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Gamefaqs Link
Last Topic's Ratings:
Fighters Megamix - GGGGAGGA - 88% (8) (1 SR)
Fishing Koushien 2 - AA - 50% (2)
Langrisser: Dramatic Edition - GGG - 100% (3)
Sega Ages: Memorial Collection Vol. 2 - BAB - 17% (3)
Touge: King the Spirits 2 - BB - 0% (2)
Zoku Gussun Oyoyo - GG - 100% (2) (1 SR)
I was actually really surprised so few people played Zoku Gussun Oyoyo for this topic, as that series tends to be reasonably popular. Maybe people just didn't play the Saturn version?
Games for this topic:
Burning Rangers
Cotton Boomerang
Daibouken: Saint Elmo's no Kiseki
Madden NFL 98
Sakura Wars: Hanagumi Taisen Columns
Uno DX
I remember thinking I had played Burning Rangers before, but it turns out I was just remembering the level based on it in Sonic and All-Stars Racing Transformed, so I'm looking forward to finally finding out what this game is all about. We also have the Saturn version of Daibouken here, so I can finally finish talking about that game.
Burning Rangers - G
ReplyDeleteCotton Boomerang - A
Daibouken: Saint Elmo's no Kiseki - G
Madden NFL 98 - A
Sakura Wars: Hanagumi Taisen Columns - G
Uno DX - G
Burning Rangers is an interesting title with a few flaws, but a number of strong points that mostly make up for them. We'll probably need to start by describing the game, since it's very unique. The gist of the game is that you play as futuristic firefighters exploring burning facilities to put out fires and look for survivors. The game is essentially a 3D Platformer, and in a lot of ways it actually kind of feels like a prototype for Sonic Adventure. As a firefighting game, most of the hazards are environmental, with the biggest threat being explosions, which have an audio cue that you need to react to to avoid being blasted (the game has the same health system as the sonic games, with crystals replacing rings). There's also a significant aspect of exploration, there's no map, instead you can call a navigator who will tell you roughly which you need to go, though exploring other rooms is useful for finding survivors or extra crystals. The game is however not without its flaws, with by far the biggest one being the camera. It's kind of cliche to complain about the camera in 5th gen 3D games, but it's legitimately atrocious here, maybe the worst of any game I've played. It forces you to constantly rotate it with L and R, but the problem is compounded by the fact that the game maps certain actions to dpad directions, which frequently trigger in unintended circumstances if the camera isn't directly behind the player. For example, if you try to jump sideways, you'll very frequently instead get a kind of side evade move instead, and to be honest I feel like the game actually has more jumps and dodges than it really needs, the standard jump / double jump / slowfall is good enough for virtually everything. Another issue is that it can be fairly easy to get lost, though the navigator can always tell you where to go, you may have to contact them fairly often. The game is also fairly short, with only 4 missions that maybe last a couple hours tops, though it does feature a randomizer mode that feels surprisingly ahead of its time. Still, while there's no shortage of small annoyances, the game still generally feels pretty cool and interesting. It has a good sense of style and it flows pretty well when the controls are cooperating. It still wouldn't be among my favourite platformers of the era, but it's still a nice little swan song for Saturn.
Cotton Boomerang is a fair bit of a step down from the first game IMO. For starters, actually a surprisingly large amount has changed between Cotton Original and Cotton Boomerang. For starters, there's now multiple playable characters, and the game uses a strange system where rather than just picking one, you pick three and these become your lives, and you can also switch between them when using your bomb. I'll say straight off the bat I'm not a fan of this change. For starters, for most shmups that have multiple characters, playing different characters is part of the game's replay value, so having you pick 3 characters reduces that, though perhaps it would not have had much effect anyway as most of the characters feel very similar to each other (the characters were actually originally just different powerups in Cotton 2). Furthermore, they're also very unbalanced, specifically the two fairy characters are vastly more powerful than the others as they have a much smaller hitbox, so you're almost always going to be picking both of them and a filler character who will probably die immediately as the game's bullet patterns in no way feel like they were designed for the big hitbox characters. With the characters feeling so similar, there's almost never any situation where using the bomb to swap between them is relevant strategically, and you can't revive defeated characters by any means either, so the entire system just kind of feels half-baked. There are a few positives though. For one thing, the magic attacks that you could do in the previous game are now just charge attacks, which lets you use them more often, though they're extremely similar between the different characters and it would have been cool to have different ones. The game also looks and sounds really nice, and runs great on Saturn, with no slowdown whatsoever, and the "catch" system remains fun (I wish it was utilized more in the boss fights). Overall, it's all right, but it definitely feels like a step in the wrong direction for the series.
