I did finish the game this week. After the Fire Bear Nation, you essentially go through the other five nations sequentially with a similar pattern — go to the nation, learn what is happening to it, and then make your way to the boss and defeat it.

The most annoying thing about all this is the very high random encounter rate. These aren’t encounters you can just hold down attack to beat — it’s appreciated that you should be using elemental attacks and such, but when there are so many of them it becomes quite tedious.

Peacock Nation

Blood is raining from the sky here, making everyone get sick. But to get to the tower with the boss we need a flying machine. This guy named Akamaru tries to trick you into giving him the key to the machine, but it turns out he’s the villain of this land. Fortunately Subaru, your second companion, shows up to help you out.

Some of her skills involve this egg/animal raising minigame, but it can’t be done if the clock is not working so I didn’t get any of those skills.

Once we get the ship we go to the bloodshed tower and finish off Akamaru.

Crane Nation

This land has suffered a severe drought that has turned everything into desert. You walk slowly through the desert but can hire a Sand Rat Cart to help out.

The boss here is Sara, the third of Ninigi’s underlings. We also get our third companion, Tenjin, who was one of the fire clan 600 years ago. He was in love with one of the Hell people Mizuki, but was cursed to have Mizuki inside him. He and Mizuki can switch who is in the real world but they can never meet.

Once Sara is beaten, the next person Juri absorbs Sara inside herself and then goes to the next world.

Turtle Nation

Juri has caused everything to be overgrown with forest. She’s a weird person who leads you through the world, putting up a lot of games, quizzes, signposts, and such.

Eventually though, she’s forced to fight — you fight her twice, once in the main form and then she combines with Sara and you have to fight her again.

Canine Nation

Here, some scientist has taken over and everyone has turned greedy, going after gold.

The first task is to deal with his big cat giant robot…this involves mining some gold ourselves and doing some other tasks to revive an ancient robot.

After a minigame we can get into the main castle, and beat the boss.

There’s a minigame in this nation that gives you a 1 in 3 chance to double your money, so you can save a few times and easily have several million gold which is enough to buy anything in the game.

Dragon Nation

We now have freed five of the six divine gods, the final one is the dragon in dragon nation. In a break from the past nations, we actually revive the Dragon as the first task. But this is also the land where the Gates of Hell is, so we’ll have to deal with that too.

The Dragon tells us that to beat Ninigi we’ll need Agni’s sword, which was what originally sealed him. It’s beyond the gates of Hell, and using the six stones of the divine gods we can open Ninigi’s barrier long enough to recover the Agni Sword. Higan has to do this on his own, but after going through a few tricks and traps he recovers it.

Now we go take on Ninigi in the Dragon Castle, but despite the Agni sword he wipes the floor with us and breaks the sword. So what do we do now? The Dragon tells us our only option is to go to Takamagahara in the heavens and ask Agni directly to help us. We need to use Ark’s Mirror to activate the divine ark that will take us to the heavens.

In Tamagahara, Agni is pissed off that we came to the heavens and brought conflict with us — she never liked the fact that the Fire Clan and the six nation gods rebelled against the heavens. She’ll help us if we show our strength by dealing with some of Ninigi’s monsters that have come to the heavens.

This just involves going around the heavens and beating three bosses in various towns. Higan’s “Dragon Strike” attack is helpful. The random enemies get much harder at this point.

Back at Agni’s place, one of Ninigi’s minions, the Atramentous Alabaster, is trying to break in, but we drive him off.

Higan has to go through another solo dungeon to get the Fire of Agni in his sword, and then Agni also gives the other two their ultimate weapons. Now it’s time to take on Ninigi.

I thought this was a tough fight. Higan needs a lot of health to use his Dragon Strike, and my basic strategy was to have Subaru and Tenjin mostly healing and buffing (Tenjin gets a skill at level 50 that lets him use any spell), but I kept getting Higan’s turn right after Ninigi’s — some speed manipulation helped here.

