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Last Topic's Ratings:
Crusader: No Remorse - AGGAGAG - 79% (7)
Heir of Zendor: The Legend and The Land - BB - 0% (2)
Jewels of the Oracle - GB - 50% (2)
Koutetsu Reiiki: Steeldom - GBB - 33% (3)
Sega Ages: Phantasy Star Collection - GGGGG - 100% (5)
World League Soccer 98 - AA - 50% (2)
More mixed compared to the the PS1 topic. I wonder what will be the next Saturn game to draw out 10+ ratings?
Games for this topic:
All-Japan Pro Wrestling Featuring Virtua
Courier Crisis
Eiyuu Shigan: Gal Act Heroism
Heisei Tensai Bakabon: Susume! Bakabons
Junclassic CC & Rope Club
Tactics Formula
This was one of the most unmanageably long titles ever. I wanted to try to get the "featuring Virtua" part in there, but it just wasn't happening within 80 characters. Tactics Formula also looks like kind of an interesting game.
All-Japan Pro Wrestling Featuring Virtua - A
ReplyDeleteCourier Crisis - A
Eiyuu Shigan: Gal Act Heroism - A
Heisei Tensai Bakabon: Susume! Bakabons - A
Junclassic CC & Rope Club - A
Tactics Formula - B
All-Japan Pro Wrestling Featuring Virtua is okay. As its name implies, it is a wrestling game featuring a couple characters from Virtua Fighter, though it still plays very much like a conventional wrestling game. Unlike some of the more nuanced wrestlers from this game, this game is still fairly mashy, in particular when it comes to grabs whomever mashes more gets their throw, which results in a ton of mashing most of the time. Each character has some special moves they can do when they get damaged enough, though I kind of don't like the fact that this sort of punishes you for doing well, and the detection on inputs in this game is not great. The biggest issue though is that this is another one of those games where it's almost impossible to ever pin anyone. If you have the crowd on your side, you can effectively always escape pins at 2, making the health meter largely pointless, which is generally the mark of a wrestling game with some issues. You can eventually break various parts of the wrestlers and this can lead to a knock out, which is essentially the way you have to win matches most of the time, but this takes forever. It does look and sound decent and there aren't many other Wrestling games on Saturn but it doesn't stay fun for very long in my opinion.
Courier Crisis is not quite as bad as I had been led to believe. It's essentially an early version of Crazy Taxi, you have to fly through a city at high speeds collecting packages from one location and delivering them to another. Obviously, the Crazy Taxi concept is fun and I think this game actually does Crazy Taxi one better in the comedy factor, with very energetic presentation and no shortage of chaos from civilians and traffic, but it's not as well-polished gameplay wise. One of the biggest issues is that there's an arrow that shows the way to your next destination, but the second you pick up or drop off a package, it changes instantly to the next target, frequently forcing you to make a 90 degree turn that you couldn't possibly react to without memorizing the route ahead of time. This could possibly have been solved by either showing you the route before the stage, or simply showing a second arrow that shows the destination to your next objective, but either way something needed to be done. Apart from this one issue it's not too bad, many people complained about the controls, but I think they likely weren't using the power turn move, which does give you the necessary accuracy to fly through the city at high speeds. While the navigation issue is annoying, there are moments where it all comes together and the game is pretty fun, I just wish they were more consistent.
Gal Act Heroism is a weird game that honestly I don't care for very much, but there are a couple decent things about it. The basic gist of the game is that you play as a team of adventurers who go around doing missions for various people. In every town, you can access a mission board and take missions, which sort of act like sidequests from other RPGs, except these are the "main game" here. The vast majority of the game involves walking around and trying to find the right person to talk to. The game has an absolute boatload of dialogue, and the mission dialogue is all voiced, which is kind of impressive. Thankfully, if you don't know where to go (which you probably won't, even using google translate I often got lost) there's someone you can talk to in each town who will tell you what to do in exchange for a tiny amount of money, and their advice updates with every step of the quest, which is handy. Sometimes you'll have to do battles as part of the missions. As far as I can tell, there are only scripted battles in the game, if there are areas where random battles can occur I never found any, which creates a lot of issues. For starters, this makes it vital to do the missions in the "correct" order. If you take a mission and it forces you to do a battle against an enemy that's 10 levels up, you'll have no way to win and just be forced to abandon the mission. You can do this at any time and with no real penalty, but your progress will be lost. At any rate, the battles comprise maybe 1% of the game, which is too bad because the battle system is actually kind of interesting, you get a certain number of action points every turn and can choose multiple actions, similarly to Chrono Cross. The biggest issue is there's just way too much dialogue. There's a reason that most RPGs have like a couple story scenes followed by an area where you just do a ton of fights, the story to gameplay ratio in this game is totally messed up. I spent my first 30 minutes playing it without even getting into a single battle because I just had to chase some drunk all over town (which has to be one of the worst introductory missions of all time), and even once you can start choosing your own missions it's really not that much better. I could see how some people might enjoy this but it would definitely need a fan translation to be fun.
