This topic is now closed
Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Baroque - AGGGG - 90% (5)
Black Dawn - GBB - 33% (3)
J.League Jikkyou Honoo no Striker - BB - 0% (3)
Prisoner of Ice - BBB - 0% (3)
Pu-Li-Ru-La - ABBA - 25% (4)
Tokimeki Memorial: Taisen Puzzle-Dama - AA - 50% (2)
I was surprised to see no SRs for Baroque, unless I just somehow missed one. Make sure to figure out your SRs soon!
Games for this topic:
Angel Paradise Vol 2
Delisoba Deluxe
Guardian Force
Langrisser 5
Panzer Dragoon Saga
Phantasmagoria
Here we are, the last topic for Saturn. Hard to believe we've been at this for almost 4 years, not bad for a system that is often written off in the west. I have to admit, of all of the games left for the final topic, I'm most looking forward to Delisoba Deluxe, simply due to how weird it is. In any case, make sure to think about how you want to spend your remaining SRs, and choose a game for the revote topics if you wish to. And of course, thanks for contributing to GAB About Games for all these years.
Angel Paradise Vol 2 - A
ReplyDeleteDelisoba Deluxe - A
Guardian Force - G
Langrisser 5 - G
Panzer Dragoon Saga - A
Phantasmagoria - B
Angel Paradise Vol 2 makes one significant improvement over its predecessor, but it's still not great. The single, significant improvement is that the slide puzzle games are gone, it's now just all movie puzzles. It seems funny to praise the removal of a certain type of content but when it's slide puzzles I stand by it. However, the movie puzzles in this game still aren't nearly as good as the ones in Girls in Motion Puzzle. There are several major problems. For starters, the puzzles are broken up into too many pieces, meaning that very little happens in each one, and for some piece shapes, like the vertical bars, it's impossible to see what's happening in them. Secondly, the movie puzzles aren't as well-directed. Large areas of the movie where no movement occurs are common, and the colour depth of the movies also isn't great, resulting in a fair number of puzzles where like half the puzzle is just brown. This leaves you with no choice but to do trial and error matching based on the shape of the pieces, which is lame. The game very heavily revolves around its combo system, but it's very easy to manipulate, just figure out which piece type will create a lot of combos and ignore all pieces that aren't that type to win easily. There's also just not a lot of content here, there's 20 stages and that's it. You can finish the game in about 45 minutes or so and there's basically no reason to come back to it. It's still a tolerable 45 minutes, but Girls in Motion Puzzle is much better.
I had no idea what to expect from Delisoba Deluxe, but the gist of it is that it's a fairly simple outrun style racing game. It has only a single course, though it's fairly lengthy and has a lot of obstacles. There's a couple alternate modes, most notably the Coin Link mode, where places coins all over the course and you get bonuses for collecting them quickly. There's also a surprisingly indepth map editor, which you wouldn't really expect for a promotional game like this, though it also seems somewhat buggy. Overall, it's not terrible, it actually controls fairly decently and the coin mode is interesting, there's just not a lot here. An interesting oddity at least.
Guardian Force is really cool. It's a shmup where you control a tank, and the game's unique mechanic is that you have a turret that you can swivel left and right. This sounds simple, but it allows for a ton of interesting movement options that other shmups don't. Controlling the turret to maintain fire on a boss while evading their attacks feels very satisfying when done well, though it's certainly not easy as the game is quite challenging. Luckily, this is a generally well-made shmup across the board, it's got that clean, very visually readable retro shmup style, your hitbox is nicely small, and there's a ton of ways to score points and power up the tank too. I particularly want to call attention to the bosses, which are pretty much all cool fights, they're huge and have multiple breakable parts, and they can generally flood the screen with plasma to a pretty significant extent, these really show off the potential of the game's mechanics. Probably one of Saturn's best shmups overall, and notably an exclusive as well.
I already somewhat forshadowed my opinion about Langrisser 5 when we talked about Langrisser 4. Langrisser 4 essentially reverted the series back to Langrisser 2's battle system but added a tedious speed system to it that slows the game to a crawl. Langrisser 5 wisely adjusts this system so that units and their commander always act together (this change was also backported to Langrisser 4 for the PS1 version), which makes it play way better. I still miss the significantly more experimental battle system from Langrisser 3, but this is now a competent engine. There are a few weird things about this game though. For starters, you have an unusually small number of units this time around. To make up for this, the main characters are extremely powerful, but this does kind of reduce the strategy a tad. On the plus side, at least the story is interesting, it's sort of a little more sci-fi ish this time around (even though technically this takes place very shortly after the events of the 4th game) and I do like the fact that there's some intrigue going on at the start, even if it does begin in exactly the same way as every other Langrisser game by forcing you to run from a powerful enemy in the first battle (this is becoming a meme at this point). Visually it also looks great and I particularly want to call attention to the OST, which is very good. Overall, I think the PS1 version of 4 is probably a little bit better, but this is still a solid game.
