I finished Glory of Heracles IV and I will have that post up probably on Sunday. The next game would have been Basted for the PCE but that turned out not to qualify as an ARPG by my standards. Next after that is Startling Odyssey II, but I will only be playing a few hours of that — it’s another DQ2 clone, and my practice has been to not finish those on the PC Engine.

I’ve repeatedly disparaged games as being DQ2 clones, and I used to refer to them as “AMID systems” but I’m not sure I ever fully explained what that really means.

In essence, a DQ2 clone is a game that doesn’t go beyond the system that Dragon Quest II introduced in 1987. You have a fixed party of people with set roles that cannot be changed or modified. The magician character will learn spells at level up but cannot do anything else. In battle, your choices are Attack, Magic, Item, Defend (thus AMID).

Furthermore, these games typically copy one of the worst features of early RPGs. They were based on Wizardry which was based on Dungeons and Dragons, and the result is that magic tends to be very hard to use. The random encounter rate is high, MP fairly low, and MP restoring items either rare or nonexistent. This means that effectively in most fights you are simply mashing attack over and over again, with magic being reserved solely for healing, or sometimes boss fights.

Startling Odyssey II is an example of a straight DQ2 clone, without even basic modifications. It’s more common for there to be some minor, token system modification — maybe you buy spells instead of learning them on level up, or the fighter character has spell-like “techniques”. There might be a front and back row of monsters. But these slight modifications do not change the fact that you are still basically mashing “attack” in every battle. 

A DQ2 clone is not necessary a bad game — Glory of Heracles III is an example of a slightly modified DQ2 system that is fun, and you could make the case that Breath of Fire 1 counts as well. Both of these games are saved by the story and/or interesting dungeon design. And games that do not copy DQ2 are not necessary good — Wizap! and Kigurumi Adventure are prime examples.

The worst is when you have the straight (or slightly modified) DQ2 system combined with dull, featureless dungeons, a generic fantasy world, and a boring story.

I’m curious to see how long these kind of games continue. Honestly if you had asked me before I started this blog I would not have thought they were still coming out in late 1994 but now I’m expecting to see them right up to the end.

 

The games I’m choosing for these “off week” posts are going to be two kinds: games that are forerunners of Super Famicom games I’m playing, or games that came out around the time I’ve reached but for a different system. That’s what I’m covering this week; a game boy RPG that came out in late 1994.

Despite the obvious technological superiority of the Game Gear, the Game Boy remained a strong system — the smash hit Pokemon came out in early 1996, when the Game Gear was essentially dead. There were RPGs for the original Game Boy coming out as late as 1998, almost a decade after the system’s initial release. The Game Boy Color was released in the same year and development for the original GB stopped pretty soon after that.

One quirk of the games released around this point is the existence of the Super Game Boy, a Super Famicom cartridge that enabled you to play Game Boy games on your SFC. I highly recommend Christine Love’s series of articles called Fuck the Super Gameboy, which is an entertaining look at the technological capabilities of the cartridge and the squandered potential, as well as some games that used it well.

 The game I’m looking at today used the Super Gameboy in the way that most games coming out around this time did — just a custom border and an assigned color palette. These were pretty easy things for game designers to provide, and my estimate is that between mid-1994 and the release of the GBC in 1998, around 75% of the Game Boy games released in Japan had at least this basic SGB feature.

I can’t find a whole lot of information about the game today. It was made by Tonkin House, responsible for the Light Fantasy games and two of the SNES Ys games. Kintaro is a famous legendary figure in Japan. There are various versions of the Kintaro legends, but the one this game follows is that he was abandoned at birth and raised by a yamamba mountain witch. He usually just wears a fundoshi loincloth and carries a type of axe called a masakari (thus the title of this game). He defeated the demon Shuten Doji and eventually joined Minamoto Raiko along with other warriors to deal with bandits and demons.

Tonkin House made two games around this idea — an “action hen” (action game) and an RPG. The RPG is just another Dragon Quest II clone; it seems like at least for the Super Famicom, designers were starting to accept that you couldn’t just clone DQ2 forever and at least try to add some new features, but I feel like designers didn’t always value the portable systems highly and were sometimes willing to shovel inferior products on there with the knowledge that the portability was an automatic draw for some people. Only 6 RPGs came out for the game boy in all of 1994, so the competition was not especially fierce. 

