Imagine if they actually retained the world-building simulation sections tho, this had the potential to be one of the best SNES games if it did. Alas, the first game was maybe a bit too forward thinking for most people so they made a safer game, albeit they tightened up the action gameplay and made it look very pretty instead.

It's pretty solid otherwise. I think they put most of their resources into the graphics. The controls are decent, but all SNES controls are just a bit wonky. Not a fan of double jumping right into a glide, it's certainly something you have to get over, get used to and embrace as traversing a lot of the levels requires mastering it. Most of the levels have a boss and midboss and while I can't say every boss fight is super intuitive, they do usually look pretty cool.

in some alternate timeline ardy lightfoot is a big deal and titus isnt remembered for that other game. or not

super charming and colorful, somewhat challenging and a bit janky but i think that’s just snes platformers in general. controls have just gotten tighter since. i think

the bouncy jump is kinda annoying to perform.

the ost is a standout. gonna have to go download it

I played this as a kid and all I remember is a very weird experience. Playing it today and it's not very weird. Kinda wish it measured up to my memories of it, but what ever really does?

You collect items that you can use through out the stage and you also shoot balls at monsters. One of the items is a ladder, which is pretty self-explanatory (you climb it to reach higher spots); another lets you jump higher; there's a bomb which might be for blowing up enemies, I don't know. You also collect "K" blocks which are basically Mario coins. Not sure what they do, but I'm amazed they made all sorts of configurations out of them but still managed to never put three Ks in a row... ahem.

(I take that back)

It plays perfectly fine, you can get pretty powerful pretty fast if you collect three balls to shooty with. I think the weirdest aspect of this is that they brought this guy back as a boss in Bad Dudes vs DragonNinja and made him the last boss in Fighter's Destiny: Karnov's Revenge. For whatever reason y'know. Now I want to go play that and see if he still be shoot the balls.

I miss the days when wish fulfillment also included weird bald shirtless Russian dudes with handlebar mustaches.

You ever play a game that feels like a "missing link" somewhere in the history of games? I won't say this game is hugely influential, as it seems to tread a similar path as Dragon Quest I or Final Fantasy I, but it taps into something I never knew I needed and it perhaps is indirectly influential instead.

This is one of those games where the price of entry is incredibly steep. Not only is it a game that never left Japan but it's also very obtuse, not only in gameplay but presentation, and it's gotten pretty archaic now as well. It's not family friendly, especially in the US in the 80s, where a game with demons as its protagonists could never fly. Not only all that, but the only version that has been translated into English by fans is the Famicom version, which I'm told is the worst version of them all. Big sigh. Regardless, the core of the idea is still there and it's good enough to gloss over some minor and major issues.

It seems like I've been finding a lot of sandbox JRPGs lately. These don't seem to make it out of Japan very easily, which I wonder about, as the story can be fairly sparse and the focus is on exploration. While DQ1 and FF1 weren't straight away sandbox games (you can throw LOZ1 in the conversation too), they did have a lot of open-world elements or at least gave the illusion of such, so was there an audience for these types of games? Yeah, I believe so. I think the problem lies in the entry point. You either need a guide (manual) or a LOT of patience to figure out how everything works.

You're simply dropped into a world. There is an opening cinematic but only if you wait on the title screen for 30 something seconds. Even then, it only really establishes that this is a post-apocalyptic world, no humans left, being invaded by space aliens. Demons, literally from hell, are the only ones that can stop them. Is the concept basically a B-horror movie plot? Yes, but it's also pretty gnarly.

The biggest flaw to the game is the flow of combat as it is incredibly slow, but if you're playing this through illicit means ahem, find out where the fast forward button is, you'll need it. And the entire gameplay loop IS basically combat. You travel around an open world searching out stone tablets that have some strange sage wisdom on them. Some of them are pretty philosophical, others help you understand each monster's strengths and/or weaknesses. You can't beat the game unless you read all 108, but luckily, they're pretty memorable so if you tread over them more than once it's not a complete waste. It's clear as you read more of these that this is very much a game made by a people that are living in a post-apocalyptic world (Japan). It's interesting to see how much the atom bomb affected art in Japan, lots of nihilism since, and I really cannot blame them at all. Paraphrasing but "Whether worshipping God or demons, neither mattered in the long run." This captures the feel of everything quite well.

You essentially level up like Final Fantasy II even though all the versions of Last Armageddon came out before that. If you haven't played Final Fantasy II, you don't acquire simplified experience points, you have experience points for every single action you take. You attack, your attack goes up, you use magic, your magic goes up, etc. While I do like the level of control in growing your characters that this gives, it also means GRIND GRIND GRIND. So while a part of me is sad that this type of JRPG never made a big impact, the other part is glad that not all JRPGs are ridiculous grind fests (unless you want them to be of course, you always have that option).

