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Last Topic's Ratings:
Burning Rangers - GGGGGGGG - 100% (8)
Cotton Boomerang - GGGAAGA - 79% (7) (1 SR)
Daibouken: Saint Elmo's no Kiseki - GG - 100% (2)
Madden NFL 98 - AAA - 50% (3)
Sakura Wars: Hanagumi Taisen Columns - GAG - 83% (3)
Uno DX - GG - 100% (2)
Seeing the level of acclaim for Burning Rangers makes me wonder why Sega steadfastly refuses to ever re-release any of their first party Saturn games that aren't Sonic R. Clearly there's a market for it.
Games for this topic:
Dungeons and Dragons: Shadow over Mystara
Game no Tetsujin: The Shanghai
Ninku: Tsuyokina Yatsura No Daigekitotsu
Noon
Puzzle & Action: 2-do Arukoto wa Sand-R
Shining the Holy Ark
Noon is a game I've had my eye on ever since we first started the Saturn GAB. Also, I think it's interesting that the name of the second title in this series it not a typo. Yes, this is part of the same series as Game no Tatsujin and indeed, the first word is one letter different in each case. I triple checked it to make sure that they were both correct.
Dungeons and Dragons: Shadow over Mystara - A
ReplyDeleteGame no Tetsujin: The Shanghai - A
Ninku: Tsuyokina Yatsura No Daigekitotsu - B
Noon - B
Puzzle & Action: 2-do Arukoto wa Sand-R - A
Shining the Holy Ark - B
I mentioned this when we covered the first Dungeons and Dragons game, but I was never too impressed by this series. It turns out I really only had experience with Mystara and I was actually pleasantly surprised by Tower of Doom, but we now come to Mystara so it's time to make myself unpopular again. Shadow of Mystara is a classic well-intentioned but somewhat ill-considered sequel, where the attempt to make the game bigger and better than the original leads to the game losing most of what made the original fun. First thing's first, there is admittedly a TON of new stuff here. For starters, there's the basic combat engine. Besides having more characters, combat has been drastically revamped, with characters having much more extensive movesets that also include motion-activated special moves. This allows for more combos than were possible in the original game, but with it most of the nuance of the original game's combat system has been lost. Previously you had to pay a lot of attention to spacing because monsters hit hard and your options for overcoming their range advantage was limited, but now you can just dash all over the place and do huge combos, which turns most enemies into combo food who differ only in terms of the number of hitpoints you need to take off to eliminate them, and even if they do hit you most enemies just do scratch damage now. Items have also drastically increased in quantity, but as your moveset has increased so drastically they now feel largely pointless outside of boss encounters, and even then you'll almost never want to have any item selected other than your shield, as the shield now must be used with the use button rather than by holding attack + back as in the first game, which is a terrible blunder. The increased number of items comes with another massive drawback as well, which is that you can now only hold a limited number of items which means inventory management is now a thing. And you have to cumbersomely manage your inventory with the scroll wheel in a game that constantly forces you onto the next screen. Accidentally picked up a garbage throwing hammer and dropped your Pot of Efreet just before the screen decided to autoscroll? Tough luck, it's gone forever. The combination of the incredibly cumbersome scroll system to select items plus their diminished usefulness and the annoyance of managing them generally makes it so you won't want to engage with this system at all save for a handful of super OP items to cheese out bosses, and this also makes the new Magic User character a pain to play as well. That said, this is still Capcom we're talking about so it's not all bad, the game still looks and sounds good and the attacks and motions are fast and responsive, but the game has lost its sense of uniqueness from the first game, it now basically just feels like Final Fight 3 with some clunky fantasy elements tacked on. One other annoyance is that the Saturn version of Mystara runs way less well than Tower of Doom does, with such absurdly long loading on boot that I always think it has crashed, and a decent amount of loading between scenes too. There's definitely worse beat-em-ups out there but if the two games didn't always come as a bundle I'd definitely have skipped this one.
