This is a game I’d been told was worth checking out way back when I first got my PC Engine Mini, and it’s a game I’ve been meaning to check out for just as long. Back when I first got the Mini and was playing through a ton of stuff on it, I very briefly booted this up, but decided I just wasn’t in the mood for something like this at the moment. I actually did that once again a couple weeks back after I hooked the PCE Mini back up to play through Ys I & II XD. However, while I still had the PCE Mini all hooked up, I resolved to finally give a genuine attempt to get through this clunky old RPG, and this Golden Week weekend I finally did it~. It took me around 30 to 40 hours (neither the game nor the Mini keep any kind of record of play time, so that’s my best guess) to beat the Japanese version of the game via emulated hardware only abusing save states a little bit (for reasons that will soon become very clear).

The war between gods and demons has raged since the dawn of time. In the endless eons since their battle began, the gods in their desperation created a weapon powerful enough to fight with the strength of a demon to fight back against those demons: The Necromancer. Eventually, worlds between the heavenly realm and demonic realm formed, with the Makai forming closer to the demons, and the overworld (where humans live) forming closer to the heavens. In that overworld where you dwell, things have slowly been getting more and more dire. Monsters increase in number every day, kings and knights have done nothing but get slain trying to contain it, and the world cries out for a hero to stop the madness. That hero is YOU, fair player, and the story begins as you set out to be the hero the world needs to save it from destruction.

As you probably gathered from me relating the contents of the game’s opening text crawl in the previous paragraph, the story is an extremely typical “save the world” fantasy story for early 1988 when this game came out. The game marketed itself as a horror experience, with commercials warning players against playing it too late at night and such, but that stuff is largely contained in the game’s aesthetics. HudsonSoft and NEC clearly knew that they needed a Dragon Quest for their console coming out in late ’87, and this was the Dragon Quest equivalent they created for their new console (and DQIII actually released a whole month after this, in fact). They’re not trying anything too daring in the narrative, and it works just fine for what it is. While it may’ve been entertainingly novel for them to have tried a horror narrative alongside their scary monsters, the story is more than competent enough to stand comfortably among its contemporaries, even if it’s certainly nothing impressive now.

The gameplay is similarly very Dragon Quest for both better and worse in a lot of ways. It’s a turn-based RPG with an overworld and dungeons, you level up as you kill enemies, etc. I’m not encyclopedic enough on the full breadth of Japanese RPGs by late ’87 to say for certain how actually innovative much of this is, and it’s otherwise so derivative I’ve basically assumed just about nothing truly is. That said, there are a few important things that differentiate it from its contemporaries in ways that I feel are worth mentioning (particularly compared to DQI and II, the games that this begs the most obvious comparisons to).

You have a party of three including your main hero, but you actually get to pick your other two companions from a group of five right at the start. Whom you choose is a very big decision, as you’ll never get to take back that choice, and some party members are sadly much worse than others. I went for Maito the black mage and Romina the female warrior, as the guide I used quite heavily recommended them as two of the best choices. While this is cool, I certainly have trouble calling it an outright benefit, as some characters like Kaosu the white mage are simply downgrades from others, and some like Baron the male warrior are just awful choices, full stop. While it’s certainly different from several other big games at the time, it’s hard to praise it that much because it’s just so clumsily handled.

The game’s balance is also quite interesting, albeit far from atypical of the time. It has very little in the way of dungeons, for starters. Most dungeons are just caves with only a couple floors, and the only reason they’re difficult is due to the strength of the monsters inside as well as how dark they are, so your visibility is very limited. Additionally, as I’m sure will be a surprise to no one, this very DQ-inspired game has a crap ton of grinding in it, and frankly grinding makes up around 70%+ of your playtime by the end of it (provided you’re using a guide to tell you where to go next, because if not, you very well may end up spending a lot more time wandering around trying to wade through hordes of enemies trying to find out where to go next). It’s certainly something that makes the game more difficult to play these days, but it’s also extremely common for the time, so I can’t bash the game too heavily for it, ultimately.

I also can’t be too harsh on the game for that stuff because it does have some pretty nice quality of life features as well. Much like many games of the time, certain characters can only use certain magic and spells (you buy spells Final Fantasy-style instead of learning them with level ups like Dragon Quest). However, unlike a lot of games up until that point, going into a magic or equipment shop actually tells you which things can be used by which party members! It’s a really nice quality of life features that makes the game just that much easier to play, even if the weapon limitations for some characters will still probably be quite annoying regardless x3.

Additionally, just like Dragon Quest, if you die, it’s not a game over. You’re just sent back to town with half your money. The money grind in this game is pretty damn brutal, so that’s still quite the penalty, but at least it’s a reason to keep grinding for levels, which you’ll always need anyhow XD. This is also something of a necessity as well, really, as this is a HuCard game. HuCards can’t fit a button battery for saves inside them, and the CD add-on for the PCE didn’t exist yet, so no saving using that thing’s save battery either. This game, therefore, arrives at the same conclusion that early Famicom RPGs (such as DQI & II) did, and saves progress the only way it possibly could have: Passwords. Going to an inn gives you a 45(!!!) character password composed of hiragana, katakana, and alphabet characters that you’ll need to write down if you want to restart from that point after you turn off the console. Thankfully, modern conveniences make it so you can just use save states instead, but this is a REALLY big pain in the butt compared to contemporary Famicom games which at least would’ve had save features. It’s hard to get too terribly upset at the game for doing this, as it was literally the only choice the developers had, but it’s still a monstrous obstacle for anyone planning to play this game these days if you’re trying to do it on original hardware.

All that said, I really do have to praise the game’s balance for the time. There were many times I felt like I was just really stuck, and while it was difficult, braving the journey to the next town to grind at instead and buy better equipment was always a worthwhile investment. Bosses are also quite fair and reasonable (what few there are) and having enemies that you can go up against and beat without needing to just pray to the RNG gods is a really nice an unexpected feature for 1988. The biggest part of this, frankly, is due to the handling of one very important mechanic: Instant death magic.

Anyone familiar with the subject will be very keenly aware that RPGs of this era (from Japan or otherwise) LOVE instant death. Dragon Quest II, in particular (which would’ve been the most recent DQ when this came out) has lots of end game enemies AND bosses that will fling instant death spells at you, and your only real solution is to just pray you get lucky enough to survive them. Necromancer, on the other hand, while it DOES have an instant death spell, it has zero enemies OR bosses that know or use it. This was frankly shocking to me, and I was waiting the whole game for some new wretched enemy or late game boss to start hurling instant death magic at me, but the moment never came. More than anything else it does, I think that resisting the temptation to follow contemporary convention and pack itself with RNG-based fun-killing mechanics like this is something that Necromancer deserves a lot of praise and respect for, as it’s something that certainly makes it an appealing alternative to most other 80’s RPGs for me, at least (despite its hell-password system XD).

The aesthetics of Necromancer are certainly nothing impressive compared to later 16-bit offerings, of course, but they’re nonetheless quite nice looking, especially the monsters. Sure, the overworld and such are nothing special, and the few music tracks the game has are all pretty forgettable. That said, they clearly put all their focus on making the monsters, and the game has some pretty stellar and very creepy monster designs. Even right outside the first town your first two enemies are some pretty inoffensive giant moths alongside the much creepier looking vaguely humanoid figures being pulled around by their intestines. The Special Thanks part of the credits has a special cut out to thank H.R. Giger, and it’s frankly not hard to see why XD. While I do stand by my earlier statement that the game marketing itself as a “horror RPG” feels a bit dishonest (especially by modern standards), the horror content it does have is easily one of the coolest and most memorable aspects of its design.

Verdict: Not Recommended. While I spilled a lot more ink here talking about how the game is actually quite good for the time than I did actively complaining about it, this is in no way a game I think anyone should be playing these days. I really do stand by my opinion that, for the time, this was a very competent RPG that (other than its password system) stands very comfortably next to what the Famicom was boasting. That said, as is the case with nearly any 8-bit or 80’s RPG I’ve played, gameplay sensibilities have changed a LOT since back then, and even a well-executed game like this is still an absolutely brutal slog of grinding and roughly signposted puzzles. If you’re a super-duper-ultra fan of the Famicom Dragon Quest games, then you might have a lot of fun with Necromancer, but for anyone who doesn’t like their RPGs as grinding-focused time-wasting machines, Necromancer is a game you should stay far, far away from XD.

It took me a few days to get through it, but I have finally reached the end of my journey through the 16-bit Ys games. I wouldn’t have originally played this version, honestly, but a partner of mine told me that the original version of Ys V was so easy that it had a reputation for feeling pointless, so I erred on the side of caution and picked the harder of the two to go through instead. Some research afterwards revealed that that may have been just as much of a mistake as it was the correct decision, but we’ll get into that later XD. It took me around 10.5 hours to make it through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without abusing save states or rewinds.

