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Last Topic's Ratings:
Dragon Knight 4 - GG - 100% (2)
Heart of Darkness - GGAGGAA - 79% (7) (1 SR)
K-1 Oujya ni Narou - GG - 100% (2) (1 SR)
Sled Storm - GGGGG - 100% (5)
Tsuukai: Slot Shooting - AB - 25% (2)
Weakest Link, The - AAB - 33% (3)
A pretty high-rated topic for having a fair number of games that weren't especially well-known. I feel like Sled Storm in particular kind of came out of nowhere.
Games for this topic:
Alnam no Kiba
Bike Race: Kamen Rider
Eagle One: Harrier Attack
Excalibur 2555 AD
Pool Academy
Tokimeki Memorial
To be honest, it was never my intention to cover Tokimeki Memorial. When it comes to Visual Novels and Dating Sims, it's generally my belief that although current translation tools make them somewhat playable, it's hard to evaluate them accurately for two reasons. First, the quality of the writing is critical to the quality of games like these and you simply can't gauge this accurately using translation software. Secondly, the sheer volume of text to translate also butchers their pacing and makes them feel overly slow even if this wouldn't have been the experience for a native speaker. As such, the game I was originally planning to cover for this topic was instead Mitsumete Knight, though while looking into it I found out that it is basically a spinoff of Tokimeki Memorial and shares almost the same gameplay. I also quickly found that I recognized a lot of its mechanics from various other games, both ones we've covered here and more recent games like Accel World Phoenix Festa, so I figured we probably needed to evaluate it after all. There's actually a fair number of english guides that can explain how to play the game, as well as a fan translation for the slightly downgraded but still largely similar SNES version, so it shouldn't be inordinately difficult to play for english speakers.
Alnam no Kiba - B
ReplyDeleteBike Race: Kamen Rider - B
Eagle One: Harrier Attack - A
Excalibur 2555 AD - A
Pool Academy - B
Tokimeki Memorial - A
Alnam no Kiba is a very strange game. It's a remake of a TGCD game, which was a fairly standard JRPG, but the remake instead opts to reimagine the game as a purely text-based RPG. However, in the process they also appear to have massively pruned down the game, as many events from the original are completely cut (including the introduction where the main character's mentor dies, which is extremely central to his character development and the overall plot), and they also pretty much axed all the cutscenes and voice acting which causes this version to look significantly worse than the original. Obviously, for a text-based game, writing quality is essential, but the writing in this game is clearly quite amateurish and bad, it's way too angsty and pretty much none of the characters are likable to any degree (a key theme in the game is that beastmen are discriminated against, but this dominates like 99% of the dialogue in the game and becomes tiresome almost immediately). There's also very little interactivity, most scenes only have a "move" and "talk" option, and the talk is almost always one line of throwaway dialogue like "please hurry to the castle" or something, making the game feel extremely sparse. Battles exist, but they're extremely barebones and I actually don't know if you can lose them, plus pretty much anything that wasn't a boss battle is just handled by a quick line saying something like "the party defeated the monsters", which is really dumb. Apparently the original game had a lot of problems with bugs and the like, but this remake is clearly massively inferior to the original and I really don't know what they were thinking with it. It's kind of hilarious to have this game so soon after End Sector because End Sector is like a million times better than this game.
I'm a fan of the simple series and Kamen Rider, but this is not one of their stronger efforts. The Bike Race is a very simplistic racing game with fairly poor controls. The first couple stages are okay, as the stages are very wide and having sweeping turns, but when you get to the third stage it becomes extremely narrow and full of overly twisty corners that the game's handling engine simply cannot handle gracefully, your only option is to come to a near direct stop or mash the wall a ton of times, both of which feel very awkward. The game really needed a power turn mechanic, but instead they use L and R for kicking, which is largely unnecessary. There are little minions on the course that you can kick off their bikes but this doesn't have any real purpose and basically just loses time. The racing isn't particularly exciting either, there's a bunch of characters but they're all the same except for their weapon, but as courses have only one other rider (besides the minions) weapon use also feels superflous most of the time. There's really not much else to say beyond this, this is a super basic racing game with a fairly poor engine. Even some of the budget racers like Europe Racer are a lot better than this.
