Game 44 - Galaxy Robo

Galaxy Robo (ギャラクシーロボ)
Released 3/11/1994, developed by Imagineer

 

1.  Turn type: Player/enemy turn
2. Maps: Large
3. Character Customization: None
   
4. Character Development: Standard XP/level system.
   
5. Party Size: A lot, I'm not sure of the exact number.
   
6. Equipment: None
   
7. Game Flow: 19 stages in order, no repeats or alternate routes
   
8. Saving: Any time
   
9. Death: Defeated characters are removed from the battle but return afterwards.

This is a rewind in time; I missed this game on my first pass through 1994 but Manny Rhyde on the SRPG Discord pointed it out to me. It has a fan translation. It's been described as "Fire Emblem in space" but it's not as close to Fire Emblem as you might think. 

The defining feature of the game is the size of the battles; after the first couple, you're typically about 30 vs. 40-50. The stages will have some named characters that can level up, and then a bunch of other grunt units that are weaker and cannot level.

The story begins with Fatis, whose childhood friend is captured by an attacking empire. He goes out with an old mech, one of the three ancient mechs that's more powerful than the other ones they make now. The story as a whole is a pretty typical "defeat the evil Empire" story -- it's nothing special, but it's fine for 1994.

 

The characters are fixed to a certain mech, and when they level up they gain stats. They don't learn any new powers or get any new mechs. There are about 5-6 different types you can have, and each one has one or two attacks. Some can repair, and there are several battleship type units as well.

This seems to be a rather obscure game even in Japan -- the shutdown of Geocities wiped out a lot of old sites, but at least in what survives I was not able to find anything about the game except for a few short reviews. No full playthroughs on Youtube or Nicovideo. I'll just make a few notes about the stages; I didn't take careful notes at first but the first few stages are not that bad. I was always unsure about how much to use the grunts, but the enemies are evenly matched enough with your guys that I think it would be quite difficult (and unnecessary) to try to use only your named characters. Could be an interesting challenge.

 

Stage 7 (or maybe 6) is a defense mission -- you have to last for quite a few turns with an army that is much stronger than yours. I lost the first time because there are a few people that can't die or you get a game over. You never get any units that can just sit and tank; I found that at any point in the game, 1 vs 4 or 5 meant a decent chance of the 1 dying even if it was my strongest guy vs. 5 grunts.

Stage 8 has a rather annoying issue that's in a few stage. There's an enemy, Kyarana, where the final blow can only be done by the main character. Other units can get her down to 1 HP but then further attacks will have no effect. I had sent the main character all the way opposite on the map, and so I had to waste many turns fixing that. There are other stages where named enemy units cannot be defeated during the stage; they can be taken down to 1 HP but you just have to beat all the other units and then they'll escape. But of course they can stay on the map wailing on your guys.

On Stage 9 I got a freeze that seemed to be inescapable; no matter how I tried to move people differently, it would always freeze when I attacked a particular enemy. Fortunately restarting the stage (and maybe moving to the BSNES MT emulator) helped and I didn't have any freezes after that.

In Stage 10 we go up into space. The space levels are basically the same as the ground levels, with space debris serving as the defense spaces. You also get your team splitting up and not reforming completely until the end of the game.

"That's no moon!"

 In Stage 14 you have to defend a base; this mostly just involves going out and attack the enemies, but missiles appear from the left and right. The grunts I left behind were able to beat them although they missed a lot.

Stage 15 involves you choosing who comes along with one of the characters to go on a secret mission; the way they set it up is confusing; what's actually happening is that you are choosing who will stay behind to fight on stages 16-17. This wasn't very clear, though, and I took everyone possible on stage 15. This left 16 and 17 more difficult. I actually lost 16 the first time but you can draw some units into the gas cloud and blow it up, which helps. On 17 you just have to survive for a while and then the rest of the units will reappear.

