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Last Topic's Ratings:
AnEarth Fantasy Stories: First Volume - GGG - 100% (3)
Christmas Nights into Dreams - GGGGGGAGG - 94% (9) (1 SR)
Cyber Speedway - GAGGA - 80% (5)
D-Xhird - BBA - 17% (3)
Pachi-Slot Kanzen Koryaku: Yunikore 97 - AA - 50% (2)
Zap Snowboarding Trix 98 - GAAA - 63% (4)
By contrast, this one really pulled in the votes. I guess that's the power of actually having a Christmas game.
Games for this topic:
Breakthru
Contra: Legacy of War
Konami Antiques: MSX Collection Ultra Pack
Lunar 2: Eternal Blue
Soukyuu Gurentai
Winning Post
I'm quite looking forward to trying out a couple of the games in this topic. The MSX Collection is interesting because the games from the MSX are almost never ported, and Winning Post is a rare localized horse racing game. There's also a translation available for Lunar 2.
It's kind of funny that Lunar was generally a series I didn't pay much attention to back in the day, but I'm slowly coming around to the opinion that it's one of the better JRPG franchises of the era. On the surface there's nothing especially fancy about it, for its time its gameplay is somewhat basic (compare its nonexistent customization system to the FF games for example), but a mixture of good writing, good pacing, and good balancing are enough to carry it anyway. In many ways, Lunar plays somewhat like a 16-bit RPG, but its writing is a lot better than most games from that era. The characters in Lunar, especially Ruby, just exude much more personality compared to characters from more mediocre JRPGs and it just gives the game a lot more energy, which helps it avoid getting dull. The game also has excellent pacing, owing to a mixture of good dungeon design and having visible encounters which are also preset, similar to Chrono Trigger. It also has better difficulty balance than most, it has a pretty reasonable level of difficulty while at the same time not requiring much grinding, which is a balance a lot of its contemporaries struggled with, as little gets boring more quickly than a game with a ton of random encounters that are also trivial. There's not too much more to say about it other than that it's a solid and fun adventure. The fan translation is not quite as solid this time around (at least, not yet, it may still be being worked on) and in particular the cutscenes are not dubbed, so you might want to play this one on PS1, even though translation issues aside they otherwise seem largely identical.
ReplyDeleteSoukyuu Gurentai is really solid. It's basically a much better version of RayForce (which in itself wasn't a terrible game), it features a similar lock-on mechanic which you can activate by holding the button down, but the game is generally vastly more polished and has a lot more stuff. One of the biggest issues with the Ray series is visual noise, which is handled much better here, this game makes far better use of colours and thus enemy bullets are easier to distinguish, which is important because there's a ton of them (this is quite a hard game on the default difficulty settings). There's also more to the game compared to RayForce, not only are there three ships to choose from, each with their own weapon and unique lock-on mechanic, each ship can also switch between two targetting systems, generally one which is somewhat easier to lock on with but has less power and one that's a little harder to lock but has more power. It's a great-looking game visually, too, but not in a way that distracts from the action, it's just a really slick title in pretty much every regard. The only knock against this game is that the PS1 version is maybe even better, I think this version looks a touch better but the PS1 version has extra content, including voice acting for the narrator, cutscenes, and a fourth ship. Either way this is definitely a game you should try out if you're a shmup fan. I feel like Eighting is secretly a top tier developer, I've pretty much never played a bad game from them.
I was initially looking forward to Winning Post until I saw that Koei developed it, as Koei has a tendency to make their strategy games somewhat cumbersome and overly complex, but they've actually outdone themselves this time. See, I imagine that opinion I just mentioned about Koei's strategy games was probably a fairly common one and the executives probably asked them to make the next game somewhat more accessible, and rather than streamline the interface or add some kind of sensible tutorial or something, they just made the game play itself. When you start the game, you choose two horses and a trainer, and that's pretty much it. The Trainer will ask you to let them take care of training your horses, and they'll handle everything from that point forward, selecting everything related to your horse's training, race selection, jockey selection, and everything, while you merely watch. You can visit the stable and try to check your horse's training, and the game actively won't let you, they'll tell you to get lost until several in-game years pass before they'll let you have any inputs into it. I figured this might have been because I selected "yes" when they asked me to let them handle the training, so I immediately reset and selected "no", but this changes nothing, they just tell you that you HAVE to let them handle everything and that's that. So what do you actually get to do? Not much. You can visit various places and ask them about things, but you can't actually do anything, and you go to the races every weekend (even if you don't have a horse racing that week), where you can watch the week's races. The most control you have over anything is that you can bet on the races, but this is mostly RNG and this probably isn't really why you'd want to play a game like this (plus, it's not like you can really do anything with your money anyway). You might think that maybe this would at least help you learn what to do when the game does finally let you have some control, but it doesn't do that at all, since the game never explains what it's doing or shows you how to do any of it. If you compare that Pachinko Hall game we played recently, that game handled this kind of thing far better. It was also a pretty complex game, but it had a really good tutorial that showed you how to set up your first Pachinko Parlor (and you can even skip this) and then it just leaves you on your own, but the tutorial is good enough that you should be able to handle it after that. If this game perhaps had the trainer do the setup for the first horse and then let you have control that might have worked out well, but I've never seen a game that seems to have this much disdain for its players before. Even if you do stick it out long enough that it lets you do something, the trainer will still constantly give you suggestions for what to do and most of the time it's best to just go with what they recommend. Even if you do just want to let the game play itself and just do what little it lets you do, you still have to mash through tons of menus and it doesn't really even do that well, this is just a bad product in general.
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