But the game still is not over, we have to go to the Dragon Palace and fight Ninigi one more time.

This was an easier battle, I thought, but the same strategy.

Once Ninigi is beaten and sealed, Higan can choose to become the new king. I chose to become king, which seemed like a good idea.

In the end this isn’t a bad game, but it’s really hampered by two things — the ridiculous random encounter rate, and the inability to do any of the clock-based events on an emulator (which is not the fault of the original game). There are a lot of other minigames and random stuff that I didn’t cover in the post. It of course suffers with comparison to the PC Engine games with the lack of speech and CD-quality music, but it’s a decent late-SFC period game.

Tengai Makyo Zero (天外魔境ZERO), released 12/22/1995, published by Hudson

This is the fourth RPG in the Tengai Makyo series. The first three games were for the PC Engine, and I covered them all earlier, although I didn’t finish any of them. (See the posts on Tengai Makyo, Tengai Makyo II, and Tengai Makyo Kabuki-Den.) One of the big draws for the PC Engine games were the voice, CD-quality music, and cutscenes, which can’t really be carried over to the Super Famicom. Instead, they added a real-time clock chip that keeps track of the date and time, allowing for special events based on either the time of day or even the season of the year. The game is also one of the largest games on the SFC, using a special compression chip to allow for 72 megabits of data.

Unfortunately the clock chip creates a problem for emulation that I’m not sure can be fixed. The game of course had no way of knowing what the actual time and date was since the Super Famicom had no internal clock. Instead you set the clock/date on your first play and the chip will continue to update it even when the game is off (apparently this drained the save battery faster than other games). But in an emulator the clock can’t advance while the emulator is closed, so unless you’re willing to leave the game running when you’re not playing it, you’ll finish the game before 2 or at most 3 days have passed. I googled to see if anyone had a solution for this; the fact that I couldn’t even find many complaints about it make me wonder if there is a way people got around this. (EDIT: I think this is simply my own ignorance of how to get the clock working — other people have reported that it worked for them.)

I decided to go against my usual practice and play the English patch. Byuu/near, who developed the bsnes emulator that I’ve been using for this whole process, counted this as one of their favorite games. I don’t know exactly what involvement byuu had in this patch — it may just be that they were able to create an emulator that would actually run the game, but they may have also contributed some hacking to the patch as well. In any case, it’s interesting to play in English once in a while.

As you can see above, this once again takes place in Jipang, but in a time many centuries before the other TM games. Here the Eternal Flame has chosen a new king for the Fire Bear Nation, which turns out to be the younger brother. The older brother is so upset that he unseals the Hell Door to seek power from Ninigi who is trapped there. It’s interesting that Ninigi is the villain since in Japanese history, Ninigi is the god who becomes the great-grandfather of the first Emperor (Jimmu) and thus the ancestor of the Imperial line.

In any case, this causes the demons to come forth from Hell, and one of the underlings of Ninigi goes to each of the six countries and causes problems there. The main character Higan is a 12-year old person from Fire Shadow Village. His grandfather was a hero who fought against evil, and now he’s trying to prove himself as well.

Higan is trying to beat the “Coal Hermit” at the bottom of a nearby mine, but he’s been defeated a few times.

The battle system is pretty standard. “Scrolls” are the spells you get from hermits, just like in the other games. This time you don’t equip scrolls to specific people, but there are certain spells that can only be used by certain characters. The “skills” are also acquired by various events; these are specific to each character. Some are free to use, others cost tech points or HP. The game lets you set 4 “plans” that autobattle with specific commands for each person. (The two other people in the above screenshot are Higan’s friends who don’t stick around for long).

Once Higan beats the Coal Hermit and gets the Blaze Cutter skill, he heads back to the village and finds that the first of Ninigi’s underlings, Zettai Reido (“Absolute Zero”) has frozen the town and kills his grandfather. But since the Eternal Flame has now chosen Higan as the Hero of Fire, he’s able to fight off Zettai Reido, who retreats to his castle.