 

Stage 18 is very slow because the ground costs a lot of movement points and there are lasers that automatically shoot you on the enemy phase if you stop in their line of fire. But it's not all that hard.

Stage 19, the last one, is hard. It's 4 of your guys vs. 4-5 boss-class enemies, and if any of your guys dies it's game over. I had to do a lot of saving and resetting here just to wait for the enemies to miss. Maybe I was underlevelled but since you can't repeat stages it's not hard for that to happen.

 

Overall this is a decent game. It's a bit simplistic and I definitely would not play this without an emulator speedup key since the enemy turns take a long time (I used it for all the unskippable battle sequences).

Game 43 - Battle Robot Retsuden

Battle Robot Retsuden (バトルロボット烈伝)
Released 9/1/1995,  developed by Winkysoft, published by Banpresto

 

1.  Turn type: Player/enemy turn
2. Maps: Small
3. Character Customization: None
   
4. Character Development: Raise levels with items, also upgrade mech stats with items
   
5. Party Size: 4 max
   
6. Equipment: Some mechs have item slots.
   
7. Game Flow: 11 stages (see post for details)
   
8. Saving: Outside of battle
9. Death: Defeated characters are removed from the battle but return afterwards.

I'm a big fan of the Super Robot Wars series, and I had always heard about Battle Robot Retsuden. It was made by Winkysoft, who was responsible for all the early SRW games, and so I had the feeling that this was a SRW-like game with only real robots. Unfortunately this is not the case.

It does share with SRW the mixing of various series, so that you have characters from Gundam, Dunbine, Xabungle, and L-Gaim. Xabungle would not appear in a SRW game until 2001's Alpha Gaiden, so this is quite an early entry for the series. All the other series had appeared before. The basic story is that there's a world (I think a parallel universe or something like that) where two empires are at war, but the mechs they produce suck. So they use a technology called Duplication to copy mechs and pilots from other worlds. These are called Branch Warriors. The Gelster Empire has used this forbidden technology to invade other lands, and the Nord Empire calls their own Branch Warriors to defend themselves. The Nord Empire just happens to have all the hero mechs, and the Gelster has all the villain mechs. There are a bunch of original characters as well, but they seem to only be in the story sequences and never actually fight.

The game begins with the Amuro copy in the Nu Gundam. The Nord people use these crystals which they call "apples" to awaken Amuro. You get additional apples from defeating enemies that you can use to raise the characters' levels, but there's a limit to how high they can be raised in each chapter.

You can also get things from the enemies to upgrade the mechs, although the quantity is quite limited in the game. Finally, there are items you can equip to certain mechs (like the L Gaim and Walker Machine) that increase their defense, give them beam barriers, and such.

Each chapter has a map like the one above (usually there are more places than this). Enemies will appear in the various spots. They will either stay there until you reach them, or move towards you. You can make teams of mechs to send out, although you have to leave at least one back with the ship. The ship can't be controlled. Once an enemy encounters an away party or the ship, a combat begins.

The battle areas are based on hex maps. Each unit has a certain number of move actions and a certain number of attack actions per round. The attack actions have very specific ranges so it can sometimes be hard to position your guy in the right place. Some actions cannot be done twice in the round, and you can also spend one point on a shield for that round (for mechs that have it). The battle sequences use large, detailed figures that were certainly a selling point of the game.

Unfortunately, all of this is ruined by one horrible decision made by the designers: you can only control one person in battle (the squad leader). Everyone else moves off horribly stupid AI. This means that in battles, the majority of your time is spent watching the computer units fight each other. Sometimes you can barely reach the battle before it ends. 

In a RPG or SRPG, it's not necessarily a fatal flaw to have some AI-controlled party members. But to be good, the AI control has to be designed into the gameplay. For instance, Ogre Battle does it well enough that I still think it's a good system. For this game, it feels like a game where you should have control over everyone but they just don't let you do it.

In addition, the maps often require you to just sit there and wait for the enemies to come to you, because if you try to go out on your own some units will reach the ship and you'll get a game over. 

