This post will cover two games briefly — one because it sucks, and the other because I already played the remake of it (and played the original enough times that I don’t need to do it again).

Kamen Rider Club (仮面ライダー倶楽部 激突ショッカーランド), released 2/3/1988, developed by Tose, published by Bandai

This is a game based on the long running, popular Kamen Rider series masked heroes on motorcycles. By the time this game came out, there had been seven different KR series from 1971-1980. Then after a break, an eighth series started in 1987 and was still running when this game came out — I haven’t seen any indication of this, but it would make sense if this was released as part of the “revival” of the series. The series remains popular; I think there have been 36 series now plus all kinds of associated things, and a new series will begin this year.

Unfortunately, this game is garbage. It’s barely playable to the point where it’s hard to see it being released at all if it didn’t have the Kamen Rider name to support it.

You get to play as the first three riders and can pick up three more throughout the game. I don’t believe that the newest rider was included. You play through each of the rider’s levels in any order, then several more levels with all of them.

The first big problem, perhaps the most important one, is that there is no way at all to suspend the game — no save or passwords. Because of the bad design of the game it will take 30 hours (give or take depending on how efficient you are), so if you are not on an emulator that’s going to be tough. Also you have limited lives and a game over sends you back to zero, although there is a secret way to continue. It’s hard for me to understand how this happened. The developer, Tose, was not new to video games. They had already made games like Kid Icarus and Saint Seiya that had password/continue systems. It seems impossible that this was a deliberate decision by the designers with full understanding of what was going on, so it probably points to a rushed development or a lack of playtesting.

Even if you play it on emulator so that you can save your progress, the game is still garbage. The gameplay is mixed action/battle. The action stages are standard side scrolling:

The Kamen Rider can only do this weak downward punch that doesn’t accomplish much, and jump. After you jump you can mash the button to slowly descend, which is necessary to reach higher platforms. You earn money and XP by defeating enemies, running into them to go into a separate fight screen (although sometimes you get damaged instead of going to the fight screen)

There are also shops you can buy stuff from but there’s a lot of randomness in what you will get.

In the fight you just mash buttons to make the arrows fill up and then you’ll knock the enemy back; eventually you will win gold and XP. (There is way to much button mashing in this game for my taste)

But not very much gold. And you need a ton of money — passing every stage requires you to spend money to open gates, so that the main thing you do for the whole game is just grind money out of the enemies (or from gambling games). This is why the game takes 30 hours or more.

If the game had some kind of suspend feature it might at least minimally playable if you like the battle system, but as it is, there’s no point. Later in 1988 there is an Ultraman Club game but it’s by a different developer and seems to be a much better game.

Dragon Quest III (ドラゴンクエストIII そして伝説へ…), released 2/10/1988, developed by Chunsoft, released by Enix

I have already played the Super Famicom version of this and discussed my experience as a kid with this game, so I’ll just briefly cover some details relevant to the Famicom version.

The major innovations in this game were the addition of battery-backed save instead of passwords, and the ability to create 3 characters in addition to your Hero, with several possible classes. Later in the game you can change your classes at the Tower of Dharma, which becomes a series mainstay. Aside from those big changes, this game is really just a refined, expanded version of Dragon Quest II.

It was hugely popular in Japan; DQ2 had already done great sales but DQ3 did even better, and I think this may be where other companies really started copying the DQ style in their own games. It’s interesting that even up to this point, 2.5 years after DQ1’s release, there still have been very few games that were actually trying to do the same thing as DQ. The majority of these RPG-“sphere” games still incorporated action into the game rather than purely command based. By the time we reach the Super Famicom I know from my play of those games that the action-RPG hybrids are in the minority compared to the tons of DQ-style command games, and I wonder if this will start being evident going from here.