Thank you for visiting; this is a blog that chronicles my playthroughs of various games. Feel free to respond here to introduce yourself, let me know what your favorite SRPG is, whatever.
I have two finished projects here: a playthrough of (most of) the Super Famicom RPGs, and a quick review of (most of) the PC Engine RPGs. You can see the list of games from the links on the top bar.
Currently I am playing strategy RPGs in chronological order, and at the same time playing other games — sometimes old RPGs, other times any game I feel like playing.
I generally update on Saturday or Sunday.
If you are only interested in certain types of posts, you can filter by categories (see the bottom of the sidebar). The three categories are Strategy RPGs, Super Famicom RPGs, and PC Engine RPGs.
Since I started this blog I’ve gotten a lot of spam comments, which the WordPress plugins deal with quite effectively for the most part. They are generally really lazy — some are just straight up “click here for X”. Others try to pose as legitimate comments but they do so in such a lazy, obvious way that the spam filter can catch all of them. Here are some examples:
Good post! We are linking to this particularly great post on our site. Keep up the great writing.
This article is both accurate and engaging. I’m impressed by how useful the whole website is.
Hi, just wanted to mention, I enjoyed this blog post. It was practical. Keep on posting!
These comments take advantage of the fact that you can leave a website in your display name when you post.
Today, though, I had this comment on the Elfaria II post which was initially not caught by the spam filter:
Of course once you see the display name and the e-mail address it’s obvious spam, but clearly this is an AI-written response. I think maybe I felt like something was off from the way it was written, but I nearly hit “approve” before I noticed the username.
When I looked in my spam folder I saw that these kind of comments had been coming in for a while now. Some examples:
That’s a really interesting bit of history about Shiozawa Kaneto’s involvement. It’s amazing how many different media tie-ins these older games had back then. (on Gate Keepers)
That’s a really interesting point about it being Sega’s only Master System RPG – I remember hearing about that back then, it’s amazing how different the console landscape was! (on Phantasy Star)
Absolutely, it felt like nothing else on the Famicom at the time. The world design and story were just incredibly immersive. (On Final Fantasy)
It seems like they started coming in around January of this year.
I’m not sure how effective this can really be because there’s no point in the spam comment if there isn’t a link to some kind of scam/honeypot, which makes it pretty easy to identify (even by a spam filter). I suppose if someone is running a larger blog where they don’t read all the comments it might work?
(My blog does not use AI at all for any posts or images.)
Wizardry (ウィザードリィ 狂王の試練場), developed by Game Studio, released by ASCII
The Wizardry series has enjoyed great popularity in Japan, much greater popularity than it ever had in the US. The last original Wizardry game came out in 2001, and by then the series was really coasting on its name value (the last game before that had been 9 years earlier). In Japan, there were roughly 25 Wizardry games released after 2001. CRPGAddict had a good guest blog post covering the history of the series in Japan.
By the time the first Wizardry game was released for the Famicom, the first three games were available for Japanese computers. The Famicom version is largely a faithful adaptation of the computer version — I see a number of sites saying that the maps of the later floors were different but I haven’t been able to find any confirmation of this. I looked at a number of sites (both Japanese and English) and I didn’t see any difference between the maps.
One interesting feature is that you can have the text either in English or Japanese. You can even do it in parts — you can have the monster names in English and the shop names in Japanese (etc). I guess this made the game easy to localize!
The dungeons have improved graphics from the original Apple II version — the full screen maps had already been done in the DOS port but the brick walls are new, I think. There is actually an option to switch it back to the wireframe original.
The Famicom version preserves the brutal nature of the original game, in which party death is permanent — if you get a party wipe you can’t reload a save, you have to start a new party. You can find your old party’s bodies in the dungeon and bring them back for recovery, but this is a difficult process and resurrection can fail. There were a number of ways to get around this regardless of which computer system you were playing on. For the NES, you can just reset the game as long as the battle has not ended yet, and then you can select the “restart an out party” option and you’ll be back before the battle. There is also an option to save your game to the “turbo file” accessory (this can be used to transfer your party to the other Wizardry games, but also just to back up your save).
Instead, I will consider Wizardry in the context of the other games up to this point. This is the last game of 1987 and the 44th game in this “early RPGs” sequence. I think the games can be broadly divided into 4 categories and I’ll see if I can pick the best game from each one.
The first are the first person maze games like Wizardry. This also includes the two Deep Dungeon games, Megami Tensei, and I guess Phantasy Star although it’s not quite as traditional a maze-style game as the other ones.
The Deep Dungeon games are just flat out bad. Maybe if you were desperate when they first came out you could struggle through them, but you would have had to deal with the Famicom Disc loading crap on top of the low quality.
