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Last Topic's Ratings:
Dark Savior - BAAABBGA - 38% (8) (1 SR)
Harukaze Sentai V-Force - GG - 100% (2)
Layer Section 2 - GBABB - 30% {5}
Mega Man 8 - GGAGGGGGG - 94% (9)
Shanghai: Great Moments - BB - 0% (2)
TNN Hardcore 4X4 - BB - 0% (2)
I was curious to see how Mega Man 8 would compare to the PS1 version, since the Saturn version is often considered better, but overall it was pretty much the same, save for PS1 getting slightly more votes.
Games for this topic:
Cho Aniki: Kyuukyoku Muteki Ginga Saikyou Otoko
Clockwork Knight 2
Herc's Adventures
Marie no Atelier
Street Fighter Alpha 3
Tenchi Muyou Rensa Hitsuyou
I'm so behind on the Atelier series, I have like 10 games in the series and I haven't beaten any of them. I guess it'll be interesting to see how it starts.
Atelier Marie - A
ReplyDeleteCho Aniki: Kyuukyoku Muteki Ginga Saikyou Otoko - A
Clockwork Knight 2 - A
Herc's Adventures - A
Street Fighter Alpha 3 - G
Tenchi Muyou Rensa Hitsuyou - A
It's kind of interesting to see how the Atelier series started out with Atelier Marie. For those not familiar with it, the Atelier series is an RPG series focused on alchemy. You play as an alchemist who is tasked with creating various items, which requires you to explore locations to gather ingredients, possibly battling monsters along the way, then create the item in your workshop by combining the necessary components (and frequently, creating various intermediate products that are needed). A key aspect of these games is time management, as the game is timed and various actions use up certain amounts of it. All of these concepts are already present in Marie, but there are some significant differences from later games in the series too. One of the first things that becomes apparent is that this game is much simpler and open-ended compared to the later games in the series. In the later games, you're typically given various assignments to produce certain items as you progress through the game, but there's none of that here, you're basically just given a little money and a 5-year time limit and set loose on the world. This is kind of refreshing in a way, you certainly have a lot more freedom than the more modern games, though it can also lead to significant stretches of time where it feels like you don't really make progress. One of the biggest issues is that your main way of making money is taking quests, but these quests are generated randomly and completely without regard for what items you can feasibly obtain / produce at the time, so it's often possible to have the bar generate no useful quests for quite a while. You can still go on outings to get more items, but as you have to pay your mercenaries these will quickly drain your money if you're not finding usable quests to take. Speaking of outings, these also work very differently compared to the modern games. In the modern games you explore an overworld area and gather items, but this is totally absent here, instead you go to a certain location and choose to search for items, which will instantly produce a few random items from that area at the expense of one day's worth of time. Sometimes you'll instead encounter a battle, forcing you to fight some enemies, though these fights are very basic. Still, something I do like about this is that characters heal over time, so if you get beat up in a battle, you can go back to town and make items for a while to let people rest up (you can also use items to heal, though this can be expensive). Events also occur occasionally, but there's not much warning about these and you can miss some of them if you're on an expedition, which is pretty lame. Something we also have to talk about is that this game has a remake on PS2, and you probably want to play that version instead. It's actually very faithful to the original, but it has a couple small but impactful changes that make it play a lot smoother. For starters, the UI is upgraded in a number of ways, making it much easier to keep track of which items you need to complete requests and make items, which helps a ton. The game is also slightly easier, your characters heal faster and the encounter rate is a bit lower. Most importantly, there's also a fan translation available for that version, which makes it a lot easier to figure certain things out if you don't want to translate everything. This version is still decent, but the updates do help a fair bit.
I'm almost not even sure what to say about Cho Aniki. It's extremely weird, even by the standards of the series, which I suppose is a good thing considering the weirdness is much of the appeal. Compared to the previous games (this is actually the third shmup style game in the series), they've tossed out the hand-drawn sprites for digitized likenesses of real people. This was almost certainly the right call as it significantly enhances the strangeness of the game and it looks much better than the games that came after it that used 3D visuals. In terms of gameplay though, it's just ok. It's a very simple shmup where you have a massive hitbox and there's a lot of visual noise, largely because your projectiles and the enemy projectiles are often the same colour. The only real nuance to the game is that you can get access to multiple different types of super shots, though the laser one is almost always the best to use. Ultimately though, you're not really here for the gameplay, if you want that stick to Parodius, this game is all about the insanity and it does that pretty well. It's still probably not G, but it's definitely something.