That said, you can break the game to some extent. Basically spam all of your magic while you are on the field (heals/cures/etc), your magic will increase after one battle by one level and it also restores all of your MP. However EXP does stack so if you did enough actions to level up several times you just have to go through that many battles to get to the appropriate level for it. This also works well if you go into a battle and defend for 5+ rounds straight. Your defense level will increase by one level after the battle and then by one more after each subsequent battle depending on how much EXP you accumulated. Confused? Oh well, I'll stop with the deep details there.

Your monsters also evolve at some point and even change appearance which is a fun little touch which might even be the first time this happened in a JRPG? Surely correct me if I'm wrong there.

After all is said and done, this can be a very hard recommend. Almost every other battle you're going to be poisoned. So you have to make the medicine each time until your magic is high enough to use the "cure" spell. Still, you have to bring up the menu after almost every battle and use the cure. Super tedious.

When/IF you arrive at a dungeon, they are in first person, which is cool at first. Seems like a nice change of pace, although you'll soon realize these are all mazes in the worst way. Everything looks the same, so finding your way is as confusing as you would think it is, not only that, but the spots you need to find in the dungeons to move the story forward have no visual indicators so it's literally just going everywhere you possibly can till something pops up. I can't imagine trying to beat this game back in 88 when there was zero help. I suggest getting a guide and finding the maps for every dungeon to save yourself (some) headaches.

By the second part of the game it feels like they decide to make the game more challenging in the cheap way of making the random encounter rate spike significantly. The encounter rate was already pretty high at 8-10 steps, now it's more like 4-5, sometimes as few as 2-3. I ended up putting in a Game Genie code to turn off random battles at the second half of the game to keep my sanity. Don't really care if that makes me a "cheater," I respect my time and would rather enjoy things than pull my hair out. There's challenge and then there's tedium and I'm very much over the latter. Besides, at this point in the game, if you played your cards right, your monsters are pretty much tanks and every single battle just starts to feel like a time sink.

So yeah, with how archaic this feels now, I can't openly recommend it, but the story is very interesting and it's almost (almost) worth it. There's so much weird stuff in this particular game for the time however, that it may be worth exploring as a curiosity, you'll likely never play something remotely like it again. While the story definitely seems like one of nihilism, the end has a spark of hope and likely leads into the sequel (After Armageddon).

I might want to check out the PCE CD version as I hear that's the most user friendly and the sequel is on the SEGA (MEGA) CD. Either way, these seem like games that deserve a more modern remake or at least some kind of fan-inspired indies, purely based on what they do right.

I recommend it only to people that like new experiences, but expect a ton of flaws.

Kinda cool game. The graphics arent great but the characters have some decent animations and there's things like reflections in water because why the hell not? Feels very Dragon Quest inspired maybe to the point of nearly being a clone. It feels more open like the first DQ, but there's more stuff to do than that game. You can hire mercenaries to fight in your place and there's also "idols" that can fight in your place (Pokemon/statue things that you find in chests). Kinda weird but the mercenaries and idols make a separate party each, you choose which party fights at the start of battle. Seems like you can always switch to one of them from your main party, but once you do it's basically auto-battle mode for the mercenary or idol party and you can't exit it. The mercenaries were fairly cheap so I got two of them and they make pretty quick work of regular enemies and bosses. I think my only complaint is that this might potentially make this game way too easy.

Make sure you search absolutely everything, there's lots of hidden items and money to collect.

The fan translation feels pretty good. I know people get autistic about translations not being true to the original, but sometimes being true also leaves things a bit lifeless, so whoever did this one, good job on that. IMO

(I can make fun of autists because I am in my own way about other things right?)

Seems like a game I might want to complete.

This is basically an anime.

It has all the tropes of being un-releasable outside of Japan, from a strange and obtuse story to some very direct biblical references.

Essentially, think Noah collecting animals ala Pokemon but it's in the future and somewhat more sandbox-y. Luckily it also has a sense of humor, from the titular Linda deriding you for only being at LVL 1 and not to even speak to her until LVL 3. Yeah it's gonna be one of those.

Another interesting aspect to this game is that there are various story scenarios that you can play through while the essential gameplay loop remains the same. You spend 8 years, or 32 seasons, running around fighting animals and collecting them, trying to get a male and female from 40 species, then random story beats come in here and there.

Actually would love a sequel or remake with better/modern graphics of this one... only thing I can somewhat compare it to is the Metal Max games, but mostly in the open-world RPG department and not much else.

I haven't actually read the Dracula novel but I feel like this is trying to capture that feeling. This is a bit of an odd game. You walk around and talk to people during the day, then you go "vampire mode" at night and can attack certain NPCs and morph into animals. There's probably more to it than that, but the first NPC I attacked killed me. Then I walked around as a ghost with zero HP. Also the OST is A+ fantastic.

Artdink is such a cool little company, I compare them somewhat to early From Soft in the level of experimentation on their titles and this is no exception. We only got a handful of their titles in the west and I hope we get some fan translations eventually, this one in particular and maybe one of the Lunatic Dawn titles.