DeleteHeisei Tensai Bakabons is an interesting game with great animation but I feel the actual gameplay is only average. It's a puzzle game that somewhat resembles Jammes, the idea is to sandwich pieces of a given type between pieces of a different type. For example, a line consisting of red green green green red would count as a match, but red green yellow green red doesn't (there's not enough yellows between the greens to count, you have to sandwich at least 2). The biggest issue with the game is that matches have very little power. 2-chains are hard to set up with these mechanics and send like 1 jam block to the opponent, which doesn't matter at all, you need at least a 4-chain to do any kind of damage, which is almost impossible to set up without using the "wildcard" pieces found at the bottom of the stack. These allow for far more types of matches and are generally the key to setting up big combos, but in the event that both players end up buried and can't access their wildcard pieces you're in for a match that's going to last like 10 minutes. It also feels like the game mostly revolves around luck as many of the wildcard matches are unintuitive and they're pretty much the only way to make big combos. It's unfortunate, because the game's animations have a ton of personality and there's a lot of clips from what is presumably a pretty silly anime as well, if this game had slightly better mechanics it would probably be quite fun.
Junclassic CC & Rope Club is essentially a "non-insane" version of Valora Valley Golf. They share the same engine, but rather than using it to make the most awful and unplayable course possible, it's a much more standard golf course. Among golf games of its time, this game isn't too atrocious, it is actually 3D, though it has a number of issues with putting and the power meter. An interesting thing to note about this game is that it actually provides the option for a 1-click swing, similar to Mario Golf Super Rush, where you only have to set the power and it hits the perfect impact automatically. While this does kinda dumb down the experience, it also makes the game far more playable (it turns out Valora Valley also has a version of this as well, but it still requires 2 clicks, it just makes the impact easier to hit). With the aid of the one-click swing, I think this might just be barely good enough for A, but there's still really nothing that's even in the same league as Mario Golf this gen.
DeleteI put a fair amount of time into Tactics Formula, but it's just not a fun game in any respect. The basic gist of the game is that it's a turn based racing game that simulates an F1 race. The track is divided into lanes, and on each turn, you decide how many nodes forward you want to go and in what lane, subject to two main restrictions - you cannot collide with other cars and lanes will have speed restrictions on turns. You are warned if you attempt to break either of these conditions, so there's no real trial and error, and if you choose to execute an invalid move you just stop dead and lose a turn. The number of nodes you move in a turn becomes your current speed, with each node representing 30 km/h, so if you move 5 nodes, you're going 150km/h. This is relevant because you can only discard so much speed per node, if you come into a turn at 300km/h, but need to take the turn at 90km/h, you need like 4 nodes to decelerate to that speed, and if there aren't enough, you're going to stop dead and lose a turn. Occasionally, rival cars will open up a "slipstream" lane, which is separate from the regular lanes and usually allows you to move faster. That's basically the entire game. You choose some nodes each turn, then do it over and over until the race ends. The biggest issue here is that the process of choosing your action involves very little actual strategy. Since you can see how each move will work out before you choose it, it's usually quite trivial to choose the best one, you just pick the path that lets you move the furthest along the track, save for a handful of times where you want to slow down just a little before a big turn. The biggest issue with the game is the enemy cars, they aren't really bound to lanes the way you are, and virtually always block at least 2 lanes if not all 3, making passing them virtually impossible. Getting into a slipstream behind a rival only to blow past him on a turn might actually be fun, but since the rival will block all the lanes and thus make the pass impossible it never really works out that way. Instead, you just keep picking the only options the game gives you and basically just watch the game play itself, which is about as interesting as it sounds. I feel like they may not have playtested this one that much because I'm hard-pressed to see anyone really enjoying it.