As I said when I reviewed it, I think Megami Tensei is quite impressive for the time it came out. Personally I would pick that as the best maze game for 1986-7 but I wouldn’t quibble with someone choosing Phantasy Star if it qualifies.
The second are the Dragon Quest style top down command-battle games. There aren’t too many of these either; even though DQ came out in 1986 it was a while before companies really started copying it. Other than DQ and DQ2, we have Glory of Heracles, Final Fantasy, and Momotaro Densetsu.
The third are top down action/adventure games. This includes Zelda, Hydlide, Adventure of Valkyrie, Magic Bell (Deadly Towers), Esper Dream, Marchen Veil, Seiken Psycho Caliber, Mirai Shinwa Jabas, Scherezade, Kalin no Tsurugi, Light of Indra, Minelvaton Saga, Dragon Scroll, and Outlanders. A lot of these games were shameless Zelda ripoffs or otherwise not very good. If Zelda counts as an early RPG-ish game that’s probably the top here but Esper Dream was a good candidate as well.
The last category are side scrolling action/adventure games. This includes Zelda II, Zombie Hunter, Getsu fuu maden, Chesterfield, Saint Seiya, Majo Densetsu II, Castlevania II, Romancia, Faxanadu and Debias. Some of these games didn’t have much in the way of actual RPG elements and to me none of these really stood out as worth playing (I did mostly skip Getsu fuu maden because it hardly qualified as an RPG but some commenters said it was a good game.
That leaves Cleopatra no Mahou, Zoids, Ultima Exodus, Haja no Fuin, Artelius, and Ginga no Sannin, which are hybrid games or ones that don’t neatly fit into the previous categories. None of those really grabbed me.
I was trying to think of an answer to this question: if I had to choose one of these games to play through to the end, which would I pick? Probably I would go with Momotaro Densetsu (just because it’s a traditional game series), Esper Dream, or Faxanadu (I was pretty far along anyway).
There are 20 games in 1988 so I’ll review them once I play them all. If you want to see the list it’s on the page for the early RPGs.
Gate Keepers (ゲートキーパーズ), released 12/16/1999, developed by ESP, published by Kadokawa Shoten
This is a franchise that started with this Playstation game but also had an associated manga, anime, and light novel. The anime was one of the last projects of Shiozawa Kaneto, who died suddenly during the creation (he only played a guest character in one episode).
This struck me as a pretty lazy harem product. Neither the plot nor the characters are particularly well developed, and the gameplay is not great either. It’s certainly much better than Seirei Shokan, but I can’t help feeling like they were mostly relying on the harem-series angle to get people interested in it.
The game begins with a vocal song and animated intro (I wouldn’t be surprised if this was reused in some form in the anime). There are other short animated sections as well. Aside from this, the graphics are serviceable.
I’m not necessarily the right audience for this but I’m not sure how much the girls in the game would appeal to harem-series fans.
They look OK but they have this 90s-anime feel to them that’s a bit outdated now.
The in-battle graphics aren’t bad either, although they can get in the way of seeing things — fortunately the game gives you a button you can push to temporarily take away all the graphics so you can see where everyone is, although even then I sometimes found it hard to tell exactly where I needed to move to attack a unit. On the whole I would say this is a decent example of this middle-late period of Playstation games.
For music and sound, there is a lot of voiced dialogue, and the seiyuu lineup is pretty good for the period. One thing that I never like is the lack of voice for the main character — I know this is normal in visual novels and this kind of game (I guess so you can imagine yourself as the lead?) But in all the animated sequences the MC does have a voice.
The story involves a group of “Gate Keepers”, who can call on things from some alternate world to essentially use magic. The main character is an average high school student who is recognized by this secret international organization that gathers Gate Keepers (who of course are all kids, at least the ones in this game) to protect the world against “Invaders”. Each Gate Keeper is associated with a different Gate which sets the type of powers they can use.
The basic story of the game involves efforts by the Invaders to take over the world, that then center on a human named Kageyama Reiji that is working with the Invaders. The game takes place in the late 1960s for some reason, and begins with a scene where Reiji uses his gate magic to kill a bunch of soldiers in the Vietnam War (and the suggestion I think is that this ends the war).
The main interest of the game, I suppose, is the different girls; of course you can develop friendship levels with them and get special endings (romantic, perhaps, although I didn’t get such an ending) with the girl you like the most. As usual, they represent a range of common character types — the shy, morose study girl, a few foreigners, an athletic girl, a child (sigh), an airhead, and such.
The system alternates between the battles and the conversation parts. For the conversation, the characters are all in a school — it’s a real school but it also serves to hide the command center of the Gate Keeper force, so that the GKs can all make it there in an instant if they need to. So you can choose where you want to go in the school to talk to the various girls. Sometimes they might not be there and then you go somewhere else (like the gym or nurse’s room). You might also get a choice of what to do. I don’t believe that going back to the same girl more than once ever does anything but I could be wrong.
