Game 5 - Lady Phantom (Stages 7-10)

One note about this game is that there are no bosses or unique enemies; the villains like Makyuras appear only in the cinematic scenes so at times it's hard to know what they're actually doing. Even the final stage doesn't really have a boss.


Stage 7

Erioche is not happy with Makyuras for his repeated failures, and once again says that neither Solon nor Vat really matter to him -- he's just trying to relieve his boredom as one of the immortal survivors of an ancient race. Meanwhile, Lady Phantom gets its next mission -- defeat the enemies at the fortress of Sanmartanmyu.


There's nothing particularly hard about this map; you get the special units again that give you an "extra life".

Stage 8

Lady Phantom's action puts the enemies in disarray. Commander Denai has failed in his attack, but his failure increases when Captain Spahn shows up. Spahn lets Denai know that Spahn and his wife were on the civilian ship Denai destroyed, and then kills Denai.

Meanwhile there's a fanservice scene on the Lady Phantom ship.

But it's time for the next mission -- defeat an enemy force that's heading near the fortress at Curlint.

This stage is very small, and once again not too difficult. The "hit all enemies" weapons come in handy here given the small area.


Stage 9

One of Captain Spahn's men comes and asks Lady Phantom for help -- they're suspicious, but when something destroys the man, Jennifer decides to help them out.

This is another short stage. There are new enemies that are quite strong, but there are also NPC units (Spahn's guys) that soak up hits for you, so it's not all that hard.


Stage 10

Captain Spahn tells Lady Phantom that these new enemies are pawns of Erioche, who is really just claiming the leadership of Vat -- he's not native to Vat and is just using Vat and Solon for fun. Of course the Lady Phantom people are pissed off at this, but fortunately Spahn knows where Erioche is. Lady Phantom has no orders to go there but they decide to break off from Solon and try to defeat Erioche.

On the planet's surface, Jennifer reveals to Spahn that they actually aren't in their mechs. Instead, part of their spirit enters the mech while they stay on their ship and control things. They warn Spahn not to die protecting them (because they won't die even if their mech explodes). You do get to control Spahn in this final stage.

This is the last stage, and it is much more difficult than any of the preceding ones. You have to make it through three levels of a base, with large numbers of the new powerful enemies. Yuubaku (automatic deaths) are frequent, and at least at the levels I was at there was a fair amount of luck involved. I actually ended up using a save state after each level after my first failure, although I don't remember whether I actually had to load one or not. Because of this stage, you definitely want to level your guys as much as possible in the previous stages and not take any shortcuts to completing the stages.

However, since XP is only awarded at the end of a stage, the enemies here don't give any XP (I think this was a bad game design choice). So it's OK to bypass some units here.

The last map is the hardest one; I don't have a screenshot of it but one good tip is that you can snipe at the enemies near the stairs to the next level from your starting point. The green mech is particularly good for this. Since all your units will be revived before the final map, as long as you get one unit down the stairs you're fine.

The group confronts Erioche at the end. He's happy to see the heroes useless fighting, and has two more units for them to fight. They are Royal Guards with high HP, but for me they died in a few hits to Yuubaku (automatic destruction).

The ending is slightly different depending on if Jennifer, Spahn, neither, or both survived the last stage -- there's barely any change. If Spahn survived them Erioche kills him to set up the next scene.

 Erioche kills Spahn (or he was already dead)

Spahn reveals the truth to Jennifer, that he's her father. He thought Jennifer and his wife had both died and so joined Vat to get revenge on whoever destroyed their ship. Jennifer tells him to hang on, but he dies.

 Now Jennifer gets angry, and in an unexplained turn says some sort of magic incantation to call down spirits to vanquish the evil before them. This destroys not only Erioche but the entire planet. As far as I could see there's nothing in the story so far or the instruction manual to explain or even hint at why this could happen.

And thus Lady Phantom leaves Galdoba, and the game ends.

Game 5 - Lady Phantom (Stages 2-6)

Stage 2

In the opening movie, a being called Elioche is talking to her servant Makuras, who is one of the Vat. He wants to control Galdoba, and tells Makuras about the Solon troop movements. He then grants Makuras his power and wants him to fight against Solon.

Lady Phantom is resting and playing games, but a new mission comes in: to protect a fleet of supply ships being attacked by a pirate gang under Vat command.