Ys V finds our hero Adol getting off a ship in a new land as usual (though oddly enough without Dogi, who went sailing off with him at the end of the last game). In this mysterious new land, there’s a legend of a lost, legendary city of gold called Kefin. In his usual fashion, he sets out to find it, helping out the local moneybags in a crystal hunt that’ll see him ultimately saving the world! (as if that’s a surprise to anyone). Narratively, this is the best Ys has been up to this point (though that’s hardly a high bar to cross). Ys had managed to be this funny and this functionally well put together as a narrative before, but this is the first time that we’d managed to rise beyond that. Though its pacing is a bit rougher than Ys IV (SFC) and its narrative in many ways a fairly direct retread of Ys I & II, it manages to have actual themes and messaging in its story in a way that none of those games ever managed to.

Granted, it’s hardly the biggest achievement of storytelling on the console. Heck, it’s not even the best written action/adventure game on the SFC. That said, I’d still say it’s one of the better written action/adventure games on the system, and it certainly manages to be better put together than a mess like Terranigma and more interesting than something a bit more typical and uncinematic like Brain Lord. The narrative is hardly a reason to rush out to play the game at once, but it being better put together than a lot of its contemporaries is certainly something worthy of praise in my book.

It's good that the narrative is decent and fun, because the gameplay is decidedly not. In a significant departure from both versions of Ys IV, we’ve once again abandoned bump combat in favor of pressing a button to swing our sword! What’s more, you can even press another button to actively put out your shield, and you’ve even got a jump button! We also have a magic system that revolves around collecting elemental stones and taking them to merchants to combine into alchemy stones (which you can affix to your equipped weapon (permanently) to give it the ability to do various magics). It’s a relatively linear adventure with some quite good signposting, but it’s got a pretty tough balancing act to manage with getting all of those new mechanics to work in harmony, and it’s a balancing act it fails hard.

The most glaring and obvious issue that cannot go without elaborating on is that the hit detection is absolutely dreadful. Swinging your sword at things is a constant gamble on if you’re actually going to harm them at all, as enemys’ sprites very rarely actually indicate where their hit box is in relation to your sword. This goes even more so for bosses, who are naturally the most difficult things you’ll usually be facing (even though you can actually carry around tons of healing items if you want, which does trivialize a fair bit of combat). There’s even a stat that makes enemies move faster (as you are “slower”) as you equip better armor and weapons!. All of this results in combat routinely struggling to be tolerable, let alone fun, and it's miserable. You could theoretically use magic to fight things instead, of course, but Ys V goes out of its way to make that an extremely unappealing alternative with one of the most poorly implemented magic systems I’ve seen in a while.

Unlike other Ys titles with magic systems up to this point, there is no dedicated magic button. Instead, you hold the R button down until a gauge hits 100, and then pressing your sword swinging button launches the magic attack and depletes that gauge a bit, meaning you can’t spam magic (you need to wait for the gauge to hit 100 again before firing another shot). This is already very awkward, but to make matters even more awkward, those elemental stones you combine into spells are almost universally hidden in invisible hiding places around the game. You’ll randomly be hugging a wall and suddenly find one, and it happens all the time, particularly in the late game. As if that didn’t make magic annoying enough to use, there are not only a limited amount of these stones in the game, but you also have no idea what spell you’re even making at the alchemy merchants until you just make it and then test it out. This means that you’re going to be doing a ton of save-loading looking for decent spells if you’re keen to use magic a lot, not that you really have much reason to use magic all that much.

The most farcical thing about magic isn’t just that it seemingly can’t harm bosses at all. That’s bad enough all on its own. What’s most absurd of all is that magic actually has an entirely separate experience tree! You gain one kind of experience for killing things with your sword, and another type for killing with magic. While this is a pretty typical Ys game in that there’s a fair bit of grinding, this makes the game have a truly unforgiveable amount if you want to use magic meaningfully at all. Never mind that you get magic late enough in the game (compared to your sword) that it’s a rough choice to start grinding magic in the first place, or that killing things with magic gives you NO money from kills. That’s just all insult to injury. Ultimately, a lot of this just doesn’t matter, as you basically never really need magic to fight enemies even a little, but it is truly baffling just how poorly put together the magic system is in a game with already miserable combat.

And the bad combat is a real death blow in an action/adventure game of this kind. It doesn’t matter that dungeons are nicely put together (if a bit puzzle-barren and small) or that bosses are varied in their designs. It’s honestly barely worth mentioning that the jumping puzzles aren’t too bad, that different swords almost pointlessly have different kinds of attacking (as there are only like 5 swords in the whole game), or that they removed the earlier games’ save anywhere feature in favor of quick saving anywhere and only being able to perma-save at inns (which is indeed a baffling change that just makes the game worse). Like Trials of Mana that I played earlier this year, there’s barely any point in praising or slagging off other aspects of the design in an action game like this if fighting basically anything always sucks.

The boss design isn’t that well done in the first place, frankly, with a lot of them (particularly later in the game) being really easy to just mulch down with barely any strategy at all. The combat is so bad, of course, that a lot of later “harder” fights being so simple is a small blessing, and even if you’re having a bit of trouble, you can always dip into that huge stockpile of healing items you can carry around.

The strangest part of it all is that this is Ys V – “Expert”. This is purposefully the harder version of the game, and my research actually shows that a decent amount of these are features, not bugs (as it were). The number one surprising thing I learned in looking into differences between the original version and this game is that the poor hit detection (on top of shielded enemies just blocking more) actually was added for the Expert version to make it harder! They certainly accomplished that, I’ve got to say, as enemies that not only hit harder but are harder to hit certainly does make for a harder experience, though I’d struggle to say it makes for a very fun one. The thing is, it’s weird to even describe this game as “harder” in a lot of ways due to the only real changes being worse hit detection and higher enemy stats. Bosses and such still aren’t that hard because you can bring so many healing items with you, especially later in the game. The changes Expert brings to the table largely just make the game more frustrating and grindy than they actually do to make it any more of a fun challenge, and it’s a damn shame.

Tragically (and ironically), it’s not even much of a way out to play the original instead, as site after site on the Japanese internet bemoaned just what a constantly freezing buggy mess the original release of Ys V was and just how far Expert went in fixing those issues (I can confirm I never hit a single freeze during my 10-ish hours with it). Expert may be the “better” version in that it doesn’t crash anymore and has a little bit of extra content, but the overall experience has been made so much worse that either version frankly sounds like a big waste of your time.

Thankfully, the presentation does manage to at least hold its own for what you’d expect for an Ys game. The music is excellent, with Falcom’s music team once again putting out a game packed with good music. Additionally, where Mask of the Sun didn’t really impress for a mid-life SFC game, Ys V really does look like a game released in ’95, as it’s absolutely beautiful. You’ve got a bit of slowdown here and there, and there are some weird graphical hiccups and flashes (though nothing nearly as bad as the flashing in Mask of the Sun) which honestly seemed to be the game trying not to crash, but it all at least runs pretty darn well for how good it looks, and that’s a nice silver lining to everything else, I suppose.

Verdict: Not Recommended. If you can get past how often the original version of Ys V apparently crashes, then perhaps the better hit detection and less grinding in that version makes it a better time. As it is, Expert may be less boringly easy than the first one (if its reputation is to be believed), but it’s worse in so many ways that I cannot in good conscience possibly recommend it to even a big fan of the genre. The combat is something to trudge through the whole way through, and it only gets easier when you’ve finally done enough grinding to be able to easily plow through (or safely ignore) the enemies that give you so much grief. There is no shortage of far better action/adventure games on this console, so you are far better off experiencing the story and aesthetics through a lets play on Youtube than wasting your valuable time banging your head against something as clumsily and poorly put together as this frustrating mess of a late-life SFC game.

The second half of the story of the Dark Hunter game that my partner and I played last week. We played the first half, and it ends quite unceremoniously, so we obviously had to carry on to finish the second half as well. Just as with the first one, she played on emulated hardware and I watched her, but the actual “gameplay” is so simple that I felt it more than adequate to call this one “beaten” for myself as well once we hit credits, and it took us a little over 2 hours to do it (as this game is a fair bit shorter than the first half for reasons we’ll get into later).