I made it to chapter 4 (out of 11) but I just couldn't take it anymore. The story seems interesting, but it's just not worth struggling through this poorly designed system that you barely have any control over. I'll close this post with a bunch of random screenshots from the game.

Game 42 - Riglord Saga

Riglord Saga (リグロードサーガ)
Released 7/21/1995,  developed by Micro Cabin, published by Sega

1.  Turn type: Player/enemy turn
2. Maps: Medium, height affects movement, and maybe combat effectiveness?
3. Character Customization: Only by what skills you focus on (see next)
   
4. Character Development: Standard XP/level system, plus a skill leveling system.Using a type of skill gives you XP in that skill area, and when you level it up you can learn new skills of that type.
5. Party Size: Max 6 on the map, 13 in party
6. Equipment: Weapon and 4 armor slots.
7. Game Flow: After an opening section, you are free to roam the map and do the required combats in any order for a while. There is an optional challenge dungeon.
8. Saving: Outside of battle, sometimes between battles in a series.
9. Death: Defeated characters are removed from the battle but return afterwards.

This game is also called "Blazing Heroes" or "Mystaria: Realms of Lore." I guess they didn't like the original Japanese name.

This is the first Saturn SRPG (I played the Feda remake earlier, but that came out in 96). It looks very different from the games I've been playing up to now because they use the power of the new system to do 3D style graphics. Unfortunately I don't think they look very good. I've always had a problem with early Playstation and Saturn attempts at this kind of graphics -- even in 1997 I thought FF7's characters looked stupid.

For me there was never a time when I looked at graphics like these and said "Yeah, that looks cool."


This also appears to be one of those games where they ran into severe limitations in text space for the translation, or were just too lazy to expand it. For the technique names in particular, it seems like they were limited to six letters in two groups of three. So "Shuriken" had to become THR STR, "Repeating Kick" became KIK, Sleep is SLP, and Lightning Arrow is LTG SHT. I remember this kind of thing from Paladin's Quest and Breath of Fire but this is perhaps the worst I've seen.

The game starts out with Prince Kurisu fighting against Gen'yusai, who is taking over his castle. He quickly gets overpowered, and then slaughtered by a story loss fight. Then you get to the first real battle of the game, with one of the bad guys joining us. The only required units for all the battles are Kurisu and Musashi.

One really nice feature of this game is that at the end of each battle, all characters get an equal amount of XP based on the enemies killed during the battle, with non-participating characters and characters who died during the battle getting half. I greatly prefer this to the common system where XP awards go to individual characters; it gets tiresome to attack your own guys or leave people at 1 HP so that you can level weaker characters.

The battle system is fast-moving and I never felt the need to use a speedup key, even on the enemy turns.

After this initial fight we get locked in a cell but can escape with some additional friends joining. There are locked doors with chests behind them in this battle but they can't be retrieved until later in the game.

After escaping the castle, we had to go to a mountain with a sage on it who would tell us how to defeat Gen'yusai. I had to do this battle three times; the enemies are difficult and have nasty counterattacks. Fortunately this game lets you retreat from a battle at any point and earn all the XP you got up to then (and the chests). I always appreciate systems like this because it means that you never have to do any true grinding, you can always attempt the next battle and then retreat when you've gotten as far as you can.

The sage tells us that we need 13 warriors to go against Gen'yusai. The next part of the game is nonlinear; there are 5 or 6 places you need to go but they can basically be done in any order. You can travel freely around the map and visit the various towns to buy things. When crossing a border into one of the other provinces you may fight a random encounter, which will be with several randomly chosen members of the party. This can be a bit hairy if they choose a bunch of weak characters. I generally tried to level up everyone until the late stages of the game.

