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Last Topic's Ratings:
Image Fight & X-Multiply - AA - 50% (2)
K-1 Grand Prix: Fighting Illusion Shou - GG - 100% (2)
Matsukata Hiroki no World Fishing - BB - 0% (2)
Pandemonium - BAAA - 38% (4)
Theme Park - AAAAA - 50% (5)
Virtual Casino - AA - 50% (2)
While it was no doubt at least partially due to the low number of votes, there was a full consensus on every game from the last topic except for Pandemonium, which pretty much never happens.
Games for this topic:
Cyberbots: Fullmetal Madness
Ginga Ojousama Densetsu Yuna 3: Lightning Angel
Midway Presents Arcade's Greatest Hits
Nekketsu Oyako
Nights Into Dreams
Pastel Muse
While obviously Nights is the biggest draw here, I'm looking forward to finally trying out Cyberbots, after seeing Devilot appear in a bunch of other Capcom games. As for Ginga Ojousama Densetsu Yuna, from what I can tell, this is the only that's actually a game, with the others being untranslated VNs, so hopefully it's decently playable.
Cyberbots: Fullmetal Madness - A
ReplyDeleteGinga Ojousama Densetsu Yuna 3: Lightning Angel - A
Midway Presents Arcade's Greatest Hits - A
Nekketsu Oyako - G
Nights Into Dreams - G
Pastel Muse - B
Cyberbots is a weird fighting game. For starters, the game has you select a pilot and a mech, but the pilot doesn't matter at all, apart from the pre-match dialogue, the mech is the character so to speak. The actual fighting is very simple, there are two main attack buttons, a weapon button, and a boost button. The attacks do a variety of punches, kicks, and slashes, in standard fighting game fashion, the weapon button activates some kind of special ability (for example, the blodia mech fires a little laser), and the dash allows for a variety of ground and air dashes. There are special moves, like in most fighting games, and supers, which you can build up by pressing both attack buttons (which is a bad mechanic, this action has no recovery whatsoever so it's absurdly spammable). Most of the game revolves around airdashes, these have no height restriction, so essentially everyone has access to Marvel-style trijumps, this also tends to make the game's neutral feel fairly simplistic, particularly considering you can also air block, even in the middle of an airdash, so zoning never feels particularly threatening. It's still a tolerable fighting game for beginners, but nothing about it feels especially incredible.
Ginga Ojousama Densetsu Yuna 3 reminds me a lot of Sakura Wars, but it's not nearly as good. Like Sakura Wars, it's something of a hybrid between a Visual Novel and an SRPG, but here the visual novel part is almost entirely noninteractive, you just read / watch some scenes, then you fight a battle, then you read some more. Obviously, this is not as engaging as the Sakura Wars formula, as the brilliance of that series lies in the way the VN parts and the SRPG parts are tied together, but at least the production values are pretty solid. As far as the SRPG combat goes, just like Sakura Wars it's super easy and basic, most characters have 2 basic attacks and maybe a couple spells, so everything is easy to figure out, and it does Sakura Wars one better in that battles have appreciably brisk pacing, largely because maps are smaller and thus you don't have to travel for multiple turns before you can actually fight something. Outside of battles, there's almost nothing else. You can buy consumable items, but the game is so easy you really don't need them, so you basically just choose to go to the next battle and watch more scenes. There's nothing terrible about it and I suspect it'd be somewhat more entertaining if it was translated (there's no question that the dialogue is fairly wacky), but I prefer my SRPGs to have a little bit more meat to them.
While this is not the same collection we reviewed for Playstation, this version of Arcade's Greatest Hits is fairly similar to the one we covered before. As with that version, the games are ported well, but they're very old and kind of hard to go back to these days, I feel only Robotron still holds my interest for any length of time. The documentary-style video clips that go along with the games are really cool at least, I really enjoy seeing the insight into the development and history of these games. Later on, the series will move into slightly newer games, which helps a lot IMO, but unfortunately the Saturn doesn't have those versions, so for Saturn owners you might as well just go ahead and grab the Midway Arcade Treasures series on the next generation of consoles.
DeleteNekketsu Oyako is still the same cool game it was on Playstation. At its core, it's a fairly basic beat-em-up, but one with a lot of depth to its movesets. One of the things I like about this game is that the three playable characters have extremely different playstyles. The first character revolves around his command dash, which he can cancel most moves into and gets various options from, the second character has some kind of power charging system that I don't totally understand but it allows for massive attacks every now and then, and the third character has air combos and a unique fast fall that allows for a lot of crazy juggles. The movesets are extensive and there's tons of potential for crazy combos, though many of them are super situational so you probably won't be able to pull them off very often, but it's still super cool when you do. Beyond the combo system, the game isn't super complex, the enemies and bosses are kind of simple for the most part, but they don't really need to do a lot, they're basically just there to be fodder for cool combos and to smack you when you screw up. Definitely a fun game to mess around with.
Nights is a pretty weird game. Its gameplay is kind of hard to even describe, the basic gist of it is that you spend most of the game as Nights, flying through what are essentially 2D courses, collecting chips and stars, and passing through rings for points. The goal is to collect 20 chips and hit the cage, then loop back to the beginning to access the next part of the course. The biggest issue is that the game is really zoomed in, so you can't really see much in front of you, so you need a lot of memorization to be able to hit all of the rings without slowing down, particularly because your flight path is often not obvious. At the beginning of each stage, there's a portion where you can run around as one of the two children in 3D, but it's almost totally superflous as you start right by where Nights is and you don't need to be the kid to beat the stage, it's more like a penalty state since if you fail a flying game you turn back into the kid. After clearing four flying courses, you have to fight a boss, and the boss battles range from "tolerable" to "bad", but thankfully they're generally pretty short. If that explanation made no sense, it's because you kind of just have to play the game to understand it, despite its wacky premise it does feel decently intuitive once you get your hands on it. The presentation is also fantastic, particularly the music, which is one of Sega's best OSTs. I don't think this is quite the masterpiece that the Genesis Sonic games are, but it's a decent game that's worth trying out.
DeletePastel Muse is basically Bust a Move, but sideways. The concept of the game is almost identical to Taito's game, you still want to line up 3 bubbles to make them clear, but they're fired sideways and there's gravity to contend with. The length of time you hold down the button determines how much power the marble is shot with, and the angle matters too, so it's quite tricky to line up your shots without the aid of the guide. It has a very powerful combo system, though, when you clear marbles, all other marbles fall and clear if they touch in groups of 3, which means that you almost always make big clears without even intending it, so lining up your shots is almost the whole game. Besides the fact that it clearly doesn't have nearly the depth that Bust a Move does, another issue with this game is the selection of modes, in particular, there's no VS Com mode available, you can only play the standard puzzle mode and a couple simple endless modes if you don't want to play against another player. It's kind of borderline, but something I look for when it comes to puzzle games is if they can put a unique twist on an existing formula. Taking a good concept and making it way worse simply doesn't hold a lot of appeal. There's basically no reason to play this when you could be playing the game it's based on instead, which is drastically better in every way.