You only have a limited number of places you can go (unspecified) before the alarm will go off to send you to the next battle
I didn’t look at a walkthrough to see what choices were good or what I should do. This ended up unfortunately with my highest friendship rating being the Chinese 11 year old (or something) above. Fortunately I did not get a high enough value to trigger the love scene, but I did have to hear from one of her classmates this very creepy dialogue about what is attractive about her. It sounded more like what a creepy adult would say about a child rather than what an actual 11 year old would say.
Once you beat the game you can access an extras menu that shows you a completion percentage which I guess measures how well you did with each girl, and the better you do the more extras (images and such) you unlock. I had 0% with every girl except that Chinese girl who had 66%; I guess I didn’t pick the right options for the others.
There are one or two battles per chapter (the whole game is pretty short, I finished it in 12 hours). Unfortunately you can only send out the main character and at most 2 girls (sometimes just 1). This is especially annoying because there are no free or side battles, so you pretty much have to concentrate on just sending out a core party. So you barely get to use any of the characters — I guess their idea is that you replay it several times (the save slot has a three-digit counter for how many times you’ve cleared the game), but I’m not going to do that. I generally sent out Jun (who has a gun) and Fei (the Chinese girl) because her gate attack could hit everyone on the screen.
Each character has their own weapon; you don’t equip anything but the weapons have different ranges and powers. The MC has both a gun and katana.
The system is player/enemy turn. You can move and act. The actions are attack, Gate, and jump (up to a higher area). The main character can also call in help to heal or status restore — this is unlimited but it takes the MCs turn and because you have so few characters you can’t rely on it to get you out of every jam.
To use the Gate powers, you first choose to open that character’s gate. You then see a number appear over the character — this is the remaining power of the gate. It goes down by 1 each turn, and then every Gate power you use takes some amount of energy (ranging from 0 to at least 5). Once it hits 0 the gate closes and cannot be opened again for that battle. Personally I would have rather seen a system where the gate energy can recover and be opened again — the system as it is seems too limited, especially in battles with multiple sets of reinforcements or when the enemies are spread all over the map. On the whole I think the battle system has good ideas, but the tiny party size and very limited use of the key power of the game makes it feel rather thin. Halfway through the game you get the ability to summon a mech by combining the power of the MC and one girl, but that basically reduces your party size to 2 because the girl you pick can’t do anything except move until the mech goes away.
If the MC reaches 0 hp it’s game over; if one of the girls reaches 0 hp you lose friendship value with them and they are out for that map.
The way the XP is done is weird. Enemies will often drop gems that give between 1 and 10 xp. 10 xp moves you up a level. But you have to get the gem before it disappears, and the last enemy you beat drops a gem but you don’t get it, even if it’s the boss and it gives you a 10 xp gem. Characters that did not join the battle get 5 xp for each one, which is not enough to keep them competitive.
For map design, there is some variety in the maps. Some of them are in the air like above (although it makes no sense because despite being in planes, everyone still retains their core attack types and ranges). Height and obstacles play a big role. There are a number of unique enemies with their own challenges.
The balance is not great. As I said above, the lack of any free battles means that if you didn’t focus all your XP on a few characters you are screwed. Moving up a level restores your HP — if it weren’t for this I think the game would be nearly impossible because all of the enemies in the game hit hard, from grunts to bosses. A lot of the grunts have their own powers and area attacks, and the bosses can sometimes hit from all the way across the screen. Losing even one character reduces your combat potential by 1/3 and so you can’t afford that at all unless you are almost done with the map.
The interface is fine, and I mentioned the extras above (the unlockable things from getting the friendship levels with the girls).
On the whole I wasn’t a big fan of the game. The harem part didn’t interest me, and the gameplay wasn’t good enough to make it interesting. The real problem, as I said several times above, is the severe limitations of the battle system.
Phantasy Star (ファンタシースター), released 12/20/1987, developed and published by Sega
This is the only exclusive Sega Master System RPG. I never played it since I was always a Nintendo rather than Sega person, but I had friends who liked the later games in the series. The game was apparently made to compete with the Famicom’s lineup of RPGs, especially Dragon Quest. The English wikipedia article says there were a number of women on the design team, which might account for the woman protagonist.
The text is all in katakana, which is rather difficult to read. I stopped talking to the town NPCs because of this. On the whole, the graphics seem to be better than those of the Famicom. The game was advertised as having a 4 megabit cart, fairly large for the time, and it also had music that was enhanced by an expansion chip to the Japanese system (which wasn’t available in the US). The English wikipedia article indicates that a lot of work was put into every part of the game, although ultimately the result was quite expensive. It looks like it was well reviewed both here and in Japan. In the US it came out before Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy.
