Maten no Soumetsu
released on Dec 29, 1993
Maten no Soumetsu tells the story of a young boy (you can name him as you like) who was found in the forest by a warrior named Zafan. Zafan takes the boy into his home, where he grows up, unaware of this story. When he reaches the age of sixteen, Zafan dies, attacked by monsters. He sends his adoptive son to visit the king of the country, to follow the way of the warrior - and perhaps to discover his true origins... This is a traditional Japanese RPG set in a medieval environment, with randomly appearing enemies whom you fight in turn-based style, viewing the battle field from first-person perspective. During your journey through the country you'll meet other characters who will join your party. There is a night/day cycle in the game.
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Yeah there's no sugarcoating it, this game isn't very good. You know how in Dragon Quest, Phantasy Star, or even Final Fantasy, there will be certain spots on the overworld where the enemies are stronger? Apply that to the entire game. Include the start of the game too and make it everywhere to make grinding an unfun nightmare, assuming you can at all. That's this game. It doesn't even have the art style or premise to back it like say The 7th Saga. It's also on Genesis, which means I have far better options like Crusade of Centy or Sword of Vermillion. I couldn't get past early game and immediately had enough. Can't say I'm mad this didn't make it overseas.
Psychotic. Cartoonishly malicious. Unbalanced to a degree so comedic it has to be seen to be believed. Equitably unplayable.
Take everything you know about disfavorable JRPG gameplay tropes - grinding, high encounter rates, low cash from enemy encounters, poor attack accuracy rates, the nine yards. Ok ok, you have an image of kusoge in your head, some real piece of work from an 'obscure japanese 16-bit games' playlist, y'know? Ok now, you think maybe it's not so bad and you can just grind through the adventure right? Tick on fast-forward, mill some hours on the weaker enemies until you're 5-10 above the leveling curve, y'know? Well joke's on you ya fucking loser, ya bum, ya dipshit, this game has ANTI-GRIND. When you over-level the enemies in a certain zone, they disappear FOREVER. PERMANENTLY. There were two occasions where I thought I got soft-locked
And the enemies, ooohhhohohohoh hey y'know how the damage in Shining Force is calculated with a super-basic Attack - Defense + Randomization function? It's kinda looney, and leads to a lot of encounters where a normally-powerful mage or preist can only deal 1 damage at a time, yeah? But it's not a dealbreaker cause you got like, 12 teammates with a huge variance of Attack stats, access to magic attacks, and the values are low enough that the game never deviates the numbers too wildly ye? It's like Paper Mario in a way, keeping everything smalls means each numerical displacement is that much more impactful. Now put that system into an RPG where ATK/DEF values start in the 100's, and offensive magic isn't easily accessible until the 5-10 hour mark. You're left with a game where attacks are ALWAYS dealing near-lethal damage, or doing literally nothing. No in-between whatsoever. Yes this applies to the enemies. The first encounters you meet deal 20% of your healthbar. Enemies as soon as the second area can OHKO you. This continues for the entire rest of the game. No JRPG has taken 'kill or be killed' so literally. You are never safe. You are never secure.
So why was this still fun to play for those initial 20 hours? Why the fuck would any human burn 20 hours into an RPG as sadistic as that??
First off, menu navigation is OBSCENELY fast. There's no downtime spent on battle animations, elaborate UX transitions, or any other nonsense. The run speed is at least twice as fast as every other peer in its field. There's no barrier between you and the game environment, which not only makes it a satisfying grind, but helps alleviate the initial shock of the bullish difficulty. Yeah, it sucks to die, but you get back up on your feet almost immediately, it's like 4 clicks and 10 seconds to jump back into the fray.
Second off, Maten no Soumetsu's bullshit is consistent. From frame 1, the game has you at knifepoint, and only continues to get more obscene. If this were a modestly-difficult game with a smattering of difficulty hills scattered about, the sense of progression would constantly come to a screeching halt. But the bullshit IS the flow. Every time you beat a major boss or peak the leveling cap in an area, you feel like you've overcome a herculean task. The achievement is in the constant uphill battle and brief moments of reprieve. Suffocation and exasperation in a pseudo-sexual cycle. Beautiful.
There's also this general vibe of early-2000's transportation going on here, there's basically NO coverage of this game whatsoever on the entire internet. I found 1 let's play on youtube with minimal commentary, 1 graphic for the early-game grind made by the fan translator, a Twitch stream by a V-tuber, and that was IT. When was the last time you played a game where you were truly in the dark, as uninformed and isolated as when you were a kid in a pre-internet era? That stumbling, that fighting, that constant struggle to make any progress whatsoever felt... so goddamn rewarding, in a way no game's made me feel in the last couple years. Mix that with the somewhat plain overworld artstyle, the infrequent meme inserts and 2000's lingo drops ('thirsty', 'sausage-fest', etc), and it all summates to feel like a weird obscure RPGmaker project by a detached highschooler. Bland on the outside, maxing the Scoville on the inside.
But I had to drop it one way or another because at some point, I realized I needed to reclaim my life. No matter how gratifying it was to dig through this, to be one of the few to make this much progress on such a relatively unknown game, I was getting such diminishing returns on the experience and kept taking myself away from other games I'd rather play. The initial impact of 'damn, I'm actually making progress' wanes a bit with each new thing the game throws at you, and when I reached the point where enemies were throwing out spell-blockers and AOE while out-speeding me (and no shops had speed-up equipment to buy), I keeled over. Even with save states, I wasn't strong enough to overcome these troubled waters.