Not a hard mission. Only one troop ship has to survive so you can let them soak up some hits (you do get a bit more XP for each one that survives, but not that much). One thing I didn't mention about the battle system last time is 誘爆 -- that's an automatic chance for any hit to kill anything. The higher a unit's BL score is, the less likely that is to happen. Great when it happens for you, not great when the enemies get one.

Stage 3

Captain Spahn, leader of the Galdoba Pirates, is talking to his prisoner Princess Sophia. She wonders why he's being kind to her, and he tells her he wasn't always a pirate. Meanwhile the Lady Phantoms have a new mission -- to infiltrate the fortress Neo Kyuraso and stop the development of new weapons, and also save the princess.

The new units are attachments to the regular units; they have their own weapons and when your HP go to 0 the unit goes away and you're back to the regular mech. An easy stage with the extra "life" -- one annoyance is that when you run out of weapons with the new units, you can't choose to jettison them.


Stage 4

This is essentially part 2 of the above mission. The cinema sequence has a flashback with Captain Spahn.

A green haired child, who could that be? Yes, it's our main character Jennifer. This is Captain Spahn when he was "Christopher". He's remembering when his ship was attacked by Vat troops and destroyed.

This stage has three floors. Each floor you either have to visit all the X spots to plant bombs, or kill all the enemies. I found the latter easier, even though you don't recover HP between floors. This could be hard if you get unlucky and your guys get destroyed, but that didn't happen to me. You can hide behind the computers and desks to block the enemy shots.


Stage 5

Captain Spahn is ready to confront Lady Phantom but when he notices Jennifer's necklace he gives back the Princess and leaves. Several days later, they have a new mission  -- protect trucks holding new weapons.

The mission is basically the same idea as Stage 2; just move ahead of the trucks and kill all the enemies.


Stage 6 

Captain Spahn is at a party with other Vat luminaries. They're criticizing him for losing the fortress to 5 girls, but during the talk he's able to figure out that Commander Denai was the one that attacked the civilian ship he was on so they couldn't notify Solon about what was going on in the battle. Meanwhile Lady Phantom gets their next mission -- destroy supply ships so that they can't reinforce the enemy.

You get new weapon options in this stage. Several people get weapons that hit everyone in range, or everyone in the hexes around the target. With this I just went straight for the supply ships -- after playing the rest of the game I think this was a mistake because you want your characters to be at as high a level as possible in stage 10, which is far more difficult than the first 9 stages. But we'll get to that in the next post.


The story is pretty light since all the development comes in the short cinematic scenes before battles.

Game 5 - Lady Phantom (Introduction and Stage 1)

Lady Phantom (レディファントム)
Release Date: 11/29/1991  
System: PC Engine (Super CD ROM)
Developer: Shin Nihon Laser Soft
Publisher: Nihon Telenet

Next up on my list is another PC Engine game, although this time one that was originally made for the system. The PC Engine is an interesting console because it was a big seller in Japan, competing with the Famicom, Super Famicom, and Mega Drive. In the US it failed, though, and so most of the PCE games were never localized. This game is probably a simulation game rather than an SRPG, but it does meet my two criteria (developing story and named characters who level), so I'll give it a go.

The Wikipedia article points out that it came out when there were a number of "girls in mechs" series coming out, most notably the Bubblegum Crisis OVAs. The game box emphasizes that they were trying to make something that was "faster" than typical strategy games -- primarily this means the limited cast size (only 5 units on each map) and a speed-based turn system rather than player/enemy. Enemy turns could be extremely long and slow on strategy games (and SRPGs) at this time.

The person who sold me the game on Ebay included a page torn from an old Gamepro magazine that described the game. It has some errors but it's interesting to read an a nice piece of history that I didn't expect to get (it's a big image so click on it if you actually want to read the text)

Because there aren't any English walkthroughs, I wanted to give at least a little idea of how to play the game -- it's not especially hard but there are some potentially confusing menu choices.

The backstory as given in the instruction manual: The war between the Solon Federation of Planets and the Vat Empire suddenly ended in peace. Project Siren, which developed weapons during the war, continued, and resulted in the Lady Phantom squad. The five girls in the squad have been sent to the Galdoba area, which was on the front lines of the war. This area lost trust in both Vat and Solon and has become an unstable neutral area.

