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Last Topic's Ratings:
3D Lemmings - BBGBB - 20% (5)
Dragon Ball Z: Idainaru Dragon Ball Densetsu - GABB - 38% {4}
Gulliver Boy - AGGG - 88% (4)
Radiant Silvergun - GAGGGAAGG - 83% (9) (1 SR)
Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels - AA - 50% (2)
Thunderstrike 2 - AAA - 50% (3)
I certainly did not expect that my opinion about 3D Lemmings would be the controversial one. I want to see what happens when PS1 comes to this game.
Games for this topic:
Dejig: Lassen Art Collection
Dragon Force 2
Mahou Gakuen Lunar
NBA Live 98
Rapyulus Panic
Suiko Enbu: Fuuun Saiki
I almost put Mahou Gakuen Lunar up in a much earlier topic because I thought it was the Japanese name for Lunar 1, this is actually a totally different game which is a remake of a Gamegear game. There's also a translation available for Dragon Force 2.
Dejig: Lassen Art Collection - G
ReplyDeleteDragon Force 2 - A
Mahou Gakuen Lunar - B
NBA Live 98 - A
Rapyulus Panic - B
Suiko Enbu: Fuuun Saiki - G (SR)
So it turns out I made an oopsie. When we previously covered Dejig: Thomas McKnight Art Collection, my review was actually for Dejig: Lassen Art Collection, which I'm surprised no one called me out on because I mentioned the circular puzzles and those are only present in Lassen. It doesn't change things drastically because both games use the improved Dejig engine and would get the same rating, but there are a couple differences between them that are worth pointing out. The most notable thing about McKnight is that the puzzles are more stylized in nature, whereas the ones in Lassen are more photorealistic. This generally works out better in favour of Lassen, because the photorealistic style results in more significant colour variation and this makes it a bit easier to identify pieces, but the art for McKnight is still decently chosen and you can still generally tell where pieces need to go if you look closely. Lassen also has slightly better music than McKnight, though McKnight has a slight edge in that it doesn't have any of the circular puzzles, which are the low point of Lassen. Overall, I think Lassen is the best of the four Dejig games, though both McKnight and Lassen are worth playing. I actually really enjoy the Dejig redemption arc, it went from one of the worst games on the system to something that's actually quite solid. It's shocking to say but it's kind of too bad they didn't make any more of these once they finally nailed the formula.
Dragon Force 2 is almost identical to Dragon Force 1. The basic setup of the game is exactly the same and it plays very similarly, just with a handful of minor differences. The most significant one is that generals can now combine multiple troop types. This is a good improvement that definitely adds more diversity to the game and makes learning to command multiple troop types far more worthwhile, but due to the simplicity of the battle system its effect is still somewhat minimized. You have a pair of troop types where one pairs up well against one enemy troop and one against the other? Great! Can you tell each one to attack the relevant enemy troop? Of course not! Even getting you troops to attack the enemy is tough, the easiest thing is just to sit in front of your commander and wait, so that tends to be what you'll do almost every battle, unless your troops are weak against the enemy troops, in which case they should just go on the attack immediately. Beyond this, most other aspects of the game are mostly the same. Searching is now done automatically when each week ends so you can't savescum it, which is a good change, though building and searching are still restricted to having 70 in their respective stat, which tends to make generals who have this absurdly good and ones that don't mostly disposable, in any case you'll tend to dump all of your resources into a small handful of generals that you use to wipe the map while the rest sit back at base, it would be nice if there was another way to train generals or something. The one other big change is to the presentation, which is that the game now has voice acting. This does help to give the game more personality and the characters and story do feel a little better this time around, but overall I still have mostly the same thoughts about it as before. It's an all right game but it simply feels a bit too simplistic to stay interesting for a long time.
Mahou Gakuen Lunar is a pretty poor RPG which definitely doesn't live up to the series standard. For starters, this game feels nothing like the other Lunar games. The first thing that stood out to me is that the charm that makes the Lunar series what it is is completely absent here. If we compare, say, Lunar 2, Hiro and Ruby's interactions are instantly endearing, whereas none of the characters in Mahou Gakuen are really likable to the same degree, they simply come across as very generic. I stopped reading the dialogue and just used a walkthrough after an hour or so because there simply wasn't anything worth caring about in the dialogue and I just wanted to get to the gameplay sections faster. Speaking of which, this game also has an extremely long and drawn out intro, despite not really having a story worth caring about, both Lunar 1 and 2 also get you into the action significantly faster. Once you can finally get into battles, you'll find that the battle system is also pretty bad. It does sort of superficially look like the Lunar battle system, but it's greatly simplified. The concept of attack ranges are completely gone, you can just run across the entire field to attack, but this barely matters because attacking isn't even really a thing anyway. Every character in the game specializes in magic attacks, so you will generally be spamming magic constantly, and to accomplish this you also regenerate magic every time you defend, which basically removes any nuance from the game as you don't really get all that many spells to use and the decision of when to use magic and when not to is critical to the strategy in most simplistic RPGs. Unlike the other Lunar games, this game features random encounters instead of visible encounters, and they are absurdly frequent, even by retro RPG standards, which is really bad because they also aren't interesting. Dungeons are particularly a slog, especially because the game has no items or equipment so there's no reason to explore, they're just a tedious slog of battles every few steps. This was apparently originally a Game Gear game and maybe it would have been more tolerable there, but on Saturn it really just doesn't stand out in any way. Just stick to the other Lunar titles instead, they're much better than this one.
