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Last Topic's Ratings:
Body Special 264: Girls in Motion Puzzle - G - 100% (1) (1 SR)
Capcom Generation 5 - GGAAAA - 67% (6)
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - GGGGGGGAG - 94% (9)
Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius: Forever with Me - GGGGGA - 92% (6)
Manx TT Super Bike - GGAA - 75% (4)
Waku Waku Puyo Puyo Dungeon - AG - 75% (2)
A crazily highly rated topic, but I won't lie, it kinda bothers me that no one else tried Girls in Motion Puzzle vol 2. It's actually a very good game with virtually no language barrier. It's too bad they never made Cats in Motion Puzzle or something because the fundamentals are easily solid enough to go beyond just being a fanservice game.
Games for this topic:
Crow: City of Angels
Langrisser 3
Segata Sanshiro Shinkenyugi
Silhouette Mirage
Texthoth Ludo: Arcanum Senki
Winter Heat
The fact that Segata Sanshiro has his own game is maybe the most Saturn thing possible. I'm sure it's probably bad, but I can't wait to try it out.
Crow: City of Angels - B
ReplyDeleteLangrisser 3 - G
Segata Sanshiro Shinkenyugi - B
Silhouette Mirage - B
Texthoth Ludo: Arcanum Senki - A
Winter Heat - A
Crow: City of Angels is a game with a bold vision. Everyone knows that Knife Only is the best way to play Resident Evil, so what if we turned that into its own game, but made everything about it a thousand times worse? This game is so bad I almost don't even know where to begin. As stated before, it plays a lot like Rez Evil in some ways, except that it's a beat-em-up. It has the same tank controls, except that they're way more stiff than Rez Evil, and the same static camera angles, except that the game has to load for a moment every time the scene changes. Attacking takes like a year, because you have to hold the attack button for a second or so before you even attack, which also removes any kind of nuance to the combat, and the movement is so stiff that there's zero nuance there either. The only good thing you can say bout the game is that it actually looks kind of decent, but it plays and runs so atrociously that this loses its appeal after the second room or so. This game is actually so godawful that it makes Alone in the Dark: One Eyed Jack's Revenge look kinda playable. This actually might be the worst Saturn game.
Langrisser 3 is considered the black sheep of the series, and it's really not hard to see why. For starters, toss out everything you thought you knew about Langrisser, because this is almost a completely different game from Langrisser 1 and 2. The first big change is that this is now a simultaneous turn-taking game. On your turn, you will simply plan out what you want to do, where you'd like to move, what spells you'd like to cast, etc, but none of it will actually happen until you end your turn. Then your choices and the enemy's choices will play out at the same time, similarly to the third Gotha and similar games. If you move into an enemy, that causes a battle, and stops your movement, which adds a fair bit of nuance to spell casting because you sometimes kind of have to guess where they're going to go. For example, if you want to heal your units, you want them to be close together because the heal is an AOE, which means you want them to move to a specific position, but the enemy could cut you off before you get there so you have to take that into account. It's not enormously complicated but it does add a bit more nuance to the basic gameplay. You might think this would quickly become hellishly overcomplicated with the unit system, but this has also been changed. Units are now basically just part of the commander, you still buy them before battle the same way, but they no longer move on their own, they mainly just exist for battles, which are also completely changed. Gone are the simple battles of the previous games, instead when you enter battle you now go to a separate screen where you can position your troops, followed by a real time battle between the two armies. These battles function a little bit like Dragon Force, except that your choices here actually matter a lot. Depending on where you position you units before battle they'll engage different enemy groups, and certain units have AOE attacks as well, so positioning is critical. Your units are no longer worthless cannon fodder, they now deal respectable damage and have somewhat comparable tankiness to the commander, so distributing who takes the attacks is crucial. If your commander is low on health, you'll probably want to position them near the back while the units take the hits (this is also a good idea for spellcasters who probably don't really want to be in combat at all), but powerful physical units probably want to be closer to the front so they can inflict maximum damage. If it sounds kind of complicated, it's because it is, but it's surprisingly satisfying once you get the hang of it and does add an appreciable level of nuance to battles. The only real issue is that just like in Langrisser 1, battles can be quite long. Even though there are not usually too many units to command, the real-time battles take long and you can't really skip them due to the strategic decisions you have to make. Technically, the ability to turn these battles off does exist, but it makes the game way harder as the computer will make awful choices for you. I've often had my units just outright die with battle scenes off in situations where I might have only taken a few points of damage with proper positioning, so I don't think this option is really viable. It does feel quite nicely paced with the use of speedups, but obviously this isn't an option on original hardware. We should also probably talk about the presentation and story. The presentation is not quite as strong as Langrisser Dramatic Edition, but it's still pretty good, and the story is also pretty interesting. New to the series is a dating sim mechanic where you can pair the main character up with different characters depending on your dialogue choices, which can help give it some extra replay value. Overall, this is a pretty solid game and I do like the innovations it makes to the series, it's kinda too bad that most of the ideas here were dropped after this game because I think this could have turned into something really noteworthy with a bit more refinement.
DeleteSegata Sanshiro Shinkenyugi is a trash game, but at least it's vaguely funny trash. As I'm sure everyone here knows, Segata Sanshiro was the mascot for the Saturn in Japan. He's essentially a martial artist who intimidates people into playing Saturn, which sounds super weird, but the commercials he starred in were frequently hilarious. This is a minigame collection of 10 games that are based around some of the commercials he did. The minigames are almost all completely terrible, but for finishing them you can unlock videos of the commercials they're based on, so that's something. It's kind of saying something that one of the minigames is based on Columns, which should be a slam dunk since Columns is fun, but it still sucks (the problem is that the goal is to simply make a match that involves 20 or more pieces, rather than to get a certain amount of points or something). In some cases the minigames at least somewhat resemble the commercials, but there's a bunch that are way in left field (for example, the Columns minigame is not an advertisement for Columns Arcade Collection, but instead Deep Fear). It's too bad this game wasn't a little better as the idea is fun, but you'd be much better served by just watching the commercials on youtube.
