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Last Topic's Ratings:
Dungeons and Dragons: Shadow over Mystara - GGGGGGAA - 88% (8) (1 SR)
Game no Tetsujin: The Shanghai - AA - 50% (2)
Ninku: Tsuyokina Yatsura No Daigekitotsu - BB - 0% (2)
Noon - BB - 0% (2)
Puzzle & Action: 2-do Arukoto wa Sand-R - AA - 50% (2)
Shining the Holy Ark - GGGGGB - 83% (6) (2 SR)
I was surprised to see so much love for Shining the Holy Ark, I was always under the impression that people loved the main series entries and the dungeon crawlers were considered meh. I'm curious to see what will happen when we finally get to Shining Force 3.
Games for this topic:
Blazing Dragons
Bomberman Wars
Bulk Slash
Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers
King of Fighters 97
World Series Baseball 98
There's a translation available for Bulk Slash. I'm also kind of curious about Bomberman Wars, since it's such a weird concept.
Blazing Dragons - G
ReplyDeleteBomberman Wars - A
Bulk Slash - G (SR)
Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers - A
King of Fighters 97 - A
World Series Baseball 98 - A
Blazing Dragons is another point and click adventure game that reminds me a fair bit of Discworld, but it's a significantly better game in almost every respect. One of the most important things is that this is a very competent port to Saturn. The Discworld games had issues with framerates and audio balancing, but no such issues are found here, this version basically feels exactly like it might be the PC version except that you're using a controller. This is also clearly a pretty competent game at its core as well, for example something it has that I appreciate is that the icons for interacting with things change when you hover something you can interact with, which cuts down on a lot of the guesswork, and the game is also quite well-written and has good voice acting as well. Even the puzzles don't feel inordinately impossible to solve, I was able to make quite good progress even without the use of a guide. I don't really have any complaints here, undoubtedly if you're looking to play a game of this type on console this generation, this is easily one of your strongest options, and if you haven't ever played this title but like games of this type you should give it a look.
Bomberman Wars is a very strange game. Obviously, the game is a strategy game instead of the action-puzzle game that Bomberman usually is. You might think this would simply be a generic strategy RPG with the Bomberman license merely stapled to it, but this is not the case at all, this is still Bomberman. You will still be placing bombs, blowing up blocks, collecting items, and trapping your opponents with chained explosions, you'll just now be doing it in turn-based fashion. The basic gist of the game is that each side creates a team of 4 units plus a king, and the game is won when either the king is defeated or all other units are. Units have differing more and bomb placement ranges, for example, the warrior can move 2 tiles and place a bomb up to 2 tiles away, while the witch can only move one tile, but can place a bomb up to 3 tiles away. Once placed, bombs explode 5 turns later, unless detonated by the explosion from another bomb, which retains the classic T-shape of classic bomberman games. Any unit caught in an explosion is defeated instantly, there's no HP here, but the long time before explosions generally gives people ample time to get away unless they get trapped in one way or another. To assist you in pinning people down, you can try to destroy blocks and find items, just like in the classic games, as getting something like a fire up or a roller skate can greatly increase your offensive options, you just have to make sure you don't corner yourself in the process. The game is somewhat nonlinear, with you being able to tackle stages in whatever order you choose, and you'll unlock more characters to use for your battle party as you go. It's kind of an interesting concept that's very reminscent of Shadows of the Tusk, but there are a few flaws. The biggest one is that the game is really slow. Bombs take a long time to explode, each unit gets only one bomb, and units have very limited movement as they can only move in straight lines on a given turn, which results in it taking quite a long time to get anything done. While it is satisfying when you finally trap and eliminate someone after turns of trying to work them into a bad position, there's no question that fights take long and there's generally a lot of time in which not a lot really happens. Compared to Shadows of the Tusk where pretty much every choice feels significant this is definitely a much lower intensity game. It does help when you start getting access to units with more special abilities, like for example the archer can make bombs explode faster, allowing you to trap people in ways you might not have previously been able to, but some of the early battles definitely feel like a slog. It's definitely an interesting novelty and if you're intrigued by the concept the localization barrier is quite low (the PS1 version has a fan translation, but it's not super necessary), but I don't think it's nearly as cool as Shadows of the Tusk.