(It does seem a bit weird that they put so much effort into the graphics and music but they couldn’t get hiragana in the game’s text)
The story involves 15 year old Alisa, who sees her brother Nero killed by the forces of the evil King Lassic. She takes his sword and vows to get revenge. The setting is a mix of fantasy and sci-fi; a fairly early example of this kind of thing. It’s interesting that the game feels no need to justify characters fighting with swords, but also having spaceships. This is a standard “just accept this” feature of almost all these sci-fi/fantasy mix games, but I wonder where it started. The examples I know of from SF literature have a justification for why the mix exists, but games usually don’t bother.
As is expected from a game of this age, there are few plot developments in the game. Several more characters join, but their backstories and characterization is pretty thin. I’m not faulting the game for this since I don’t expect a huge amount of story out of a 1987 game; I’m just taking note.
The battle system is your normal basic early RPG system. There is a “talk” command that you can use, although I never actually did this much because it didn’t seem to work often enough to bother. I think the only effect it can have is make the enemies leave you alone.
The game starts off pretty difficult. You just have Alisa by herself, and most encounters will result in a game over. You can save anywhere, but if you get a party wipe you have to reload your save. Basically the beginning of the game is dying a lot (if you can’t run from the harder fights) and using the free heal near the beginning until you’ve built a few levels and can buy some better equipment, then you can start venturing out further afield.
One issue that CRPGAddict ran into is that you sometimes have to talk to people multiple times to get them to do what you want. He didn’t like that, and I don’t much like it either. To progress early in the game you have to try to buy a “secret” item; the first two times the shopkeeper will yell at you that you can’t buy it, but then the third time he lets you buy it. There are several other instances of this in the game, but it’s annoying without some kind of clue. Once you get the passport you can go to another planet and get the cute little cat character Myau, your second unit. We also start learning some spells.
The caves and dungeons are all first person. There is no map and sometimes the way the screen moves is a bit confusing. Most of the chests in the dungeon are also a waste of time — the designer later said he didn’t know how to make an RPG, and you do wonder about some of these early RPGs when a dungeon has 10 chests, 8 of which are basically useless.
There are three total planets, a desert one, a winter one, and the one you start on.
I think I played about half of the game. Compared to the other 1987 RPGs of this type, I think it holds its own. The graphics and music are better, the first-person dungeons are a nice touch, and I don’t think it noticeably more grindy than Final Fantasy or the Dragon Quests. The English wikipedia article has a lot of detail on the background of the game, which is worth reading.
I don’t recall ever seeing or playing this game as a kid. I vaguely remember one friend had a Sega Master System but we didn’t play it much. The later games on the Genesis I do remember; I never had a Genesis so I didn’t play them, but I was aware of the series.
Kukuroseatoro – Eternal Eyes (ククロセアトロ 〜悠久の瞳〜), released 12/2/1999, Developed by Tamtam, published by Sunsoft
Here is one of the few 1999 SRPGs released in English. The English released dropped the main title (which I think is from ancient Greek) and just called it “Eternal Eyes” (the subtitle). It was not reviewed very well among either Japanese or American players, which isn’t a big surprise — it’s a mid-tier SRPG that is short, easy, and not very well developed in any area of the game. It’s perfectly playable but not really worth it unless you are really committed to playing all the games released in English.
The graphics are OK. The text is readable, they have some nice pictures for some of the story sequences, and they didn’t try the crappy polygon or 3D graphics.
The music and sound weren’t all that memorable. No voicing of the dialogue.
The story involves some kids who are descended from the “kukuroseatoro”, a kind of puppet master who can animate puppets into various kinds of beings and then use them to attack. The story is mostly a string of cliches that we’re all used to now that includes killing all of humanity to save it from endless war and stuff like that. There are some OK moments but on the whole the story develops slowly and you fight a lot of battles between story sequences.
The system is basically two aspects — the puppet system and the battles. For the puppet system, you gain various elemental stones in battles which you can use to create new puppet monsters, or to teach the monsters new spells or upgrade them (4 upgrade ranks total). The upgrade system is quite complex, with a total of over 100 possible monsters. The first upgrade just takes one stone (and a certain level), then the second upgrade takes two more stones of specific types, then three, then four. The problem is that what types you need are dependent on the upgrade path you are following, and there’s no way to tell what the correct stone options are. So you would just have to keep trying a bunch of combinations until you finally come across the right one, and for the fourth level upgrade that means you need to find the exact right combo from 6 stones times 4 choices, which is a lot.