The game begins with Raiko sending out his team to deal with various oni threats. Kintaro is paired with Tsuna since Raiko is afraid that Kintaro won’t actually do his job and just go out to play pranks. He gives Kintaro a Legendary Masakari.

There’s really no specific goal given, but Princess Kaguya’s adoptive parents are in a house in the city saying that she was taken. That’s at least a goal but there’s no real advice on where to go. The people in the town are all accusing Kintaro of having played pranks on them…

The battle system is exactly what you would expect. The random encounter rate is quite low, and the advancement seems fairly quick so I think this would be overall a pretty easy game to play.

The stuff in town was too expensive so I just went on exploring for other places. First we cross a bridge, and Kintaro tries throwing his masakari in the river in the hopes that the river spirit will give him a better one, but she can’t because the river is poisoned. He just gets a regular masakari instead…I found a village on the east side of a forest, and they told me that a bunch of people have been captured in a cave to the south, so that seems like a reasonable place to go.

There’s a nice feature in the caves where the Super Gameboy background actually switches:

So Tonkin House did more than the bare minimum for the SGB support. The enemies here were hard, especially the fire spirits, so I did a bit of grinding and bought better equipment before trying again. In the cave are some captured women.

They want me to defeat the demon in the cave to free them. This is where I stopped; it’s a perfectly functional DQ2-clone RPG but nothing special. The various mythological references may provide some interest, and there is some nice humor in the conversations. I often find that portable games in this era are hard to judge fairly because they were still at a point where the capabilities of the handhelds lagged way behind the consoles, and the portability was a big bonus of the games. But nowadays the portability no longer matters unless you insist on playing everything on original hardware. That’s not to say that no one managed to bring out any portable games that were competitive with the console games, but games like Masakari Densetsu just don’t seem all that worth playing now.

I’m afraid that I will need one more of these off week posts before I get back to Super Famicom — Bahamut Lagoon is turning out to be a little longer than I thought, and I have family visiting this week so I may not have that much time to play. But I should definitely be back with Wizap the weekend of April 10th. (EDIT: I think I should be done with Bahamut Lagoon by tomorrow so we should be OK.)

  

In late 1989 when Glory of Heracles II was released, the situation was totally different. Since the first game, there were many other DQ-like games released for multiple systems: Dragon Quest III, Final Fantasy I and II, SaGa 1, Phantasy Star II, Mother 1, Tengai Makyo, and others. The Dragon Quest clone had become fully established as the dominant console RPG style, and Glory of Heracles II follows the pattern. All of the oddities of the first game are gone — the durability of weapons and armor, the passwords that don’t preserve which bosses you’ve beaten, and overworld and towns on the same field, for instance. 

The wikipedia article says that what did make this game stand out was the Greek mythology theme, as well as the tragic story that was somewhat more developed than other games at the time.  

The game begins in the town of Nana, with naming your hero, and then talking to a girl and naming her. The hero (Kurisu)’s grandmother has gotten a letter looking for people to go out fight the Lord of Darkness. She tries to hide it from him, but Kurisu finds it in his bed and heads out. The Queen of Nana tells me to find Homer, who should know more about what to do. I bought a sword and then headed to the mainland, to Athens.

Homer’s already left Athens, but I meet a doctor who tells me to find Deadelus in Selan because his son Icarus is injured. Selan is to the east, and I gained a few levels before going there.

The battle system doesn’t need description; it’s Dragon Quest II. I did learn from wikipedia and reviews that there are monsters later that can break your equipment, which is pretty annoying. There’s also a day and night system like DQ3, and it seems like the random encounter rate is much higher at night. The enemies give a lot of XP though so raising levels was fast.

I made it to Selan and found out that Deadalus wasn’t there. Homer had gone north to Minoa, so that’s where I headed next.

Homer was there, and told me that we need to find the Chaos Axe to break the seal leading to the Dark God. That’s a big quest with no direction, but at the same time a centaur being bullied tells me that there’s a great treasure in the cave to the east, guarded by Cerberus. Unfortunately there’s no inn in this town so that’s a hassle to walk back and forth.