The next part I did was going after a pirate and then getting shipwrecked on an island. For me this part was the most difficult in the game, and the last hard fight until the final boss. There is some method that the levels of the enemies scale to match yours, but it's not absolute. I was having so much trouble with a battle in this section that I was afraid I might have to go back to a previous save, but I noticed that as I retried the battle over and over again, the enemy levels were not going up at all. Also I was learning new skills, which is probably more important than the levels. So eventually I won.

After this I found that the game got significantly easier. I think this is because once you get better techniques and moves, the fact that the enemies match your levels is no longer that important. There was a tower where enemies could only get hurt by magic or certain moves, and I had to skip it for a while, but when I came back it was easy.

Honestly the next stage that provided any challenge was the final stage, and that's only because almost every unit on the map can confuse your characters. I thought I was going to have to try from the beginning but I managed to beat it with only the main character left alive.

Overall this is a decent game. It's a bit short, and the difficulty is very uneven, but it's a fun play and the very clean and easy interface makes it much less of a chore than some games. I'm looking forward to trying the sequel in a while.

Game 41 - Little Master 3

Little Master: The Rainbow Stones (リトルマスター〜虹色の魔石〜)
Released 6/30/1995, Developed by Zener Works, published by Intermedia

1. Turn type: Player/enemy turn
2. Maps: Medium, Terrain bonuses and lots of gimmicks on each level
3. Character Customization: The monsters can be combined into a new monster.
4. Character Development: Standard XP/level system.
5. Party Size: Max 6
6. Equipment: One accessory.
7. Game Flow: A series of required stages in order. Some of them can be repeated, and there is a bonus post-game dungeon.
8. Saving: Outside of battle.
9. Death: Defeated characters are removed from the battle but return afterwards.

This is Zener Works' third and final game in the Little Master series. The first two were for Game Boy, and I felt that they had a lot of potential but were hampered by the limitations of the portable system. I knew that this game was coming up on the SFC and was eager to see how it improved on the formula. After playing it, I think it did make some big improvements but in other areas it still disappointed me.

The graphics are a high point. Obviously they're better than the Game Boy but even compared to other SFC games they have a nice colorful style that stands out.

The backgrounds, characters, and sprites are all well done. The game doesn't take itself too seriously (as you can see with the ghost pirate in the first screenshot who does a basketball shot with his skull). The different monsters (both enemy and character) have detailed and individual attack animations, with several variations per character.

The story is also considerably improved from the first two games -- there are a lot more story sequences, and there's more plot development. It's still a fairly pedestrian story but it's nice that they put more attention into it.

What made the first two games stand out was the map variety, and that continues here. They kept a lot of the same map ideas from the first games -- random tornados that move you around, warp tiles, and monster spawns. There are new ideas like a map where you have to search snowmen while a monster throws snowballs around the map, fake treasure chests, flooding maps, seesaws where you fling your people to other parts of the map, and other things. Although a few of them end up being more annoying than fun, I like that they tried different ideas out so that each map feels unique.

The most disappointing part of this was the battle system and the monster combination, because this is where they didn't really improve on the older system. They added two main new features. There is a day/night as well as rock/paper/scissors attributes for each character. This changes the compatibility between characters and makes certain units get stronger at certain times. The second is a just frame system where you can hit A at the exact point during the attack or defense where the move hits, and increase/decrease the damage.

But there's still far too little variety between the characters. Tamtam is back from LM2; she can heal and if she gets attacked she turns into a monster. There's a new character who can switch between an offensive or buff/debuff mage. But other than that, every character can only move and attack. They differ in the range, but that's it. Your main character can move and do a range 1 attack. That's what he can do on stage 1, and that's what he can do on the last stage of the game. He never learns any new moves, and you can't change his equipment except for an accessory. This means that the colorfully designed monsters and units are a lot less individualistic than I would like.

The other problem is the monster system. As with LM1 and 2, the only way to recruit a monster is to visit houses on the maps. This means there are a fixed number of specific monsters you get in a playthrough. You can combine them to make stronger monsters, but you can never get any more than the 18 specific units the game has pre-determined. Since you have to combine two monsters to make one of a higher "rank", there's a limit on what you can actually achieve. They did allow the monsters to level up in this game, which means you can make any monster good.

