I had a strange occurrence when I got back from vacation. I took my laptop along but I couldn’t find any convenient place to set it up so I played Another Eden (as I said in my last post). When I got back and tried to play RS3, my save file was gone or had been overwritten by the emulator, and all the emulator settings were gone as well. I’ve been using the same laptop and setup for all 5 years I’ve been doing this project and this has never happened before — I was still able to load save games from the other games I played before.
Although RS3 was coming along OK, I wasn’t enjoying it enough to want to start all the way from the beginning, so I’ll move along to Dragon Quest VI instead — I’ll post a final update about RS3 this weekend.
For now I thought this would be a good place to collect a list of the Super Famicom games that I have either skipped or not finished. First, these are the games that I started to play but did not finish:
- SD Gundam Gaiden Knight Gundam Story – This game is a combined port/remake of several Famicom games; I found the game slow and boring and so stopped playing on the grounds that it was a port.
- Dragon Ball Z – I had reached a point where I could not beat a boss and it looked like I would have to start over from the beginning; since there is a patch for this I moved on.
- Romancing Saga – I reached a point where random encounters were giving me game overs and I was not confident in my ability to finish the game even if I did grinding.
- Cyber Knight – The game was not fun and I was losing badly even in regular encounters.
- Romancing Saga 2 – Basically the same reason as RS1; I didn’t want to do the amount of grinding it seemed like it would take to win.
- Wizap! King of Darkness – Technically I “finished” this game but I got a bad ending that didn’t require me to actually accomplish anything. I couldn’t figure out how the game worked without a manual or guide.
- Nekketsu Tairiku Burning Heroes – I finished two of the routes, but it looked like the other 6 routes were basically the same game with slight differences, and there was no bonus for doing all of them, so I moved on.
- Mahoujin Guruguru – This isn’t really an RPG in my eyes, so I played it until it got annoying and grindy.
- La Wares – This game was awful, has a patch, and once again was going to take a ton of grinding to beat.
- Ruin Arm – Also not really an RPG by my standards.
- Demon of Laplace – This game was OK but not great, and perhaps I skipped it too easily on the excuse that it’s a port.
- Dunquest – Same as Guruguru and Ruin Arm, not really an RPG to me.
- Romancing Saga 3 – Save game deleted, unwilling to restart.
Now here is a list of games that I skipped because they have official English releases (E), are ports of games from other systems (P), or I’ve already finished it before starting the blog (F):
- Drakkhen (EP)
- Ys III (EP)
- Final Fantasy IV (EF)
- Dungeon Master (EP)
- Lagoon (EPF)
- Super Chinese World (E)
- Soul Blazer (EF)
- Dragon Slayer: Legend of Heroes (P)
- Inindo (EP)
- Arcana (E)
- Ultima VI (EP)
- Shin Megami Tensei (F)
- Lennus/Paladin’s Quest (E)
- Elnard/7th Saga (E)
- Wizardry V (EP)
- Final Fantasy V (F)
- Burai (P)
- Might and Magic II (EP)
- Spike McFang (E)
- Legend of Heroes II (P)
- Lufia (EF)
- Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (EF)
- Secret of the Stars (E)
- Ys IV (F)
- Dragon Quest I&II (P) – I feel like I should have played II, at least. I’ve beaten I for the game boy, but never II for any system.
- Eye of the Beholder (EP)
- Shadowrun (E)
- Final Fantasy VI (EF)
- Ultima Gaiden (Runes of Virtue II) (E)
- Brandish (E)
- Robotrek (E)
- Super Drakkhen/Dragon View (E)
- Ultima VII (EF)
- Chrono Trigger (EF)
- Princess Minerva (I played the PCE version)
- Emerald Dragon (same)
- Brandish 2 (P)
- Wizardry VI (EP)
This leaves a few more: Shodai Nekketsu Kunio-kun, and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure are both only marginally RPGs I think, and Jojo has an English patch. The Barcode Battler game can’t really be played without the unsupported peripheral. All the games relying on the BS modem hookup have content that can’t be emulated.
It’s possible that some day I may come back and do some of these games I skipped. I have an idea for what I want to do once I finish the SFC library, and that could include some revisits of these games.
You missed Elnard on your skip list, though I wouldn’t mind seeing you play it considering how drastically different it is from 7th saga.
This is probably not the case since you mention that your emulator settings got lost as well, but for what it’s worth anyway…
If you use savestates, the savestate information does not store just the emulator’s running state, but the sram contents (i.e. savedata) as well. If you happen to load the wrong savestate, the emulator will overwrite the sram contents, and if you saved since the creation of the savestate, you will (most likely) lose your save.
Personally, I think this is really bad design, but seeing that I know at least two emulators that do this exact thing, I guess there must be some sort of reason to it.
(Easy reader version: If you use saves, don’t use savestates. If you use savestates, don’t use saves.)
Now here is a list of games that I skipped because they have official English releases (E), are ports of games from other systems (P), or I’ve already finished it before starting the blog (F):
Final Fantasy IV (EPF)
Dungeon Master (EP)
Lagoon (EF)
Did the annotations for FFIV and Lagoon get switched, by any chance? (Lagoon being a port from X68000, and FFIV a Super Nintendo original)
Yep, thanks.
Hello, I’m new here, you are doing god’s work. However, I don’t think that Brandish 2 has an official English release. I could be wrong, but I have not seen evidence for it.
Yes, you are correct. I will change that.