The second half of the story of our three unlikely heroes (the school girl, the vengeful loner, and the secret agent) fighting against the interdimensional invaders trying to take over the world via a remote Japanese high school. While I do say second “half”, that’s not strictly true. As our playtime implies, this chunk of the story has dramatically less content than the first part, though only part of that is gameplay related. This would more accurately be described as the last third, or even the third act of the story, and it honestly suffers for being so short. We really exhaust most of our narrative momentum in the first part, and this part of things mostly just feels like a long walk to the end. Granted, we do get some hilarious moments here and there with certain action scenes and the performances of the actors, but we found it overall less entertaining than the first half.

The gameplay is still more or less the same, though there are still some very notable changes. So far as things being similar go, we still have our English-language education-focused presentation. You can still switch between Japanese and English for your subtitles and voiceover, and you can still also rewind things however you like. The actual value of this as an educational tool remains just as dubious as I felt it was in the first part, but at least it hasn’t gotten any worse XD.

There are still some video game-y parts as well, but they have mercifully been tuned down significantly compared to the last one. The dreadfully long and poorly constructed first-person adventure sections, in particular, are thankfully completely absent from this game (and that’s another big reason for this being so much shorter than the first game to go through). We still have the non-light gun sections, a bit of outright English practice, and some reaction time tests, but it’s all inoffensive and pretty quick to get through. Strangely enough, a large amount of the fights that happen aren’t even mini games you get to partake in. While I wouldn’t call the fights “fun”, per se, it’s yet another thing that robs the ending of its climactic nature because you don’t even get to do the fights against our big foe we finally meet up with. Would it have massively improved the game had we gotten to do those fights? Absolutely not. However, I think it would’ve at least made the climax more memorable rather than the wet thud we’re left with in the version we have.

The presentation is just as amusing and funny as the first game. Japanese VA continues to be quite good while the English VA continues to be hilarious. The translation also continues to be good while the animation continues to look very uncanny (and very funny). The music (of what there is) is very forgettable, and the 3D animations also look about as rough as you’d expect for ’97.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. If you played and enjoyed the first half, then you’ll find this half worth playing through as well. Despite the worst of the mini games taken out, I still find this one underwhelming compared to the first game, however. While I certainly would’ve preferred a better put together conclusion to the game, it’s at least short enough that you can treat it as a slightly interactive B-movie to laugh at with a friend, and at least in that regard, I think that’s the least you could ask of it.

Continuing my journey through the 16-bit Ys games, next on the list was IV, a game I knew next to nothing about outside of it getting a remake on the Vita some decades later. Before even starting it, I was made very aware that this is one of two versions of the game, with the PC Engine version being developed by Hudson Soft and being completely different outside of sharing some similar plot beats, but this was the version I chose to play (if only because I already had all the stuff set up to play it and couldn’t be bothered to do the same for the PCE version X3). It took me about 8.5 or so hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without abusing save states.

Mask of the Sun begins with Adol, our hero of Ys, finding a message in a bottle on the beach one day. The unfamiliar language inside, once translated for him by a friend, simply reads as a message to save a far-off land named “Celceta”. Adol quickly hops on a ship and sets off towards adventure in this land that apparently so badly needs saving. As was the case with Ys III, this is yet another good step forward in story writing for the series (despite effectively being written by completely different people). We have a more tightly paced story with better developed characters, and though I’d say we’re not quite at the level yet where we’re telling a story with deeper themes and messaging, we’re very nearly there! Granted, some of the messages you can read into Ys IV are less than positive in some respects, but they’re unintentional to the point that I don’t think they hurt the overall story too much ^^;. Oddly enough, even though this game has a ton of connective tissue to Ys I & II, it never mentions Ys III’s story at all. This isn’t really a problem, of course, but it was something that made me giggle nonetheless, especially with just how much this story so easily reads like an actual narrative sequel to Ys II, far more than Ys III ever did XD.

This goes beyond narrative as well, for Ys IV actually has a ton of connective tissue to I & II in its mechanics as well: Bump combat is back! I’ll admit, I was pretty bummed to see the return of bump combat, as I didn’t particularly enjoy it in Ys I & II, but I actually enjoyed it here a fair bit more than I did in those games. I understand that the overall premise (hitting enemies not dead-on deals damage where dealing direct bumps tends to just get yourself hurt) is basically the exact same way that bump combat works in I & II as well, but I noticed it far FAR more here than I ever did in those games. It’s an element of this game’s combat that’s far more unignorable than it ever was in those games due to how this game is balanced, and it makes for a much more challenging and interesting version of bump combat as a result. I found myself actually enjoying normal combat far more than I ever had in I & II, and it made combat feel a lot less overall pointless as a result.

Honestly, the mechanics overall are much stronger than I & II’s were, which I was very happy to see. Though there’s still some rough signposting here and there, it was never anything nearly so bad as plagued the far earlier adventure game designs of I & II. Though there were some things I had to look up in a guide at some points, they were almost always things that had just totally slipped my mind rather than things that I’d had no way of knowing the way those earlier games struggle with signposting. Level design on the whole was something I found markedly improved from the first two bump combat games, and the same goes for boss design as well.

These bosses felt far more actually designed than the first two games’ bosses usually did, and there was always some meaningful element of figuring out the strategy I needed rather than the old bump combat strategy I’d gotten used to where I just charged forward, hoped for the best, and usually won almost instantly. Magic is also back, and it depends on the sword you’re using instead of having bespoke spells you’re choosing from. I never found it super useful, as bump combat on its own was generally more than enough, but it was nice to have the option at least. I’m not sure this is going to convert anyone who already hated bump combat, and this game is certainly just as grindy as those old games were for having the right levels to take on the challenges you’re facing, but it was at least nice to see Ys return to that old formula and improve on it so significantly (despite the dev team being completely different x3).

The presentation is a bit simple for a mid-/late-life SFC game, but I still liked it quite a bit. Enemy, especially boss sprites, are well designed and cool looking, and the cutscene animations are very fun despite the relatively simple character and environment sprites. There’s a charm to things much like RPG Maker games would later have, with characters spinning on the spot or running around to indicate emotions in a way that I found very delightful, and some bespoke animations for certain cutscenes that had me giggling like a madman in my seat (like when Adol gets struck by lightning XD). The music is also unsurprisingly excellent. There were a lot of times where it almost felt like I’d stepped into a Mega Man X soundtrack all of a sudden, and I absolutely mean that as a compliment. An Ys game through and through, this game is packed with good and rockin’ tracks to fight monsters and witness drama, and that’s about all you could hope for, even in an Ys game not developed by Falcom themselves.

Verdict: Recommended. This is one that is very borderline between a hesitant and a normal recommendation, but I think it’s overall solid enough that I’d recommend it about as much as I would other less-than-perfect 16-bit action/adventure games I’ve played recently. Combat is quick and fun, boss battles are great, music is awesome, and the signposting is usually right on point. It’s honestly very confusing to me that this game has such a negative reputation. While I’d certainly believe the PCE version of Ys IV may indeed be better, I’d have a very hard time listing basically any way that the PCE version of Ys I & II is better than this game outside of that game’s CD-quality audio. This may not be the best of the Ys series, but I think that’s something you can really safely say about any of the Ys games made before Ys Origins. This game is good fun! Even if, as I said before, this probably won’t convert anyone who was already a non-believer in bump combat, I can still say with a good degree of confidence that, if you liked Ys I & II, I think you’ll probably really like this game too~.

After finishing Ys I & II, I went straight to the sequel. I watched a let’s play of this game well over a decade ago, and that was actually probably my first exposure to Ys as a franchise. It didn’t look super incredible then, so I’ve never given it that much thought in the time since, but I figured since I was already thinking about Ys (and this is also a game my partner quite likes) that I might as well track down a way to play it and finally experience this game myself. It took me around 5 or so hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware.

Ys III takes place two years after the first Ys, with Adol going off with Dogi (a minor character from the first Ys) on more adventures around the world. Eventually, a fortune teller gives Dogi a disastrous fortune about his hometown of Redmont, and the two set off there at once. With such ominous beginnings, Adol quickly finds himself on a quest to save not just Redmont but all of Felghana from the great evil that lies just beneath its surface. Once again, this is a relatively early 90’s action/adventure game, so it’s not the best thing in the world, but we’re already seeing good steps from Ys I & II. The total cast is significantly smaller than that of those games, and those who are here generally have relatively far more active roles in the story instead of just being glorified dialogue flag triggers for Adol. It’s hardly going to give most SquareSoft games a run for their money, of course, but we’re taking firm steps in the right direction, and it’s a story I thought was good fun.