What they did add in this game is a post-game dungeon that has repeatable floors. Here you can go to the houses over and over again and rank your monsters up as much as you want. But it seems like they went a little too far with this; my monsters at the end were in the 30s or 40s of rank, but the strongest monster is rank 175. You would have to do a lot of repetition in the postgame dungeon to get that.

Overall this is not a bad game at all; it's definitely the best of the Little Master series and worth a try. I just feel like there was a lot of missed potential if they had allowed some kind of monster recruitment, or given the monsters more abilities.

Game 40 - Arc the Lad

Arc the Lad (アークザラッド)
Released 6/30/1995, developed by G Craft, published by Sony

1. Turn type: Speed based system
2. Maps: Medium, Terrain bonuses.
3. Character Customization: None.
4. Character Development: Standard XP/level system.
5. Party Size: Max 8
6. Equipment: 4 accessory-type items.
7. Game Flow: A series of required stages in order, but there are free battles to fight as well.
8. Saving: Outside of battle.
9. Death: Defeated characters are removed from the battle but return afterwards.

This is the first SRPG for the Playstation, which had come out in 1994. It was the first in a trilogy of games; they were not released in English until 2003. It seems that this was not originally intended to be a series, but Sony felt that the Playstation needed more RPGs to compete with other consoles. So Arc the Lad was released in basically an unfinished state; the main quest is very short and ends in the middle of the story, to be continued in Arc the Lad II next year.

The graphics are quite good for the time; the sprite work looks like improved late-Super Famicom graphics, the backgrounds are lush and well done, and the small number of FMVs fit well into the whole. What I find interesting about these early Playstation RPGs is that they were clearly following the Super Famicom model rather than the PC Engine model. The PCE had to rely on a lot of voice work, orchestrated music, and visual cutscenes to make up for the inferior graphics capability of the system. But early games for the PS1 like this have no voicing in the story sequences at all. Arc the Lad has a limited amount of voicing in the battles when the characters act and use their moves, although other games like Suikoden and Final Fantasy VII have no voice at all. This is in contrast to the shortlived PC-FX, which built on the PCE's success -- games like Der Langrisser FX and Power Dolls FX are fully voiced.

I used the Mednafen emulator, which I have already been using for the PCE and Saturn games. The game ran flawlessly on my 4-year old laptop and used a modest amount of the CPU.

The battle interface is streamlined and overall easy to use. You can move directly with the D-pad, attack with the circle button, and end your turn with the X button. You only need to open menus to use items or spells. The X button ending turn is tricky for someone used to most other SRPGs -- I kept accidentally ending my turn when I intended to take back my move instead (you don't really "take back" a move in the game, you just move somewhere else).

Each character has a basic attack, but then also has a number of special abilities that they learn -- mostly by levelling but a few characters learn by finding them instead. Arc is a basic fighter, Kukuru is a healer, Gogen is a magician, Poco has mostly buffs and debuffs, etc. The abilities level up as they level. It's a nice system that keeps each character different. Chongara has summon abilities which produce units that can create platforms, heal, or do other things.

My biggest problem with the system is the balance. This shares a quality of several other SRPGs -- due to something about the damage and stat formulas, a character who falls behind by a few levels becomes nearly useless in battle. It is possible to simply ignore this and only use a few characters. This is what I did, relying almost entirely on Arc and Gogen, with Kukuru to heal. This works, but I don't like having to do this. I think that you basically have to grind to avoid this. To the developers' credit they did provide a number of things to do other than the story battles -- there's a 50 floor optional dungeon, an arena, and a training center. So if you do want to grind your characters, you don't have to just play the same maps over and over.

The game takes place in a steampunk type world, although the steampunk elements are somewhat muted. You have airships to take you around to different places, but none of the main characters use any guns or anything like that. For the most part you can't explore towns, and maybe if you could the steampunk elements would be more evident.

