Sunday, September 10, 2017

Game 13 - Hero Senki Part 3 (Final)

The heroes have now made it into Solomon City by a back way, and the first task is to take care of traitor Jared, who comes out with his new mech, the Psycho Gundam
He shouldn't be able to use this
One annoyance of the battle system is that there's no way to revive a character in battle. Many bosses have multiple attacks per round, and so you can get unlucky with critical hits and have a character defeated with no way to bring them back. This happened to me in this battle with Ultra Seven (the healer), and I was just mashing buttons to get the game over but somehow I won instead.

While I'm at it, the special moves are not very well balanced. For instance, Kamen Rider's Rider Kick costs 25 TP. His ZX Shooting Star costs 440. The ZX Shooting Star only does at most 4 times the damage of the Rider Kick but costs 17 times at much TP. Kamen Rider's TP at the end of the game for me was around 1500, and TP restoring items are rare and not buyable until the end of the game. What's worse, the special attacks can miss. So if you use the higher attacks you quickly run out of TP and run the risk of blowing 1/3 of your TP on a miss. Bosses often take virtually no damage from regular attacks. This means that the higher level attacks are rarely useful, and you mostly just want to use the cheap moves.

After beating Jerid, the group goes through a series of events to get them into A Bao Qu city. Once there, they fight Scirocco.
Ji O
He's not especially hard, but after he's defeated, Gilliam returns! Unfortunately he's now working for the enemy, having recovered his memories. He won't kill us (of course) but he gets us out of the way with a teleporting attack.
Auf Widersehen!
This means that once again the team splits in 3. I don't like these portions of the game. It's not fun to have 1 vs 3 or 4 when the 1 has no healing and has to rely on items. Each section involves the hero trying to get back to Dakar City to rejoin the group.

First up is Kamen Rider, who wakes up in a coffin. His goal is to stop some missiles from being launched, which I assume is based on some storyline from the series. Along the way he learns the weak spot for Kaiser Grow, a monster that seemed to be immune.

Ultra 7's story is confusing. He begins in a city that looks like Zeit City but the mayor is a robot. Escaping from this he follows a boy through the forest to the real Zeit City only to find out the boy was a ghost or something like that. This was really hard to follow and I was never really clear about what was going on with the fake Zeit City. Ultra 7's ultimate goal is to stop the enemies from using a bomb to make lava flow down and destroy Zeit.

Finally, Amuro needs to get money to repair the road from Shangri-La City back to Dakar. He meets Char who joins him to find some hidden Zabi money, promising to give Amuro (and Judau) some of it. He also encounters Shuu Shirakawa (Masaki's counterpart from Super Robot Wars).
Shuu
The boss of this section is annoying because neither Char nor Amuro have any healing; fortunately the best healing items are soon buyable so I was able to use up a bunch of items to get by.

Around this time there's a little cutscene that shows the goals of the enemies, but it's a cookie cutter "Destroy the world to rebuild and save it" plot.

Now the group has reassembled in Dakar, and this is the final portion of the game. First we have to sneak into A Bao Qu (along with Seabook Arno from Gundam F91). Before that, there are some optional things you can do that ritchie doesn't list in his walkthrough on GameFAQs. On the off chance that anyone ever checks this who is playing the game, I'll list them since they help a lot.
  • If you go back to Shangri-La, Judau has opened a store that sells the best equipment and TP restore items. You can find all the equipment in the last dungeon so don't waste your money on that, but the TP items are useful.
  • Go back to Lido City and talk to an old man who gives you a choice. The top choice gives you Shuu, the second choice Masaki. After that you need to look at a wall in the final dungeon (This site gives you a picture of where), and then Shuu or Masaki will be in a room in the next area. They join at level 99 so this helps a lot.
  • In Zeit City, at the city hall, Ultra 7 can learn his ultimate move (which often does 9999 even to bosses).
After you beat the Lafressia there are a few more things you can do:
  • In Mousa, talk to the nurse on 2F of the hospital and pick "Yes". She will show up in the last dungeon to heal you and sell you healing items (including TP recovery).
  • In Shaoyan city, find an old man who will give you a message from Ultra King. In the final dungeon, he'll show up and give you Ultra 7's best equipment.
All of this backtracking is annoying given the method of travel in the game, but it's worth it.