The actual gameplay of Ys III could hardly be more different while still being in the same action/adventure genre. Dead and buried is the old staple of bump combat, as now not only does Adol fight by swinging his sword with the attack button, but we’re not even a top-down game anymore! Ys III is a sidescrolling action/adventure game in the vein of something like Castlevania II or Zelda II, with everything from towns to dungeons navigated like that and having no overworld to speak of. This is sort of a double-edged sword. On the more negative end is that sidescrollers just have a lot less literal space to work with as adventure games. The world feels quite small compared to Ys I & II (even though it’s not terribly bigger or smaller), and the level design ends up feeling quite unimpressive as well.

On the other hand, however, I honestly far prefer the gameplay in this to the gameplay of Ys I & II. While the bosses still aren’t amazing and a lot of enemies are quite simple and similar to one another, needing to jump, duck, and swing your sword to fight stuff means that combat has far more depth, and I found it far more fun as a result. Sure, a lot of bosses are still a matter of mulch or be mulched, that more active element means you actually feel more accomplished for taking a boss down quick compared to the bump combat equivalent of just having vindication that you did enough grinding to see this through. Hit detection (especially on the penultimate and final bosses) is a bit wonky at times, but this game at the very least continues to have the same save anywhere system that the earlier Ys games has, so getting nuked down by a boss is still just a matter of entering the room and trying again until your strategy is more sound.

This game still has levels to grind for, sure, but the relative length of this game being shorter also comes with the levels being far faster to grind for too. I did maybe a combined hour or hour and a half of grinding in this (with the owls in the ruins being a particularly great place to reach max level quickly), and after that it was all smooth sailing. This game even has better signposting than the first two did as well, thankfully, and I didn’t get lost or need to look up where to go a single time~. Ys III is overall still a bit on the easy side (much like Ys I & II were if you kept on top of grinding), but the overall play style of this was something I ended up enjoying much more despite how much smaller an adventure this is.

Though we’re on a SNES and therefore lack the storage capacity for the voice acting or CD-quality sound that a PC Engine can boast, the presentation is still as good as ever. The graphics are a bit simple compared to some other SFC games, but environments are still nice and colorful, and enemies especially are very pretty and well designed. Though I’ve been told that other versions (such as the PCE CD version, naturally) have better music, the SFC is still a very capable machine, and this is still an Ys game, so the music still rocks as much as ever even though the gameplay has changed so much.

Verdict: Recommended. This is a game that I don’t think is honestly that much better than Ys Books I & II on paper, but the execution is done so much better that it ends up being much easier to recommend as a result. If you don’t mind a bit of jank and a bit of grinding at the start, this is a good fun action/adventure 16-bit adventure game. It’s not the best thing on the system, for sure, but it still manages to be good to play with good music, and it’ll make a fun thing to go through in a weekend if this is a retro genre you’re interested in (as I so very much am).

Playing through Lagoon recently, it made me curious on just how it compares to the game its so clearly copying, Ys Books I & II. I’ve played through the DS remake of Ys I & II many years ago, but I’ve never actually so much as looked at the original version of the games. I then realized that I actually have a perfect way to play the contemporary versions of those games via my PC Engine Mini, and set right to work playing through them once I finished with Lagoon. It took me about 18 or 20 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on my PCE Mini without abusing save states.

Ys Books I & II, as its name implies, is the first two Ys games back-to-back, as they are each one half of one larger story: Book I is our hero Adol unraveling the mystery of the tomes of Ys and climbing the Tower of Darm, and then Book II is him actually in the titular Ys and saving it from the great evil that besieges it. Being action/adventure games from the late-80’s, the writing isn’t exactly anything terribly impressive (it’s a bit too exposition heavy and the cast is a bit too packed with one-dimensional characters, for starters), but the voice acting this PCE CD version adds to the PC-88 originals definitely helps it stand out that much more. It’s highly improved by the remakes the story has gotten over the years, but it’s quite impressive for a game this old nonetheless.

The gameplay of Ys I & II is actually a little different between games, but the building blocks are the same, and they share the most important one anyhow: bump combat. Back when making games, especially on home computers, faced a lot more difficult technical hurdles, some games opted to forego an ability to swing your sword at things and instead just have combat decided by how you happened to run at your enemy and make contact with them. This collision-based combat has been since deemed “bump combat”, and while Ys is far from the first instance of it, it’s definitely one of the most famous.

That said, just because it’s historically interesting doesn’t really mean that it’s good, and I think that we’ve since moved away from bump combat for very good reasons. Your power in Ys is determined not just by what sword, shield, and armor you’re using, but also your level, as this game has light RPG-elements in how you get experience points from killing enemies. While there are actual mechanics to the bump combat here (it isn’t all random or stat-based), you and your enemies move so fast that you functionally don’t really have much reason to think of them most of the time. As long as you’re not standing still (in which case you will definitely take a very nasty hit), you’re bump combat-ing more or less correctly.

Ys II adds offensive magic that makes fighting bosses in particular feel far more like your choices actually matter, but Ys I has no such system to benefit from. Bump combat is neat in how fast and simple it is, sure, but it’s so simple that I ultimately felt myself questioning why it was even there in the first place. Especially given just how much grinding is necessary in these games, bump combat often just makes the “combat” feel like nothing but padding between boss fights, and those boss fights are pretty lousy too. Either you’re getting mulched because your stats/equipment aren’t high enough (or that boss has some really annoying gimmick that makes them awful to hit like the one in the mines), or you’re instantly mulching them because your stats are high enough. The final boss of Ys I and especially the final boss of Ys II are some stand outs as for how they really make you use some strategy and reflexes to dodge projectiles and such, but the combat and boss fights in both games are frankly really underwhelming compared to a lot of other action/adventure games we had by the late-80’s.

This wouldn’t be such an issue if the story were good or interesting, which it isn’t terribly, or the level/dungeon design were good, but that’s also sadly not the case. Both games (but especially Ys I) suffer from some really rough level design, and the signposting can make it absolutely maddening on where you’re actually meant to go next. Ys I is packed with necessary plot items hidden in all corners of its dungeons, and it’s very easy to make a wrong turn or just not realize one is there at all, so then you’re stuck wondering just what the heck you missed, wandering around for ages just trying to find some semblance of where to go. Ys II is thankfully far better in this regard, but both games have some pretty rough design in just how sprawling and maze-like their dungeons are, and with basically all enemies fighting the same way (it’s all just bump-to-win) too, it’s not like dungeons really feel all that different from one another anyhow outside of aesthetics. A lot of Ys I & II’s issues are far from unique to them for their era, and a lot of their issues come down to their large ambitions more than anything, but that’s cold comfort in current-year when those failed ambitions just make things frustrating more than they do fun or interesting a lot of the time.

Given that the aesthetics are from 1989, they’re really impressive and show off a ton of just what the PC Engine could do with its fancy CD tech! While they’ll hardly put later games in the 16-bit generation to shame, they’re both very impressive for the time and still pretty now. On that same note, the music is absolutely excellent. Lots of awesome, rocking tracks that underlie the action at hand really well. If anything, they’re so awesome that the action should kick things up a couple of notches just to keep up! XD

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. As much as I ragged on this game for a lot of reasons, I did still quite enjoy it at the end of the day. While the first Ys games really do show their age quite a bit in this, one of their earliest remasters, they’re still fun games and it’s no surprise that the series got so popular off of games like this. I think it’s going to be a hard sell for all but the biggest of retro fans to go back to this particular version of Ys I & II these days when there are so many excellent remakes that Falcom has made since, but there’s still some fun to be found here for those who are willing to look for it.

This is a game I’d actually never heard of until my partner suggested we go through it together sometime as an idea for a date night. Always curious to both learn more about a new (old) game as well as spend time with her, I eagerly agreed, and we played through it together last weekend. It took us about 4 hours or so to go through the PS1 version on emulated hardware with her at the controls.

Both halves of Dark Hunter are part of an English educational series published by Koei during the late-90’s, and this is the first half of it. The titular academy is surrounded by mysterious happenings, and it’s up to our unassuming high school girl and two strange transfer students to get to the bottom of it. This is only the first half of the story, so it doesn’t exactly feel fair to judge it on its larger narrative elements quite yet, but the premise is at least delightfully odd with just how quickly things get utterly ridiculous (which is exactly why my partner suggested we play it together x3).

A large reason for it being so entertaining is because of how this is (ostensibly) an English educational tool. The game is a visual novel that plays out like a very simply animated anime. Not only do you have subtitles for everything, but you also have full voice acting, and both of them are in Japanese and English. You can switch between either whenever you like, and the English bits even have remarkably detailed explanations for harder words as to how they’re used (such as for the word “they”, pointing out both what the article is pointing to in the particular sentence as well as a more dictionary-definition of the word).