DeletePanzer Dragoon Saga was certainly not what I expected from a game many call one of the best RPGs of all time. I expected to spend this review comparing this game to Final Fantasy 7, but you can put that comparison out of your mind right now. Not only is it in no way comparable in quality, they're so drastically different in terms of gameplay that the comparison is largely pointless. It's kind of like comparing Symphony of the Night and Crash Bandicoot. Yes, the difference in quality is so drastic I have no problem saying that Symphony is the better game, but apart from the fact that both games involve jumping that's about where the useful part of the comparison ends. Panzer Dragoon Saga barely qualifies as an RPG at all, although you do technically level your stats barely matter and battles more closely resemble puzzles than anything else. The game is also incredibly linear and short, with an extreme focus on cutscenes to tell almost every part of the story. It actually bears some resemblance to Koudelka, which we covered recently for PS1, they're both very presentation-heavy games that are about the same length, though I find Koudelka to be a better game in pretty much every way. For starters, there's the graphics. Panzer Dragoon Saga is a fully 3D game, with no prerendered backgrounds or 2D sprites of any kind, and its graphics have aged atrociously. Environments are incredibly generic and repetitive and draw distance is incredibly short, resulting in extremely visually dull low poly environments that are almost never interesting to explore. Perhaps luckily, there isn't really much exploration to do in the first place, as although there are side areas and things you can shoot along the way, this is predominantly a hallway game with basically no important items to pick up, basically everything you'll get is either junk you can just sell for money or consumables you'll never need because the game is so easy, so if you want to just blow through these areas there's not much stopping you other than random encounters.
Speaking of, we need to discuss the battle system. This is easily the highlight of the game. Surprisingly, battles in Panzer Dragoon Saga are actually very similar to the rest of the games in the series. They take place with you flying on your dragon, and the dragon's homing laser and the pilot's gun comprise your main attacks. As before, you can rotate the dragon to get a different perspective on the battle, and this is completely vital to the combat system, as enemies use different attacks depending on your relative position to them, and also have weakspots that can only be attacked from certain sides. Combat occurs in semi-real time, you have a charge bar that builds up which you need to launch attacks, but you can move around the field at any time, and so can the opponents. This is kind of cool and the visuals here are actually pretty good, a noticeable step above the rest of the game. The only real problem is that most of these fights are quite simple. For example, if you're facing an enemy who can't attack if you're behind it, the strategy is simply to get behind the enemy, then homing laser them twice or so to win. They might try to manuever around you, but then you just move to their back again and repeat until they die. Different enemies have different gimmicks (for example, a common one is that their weakspot can only be targetted from an area where they can strike back), but once you know the basic gist of how to handle each enemy these fights are fairly trivial. It's also a bit concerning that there aren't many of them for each area, so you may end up seeing the same battles a bunch of times. Luckily grinding is basically never needed due to the low level of difficulty so it doesn't get too repetitive. The boss battles use the same system but generally have some additional gimmicks, for example the first boss uses an attack where it will charge at you. This is unavoidable, but if positioned properly it will crash into the wall behind you and stun itself, letting you get a bunch of free shots in. We should also probably talk about sound. This game has full voice acting, which is impressive for its time, though it's not translated for the US release, and the soundtrack is also pretty decent, this is also probably one of the highlights of the package, though I feel like this causes some scenes to go on pretty long since you can't fast-forward the dialogue in the in-engine cutscenes. There's really not too much else to say about the game, technically some towns exist but they're small and simple and subquests are nearly nonexistent. You'll basically just fly through an area, fight some random battles, fight a boss, see some cutscenes, move to the next area, and repeat. The game is pretty short, so it doesn't particularly wear out its welcome, but I also don't find any part of it particularly memorable (in particular, its story doesn't grab me in any way, it's very basic and the characters are very one-dimensional, even though many people praise this part of the game). I feel like this is easily one of the most overrated games of all time, even with Saturn having relatively few RPGs this would not make my top 5, and I don't think this would even be top 30 on PS1. In any case, if you are one of the people that love this game, definitely try out Koudelka because it's fairly similar in a lot of ways.
DeletePhantasmagoria is a game that does a few things well, but it's actually one of my most disliked games overall from this GAB. The basic gist of the game is that it's a point and click adventure game that uses FMV mixed with prerendered backgrounds to achieve an almost full FMV look. From a technical perspective it's kind of impressive, though the resolution has taken a pretty significant hit on Saturn, resulting in a lot of blue outlines that kind of ruin the effect. Nevertheless, the game still generally looks and sounds pretty good. The interface is not great, the cursor is way too big and on Saturn, the UI has been relegated to the pause screen so using items is slower, but it's still tolerable. This is also an extremely violent and gory game, except not on Saturn, as the game is heavily censored with a lot of stuff cut out, but that's also not really the problem with the game. Nor is the fact that the house is confusing to explore and getting anywhere takes forever the main problem (but by now most of these issues would probably have pushed the game down to A). The game's real issue is with its storytelling. See, this game violates the fundamental story structure that almost every other game in existence follows. In most games, something bad happens prior to the start of the game that is the motivation for the player's quest, and the result is that that bad thing is mitigated or resolved. For example, let's look at Dark Seed, which we covered a few weeks ago. In the intro cutscene, the player is implanted with an alien embryo that will kill him and everyone else if not dealt with. By completing the game, you get rid of it, save humanity, and meet a girl. This progression from problem to resolution gives the player motivation to keep playing the game, and actually, I think Dark Seed's story is pretty good. However, Phantasmagoria is the complete opposite. When you start the game, everything is fantastic! The main character has a loving family, a promising career, and a nice new house. There is literally no issue presented prior to the start of gameplay, the player is just left to wander the new house out of boredom or something. Every bad thing that happens in this game happens as a direct result of the player's actions, and everything the player does makes things worse and worse. It's basically the opposite of the standard storytelling above, where the more you play the game and the more puzzles you solve, the worse things get, all the way up until the game ends (don't bother asking if the game has a happy ending). To me, this completely removes any incentive to progress through the game. After all, as long as you don't complete chapter 1, everyone lives happily ever after! Just like Wargames, the only winning move is not to play. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that Sierra made this game, considering that making their games unwinnable because of some mistake you made at the beginning of the game has been their calling card for decades. Even if you enjoy watching people suffer, you'd probably want to play this on PC instead, but I'd probably recommend pretty much anything else, even other B rated games like Prisoner of Ice before this game.
Delete