The basic gameplay is to visit each of the 6 areas and solve the problems that Ninigi’s underlings are causing there. Then there’s a final area (I assume) where you beat Ninigi? We’ll see.

In the Fire Bear Kingdom you have to free the Fire Bear god, who has been frozen by Zettai Reido. This involves first having Hisui forge your rusty sword back into the Fire Bear Sword, and then going to the Ice Castle.

He’s pretty easy; you can just cast Singe over and over again and have Hisui heal. After this, Hisui puts the rest of her life force into the next fairy that will be born (named Subaru), but she won’t join you yet. Now with things unfrozen you can move on to the next land.

One major sidequest I haven’t been doing at all is the Tea House events. I think these are based on the Yoshiwara (red light) district in Edo, which was commonly depicted in literature. Basically you can talk to different women in the tea houses and try to get in their good graces by bringing them gifts and other things. They’ll repay you with various things — good items, or love scenes where you get your HP/MP restored, they can write you love letters, and such.

This is an interesting sidequest but the main character is 12! Why would they include this event with such a young main character? In any case a lot of the events depend on the clock also, so unless I can figure out how to get the clock to match the real world clock I wouldn’t be able to do a significant chunk of these events anyway.

I’ll end here; this is basically as far as I had gotten because it took me so long to finish Mouri Motonari. It seems like a pretty short game so I’ll probably have the finishing post up next week.

Seiju Maden Beasts and Blades (聖獣魔伝ビースト&ブレイド), released 12/15/1995, developed by BPS

This game began as a reader participation game in a magazine. These were very popular in the 80s and 90s although I don’t fully understand how they worked even after reading up on them. You sent in a postcard each “turn” to participate and then somehow things were handled through magazine articles. I know that Play by Mail games were popular here too in the pre-Internet era (I remember them being advertised in Dragon Magazine); maybe they worked in a similar way. I vaguely recall that a previous game I played also began as one of these reader participation games but I can’t find the details.

In any case, the Super Famicom game was based on the franchise; some places say the game came out December 1996 but I think the 1995 date given by other sources is probably correct.

The basic underlying story is that the world is repeatedly fighting battles between the Light and Dark Goddesses. Each time a war starts, one of the races will be chosen to split into two sides and fight for control of the world. The purpose of these wars is unknown; there is a legend that the Goddesses are fighting to become the wife of the supreme God, but why the war would have to be repeated if that is the case is unclear. The reader participation game was planned to have 5 total segments, but it ended after the first 4, so if there was going to be an answer to why the wars were actually being fought, it was never revealed. Both the magazine game and the SFC game start at the beginning of the Fifth War, when humans are the chosen race.

The game is a curious mix of strategy and RPG elements that I think some people would classify as an SRPG — it’s right on the dividing line of my criteria; I think that it may technically qualify as an SRPG under my rules but since I’m playing it either way, it’s not that important. More importantly, I feel like the game is not fully implemented, which I’ll say more about as we go along.

The game begins actually before the war has started. The main character wants to be a “beast master”; the beasts in the title refer to monsters that can be controlled by the characters. You can get beasts from a shop in town, some characters come with beasts, and the Beast Kings get their own special beasts. Over time beasts will become upset and you either have to take them to the shop to fix them (which never worked for me), or use an item that increases their friendliness. (The Beast King special beasts always stay at max friendliness).

This is an area of the game I found confusing. Every character I recruited either came with a beast that could not be changed, or couldn’t control beasts. I never bought a beast from the store or used the services because it never seemed to be allowed — I read the instruction manual but don’t see anything I was doing wrong.