DeleteAs I alluded to when we covered Daibouken Deluxe on PS1, it's a very different game from the original Saturn version, almost being a full-on remake of the Saturn version despite only releasing a few years later. The basic plot is the same, you still travel the world by sea liberating towns from monsters and trying to earn fame and fortune by trading, but almost all of the details are totally different. One of the biggest changes is that unlike the PS1 version, there are no monster nests, the monsters are instead found in the occupied cities themselves. To be honest, I feel like this actually makes a bit more sense, and I like that they don't respawn, so you can run back to a safe port to heal, with the only disadvantage being the cost of the trip. This does mean that opportunities to fight monsters are limited, but you level way faster this time around so it's not a problem. In fact, you level so fast that the main character will tend to massively outpace any potential mercenaries, making them fairly redundant in this version unless you're really stuck (mercenaries don't level and must simply be replaced with better ones from time to time).
(Cont'd)
The battle system is actually mostly the same, except that you can use the magic rings way more times before you have to recharge them, which makes them feel a little bit too good here, in particular they make special attacks totally redundant since they frequently fail in this version of the game. Another big change is to trading, which is way less lucrative in this version. Some of this is because the game doesn't display the relative price of goods in each town, making it harder to make good buys, but even if you do buy goods at a good price the profit margins are a lot lower. To be honest, I actually think this is mostly a good thing, it's a bit too easy to become ludicrously rich in the PS1 version, here money actually feels relatively tight for most of the game, so even though trading is not super profitable you still want to do it when you can. Speaking of profit, though, we need to talk about the Naval battles, which are drastically different from the PS1 version, and also a fair bit worse. For starters, they're vastly more rare, but they also play totally differently. There's no hex grid here, you have full movement in the water, and instead of taking turns you instead have simultaneous turn taking where you have to plot a path through the water, firing automatically at the enemy when they're within range. This generally feels pretty luck based, and I think the AI cheats and reads your moves (I notice that regardless of which way I turn, they always seem to know and follow me). It also takes way too many shots to sink someone, but thankfully you can skip this entirely and just board the enemy ship and fight the captain in single combat, which was not an option on PS1, where you would instead have your hired sailors fight instead (and running out of them also sank your boat). These battles play out identically to all other battles except that the main character fights alone, though as long as you have a couple heals and some good equipment they're not hard to win. They're incredibly profitable, too, as unlike in the PS1 version after defeating a pirate you can loot their ship, so if you have a fair amount of cargo space feel free to steal all their cannonballs and trade goods for huge profit, though even then it's still less money than you'd make from trading on PS1, as pirate ships are somewhat rare. We also haven't talked about the presentation, though it's a fair bit weaker than on PS1. It's still not a bad-looking game or anything, but this version definitely has less detail, and I notice that they reuse the town layouts a ton here whereas on PS1 they're a lot more unique. Oh, speaking of the towns, annoyingly the facilities aren't marked in this version, though they tend to be in the same spots since there's only a few town layouts. Overall, I definitely think the PS1 version is somewhat better, it just has a fair bit more nuance to it in a number of ways (another example is that on PS1, ports pay awful prices for trade goods while occupied, but in the original they pay the same amount, you just can't buy trade goods from them). That said, this version is still fun and it's kind of interesting to see how they differ, this is still one of the better RPGs on Saturn and if the PS1 version didn't exist I probably wouldn't be complaining about much beyond the naval battles, which are easily handled by the auto battle anyway. It's too bad neither version of this game was translated into English.