So the opacity of the system is an issue, but also the large number of potential monsters are not that useful because you can only take 2 units into battle and any new puppet starts at level 1. So there is very little motivation to try all the various combinations to find new monsters, especially given how easy the game is. You can break the game wide open by looking at a walkthrough to get the level 4 monsters, which renders the entire game a cakewalk (especially if you aim for the strongest level 4 monsters).
But even if you didn’t do that, a pair of rank 2-3 monsters is enough. You level very quickly, and you can do grinding if you need to. You’ll be in the 90s by the end of the game regardless.
Aside from the monsters you have the main character, who just attacks. Everyone’s equipment can also be upgraded, and items can be bought as well. The MC can use bows and spears too, but I just stuck with the more powerful swords.
The map design is generic; mostly just small repetitive maps dotted with enemies. Each “chapter” is organized around a single dungeon with a bunch of floors; there might be a boss at the end but otherwise it’s just a bunch of generic enemies.
The balance, as I said before, is not great. The game is way too easy. The individual puppets aren’t really that distinct from each other — they use different spells but a lot of them are similar and there’s no real reason to use more than a few of them.
The interface is OK. For the extras, you do have a book that collects all the different puppets you can create. But filling this up would be quite a slog, I think. Even if you used a walkthrough to know what all the combinations are, you would have to do a lot of grinding to get all these level 1 puppets up to the point where you can upgrade them, and then also get the correct stones you need to do it. The whole game took me 8 hours to beat. I have a feeling that filling up the puppet book could take 3-4x that much, or maybe even more.
This game doesn’t deserve the 1/10 ratings it has on GameFAQs but it’s not very good or memorable.
Final Fantasy (ファイナルファンタジー), released 12/18/1987, developed and published by Square/
This is a biggie; the first in a long running series that continues to this day. In the Super Famicom era, FF was always head and shoulders above other contemporary RPGs — is this true in the Famicom era as well? I would say so. At this point there were only four of these classic top-down command-based RPGs: Dragon Quest 1 and 2, Glory of Heracles, and Momotaro Densetsu. Final Fantasy does advance on them in several ways, I think.
First off, the name: for a long time, I had always heard that this was called “Final” Fantasy because it was Square’s last attempt at a game before they went bankrupt. However, Sakaguchi Hironobu, the developer, has said in interviews that they wanted something that would shorten to “FF” in order to be memorable, and that “Final” was a word that was familiar to Japanese people. The Japanese wikipedia article doesn’t even mention the bankruptcy story, so that might just be apocrypha that started outside of Japan.
As soon as you start you choose your 4 Light Warrior classes. This is the first JRPG-style game that lets you do this — the designers would have been familiar with it from Wizardry and Ultima, though. The selection forms a big part of FF1’s replayability and ensured a long running popularity. People tried out unusual parties and also proved that the game can be cleared with a single Light Warrior of any class (even un-upgraded).
The visuals are similar to Dragon Quest on the overworld although they found a way to code faster movement for the airship. The battles are different, though:
Unlike the Dragon Quest style where you can only see the enemies, here you can see the players as well and they have little animations for their attacks. The results are still communicated via text boxes, but it’s a bit more visually striking than DQ. The battle system is pretty basic at this stage; unfortunately you have the “ineffective” message if you target someone who gets killed that turn. Magic is done via Wizardry-like spell levels, and all the spells are bought in stores.
The game came out in 1990 in the US (after Dragon Quest III). I have fond memories of the game — I subscribed to Nintendo power so I got this hint guide issue. I’m not sure why I thought I would like the game; I believe that I had played a bit of Dragon Warrior and Ultima: Exodus but for some reason I was obsessed with the game even before I got it. I read the strategy guide over and over again.
The game didn’t disappoint me. I played it through several times although I didn’t always know what I was doing despite the guide. I remember never using Cabins or Tents, and I didn’t understand how useful the heal items (helmet/staff) were. I played through the entire game without realizing you could equip more than one piece of armor. I remember that I had made it to the sea palace before my save game got deleted and so I had to start over. But I did finish the game.
I think this game is clearly ahead of the other top-down command RPGs of the time, but it still shows its age in a lot of ways. The interface has a number of issues: any status effect puts the character at the end of the marching order. There is no way to buy more than 1 item at a time. There are pretty severe equipment inventory restrictions, particularly in a game where you might want to keep multiple weapons around because of their effects.
There are also a surprising number of bugs, including some pretty serious one. Intelligence has no effect. The monk armor ability is glitched, as is the chance to run from battles. Some spells have no effect (or the opposite effect). There is a patch that fixes all or most of these bugs and adds some QoL improvements, which is probably the best way to play this game if you don’t want to play one of the remakes (which bring much more drastic changes to the gameplay).