As an English-teaching tool, I think it’s a really remarkable effort, and the English is just about perfectly fine save for a typo here and there. That said, I think this is kinda a product for no one in many regards. By my experience both teaching English and learning Japanese, I think a hypothetical Japanese learner of English would very likely find little value with this game, as it’d almost certainly be either far too difficult for them or far too easy. It’s a pretty wild story, and they’re using that to try and engage you, but at the same time, it’s also so complicated that you’d need a pretty advanced level of English to engage with that aspect of it meaningfully. It’d certainly be a nice practicing tool for someone with more advanced English skills (not unlike how I use Japanese-language games to practice my Japanese), and it’d be quite unique in ’97 when importing an American game to practice with would’ve been a lot harder, but it’s still such a niche product that I have trouble praising its educational value too highly.

The game is mostly a visual novel that you just watch happen with a very occasional choice here and there, but there are actually some more video game-y aspects to things as well. However, they’re often so poorly implemented that you’d wish they weren’t there in the first place. On the more unremarkable side of things, you have mini-games that are just glorified little English tests, which are inoffensive enough even if they’re not too interesting. Then on the more egregious end, you have the adventure and shooting sections. The adventure sections are basically point and click adventure games with you navigating areas in first-person, and they’re dreadful. It’s often extremely unclear on where to go, and the loading times on the unskippable voice clips are such that it takes absolutely forever to just aimlessly hunt around some of these areas trying to find the one very unclear thing you’ve missed (or just hoping the game eventually decides to let you progress).

The shooting sections are light gun games without the light gun, and they’re also pretty bad. My partner confirmed this to be true after the fact, but even just watching her play I could very easily tell that the response time on the cursor was awful and even the button to shoot their weak points was weirdly unresponsive too. You can retry one right from the start of that fight should you die, thankfully, but that doesn’t make them suck any less, unfortunately XP.

The presentation is, like the story, definitely a reason to check the game out, but not really for good reasons XD. The animation is very stiff and characters are almost never on model. This combined with the less than stellar English voice acting makes for a great comedy experience, even if it takes a lot out of whatever tension the story could theoretically have XD. The Japanese voice acting is good, as you’d expect, but I imagine most people reading this review would be playing the game for its hammy English VA anyhow, and it is indeed just as hammy as one would hope (it even shares a voice actor with the original Symphony of the Night voice cast! X3).

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. If you can bear with the cruddy adventure and action sections, then this is a good, silly time to go through with friends like we did. The story is hardly high art, and I doubt going through the second half this coming weekend will convince me otherwise, but it’s at the very least entertaining regardless, which is the least you can ask of something like this, I feel X3.

This is the 3rd game in my journey through the Gundam & Tokusatsu crossover JRPGs that Banpresto published in the 90’s. This is the first one they not only published, but also developed in-house as well (as they were starting to do with Super Robot Wars around this time). Releasing in 1999, it’d been a good few years since the absolutely awful previous entry in this kinda-series was released, and given that this was Banpresto themselves, I had a fair bit of hope that this one would at least be pretty good. It took me around 36 hours to beat the game in Japanese on real hardware.

Though it’s a licensed game, the story of SHO follows an original main character as the main point of view character (in a very Super Robot Wars-y fashion). There is a male and a female character to pick from, but I chose the male character Ingram. You start in the very G Gundam & Gundam Wing-y future, sent on a mission to chase down the Devil Gundam, but upon falling to earth to chase and fight it, it flings you back in time 40 years to the very Ultraman and Metal Heros-y past. While this game does adapt just about all it can of Ultraman, in a change from previous games in the series, the only Gundam adapted is G Gundam and Gundam Wing, so no U.C. Gundam stuff at all. Most strange of all is how we are also deprived of any Kamen Rider and instead we have a lot of Metal Heroes (and adjacent franchises like Kikaider and Kaiketsu Zubat) characters in the story instead. This came out right on the deathknell of Metal Heroes as a larger franchise (and on the eve of Kamen Rider’s rebirth), which makes this an especially interesting and odd bit of crossover fiction from a historical and cultural standpoint.

As far as quality of the writing goes, it’s a really mixed bag on a lot of levels. The general structure of the game is one-by-one doing general reconstructions (within its own framework) of popular episodes from the properties its adapting, not unlike a SRW game or something. The issue most prominantly with that is that in a JRPG, we don’t have the luxury of skipping to the most intense bits of battle or plot or whatever that an SRPG can get away with, so this invites more problems than it solves. The first half or so of the game is really slow with a lot of clunky design mixed in with pretty same-y Ultraman missions. The game is sorta based around plot cul-de-sacs as a matter of point, as a result, but in some cases it’s way worse than others. The Gundam stuff in particular is located almost entirely in the few and far between future segments, making it very jarring and hurried when we finally return to those stories.

Some aspects of the story are done really well, like the Kikaider and Metalder parts in particular, but so much of it is sorta all over the place and confusingly related that it’s hard to get terribly invested in. The plot really starts taking shape around the 60% or so mark, which is when a few more interesting and important characters get introduced as well. The end result of all of this is that, compared to another game in this kinda-series like Hero Senki, this game has a lot more trouble standing on its own, and I’d say someone not already quite invested and interested in the represented series is going to have a much lesser and more boring time with it than someone who isn’t.

Mechanically, it’s a pretty unremarkable JRPG. A party of four and eventually you can swap characters in and out in between battles as the size of your party increases (and it gets pretty hilariously large, frankly), and the battles are simple turn-based affairs. There are some neat little mechanics to battle here and there, like HP slowly recovering in between fights, MP being recovered by doing normal attacks, and an overcharge meter that gets filled slowly by normal attacking with full MP that will give you a free and more powerful spell when you finally cast one. But the game is more mechanical missteps than it is successes. In total honesty, the game moreso comes off as an adventure game masquarading as a JRPG with just how much text there is and just how little actual gameplay you do compared to more typical JRPG games from ’99.

The story is entertaining enough for someone who likes the series represented in this game, but the actual playing of the game is clunky and cumbersome enough that it makes playing the game solely on its narrative merits more difficult than I’d like it to be. For starters, everything about menus and inventory is so busted and poorly done that it’s hard to believe a company as big as Banpresto developed this. The game has a TON of items, but you can’t see what they do in battle. You can only check that in your inventory between fights, and you’ll just have to remember what they do. You can’t see the actual effects that most equipment items do, just what stat they affect, meaning you’ll be swapping in and out items to try and get a sense of just what they even do to try and see what equipment is most worth using.

Of course this means shopping is a nightmare too. You can’t even sell items at a normal store. A store can only buy things that they already sell, so getting rid of early-game equipment can be a really annoying hassle, and more unique items, well you’re stuck with them forever. This is all even more annoying with how there’s no inventory sorting of any kind. It’s just one giant list. You can filter the list by what class (i.e. what series) can use those items, but otherwise it’s just equipment and consumables in one giant pile and you just gotta sort through it every time. There are also secret collectible trading cards that almost universally serve no function other than simple completion too, so that’s one more thing to clog up your mega list of an inventory. As an icing on the cake, you can’t even see your current HP or MP when using restoring items in your inventory. You’ve gotta look on the main screen, remember who needs healing and how much, and then go into your items menu to actually heal people. It’s absurd just how poorly put together this inventory system is for a major release by a major publisher in 1999, because I’d call this level of clunkiness embarassing even for 1994, let alone doing it in nearly 2000.

And the general clunkiness and rough design unfortunately doesn’t stop there. The game is put together with pre-rendered 3D assets, a lot like a game like Super Mario RPG is. This means that there are a lot of nearly identical looking areas because of how often they just reuse maps, and they reuse them a LOT. This combined with generally rough signposting means a more than fair amount of getting lost, especially in the four or five endless expanses of similar repeating maps the game has over its duration (which is even better because map edges aren’t clear either, so it’s diffciult to know if you’re exiting on a diagonal or not, so making mental maps is that much harder).

Combat is mercifully never difficult, almost literally. A lot of the bad design in other places would be far more worth complaining about if the game were actually difficult in any way, but it really isn’t. I encountered only a single actually difficult fight in the game, and other than that, as long as you’re just fighting things and gaining levels (the most important way to get stats), you’ll be fine. Combat takes too long and the buttons for your commands are such low resolution JPGs that they’re almost impossible to read, but at least it’s a trivial exercise. The balancing between characters is also awful, with Metal Heroes being the stand-out best among anyone and Ultramen being hilariously awful (you need to burn a turn to turn into Ultraman, and given that most battles are over in two turns, this means they rarely are actually useful, and they’re also very weak even when they’re Ultraman). While I’ve spilled a lot of ink here about how the mechanics are rough, it all really just comes down to being annoying. Like I said before, the game is really more of a glorified visual novel with a JRPG paint job given how simple the mechanics are and how much text there is. Heck, I think there are more event boss battles (ones you can’t win or are just glorified cutscenes) than actual boss battles. The main point of this whole section is basically just to exhaustively explain why anyone looking for a good JRPG should stay away from this game, as really it’s only the story that you’d wanna come for.

