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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Death Crimson - BBBB - 0% (4)
Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom - GGGAG - 90% (5)
GT 24 - BBB - 0% (3)
Johnny Bazookatone - BBA - 17% (3)
Maboroshi no Black Bass - BB - 0% (2)
Sengoku Blade - GGGG - 100% (4)
Well, this one was certainly full of ups and downs. I didn't know anything about Death Crimson's formidable reputation when I put that topic together, but I sure learned the hard way.
Games for this topic:
Fighting Vipers
Kumitate Battle: Kuttu Ketto
Moujya
Shienryu
Slam Dunk
Wangan Trial Love
It's the 50th topic for Saturn GAB, so we've got kind of a big title here in Fighting Vipers. Also Moujya, which I've wanted to put up for some time now.
Fighting Vipers - B
ReplyDeleteKumitate Battle: Kuttu Ketto - G (SR)
Moujya - G
Shienryu - G
Slam Dunk - B
Wangan Trial Love - B
Fighting Vipers is a game that has potential but is held back by some massive issues. At its core, it is a string-based 3D fighting game, which reminds me a bit of something like Flying Dragon. Its unique mechanic is that every character wears armor on both their upper and lower body, which can be broken by taking too many hits. Broken armor persists across rounds, and once your armor is broken you take more damage from certain types of attacks, so you ideally want to prevent this for as long as possible. There are also certain strong hits that break armor easily, but are typically slow and punishable. This is kind of an interesting system that gives some risk / reward to the gameplay. Speaking of risk / reward, there's also the guard and attack system. By pressing back + punch or back + kick, you can perform a special move that has armor against mid and high attacks, but is unsafe, which you can use to escape pressure. Unfortunately, this is also the biggest issue with the game. Virtually none of the game's strings are true combos, so you can freely mash out the guard and attack during strings to get free hits, which severely discourages offense. You might think, well, I'll just stop my string before the final hit to prevent them from doing this, but that's not viable either as most strings are unsafe on hit if you do only the first couple attacks. Maybe if playing against a real player they wouldn't be able to react to this situation, but the AI can do it easily and will always punish you if you do this. This forces you to stick to only your simplest strings, making things like juggle combos nonexistent (though the game's combo system is extremely basic anyway). Even throws aren't safe, if you land a throw, the opponent can perform a reversal that causes you to get thrown instead, rather than a simple throw break, you end up taking damage instead for successfully landing your throw, which is idiotic. All of this tends to encourage extremely passive play, you'll just want to stand block all the time because lows are weak and virtually never lead to any significant damage, so you basically just wait for the opponent to attack, then punish them for whatever it was that they did, which simply isn't very fun. It's unfortunate because with proper frame data that didn't allow mashing out of combos this game would probably have been at least A.
Kumitate Battle: Kuttu Ketto is a weird game, but it's actually a heck of a lot of fun. I had no clue what this was even going to be at first, but it turns out it's a strategy RPG that somewhat resembles Front Mission, except there's no story and it's only arena-style battles. You have to start by creating your three characters, who are little blobby men of sorts. You can then buy parts for them. There's some obvious stuff, like weapons and clothing, but there's also a ton of other stuff, like ears, hats, ponytails, shoes, and all kinds of other weird stuff. Everything you can buy affects your stats, and many of them give you new attacks you can use in battle. I made myself a bunny man, a cook, and a mage. The bunny man was extremely fast and has a buff he can use to make himself even faster. The cook hits like a truck with his knife, and the mage has an AOE spell. Matches in the game are 3 on 3 and take place in square arenas, but there's some varied terrain. Things like dirt and water slow your movement, poison swamps hurt you to cross, and blocks and trees block your movement entirely. Special moves require energy, which charges when it's not your turn, so characters that are very fast get a lot of turns, but they won't typically have a lot of energy to use, while characters who are slow can use powerful specials every time they act, which is an interesting balancing mechanic. Like in many SRPGs, it's preferable to hit from the side or back, and enemies will counter regular attacks, but not specials. Speaking of specials, there's usually a little timing-based minigame to play beforehand to determine their power, sort of like in Mario RPG. You also have to be careful with AOEs because friendly fire is a thing. I didn't see any specials that could heal, but fruit and meat periodically shows up on the battlefield, which you can run over and pick up to heal. Winning matches makes money to buy more parts and sometimes earns prize parts, for example after the first set I won some laser eyes for my bunny man that gave him a ranged attack. It's a very silly game, but there's actually a ton to it and it's very interesting to play. I showed this off to one of my friends and that time I ended up with a busty cat woman with a throwing axe who meows cutely while she puts a hatchet into your skull, which sums up this game pretty well. I miss these kinds of insane Japanese games.