On the whole if you had to choose an RPG from 1987 to play, Final Fantasy would be a great choice despite all the issues. Here’s Zenic’s playthrough of the whole thing.
Vermilion Desert (バーミリオン・デザート), released 12/2/1999, developed by Riverhill Soft
This is a real-time strategy game with some RPG elements. I didn’t play it very far because it’s one of those games where you mostly just watch the action occur without really participating much. It’s also for me a textbook example of how not to introduce a game system to the player.
The story basically involves a world in a large war, and the main characters are part of an elite mercenary band called Silver Fox. The characters within the organization seem to have their own backgrounds and goals — there’s one woman who is apparently hiding her aristocratic (or elite) past, and the main character (of sorts) has lost his memory but is recognized as the “grim reaper” who survived a number of annihilation of his squads. The youngest character is 24 which is unusual. I didn’t get far enough to see how the story develops, but I saw reviews praising it.
The story is fully voiced and well presented, and from what I’ve read it’s apparently a strong point of the game.
In the first mission, you can’t control anything — you just watch your three squads progress to their predetermined locations. If they encounter enemies they will fight them, but all you can do is use “support” items like healing and some bombs (which are helpful against tanks).
The inset map shows you the whole area. You can switch easily between your three squads, with their information on the right. That arrow will change depending on whether they are fighting, disarming a trap, waiting, etc. The blue bars are the current HP of the members. This part of the interface is fine and makes it relatively easy to see what’s going on and to switch between your squads.
So after you’ve just watched a mission without really interacting, the game now throws the entire system at you at once. Because of the relative lack of control during the missions, the main thing you do in the game is set up your squads before the mission and set their movement.
You can set your characters into as many as five squads. Each character has several pieces of equipment, and they can take on one of six jobs that weight their performance towards a certain aspect (like disarming traps, or shooting, or melee fighting). You can also do training, where you pay some money and choose one of your characters as the instructor, and then a type of training, and this raises your stats (in a way that is not particularly clear to me).
The problem with this is that it’s way too much — maybe it’s just my personal preference for this kind of game, but I don’t like going from a tutorial(?) mission where you can’t control anything, to suddenly having to put 10 characters in squads and manage all their equipment and training. It doesn’t help that the interface is confusing; it’s amazing that as late as 1999 a game has a shop interface where you can’t see how the stats of the equipment compares to what your characters have equipped, and with 10 characters to outfit it’s especially annoying.
The instruction manual doesn’t provide much help, especially with the opaque training. One site I saw said that it makes it much easier if you do training “until you are sick of it” (it takes an annoying amount of time to watch useless animations to do the training). But neither the game nor the manual give very much information about how you should choose your trainer, or what the various training options do.
As I said this may just be my own preferences, but faced with this situation I just don’t want to play the game. But I did decide to do some random training, assign more or less random jobs to people, and then try the second mission to see how it went. The main thing I did was buy 99 healing items and give max healing items to each person.
Before the mission, you set your squads up and then decide how they will move (by selecting those points). For each point-to-point movement, you can decide whether they will go full speed, scout (for enemies), ready an attack, or search (for items). You can hit Y to bring up information about where the traps and enemies supposedly are on the map, although there cane be unforeseen complications.
You can change the orders during the mission, so you’re not set in what you do.
After that you just watch them move and fight. Once again you can change the orders or use “support” items but that’s it.
This is also a huge mission; there’s a large overworld area and then a 4 floor building. The tanks are especially annoying but I guess you should probably use support bombs to deal with them.
I quit during this second mission. I can’t tell whether this is a bad game or just a game in a genre/style I don’t like. But I really had no desire to play through the whole game when most of the game is just watching your guys move and fight without any input from you.
I was a little surprised to see most of the reviews I found on the game positive (although maybe for a game as obscure(?) as this those are the only people motivated to write the reviews). I thought more people might complain about the fact that you mostly just watch things happen, but maybe people thought the limited orders and setup you can do is enough to be fun.
Ginga no Sannin (銀河の三人), 12/15/1987, developed by Pax Softnica, published by Nintendo
This is a Famicom port of a 1985 computer game called Earth Fighter Rayieza. From what I have read (and can see on video playthroughs), the Famicom version is more or less a complete remake rather than just a straight port.
The setting is the year 2300, where an invading race known as the Garm have destroyed all the space colonies and taken over all human habitations except for Earth — Earth is protected by a barrier but it’s only a matter of time before the Garm breach it. The main character and his companion Blue are entrusted with the Rayieza space mechs in order to defeat the Garm.
First you have to respond to a distress call on the moon.