ACT 1

The Lady Phantom squad is relaxing after a mission when their superior (I guess) from Lezas Command tells them their next mission: on Megumes in the Galdoba area, there's a resistance group that wants to overthrow the government and join Vat. We need to stop that from happening, so it's time for a direct attack on the base.

The five characters are Jennifer Sylkis (green hair), Dora Langenkamp (red), Ramia O'Niel (blue), Cindy Matsunaga (brown), and Elene Myer (yellow). At the start of the mission, the first thing you do is choose weapons. Each character can bring two weapons except for Ramia.

I find the default weapons are fine; typically if you just look at the MG part (which is number of shots) it should give a decent idea of the weapon. RG is the max range and BS is the recommended range for highest hit rate (although I don't know whether it means exactly 4 or less than 4). RF is the number of shots per attack, PW is the strength, and ST is the hit rate. The manual claims it's a percentage but 45% seems low for what I've seen actually playing so there must be other numbers involved.

Once you finish choosing the weapons, hit 作戦実行 at the bottom and the mission starts.

The game has a speed based turn system, although it's a rather confusing one because people often get multiple turns in a row for no clear reason that I can see (I've seen as many as 4 actions in a row for one of my guys).

Each unit has five options:

They are:

• 移動 (move)
• 攻撃 (attack)
• 進撃 (advance)
• 狙撃 (snipe)
• 警戒 (caution)

Move and attack are paired -- if you do one, you have to do the other. So if you only want to attack or move, you have to pick the "advance" (move double distance) or "snipe" (attack with higher percentage) actions. Caution is defend.

Who you can attack depends on range, but also which way you're facing and whether there are obstacles in the way. The game has a lot of walls and objects you can hide behind. There's also increased hit rates for attacking from sides or back. If someone is defeated, they exit the stage and earn no more XP for that mission. At the end of the mission, each unit gets an automatic XP for finishing the mission, another 3 if they survived, and then XP for each unit they defeated (individually).

AT and DF should be obvious. AC is speed, PT gives you a better chance of counterattacking, and PR "affects various things" according to the manual.

These battle screens can be turned off

Some stages, like the first one, have multiple maps. Anyone destroyed in the first map doesn't come back for the second one so you have to be careful.

Attack range

That's more or less the gameplay -- it's relatively basic but I'm finding it reasonably fun so far. I'm up to act 5 now so I'll make another post later in the week covering the next few stages.

Game 4 - Langrisser wrap-up

Langrisser (ラングリッサ―)
Release Date: 4/26/1991 (PC Engine version 8/6/1993). Mega Drive version released in English as "Warsong."
System: Mega Drive/PC Engine (later remake for Saturn and Playstation)
Developer: MASAYA
Publisher: Nippon Computer Systems

FACTS

1. Turn type: Player turn/Enemy turn
2. Maps: Medium to large. Terrain gives bonuses.
3. Character Customization: Each character has a branching class path.
4. Character Development: Standard XP level system. At level 10, character automatically upgrades to a new class, although the player can choose which one to advance to. The four "main" characters have secret classes in the PC Engine version.
5. Party Size: You have at most 9 leaders, of which 4-8 can be sent out on each map. Each leader has up to 8 nameless grunt soldiers under them (fortunately the game has an auto-move system for the grunts if you don't want to move them all individually).
6. Equipment: Each character can equip one item (which includes armor, weapons, or items).
7. Game Flow: 20 stages, one after another, no repeating stages or multiple paths.
8. Saving: Permanent saves only between levels. At least in the PC Engine version you can do "memory saves" during the stage at any point, which go away when you turn off the power.
9. Death: The nameless grunts all disappear at the end of the stage whether they die or not. In the Mega Drive version, a leader who dies is dead permanently. In the PC Engine version, they are simply removed from the stage with all their grunts.

IMPRESSIONS 

This game is probably easiest to compare with Fire Emblem, since they came out around the same time and are both the beginning of long-running franchises. I think I probably enjoyed the two games about the same -- there are a lot of rough edges and the storyline barely exists, but it's still reasonably fun. Langrisser is far less frustrating than FE because of the ability to save and load your game as many times as you want during the stage. I believe this is in the original Genesis version as well although I'm not sure. The lack of permadeath in the PC Engine version also lowers the difficulty a bit but not as much as the save/load.