The way you get companions is by using the “friend” command in town until you find someone who can join. You can’t see what type of character they are before you get them on your team which is frustrating. Each character only differs in the type of weapon they use, and whether they can have a beast or not. Weapons can be bought at the shop and also refined into better versions. I believe that each weapon has a fixed maximum it can be levelled when you buy it (maybe randomly chosen?) and if you exceed that it breaks. If you can get a level 4 weapon you can sell it for an enormous sum that will fund all your purchases for the rest of the game. I got one by luck very early in the game so after that I had no money issues.

The game doesn’t really have a strongly developing story. There are a lot of events you can activate — some of them are optional, and some you have multiple choices for which event to do in order to get the next one to open. There’s no real feeling of story progression. Some reviews I saw in Japanese complained that it was difficult to figure out what to do next (I used a walkthrough for this), and I can see that being an issue.

Kurisu accepts a request to go to the west cave to save a little girl. You move on an Ogre Battle like map where you send your guy in real time across the map. The “food” goes down as you move but is very easy to replenish in town. There are random encounters as you go, but most can be easily escaped from.

Battles are done on an SRPG-style grid. Each character starts their turn with a number of points, and each action takes a certain number. You can do as much as you want until you lack the points to do anything else, then that’s the end of your turn.

Inside caves and dungeons, you explore on an isometric style map. The battles in here are fixed (which is why I said that it may technically qualify as an SRPG by my rules).

As Kurisu does the first few events, he meets some of the Dark Kings who recognize that Kurisu is one of the light kings (even though he doesn’t yet) — because the war hasn’t officially started they can’t oppose Kurisu directly, though.

After doing a few of these events, Kurisu eventually learns that he is the First King of Light and heads out to Meishilva Castle to join the other Kings as the war officially starts.

The game now changes once the war starts. You can send out multiple parties at once, each headed by one of the 11 Kings (you don’t have them all at the beginning). In addition, Dark parties will appear on the world map as well and head towards towns or towards the hero parties. The game’s text indicates you should be sending out the parties to protect the towns around the world, and by selecting a town you can see how closely associated the town is with the Dark or the Light. Each town also has a defense rating.

So this seems like it should add some strategy aspects to it, but from what I can tell the system was not actually implemented. From what I saw, any time a dark unit reaches a town the town’s defense always repels it. If heroes are defeated they return to Melshiva castle and the dark unit disappears — this even happens if the hero is already on Melshiva castle. There seems to be no difference between entering a town that is aligned with the Dark or the Light. The only thing that changes is that sometimes when you go to a town you’ll have to join the defense force to fight an attacking unit before you can enter.

So for the most part there is no real purpose in using any unit but the main character, except for one story required event where you have to be using a female unit for it to activate. There are some optional events involving the individual heroes, though.

At this point your goal is simply to go around to places in the world activating various events. As I said earlier there is no feeling of any kind of forward story progression, and the dungeon that basically acts as the “final dungeon” has no feel of finality at all, it just seems like another dungeon. Once you finish that everyone goes back to Melshiva castle, and the castle itself becomes a floating palace to take on the stronghold of the Dark Kings.

This part is annoying because they take away your companions and stick you with two specific Light Kings and give you no opportunity to equip them. Even so this succession of battles was not very hard. If you have the beast masters use the “beast” command they strengthen the beasts who can then use moves that hit all enemies on screen. If you lose these fights for the first time in the game you actually get a game over (in this case I guess an ending where the Dark Goddess wins the war).

At this point the heroes go to a gate where the Light Goddess says it’s time to send the Light Dragon into the world to cleanse it of all the dark people and win the war for Light. If you accept this it apparently leads to another bad ending, so you should refuse. The main God himself then thinks this is interesting and you fight a three headed dragon.

You use all the Kings here but without their beasts. This was kind of a long fight and I lost about half the (unlevelled) Kings but in the end I won. The God decides that the people of the world can now decide their fate for themselves, and that (perhaps) the wars won’t happen again.