Game no Tetsujin: The Shanghai is a bit of a strange package. You might think this would be just a Shanghai game, but it's not, like the previous Game no Tatsujin this is a compilation of several different games, in this case Shanghai, a Shangai variant called Rong Rong, and most bizarrely of all, a port of the Genesis game Shikinjou. Shanghai is still Shanghai, no complaints there. Rong Rong is a weird game that feels like Shanghai for beginners. It looks superficially similar to Shanghai but the rules for matching pieces are different and generally much more permissive. In Shanghai, it's all about if a piece is "free", which means you can move it left or right without disturbing another piece. This is not a thing in Rong Rong, instead the match rule is that if you can draw a line between two pieces, you can match them. There's also some weird rules where sometimes clearing pieces creates combos and the game also always shows you all possible matches when you highlight a piece. To me, this mode is kind of boring, it simply loses most of the charm of Shanghai as a game. As you get to be a better Shanghai player you learn to start to identify the types of traps that can cause you to lose the game, but that's basically absent here. Like I'm sure you can lose Rong Rong but it's much harder to do and even if you play haphazardly you'll win most of the time. Shikinjou is a seemingly exact port of the Genesis game, making it by far the most content-rich game in the package as it has 200 stages, sadly the banger ost from the Genesis version is not retained. Besides these three games, the game boasts a story mode which challenges you to play stages from all of them in sequence as a very basic text only story plays out. There's also an ironman mode which is basically the same idea, but without the story. Neither of these are as good as the world tour mode from the original Game no Tatsujin, though, a key element of why that worked as well as it did was that you could always choose which game to play. Still, even if you could do that, there would also be the issue that Shanghai and Rong Rong don't have that many boards, and Shikinjou, while not a bad game, is so different from the other games in the package that it feels out of place. It's still not an awful package or anything, but it's not nearly as good as Shanghai Triple Threat overall, which also has some Shanghai variants that are much more interesting as well as significantly more boards.
DeleteNinku is a classic bad fighting game. There's not too much I can say about this beyond the fact that it has no cancelling and no combos. Any time you hit someone there's an obnoxiously long hit pause, and most moves push back so far you can't even link afterwards, for example most characters can't even combo off a clean jump in because it pushes the opponent too far back. Don't expect juggle combos either as all opponents can immediately air recover. As such, you will just be spamming good normals until you gauge fills, at which point you can spam powerful special moves for a while, though the opponent can basically just block since it's not like you really have any offensive options in this game. About the only good thing you can say about it is that it looks decent, the animation and voice acting is ok and it tries to do a 3D effect that it actually pulls off decently well, but the core gameplay is pretty bottom of the barrel. It's not quite as bad as Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon Super S: Various Emotion, at least you don't randomly taunt mid-match, but it's honestly not too far off.
Noon was a game I was looking forward to playing for years, but unfortunately it's trash. For starters, at first I thought it was some sort of RPG, then I thought it was some sort of puzzle game, but it's really neither, it's sort of a weird action and puzzle game hybrid that is like nothing else that ever existed. Essentially, you control a character on a top-down battlefield, and you're fighting aganist another character. Each of you has your own coloured zone, which is key to winning. The goal is to prevent this zone from getting filled up with blocks. Blocks gradually appear on the battlefield in different colours, which you can push around by walking into them. If you match 3, you can punch them to clear them, which will fill up a bit of the opponent's zone with garbage blocks. There are also rainbow pieces that can be used to make combos, and you can gain power for your special move by smooshing blocks into each other. The problem is, basically nothing in the game works to any degree. By far the biggest problem is that you both play on the same playfield and can smack each other whenever you want. This effectively makes making matches impossible, because the opponent can just come in whenever they want and smack your pieces away or crush them to break your match. At best, you might be able to complete a match that appeared mostly complete, but for the most part this is a waste of time. The key to winning is actually just to pick a character with a cheesy power and crush blocks so you can use it quickly. For example, one character instantly fills the opponent's zone with garbage blocks, guaranteeing you get at least a few ticks on the timer, and you can easily spam more matches while they try to deal with it. Another huge annoyance is that if you get stunned, you have to mash or you stay stunned for ages, but there's no audio or visual cue that you've been stunned, so frequently your character will just seem not to respond to your inputs until you realize what has happened. There's also a bunch of powerups that appear every now and then and they're also much too strong, like one that just lets you walk through blocks to destroy them. Overall, the game basically just feels like chaos and little you do other than spamming your power feels like it has any meaningful effect on the game. Funny enough, the boss battles, while still bad, are by far the best part of the game because the absense of a second character means you actually can focus on building matches here. This game probably would have worked better if there was a line in the middle that players couldn't cross, as it stands while the game is very unique it simply isn't interesting, deep, or fun, and you definitely need at least one of those things for a game to be worth playing.
