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Last Topic's Ratings:
Duke Nukem 3D - AGAGG - 80% (5)
Logic Puzzle Rainbow Town - GG - 100% (2)
Riglord Saga 2 - GA - 75% (2)
Street Fighter 2 Movie - ABBB - 13% (4)
Strikers 1945 2 - GAGA - 75% (4)
Voice Idol Maniacs: Pool Bar Story - GA - 75% (2)
By comparison, this was a much more highly rated topic. There will probably be a fair number of these to come, Saturn received a number of highly acclaimed titles in its later years.
Games for this topic:
Fighters Megamix
Fishing Koushien 2
Langrisser: Dramatic Edition
Sega Ages: Memorial Collection Vol. 2
Touge: King the Spirits 2
Zoku Gussun Oyoyo
I actually don't know how we got this far without any of the Langrisser games showing up, considering Saturn has a lot of them.
Fighters Megamix - G
ReplyDeleteFishing Koushien 2 - A
Langrisser: Dramatic Edition - G
Sega Ages: Memorial Collection Vol. 2 - B
Touge: King the Spirits 2 - B
Zoku Gussun Oyoyo - G (SR)
Fighters Megamix is basically Virtua Fighter vs Fighting Vipers with a bunch of extra stuff thrown in. First of all, this is a pretty original idea for its time, obviously these kinds of crossovers are commonplace now but it was a pretty unique idea when it first came out, and seeing the characters from the two franchises go at it is still pretty cool. Something I like is that both franchises retain some of their unique mechanics, for example the Fighter Vipers characters still have their unique armor and counter attack systems and tend to be more combo-oriented while the Virtua Fighters characters focus more on powerful single strikes and mixups. Compared to the earlier Virtua Fighters games the game also just feels a bit more polished, with better general movement speed and control and more moves (it has a bunch of moves from Virtua Fighter 3, which was never ported to Saturn), so even if you're more of a Virtua Fighter fan than a Fighting Vipers fan, this is still probably your best Virtua Fighter option on the system. Beyond these two, there are also a boatload of hidden characters as well that you can unlock, giving this game some decent single player replay value as well as a pretty massive and varied roster for its time once everyone is unlocked. Make no mistake, there's still some early 3D fighter jank here, a lot of strings will never combo unless they hit as a juggle and much of the game tends to revolve around finding a few really powerful normals and abusing those as much as possible, and I still don't think this game is quite as good as something like Gen'ei Tougi, but it's still definitely one of the better 3D fighters of the era and a nice celebration of two of Saturn's most prominent franchises.
When we covered Fishing Koushien 2 on PS1, I noted that the game has a gamebreaking bug that basically makes the PS1 version unplayable, but that bug isn't present on Saturn. Well, I stand corrected, it is still present on Saturn, but it happens very infrequently in this version (compared to PS1 where it happens constantly) and thus doesn't significantly damage the game. In any case, Fishing Koushien 2 is a fishing game that has some strong points but still has a number of flaws. For starters, the game has a number of interesting ideas. The game begins with you picking 3 members for your fishing team, who have various different statistics. This is a cool idea, but realistically the game isn't complex enough for this to really matter and there's only a handful of characters that are really viable anyway, with most others being purely inferior to them. It would be pretty awesome if the characters somehow had different special abilities or something, but as it stands it's just a cool idea that doesn't really pan out. The game also has some neat ideas when it comes to fish fighting. For starters, a major part of this game is obstacles. Bass like to swim near rocks and trees and such, but obviously this presents a problem for your fishing line, as it can get caught on these obstacles and break, so a major part of the game is trying to maneuver the line around obstacles, which is kind of an interesting mechanic. Fish also sometimes jump out of the water, which is key to reeling them in, as you must immediately cut the tension here or the line will snap, but because the fish doesn't run during this time this is also a great time to drop the tension to the lowest so you can start reeling again. It's nothing super complex, but fish fighting in this game is generally fairly fun when it works (as noted, that bug where sometimes you just can't reel at all does occasionally happen on Saturn, in which case you kinda just have to let the fish go). The biggest problem with the game is the same one that a lot of other fishing games have, which is the tournament format. As usual, only Bass count, and considering this is a game where you can't see below the water at all, you have no ability to tell what you're catching until you reel it in. Making matters worse, the game is super picky about which fish are big enough to even count, so you'll probably have to catch 4-5 fish for every one fish that you actually get credit for, which is super lame. This kind of RNG badly hurts all fishing games that use it and there's a reason it was totally eliminated from modern fishing games. Besides this, this is also a pretty nice-looking game and like the first game the music is pretty good, so you could do worse, but it's still way behind Murakoshi overall.