The soldier hiring is a nice aspect of the game and makes it feel more like you're commanding large forces than Marth's band of 20 or so. The use of the "command zone" strengthens the feeling of the squads. The designers thankfully included an auto-move option for the soldiers so you don't have to manually move 40-50 units every turn.

My biggest problem with the game is that I never felt like I fully understood the system. You can see attack and defense stats, but it's hard to predict what that will actually mean when the fight starts. There are modifications based on level, terrain, compatibility of units, and remaining HP. All of that means that I had way too many experiences where I just had to save the game, try an attack, and then reload when I saw it didn't work as I expected.

The next Langrisser game will come up in 1994; I'll be curious to see what changes have been made (although some of the I->II changes were already done for the PC Engine version).

One point of interest is the CD-ROM technology. I've done about 25 games now on PC Engine between this blog and my other one, and there's a wide difference in how companies actually use the capabilities of the CD system. CDs are cheaper to produce than carts/cards and may entice buyers, so there was an incentive to use the system. Games like the Tengai Makyo series made great use of the system with lots of voiced dialogue, cutscenes, and orchestral music tracks played off the CD. Others barely used it at all, with just a token animated intro. Langrisser is between the two -- the music is high quality. There are some voiced cutscenes before each map but the total amount of voice and cutscene is maybe 5-10 minutes (plus the closing credits with the vocal song).

Next up will be another PC Engine game, this time one that was originally made for the system rather than a remake. The packaging advertises the cutscenes and story so we'll see how it compares to this.

Game 4 - Langrisser (Stages 16-20)

Scenario 16 - In the Darkness

The dragon from scenario 15 fled wounded, and Ledin chases after him to his cave, to deal the killing blow. This stage is 5 player squads vs quite a few enemies, but many of them start far away from the heroes, and the dragon is directly ahead.

I actually decided not to grind this stage for XP and instead went for the dragon right away -- I still ended up killing about half the enemies on the board. There's a chest that has a Dragon Slayer in it, that works only for this stage. Tyler got it, but Ranger Namu did so much damage it wasn't necessary. And thus the Dragon goes down. A soldier finds a tablet with some old writing on it, that says Bozel tried to envelop the world in darkness but Sieghart, the king of Elsreed, used the power of Langrisser to seal away the darkness in Velzeria. Since Bozel is back, we need to do the same thing.

Scenario 17 - Velzeria, the Forbidden Land

The collected heroes

The collected villains

 Ledin and his forces head to Velzeria to seal the darkness away again. The title of this mission is different from the Genesis version and there seem to be other changes as well, mostly to bring Bozel and his underlings into the story earlier than in the Genesis version.

Nicholas starts by taking over Chris' mind, causing her and her troops to attack us. This stops when we take out Nicholas, so I did that as soon as possible.

There are a lot of flying enemies in this stage that fall to archers. Nicholas and Nyaga are both here -- in general spell casting has gotten a lot more annoying since they can use spells from far away that affect a large range. But I also have Heal 2, Healing, and other spells that make it fairly easy to recover. I've started equipping Orbs on both Jessica and Chris every battle, increasing their MP by a lot as well as their range.

Scenario 18 - Velzeria

Time to invade Velzeria. This is Nagya's last stage -- he has some new Stone Golems he hope will protect him. They are quite annoying and hard to damage, but they don't do much in return. Eventually I managed to have Namu take him out. Other than that I've just been trying to max the classes of my guys -- Chris is now a Princess so all that's left is Jessica's Sage class. The other ones I don't care so much about.

After the battle, an army is massing outside to fight, but Lance decides to stay behind and deal with them while we take on Bozel inside.


Scenario 19 - Illusionist

This is Nicholas' last hurrah. Like the other stages there are a lot of spellcasters in here that do wide damage to a lot of people, so Jessica, Chris, and Ledin's heal spells are effective. Other than that, by this point in the game it's pretty much the same tactics every map. Archers are particularly good, I find.


Scenario 20 - The Seal of Darkness

The last stage, and fight against Bozel.

Same deal as before -- lots of healing to take care of the spellcasters. I divided my forces into two to clean up a lot of the squads, focusing on the leaders when I could. Sadly Jessica did not make her final class, but it wasn't necessary. Bozel went down easily to Namu equipped with the Langrisser. Then Chaos appears. Bozel was trying to bring him back, but of course Chaos wasn't going to be controlled by Bozel and is now fighting us.

