different ways there have been to integrate RPG elements into games. I’ve played 18 games so far of these early RPGs or pseudo-RPGs. Most of them have been action or “adventure”-style RPGs, with two maze exploration and three dragon quest-style RPGs (of which two are Dragon Quest).

Puppet Princess of Marl Kingdom (マール王国の人形姫), released 12/17/1998, developed and published by Nippon Ichi Software

This game is (I believe) the second RPG made by Nippon Ichi, after Angel Blade which I covered earlier. I’m not sure exactly when N1’s games began to gain steam, but just looking at their releases I feel like this must have been their first hit game. It was followed by two sequels (in 1999 and 2000) and a Marl puzzle game. This first game was localized as “Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure” but none of the other games were.

This game is often classified as a tactical/strategy RPG but for me it doesn’t qualify. It’s basically a standard RPG but the battles are on a small grid — the grid itself introduces only a small amount of added strategy. I still wanted to play the game because it looked interesting and it has a connection to La Pucelle Tactics, but rather than wait until the end of 1998 I figured I would just play it now.

The main character is Cornet, a girl who can play the trumpet — not just to earn money, but to convert certain “puppets” into party members. She is accompanied by the fairy Kururu, who is important to the story but (I think?) does not do anything in battle.

The story is pretty basic and focused more on cute things and (vocal) songs than anything deep. Cornet wants to marry a prince, but when the evil Marjoly kidnaps the prince she has to track down 5 “hearts” of various elements and then save the prince from Marjoly’s botched spell that turned him to stone. In comparison to Angel Blade, I think this is a big step forwards to the more irreverent, developed humor that you see in Disgaea compared to the cookie-cutter boringness of the earlier game.

The graphics are quite good — as I’ve said before, I much prefer this kind of art to the (often sad) attempts at 3D polygon art that games in the PS1/Saturn era tried to do.

You can also collect various illustrations throughout the game — the maps by StarFighters76 on GameFAQs do not have the illustrations (the chests are just normal items instead). Were they removed from the DS version of the game or another re-release?

Your party is made up of Marl and three other characters from your pool. These consist of the puppets (16 of them in total) and monsters that can offer to join your team. The main difference with the monsters is that if they reach 0 hp they are permanently dead. Also, every character joins at level 1 no matter what, and characters not in your active party earn 0 xp. This makes the monsters effectively useless, and most of the puppets aren’t very worthwhile either since you’re better off focusing on a small team.

Each puppet (or group of puppets) has a sidequest associated with it, although completing it doesn’t seem to grant any rewards. Some of the sidequests are annoying too (requiring level 30 characters, which my guys didn’t even reach by the end of the game).

The dungeons are mostly done through a series of “rooms” connected by entrances, so it’s useful to have (or make) maps.

The world map is just a “pick a place” variety.

The battles are random, and done on a grid. Each character has attack and special moves, and Cornet can use “concert” to boost attack power, and the musical staff in the top right will build up until she can use “rewards” that do extra damage. Overall the game is fairly easy, with only one or two bosses that require more than a very basic strategy.

One big drawback of the game is that it’s sometimes difficult to know what you are supposed to do next. The middle part of the game is somewhat non linear, and the trigger events sometimes involve talking to a random person in a town that now has a new line of dialogue to open up something else.

On the whole I had fun with this game despite the flaws. From what I understand, the second and third games abandoned the grid-based system in favor of a traditional RPG, and the DS remake did this as well (plus a whole bunch of other changes).

The next few weeks should be SRPG game posts as I try to get through the very long 1998.

Ys: Ark of Naphishtim (イース -ナピシュテムの匣), released 3/10/2005, developed by Konami, published by Konami Shanghai

I’ve had Ys VI for quite a while (I either bought it right before I left Japan in 2005, or more likely I bought it in 2013 on another trip). I was waiting to play it until I had finished the other Ys games before it, which I’ve finally done, so I can play this game I’ve had sitting around for ages. Because I played it on an actual PS2 I wasn’t able to take screenshots, so I’ll have to try to borrow some screenshots from the internet to do this post.

The Ys series started out with the hugely popular Ys I&II — not just the successful computer originals but the highly regarded PC Engine port. After that, though, the original team disbanded. Ys III’s side scrolling gameplay was not as well liked, and the ports weren’t great. Ys IV had the weird double release, with a (rather bad) Super Famicom game and a better PC Engine game — although by this time, the “run into enemies” style was pretty out of date. Ys V finally added more action elements, but that game had a number of problems as well.

