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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
D - GAAABAAG - 57% (8)
Formula Karts: Special Edition - BB - 0% (2)
Funky Fantasy - GG - 100% (2) (1 SR)
Gradius Deluxe Pack - GGAAGAA - 71% (7)
NFL Quarterback Club 97 - BB - 0% (2)
Ultraman: Hikari no Kyojin Densetsu - AB - 25% (2)
It's pretty incredible that Duke Nukem and D got the exact same score, considering I can hardly think of two games that are more different. What a strange coincidence.
Games for this topic:
Dragon Master Silk
Minami no Shima ni Buta ga Ita
Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam (Zenpen)
Pachinko Hall Shinso Daikaiten
Pretty Fighter X
Wing Arms
There are two games on Saturn based on Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, this is the Zenpen one, the other one is sort of a sequel to it, so it makes sense to do this one first. I think this also looks like an interesting set of games, this should be a good week.
Dragon Master Silk - G
ReplyDeleteMinami no Shima ni Buta ga Ita - G
Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam (Zenpen) - A
Pachinko Hall Shinso Daikaiten - G
Pretty Fighter X - A
Wing Arms - G
Dragon Master Silk is decent. It's a dungeon-crawler RPG with pretty good production values that feels like it was probably a bit ahead of its time. One of the first things worth noting is the interface. Put simply, it's much better than you'd typically expect for games of this age, feeling much closer to a modern dungeon crawler. There's automap, there's autobattle, you can autoheal the party after battles, when buying equipment it compares it to what you already have, there's a description available for all of the items that shows what they do, etc. This is all stuff we take for granted now but many of the old games didn't have any of this and it made them feel lousy to play. There are a few things missing, the automap doesn't provide much detail, I wish it would note the location of things like locked doors and warps, and the lack of a strafe button is a huge loss (I estimate you could move through the dungeon about twice as fast with this) but for a game from Gen 5 it's still pretty solid. The presentation is quite good, too. This is a very goofy game, it starts off with a very long anime cutscene introducing the characters. Silk is a flat-chested bounty hunter with short hair whom everyone mistakes for a boy, she gets entrusted with a quest by the demon dragon and his three retainers, who are all busty babes with extreme personalities, Aka is a hot-blooded warrior, Ao is the serious one, and Ki is the ditz. After the game starts, dialogue sequences with the characters are common and the silliness extends even into the game's mechanics. For example, the first time you encounter a warp mirror, the party is discussing what it does, when Ki reveals that it's used to warp, which she knows because she read the game's strategy guide. Later on, Ao reveals that every time you go down a floor the shop gets better stuff, and she recommends checking the shop and coming up with a plan for what to buy, which you can then work towards in the dungeon, but while she's explaining her complicated system of choosing the best equipment the other characters just leave her there, which causes her to get very angry. These scenes are pretty common and help give the game a bit more personality, which is good because these sorts of games can get monotonous. Speaking of, that's probably still the game's biggest issue. Although the game has good production values and a good interface, the battle system is still very basic. It's a very standard "Attack / Magic / Item / Defend" battle system, and there's no character customization whatsoever beyond what equipment you choose to give to the characters. Silk is an all-rounder, Aka is a physical attacker, Ao is a magic attacker, and Ki is a healer, and that's pretty much all you can say about the battle system. Coupled with the massive size of the floors and the relatively frequent random encounters, it can definitely get a little tedious at times, though never to the point of feeling like a complete slog the way most other old games of this type often do. There's not much question that it pales a bit to more modern dungeon crawlers, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of them took some inspiration from this game, because it feels surprisingly close to the types of games you'd see on Switch and Vita despite its age.
Minami no Shima ni Buta ga Ita is a really strange game but it's not bad. The basic gist of the game is that it's a hybrid of a platformer and a puzzle game. There are short platforming levels that feel like something you might see on NES, followed by many different types of logic puzzles that you have to solve. The platforming levels are functional but are so short and basic that they're clearly not the appeal of the game, if you're playing it you're playing it for the logic puzzles, which are decent. If you compare something like Jewels of the Oracle for example, the puzzles are far less cryptic, being ones you have most likely heard of before, like slide puzzles, the "fox and grain" puzzle, and even simple ones like tic tac toe. Most of them aren't too hard, but there's a hideous "magic square" puzzle in the second set that took me like an hour and I still never solved it (thankfully, the game does allow you to give up and move on if there are puzzles you just can't solve). Strange concept aside, I feel like this is actually pretty fun, it's worth a look if you like puzzle games.