I don’t know about this game. It has a lot of interesting components but the actual implementation of them is kind of a mess. If you were playing this just to mess around and send out your people to various towns without worrying about making a lot of progress you might enjoy it, but it’s hard to feel that there’s any kind of story development or whether you’re doing anything productive or not. And as I said earlier, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that the designers had bigger plans for the game that they were not able to implement for whatever reason.

Game 100! Although if you include the SRPGs I played it’s actually game 128. Also, last week was 6 years since I started the blog. I have approximately 30 games left so probably it will take another 2 years or so to finish the Super Famicom games.

Today’s game is one that I played some years back. Since I did everything in the game I won’t play it again, but I wanted to mention it because it’s such an important game. It was developed by Wolf Team, which made Hiouden, a game I played before. I noted at the time that many of the spells in that game reappear in Tales of Phantasia.

This is, of course, the first game in the long running and popular “Tales of” series. I’ve played all of the games through Vesperia. I tend to like the 2D ones better — my favorite entries in what I have played are Destiny 2 (the Japanese one) and the DS version of Hearts.

The game pushed the limits of what the Super Famicom was capable of, with a 48 megabit cart. This is one of the largest carts of any SFC game, beaten or tied by only a few other games (Tengai Makyo Zero and Star Ocean are two of them, which I will be playing). This space was used for things like the vocal opening song and voice clips for the characters using their various moves and a few lines of dialogue. The music was done by Motoi Sakuraba, who had done Hiouden’s music.

The character designs were done by Fujishima Kosuke, a popular manga artist who also did designs for the Sakura Taisen series and would go on to design characters for some of the other Tales Of games.

The battle system is action-ish, but in a way it’s more of a real-time command entering system than a true action game. When you make an attack, Cless (the only character you can control) runs forward to attack an enemy. As you level you will learn new moves that can be used either close to the enemy or far away (you equip different types for each). When you use a move enough you master it, and by mastering multiple abilities you learn combination “ougi” moves as well. All of these abilities take TP.

You will get other characters who essentially stand behind Cless and either cast spells or shoot a bow. You can order them to cast spells through a command menu. I found that a lot of the game was spent in the menus queuing up the spells; you have to be fast and aggressive because if you let the enemies get too far on your side, they will start attacking the defenseless magic users and you’re in trouble.

One common complaint is the very high random encounter rate. You can buy holy bottles to cut the rate which helps a lot (even if you use a holy bottle all the time, you will still fight more than enough enemies).

The story involves a group of heroes who sealed away a powerful sorceror called Dhaos, who can time travel. The descendants of those heroes have to team up to once again defeat Dhaos and restore peace to the world.

Here’s a video I made when I played it (14 years ago!) of the final battle, with my Moria-beefed party. I was playing on an actual Super Famicom thus the video quality. The SFC later got donated to byuu/near.

The game has been remade many times — the Playstation and GBA versions were basically enhanced ports but the two PSP versions were full remakes. I played the first PSP version and didn’t like it as much because it seemed like there were way too many pincer and back attacks, which doesn’t work well with this system where Cless is the only one who can really fight.

All in all this game is fine, but the later Tales games are much better; playing this one (especially in the SFC version) is probably mostly interesting to people who are big fans of the series or who just like the Super Famicom.

At the end of the last post I had restored the Hero’s memories as well as the Zenith Castle, so it’s time to visit the Zenethian King.

Here we learn that Deathtamoor is in the “hazama no sekai”, which means something like “In-between world” but is apparently “Dark World” in the official translations. To get there, though, we have to revive the Pegasus. The Pegasus is in a tower guarded by some of Deathtamoor’s monsters, but the boss fight was fairly easy — the spirit enemy here can use a multi-hit death spell that could be bad but I killed him before he used it.

Now with the Pegasus, we can go anywhere in the world as well as to the Between World.