I’d love to say the aesthetics are worth coming for as well, but that’s another pretty mixed bag. The pre-rendered 3D model SD art style is gonna be hit or miss depending on who you are. I think it doesn’t look very nice, as did most of my friends I showed it to, but that’s all down to taste at the end of the day. One of the best things worth noting about the presentation visually, however, is how they go out of their way to recreate bits from the show in different ways. In one of my favorite ways, they inter cut live action shots from the shows for events like the Metal Heroes guys transforming, which adds a lot of silly tokusatsu-y energy to it all. Similarly, battles may take way too long, but a lot of the Metal Heroes special moves in particular really go out of their way to recreate the tons of cuts between jumps they'd do in the show by having it do the same thing with their animated 3D models mid-fight. It definitely takes too long, and most enemies are too easy to actually warrant using special moves on at all, but it's a touch I found very fun.

A bigger and more measurable problem is in regards to the game’s music. There really isn’t much of it, and while what’s here are pretty good original track and arrangements of licensed tracks (which are sometimes also incredibly funny), there just isn’t enough of it. This game is one of the very few I’ve found to have the “Lufia 2 Problem”, as I call it (as that was the first game I played that has this as well). There are so few songs and they do an exceptionally bad job of using music to underscore what should be more affecting and dramatic moments of the story, meaning a lot of moments (especially nearing the climax of the narrative) hit way weaker than they otherwise should. It’s not a death sentence for the writing by any means, but for a game that has so little to go on beyond its story, it’s really unfortunate that the music makes that story hit so much less hard than it should.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I’ve complained a lot about this game both here and in many places over the course of playing it, but ultimately, it’s just OK. I more or less had the read I do now like two hours into the game that this would be a solid 6/10 experience, and I ended up being more or less correct on that assumption by the end. Having finished it, I enjoyed the parts I enjoyed more than enough that I don’t regret playing it, but I think only people who are already invested in the series this represents will end up feeling that way too. Unless you’re a huge SRW and/or tokusatsu fan, I’d stay away from this one. It just can’t stand on its own merits well enough, and it only really succeeds at being astoundingly mediocre or sub-par at most everything else it tries to do. It’s not a bad game, but it’s also one you’re probably better off hearing about than actually playing yourself.

This is a game I think I’ve seen in person a time or two, but the cover and title were just so unimpressive that I never really paid it any mind. I didn’t realize it was a 2D-Zelda type game until a friend of mine mentioned it offhand to me when I was talking about how I was playing through Brain Lord a few days ago x3. Very much not wanting to let a game in one of my favorite genres pass me by so easily, I got right to playing it once I was done with Brain Lord. It took me about 8~10 hours (I didn’t keep super good track) to play through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware only abusing save states very rarely (which I will specify more on later).

Lagoon is the story of a teenage boy named Nasir (or “Nassel”, if his transliterated name in Japanese is anything to go by). Sat down and instructed by his father figure at the start of the game, he’s told of the kingdom of Lakelyland and how a curse at Lagoon Castle is causing all of the water in the land to turn foul. If that weren’t bad enough, it’s also causing monsters to spawn all over the kingdom! So begins the story of Nasir, Lakelyland’s Hero of Light. It’s all around an okay story. The pacing is honestly pretty decent, and there aren’t too many characters to get lost in either, so I had a good amount of fun with it. It’s nothing amazing or anything, as it’s a pretty stereotypical fantasy adventure story for the time, but for 1991 on the SFC, it’s nonetheless a pretty good showing for an action/adventure game.

While the story was more or less what I expected (if not a little above my very meager expectations), the gameplay was immediately surprising. It’s a top-down 2D action/adventure game, sure, but this is no Zelda-clone. It’s a heckin’ Ys-clone! xD. The original Sharp X68000 version of this game had bump combat, but they’ve switched to giving you a physical sword in this one, and it’s VERY short. You go around towns and a handful of dungeons along your quite linear quest to save Lakelyland, but the combat is never particularly great. That said, enemies tend to be pretty simple to deal with between your sword and your magic, and just learning their movement patterns makes things not too difficult to deal with eventually.

This is down to three factors. Factor 1 is that you actually regenerate health and mana by just standing still (as long as you’re not in a boss arena). This means that, as long as you can beat an enemy, you don’t really need to worry about running short on resources, since just standing still for a little while will get you right back up to perfect readiness. Sure, it’s annoying in the late-game to stand still for like a minute to just fight one or two more enemies, but at least you won’t die. Factor 2 is that this game actually has save-anywhere functionality. As long as you’re not in a boss arena, you can save anywhere, and you’ll appear right back there upon death, so even getting sniped by an unexpectedly strong enemy or boss doesn’t need to be much of a set back as long as you’re saving frequently.

Factor 3 is that, much like Ys, you have levels that you gain from fighting stuff, and there’s little that just grinding a bit won’t eventually solve. However, unlike Ys, the maximum level is something way higher than you’ll need to fight almost anything in the game quite comfortably. Sure, your sword is so uselessly short that you’ll take hits a lot, but between hunting down better swords/armor and grinding up a few more levels, there’s usually just a bit of grinding between you and being able to tank that boss well enough to finally beat it.

The only real exception to this is the final boss, who is a pretty unforgiving gauntlet of hard-ish fights with the penultimate one being NUTS hard, and you basically just gotta get lucky to kill that guy. You actually can’t use magic in boss fights, and instead you have magic rings you can equip that buff your stats in exchange for draining MP constantly, but even then, that final boss really is a step too far. Sure, the boss fights are already not very good, as there’s not a ton of strategy beyond having the stats to tank and spank your way to victory with your puny sword (that’s far too difficult to hit things with when facing up or down), but I was having a good amount of generally frustration-free fun with the game until the final boss came and ruined things. He was what I finally had to start using save states for outside of a faster alternative to the save-anywhere system, and godspeed to anyone brave enough to take that jerk on using original hardware. Overall, the mechanics of the game will probably wow few and frustrate far more, but as a big fan of the genre, I thought it made for a good enough time that I was excited to go back to playing more Lagoon after getting home from work the past few days, and I think that speaks for itself in regards to how engaging the game manages to be despite its relatively poor mechanical polishing.

Aesthetically, the game is pretty good for the time even if it’s still very heavily drawing from Ys for its mechanical inspirations. The graphics are simple and very Ys, but they have a simple charm to them that I found quite fun. While the monsters (and especially bosses) are big, fairly detailed sprites, the adorable simplicity of the human sprites made me smile and giggle a lot, and that goes double for Nasir’s friend Soa and his 80’s hair metal haircut XD. The music is all around pretty damn good though! There were quite a lot of times where a field theme or boss theme had me bopping my head along to how good it was, and the music is honestly the highlight of the game in terms of how little there is to criticize.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While this is apparently a bit of a meme-bad game in some circles (given that several of my partners began to laugh when they heard I was going to be playing it x3), I think it’s nowhere near that bad. It’s something that only big fans of 2D Zelda-style or Ys-type games should really consider looking at, but I had more than enough fun with it that I can recommend it at least a little even if I understand that it’s actually a relatively weak game at the end of the day.

As a huge fan of 2D Zelda-like games, this is a game that’s been on my radar for a good while, but I’ve just never gotten around to looking at it. My girlfriend happened to mention it offhand a week or two ago, and it jogged my memory and my interest about it enough to finally sit down over the past few days and play through the darn thing. It took me about 10-ish hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without abusing save states or rewinds.

The game opens with a flashback, where the main character is being told of his lineage before his father sets off on a journey that he clearly expects never to return from. We learn of an ancient clan of dragon warriors whose job it was to safeguard the world from darkness, and that you are one of that clan. However, the dragons have seemingly completely disappeared, and your father is going off on a quest to hopefully find one and fulfill your clan’s proud destiny. Upon waking up from this flashback dream, our hero is at a bar in the present, and they learn of a local job to hunt down dragon scales from a nearby abandoned fortress. Seeing it as a clear opportunity to fulfill his father’s wishes, he takes it up at once, and so begins our journey to find the dragons and (of course) ultimately save the world.

