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Last Topic's Ratings:
Airs Adventure - ABB - 17% (3)
Frankenstein: Through the Eyes of the Monster - BA - 25% (2)
Ippatsu Gyakuten Gambling King no Michi - AA - 50% (2)
Metal Slug - GGGGGGG - 100% (7)
Quake - GGAGAGA - 79% (7) (1 SR)
Tsuukai Slot Shooting - AB - 25% (2)
Not really a ton to say about this one. I feel like Metal Slug and Quake doing well isn't a big surprise, but I guess Gambling King did a bit better than might have been expected.
Games for this topic:
Corpse Killer: Graveyard Edition
Farland Saga: Toki no Michishirube
Pebble Beach Golf Links
Return Fire
Sakura Wars 2
Zero Divide: The Final Conflict
As you might have figured out by now, the Saturn GAB is winding down. It was my fervent wish that the translation for Sakura Wars 2 would be finished before it ended, and it has been! Unfortunately, a few other games aren't likely to be so lucky (astute readers might notice that some of the games that are left over have in-progress translations), but I'm glad we got this one. Of course, this is also the 100th topic for Saturn, which is a pretty respectable amount for a system that's generally considered to have a somewhat small library (though really, it's only the US library that's on the small side). We also have Return Fire, which is an unreleased game, but the developer made the unreleased Saturn version available.
Corpse Killer: Graveyard Edition - A
ReplyDeleteFarland Saga: Toki no Michishirube - G
Pebble Beach Golf Links - B
Return Fire - B
Sakura Wars 2 - G
Zero Divide: The Final Conflict - B
Ey brah, it's time for me to tell ya about Corpse Killa. Tero has come down with de Zombie Brainrot so I will be explaining dis game to you, mon. Corpse Killa is a game where you will shoot many zombies and watch hilarious cutscenes featuring me and some dumb woman who you definitely shouldn't listen to, brah. Now drink your zombie king c***tail, it is the only cure for your brain after playing dis game, hahahaha! ...AHEM. Okay, that's out of my system now. Corpse Killer is probably the dumbest game ever made, though it's completely in on the joke. It's sort of like a pseudo-light gun game, though it doesn't actually support any Saturn light gun, and it's also extremely easy and dumb, with most zombies just walking across the screen and not actively threatening you in any way. The entire game is shot in live action, and the zombies deliberately look as terrible as possible. Sometimes they jump towards the screen, and you do have to shoot those ones, and there are also powerups that fall from the top of the screen that can give you special ammo (which is needed to beat certain enemy types), though some powerups are harmful and must not be shot. The game is essentially cyclic in terms of its structure, you do a couple stages, then go to the fortress to rescue one of your captured comrades, then go to the graveyard and repeat. Once all comrades are rescued you can face the final boss and beat the game. Inbetween cycles you can do subquests for either of your friends or get more ammo if you're running out, though the game is inherently kind of repetitive and this is probably its biggest weakness. Pretty much the only reason to play the game is for the cutscenes, which are hilarious, in particular the driver is by far the highlight of the game. This makes it very hard to rate, because the gameplay isn't particularly great but it's also kind of not the point, and in a certain sense it also sort of enhances the cheesiness of the game without ever being too offensive as to get in the way, though I feel the game is slightly too repetitive for G. It's still a decent A though if you want to turn your brain off for a while.
Farland Saga 2 is basically just a classic example of taking a game that had one major flaw and fixing it for the sequel. When we covered the first game, I noted that it was a charming if somewhat basic SRPG that was hindered by overly slow combat. The sequel retains most of the charm (though it's definitely a lot sillier), but the battle system now runs much faster. Movement animations are now lightning quick and the AI no longer takes forever to decide what to do, so battles now progress at a much brisker pace. At first I was a bit annoyed with the text autoscrolling so fast (as it takes me a while to translate it all) but it turns out if you press the confirm button while the text is scrolling it will stop and wait for you, which is a little weird but it works. There's not really too much else to say, this is still a fairly simple game, but it's cute and funny and when you couple that with a solid battle engine it's generally a recipe for a solid product.