DeleteI originally intended to put Moujya up some time ago, but upon playing it, you can probably see why. Whereas Money Idol Exchanger combines making change with Magical Drop, Moujya combines the same change mechanic with Puyo Puyo. I'll admit, the first time I played this game, I wasn't too impressed by it. Money Idol Exchanger works because Magical Drop is a fairly simple game, and the change mechanic adds just enough extra complexity to make it interesting. Puyo Puyo, though, is already one of the most complex puzzle games out there, so adding the change mechanic makes it borderline unapproachable. Did anyone ever play Puyo and think "boy, I like this idea, but I wish it was way harder to play?". There's a reason most Puyo variants make the game somewhat easier to play (ie, Deron Dero Dero, Yakyuu Puzzle Stadium), not harder. I was just going to slap an A on this game and be done with it, but because I'm too stubborn to admit defeat I spent a while grinding out matches against the AI and after a while I was actually starting to see some of the patterns. It helps that the new coin always goes in the bottom right, I sometimes get confused about where it will go in Money Idol Exchanger, and you can use the 5 and 50 coins to clear garbage blocks fast, but there's no question that this game is super hard and playing it hurts my brain. At least it does have excellent presentation, the art and music are both great, and unlike Money Idol Exchanger's PS1 port, there are absolutely no control issues or anything here. I suppose it is a fairly solid package overall, but don't expect to get very far if you're not willing to put in a lot of effort to learn the game.
Shienryu is a classic vertical shmup that reminds me a lot of Raiden. Like Raiden, it's a fairly simple game with 3 different weapons, but the appeal is in the high level of polish and classic mechanics. Something that stands out to me immediately is related to this game's visual design. It looks very good from a graphical perspective, but visually I find it to be one of the best shmups in terms of bullet readability as well. All enemy bullets use a certain blue colour that the game wisely doesn't use for anything else, and I feel this just kind of works from a gameplay perspective, you just quickly get attuned to "avoid blue!" and I find I can quickly recognize and avoid tricky bullet patterns more easily in this game compared to many others. The game also has an excellent soundtrack, and generally plays very well. There's a PS1 port of this game (under the name Gekioh Shooting King), but it's somewhat gimmicky and is missing some content from this version, but we'll discuss that more when we come to it.
DeleteMaking a basketball game based on Slam Dunk feels like it should be a sure winner, but it's been a struggle, and that continues here on Saturn. As you might imagine, the Saturn game combines scenes from the anime with basketball matches to create a retelling of the game's story. The anime cutscenes are actually quite good, they have good quality and there's quite a lot of them, but the same can't be said for the gameplay. It basically plays like a much simpler and worse version of the original NBA in the Zone. First of all, we have to discuss defensive play (when you don't have the ball). Simply put, there isn't any. Literally. When on defense, all of the players are controlled by the AI and you have no option other than to "mark" a player to make the players pay special attention to them. Obviously, playing defense well is generally where most of the skill of playing any sports game comes in and without it the game feels extremely shallow. You can't even rebound on command, despite rebounding being the main character's signature skill. Offense isn't much better, either. For starters, you have to press a button to begin dribbling after getting a pass, which just makes the game feel stiff. Speaking of passing, you can't choose who to pass to by holding a direction, you instead have to cycle through pass targets with L and R, which is slow and terrible. Oh, and the real kicker is that each half is 20 REAL MINUTES and you can't shorten it. I can't even imagine sitting through a whole game of this, let alone the entire thing.
Wow, talk about disappointment, I thought Wangan Trial Love was just going to be a definitive edition of the PS1 game or something, but it's a completely different game, and probably one of the worst ones I've ever played. Wangan Trial Love is a cross between a life simulator and a racing game, though it's completely awful at both of them. Let's start with the life simulator part. For starters, you can choose to play as a Jr High School student or a High School Student. If you play a Jr High Student, the game is simpler because you don't have to work or get into fights (which involve horrible minigames), but it sucks either way. Each day, time will pass and your character will do certain things according to a schedule, like going to school, working out, hanging out with friends, and sleeping. This is okay, but every action is accompanied by a fairly long animation, so watching even a single day play out takes about 2 minutes without speedup, and even with speedup it's still fairly long. At any time, you can interrupt the schedule to do other things, and you have to get anything done, as you'll need to do things like buy parts and tune your vehicle in order to do races. To actually get into a race, you have to call a race hotline and register, which will usually be like a week away, which is like a bare minimum of 10 minutes of waiting between races, which is stupid. Periodically, you'll see various little scenes with some of the other characters, but these are super limited, there's no animation and very little voice acting. Apparently some of the scenes are risque but I can't imagine playing this for dozens of hours to get to one such scene. Anyway, once you finally get into a race, either by waiting long enough or just ignoring the dating sim mode altogether and just picking the race option from the title screen, you'll quickly discover it's just as bad. The Karts have the most atrocious controls in history, I don't think I can even describe how bad they are, you basically just spin instead of turning and it feels like trash. The cars kind of work but you absolutely MUST have an automatic transmission because this game forces you to clutch and shift manually if you use a manual, which is basically impossible while playing a standard racing game. The car-based racing mode is marginally less bad but it's still really bad. Basically everything about this game is just pain and it's hard to say enough bad things about it.
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