This is the main space map. You choose a place to visit and then move towards it. You can move a number of “steps” equal to the number of boosters you’ve picked up, although moving more than 2 will cause HP damage. So if a place is 34 distance, and you have one booster, you’ll have to do 17 two-step jumps to get there, and each one can have a random encounter. This becomes rather tedious as the game goes on because it doesn’t have the exploration feeling of a normal overworld map, you’re just pressing A over and over again and doing fights.
On the moon we do the first dungeon:
Here you move around through a maze. There are no encounters in this one but there are in other dungeons. We find a girl in a capsule and bring her back to Earth to recover, then go out into space again. The main goal of this first section is to destroy the three Garm ships (the green things on the map above) and then the Garm base. But you have to prepare for that by building up money and levels and buying better equipment.
Levelling up only increases your max HP, and when Remi (the girl) joins you early in the game, she will also increase her EP and learn new support moves. The only other way to increase your power is to buy items. There are two types of weapons. The first is the basic beam attack which attacks all monsters and can be used infinitely. The second are your missiles, which are limited. You can shoot as many missiles as you have. (You also get promoted in rank after a certain number of battles but I don’t believe this has any effect).
There are hidden level limits based on how far you are in the game, and 40 is the highest possible.
Basically you want to get the best stuff you can from the first space map area (the Mega Ion and S-Missiles) for both the main character and Blue, and that should be enough to take out the three Garm ships.
Fights are like this — you can see the enemies and their HP. Your beam attacks hit all enemies but the more enemies there are, the less damage it does. The missiles work the same way but do more damage.
When you fight the ships, you first have to close into their range before you can shoot them with missiles and such, so you need a fair amount of HP and healing items.
You can visit the various planets as well but there’s really no point at the moment. Once the three Garm ships are destroyed, you find out that an escape capsule went to Uranus, and we still can’t damage the main Garm base.
I got a game over in the Uranus dungeon (which sends you back to your last password place with half your money taken but everything else intact), and this is where I stopped.
I think that the game has some interesting ideas, but the travel and battling feels like a slog because it’s so repetitive. I’ve also read the the game suffers from increasingly severe balance issues; you can only hold 9 heal items and level 40 is the maximum. It seems like later in the game you just have to run from nearly every fight in the dungeons to avoid getting a game over, and levelling up gives you only a slight advantage.
The story has some interesting twists at the end, but there are long periods of no story development at all, just going to different dungeons for fetch quest items.
In the end while this has some interesting aspects to the gameplay and might be worth a try, it’s probably not worth playing to the end.
Shin Masou Kishin (真・魔装機神 PANZER WARFARE), released 11/25/1999, developed and released by Banpresto
Masou Kishin was originally developed for the Super Robot Wars franchise, starting back in 1992 with SRW 2. That game introduced Masaki in the Cybuster and Shuu in the Granzon, and the instruction manual had the embryo of the setting — Masaki’s Cybuster was created in the underground kingdom Langran from a mix of magic and technology, and Shuu’s Granzon was created using technology from the alien race of “Guest.” This setting continued to be developed through the succeeding games, with EX taking place in Langran, Guest themselves appearing in 4/F, and finally a standalone game in 1996.
Apparently this game was intended to be the sequel to the 1996 Masou Kishin game. But the relationship between Winkysoft (who had developed most of the SRW games) and Banpresto broke apart for some reason, and so this game was made instead. It completely changes the setting and characters, keeping only the names and designs of the 4 main mechs. Winkysoft released their own Masou Kishin-ish game in 2000 called Rayblade, while Banpresto used Masaki and crew in SRW Alpha and Alpha Gaiden. After that the franchise was silent until 2010, when Winkysoft again teamed up with Banpresto to do a remake of the 1996 Masou Kishin game. They then released three more Masou Kishin games in three years, finishing the original storyline.
Panzer Warfare moves the setting to a new alternate world. At least in the part of the game I played, there is no longer any connection to Earth. The Masouki (lesser mechs) and Masou Kishin (the main 4 strong mechs) are created out of technology derived from the “Arm of God” that suddenly appeared in the world. I didn’t finish the game so I don’t know what the ultimate reveal is for where this Arm of God came from.
Strangely when you turn on the game, you get the OP and an ad for the TV anime that Banpresto made as well, but that has nothing to do with this game (it’s yet another alternate setting for the Masou Kishin).
Anyway, the review. The graphics are serviceable; you can see the in-battle animation above (which fortunately you can turn off).
The sequences have decent looking pictures, and there are a fair number of scenery pictures as well to illustrate the scenes.
The maps are overall OK. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell exactly which hex the enemies are on but it’s not to too bad.
The music was unmemorable; the sound is underwhelming. There is only a tiny amount of voiced dialogue, similar to what the SRW games were doing at the time.
