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?
I’m going to schedule the second (and last) Ruin post for a few days from now so that I can do this post instead.
Two years ago I started this blog. If you view this on desktop you can see from the sidebar that I’m 30% done with the game list (which doesn’t necessarily mean 30% of the time the blog will take). Thanks to everyone who has been reading me, either the whole time or just starting recently.
A few new readers over at the PC Engine Bible forum commented that judging from my posts, it didn’t seem like I was having much fun. There is some truth to this — I have been disappointed in the quality of the games so far. Before I started the blog, I was thinking about the classic SNES RPGs I had enjoyed as a kid, and all the untranslated Super Famicom RPGs I had heard about that people liked.
Instead, too many of the games so far have basic, dull RPG systems, too many random encounters, poorly designed magic systems, and boring dungeons. It’s sometimes difficult to find things to write about in the posts because once I’ve described the basic gameplay in one paragraph, that’s pretty much how it goes for the whole game. You can see a real difference in interest and energy level if you look at the Dragon Quest V posts.
However, that doesn’t mean I’m not enjoying the experience. I do like the accomplishment of finishing the games and advancing in the list. I do expect the library to improve as I go on. There are still quite a few games that I’ve heard good things about but never played. My decision to do the Strategy RPG blog alongside this one was a good idea I think, because the RPGs feel fresher when I return to them.
Lastly, here are some of the games coming up in the next few months that I’m excited about:
Illusion of Gaia – I know this was released in English, but I haven’t played it in many years and I loved it as a kid.
Dokapon kingdom – This is a mix of a board game and RPG; there will be several of these on the blog, but I’m interested to see how it plays.
Romancing Saga 2 – Will I like this better than RS1? Will I be able to beat it?
Shin Megami Tensei 2 – I’ve played 1, and the remake of the NES games.
Forward to year 3!
PS: Geocities Japanese is shutting down soon. This is the source of a lot of walkthroughs and info for older, more obscure games, so it’s a big loss.
One thing I’ve been frustrated by in searching down games for this blog is how many of these games, particularly the older ones, have almost no information on them in Japanese or English. Videos are also scarce in many cases; sometimes there’s only an intro, or a minute or two of gameplay.
I’ve been hesitant to set up a Twitch or streaming youtube (for either of my blogs) because I can’t commit to a regular time, and without that I’m not sure I could get consistent viewership.
What I would like to do is for each game, stream my first session (1-2 hours) so that at least there’s a video for each game with a basic explanation of how the game works, and footage that includes both story sequences and the gameplay.
I don’t know exactly what form this will take or how I’ll do it, but I’ll try to decide that in the next few days. Little Master 2, the game I’m playing now, has a full video playthrough on youtube so I’ll wait until the next game, probably.
I am now officially caught up with the PCE games, so this blog will return to being mostly SFC games with an occasional PCE intruder. The PCE library continues pretty regularly through 1994 but then drops to just a handful of games in 1995 and a single game in 1996.
Now that I’m caught up here and doing my new blog (This Map is Completed!), here are a few notes about this blog going forward.
At the rate I’m going this is still probably a 10 year project so we’ll see if I’m still around in 2028 to finish Thracia 776.
Stage 15 – Gadain, the Magic Country
“The evil bishop Garnef appears.”
Overall this stage isn’t too bad, but there are a couple of difficulties. The first one is that innate magic resistance does not exist in this game. So magic does the same damage to everyone unless you use the M Shield staff, or the permanent magic resistance item (one is in this stage). So unless you have these items, no one can really tank against magicians. However, they don’t do serious damage individually.
Garnef is at the right side of the stage, but as the helpful villager tells you, he cannot be defeated (according to the instruction manual we’ll take him out on stage 23).
Garnef leaves after a few turns, and the mage reinforcements around him stop. The only other difficulty is that most classes move slowly on the desert. But that’s not a big deal, and the boss goes down fairly easily.
After the stage, Gato speaks to Marth through magic. He tells the story of Garnef and Miloa, who were once his disciplines. But Garnef stole the Mafu magic and now has the Falchion — he surely hopes to control the world himself, without relying on Drua. Our only chance to beat Garnef is to find the Orb of Light and bring it to Gato, and then we will get Starlight Explosion, the only magic that can beat Mafu.
Stage 16 – The Fight in Altia
“Marth takes back his country, Altia.”
This stage has a strange character, Chaney, who is the Commando class. I believe this class is only in FE1 and remakes. He can copy any other character, although he retains his own inventory and can’t gain xp while copying.
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| Chaney |
There’s really not too much to this stage. I just took my party south through the building with Chaney, and then around to the boss. There are villages at the top left to recruit either Samson or Alan (you have to choose one or the other), but Marth moves fast enough that I could send him off alone to do that and then catch up later.
Now Marth has taken back his kingdom, but he still has to clear the enemies out of the castle.