The story begins with the mayor of the starting town tricking Kukuru into extinguishing the Cion Flame, thus releasing the Ark Demon into the world. Later, the main character Arc tries to fight the demon but gets wasted. A mysterious spirit gives him the power of the guardian spirit, and he sets out on a quest to find out more about his father and hopefully stop the monsters who have come into the world. The story is fine and has some nice developments and twists, and the cast is limited enough that you get to know all your companions. It's hard to say too much about it because this is only the first part of the story -- although it does finish after a climax point, you could probably beat this game in 5 hours if you knew what you were doing. If you do all the extra stuff that's probably another 15-20.

Arc the Lad II was released the next year; it's game 72 on my list so I will be getting to it before too long. The game allows you to carry over some things from the first to the second game so there's a continuity -- this is a feature that was enabled by the use of memory cards to save games. Did the PC Engine or Sega CD have any games that used the internal memory to enable a carryover?

Game 39 - Shining Force Gaiden: Final Conflict

Shining Force Gaiden: Final Conflict (シャイニング・フォース外伝 ファイナルコンフリクト)
Released 6/30/1995, developed by Sonic, published by Sega Enterprise

1. Turn type: Speed based system
2. Maps: Small. Terrain gives bonuses.
3. Character Customization: Promotion at level 10.
4. Character Development: Standard XP/level system.
5. Party Size: Max 12.
6. Equipment: 4 items, including one equip weapon and one equip accessory.
7. Game Flow: 22 stages in order, no repeats or optional
8. Saving: Between battles.
9. Death: Defeated characters can be revived between battles for cost. If the main character dies it's game over, but you keep the XP and items you earned in the battle.

This is the sixth Shining Force game released in four years. If you've played another Shining Force game this will be familiar territory. Like the other Gaiden games there are no explorable towns between the battles, just a camp where you can purchase things and revive characters. The plot takes place between Shining Force I and II (the main games, not the Gaidens), and provides a link to those games and also Shining In The Darkness. So it's probably most interesting to people who have played at least SF1 and 2, since a lot of characters return from those games or at least are mentioned.

Since I played the other Gaiden games on the CD remake, this is the first time I played one of the games on the Game Gear. While the graphics do not look as good as Royal Stone, they're still not bad. When you compare the Game Boy games that have come out so far, I think that they did a better job here of reducing the Shining Force experience to a handheld game that still preserves the essential gameplay and isn't too short.

This will be a fairly short post -- I don't want to spoil the story since there's a good fan translation patch, and the gameplay doesn't require a long description because it's just more of the same. The story begins with Max (the SF1 hero) going off to fight Mishaela (who was in SF1 with her dolls) who is trying to revive Darksol, the SF1 boss. Adam, the robot, is damaged, but manages to get working again -- he won't be able to fight but he can act as the tactician for the team. A new main character comes along, and a new set of characters who all occupy the familiar classes and roles that you know if you've played the previous games. There are no new classes, abilities, or anything like that.

I found the game to be quite easy; possibly the easiest of the SF games. The only reason I had any trouble was that I was determined to level up Cynthia (the healer) to try to teach her Aura. But leveling healers in SF in general is hard, and it's really hard in this game. She has low MP and can't earn much XP by that, and dies in one hit from everything in the later game. I did manage to get her to learn Aura level 1 but it was such a hassle I moved on, and it turned out I didn't need her at all to win the game. I didn't use any Healing Rains either.

The second to last battle has lasers shooting at you but I was able to mostly avoid them while climbing the stairs. The final battle is like Shining Force 1. The hands have nasty spells but their HP aren't that high, and once you beat them, the face doesn't do much. 

After all that Shining Force, the series rests for a while (at least on the SRPGs). We'll see it again in 2 years (game 110!) with Shining Force 3, part 1. Next up is Arc the Lad which I've already finished, so I'll try to get that post out soon.