Light Fantasy (ライトファンタジー)
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| “Father, I will be a decoy.” |
As you can see, there are facial portraits for all the characters (even random townspeople). This is also the first game I’ve played in this blog that has normal kanji and kana in the text.
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| “I couldn’t hold back the darkness. But you, who are descended from the Jiyuu Hero who created this continent…” |
And then agree…unfortunately the mirror has been stolen, so the first quest is to find it. Now you head out into town, and one of the features of this game is that you can recruit random townspeople. Only fixed ones can be recruited, but in the first town you can get a boy, a bartender, and a dancing bunny girl. You can freely rename them in the temple.
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| The bunny girl’s specialty is “sex” |
Now, the starting money is too low to buy more than one or two pieces of equipment, but that’s not necessarily a problem. So far, this game doesn’t seem so bad!
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| 4 people vs. 1 metal beetle |
I immediately got a game over in the first fight of the game. When you look at Japanese playthroughs, reviews, and such, the universal consensus is that this could have been a classic RPG if not for the deeply flawed battle system. What’s wrong with it? It may be hard to tell from the above screenshot, but it was clearly modeled after Ultima III. Here’s a rundown of the problems:
- Battles move very slowly and take a long time. The field is large and movement is slow (Ultima III was much faster). In a 5 vs. 8 battle it can take forever just to get people in range to attack. Range weapons are far superior to close combat weapons for this reason. Some units have odd movement rates (e.g. the devil and metal beetle can move 8 spaces forward, but only 1 space the other directions. This isn’t 8 spaces the way they’re facing, but 8 spaces up (or down for the enemies).)
- When enemies die, they leave behind pots that can’t be removed until the end of the battle. You can walk through them, but cannot stop on them. Because of the short movement rates it’s easy to get stuck:
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The enemies on the whole are too hard. The status effects are especially devastating, and hard to cure (and when your character gets a status effect, their sprite changes to a sick face which is the same for everyone, making it hard to tell who is who.) Equipment can’t increase magic defense.
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The encounter rate is very high. (You can flee.)
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The dodge rate (on both sides) is too high, lengthening combats even more.
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When anyone gets hit, a speech bubble with a silly, childish sounding message comes up indicating how much HP they have remaining. The same silly quotes are used for anyone, whether it’s a demon king, a mushroom, a devil, or a dog.
- There is a number matching game in the bar. After you choose your numbers and the person says じゃあ、めくるよ, if you hold down up, L, R, and Y, and press A, all your choices will be correct. This lets you overcome the money problem at the beginning.
- There is an item called 女神のお守り that eliminates random encounters for a while. If you use this, save your game, reset, and reload the file, the effect will be permanent. You can reverse it by loading a different save, using the item, and then reloading your original file.
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| I wasn’t doing anything but but I can’t get my wings loose! |
The pixie is one of the “destiny” people that you can’t freely add or remove from your party. She’s worthless because her movement is the smallest possible (not even 1 diagonal square) and she can’t equip the bow. But we have to take her along. The key opens the cells in the starting castle, and I was able to pick up a demon there to join my party. He got equipped with a Chainsaw.
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| Miradi |
The demon is above him, but can’t attack. For some reason there’s no way to attack the boss from above. But because of the money trick I used my characters are probably a little better equipped than they should be so it wasn’t too bad. Note the dog has over 300 HP.
Ah, so the main problem is the battle system. I hope this is one of those things that gets better as you progress (since you can get more options) just so you don't have to struggle quite so much. But we'll see.
I approve, this game is a big pile of shit.
It’s so much more annoying when I see this cute graphics, but it’s so much bad.