It was 8 years before Ys VI came out, and I wonder whether at the time people thought the Ys series was just dead. In 2003, Ys VI finally appeared, as well as PS2 ports of the first three games. The PS2 port of Ys VI (with the number dropped) was released a few years later in 2005 — as usual the port was not handled by Falcom.

One big change between Ys 3 and 6 is that the mess of competing computers (PC-98, MSX, etc) had been swept aside and replaced with Microsoft Windows, which probably allowed for easier development. DirectX 9 was out by this point. Obviously the graphics are far better than anything the series had seen before, and the technological advancements also allowed for a more fast-paced, action oriented game.

Adol can do a basic attack, but you can hit the button several times to chain attacks together. You also have a jump-spin attack, a downstab attack, and a few more things that I never really used much because they were too hard for me to execute reliably. (The worst one in this respect was the dash jump, which you need to do in order to access certain treasure chests but I never managed to do it right)

As usual, Adol can do magic-like attacks as well. The way it’s implemented in this game is that you get three different swords, one of each element. By earning Elemen you can upgrade the swords, and as you do so, you gain the ability to use the sword’s associated power. Once you use it, it takes some time to recharge, depending on the level of the sword (I think it also helps it recharge if you beat monsters with it).

The bosses are huge and colorful. This game shares Ys V’s ability to equip an item and carry up to 9 of them, so you can have a lot of healing during a fight. I actually found that this alone did not break the difficulty of the combats — you can do extra levelling and sword crafting to make most bosses much easier (including the final bosses) though.

The game is relatively short, a feature it shares with the previous games. For extras, you have a Time Attack mode (vs all the bosses), a bonus dungeon, some optional bosses and item collection within the game, and harder difficulty levels.

The storyline is the usual Ys fare, where Adol comes to a new place and solves the problem there. For some reason when Konami did the PS2 port they replaced the anime opening with a CG one (contrary to what I’ve seen elsewhere, this was not something done for the English release.) All the lines are voice acted, but the quality varies.

The story brings back a few characters from previous games, particularly Dogi and Terra (from Ys V). But all the returning characters play side parts. The main storyline involves Adol’s ship being attacked by Romun Empire forces, which causes him to shipwreck on Canaan Island, a place that is cut off from the main lands by strong vortexes. He is saved by two daughters of the chieftain of the Eleshia people. He distrusts humans, but Adol slowly wins his trust and then goes out to try to find the magic mirror they have lost. Of course this will eventually lead to stopping a world-destroying evil. The plot is nothing special, but it’s enough to support the action without being so detailed and long that you just want to fight things.

On the whole this is a far better game than Ys 3, the Super Famicom 4, and Ys 5. I still have a strong nostalgic affinity for Ys I&II though. All of the Ys 6 releases are available in English. Unless you really care about voice acting it seems like the PC version (on steam) is the best way to play it.

I will be out of town next weekend, but I will try to schedule a post on Langrisser V.

Mirai Shinwa Jarvas (未来神話ジャーヴァス), released 6/30/1987, developed and published by Taito

This game has two distinctions — it’s the first 2 megabit Famicom game, and it’s the first Famicom RPG to have a battery backup save system. Unfortunately the designers used these features to make one of the worst games of the system.

The backstory in the manual has little to do with the game. In the far future, humanity has sent out various spaceships. One of them, the Jarvas, returns home after a long journey to find Earth completely changed — all the civilization and technology is gone, and warlords are controlling the Earth that has been overrun with monsters. The main character (one of the Jarvas members) will search the Earth to find out what has happened. However, if you turn to the next page in the manual the “goal” of the game is given as “Defeat the 7 warlords and become king of the unified Earth.” There are no further story developments and the ending scene is basically just a generic “you became king, you win” screen.

As is typical of games of this period, when you start, you get dumped out on a world map with no introduction or indication of what you are supposed to do. The areas in this game are very large, and just getting your bearings and figuring out the basics of the game would take quite a while. It’s an action RPG so you get monsters on the map (like the one at the top right).

You move very slowly, and the attack has almost no reach. It’s rather difficult to learn how to fight the monsters without taking damage yourself. The only way to restore HP is to buy medicine in the towns, so until you can find the first town (which is not especially close to where you start) it’s a rough time. You also can’t level up until you find the town. Here’s a map of the first area to show you how large it is (courtesy of Starfighters76 on GameFAQs, a prolific map creator whose maps I have used several times before):

The majority of the map is empty, with just monsters that appear. Letter A in the middle has an “old belt” item if you search the stump (a villager gives a vague clue about this); apparently you need this item for later. #1 is the town, which should be your first destination.