DeleteMobile Suit Zeta Gundam (Zenpen) is an alright game. It's another one of those anime games where it retells the story of the anime with very extensive cutscenes from the original show inbetween playable segments, but unlike something like Slam Dunk it's vastly more playable. The anime segments are of high quality and this is a very highly acclaimed anime, so there's not too much to say about that, so I'll focus on the gameplay portion. Zenpen is a side scrolling action game where you control the titular Gundam. Missions vary a fair bit, from missions on land which feature some platforming to space missions where you have full movement in all directions, but in every case the game generally focuses on high-speed combat with a mixture of melee and projectile weapons. A unique feature for the game is that enemies can also attack from the foreground and background, where you cannot attack them directly, but you have access to a "Lock On" feature that allows you to lock on to these enemies and fire at them to take them out. There are also a ton of boss battles and they are brutal. The bosses hit extremely hard and fast, and fly offscreen between attacks, then dash back onscreen with quick attacks that are hard to avoid and even harder to retaliate against. The bosses can also attack from the background and foreground as well, and these are often among their most dangerous attacks because they typically fire on you near instantly and you'll take damage unless you're already moving, but if you want to punish their other attacks you kind of have to be in the right position to do so so you don't want to constantly move either. Their attacks do a ton of damage and they're often fairly tanky themselves, so there's almost zero room for error, and you will have to learn the boss patterns extremely well to have a chance. Luckily you do get unlimited lives but the inability to skip dialogue sequences and the sometimes long periods of downtime between missions can make this somewhat frustrating, even if it is very satisfying when you finally get them, likely by the skin of your teeth. I'm not usually one to harp on a game for being hard, but part of the issue is that a fair bit of the game's difficulty comes from its controls. The Gundam has 4 weapons, but you only have one attack button, you have another button that cycles through the weapons which you need to use to swap your weapon. Of the four weapons, the Vulcan is nearly worthless and so is the super shot, the main two you want are the beam sword and rifle, which you kind of need access to all the time, as there simply isn't time to switch between weapons during boss fights with how fast the bosses attack and how quickly you need to react to them. The game's sequel, Kouhen, wisely alters the control scheme to give these two weapons their own, separate buttons, which is a huge help, and probably would have elevated this game to G, but we'll talk more about that when we come to it.
Pretty Fighter X is a slight improvement over the first game, but that's not really saying much. As before, it's a very simplistic all-girl fighter where the main focus is on fanservice. The first game had absolutely atrocious framedata where everything was way too fast and nothing had any kind of recovery or anything, and that has kind of been addressed here, but they went way too far in the other direction, as now pretty much every move in the game has a ton of startup, making the game feel much stiffer than other games. Combos are basically nonexistent, even though cancelling exists, specials generally start up too slow to actually combo from anything, so about the only combos you can really do are links of heavy buttons into light buttons. Since most moves have a ton of startup and almost no characters possess any kind of viable reversal, frame traps are absolutely godlike in this game. I was able to clear the entire game effortlessly by just frametrapping with meaty buttons and slides on the opponent's wakeup, which you basically can't do anything about other than just block, so you basically just have to hold the throw vs button mixup on wakeup and even if you get out the opponent can probably still continue the pressure by abusing plus frames. It's actually kind of funny to play, but it's certainly not deep. That said, you're clearly not here for the gameplay. Besides the lacking frame data, most characters have only 2 or 3 moves, there's no supers, and most of the characters are pretty samey anyway, for example almost every character has a very similar projectile. The real reason to play this game is for the anime scenes and the stills. Every character has a fully animated intro and ending, and they're of very high quality. There are also some fanservicey still shots you get from winning battles, which are not quite as great but it's something I guess. It's not unplayable, though Advanced VG is better in pretty much every way possible.
DeleteWing Arms is a great flight game with only a single flaw. Compared to many other games of this type, it's a fairly simple game, you don't have any great variety of weapons, just a machine gun and missiles, though unlike many games, your machinegun is generally the star here, as the missiles are non-homing and are mainly just useful for pummeling slow targets. Control is exceptionally well-polished, probably among the best of any game of this type, for example the third mission involves navigating a tight canyon to take out a patrol that would be hell in almost any other game but is no problem at all here, and this generally makes the game feel great to play. There's a decent variety of missions and the game also runs flawlessly, never dropping from 60fps at any point. Another cool thing I really like is that if an enemy gets behind you, the game switches to a "chase cam" while you try to shake them off, which both looks really cool and drastically increases playability. Really, almost everything about this game is top notch, except for its one main issue, which is that it's extremely short. It's only about a 45 minute game, and I was completely shocked when I reached the final mission as I thought the game was basically just getting started. It doesn't have much replay value either, although there are 7 planes to choose from, they are completely identical in every way except their appearance. It's still very solidly G, but I really wish there was more of it.