DeleteLangrisser: Dramatic Edition is a compilation of Langrisser 1 and 2 (aka Warsong and Der Langrisser) with a fairly substantial upgrade to its presentation. Besides higher resolution map and unit textures, the game now also features a number of cutscenes, significantly improved character portraits, and voice acting, which really does make the game come alive quite a bit more. The gameplay seems to be mostly untouched, though you can now disable battle animations in Langrisser 1 (the two games now share the same general interface), which was a common complaint about the first game. In case you're not familiar with how they play, the basic idea behind Langrisser is that the story units are "generals" who command generic units. The units are much weaker than the generals, but if you position them near the generals they boost your stats, and they can essentially waste enemy turns attacking them while the general stays healthy. Similarly, defeating enemy generals is enough to win, but you can gain extra money and exp by defeating their units first, and you'll need that money to buy soldiers later. It's an interesting concept, but the number of units involved in the maps can make battles take quite long, especially in Langrisser 1, which I feel like is somewhat showing its age, Langrisser 2 by comparison tends to be a bit better paced. Overall, there's not really too much to complain about here. We've seen our fair share of zero-effort last gen ports (Legend of Heroes 1 and 2 comes to mind) and this is clearly not one of them. Even if these games might not quite measure up to some of the best new titles from this gen, I respect the effort that went into this port and I think the intention was to have the entire series available in one place, which is kind of nice.
DeleteSega Ages Memorial Collection 2 is pretty much the same as the first game. To their credit, Sega did increase the number of games, this time, it's a collection of 6 ancient Sega games, Samurai, Monaco GP, Star Jacker, Sinbad Mystery, Doki Doki Penguin Land, and Ninja Princess. As before, most of these games predate the NES, with Ninja Princess being the newest game at 1985. Right off the bat you'll probably notice that the only game you've actually heard of is Monaco GP, and even then it's probably Super Monaco GP that you're familiar with, which came out a whole decade later. There's good reason for that, which is that none of these games are particularly good or memorable. Sinbad is kind of playable, it's a Pac-Man clone with a few unique mechanics, and Ninja Princess is the clear standout of the package, being kind of like a Japanese-themed version of Commando on NES. Still, when the best game in the package is basically Commando, you can tell how weak the overall set is, and once again it comes with no extras or anything. This is one that's best left in the annals of history.
Touge: King the Spirits 2 is a massive disappointment. The first Saturn game, Touge King the Spirits 1 / High Velocity was actually a pretty solid early racer with a decent handling engine, but unfortunately they completely tossed out the engine from the first game and the result is far worse. When I first played it, my first thought was "oh no, they switched the engine for the one from the PS1 game", but it's not quite as bad as Touge Max 2 (almost nothing is). Still, it's definitely got more in common with that game than it does with King the Spirits 1, which is a massive shame, because there are some decent things about it but it barely matters when handling feels this bad. Something I particularly like is the way the King Battle mode works, you have a gradually expanding selection of cars, and when you pick a course you'll race against a car you don't have, win the race and it's yours. This would be really cool if controlling all the cars didn't feel like garbage. They simultaneously oversteer and understeer, depending on how fast you're going, just like Touge Max 2, either way it never feels good to control at any speed and most of the game will just be bouncing off walls, which is actually often faster than drifting because drifting sucks so much. There's also only 3 tracks, which is kinda not enough for a game that came out in the middle of the era, and by now other good racers on PS1 have left this game in the dust. Just stick to PS1 for your racing needs I guess.
DeleteWe've spent a lot of time with Gussun Oyoyo over the years at GAB, and now we finally come to what is probably the best game in the series, the Saturn version of Zoku Gussun Oyoyo. When we covered this for PS1 I noted that they had made a lot of improvements to the core formula, as well as also making big upgrades to the presentation. Something I didn't talk about too much, though it's also a big improvement, is that you can now save your progress through the main game mode, which, in addition to the infinite continues, makes playing the game much nicer. However, there is actually a significant change between the Saturn and PS1 versions of the game that I couldn't find anyone talking about anywhere, which is that the Saturn version has a completely different set of levels. Some of the levels are shared between the two, but compared to the PS1 version where the difficulty ramps up very fast, the Saturn version has a much more gradual difficulty curve that makes it play much better. It's still hard, but much more manageably so than some of the other games in the series. Other than that, all of the other additions to the PS1 version are still intact, making for a package that's jam-packed with content. If you've wanted to get into this series but never knew where to start, this is definitely the time.