Until you find the town, you can’t make any progress in the game. The town has six buildings. Three of them are shops (weapon, item, armor). One is a quest house which gives you two possible quests — this is the only way to make money in the game since the enemies drop no money. It’s also a trap because if you pick the second quest, you’re screwed since you have to go to another area to complete the quest and you can’t do that without 100 gold to buy a pass (you start with 80). So you should pick the first quest, the pot.

At the guild you can change class (to Fencer, Fighter, Mage). Fencer seems to be the best choice. You also level up here if you have enough XP; just pick any option and you will level when you leave. The guild also allows you to fight duels, which you need to raise your fame.

Raising your fame is necessary to recruit mercenaries, which you need to do in order to pass the barriers to the castles (#4 in the map above) — the goal of the game is to conquer the castles in each of the seven areas.

The duels are on a 2D map but seem to be bugged because regardless of your stats or armor, if you touch the opponent you instantly die. The only way to really win the duels are to intentionally get hit by the projectiles and hit the opponent while you have the post-hit invincibility, or use your own projectile weapons. There is also a glitch you can exploit — when you select the duel option in the guild, if you then mash B quickly enough, you can exit the guild and it will count as winning the duel.

The 6th building is a boat that takes you to the upper right island where the pot (for the quest) is. You don’t get a choice whether to take the boat or not if you enter the building, and it’s a one way trip (you have to take another boat to a different area of the map).

So basically the first thing you have to do is build money and XP by repeatedly taking the pot quest (200 gold a try), until you move up a few levels and can afford some better equipment and medicine (the equipment does not change your stats on the status screen but it does help).

You then need 5 Fame, which you get by “winning” 5 duels. At this point it’s time to recruit the 500 mercenaries you need to get into the castle.

The mercenaries are the brown guys you see wandering around that give you no XP. You need to walk over them and choose “recruit”. Each one is 25 guys so you need 20 of them. They’re quite annoying to find because they appear randomly, you walk slowly, and if they go off the edge of the screen they disappear.

Once you get the 500 people you can go through the castle gates — the mercenaries are not actually in the game, they just act as a key for the door.

The castle was impossible; I died about 10 times before deciding I had seen enough of the game. Judging from the walkthrough I was using, what you want to do is go to another area and get a projectile weapon, which makes things much easier. But to do this you have to go through an area with monsters way above your level, and just avoid them. I guess if you weren’t using a guide you would just keep levelling and buying equipment?

I think this is the worst game I have seen so far in this journey through the early console RPGs. It has all the worst aspects of these early games, and even with a guide is very slow and difficult to play. As you can see the graphics are bad, and there are only 3 BGM tracks in the entire game (including the title screen music).

The kusoge wiki entry for this game did point out that the game does provide some innovations and game elements that sound interesting — class changing, recruiting soldiers, battery backup save, job quests, and a big open world. They’re just implemented so poorly and with so many bugs and so few hints, that the game is punishing to play. Even at the time it was reviewed poorly.

Deep Dungeon 2 (勇士の紋章 ディープダンジョンII), released 5/29/1987, developed by Hummingbird Soft

This is the second of the four Deep Dungeon first-person RPGs. Since this one came out only five months after the first one, it’s not a big surprise that it is nearly identical to the first game, just with new maps. You still control just one hero; there are eight dungeon levels but divided between a tower and a dungeon.

After spending your initial gold, it’s time to enter the first floor. (You can transfer your character from the first game and start at level 2)

One difference this time is that time passes even if you do anything, so you can get attacked if you are trying to map. The random encounter rate is high, but if your own level is high enough, enemies will no longer appear on certain maps. Compared to the first game, you can find a lot more gold in your travels (which restores when you leave the dungeon).

The random encounters are fairly easy. This game has a much easier starting curve than the first one, and you don’t miss as much. However, you need to be careful of the fixed encounters which are quite strong.

As with DD1, there is very little that you actually need to do to win the game; most of your time is just mapping the mostly empty floors, finding gold and raising your level.

I don’t have much more to say about this game — it’s essentially the same game as Deep Dungeon 1, but it runs a little smoother and has a few changes. There will be more significant upgrades in the next Deep Dungeon game which took a year to develop.