DeleteAs with most Sports games on Saturn, NBA Live 98 is something of a downgrade from the PS1 version. The game itself is a competent but somewhat unremarkable 5 on 5 basketball game. It has good pacing, responsive controls, and shooting and stealing work well, so there's not really a lot to complain about with the fundamentals, but there's also nothing that really makes it stand out compared to some other comparable games, other than the fact that on Saturn you really don't have many other options. You could certainly do worse, it plays pretty well and looks all right, the biggest issue on Saturn is that it's a very muted experience as the in-game commentary has inexplicably been cut compared to the PS1 version. It's not that it was super exciting there, it's basically just play by play with no real analysis, but it's weird that they cut it here because it's not like they didn't have the disc space or anything. The Saturn version also looks worse than the PS1 version (character models have significantly reduced detail) and it has some framedrops, whereas the framerate on PS1 is more consistent, but the Saturn version is still serviceable if you really want to have a traditional basketball game for the platform. Otherwise though, there are better options on PS1.
Rapyulus Panic is somewhat similar to Haunted Casino, but it's not nearly as good. The gist of it is it's a minigame collection consisting of 10 games - Roulette, Video Poker, Blackjack, Spot the Differences, Concentration, Jigsaw Puzzle, Shooting Gallery, Simon, Whack a Mole, and Slide Puzzle. In each of these games you play against a girl and if you win, you get a picture of her. Every girl has to be beaten twice, and the second picture is generally of her in swimwear / underwear / something else vaguely racy, but unlike Haunted Casino there's no nudity. The first thing that has to be noted is that a lot of the games are really lame. The casino games are tolerable, I guess, but they're certainly not great and the AI cheats like crazy in Blackjack (if you don't have 21, you can damn well better believe they're going to). The best set of games by far is the middle set, all of Spot the Differences, Concentration, and Jigsaw Puzzle are decent. The final set of games is by far the worst, with only Simon being somewhat tolerable. Whack a Mole is by far the worst game in the set, requiring a ludicrously high score that I doubt anyone could ever achieve without cheating / mashing / pause buffering or some combination of all 3. It does feel kind of hilariously appropriate that Slide Puzzle is the final boss, because it is definitely one of the most evil games ever created, but that humourous note aside there's not a lot of quality content here. One of the biggest issues is that the art quality isn't nearly as high as Haunted Casino and there's basically no titillation (even the second pictures are extremely tame) so that aspect of the game isn't likely to keep you playing, and once you've finished the 6th game there won't be anything else fun in the package. As we can see from Haunted Casino this idea has some potential, but it probably needs actual nudity or at least drastically better minigames.
DeleteSuiko Enbu: Fuuun Saiki is basically the "Street Fighter 2 Turbo" version of Suiko Enbu / Dark Legend. A lot of the reason this game exists is because the original Japanese version of Suiko Enbu was pretty bad, it had a lot of slowdown and other problems. These were completely fixed for the US release, which also included balance changes and other improvements, but it wasn't an option for Japanese players since Saturn is region locked, so they came up with this slightly upgraded version, which backports most of the improvements from the US version as well as adding even more balance changes and a couple new characters. Probably the most notable change here, besides the two new characters, is that this version of the game is much faster. It's actually kind of ludicrously fast on the highest speed setting, but you can set it to the "slow" setting, which is pretty similar to Dark Legend, or the "normal" setting, which is a little faster but still manageable. Speaking of speed, one thing that's a bit regrettable is that this version actually still doesn't run quite as well as the Dark Legend version, while there's no slowdown whatsoever the vast majority of the time, the game does still run at about half the framerate when the puppet character is onscreen, like the PS1 version, while Dark Legend always runs at full speed. This version also has further balance changes, typically altering which moves cause which "special states". In general, I think these are usually for the better, a couple characters lost some stuff, but generally they were characters who already had tons of options, while other characters who were more limited got more stuff, resulting in pretty much every character having at least one very cool combo now. For example, Kousanjou has very limited combo routes in the original, due to having few moves that do special states, but she has way better routes now, such as cFP -> jMP -> cFP -> air throw or FP dragon punch, in Dark Legend cFP is not a launcher so nothing like this is possible, and this definitely makes her much more fun to play. The other downgrade in this version is that the character endings have been axed and replaced with text, which is kind of lame, but everything else remains intact, in particular the soundtrack still kicks ass. Overall, it's a bit of a hard call between this and the Dark Legend version, though overall I think I'm starting to lean towards this version being superior, after getting used to some of the new combo options it's hard to go back, so I'm moving my SR over to it. Still, either version is highly recommended (or even the PS1 version, though it's worse than both), this is now the third time we've reviewed it and I still end up playing it for a couple hours each time because it's just that fun. Probably my overall favourite fighting game of the generation even with all the competition.
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