Eagle One is basically a poor man's Ace Combat. The intro is admittedly super cool, the news report style is actually really neat and you even get more of these little cutscenes between missions, which does help keep the game moving. Unfortunately, the gameplay is at best average. One of the first problem is that the game does not have fully customizable controls. There's only a couple schemes available and none of them are exactly what I want. Even when you adjust to the controls, they still feel imprecise, in particular the basics of adjusting the throttle to perform precise turns just don't feel particularly good here, your speed adjusts way too slow and even the power turn doesn't feel sharp enough. To try to account for this, the game provides a "hover mode" which completely changes the controls and effectively turns you into a helicopter. This is generally preferred when you have to do battle with largely stationary targets like helicopters and ground targets, but the fact that standard aerial dogfighting feels as bad as it does is a big strike against the game. Another big issue is the game's targeting system, getting a lock on kind of works, but you have to switch targets manually and the target selector is not always sensible, and missiles are also oddly bad in this game, they travel really slow and basically cannot hit planes that are flying away from you to any degree, making the blindfire missiles generally the weapon of choice. Another big issue is the radar, which simply doesn't show enough, you have to frequently pause to check the nav computer to find your objectives. Overall, it's playable but clearly not great. The presentation is enough to hold A territory but there's a lot of other flight games on the system that are much better.
DeleteExcalibur 2555 AD is kind of the opposite of Eagle One where it's fairly mechanically polished but very dry in terms of presentation. The game is often compared to Tomb Raider, but it doesn't really play that much like it. It's sort of a basic 3D action game where you explore an underground labyrinth. The game is divided into a ton of rooms, which will generally either contain an enemy, some traps, an item you need, or an NPC you need to give an item to. Combat is probably the highlight of the game. The game's combat engine is somewhat similar to Les Visiteurs, where you'll be timing blocks and slashes to overcome enemies, but significantly more polished. Enemies can also block, and different enemies have different attack timings and block timings, so the game kind of feels rhythm-based in a way, much of the game revolves around learning the specific amount of time each enemy holds their guard for and then timing an attack exactly as they drop their guard (attacks have some startup), though against some enemies you must weave in some blocks to defend yourself. It's nothing super complex (you have multiple attacks and a charge attack, but generally the basic swing is all you'll need 99% of the time), but it works fairly well. Probably the most unfortunate thing about the combat is that when you face multiple enemies at once, they kind of just "wait their turn" to attack, which stops these encounters from potentially being more dynamic and challenging. Should you tire of combat, most enemies can also be avoided as you are fairly fast and they're not, though some enemies must be defeated in order to open doors or get items. The rest of the game is definitely not as strong. Sometimes interacting with the NPCs is fairly straightforward, for example in the first level someone tells you to get him alcohol, so you can bring a glass to a bartender to get it for him, but in other cases the items you need to give to NPCs are fairly illogical, like the guy on the third level who wants a locket for some reason, and similarly keys are unmarked and you just have to try them on various doors to see where they work. The traps are also fairly annoying as later levels involve a ton of backtracking, generally forcing you to pass the same traps a half-dozen times. You do have quite a lot of health, but healing items are limited and if you die you have to start the entire level over again, and these stages can be quite long. The game's biggest issue though is the total lack of story. Though NPC conversations are voiced, they basically never say anything substantial beyond generally some clue as to the kind of help you need to give them, and there's no cutscenes or story between levels either. It results in the game feeling fairly barebones and the combat can only keep the game interesting for so long, especially as the level design quickly starts to get repetitive. It's certainly not terrible, but I wish they had been a bit more ambitious as a very good game definitely could be made with this engine.
DeletePool Academy kinda sucks. For starters, this is a very simple game with relatively few modes and very basic presentation compared to many similar games. By far its biggest problem is its control. This game uses a really annoying hit mechanism where whenever you take a shot, you have to hold the button to build power, then tap it again when the cue is far back to actually take the shot. This just feels superflous and slow and I frequently just tap the button, forgetting that I need to hold it (you can cancel this but it wastes time). The game also features a mode where pre-arranged trickshots, which has a kind of cool reward where if you hit the shot you get to see a video of it being done in real life, but apart from the first one these shots are extremely obnoxious to pull off, requiring tons of trial and error with the "angle" function, which also isn't fun. There's not really much more to say about the game than that, it's kind of basic game with annoying controls that isn't nearly as good as Backstreet Billiards.
