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Last Topic's Ratings:
Bakusou Kyoudai: Let's & Go!!: WGP Hyper Heat - AB - 25% (2)
Bowling - BAB - 17% (3)
Bug's Life, A - BBBAA - 20% (5)
Contra: Legacy of War - BBBAB - 10% (5)
Lucifer Ring - AB - 25% (2)
Samurai Shodown: Warrior's Rage - BG - 50% (2)
This has got to be one of the lowest-rated topics we've ever done. It's a bit funny to me considering that a number of the games here are part of franchises that are popular, but these particular entries are not.
Games for this topic:
Barbie: Race and Ride
Choukousoku Grandoll
Juggernaut
Legend of Legaia
NCAA Final Four 2001
Toko Toko Trouble
I'm really hoping people have played Juggernaut, or this could be a topic that doesn't get many ratings, even though I think both of the Japanese games here look interesting. I'm also kind of curious about the Barbie game as I feel like this is a concept that has potential if they put enough effort into it.
Barbie: Race and Ride - A
ReplyDeleteChoukousoku Grandoll - G
Juggernaut - A
Legend of Legaia - A
NCAA Final Four 2001 - G
Toko Toko Trouble - A
Barbie: Race and Ride isn't quite what I expected. For starters, the horse riding in the game is all presented as FMV, with you having very limited interaction other than to make the horse jump over obstacles. While this is not super engaging, it looks very nice and is kind of relaxing in a certain sense. However, you don't actually get to do a lot of riding as Barbie interrupts you every 3 seconds to stop and take a look at something. These are often minigames of various types, which are serviceable but very basic, or alternatively sometimes she just wants to stop and look at some animals or something. The touted horse racing is also one of these minigames and is super simplistic, you simply tap forward to go fast and occasionally jump over obstacles and that's about it, there's no concept of stamina or anything like that. At the end of each ride, you have to return to the barn as the sun sets, which should have been an opportunity for a pretty impressive visual spectacle considering the game is full FMV, but for some reason they instead fade out and just go to a new scene where the sun has set already, which is a big letdown. Overall, the game is really mostly a minigame collection with some pretty window dressing. It's not completely atrocious and I think it might be decent for its target audience, but for the amount of work that likely went into this I feel like it could have been quite a bit more.
Choukousoku GranDoll was secretly the game I was looking forward to the most out of this batch and happily it doesn't disappoint. You can probably tell from a single screenshot that it looks very similar to Megaman, and indeed it is, it plays kind of like a discount version of Megaman ZX, your default form has Bass's 8-directional shooting and Bionic Commando's grapple arm, but as you beat bosses you get suits based on them that you can transform into at any time, each with their own special abilities. The game is also very heavily anime-styled, with full videos before and after each stage to tell the plot, in a way that kind of reminds me of Valis, though it is clearly much better gameplay wise. Initially I thought the story was intended to be a parody of magical girl anime, though apparently this is based on a real OAV, but either way it's incredibly cliche and (perhaps unintentionally) hilarious. Watching Hikaru's obsession with her Sempai (whose name I don't think is ever mentioned) deserves special mention, though he does fade out of prominence after a few stages when the plot gets more "serious". Gameplay-wise, the game is not quite as good as Megaman, mostly because the controls aren't as tight, but it's still well playable and fun. Probably the biggest issue is that it's somewhat short, with only 6 stages, and if you don't count the cutscenes the total game time is probably less than an hour. Still, it's a good time while it lasts.
I actually played through Juggernaut in its entirety for this review, as it was extremely hard to get a bead on it until the very end. Gameplay-wise, the game is very similar to Myst. It's a first-person adventure game where you'll explore various esoteric worlds and solve puzzles, albeit with a horror / creepy theme to it. The basic concept of the game is that your girlfriend has been posessed by a demon, and you have to venture into her soul to save her. To explain why it was so difficult to rate this game, I first have to explain the structure of the game. The game is divided into 10 parts: A short prologue, a segment where you explore a mansion that also serves as a HUB level of sorts for the game, and 8 short stories that are accessed from the mansion, each of which puts you into the shoes of a different character in a strange environment. The prologue is short and largely forgettable, having no real connection to the plot other than to basically introduce the controls, but has nice visuals and is generally inoffensive. The problem starts when you reach the mansion.
DeleteSimply put, the mansion absolutely sucks. It is by far the largest portion of the game, and also easily the worst. The basic idea of the mansion is that you need to explore and find items that will allow you to solve four central puzzles and grant access to the short story segments, which, when completed, lead to the endgame. The problem is that exploring the mansion is a hideously tedious process thanks to the awful body switching mechanic. As you explore the mansion, you can change between three bodies, adult, child, and soul, allowing you to explore different areas and interact with different things. This is not an inherently terrible idea, if the different abilities of each form were utilized in an interesting way, it might lead to some interesting puzzles. However, literally the only relevant ability of each form is the ability to access different types of doors, big doors for the adult, small doors for the child, and holes for the soul. You can also only change bodies at specific rooms. As such, the only purpose of the body change mechanic is to create a ton of tedious backtracking to get from one room to another. The soul form is also useless, having no gameplay use other than as an intermediate step in changing bodies, as you cannot change directly from child to adult, you must change to soul first, then float to the other room and change there. There's never anything clever about you having to solve some puzzles to open a route to a switching room or anything like that, just a ton of tedious backtracking that has no reason to exist. A task as simple as moving from one room to another to grab an item and come back often involves traversing the entire length of the mansion four times, which makes exploring the mansion an absolute pain the ass, and there's also nothing interesting about the mansion either, as it is largely devoid of story or any refences to the overall plot. Based on this segment alone, the game would easily be B, and I had a full review written up that gave it this grade, but the nature of the game changes drastically once you reach the short stories, so much so that I knew I couldn't properly rate it until I went through them.