I'd love to revisit this if anyone somehow makes a patch to improve the EXP/gold rate. You could go beyond and fix all the other problems with internal logic, but if you took away the bullshit, you admittedly wouldn't be left with much. Just fix the EXP, just triple/quadruple what you get to cut that runtime down to something more palatable. There's not much to see and do in Maten No Soumetsu's sparse overworld and bite-sized dungeons, especially when comparing it to other 1993 JRPG's. Its scope is comparable to an NES Dragon Quest, debatably smaller in some respects. So to the MD romhacker reading this, uh, let me grind on enemies I out-leveled, and give me 3x EXP and money, and I will give you one hundren million dollars, in cash, annually.
I'll be back someday, you vile creature, you
Take everything you know about disfavorable JRPG gameplay tropes - grinding, high encounter rates, low cash from enemy encounters, poor attack accuracy rates, the nine yards. Ok ok, you have an image of kusoge in your head, some real piece of work from an 'obscure japanese 16-bit games' playlist, y'know? Ok now, you think maybe it's not so bad and you can just grind through the adventure right? Tick on fast-forward, mill some hours on the weaker enemies until you're 5-10 above the leveling curve, y'know? Well joke's on you ya fucking loser, ya bum, ya dipshit, this game has ANTI-GRIND. When you over-level the enemies in a certain zone, they disappear FOREVER. PERMANENTLY. There were two occasions where I thought I got soft-locked
And the enemies, ooohhhohohohoh hey y'know how the damage in Shining Force is calculated with a super-basic Attack - Defense + Randomization function? It's kinda looney, and leads to a lot of encounters where a normally-powerful mage or preist can only deal 1 damage at a time, yeah? But it's not a dealbreaker cause you got like, 12 teammates with a huge variance of Attack stats, access to magic attacks, and the values are low enough that the game never deviates the numbers too wildly ye? It's like Paper Mario in a way, keeping everything smalls means each numerical displacement is that much more impactful. Now put that system into an RPG where ATK/DEF values start in the 100's, and offensive magic isn't easily accessible until the 5-10 hour mark. You're left with a game where attacks are ALWAYS dealing near-lethal damage, or doing literally nothing. No in-between whatsoever. Yes this applies to the enemies. The first encounters you meet deal 20% of your healthbar. Enemies as soon as the second area can OHKO you. This continues for the entire rest of the game. No JRPG has taken 'kill or be killed' so literally. You are never safe. You are never secure.
So why was this still fun to play for those initial 20 hours? Why the fuck would any human burn 20 hours into an RPG as sadistic as that??
First off, menu navigation is OBSCENELY fast. There's no downtime spent on battle animations, elaborate UX transitions, or any other nonsense. The run speed is at least twice as fast as every other peer in its field. There's no barrier between you and the game environment, which not only makes it a satisfying grind, but helps alleviate the initial shock of the bullish difficulty. Yeah, it sucks to die, but you get back up on your feet almost immediately, it's like 4 clicks and 10 seconds to jump back into the fray.
Second off, Maten no Soumetsu's bullshit is consistent. From frame 1, the game has you at knifepoint, and only continues to get more obscene. If this were a modestly-difficult game with a smattering of difficulty hills scattered about, the sense of progression would constantly come to a screeching halt. But the bullshit IS the flow. Every time you beat a major boss or peak the leveling cap in an area, you feel like you've overcome a herculean task. The achievement is in the constant uphill battle and brief moments of reprieve. Suffocation and exasperation in a pseudo-sexual cycle. Beautiful.
There's also this general vibe of early-2000's transportation going on here, there's basically NO coverage of this game whatsoever on the entire internet. I found 1 let's play on youtube with minimal commentary, 1 graphic for the early-game grind made by the fan translator, a Twitch stream by a V-tuber, and that was IT. When was the last time you played a game where you were truly in the dark, as uninformed and isolated as when you were a kid in a pre-internet era? That stumbling, that fighting, that constant struggle to make any progress whatsoever felt... so goddamn rewarding, in a way no game's made me feel in the last couple years. Mix that with the somewhat plain overworld artstyle, the infrequent meme inserts and 2000's lingo drops ('thirsty', 'sausage-fest', etc), and it all summates to feel like a weird obscure RPGmaker project by a detached highschooler. Bland on the outside, maxing the Scoville on the inside.
But I had to drop it one way or another because at some point, I realized I needed to reclaim my life. No matter how gratifying it was to dig through this, to be one of the few to make this much progress on such a relatively unknown game, I was getting such diminishing returns on the experience and kept taking myself away from other games I'd rather play. The initial impact of 'damn, I'm actually making progress' wanes a bit with each new thing the game throws at you, and when I reached the point where enemies were throwing out spell-blockers and AOE while out-speeding me (and no shops had speed-up equipment to buy), I keeled over. Even with save states, I wasn't strong enough to overcome these troubled waters.
I'd love to revisit this if anyone somehow makes a patch to improve the EXP/gold rate. You could go beyond and fix all the other problems with internal logic, but if you took away the bullshit, you admittedly wouldn't be left with much. Just fix the EXP, just triple/quadruple what you get to cut that runtime down to something more palatable. There's not much to see and do in Maten No Soumetsu's sparse overworld and bite-sized dungeons, especially when comparing it to other 1993 JRPG's. Its scope is comparable to an NES Dragon Quest, debatably smaller in some respects. So to the MD romhacker reading this, uh, let me grind on enemies I out-leveled, and give me 3x EXP and money, and I will give you one hundren million dollars, in cash, annually.
I'll be back someday, you vile creature, you