DeleteSaturn has seen its fair share of crummy PS1 ports, but thankfully Madden 98 is not one of them. As far as I can tell, the game seems to be completely intact, it runs at the correct framerate with no slowdown, it seems to look about the same, and the commentary and sound remains intact as well. We could possibly just end the review there because there aren't really any other options for football games on Saturn, but unfortunately, while this is a great port, it's a great port of one of the weaker Madden entries overall. Madden 98 basically has a single but significant problem, which is that running plays are trash because blockers don't do much of anything. "Well, you can just pass", you might think, and indeed you can, but without running plays being a viable alternative the strategy of the game is lost. Because you know passes are the only good plays, you just always run zone defense, which gets you tons of knockdowns and interceptions. Even if the opponent tries to run, which should easily beat a zone defense, the blockers are so bad that they usually get no gain or a short loss anyway. See, the key to football working the way it does is that running plays are a reliable source of short yardage which can convert fairly reliably into first downs under normal circumstances, this forces slightly riskier defensive plays like blitzes to try to get sacks and force punts or turnovers, which are then vulnerable to passing plays for big gains. With running plays being so poor at gaining any yardage at all (it's a miracle to even get 3 yards), this completely falls apart and the game has no depth. It still looks nice and controls reasonably well, but it's hard to recommend when NFL Blitz absolutely nails this concept (it's also kind of jokey that NFL Blitz is a much more strategically nuanced game than Madden, but Blitz has actually always relied on solid fundamentals). It's still playable and it's still one of the top sports games on Saturn, but I'd still probably just recommend sticking to PS1 for your sports game needs.
DeleteSakura Wars Columns is a Sakura Wars variant of the classic Sega puzzler with a unique but slightly flawed new mechanic. The new mechanic applies only to the game's standard arcade mode, which is a series of VS matches against the other characters where you can attack each other by making combos, like most puzzle games of this type. The unique mechanic is that your attacks are tied to a meter which increases when making matches / combos, and when it's full you can use one of three choices, "Attack", "Save", or "Defend". If you choose to Attack, you send some blocks to the opponent, while Defend instead erases some of your blocks. If you choose to save, you do nothing but can instead hold the power for a stronger attack when the bar fills again. Next time, you can do a "level 2 attack" or "level 2 defense", or continue saving. At level 3, you can no longer save and must use it, with the middle option instead giving you a wild card piece that can clear any match (but generally isn't worth it). This system works decently well for the game on its face because making big combos in columns is really hard, but the issue is that attacks are generally pretty weak. They send regular blocks, which just have a delay of a couple turns before they can be used, and when they turn back they will almost always make huge combos for the opponent, making attacking generally pretty bad unless it outright kills the opponent. As such, you will almost always just pepper them with level 1 attacks or save up for a level 3, taking most of the nuance out of the system. It's also kind of lame that you can't trigger the attack whenever you want, if you commit to saving you have to wait for the next level, as I feel it would add some interesting nuance if you could use it whenever. Still, it's at least mostly functional and it still feels like it rewards good play for the most part even if it's not terribly deep. More significantly, besides the main arcade mode the game also has a very fleshed out story mode that plays a lot like the main Sakura Wars, complete with constantly having to answer various questions and getting points with the girls (or not) from it. Besides versus matches, there's also some puzzles and other game types in here too, giving it some decent variety. The game's production values are also quite solid, the art quality is right on par with the mainline Sakura Wars games and there's a lot of it, this clearly wasn't just a cheap spinoff or anything, quite a bit of effort went into this one. Hopefully at some point it will be translated.
DeleteUno DX is a port of the PS1 game, which was a member of the Superlite 1500 series. It's kind of interesting to see this on Saturn, as not many of these budget series titles got ported, but this is clearly one of the better ones so it's welcome to have it here. It's worth noting that this release lacks the "Basic Uno" mode that's in the PS1 version, but as that mode is just the same thing but with slightly less features it's not really a loss. As before, this is a surprisingly fully featured take on the card game, that not only has a bunch of rules, but also a bunch of fully voiced and animated anime characters to play with and even a story mode. I also appreciate some of the little touches, like for example when you play a wild card and select the colour to change it to, even though the names of the colours are in Japanese, the cursor changes to the colour you're highlighting so even if you don't know the colour names it's not a problem. There's not too much else to say about this other than that it's a pretty solid product if you're a fan of the card game.