It's sort of funny that I originally figured Tokimeki Memorial would be too difficult to cover due to the language barrier, but it's actually much simpler than many games we've looked at already and the language barrier is almost a non-issue. The basic gist of this game is that you're a student who is just entering high school in Japan. Like any good Japanese high-schooler, you'll spend the vast majority of your time studying, but you'll also join a club, go to various school festivals and trips, and meet and date various girls in the hopes that one of them will confess her love to you at the end of the game. At the start of each week, you'll choose what you want to focus on that week. You can study for literature, science, and arts, work out, do club activities, hang out with friends, work on your appearance, or just sleep. These actions will raise various parameters, for example working out raises your athletics score, but your other stats will slowly decay if you neglect them. On days when you don't have school (generally Sundays, but periodic days off also exist) you can choose to study, but you can also call people on the phone and go on dates. You begin the game knowing your male friend who serves as an info man on the various girls, and Shiori, who is immediately datable, but the game has many other girls who you may or may not run into throughout the course of the game. Generally speaking, many of the girls tend to be tied to certain actions, for example if you study literature a lot you're likely to meet Mio, the bookworm, whereas if you instead focus on atheletics you're more likely to meet the athletic Nozomi instead. After meeting any girl, you first have to call up your male friend and ask him about her to get her phone number, at which point you can then ask her out on dates through the phone as well. When asking someone out on a date, you have to pick a time (it's virtually always best to just pick the next available date) and a place to visit, such as the park, shopping street, or library. Assuming they accept (which they usually do) the next week you can go there for a short event. The date events are fairly simple, you'll be given a choice of activity (depending on the location) and then a prompt from the girl, and choosing the right ones raises her affection. For example, at the shopping street, if you choose to go shopping, the girl will usually apologize for taking so long, and one of the options you can choose is "don't worry about it", which is generally the response that most girls like. The basic loop of "raise stats then go on a date" is fairly straightforward, about the only thing you really have to watch out for is your stress level, which will require you to rest occasionally.
DeleteHowever, there is a major complication in the "bomb" system. You would sort of think that the correct way to play this game would be to focus on one girl, because they probably won't like you going on dates with different girls every week, but it's actually the total opposite. After you meet a girl, you need to go on a date with her at least occasionally or she'll start getting jealous of the other girls, which is represented by a bomb. If you don't show her a good time before the bomb goes off, she'll badmouth you to the other girls and this trashes your reputation for them. This creates a somewhat weird gameplay mechanic where the most optimal way to play the game is to try to meet as few girls as possible. You're eventually going to have to meet some, but you don't want to just play the game aimlessly and meet a ton of girls or you'll have a lot of trouble juggling them all. That's basically the gist of the game. This game was super popular when it came out and was ported to a bunch of different systems, and its mechanics were adopted into many other games (even K-1 Oujya ni Narou heavily resembles it in terms of structure). One thing the game does well is that it's reasonably easy to get into. Unlike a fair number of other games we've looked at it's not really complicated and you won't need a guide to make progress. You might run into trouble with the bomb mechanic, but even then if you savescum occasionally you should be okay. Generally speaking, the game's biggest issue is that it's somewhat overly simple and repetitive. This game essentially set the convention for the dating sim genre, but as a result tons of other games built upon its formula and pretty much all of them add some additional wrinkles into the mix. One thing in particular that is not super well fleshed out here is the girls themselves. In most games of this type, each girl has a kind of "storyline" that you'll see if you choose to pursue her a lot, but that's actually mostly absent here. Sometimes you do get extra scenes on dates but they're pretty simplistic and this results in a lot of the girls feeling kind of interchangeable. This also extends to the dates, generally all of the girls will give you the same general dialogue options at each date spot, and most of them like the same responses. Though there is some variation where certain girls like certain date spots or activities, which usually means the difference between a great date and a good one, this does result in these dates quickly feeling kind of mundane. Events like the school festivals and trips are a little better simply because they occur less often, which makes the scenes with the various girls feel more unique here. This is still generally a cute game and it was undeniably very influential, but you can tell this was originally a somewhat low-budget 16-bit title. It's still a pretty good A and you could maybe make the case for G based on its early release and influence on the genre, but there's a reason why pretty much every other game that followed it added some extra mechanics to spice up the experience.
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