Stage 17 – Starlord Marth
“Marth frees Altia castle.”
This was a tough stage. I had to reset more times on this stage than in the rest of the game combined.
The left side of the map has a bunch of chests. The right side of the map has the boss, who cannot be hurt by magic. This leaves Dragon Killer swords the only really effective means of hurting him. The two priests on the right both hold important items (a Member Card and a Reserve staff, which heals all units for 10 HP). None of this would be terrible except that reinforcements begin to come out from the right of the priests on turn — three a turn for the next 40 turns.
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| Marth in the treasure room |
The plan I eventually came up with was to warp Marth into the treasure room (you almost have to do this to avoid losing any chests to the thieves). Then part of my group would follow him, including Julian and Boa (who has the warp staff). Meanwhile Jeigan went to get a door key from the storage to open the door to the boss. After clearing out the enemies on the left side and getting most of the chests, I warped Marth next to the priests. He was able to then use his 11 move to mostly stay ahead of the reinforcements, get back around to the throne area, and receive a Dragon Killer sword from Astria. The other one I had went to promoted Kain, and they didn’t have much trouble taking down the boss.
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| A failure — this was the first time I tried the stage, before I was warping Marth into the treasure room |
The problems I had were mostly beating everyone on the left side without losing anyone. I had one time where I had done it but I lost a person from full HP to a critical hit. Another time I did everything right but hadn’t yet realized I needed Dragon Killers, and couldn’t kill the boss. Finally everything worked out and I moved on. I did not use the secret shop behind the throne.
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| Marth running from reinforcements |
So Marth has taken back his kingdom and castle. Unfortunately his sister Ellis is still with Garnef.
Stage 18 – The Black Knights of Gurunia
“Marth faces a fierce attack from the Grunia Black Knights on the bridge spanning Kashimia.”
This is another stage removed from the SFC version. After 17, it’s a breeze.
Except for one stupid loss when I just wasn’t paying enough attention, this was basically a matter of charging ahead and killing everything. I wanted to finish the stage before the reinforcements came out, but Est (a pegasus knight) joins here along with the Mercurius Sword, which is one of the best weapons for Marth. So I had to wait for her to catch up and face a couple of reinforcements but nothing too bad.
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| Est |
As people on the Discord told me, she’s the last pre-promote unit to join but has excellent growth to compensate. But I already have a lot of P Knights. After the battle, Modorf warns us about going to Laman Temple because there’s a fierce goddess that will kill anyone who takes anything from it, but Marth needs something from there.
Stage 19 – Mamkute Princess
“Marth gains an important item at Raman Temple.”
This stage is fairly small and has few enemies (and no reinforcements, but there are some tricky aspects to it.
As you can see, the Snipers will interfere if you try to use thieves to open the doors, so they have to be beaten, or you can use some other hardier class with a Door Key. I did this for a few of them but then just killed the snipers after that. The important treasures in this stage are the Earth Orb, from one of the chests, and the Light Orb, which a thief holds. They play a mean trick by having another thief equipped with a Devil Sword. I wasn’t checking inventories and I got a nasty surprise and a reset.
The boss of the stage is Chiki, who Banutu told us about earlier. He can convince her to join and break out of her mind-control spell, so there actually isn’t a boss to the stage.
Aftewards, Nina tells us that before going to Grunia, we should try to talk to General Camus. Camus was the one who protected her years ago when Drua attacked Akaneia, despite Medius wanting her dead. She hopes that by talking to Camus we can get him on our side. So that’s the next destination.
I tried hooking my laptop up to my tiny TV today, it works pretty well. It feels more like I’m playing a classic console game than an emulator. I haven’t done this so far because I often watch some sports while I’m playing, but with basketball season coming to an end I might be doing this more.
Albert Odyssey is a short game so I will likely be finished with it by Saturday. My copy of Metal Max 2 isn’t going to get here until next week, so I’m going to do a little detour next week into the PC Engine (Turbo Grafx CD) archives and play Tengai Makyo Ziria.
The PCE is a nostalgic console for me and if I had thought of it I would have probably done PCE before Super Famicom, but it’s too late now. Instead I think I will dip into the PCE archives every so often (maybe every 3-4 games). When I play the PCE games I will only play each game for a week unless I want to extend that because I’m enjoying the game (rather than just for completion purposes).
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I got a comment (not on this blog) that my blog was too negative, and that I wasn’t understanding enough of the early developers’ time and money limitations. I have wondered whether I’m too negative at times, and I think there’s always a question about whether old games like these should be reviewed how they seem in 2017, or how they would have seemed when they first came out.
So far I would rank the games I’ve played in the following categories:
That’s 1 good, 3 average, 8 bad, and 4 terrible. That’s pretty bad overall, and maybe there is something to the argument that I’m being too harsh (Albert Odyssey is hovering in between Average and Bad for me right now).