Juggernaut cont'd
DeleteThe short stories have far more of a narrative focus, with more dialogue in the opening of each story than in the entirety of the mansion. Each one tells its own isolated story, which vary substantially in quality. A couple of them are quite good (the ones about the island girl and the one about the legendary beast are my favourites), though some are overly short and linear and many rely on obscure dialogue triggers. I would put the short stories closer to A in terms of quality overall. The biggest issue I have here is that the short stories generally don't feel like they have a lot to do with the main plot of rescuing your girlfriend, who basically feels as though she's been forgotten about, as no part of the game ever tells us anything about her personality or history. This is why I went to the very end of the game, to see if they would somehow try to tie everything together in the last few minutes in a way that made the entire adventure feel cohesive, in which case you could probably make the case for G. Spoiler alert, they don't. There is a post-game section that provides a little bit more backstory, but it's mostly about the game's antagonist, and no effort is made to relate the short stories to the main narrative, which feels like a big missed opportunity. Ultimately, the game does still have some interesting moments and I don't regret playing it, but definitely use a guide to get through the mansion segment as quickly as possible.
Legend of Legaia is a fairly traditional JRPG with a few unique ideas. By far the most noteworthy thing about the game is its battle system. Rather than simply choosing to attack, characters in Legaia can string together combos made of four different types of attacks, denoted by the directions on the dpad. Besides the fact that some attacks are more effective against certain enemies than others (for example, high attacks fail to hit very short enemies), inputting certain combinations creates special attacks. As you progress through the game, you can input more and more attacks at a time, potentially allowing you to activate multiple special attacks in one turn. It's kind of cool and the animations are quite well done, but is also a major part of the game's biggest problem, which is that the game generally feels pretty slow. Battles in Legaia take forever, as the aforementioned strings of attacks result in some pretty lengthy animations for a single attack, and the enemies have them too. Making matters worse, both enemies and the player sometimes randomly block hits, which negates all damage, and at least once every couple turns you'll need to use the defend command to restore your SP so you can keep attacking (it also allows you to use more attacks on the next turn). Thankfully, the game does remember what commands you last inputted for each character and current length of the attack bar, so you don't have to input them every time, though you do have to experiment to learn special moves in the first place (or just read a guide) as the game never tells you their inputs, which feels a bit strange. The game can also be a bit grindy, battles grant relatively little exp and money for how long they are, and if you want to use magic, you also have to grind it up as well, in a manner somewhat similar to Secret of Mana. Thankfully, the plot of the game is decent and it definitely has some of that oldschool RPG charm, so I didn't really mind playing it, though it wouldn't be one of the first RPGs from this era that I would recommend.
DeleteNCAA Final Four 2001 is a super solid game. This is one of those cases where a game just does so much right I don't have a lot to say about it. I guess one of the first things worth hightlights in the controls. The game implements a shot meter, which I like, even though hitting the green zone is not too hard, it makes shooting feel more interactive. The controls for pretty much everything else are solid too, in particular rebounding feels better than it does in many games. I also simply feel like the speed of the game feels right, with some other basketball games I've complained that movement either feels a bit slow or that driving moves simply go too fast, but everything just feels good here. The presentation is also very nice, with good player models and animation and well-done commentary. There's also a lot of modes and options for playing the game. This is definitely a strong contender for the title of best sim-style Basketball game of the generation, it actually almost feels like it could be a PS2 title in a lot of ways.
DeleteToko Toko Trouble is a decent little puzzle game. The core concept is very simple, aliens are slowly advancing from the top to the bottom of the screen, and if they reach the bottom, you lose. You have a targetting cursor that can be used to perform one of two actions, either you can eliminate one alien at a time, or you can push the current column back, filling in any gaps. If four or more of the same alien line up, they are cleared instantly. Also, sometimes you get some powerups that let you wipe out more aliens at once. That's basically all there is to the game, but it's not really a bad thing, the game is quite fast-paced and making quick decisions about which aliens to remove to create opportunities for matches is fun. The game is also pretty bright and colourful and its main theme is weirdly catchy. The only real downside to this game is that there really just isn't a lot of content here. There's the main arcade mode, which can only be customized in terms of difficulty, then a two-player mode and four player mode and that's it. The ability to, say, play the VS mode against the AI, or perhaps some kind of puzzle mode where you have to figure out how to eliminate the aliens in limited moves would go a long way to extending the experience. What's here isn't bad, but I wish they had done more with it.