The story isn’t really what you’d expect for the depth action/adventure games often had by 1994, but it’s nothing bad, just unambitious. Our silent protagonist has a handful of fellow adventurers that he pals around with, and their dialogue writing along with miscellaneous NPC dialogue is all quite entertainingly written. The twists the narrative takes are interesting enough, but it’s really not the reason to show up (as it were). Compared to other Enix titles and especially SquareSoft titles around this point in the SFC’s lifespan, Brain Lord doesn’t really have a bad story so much as it just fails to stand out from the crowd. It’s not a strike against the game per se, but it’s just one more thing that makes the game that much less novel or interesting to go back to in 2024.

The gameplay is a pretty straightforward top-down action/adventure game. I’ve been calling it a Zelda-clone personally, but it honestly has so much more action than adventure that it feels like its drawing from inspiration outside of Link to the Past, at the very least. You’ve got five BIG dungeons and not much of an overworld to speak of, and 4-ish big bosses to fight along the way. You don’t really get traversal tools or anything like that. It’s just going through dungeons solving puzzles and fighting enemies in a not too complicated fashion. The only really novel mechanic are the fairies you can find as well as buy in some stores. You can have up to two out at a time, and they’ll either attack enemies around you or provide passive benefits like lighting up an area or increasing your attack power. Additionally, while you only get stronger from certain stat boosting items and new weapons/armor, monsters will occasionally drop EXP balls for your fairies, and that’s how they level up. Sure, there are a few weapon types, but the range on the sword is SO nuts that I never found any reason to use anything else (though at least they tried, I guess).

Dungeons don’t really have puzzles, as such, beyond just finding keys and then the appropriate door to take them to. Overall, that signposting is usually pretty good, outside of how massive some dungeons are that can make it difficult to remember where a locked door or now-breakable block even is, but that’s really the whole of it outside the block pushing puzzles and platforming puzzles. Those block pushing puzzles are frankly pretty damn tough, and they’re such brain-benders that it’s allegedly what inspired the title “Brain Lord” in the first place. They’ll probably annoy some, but I like these kinds of puzzles, so I enjoyed them at least x3. The jumping puzzles were far more annoying to me, but as far as Zelda-clones with platforming go, I found the platforming in this far more bearable and fun than the stuff in Terranigma or Beyond Oasis at least. Ultimately, while the moment-to-moment gameplay is fun enough (if a bit too easy), and I certainly enjoyed my time with it, it’s an experience that, much like the narrative, really struggles to be memorable.

The presentation is overall pretty good, if (again) a bit unimpressive for a 16-bit console in ’94. Anyone who’s played 7th Saga will likely find the human sprites looking quite familiar, and that’s because it’s from the same devs as that. Sprites are big and pretty, but they’re not so big that they make actually navigating spaces onerous, which I certainly appreciated. The music is pretty darn good. It’s not like, stand-out amazing, but there were quite a few times where I was going through a dungeon or overworld area and said out loud, “damn, this track really rocks!”.

Verdict: Recommended. I wavered a lot whether to give this an outright recommendation or a hesitant one, but I think this game is overall solid enough that it deserves an outright recommendation. Comparing it to one of these that I played relatively recently, I’d say I enjoyed this game about as much as I did Crusader of Centy. While it doesn’t have the novel design or aesthetics of that game (the highs, you could say), it also lacks the most irritating parts of that game’s ambition (which you could call the lows). Brain Lord jumping and block pushing puzzles may drive some batty, and it doesn’t have a ton that makes it truly stand-out or memorable, but it’s a very competently put together game that I had quite a good time with. While it may be a bit generic, if you’re a fan of 2D Zelda-style games, I think this is still a game you can pick up and have a quite fun weekend with even if it probably won’t be an experience you’ll remember for years afterwards.

I bought this game specifically to play it over the course of spring break, and now that I finally had all the game’s I’d set aside to specifically play with people all done, it was time to finally tackle this oddity. Something between a remake and a port of the original SRW Alpha, I’d always been at least somewhat curious about picking this up after playing through the original Alpha on PS1 a couple years back. It was a very interesting experience, and it was also extra cool to see how so many of these series are adapted in more detail now that I’ve actually watched a fair few of the series portrayed in this game. These games never record playtime, but it took me around a week and a half to play through it, so I reckon it took me at least 80 hours if not more. I played through the game as a male real robot pilot (as I did a female super robot pilot last time), and I did the Dreamcast-exclusive ending.

With Banpresto’s first turn at the wheel of making one of these SRW games themselves instead of just publishing them, they took a big swing at adapting a ton of licenses as well as tying in most all of the original content that Winkie Soft had thought up over the previous decade. What results is a big, new adventure where your created main character fights alongside the cast of Gundam, Getter Robo, Mazinger Z, and a big pool of other robot properties to defend Earth from the Ze Balmari Empire’s first big invasion against them. The writing is just as fun and good as it was the last time I played it. It’s definitely something a lot more enjoyable and engaging if you’re already familiar with the properties being adapted (I was impressed at just how deep they dug to adapt some scenes with new characters, honestly), but it’s still great fun even if you’re not familiar with mecha shows and just like big robots and silly crossover stories (as I very much do).

The Dreamcast-exclusive content was also very interesting, and it’s really not hard to see why it was included. It ties up some loose ends in the Neon Genesis Evangelion stuff and especially gives a proper conclusion to the Giant Robo stuff that is quite unresolved in the original game’s endings (though given that the original OVA series never quite ended either, that seemed appropriate at the time). Granted, by playing their hand for tying up the NGE ends too early, they unintentionally make an explicitly non-canon ending for the game (as it makes the return to NGE stuff that Alpha 3 does impossible), but there’s also clearly a greater motive at play. Having already played Alpha Gaiden (the PS1 game that sits between Alpha 1 and 2 in the series), it was difficult to ignore all of the proper nouns from that game’s plot that they mention here. By the end, it was very clear what they were trying to do. The Dreamcast-exclusive ending effectively exists so you have a clear narrative path that circumvents the events of Alpha Gaiden being necessary. This way, a Dreamcast owner didn’t need to have played Alpha Gaiden to just pick up a PS2 and hop right into Alpha 2 without being lost. Though, as mentioned earlier, that future proofing went a little bit haywire, it’s still a really cool new version of this story’s events, and it was very cool to go back and look at all of this as someone who’s already played through all four Alpha series games before.

Mechanically, this game is more or less identical to the original Alpha (so just looking back at my review of that will give you what this game has in good detail). It’s a turn-based strategy RPG with mechs and pilots, and mechs upgrade with money while pilots level up with EXP earned in battle. A neat feature is that mech weapons still upgrade individually rather than all at once like they did from Alpha Gaiden onwards, so that was a nice surprise. The game has all manner of unlockable characters and different routes you can do, and the network of long-term unlockable characters is still a nightmare to decipher just like in the original PS1 game even using a flowchart guide like I did.

The only actual additions/changes here are a couple of new units from another Banpresto-made SRW-like game, the addition of the team move mechanic (moves that two+ mechs can do when standing adjacent to one another) that was completely absent in the original game, and some spirit abilities (personal buff/debuff spells that each pilot has six of) being changed to reflect how they’d be in the PS2 games onward rather than how they were in the original PS1 game. I’d read in several places that this version of Alpha was considered the harder of the two, but my experience absolutely did not reflect that. If anything, the changes to spirit abilities makes them even stronger than they were before (and even the nerfed ones are only very slightly worse, if worse at all), and the team moves also make certain mechs like the EVAs far more powerful than they already were. That said, I’d still say this game is only slightly easier than its PS1 counterpart, and it’s already a fairly easy game on the whole anyhow. If you’re someone who likes Advance Wars or Fire Emblem-levels of complexity but wants something more forgiving while still feeling challenging (as I am), then this title is just as great as it ever was for that.

The aesthetics are overall quite good, which is a lot more than I was expecting! The biggest and most obvious difference between this and the PS1 game is that they completely redid all of the graphics for this version of the game. Of these, the element that stands out the most is that all of the 2D fight scenes have been redone in 3D, and while I expected them to look hideous (as the later 3D SRW games often do), they actually look really good! It really goes to show what you can accomplish when you put some time and money into modeling all of this stuff, but my assumption would be that it was so much time and money that that’s precisely why they never did this again XD. Outside of the battle scenes, all of the other graphics have been spruced up too, with units now changing direction upon moving on the isometric map screens (as they do in Alpha Gaiden forward but did not in the original Alpha) and everyone getting new character graphics too for the narrative scenes between battles (the same ones they’d continue to use for them all in Alpha 2 on PS2). Most of these new 2D assets are flat-out improvements, with tons of infamously weird looking sprites made far less dorky looking (like Kouji from Mazinger or Misato from NGE), and only a few rare examples of “why is that like that?” (like how Shinji and Ritsuko from NGE only have left-facing sprites and lack right-facing ones when they had both in the PS1 game).