DeleteClockwork Knight 2 is basically the same game as the original Clockwork Knight, which is both good and bad in different ways. The good news is that the solid controls and charm of the original game have been retained. The bad news is none of the issues with the original have been addressed, most particularly it's still an absurdly short game, with exactly the same number of stages as the original (8 regular stages and 5 bosses). To make matters even worse, there are now two autoscroller stages that you do on the horse, and these go by super fast, so the game is actually probably even shorter than the first one and these levels are pretty clearly the low point of the game. The biggest addition is that there's some secret cards now, 4 on each level, somewhat akin to the KONG letters from Donkey Kong Country, from which it's now fairly clear that the game takes some inspiration (in case the map screen and minecart-esque autoscroller stages didn't tip you off already). It doesn't really want to make this comparison though, as DKC is a far better game that has vastly more content and replay value. One of the biggest issues is that you still can't replay stages, which is now a huge issue as it means if you miss any cards you simply have to reset the game, and this is particularly troublesome on the autoscroller stages. It really feels like a missed opportunity that they didn't increase the number of stages and add a proper map, as the fundamentals are here for this to be an extremely solid game, but it seems like it was probably rushed out (this came out the same year as the original). Another interesting note is that the English version also contains the original game, but this just goes to show they had a ton of extra space that they easily could have used for more levels instead.
Herc's Adventures is an unbelievably weird game and I can't really decide whether I like it or not. For starters, this game is made by the same team as and heavily inspired by Zombies Ate My Neighbours. It features the same top-down style of gameplay and completely madcap sense of humour as that game, though instead of being level-based it's now a sprawling adventure with a completely free-roaming world map. It really can't be overstated just how nuts this game is, whenever you get hit you almost always suffer some kind of outlandishly cartoonish injury, like being squashed into a pancake by a cyclops, eaten by a giant boar, or having a cannibal gnaw on your leg. The sections where the gods talk to you are a particular highlight, the animation and voice acting for them is almost CDI Zelda-level insane, and it feels very kooky and self-aware. I'm not generally quite in love with the gameplay as the visuals though. One of the biggest issues is that most of the enemies are very tanky, and combat doesn't have much complexity to it, so you spend a lot of time just bopping enemies over and over again until they go down. There are things you can throw to speed things up (including people's homes, which is often a good source of items), but generally it does tend to get a bit repetitive. You can play co-op, which is appreciated, this is really the kind of insanity that needs to be shared with someone else, but I don't know how many people would have the patience to get through the entire thing despite how wacky it is.
DeleteAs I mentioned last topic, you really can't fault Capcom when it comes to their port quality for Saturn games, and that continues with Street Fighter Alpha 3. While I do think Alpha 2 is a bit better gameplay-wise, this is still an incredibly strong package with among the most content you'll find in any fighting game. Not only does it have 3 fighting styles and a crazy number of characters for a game from this era, it also has a ton of modes, not only do you have standard arcade mode, complete with unique character rival battles and endings, but there's also a ton of other things, like the dramatic battle mode, world tour mode, survival mode, a team battle mode that plays like KOF, and many more. It also runs absolutely flawlessly on Saturn, even the Dramatic Battle mode which has extra characters on the screen has no real issues. Even if it's not my favourite this is definitely the gold standard for the home console release of a fighting game this generation.
Tenchi Muyou Rensa Hitsuyou is a game that's almost great, save for one bad mechanic. It's essentially another Puyo variant, of the "match 3" variety, but its twist lies in its "water level" mechanic. Each player's field is essentially a water tank, and although it begins empty, the water rises when the opponent makes a combo. As the water rises, new pieces are placed on top of the water, and any pieces below the water level can't be used in matches. There are only two ways to lower the water back down, you can either make a match of 3 heart pieces, which drops it a couple rows, or you can make 3 separate matches of Ryo-Ohki pieces to activate your character power, as some character powers lower the amount of water on your side of the field (but not all). Therein lies the problem. The only ways to lower the water require special pieces, and if you don't have any above the water's surface, the opponent can just spam small combos to ensure that you can never lower your water tank. This effectively prevents you from doing anything at all as you can't match the pieces under the water even if you use an anchor piece to send pieces down there. Clearly the solution is to raise the side columns early and stick heart pieces on top of them so they can't be easily buried, but in general the entire game revolves around playing as fast as possible because the first person to put a significant amount of water in the opponent's tank almost always wins. This would not be so much of a problem if you could still match the pieces under the water, and if that was an option I think the game would clearly be G, but without it it's actually a borderline B-level game because of how braindead simple it is, probably the only thing keeping it out of there is the fact that the presentation is very good, there's both a ton of voice acting and the visuals are also very nice without being distracting in any way. It's still one of the weakest games of this type gameplay-wise, though.
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