Ouka Houshin (央華封神), released 12/16/1999, developed/published by ESP, MediaWorks, and EXE Create

This is a game based on a tabletop RPG, by the same people who did Sword World and Record of Lodoss War. Those games were based on Western fantasy standards, whereas this game is based on Chinese mythology, and especially the Investiture of the Gods work that also provided the basis for Houshin Engi.

It’s the kind of SRPG that I’m not overly fond of; along the lines of the Dragon Force/Brigandine style of game. In contrast to those games this does have specific story battles, but for my taste there’s still too much repetitive fighting against random enemies that are emanating from castles or other structures. This is always my biggest issue with this kind of game.

I do like the graphics. The characters have a nice design, and fortunately they did not try the 3D polygon style that never works. The maps allow for enough rotation that you can see what’s going on, with the exception of the city maps which are very hard to navigate.

Music and sound: The music is appropriately Chinese-themed. The important story dialogue is voiced.

The story is pretty thin on the whole — there are so many characters that few of them are given any depth, and the story doesn’t really rise very far above “stop the evil people.” Your team is made up of sennin (basically Daoist sages who have gained magical powers through their austerity and other spiritual devotions) coming to Earth to deal with evil beings who are corrupting the world and trying to bring back some evil presence by hatching an egg. They needed a lot of characters because of the way the system works, but it may also have something to do with the source material. The left person in the first image above is sort of a main character, but even the main character isn’t really all that well developed.

The basic idea is that you need to cleanse the Yin energy from all the locations and restore the Yang.

The system involves an overworld map and battles.

The overworld map consists of a number of points, some of which are villages and others are caves/shrines/etc. The yellow places have been cleansed to Ying, and the blue are Yin. The lines coming out of them show connections between Yin or Yang points. You can make several different groups of out your characters and go around to the places (most of them also have Sage powers that can fast transport). If you go to a place that is Yin you may have to fight a battle first, then you can cleanse it. When you cleanse the right places you get the connection lines and this gives you toku, which basically acts as money. Enemies will come out of certain Yin places and try to recapture the areas, although if you cleanse enough places in an area (or maybe complete story events) the Ying level will turn to “MAX” and then the enemies cannot take it over anymore.

Additional places open up as you cleanse certain areas and complete certain story battles.

This all happens in real time, and your characters are not automatically healed after battle. So you do sometimes need to spend time waiting in order to recover their MP or HP.

The battles are pretty standard SRPG grid battles; characters have their own types of weapons with different ranges and areas, and there is a fairly complicated magic system that I never quite figured out — using the spells is easy enough but the way you learn them involves gaining levels but also something that you gain from cleansing the various places. But some characters learned huge amounts of magic while others learned almost none, and I was never entirely sure why this was.

On the whole the game was difficult to figure out, and this is partly due to things being needlessly complicated, and issues with the interface. The instruction booklet is not very clear on many parts of the game. I didn’t figure out how to buy things until near the end of the game (you have to use the power to go back to the clouds and then buy things from the sages), and even then how to equip things was not straightforward. I did eventually figure it out with a combination of the instruction manual and the game itself, but managing all the different groups wasn’t very fun either.

The map design is mostly generic; there are only a handful of actual story battles.

Finally, the balance. Without fighting a lot of extra battles (i.e. waiting for guys to come out) it’s hard to keep your levels even, and it’s much easier to just use a single group for most of the tasks, and have some side groups to deal with some of the generics. On the whole I didn’t find the game too challenging until near the end, when the unique enemies started having a lot more power and the ability to cast very damaging spells that sometimes hit the whole map (you can get these too).

But the final battle was a different story and a situation that has become familiar to me now. It represents a huge leap in difficulty; the boss has multiple places that you can damage it but they keep changing, and it has very damaging attacks. I looked at a video of the boss and they were much more highly levelled than me. So I thought I would grind a bit, but it turns out that once you get to the point where the final boss is revealed, you cannot fight any more battles, so you’re stuck with whatever team you have at that point (unless there was some way to train that I never figured out). So that’s where I stopped — I think this is the 5th or 6th game that I have had to stop on the final battle.

So as I said above, I still don’t really like this kind of SRPG.