DeleteBulk Slash is fantastic, easily one of Saturn's best titles. In many ways, the game feels like a better version of Starfox 2, it maintains the same gimmick of being able to transform between a plane and a mech to assault large 3D stages, it just does everything way better. One of the things that's really impressive about this game is how well it runs. The stages are quite big and full of stuff and you can move through them quite fast as the plane, but thanks to smart use of level of detail scaling it runs flawlessly at all times, even when battling the giant bosses that show up at the end of each stage. The game controls and plays well as both the mech and the plane, the mech is generally a bit better suited to precision assaults against ground targets, while the plane is better for engaging air units or moving quickly, but both feel smooth to control. I particularly like the way the mech is handled, it has a charge bar of sorts which will let it launch a large bomb, but if you hold the button down instead you can use a rapidfire cannon, it just feels like a clever system in general. The game's presentation is also quite good, you can collect one of a number of different navigators to accompany you on the stages who both give some advice and react to you getting hit, and there's an ending for each of them if you use them for most of the levels. Overall, this is just clearly a really good 3D action game, almost on par with the likes of Starfox 64, it's criminal that this wasn't localized.
DeleteAs I mentioned when we covered the original Devil Summoner, I think it's possibly the weakest of the SMT games. Gameplay-wise it plays like a throwback to the very first SMT games and ignores the various improvements that some of the more recent games have added, and it also adds the obnoxious loyalty system that restricts your options in combat. For Soul Hackers, absolutely none of these things have been addressed, all of the core systems from Devil Summoner remain in place. What the game has instead done is attempt to downplay these mechanics by giving you some tools to mitigate them to some degree. The main way this has been done is through the addition of two special demon companions. The first is Nemissa, the game's secondary protagonist. I suppose technically she fights somewhat like a human and cannot fuse, but you don't lose the game if she falls in battle and she can use demon spells as well. However you want to think of her, though, she's by far the most powerful character in the game and tends to serve as the lynchpin for your entire party. Not too far into the game you also get Zeed, a special demon whom you can fuse over and over that has some special properties, most notably that he's always perfectly loyal and doesn't cost any magnetite to summon. As your party contains 6 members total, that's half your squad right there and you don't even have to pay any magnetite for it. As Nemissa will usually be contributing most of the damage and Zeed can fulfil any role you want since it can inherit any skill, you'll basically just be using the random demons you collect for support and Zeed fusion fodder, which helps with magnetite economy and generally makes the game a fair bit less tedious. Another notable improvement is to the game's plot and setting. This game features a pretty interesting premise involving a virtual world which steals people's souls, and your adventure takes place both inside of it and in the real world, as well as getting to experience the final memories of various people close to the project. It's definitely pretty different from the norm, even for the series, and it helps give you an incentive to stick it out despite the game's flaws. Make no mistake, this is still in no way one of the best games in the series, and the Saturn version is also the worst one as the PS1 version and especially the 3DS version have a ton of extras and changes, but it is at least more playable than the first game.
King of Fighters 97 is much like the previous KOF ports to the console, which is to say, underwhelming. Like the previous games, it still needs to load atrociously long before every character, in fact it's actually way worse here than before, it now loads almost 10 seconds before every character comes out, nearly double that of the PS1 version. This version is still better than the PS1 version though because at least the game runs properly once a match does start, the PS1 version has a severe problem with frameskipping that thankfully isn't present here, but even when playing this one on 1 vs 1 the load times feel obnoxious. The soundtrack still sucks, too. The gameplay is definitely decent, but there's a lot of other better fighting games available on the system. It's a shame they didn't port KOF98 to this system and use one of the memory packs to make it actually work properly, as games like X-Men vs Street Fighter show it clearly could have been done.
DeleteWhen playing World Series Baseball 98 I knew I had absolutely played this game before, but no matter how much I racked my brain I couldn't figure out where. It turns out this is actually basically the same game as Pro Yakyuu Greatest Nine 98 Summer Action, albeit with the MLB license, some adjusted visuals, and english commentary. Compared to the Japanese game, the commentary does seem to be a bit more fleshed out here, which is nice, but mechanically it is identical. As before, the ability to call out a corner for a pitch is interesting, I like that this actually gives some strategy to hitting, but running still feels awkward, even knowing exactly what button to press to advance / retreat runners it's often hard to get them to do the right thing on fly balls and this leads to an unnecessary number of outs. I suppose you can just set baserunning to automatic to deal with this issue, though that still feels kind of like a cop-out. Defense also doesn't feel super fantastic either, tI've mentioned before that when you're playing a game that handles defense well you always just kinda know who you're going to be controlling when the game puts you in control of the fielders, but that's not the case here, I always need a second to figure out who I am before I can get the ball. Overall, it's certainly ok, it runs well enough and there is some nuance to batting, it's still probably one of Saturn's better sports options, but at the same time I'm not really blown away by it.