The story relied on familiar elements but seemed good. The main character, Keigo, is a Masouki pilot in training, and his training is interrupted by both monsters attacking, and the assassination of the king of the neighboring kingdom. This starts a war between the two kingdoms although it’s being controlled from behind the scenes by someone with a more sinister motive.
The system relies on a hex map. The overall system is broadly similar to the SRW games with a few key differences. The first one is that switching your facing takes movement points, and which attacks you can use depend on the facing. You can also fly, which gives you more movement and also lets you use your melee attacks against flying enemies. The downside is that you can only move forward in about a 30 degree angle.
This system makes certain attacks much more useful than others. In particular, the attacks that cannot be used post movement, and also can only be used to front-facing enemies, means that the enemies can just move behind you repeatedly, taking away that attack.
Rather than energy, attacks depend on Prana. The more powerful an attack is, the more prana it uses. Having a low or high prana also affects the damage of general attacks. Spending a turn without attacking will restore some prana depending on your stats.
When you level up, you can put points into various stats. I put a lot of points into the prana stat that raises your SP to cast seishin (and gives you better prana recovery). I also did Luck which helps the activation of your sword cut/block skills, and then dodge/evade. I seemed to be doing decent damage so I didn’t put many points into attack….this was a big mistake and resulted in me getting stuck about 2/3 of the way through the game.
Another aspect of the system is that the enemies can cast seishin as well. This often means that you can’t leave any units alive on the EP or they will just get healed (often to full HP).
There are no items or equipment.
The map design is OK. Most of the maps are just enemies that come towards you and you have to beat them, without any particular complication. Some of the maps take place on an alternate world (where the monsters are coming from) but that doesn’t make a big difference.
The balance is not great. At the beginning, your masouki are fairly weak, especially the side characters. But then about stage 10 or 11 you get the Masou Kishin which are much stronger. Despite what some sites said, I didn’t find that it was laughably easy at this point — it certainly wasn’t hard, but you do have to deal with the healing enemies.
But, the game is a stage-by-stage flow with no alternate or repeatable stages, nor can you use the game over trick that is common in SRW to get more XP. So this means the designers should be careful not to make stages that can be unbeatable if you didn’t develop your forces in the right way…and they weren’t careful.
This stage gives you a very limited time to kill these 4 enemies before the bomb goes off. You only have Cybuster (plus an NPC, but she doesn’t really help). All 4 enemies have heal seishin, and there is an additional healer at the top of the map that can Friendship everyone to full health. Every walkthrough and video I watched said the same thing — you just use a hot blood Cyflash to kill them all. Which probably works if you were a normal person and put more points into the attack stats than I did. But given that I didn’t do that, I see no way past the stage — if I do the hot blood cyflash, they’re all back at full HP the next round, and the time is so limited that I can’t take them out individually or exhaust their seishin points. Even if I take out the friendship user at the top, the individual units still have their own Trust healing seishin.
Do I deserve some blame for being weird with my character building? I guess so but I think it’s more the designers’ fault for making this kind of stage.
The interface is fine for the era. There are no extras as far as I know.
Overall this was a mid-tier game even before I got stuck. The system has some interesting ideas but they often create more frustration than fun.
Outlanders (アウトランダーズ), released 12/4/1987, developed by Micronics, released by Victor
I just passed the 9th anniversary of this blog. I wonder how much longer it will go?
Anyway, what better way to celebrate than with a crappy Famicom game based on a manga. As of a month ago the only walkthrough on GameFAQs was an incomplete one beginning with this: “I will be honest with you. If not for the sake of the NES Completion Project going on, I would not have touched this game let alone make an FAQ for it. This game is totally a piece of crap. The controls are all whack and the fighting system is garbage. In order to even, win a battle you must move around until your enemies are in a straight line and then hold down the B button to slash at the enemy continually.”
Since then, someone has made a full walkthrough, but the game is still as bad as the other writer said. The whole game is divided between single-room style exploration and wider areas, kind of like Deadly Towers.
This is what the battles look like — they are symbol encounters. As the FAQ writer said, it’s very hard to effectively fight because your sword has low range, and the hit boxes are weird. The most certain way to win is to run around until they line up and then you can fight them head on. There might be other ways to do it, but you will get killed very quickly. You also can’t see your HP during battle or how much damage the enemies are doing.
The battles give you money and XP, but to level up you need not only XP but “smile pins” that you find in various places. You can buy weapon upgrades and items.
The game itself is not especially long or big, but it’s so annoying to play that there’s no reason to really bother.
As is predictable, the interface also sucks. The graphics glitch a lot, with boxes appearing over items, things in the wrong place, etc.
This is one of the worst games I’ve seen of these early RPG and RPG-like games. It’s still probably better than Hoshi wo Miru Hito and Mirai Senshi Jarvas, but not by much.
