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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Amok - GGA - 83% (3) (1 SR)
Fishing Koushien - BB - 0% (2)
Marvel Super Heroes - GGAGGG - 92% (6)
Prikura Daisakusen - GGABA - 60% {5}
Sankyo Fever: Jikki Simulation S - BB - 0% (2)
Warcraft 2: The Dark Saga - AGAGG - 80% (5)
Compared to the chaos of the PS1 topic, this was pretty much business as usual. Perhaps some of this is because we already have a measuring stick for how some games will be received thanks to the PS1 topics, though there are enough instances where the ports differ significantly to prevent this from being too reliable.
Games for this topic:
Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu S
Madou Monogatari
PTO 2
Street Fighter: The Movie
Tetris Plus
Yellow Brick Road
I always enjoy seeing the Madou Monogatari games, as a fan of Puyo Puyo it's always a strange experience to see the franchise that it comes from. I'm also very deeply worried about Street Fighter The Movie. Making a game based on a bad movie based on a great game seems like a questionable decision.
Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu S - B
ReplyDeleteMadou Monogatari - A
PTO 2 - A
Street Fighter The Movie - G
Tetris Plus - G
Yellow Brick Road - A
Jikkyou Powerful Pro is a series with good pedigree, but this particular game is strangely bad. I've often said that baseball is a relatively easy sport to get right because the foundation of how to make a good baseball game has been well-established by now, but somehow this game manages to screw up almost everything. For starters, fielding in this game feels terrible. The field is huge and the players are really slow, allowing a ton of balls to get through, and unlike pretty much every other baseball game ever made, there's no indicator of where fly balls will land, making catching pop ups far harder than it ought to be. Pitching isn't much better. The strike zone is absurdly small, so if you move your pitch even an inch from the dead middle of the box, it will be called a ball, so you have almost no freedom when pitching, and the batter can see the exact location of the catcher's mitt as well, making it trivially easy to know whether or not to swing and where to aim the batting box. The combination of poor pitching and fielding makes offense in this game extremely strong, leading to innings that go on forever and a general lack of nuance to the game. There's a ton of modes and options in the game, but when the core gameplay is poor all of this fluff doesn't amount to much. Saturn has a million baseball games available, and pretty much all of them are better than this.
Madou Monogatari is a very polarizing game. To start off, this game has among the best presentation of any game of the era. The spritework and animation in this game is absolutely gorgeous, with easily some of the most impressive 2D battle sequences in any game. The overworld and character graphics is also very nice and the game has pretty good music, the entire experience is very cute and charming. However, that's pretty much all the game has going for it. Beyond its presentation, it's pretty much the most basic RPG of all time. Battles are of the most basic variety possible, where you simply choose from a couple attacks, some of which cost MP and some don't, there's virtually no customization and the game is extremely easy. The only nuance to the game is that each character has a limit meter, though you have very little control over it. Bosses usually have one too, so if theirs gets full you should block, and that's about the extent of the strategy to the game. Worse yet, due to the game's simplicity, the gorgeous animations actually start to act against it, because they're also pretty long and thus make the overly simple battles take even longer. Outside of battle, you mainly just walk through very linear dungeons, the only complexity is that each character has a character action you can use to solve very simple puzzles, but it's incredibly basic, and the game is almost totally linear. It seems like this game had a troubled development and was almost a totally different game at one point, so perhaps the current, exceedingly simplistic gameplay loop is a result of that. It is definitely kind of cool to see the world and characters of Puyo Puyo this way, but I can't heavily recommend the game to anyone who isn't a huge fan of the franchise as they'll likely get bored.
PTO 2 is interesting, but suffers from most of the same problems as most of Koei's other strategy games. For starters, something I like about this game is the presentation. Each scenario begins with a video explaining the historical context behind the scenario, which is pretty cool, and your advisors have a number of interesting things to add throughout the scenario as well. There's also some interesting gameplay ideas here, for example a new system is that after each month, you have a government meeting to agree upon various budgets, where you can try to persuade the other members in various ways, though these meetings go on pretty long. Actually, that's one of the biggest problems with the game in general, most of the game tends to be fairly slow. Every day is divided into two phases, a move phase and a plan phase, so the mere act of sailing ships from one location to another requires you to pass a ton of turns and there's a lot of waiting. Couple that with the need to have meetings, order ships, and assign commands to dozens of fleets and you have a game that really doesn't move very fast. Thankfully, there are some shorter scenarios you can play and the pacing in these is not bad. The other major issue is that like all Koei games, it's not explained well enough. It's better than some of their older games, but there's still a ton going on and a more direct tutorial would have been helpful. I feel like with many of these games, Koei just kind of had too many ideas for the game and probably should have pruned them down to some degree. The key to making a great game is usually just to focus around a handful of strong mechanics, rather than just throwing everything into the game in the hopes that it works well together.