The music is also very good, and it’s a lot of very good versions of the songs recreated from the animes present. This also features the very last time a karaoke mode appeared in a SRW game, though this one is just like the one in the original Alpha (complete with lacking battle scenes playing during the songs, unlike all other SRW game karaoke modes). The only real audio weirdness is that this lacks some songs that the original game had in the karaoke mode, such as, despite the Macross song “My Boyfriend is a Pilot” song being in the game still, it’s curiously absent from the karaoke mode.

The only real outright negative I can give for the presentation is the loading times. The original Alpha is famous and infamous for being the first SRW game to give you any option to skip battle cutscenes in maps while also having roughly 10-second-long loading screens for the battle scenes you actually choose to watch. This Dreamcast version does absolutely nothing to improve that, sadly, and likely as a result of just how nice and pretty those 3D cutscenes look (just as was the case with the very pretty 2D cutscenes in the original), we’re still stuck with 10 to 12 second loading times for each fight animation. It certainly would’ve been nice if they’d managed to shorten them some, but at least you can still skip them <w>.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. Despite all of my expectations, this is a great version of a great game. While it does have meaningfully more content and outright better graphics in some places, I’d still hesitate to call this a truly definitive version if only because, while the 3D IS good, it’s not quite so good that it makes the original beautiful PS1 version’s 2D animations obsolete. Ultimately, which one looks better is likely the thing that will dictate which version you prefer, but you frankly can’t go wrong with either. Both are fantastic ways to enter the SRW franchise and great beginnings to the Alpha series, and they’re well worth checking out if you can understand enough Japanese to play them~.

After playing through the previous two Frog Detective games the previous week, my friend and I finally got to playing through the third and final one this week. We did it just as we did the other two, with them controlling it and me doing the bulk of the voice work, and we did it over the course of three or so hours between two Twitch streams.

The third Frog Detective game, as the title suggests, takes place in Cowboy Canyon, and you’re here to solve the mystery of who stole everyone’s hats! There’s a bit more to this game than the previous two, and it’s about twice as long as a result, even if the same overall principles apply. It’s another simple adventure game where you walk around, talk to people, and do trading quests, but it’s back and better than ever this time. The graphics are also once again similar but just that much more polished than the previous entry, with more animations and larger locations this time. I’d go as far as to say the map here may be as large as the previous two game’s maps combined, and what could be more appropriate for Frog Detective’s biggest adventure yet.

Verdict: Recommended. If you liked the previous two Frog Detective games, then this one is a no-brainer of a pick up. The story and writing are the best they’ve ever been, and it’s a lovely bow on the end of the series. If you have any interest in adventure games at all and you don’t mind something that doesn’t get too heavy (and certainly doesn’t outstay its welcome length-wise), then this is a great pick up along with the rest of the trilogy.

This is a game I played a TON when it first came out nearly 20 years ago. I must’ve put well over 100 hours into PMD: Red Rescue Team back when I was a kid, and then dozens more hours into the sequel on DS, but I haven’t really thought about it since. However, with my recent urge to play a bunch of old Mystery Dungeon stuff, and the desire of several of my partners to play through this particular game for the first time as well, I thought there was no better time than to track down a copy for cheap and revisit this part of my childhood. It took me about 16 hours to play through the main story of the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.

The story of the first PMD is the story of you, but as a Pokemon! You start the game by taking a little personality quiz, and depending on the results, that’s what determines the Pokemon species of your main character, but you get to choose what Pokemon your main buddy will be. You wake up after a strange dream in this new Pokemon world being found by the buddy you picked at the start. Confused by your new surroundings, you barely have time to think before the two of you are off to save a Pokemon in distress. You do such a good job that the two of you decide to start your own Pokemon rescue team. Such is how your quest begins to both save the world and hopefully find the reason as to your suddenly becoming a Pokemon as well. It’s not the most in-depth story in the world, and it’s a narrative that would be significantly overshadowed by its sequel, but it’s still a fun little story that gives a perfectly good justification for the action at hand. A perfectly good justification when it isn’t getting in the way of the mechanics, that is.

The mechanics of the game are a Mystery Dungeon setup for the most part. You have procedurally generated dungeons to go through in a rogue-like turn-based style where your enemies move whenever you do. Just like later PMD games, the main focus here isn’t just dungeon crawling. Your goals in the dungeons are fulfilling requests that you accept before going into the dungeons, and those can be anything from finding a lost Pokemon in distress on a particular floor all the way to safely escorting a super weak Pokemon to a deep, dark floor of a big dungeon. The mission structure is a really good way to give the traditional Mystery Dungeon formula more longevity, even if the actual ranking up as a rescue team doesn’t often have that much to do with the story.

The story itself is more around getting through dungeons and often beating bosses at the end, but that’s where problems start to surface. On a more positive side compared to some earlier, less forgiving Mystery Dungeon titles, you no longer really have equipment to nurse and upgrade. While you do have ribbons to equip, they don’t get upgraded, and instead you just gain both levels and new moves just like you do in normal Pokemon. Those moves have power points just like they do in normal Pokemon, granted, so you can’t go throwing them around with reckless abandon, but it’s a very clever way to incorporate Pokemon mechanics into this tried-and-true rogue-like formula. You can even recruit new Pokemon as you go into your rescue team up to a team of four, giving you even more options to work with! That said, just because it’s clever doesn’t mean it’s actually good, and the cracks in this system are most obvious when interacting with story missions.

Whoever wrote this story and designed its boss encounters seems to have done so without much actual care for how they’d be impacted by Pokemon’s base mechanics of type advantage. Almost all of the Pokemon you can have selected for you at the start via the quiz (as well as basically all possible iterations of your buddy) are one of the three starter Pokemon from the first three generations of Pokemon. This means you’re almost certainly going to be a fire, grass, or water type, and you also can’t actually evolve until the post-game, so no double typing for you until you’ve beaten the main story.

This wouldn’t be a huge problem save for how limiting that is when put against the type disadvantages you’ll so often encounter along the story, and that’s really brutal given that either you or your buddy going down in a dungeon generally results in a game over (in stark contrast to something like the Chocobo’s Dungeon games where your buddy dying mid-dungeon wasn’t a fail state). For example, your first three major boss fights are against the legendary birds from Kanto, so those are an electric/flying, fire/flying, and ice/flying type. If you’re an unlucky sod who got a grass type for their main character or their buddy (as grass is weak to flying, ice, and fire), you’re going to have a really miserable time surviving through those boss fights (especially because you’re actually not allowed to have extra buddies along with you for several of them for plot reasons). This combined with how crushingly foolish the allied AI is compared to earlier Mystery Dungeon games makes a lot of the game a really frustrating climb against a mountain of RNG, and your only paths forward are more grinding for moves and levels and hoping you get luckier next time. The core idea may be very clever, but the execution is really unpolished, and it makes for an experience that often felt needlessly frustrating whether by the designer’s malice or incompetence in scenario design.

The aesthetics, at least, are very good. The graphics are delightful, with all of the main story’s characters having all sorts of expressive and fun character portraits as they talk, and the battle graphics being really good representations of the Pokemon they’re adapting as well. The music is also very good, and I cannot describe in words how hard the dormant, school-age neurons in my brain began to jolt upon hearing the game’s main theme upon boot up. While the mechanics may be a bit unpolished, they were absolutely spot on with the presentation, and it’s no wonder they didn’t feel the need to mess with them much for the DS entries to follow.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This certainly isn’t a bad game, but it’s one that’s aged very roughly even compared to some older Mystery Dungeon games. The Mystery Dungeon dev team is very clearly still inexperienced with how to actually adapt Pokemon’s systems to a gameplay loop that plays nice with the rogue-like gameplay loop, and unless you’re willing to put up with that frustration and grinding, this is a game you’re likely to find a very hard time scrounging up the will to finish it. That said, if you’re a big Pokemon fan or a big rogue-like fan, this is still a game checking out, as there’s a lot to enjoy here if you don’t mind praying to the RNG gods every once in a while to help see you through to the end of a particularly tough boss fight.

Played through one route together with my wife, so I can't give a super thorough impression of the story, but I can on what we played.

It's a quite well put together little story! Compared to other stuff we've played together like Clannad, this so much better captures how awkward and emotionally immature teenagers bumble through relationships. As much as the H-scenes are at times incredibly uncomfortable, the story has an honesty and sincerity to it that made it hard not to enjoy.

It's certainly no surprise on why this story is so divisive for people in how they enjoy it, but there absolutely is stuff here to enjoy for those looking for it.