This is where I stopped; it seems like this is a perfectly playable (for 1989) RPG that has an interesting theme. I believe this has a translation patch so if you like early NES era RPGs, give this a try. Next week I will cover the Glory of Heracles game for Game Boy that came out in 1992, six months after the third game. I should be done with Bahamut Lagoon by then and I can move on to Wizap and two PCE games.

1995 was the longest year yet. Here were the games, which I’ll categorize in three sections — good, average, and bad.

Good: Majin Tensei II, Super Robot Taisen 4, Riglord Saga, Tactics Ogre

Average: Front Mission, Royal Stone, Another Bible, Shin SD Sengokuden, Arc the Lad, Little Master 3, Shining Force Gaiden: Final Conflict, Bounty Sword, Heian Fuunden, Tenchi Muyo, Sangokushi Eiketsuden

Bad: Gundam Cross Dimension 0079, Farland Story, Super Robot Taisen 2G, Battle Robot Retsuden, Sengoku Cyber, Farland Story II

This year was mostly Super Famicom games, but Playstation and Saturn both had their first offerings. Of course graphics and presentation are improving. Front Mission and Tactics Ogre introduced height and the isometric perspective, and Arc the Lad continued the trend of SRPGs with far more RPG elements than previously.

Which of the 4 good games should be the Game of the Year? For me it’s between Riglord Saga and Tactics Ogre. Both have flaws. But Tactics Ogre’s story writing is far beyond anything else, and it emphasized the role of class changes and job systems. Riglord Saga has an open world, non-linear style, and a neat skill system.

I think I am going to go with Riglord Saga because Tactics Ogre has some pretty serious balance problems, and the permanent death is too severe given the lack of in-battle saves and the frequent places where you have to fight two or more battles in a row. I think the designers realized they messed up there because in the PSX remake the following year you can do in battle saves (I used save states myself). But it’s very close.

Games of the year:

• 1990: Fire Emblem
• 1991: Langrisser 
• 1992: Just Breed 
• 1993: Super Robot Taisen 3 
• 1994: Langrisser II
• 1995: Riglord Saga

I’m still playing Sangokushi Eiketsuden for my other blog. As I said in the previous post, when I don’t have a post ready for this blog, I’m going to make a short post about some other retro RPG. I’ll play it for a short time (1-2 hours at most). This is not a new chronological project, just a way to make a quick post to fill a gap here.

This post is for Heracles no Eikou (The Glory of Heracles). The third game in this series was one of the early games I played here, and Glory of Heracles IV is a 1994 game that I will get to later. So I thought I would go back and see how the series started.

As far as I can tell, this game is the first RPG imitating the Dragon Quest style. Dragon Quest 1 and 2 had already come out by this point, but it took a while before other companies began to mimic their design. Rather than the generic fantasy world of Dragon Quest, Data East used ancient Greek mythology as the basis for their game.

As is typical for games of this era, the game itself gives no backstory — upon starting the game you’re immediately dropped in Athens. The instruction manual has the story. Hades has captured Venus, and Heracles has come from Olympia to save her. 

 The graphics are pretty underwhelming even for this era — look at how Heracles gets lost in the brown color of the floor. The inside of the buildings is also strange:

Dragon Quest did a much better job with their limited graphics.

It appears that the game involves defeating 12 bosses (reminiscent of the challenges of Hercules from mythology) and then defeating Hades. You cannot save your game; instead you have to visit a person in town to get a password. Many western players do not know that the first two Dragon Quest games in Japan used passwords instead of saves. In the early days of the Famicom, the battery backed memory had not yet been developed. The Famicom Disk System had come out in 1986, which allowed saving games as well as larger games than the cartridges of the time could hold. But Data East stuck with the cartridges.

The password system is strangely implemented. Using it allows you to preserve your levels, equipment, and items. But all the bosses you defeated return, and all the chests in dungeons can be taken again. This seems to mean that you do not actually need to defeat all 12 bosses to win the game. Some of them have items that you need to win, but others just give XP/gold or items that might be useful but not necessary to win. I understand that Data East wanted to keep the passwords shorter (the DQ2 passwords are 41 characters), but it creates a strange playing experience. If you die you return to Athens with half your money but everything else the same. So I suppose nowadays you could just use save states on an emulator instead of passwords, although it would change the way the game played.