DeleteStreet Fighter The Movie is a riot. It's essentially Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo: Janky Mocap edition, shockingly, almost everything from Super Turbo is intact, characters have all the right moves and even supers, but many aspects of the game feel a little off. For starters, there's the frame data, where it kinda seems like they just made everything up from scratch. Generally speaking, most moves have a lot less hitstun, which causes many combos not to work, many blockstrings to have gaps that they didn't have before, and a few moves even become unsafe on hit, but it's not completely gamebreaking, there are still reliable combos and blockstrings, they're just different from ST. The damage ratios are also all over the place, generally things do a lot less damage, particularly specials, though throws remain very powerful. Motion detection is also a little wonky, though this was also the case with Super so it's not clear if it's actually worse than ST, but some moves can be finnicky about coming out. Speaking of moves, surprisingly this game also has EX moves, which are performed exactly the same way as SF3 (though this game predates SF3 by several years!), by doing the regular motion and pressing 2 attack buttons. These take half a bar, but if you have full super, you can do as many of them as you want as long as you don't use your super. At any rate, surprisingly the gameplay isn't too bad. It's not as good as ST, but it's still better than a lot of other fighters, in particular it's drastically better than Mortal Kombat or Killer Instinct or any other fighter that used digitized graphics. However, the gameplay isn't really the appeal here, what makes SF The Movie so special is the comedy. Seeing real actors performing Street Fighter moves is hilarious. If you remember that one scene from Jackie Chan's City Hunter where they parody Street Fighter, this is basically that if it was a full game. I never get tired of Ryu's goofy win pose, which could not be more at odds with his established character from the games, and seeing characters like Blanka and Zangeif portrayed by real actors is awesome. Playing this mostly Street Fighter game with digitized characters and slightly wonky frame data just feels hilarious in a way that I can't quite describe, thinking about the universe where we got this game instead of Street Fighter 2 just makes me laugh. I feel like this is a must-play for any Street Fighter fan.
DeleteTetris Plus is pretty much the same game as on PS1. The appeal of this game is the brand new Puzzle Mode, where the goal shifts from just cleaing lines to clearing a path for the professor to reach the bottom of the stage, somewhat reminscent of Gussun Oyoyo, but much more simplisitic. This mode is a great way to shake up the classic Tetris gameplay (though the classic mode is still available) and it's cool that you can play with two players. This neat new mode does a lot to distinguish this game from the million other Tetris games out there and makes it one of my top picks from the series.
DeleteYellow Brick Road is a decent game with a major issue. Gameplay-wise, the game is somewhat akin to a "baby's first first-person puzzle game", it plays like Myst, but drastically more simplistic. If a room has a puzzle you need to deal with, the game literally won't let you leave until you finish it. If you need to use an item, if you simply look at the thing that needs the item, the game will use it for you. I actually kind of don't mind this, after wandering around lost in games like Myst for hours the simplicity is kind of refreshing in a way. As you progress through the game, you'll find Tin Man, Lion, and Scarecrow (I quite like this game's rendition of Scarecrow), who you can talk to for advice whenever, but this is not really necessary given the game's simplicity. There are also battles in the game, though these play out more like puzzles than anything. The enemies start at one end of the screen and gradually advance towards you, and if they reach you, you lose. You can command the allies to attack any of the enemies, or use one of the various items you've picked up, and each enemy has different reactions to the different things. For example, an enemy might repel Tin Man's attack entirely, but be pushed back quite far by the Trumpet. You don't get penalized much if you lose (you just get tossed back outside) so even though there's a lot of trial and error they're generally inoffensive. So what is the big issue I mentioned earlier? After exploring the Yellow Brick Road a bit, we took a detour to a castle to find an emerald. After getting through the castle and fighting some enemies, we came to a battle against the Wizard of Oz who I assumed was the game's first boss, but after you beat him, the game ends. It turns out the entire game is only like 30 minutes long. Apparently this is actually part of a trilogy of games, but only the first game was ever ported to consoles, but there's no question that they really should have bundled all three of them together because it's simply way too short for a console game. It's too bad, because the start was promising, I just wish there had been more to it.