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Last Topic's Ratings:
Battle Arena Toshinden URA - BBGAA - 40% {5}
Bug Too - BAB - 17% (3)
Dejig: Thomas McKnight Art Collection - AG - 75% (2)
Detana Twinbee Yahho Deluxe Pack - GGGGG - 100% (5)
Masters: Harukanaru Augusta 3 - BB - 0% (2)
Thunder Storm LX-3 and Road Blaster - BB - 0% (2)
What a redemption story for Dejig. Spared becoming another franchise where every game gets the low range!
Games for this topic:
Andretti Racing
DragonHeart: Fire & Steel
J League Victory Goal 97
Sega Ages: Shukudai ga Tant-R
Shin Megami Tensei Devil Summoner
Sokko Seitokai: Sonic Council
Strangely, there's no translation available for SMT: Devil Summoner, but there is a guide available for it that's pretty thorough. Sokko Seitokai also looks interesting.
Andretti Racing - A
ReplyDeleteDragonHeart: Fire & Steel - B
J League Victory Goal 97 - G
Sega Ages: Shukudai ga Tant-R - A
Shin Megami Tensei Devil Summoner - B
Sokko Seitokai: Sonic Council - G
Andretti Racing is a solid game but ideally you want to be playing the PS1 version. The game is an interesting game that combines NASCAR-style Stock Car racing with F1 Racing, and generally does so fairly competently. Something I really like about the game is its sense of style. Not only does it have good music, before every race there's a TNN-style broadcast where the commentators tell you about the track and the weather conditions that really helps add to the sense of immersion and I like these segments quite a lot. Gameplay-wise, it's also pretty decent. It's kind of arcade-style, though pitting and car damage are both factors you have to pay attention to, making it play a little bit more like a hybrid. Races can be a touch on the long side (this is sort of unavoidable if you want pitting to matter), but not so much so that it starts to be a problem. On PS1, I think this is actually quite a solid title, but the Saturn version has some downgrades. For starters, the Saturn version actually has a minor upgrade to its visuals, with better car models and colour, but it comes with quite a few drawbacks. The first is load time. I usually don't gripe about load time too much, I actually don't think load times in this era tend to be too bad (it's really next gen that they become egregious in some cases), but the load times on the Saturn version are quite long and notably are far longer than on PS1. A more significant issue is that the draw distance is significantly reduced on Saturn. You can constantly see the track drawing in in front of you on Saturn, whereas this is rare on PS1, and this is quite a big deal when racing the F1 cars, which are very fast. Thirdly, the controls are tighter on PS1. Neither game supports the system's analog controller, which is regrettable, but on PS1 the controls feel better adapted to the DPad, which is critical for racing the F1 cars. Overall, I feel like F1 feels fairly bad on Saturn, whereas it feels pretty decent on PS1. Luckily, the stock car racing is quite good on both systems and you can opt to play that mode exclusively if you prefer, but it's kind of hard not to recommend the PS1 version when you could have both.
Dragonheart feels a little worse compared to the PS1 version. I don't know if my patience for it just ran out, but I swear the controls feel more sluggish on the Saturn version, which turns what was already a fairly mediocre experience into a pretty bad one. In particular, the dragon fight at the end of the second stage feels totally awful on Saturn and I don't recall it being quite this bad on PS1. It's still slightly playable but I can't say I'd recommend it.
The original Devil Summoner is, in my opinion, probably the weakest title in the SMT franchise. In almost every way, it's a step in the wrong direction, while contemporary games like Shin Megami Tensei If, Majin Tensei 2, and especially Persona streamlined and improved the core aspects of the game to make it more enjoyable to play, Devil Summoner goes in completely the opposite direction where it plays like the oldest games in the franchise but includes new annoying mechanics that make it even more tedious. The big issue here is the new loyalty system. Unlike in previous games where you could just tell your demons what to do during battle, they will now simply act on their own (which often means not acting at all) until you raise their loyalty. Raising loyalty differs from demon to demon but is always tedious. It might make sense if demons could level in this game (compare Ronde, which also has loyalty but demons CAN level in that game), but like other early Megaten titles, they can't, forcing you to fuse them (and reset their loyalty in the process) to create newer and better demons. Combined with the return of the always annoying demon communication system and magnetite systems from the original Shin Megami Tensei games, this acts as a pretty strong incentive to use demons only as much as absolutely necessary, and generally makes the game feel annoying to play. Beyond this, the game plays almost exactly like SMT 1 and 2, there are no other particular innovations here and the game does little to make use of Saturn's increased power compared to previous systems. If you do want to play this game, it's strongly recommended to play the PSP version, which has many enhancements, including making loyalty way less obnoxious, or just play Soul Hackers instead.
DeleteSonic Council is a really weird fighting game that kind of reminds me of Asuka 120, though I don't think it's quite as good as that game. In some ways, it actually feels kinda modern for its time, with a bunch of SNK-style movement options like hyper hops and guard cancel rolls, though it's also got a ton of completely wacky character designs that you wouldn't see in most standard fighting games. For example, the first character, Ai, has a very standard style Dragon Punch (though it also juggles), but her "fireball" is an extremely slow fire breath move and her standard super is raging demon. Her raging demon is also cancellable, not only can you combo into it, but you can also, say, pressure out a guard cancel roll and then immediately cancel into the raging demon to punish (it's just QCF + PK), you can even cancel out of specials into it so there's very few safe times to guard cancel roll against her, making her corner pressure extremely scary. She is by no means alone in having a bunch of crazy stuff however, pretty much every character has some bonkers tools, like the Ninja who can zip all over the screen and the fireball character who has King's Double Fireball but way safer and harder to jump over. It's definitely a little on the bananas side and I don't know how much depth it really has (you get meter absurdly quick and a lot of stuff seems super safe), but it is kind of fun in a wacky sort of way.