We get locked into the Between world, and everyone’s HP is set to 1 and MP to 0. This cannot be healed or cured by any means (even if you leave the between world). This is because you’ve fallen into the despair of Despair Town, the first destination. Everyone there just lies around doing nothing. There is a man Clarke Ende, who came from the town of Zaxon in the real world. He once forged good armor but he’s too depressed now — however, he gives us his pipe to show his wife and child if we ever find them.

We can return to the real world from a spring to the west of the town, and show the pipe; his wife gives us Ende’s tools. When we show Ende the tools he knows we can actually travel between the worlds and this perks him up enough to forge him some armor. This also restores the spirits of the other townspeople and allows us to heal our HP/MP.

Next up is Greed Town, where everyone tries to selfishly cheat, and they’re all obsessed with this treasure that’s supposedly in the mine. All we find in the mine is a note saying that a rich man in town knows where the treasure is — he tells us it’s in a nearby lake. A bunch of townspeople gather there and start fighting over the chest, but we open it and reveal that it’s empty, the townspeople realize they were fighting over nothing and the greed of the town vanishes. It also turns out that the rich man was serving Deathtamoor.

The last of the towns here is the Prison Town, where we have to do a lot of sneaking around in soldier costumes — eventually there’s a revolt from the prisoners and we manage to take out Akbar. Akbar himself is somewhat difficult, but Hustle Dance from the hero helps a lot in healing, as does Mireyu’s Bikilt spell.

Solving this area also releases Krimut and Masarl, two magicians who are able to open the way to Deathtamoor’s Castle, the final dungeon.

The castle itself has a lot of difficult enemies, but with Hustle Dance I was able to keep up my HP. When I reached Deathtamoor, the main character still was on level 7 Superstar so I had not even unlocked the Hero job yet. I was around level 30-31, and Deathtamoor kicked my butt.

I decided to master Battlemaster for Hassan and switch him to a Dragon, then try again (originally I was going to master Dragon but that takes way too many battles). Actually Hassan’s job didn’t help very much; it was the general levels and being able to get some Hero levels that really helped.

Deathtamoor has three forms. My basic strategy for all of them was the same — attack with Drango (dragon) and Hassan, use Hustle Dance or Gigaslash with Kurisu, and have Mireyu use Bikilt on Drango/Hassan if they need it (since Deathtamoor frequently eliminates our buffs), heal if necessary, and just guard if neither of those are needed. The second form uses def+ a lot so I used Kurisu’s hero ability that removes the buffs. Sometimes I used Drango’s breath attack but in general I found just attacking with both was more effective. I also had World Tree Leafs on each person in case someone needed to be revived.

For the third form, the Left Hand has to be taken out first since it can revive the others (in the DS version they made both hands revive). I swapped in Barbara here so that she could use Madante which did 650 damage to each part. From there the same basic technique as the other bosses worked, and he went down faster than I expected. I probably overlevelled.

After Deathtamoor dies, the Between World vanishes, and there’s a long ending scene where everyone goes back to their lives. I was a little confused because I thought they said the Dream World was disappearing and Barbara does vanish, but then there’s a later scene where she’s still there. Maybe Kurisu’s ability to go to the Dream World was just removed.

If I load my clear save, I can go get the Hagure Metal job book and then fight about 150 battles to unlock the bonus dungeon but I’m not going to do that. If you can beat the boss in the bonus dungeon in 20 turns you can wish for something that will change the ending, but I wasn’t able to find any description of what it actually changes (perhaps Barbara doesn’t disappear)?

In the end this is definitely a strong game and one of the best I’ve played so far, but it’s not as good as DQ5. The job system is fun but I think the battle numbers are too high, and they had to create a lot of abilities to fill out the jobs, most of which seem fairly useless. I also never recruited a single monster even though I had a maxed Monster Tamer in my party for a good chunk of the game. The dungeon design is inferior to 5 and I really liked 5’s storytelling.

DQ will show up one more time near the end, with the SNES remake of DQ3.