Artelius (アルテリオス), released 11/13/1987, developed by published by Nihon Bussan

This game reminds me of Zoids — you walk around an overhead map and then when you encounter enemies, you get taken to a first-person action screen where you shoot the enemies.

The game begins with the story in English (one walkthrough I saw said that step 1 is “read the Japanese story from the game manual”).

You then go through a little introductory sequence where you become a cyborg and assign your stats. I evenly divided them but this is not what you should do — STR is the most important attribute.

You can save anywhere, but it costs 10 money (grr).

The main screen looks like above. You wander around, and when you encounter one of those balls, a fight begins.

The fights don’t have a whole lot of strategy — you just move the aim around and shoot the enemy until it dies. If it shoots at you, there is no way to dodge. The big issue is that if your STR is not above the enemy’s Shield rating, your attacks do 1 damage each. You will still kill them eventually, but it takes a while.

Basically all you do is wander around and move up levels. There are some shops but they just sell items that go away after a while.

There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of depth to this game — I played for a while and never really found anything interesting. There are warp gates but you need a certain “weapon level” to enter some of them. From what I can see in a walkthrough, the majority of the game is just going in these gates to find passwords to open other gates, and to gain enough levels to be able to enter the future gates. There seem to be only a tiny number of things you actually have to do to finish the game. This combined with the very repetitive battle system makes this a pretty unappealing game. The Japanese reviews I saw of it weren’t very complimentary either.