DeleteSilhouette Mirage also sucks, albeit nowhere near as badly as Crow or Segata Sanshirou. The basic gist of the game is that it's an action platformer somewhat in the same vein as something like Megaman where everything in the game is divided into either Silhouettes or Mirages, usually denoted by their colour. Silhouttes can only be damaged if you're facing right. Mirages can only be damaged if you're facing left. If facing the wrong way, you deal no damage, but you can instead use your reflector to send their projectiles back at them to cause damage. The entire game revolves around this mechanic, the problem is that it simply isn't fun at all. Action platformers like this live and die on their movement mechanics, what makes Mega Man X such a good game is how fast and fun the movement is, but forcing you to specifically get to one side to damage enemies completely throws off the game's pacing and restricts your movement options in a way that just doesn't feel fun. Probably because they know that your movement options suck, your shots also auto aim, which removes any real nuance from combat, you basically just shield until you can get on the right side, then just spam bullets to kill whatever you're facing, even bosses. The big gimmick is that some bosses can switch between Silhoutte and Mirage like you can, which means you have to get to the other side to continue damaging them, which is just as exciting as it sounds. For a treasure game, this game also has unusually poor visuals with a ton of bland, repetitive backgrounds and generally unappealing character designs. Apparently Treasure was somewhat aware that the core idea behind the game simply wasn't fun as they attempted to tweak it quite significantly for the playstation version, and then again for the localized playstation version, which have a ton of changes, but ultimately the concept behind this game is just bad and I don't know how that didn't immediately come up in early playtesting. Like I can see how you could make the case for a low, low A, but I can't see why anyone would ever want to play this when you could be playing literally any other treasure game or Megaman or something. I would even easily take something like Megaman X5 over this. Maybe Saturn's worst platformer.
Texthoth Ludo is a strange game but I think I've figured it out. It's a board game where you draw cards to move instead of using dice, with the goal being to reach the goal tile before the opponent. To move, you choose one of the numbered cards in your hand, for example if you had a 2 of cups and the 4 of pentacles, you could move either 2 or 4 spaces, depending on the card you picked. Each character has a suit that matches them (for your character it's swords), which lets you move twice as much, though you can choose to move the regular amount if this is more advantageous. After picking a card to move, you can either move as far as you can, or you can stop early on certain specific spots. The goal tile is never on the board's "main loop", to get there you have to land on branch tiles, which are red and have arrow marks on them. You cannot stop early on these tiles, you have to land exactly on them, and the same goes for the goal, so a large part of the game revolves around getting the correct cards in your hand to land on the necessary branch tiles and reach the goal. To that end, one of the best things to do is to land on the "draw more cards" tiles, which happen to be one of the tiles you can choose to stop early on. However, there's more to the game than simply moving around. If you pass the opponent, you can choose to battle them. When this happens, both players pick cards to put up, and the higher total wins, subject to a few rules (once again, using cards of your character's strong suit is more powerful). The winner gets a free card, while the loser is knocked back to start, which can be useful to delay their progress. You can also land on special squares that let you summon monsters on the map, which can also be used to battle in the same way, or squares where you can pay a face card to activate a special effect. Finally, at any time, you can sacrifice either two face cards or two number cards and one face card to summon your major arcana card. These are like spells, and have special effects, like making the opponent lose a turn or even letting you control them for a turn, but paying 3 cards for this effect is expensive. It's kind of interesting that you can actually choose which card is your major arcana as you progress through the game, allowing you to choose an effect you think is strong. Anyway, that's about the gist for the mechanics. Something I noticed is that the game doesn't explain this very well, there is kind of a tutorial on the first stage but it's peppered with a lot of unnecessary "flavour text" and glosses over a lot of important stuff too quickly. I also feel like a fair number of the mechanics are kind of unnecessary, like summoning monsters. In most cases they're just a free card for the opponent as they are not hard to beat, in theory you actually can evolve them but that's a ton of time spent that should just be spent reaching the goal. The AI also isn't very smart and wastes a lot of cards that they might need to reach the goal tile, so the game generally seems to be pretty easy. It's sort of an interesting idea and you can play multiplayer against another person instead of against the AI, but it also feels like some of its ideas are a little half-baked and I think I'd usually rather play Culdcept or Fortune Street instead.
DeleteWinter Heat is very similar to Decathlete, just focused on winter sports instead of summer ones. This is a bit of a double-edged sword. The simplistic gameplay of Decathlete works well for the summer events, which are mostly track and field events, but the winter events involve a number of somewhat more nuanced sports like skiing and skeleton which are focused more around precise control instead of button mashing and timing, and they just don't work all that well because the game doesn't support analog controls. Many of these events are solo events too, which hurts the game's value as a multiplayer game, since running the events solo and then comparing scores at the end just doesn't have the same excitement as a race that comes right down to the wire, and it's quite a bit slower to play too (some of these events take almost a full minute per player). It's certainly not terrible (well, the Slalom event is terrible, it's a bizarre timing game that basically just doesn't work properly), but I would generally stick to Decathlete and then just get a good dedicated Snowboarding game, as they'll do all of those sorts of events much better than this game does.
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