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Last Topic's Ratings:
Battle Monsters - ABA - 33% (3)
Blast Chamber - AAAA - 50% (4)
Deathmask - AB - 25% (2)
Hattrick Hero S - BAA - 33% (3)
House of the Dead, The - GAAAGG - 75% (6)
Puyo Puyo Sun - AGG - 83% (3)
I wanted to do some big comparison between the various ratings for Puyo Puyo Sun, considering it's the first game we've rated on all 3 platforms, but it turns out it only got 8 votes across all 3 systems combined. Of those, the Saturn version was the only one to get an A rating, but the sample size is too small to really draw much of a conclusion from that. Oh well. Blast Chamber did get the same score as on PS1 though.
Games for this topic:
Blast Wind
Casper
Golden Axe: The Duel
Olympic Soccer: Atlanta 1996
Sega Ages: Rouka ni Ichidant-R
Suikoden
Surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be a fan-translation for Suikoden on Saturn, but there's millions of guides for the PS1 version. I'm also curious to try out Golden Axe The Duel.
Blast Wind - A
ReplyDeleteCasper - A
Golden Axe: The Duel - B
Olympic Soccer: Atlanta 1996 - A
Sega Ages: Rouka ni Ichidant-R - A
Suikoden - A
Blast Wind is a super basic vertical shmup. There's not really a whole lot to say about this game, it's a game with only one ship and one weapon, so there's very little variety. The most notable thing about the game is that there are buttons you can push in some stages that lead to alternate routes, which is kind of interesting, but there's no real nuance to it. Something I noticed is that the game feels incredibly claustrophobic, your hitbox is massive and so are enemy bullets, and enemies often take up most of the screen, leaving very little room to react and dodge, however, your bomb is super strong so you can just spam a lot of those. There's not really much else to say about it, it's clearly significantly outclassed by many other shmups this gen.
Casper is pretty much the same game as on PS1, though I think this version seems to have marginally upgraded presentation. As before, it's a generally peaceful but somewhat overly cryptic adventure game that does a decent job of capturing the essence of the film, with the biggest problem being that it has too much load time when going between screens (sadly this is not improved on Saturn). Not too much else to say about this one that wasn't said already.
I figured Golden Axe: The Duel would either be amazing or atrocious, but it's not really either of those things, though it skews much more heavily towards the latter. It's basically just a really basic fighting game with bad frame data. Characters have gigantic hitboxes in this game, in particular virtually everyone's crouch fierce punch is a ludicrously godlike anti-air, and most people have other massive hitboxes that almost totally deter forwards approaches. Special moves are limited and generally bad, they very rarely combo and are typically very slow and unsafe, and there's also virtually no pressure after knockdowns as there are very few crossups and most moves push too far away on block to allow for any kind of additional pressure, particularly given the already very limited combo game. One of the game's most unique mechanics is that you can collect potions by smacking a goblin that runs around, and when you have 5 you can go into a mode that lets you do your super, but it lasts only a very short time (similar to max mode in KOF) and given the game's campy nature it's very hard to create any real offense with it. I also need to point out that this game's soundtrack is inordinately atrocious, probably one of the worst fighting game soundtracks ever. On a system with a ton of good fighting games (particularly the spectacular Dark Legend, which it released alongside) there's really just not much reason to bother with this one.
I feel like the fact that there's no translation for the Saturn version of Suikoden pretty much says it all. Not only does the game make the translation to Saturn totally intact, this is actually kind of a "director's cut" version of Suikoden that includes some bonus features, like a new battle arena and some expanded story content. The PS1 Suikoden games are extremely beloved, so you'd think this would be a no-brainer to port the PS1 translation over to this game like was done with Grandia, yet there's been pretty much no interest in it. Of course, the reason for this is obvious: Saturn does not have Suikoden 2. The Suikoden games are kind of a set, probably the most notable thing about them is the data transfer between the two games. Imagine if Saturn had a special version of Suikoden 2 that fixed some of the glitches, like the issue with transferring the Suikoden 1 hero's name over, and maybe gave us some expanded story content towards the endgame. Alas, it never materialized. Suikoden is still an alright game, it might be one of Saturn's better traditional RPGs, but without the sequel there's really not much reason to recommend playing this version over the one on PS1.
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