Seiken Psycho Calibur (聖剣サイコカリバー 魔獣の森伝説), released 5/19/1987, developed and published by Imagineer

This is the third game in Imagineer’s “Wave Jack” series. The first game (Ginga Densetsu) was a hybrid shooter/adventure game (like The Guardian Legend), and the second game (Kieta Princess) was an action game/mystery game hybrid. The unifying element of the games is that they came with booklets and audio cassettes that expanded on the background of the game and gave some clues to puzzles in the game. They also featured theme songs by a popular idol group at the time. The third (and last) Wave Jack game was Seiken Psycho Calibur, and it’s not hard to see what game they were influenced by:

I think people are sometimes too quick to use the term “ripoff” — Zelda itself borrowed elements from Hydlide and Tower of Druaga, although of course it develops its own feel and system well beyond what those games had. SPC is more obviously based on Zelda, although it’s nowhere near as good of a game. I think it does enough things differently from Zelda that it’s not just a pure ripoff, but the accusation is probably justified.

The story is pretty basic, although perhaps the material included with the game expanded on it more — the story in game is just the usual “main character is the descendant of a legendary hero who beat the demon 300 years ago” setup.

Rather than the large map of Zelda, this game is separated into 9 areas, each with a boss. You start in an area where there are a number of houses with clues, some shops, and two training areas. You get 100 coins to start, and 200 total food (the red oval), which decreases as time passes. If it hits 0 you start losing HP. You also have two meters, P (which is hit points) and F (which is strength).

The starting area is interesting because you can never come back to it, so you are basically choosing a starting set of things with your 100 money. Some of the items will be available from other shops later, but the Clothes (which raise defense) are only available here. I went with the clothes, which are 80 coins — this means you can’t pay 50 coins to train your power or force, but it seemed reasonable. Once you’ve visited all these areas and chosen your starting stuff, it’s off to the first level.

You wander around the levels, which are relatively small. Unlike Zelda there’s not much to find in each one — the first level has only three things of importance. There’s a shop that sells the Boomerang (essentially the same as Zelda except it actually does damage), 100 food, and Trent Fruit (bombs). There’s also a boss that drops a key, and then you can use the key to free the first of two fairies (which will go in one of the four boxes there below the Force and Power meters.

Beating the regular enemies will give you food and money, and occasionally things that will increase your hit points although I’m not 100% sure how that works. The Boomerang is a good weapon but 100 coins is a lot (nobody dropped more than 1 for me); you can return to old areas other than the starting area, so you wouldn’t have to buy it now.

The first boss shoots out fireballs but is not too difficult. Beating him gives you the key.

The fairy can be brought out to block 3 projectiles, and then it will disappear for a while to cool down. The other blocks are a second fairy, sword techniques (which you learn as your Force meter goes up), and the secondary items. The fairies and sword techniques are at least something different from Zelda.

The second area has no shops or items, just this spider boss which drops a key; you need the key to go into an underground part of the level where you will find another boss. None of this is necessary to go to the next stage, but you need to raise your Force to learn the sword techniques, some of which are necessary to pass areas or fight bosses — you wouldn’t necessarily have to do it in the order given, but you would have to do them all eventually.

This is where I stopped. It’s a pretty bad game, especially under the shadow of Zelda. The control feels stiff, and there are annoyances like not being able to use your sword when you first enter a level.

Apparently the purpose of the included cassette tape is to give you clues to getting through the Lost Woods (another Zelda influence) on the final map; you have to go in a way that forms the theme song which you can hear on the tape.

I’m not sure why Imagineer didn’t make any more Wave Jack games, but I have a feeling it just wasn’t worth it to include all these extras in the game — from what I can see the price (4900 yen) was on the expensive side but not an unusual price for a Famicom game. So they were probably not making as much money as they could have and I doubt the extras were a big draw for the game (especially since all three games got lukewarm or negative reviews even at the time).

I also played Deep Dungeon 2, so I will do a post about that midweek and then next Saturday I will post about Tokyo Majin Gakuen.

For some reason the last three posts did not show up unless I was logged into the admin account — I only noticed this today. It seems to have been caused by an issue with a cache plugin for wordpress. So you should be able to see the last few weeks of posts now.

Too bad it’s just my slow crawl through Shining Force III but I’m on the last stage so we’ll be moving on soon!

I played a bit more Grandia but I think I am going to abandon it; if I were more than 1/3 through it I might tough it out to the end, but I just don’t like dealing with the 3D maps. In addition to that I find the battle system often feels sluggish, having to wait for all these spell and move animations to finish before you can keep playing.

So it’s back to Shining Force, then I rolled more random games. The first one I had already played so that will be the next old game (Seiken Psycho Calibur), the second one was a game called Jade Cocoon for the PS1, which I guess did come out in English.