DeleteShining the Holy Ark is a fairly basic dungeon crawler with a single massive flaw that puts it below almost every other game of this type. The first thing to note about the game is that its presentation has some appeal. The game puts you inside the head of the main character, and everything is seen through his eyes. The game has remarkable dedication to this aesthetic, for example when talking to people the camera will shift as though your character's head is moving to look at whomever is speaking, and even in battle you never see the main character directly, but your perspective jumps forward when you attack. The monsters you encounter in the game are well-animated too, and I particularly like how they emerge from around corners and such when you encounter them. Gameplay-wise, the game is super basic. This is a standard "attack item magic" RPG, with no character customization of any kind beyond which characters you choose to put in your party. The most notable thing about the game is the pixie system, as you play the game you can recruit pixies who can perform attacks for you, this works by pressing a button to have them attack as monsters appear (before the battle starts), with the attack working or not depending on where the monster enters the screen from, almost like a QTE of sorts. Successfully picking the right pixie results in a little damage, as well as a bit of bonus gold and exp. It's not hugely consequential, but it's something. Anyway, so far this sounds okay if a bit basic, and indeed there are some things to like about this game, but it also has some big problems. As you might have guessed since we haven't talked about this part yet, the actual dungeon crawling is the most flawed part of the game. For starters, visually the dungeons are incredibly generic. There's effectively no variation whatsoever in the wall or floor textures, so basically everything within a given dungeon will look the exact same, but this is easily forgivable. The dungeons are also absolutely massive and take ages to explore, but to be honest I could forgive that too, sometimes exploring a well-designed dungeon can be kind of relaxing. Not so here, though, because the real problem with the game is the hidden items. We're not talking treasure chests here, those are present too and are fine, we are instead talking about items hidden inside unmarked walls, which are everywhere in this game. It wouldn't be so bad if it was just basic items and equipment you can buy, but the vast majority of the game's pixies are hidden this way too! For example, you'd think for sure the first pixie would be a scripted encounter that tells you about how they work, right? Of course not. It's just hidden on a random wall in a completely unsuspecting dead end in the first dungeon. The second one is in a random wall just outside the first dungeon, and the third is on the side of a village in the first town. You will never find these just by playing the game normally, which leaves you with two atrocious options for dealing with them. Either you can use a guide literally every step of the way, which is hideously tedious, or you can check every wall in the game, which takes forever and is equally tedious. Either way, this turns the dungeon exploration into a painful slog that just isn't fun at all. When you miss one of the pixies because you literally played the game for 5 minutes without consulting a guide, it will take ages to go back for it due to all the random encounters, which quickly become incredibly tedious due to the game's simplicity. I suppose you could also just skip all the pixies, like in theory they're not really necessary, and there are a couple you can get from quests, but even then it's still a very basic game with overly-long dungeons and a fairly by-the-numbers story. It does look nice, but something like Boundary Gate is better in virtually every way, the story was better, the graphics were at least as good if not better, and most importantly, the dungeons were short and not super tedious to explore.
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