As with all other enemies, Chaos has 10 HP. A combination of Namu, Ledin, and various spells were enough to make a quick end of him. Like many RPG villains he says he can't die because he's in the hearts of men, and he'll be back later blah blah blah.

Now as with Fire Emblem, there's a brief section showing what everyone does and their final class.

Jessica doing alchemy

Namu training

Chris and Ledin get married.

Finally there's a vocal closing song, which actually is not that common on the PC Engine even though the technology supports it. At the end, there's a screen that shows your total turns.

So that's Langrisser -- the PCE version is more different from the Mega Drive version than I thought it was, but that's fine. The series will return in 1994 with Langrisser II.

Game 4 - Langrisser (Stages 11-15)

Scenario 11 - Dalsis Castle

Barely halfway through the game and we've already reached Dalsis Castle, where Digos is. So obviously he's not the final boss of the game. This map is very different from the Genesis version both in the enemies and the layout. All of your guys start at the bottom of the screen and you basically have to split into two sides.

I tanked the stage at first because I didn't have the right division of units. Once I paid more attention to which units were on which side and assigned my soldiers appropriately, it was much easier. I was still struggling to level up Namu, who had fallen way behind.

Partway through the stage, monsters appear at the top of the screen and start attacking the stage boss. Ledin realizes these are here because Langrisser has been unsealed. The boss doesn't last very long against the monsters, but since the win condition is for Ledin to reach the top of the map we still have to take them out.


Scenario 12 - Twin Castle

Time to beat Digos. His Emperor class is actually not that good compared to some of the other leaders, and his Armor Soldiers are not especially effective. Sort of an anticlimactic end for him.

Getting to him is a bit challenging, though. The two sides of the castle are separated, and you can't control who starts on which side. The enemies are totally different from the Genesis version so I had to start, write down the enemies, then restart and assign appropriate underlings. Once I did that it wasn't very hard, and Digos was taken down by horsemen.

Now we have recovered the Langrisser, but there's still 8 stages left. The Langrisser itself is an equippable item that increases stats quite a bit.

Scenario 13 - The Town of Statues

Ledin reaches a town where Basilisks have turned everyone (including Lance!) into statues. The Basilisks will also stone us. The maps are diverging much more from the Genesis version than before -- from here on out the story is the same, and each map is the same general idea, but the maps almost all have very different enemies, and often different layouts as well.

I was getting annoyed by the Basiliks turning my guys to stone so I just beat their leaders as quickly as possible.

There are ants as well, and slimes. The ants go down fairly easily to archers and the slimes are the last hurrah for the Guardsmen, who I gave to Jessica.

Lance joins the team afterwards, although he vows to even things with Ledin afterwards, if they both survive.

Scenario 14 - Wolfpack

This stage has probably the biggest divergence from the Genesis version I've seen -- as with the Genesis version there are a lot of werewolves in the stage attacking the townspeople. But there's also a guy named Nagya with some skeletons who seems to have some control over the situation.

I used Monks for the first time in the game to deal with his skeletons. The werewolves made it to the church where the civilians were hiding and started killing them, but it takes too many turns for them to kill them all so there was never any big concern that they would die. Even though you can only send out 4 squads here it's not that hard.

Scenario 15 - The Cry of the Dragon 

Nagya is back again here, guarding a temple where the Efreet will come out to fight against the Grand Dragon, who is your main opponent here. Fortunately the civilians flee to the bottom left of the screen so they're in no danger.

Once again, only 4 squads. I tried Monks again but they were ineffective against Nagya's troops so I tried again with 3 archer squads and Ledin with Griffons. The archers were quite effective (especially Chris -- I don't understand why her underlings are always so good). The enemies come in off the lake but I hid in the mountains.

Once Nagya is defeated, the Efreet comes out and starts fighting against the Dragon. But he refused to come in from the water so I had to go out and fight him. I finally got Ramu to her secret class, the Ranger. Rather unusual class; she has good stats but can't have any troops. Chris was also able to rank up to Princess. Now the only major character I have left to rank up is Jessica. She had fallen behind but I was able to get her up to High Priest in this level. Rather odd that for the secret classes, Chris has to go to Archmage and Jessica to High Priest -- you would think it's the reverse.