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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Digital Pinball: Necronomicon - GGG - 100% (3)
G-Vector - GBB - 33% (3)
Jonah Lomu Rugby - GBB - 33% (3)
Mass Destruction - GGG - 100% (3)
Mortal Kombat Trilogy - BABAAA - 33% (6)
SimCity 2000 - GAAAA - 60% (5)
This was an interesting one. It was nice to see that there were so many votes, not a single game got less than 3 this time.
Games for this topic:
D
Formula Karts: Special Edition
Funky Fantasy
Gradius Deluxe Pack
NFL Quarterback Club 97
Ultraman: Hikari no Kyojin Densetsu
If you've been paying a lot of attention, I've alluded several times to the existence of a strategy game on Saturn that I was holding back from the GAB topics since I was writing a guide for it, it can now be revealed that Funky Fantasy was that game. My guide for the game includes a full translation of the game's script, so definitely check that out if you're interested.
D - B
ReplyDeleteFormula Karts: Special Edition - B
Funky Fantasy - G (SR)
Gradius Deluxe Pack - A
NFL Quarterback Club 97 - B
Ultraman: Hikari no Kyojin Densetsu - A
D still sucks. Something that really stands out to me is how absurdly slow this game is. Simply moving from one position to another often takes like 5-6 seconds, which is insane, you can play this entire game on double speed and it doesn't feel out of place in any way. Something else I have to comment on, though I said this for PS1, is how much more compelling the game's intro is compared to the main game. Dealing with a mass murderer in an abandoned hospital seems like it would be super creepy and tense (the hospital is also the best part of Parasite Eve), I'd definitely rather play that game then the one set in this boring empty castle. In any case, this is certainly nowhere near as good as Juggernaut, or other non-horror FMV games like Psychic Detective.
Speaking of games that sucked on PS1 and still suck, we also have Formula Karts. Actually, this version is much worse than the PS1 version. It still has all of the same problems, except on Saturn it also only runs at like 10fps. Maybe the worst racing game on Saturn, it would certainly at least be bottom 5.
There's so much going on with Funky Fantasy that it's probably going to take me most of this post just to describe the game. For starters, it's a strategy RPG that bears some resemblance to Front Mission. You have a cast of characters who level up throughout the game, but they do not fight directly, instead they control various monsters to fight, and the stats of the combined unit depend both on the stats of the pilot and the stats of the monster. Different monsters have different abilities, which tend to suit different characters. For example, an Archer does well using the Centaur bodies, which have powerful ranged attacks, while the knight prefers a unit with high defense and health regeneration like the Chimera. This kind of idea should be fairly familiar to anyone who has played Front Mission. However, you don't simply pair up units with monsters and send them into battle. On most missions, at the start, you have only a single unit, Bunny, who acts like a hero unit. She is responsible for summoning the other characters into monster bodies. This requires MP, which is built up by capturing magic circles on the map. Stronger monster bodies require more MP to summon, so there's a tradeoff between potentially summoning many weak monsters to expand faster, and summoning a few powerful monsters to perform better in combat. The game is lost if Bunny falls, but if the other characters are defeated, Bunny can just summon them again, assuming enough MP is available. Each character can only be summoned so many times per battle, but you get a lot of characters, so they're generally pretty expendable. This almost makes it feel more like a traditional turn-based strategy title like Advance Wars, where you'll spend a lot of time gathering resources and harassing the enemy while you build up forces for a big push. There's a lot more to the combat system than this, characters have certain skills they can use (which also use up MP) and there are unison attacks if characters are positioned correctly, but it's generally a pretty interesting and unique system. However, we can't discuss this game without also talking about the story, as it is also super unique and helps tie the package together. Funky Fantasy is essentially a "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" style mashup of a ton of different 90s games and anime. The main characters, Bunny Moon, is clearly based on Sailor Moon, while her friends Riki and Altar are based on Akira from Virtua Fighter and Arc the Lad, respectively. You will encounter characters based on Gundam, Phantasy Star, Fist of the North Star, King of Fighters, Puyo Puyo, Star Wars, and many more. The entire game has kind of a goofy, Spaceballs-esque parody feel to it, but it's also surprisingly dramatic at times, likely because it borrows many of the most iconic scenes and best plot twists from the works that it's lampooning. The game itself is not terribly long, but there's 4 different routes which dramatically change the plot, and it made me want to see them all just to know what other crazy things they would toss in there. At any rate, it's clear that a ton of care went into this one, and it boggles my mind that it's seemingly not all that well known even to Japanese audiences. Easily one of my top finds from GAB so far, and probably my current favourite game on the system.
DeleteAnother game we've already covered for PS1, but this time it's a fair bit better, with Gradius Deluxe Pack. As before, this is a fairly no-frills port of Gradius 1 and 2. These are decent games, but as a package it doesn't hold up particularly well compared to many others, like the Capcom Generations and Thunder Force sets. I think one of the biggest issues here is the very widespread availability of these games. Both titles are also available on NES, and while some people may not have played Gradius 2 that way since it was a Famicom-exclusive, I feel that the NES version of Gradius 1 is actually superior to the arcade (for one thing it has much less slowdown). There's also the later Gradius Collection for PSP that has Gradius 3, 4, and Gaiden as well. I feel like it really would have been nice to either include the NES versions of the games or Gradius 3 as well, just to round out the package a little more. They're still solid games, but considering all the great shmups this gen they just don't stand out that much.
DeleteYet another PS1 port here with NFL Quarterback Club 97, and another instance of the Saturn version having a terrible framerate. Like Formula Karts, the framerate is at least cut in half compared to PS1, and it feels like there are many times where it still drops a ton of frames, like when hiking the ball, which makes defensive play feel horrid since you can't quickly react to what the quarterback does. This is an okay game on PS1, but the massively degraded performance effectively makes this version unplayable. It's kind of shocking how many utterly slapdash ports Saturn was subjected to.
While clearly not nearly as good as Kamen Rider, I still kind of like the Ultraman game. It's a very basic 2-button fighting game, and for some ungodly reason it has blocking mapped to a button, but it's still kind of entertaining. For starters, something I noticed was that after playing Ultra Kaiju Monster Rancher, I now recognize every character in the game (and there's actually quite a lot of them), which suggests that it actually has a pretty solid roster of series favourites. Despite only being a 2 button game, characters actually have quite a number of moves, and it's nice that there's a control scheme that maps the unused buttons to special moves so you can do these more easily even if you don't know the motions for them (though they generally seem to be quarter and half circle motions for the most part). There's not really a ton more to say about it than that, it's an extremely basic game with limited combos and most characters having fairly similar moves, but this is clearly still leagues better than something like the early Mortal Kombat games.