I wandered around Athens, getting some clues to various places I could go — everyone agreed that I should go south first and gain levels. I bought some basic equipment and a few pieces of food to restore HP. 

I bought a copper sword, copper shield, and leather clothes, which are shown on the right. Those numbers are not the strength, but the durability — as you fight and get hit, the durability goes down. You have to return to Athens and get Hephaestos to fix them before they get to 0 or they will break and disappear. You can also hire him for 5000 gold and then he’ll be permanently in your inventory and automatically fix things after each battle.

I’m not sure what the stats of equipment is or even if they have stats — apparently the weapons have different compatibility with different types of monsters (which is listed in the manual).

I left the city and headed south. Unlike Dragon Quest, the city and overworld are not on separate maps. I quickly encountered my first enemy.

As in DQ1, each fight is one on one. Running is pretty effective; I’m not sure what talking does. The instruction manual warns you to be careful doing it but doesn’t say what it actually does.

I gained a level wandering around, but ran into an Iron Golem that blocked the way and was impossible to defeat. However, you can simply run from him and pass by, which leads to the second city, Pella. This is actually where I stopped playing — I intended to do a bit more than this, but this game is really bad. It’s slow moving, ugly, and the annoying blacksmith feature means you have to keep running back to Athens.

So this is not a good outing for Data East, and according to the Wikipedia page it was not received well in Japan — it was criticized for its poor game balance, lack of in-game guidance, and difficult puzzles with inadequate clues. There were also ways you could mess up your game, by selling key items or running into certain bugs that would stop you from being able to finish the game.

I should be able to do a Live a Live post next week, but next time I have a free week I’ll do Glory of Heracles II to see how they improved on the original.

 Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates.

I’m playing games but won’t have any updates until after New Year; expect Farland Story 2 on the other blog probably next weekend, and then back here for Kishin Korinden Oni.

I got a comment from an anonymous user that aligned with something I had been thinking for a while — the progress on this blog has slowed down too much because of the SRPG blog. I want to do both projects, but I think doing a 1-to-1 alternation is naturally prioritizing the other blog because the SRPGs tend to be longer. Lately I haven’t even been averaging one game a month on this blog, which is far too slow.

I have two possible fixes for this — one is to do 2-to-1 favoring this blog unless the SRPG is very short (like Tenchi Muyo! I just did which only took me 4 days). The second is to play SRPGs and the SNES RPGs at the same time so that I always have a post to make here each weekend. This might be a better option although I have never liked playing multiple RPGs at once. Or if readers have any other ideas?

Tomorrow or Sunday I will have a new update with Sword World SFC 2 and I have started Tenshi no Uta so I will have updates here for the next few weekends and hopefully I can go more quickly here in the future.

I just finished Tactics Ogre, and restarted Samsara Naga 2. I’m going to use a cheat code to get the necessary monster corpses to pass that stupid baby feeding part, but hopefully I can quickly get back to World 3 with the correct dragon combination, and can make an update next weekend.

I wanted to remind everyone of my other blog on strategy RPGs and link all the Super Famicom SRPGs I’ve done so far. The Super Robot Wars entries are just a collection of message board posts I made many years ago when I was playing them, so they may not be as interesting.

• Super Robot Taisen 3
• Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblems
• Majin Tensei
• Hiouden: Pact With the Monsters
• Galaxy Robo
• Super Robot Taisen EX
• Albert Odyssey 2
• Power of the Hired
• Gundam 0079 Cross Dimension
• Majin Tensei II: Spiral Nemesis
• Farland Story
• Front Mission
• Super Robot Taisen 4
• Shin SD Gundam Sengokuden Taishogun Retsuden
• Little Master
• Battle Robot Retsuden
• Bounty Sword
• Heian Fuunden 
• Tactics Ogre

I still have around 15 more Super Famicom SRPGs to go.

I’ve finished moving and have all my stuff set up so I’ll be back to regular updates. The next game I’m playing is a Super Famicom game but it will be on my other blog — it’s Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblems. The first post should be up by the end of the week.

In the meantime I’ve been playing Another Eden, a mobile game that I recommend; it has a retro game feel and has some gacha elements but no artificial play limits. Anyone else played this?