The final dungeon is fairly long, but at least the nurse is there to heal us.
The final dungeon
At the end of the dungeon we fight six bosses -- Birdon, Yapool, Ji O, Kaiser Grow, Shadow Moon, and XN Geist. Fortunately they don't have to be fought back to back. With Ultra 7's Ryuusei Kick and Shuu's Granzon the fights aren't very hard except for Kaiser Grow. Only Kamen Rider can hurt him and he can heal himself, so it's a bit tedious but ultimately not too bad. After the first five I returned to heal up.
Does she get hazard pay?
The final boss is Apollo, in the XN Geist.
Looks like something from Super Robot Wars
XN Geist was quite easy; I thought he was easier than some of the previous bosses. Afterwards, it turns out that Apollo was actually Gilliam. With his future sense he thought the world was heading into destruction so decided to do the "wipe out everything to save humanity" deal. But now he can see a brighter future with ZEUS fighting for good, so he's not sad to die. The epilogue then shows some of the side characters during the game, and also indicates that Gilliam may have survived the final fight.

Now that I've played this I'd like to see Gilliam's first appearances in 4 and Original Generation again to see what connections are made. I know they make him a dimension jumper that actually exists in the different universes.

My final levels and time before the boss
Ultimately I was really disappointed by this game. It turned out to be a below-average button masher with a confusing story that seemed made mostly for fans of the series. Unfortunately the next game on my list (Song Master) is also known as a kusoge. I assume I'll reach good games eventually? It's a little disheartening that out of 13 games I've played so far, the only good ones are Heracles III and Dragon Quest V.

7 comments:

  1. These robot wars style rpgs don't appeal much to me, but I can appreciate that they were made for fans of the series to enjoy. Perhaps Hero Senki has even succeeded on the fanservice front, if nowhere else?

    I didn't play much of Song Master but I recall the dreadfully bad music score, ironic considering its title. But the story focus on music is a refreshing change and who knows how it'll turn out. I remember someone mentioning it had problems with its battle balance - something you've unfortunately become very familiar with these early games.

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    1. Maybe -- I'm a huge fan of SRW (I've played over 40 games in the series) but this just didn't work; it was a lot more fanservicy than the SRW games are.

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  2. I owned Genesis back in the day, so I didn't have access to all these Japanese RPGs, naturally... I have to say that I was hoping for some better stuff. Then again, supposedly the best games started popping up around 1994 or so, as far as SNES goes. Also, there were way fewer Jap exclusives released on good old Genny (about 100 as opposed to... 900 for SFC?), very few of them being RPGs. I believe there are only 4 or 5 untranslated Genesis RPGs left at this point. I heard some good things about Mega CD Japanese exclusives though.
    Either way, nice work! Hopefully you'll get to some good games soon enough. :)

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    1. I'm relieved at how much I enjoyed Dragon Quest V -- I was afraid that I had just gotten to the point where I couldn't go back to the SNES era, but I feel pretty confident in saying these games just suck.

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  3. I've always bemoaned the lack of localization for all RPGs, but if this trend continues, I should be glad they kept most of the mediocre or bad ones.

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    1. It's too bad I'm not also playing the localized ones so I could actually see how the quality of what got localized compares to the entire field. I know there were some localized RPGs for the SNES that never had good reputations (Seventh Saga and Secret of the Stars come to mind).

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    2. 7th Saga (Elnard) is a bit of a special case because the localization staff utterly fubared the game balance. The Japanese version is a rather easy game with one large difficulty spike near the end; the US version is a horrible grind- and reset-fest from start to finish, with the additional cute twist that the "default" main character choice, the human warrior that the selection cursor starts on, is a landmine whose abilities are almost strictly worse than two other characters' (in the JP version he was the strongest or second strongest choice)

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