Pebble Beach was another one of those games where I swear I've played it before, it looks like this is because Pebble Beach, Harakanaru Augusta and Valora Valley all use the same (awful) interface, just with different courses. As such, I remembered that this game does give the option to turn on a one-button swing, which sort of helps deal with its awful swing meter, but doesn't really deal with many of the game's other issues. I do kind of like the overview they give of each hole before you play it, though the load times after this are atrocious and the actual gameplay is a huge letdown compared to this initial introduction. Putting also completely sucks, as usual, with the amount of power needed to sink putts being virtually impossible to gauge. I can't believe they made (at least) 3 games using this engine.
DeleteReturn Fire may be an unreleased game on Saturn, but Saturn wasn't missing much. It's identical to the PS1 version except that it's much choppier when any kind of action is happening. This is still basically a 2P-only game and a fairly boring one at that, with the maps barely mattering at all even though there's a ton of them since there's no way to have any presence in multiple locations at the same time, forcing you to leave your base totally undefended any time you want to go on the attack. Maybe if this game was 2 on 2 or something it might have played somewhat better, but it just doesn't work as a 1v1 game.
One of the most surprising things about the original Sakura Wars was just how much they got right the first time, even in the original game pretty much all of the series conventions are intact and they pretty much nailed the formula right from the get-go. It's not too surprising then that Sakura Wars 2 doesn't really change all that much, though what might be the most surprising is that it doesn't even change out the cast, which is a bit odd for a dating sim sort of game. There are a few new characters, but the second game (and actually, the third and fourth games as well) maintain the same protagonist and most of the same girls, which does feel a little weird since you can absolutely pair up with one girl in the previous game and then just completely ditch her for someone else this time around. Still though, the cast and setting are still charming and the production values are still completely insane for a game from this era, and compared to the previous game it's even bigger, with the game being quite a bit longer and having more girls to choose from. In many ways this feels like it was intended to be the Saturn's swan song, and once again it's super unfortunate that it was never localized, but at least you can play it now. In terms of mechanical changes from the first game there's barely any, the biggest one is that sometimes if you let half the time elapse when choosing a response, you'll get a new response now, though there's usually a blank space to indicate this will happen (very rarely it changes one of the existing responses instead). These changes are largely inconsequential though and if you didn't play the games back to back you probably wouldn't realize it wasn't in the first game. Overall, I do still sort of have the same criticism of the game as with all the entries that the strategy battles sometimes feel like they go on a bit overly long, and with how infrequently they occur I don't necessarily feel the series ties these mechanics together all that well, but the rest of the game is so solid that it's not a big issue. Easily one of Saturn's most ambitious titles and a fun game that pretty much anyone who enjoys anime or Japanese games should play.
Zero Divide continues the series trend of getting worse with every game, as the third game in the series is the worst. This game isn't really all that new, it's kind of a director's cut version of Zero Divide 2 (it has all the same characters and movesets), but with some missing features and other issues. By far the biggest issue with the game is that compared to Zero Divide 2, it plays at basically double the speed. This is simply way too fast for this game, it makes almost all moves unreactable and basically turns it into a button masher, especially because this is not a game where you can simply hold back to block, you have to block with a button. Even worse, the increased speed also results in a drastically shorter input window for virtually everything, including short hops, which are almost impossible to pull off consistently in this version and are completely vital to offense as normal jumps are uselessly floaty. They've also cut out the ability to view the command list when pausing the game in this version for some reason, which is annoying as this was one of the only good features about Zero Divide 2. About the only good thing about this version is the new visual effect for when your parts get damaged, which looks cool, but as before it still kinda barely matters and the game is too mashy for it to have any real consequence anyway. If only Zoom had just stuck to making Dolucky games this generation.
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