However, I’m not sure it’s possible to put myself back in time to 1992. I was playing video games at the time, and I honestly don’t know how I would have reacted to some of these games if they had come out in English. I was pretty starved for RPGs at the time, but I was also a kid who only got a few games a year. So there was a lot more reason to play a bad game, which is a different situation than 2017 where you can play all these games for free (or even if you want to get them for actual consoles they’re pretty cheap).
I know this was early in the SFC lifecycle and developers were still figuring out the new console, but I’m not sure that excuses the quality of the games. Light Fantasy sold for 8900 yen, which at the time was 71$ US. That’s a lot of money to play for a game that’s barely playable. It’s not like the LF designers had no examples of SRPG-type battles to look at — the battle system is worse than Ultima III, which was made 10 years earlier.
Really all I can do is speak to my own enjoyment of each game, as someone playing these games in 2017. I try to give the creators credit where credit is due (I praised LF’s graphics, for instance, and 3×3 Eyes had good music). But the fact that LF may have been rushed for time or money (it clearly was not tested very much) doesn’t make it any more fun to play.
I mentioned this before, but I was very relieved at how much I enjoyed Dragon Quest V. I had started to wonder whether I had just played too many games to go back to these 25-year old RPGs and enjoy them. There may be something to that, but I still think I can find some fun standouts, and I’m expecting the general quality to improve as I get through the library.
One problem with a chronogaming blog of this kind is that a good number of the games will be bad. I’m in this slog right now of 5 terrible games in a row — as far as I can tell there are no other stretches like this in the library, thankfully. But it has gotten me thinking again about how to approach bad or average/tedious games. This blog is primarily about fun for me. I do gain satisfaction from completing even bad games if it’s in a structured approach like this, but that only goes so far.
Of course it would be nice to play every game on a real system with no walkthroughs, but I don’t want the blog to stagnate because the game I’m playing is so tedious/boring/bad that I can barely bring myself to play it. On the other hand, if you do have walkthroughs and emulator speedup keys/etc, it’s easy to dip into that well far too quickly.
It raises the question of whether it’s better to play the game honestly and quit if it sucks, or if it’s better to use save states, emulator speedup, walkthroughs, etc to at least get some of the experience and document the game.
So I think this is how I’m going to do things from here on out.
For the first week I play any game, I will play it on the nSide emulator (a fork of higan) and without using the speedup key or any other emulator features. I also will not use walkthroughs with the exception of basic explanations (what the buttons do, what the effect of spells and items are), or if I am seriously stuck and cannot progress. If this means I make slow progress because the game sucks, so be it. [My reason for using bsnes is the accuracy; I already ran into a bug in snes9x where Light Fantasy wouldn’t save games at all.]
After the first week, if the game is bad or tedious enough that I would normally stop playing, I will begin to make use of the speedup key and limited walkthrough use, and possibly using snes9x to get even faster speedup (this is what I’m doing with Fist of the North Star right now). In extreme cases I may even use cheat codes or save state abuse.
My justification for doing this instead of just quitting a game is this: judging from comments I’ve seen on CRPG Addict (and a few on my blog), one of the purposes of a project like this is documenting games that have very little information on them in English. A good example of this is Fist of the North Star 5 — the only information that I know of on this game is the walkthrough on gamefaqs which gives very little detail, but given that Fist of the North Star is a well known series even in the West, I figure it’s worth it to struggle through the game using as many emulator tricks as I can just to have the experience documented somewhere in English.
This also explains why I was willing to abandon Dragon Ball Z after one post. The game wasn’t all that good (to me), especially not being a DBZ fan. I was going to have to start the game from the beginning. Since there’s already a full fan translation patch for the game and multiple walkthroughs on GameFAQs, interested people can experience the game themselves.
Any thoughts?
PS: My controller is a PS2 controller hooked up through an annoying conversion cable to USB. Any suggestions for a better one? It has to have a good D-pad and have two R and L buttons (so that I can map one to screenshot and the other to speedup).
PPS: The computer I’m using is an Acer Spin 3, which can easily run nSide at 60 fps and can get between 100-120 fps on speedup.
For the most part I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what an RPG is without using an objective criteria — I can tell the difference between a simulation game and a strategy RPG, and an adventure game and a regular RPG. Action RPGs are where I’m rather unsure.
My gut feeling is that Secret of Mana is an RPG whereas Castlevania II is not. But I have a hard time coming up with any objective criteria that would exclude C2 but not SoM. Both games:
I’ll make a full update tomorrow, but RS is really pissing me off. I’m in the 800+ battle point. I have several open quests that I can do, but every time I try one, I run into some monster that does more damage than my max HP, to all characters, with one attack (e.g. breath attack or a spell). Not all the monsters do that so I can just keep saving and loading, but I sure hope I don’t have to do this from now until the end of the game. I have the best armor that I can buy at this stage, but it doesn’t seem to help. This game is a mess overall, but I hope I can at least find some way to finish it.