PCE Game 18 - Legend of Heroes II

Dragon Slayer: Legend of Heroes II (ドラゴンスレイヤー英雄伝説II)
Released 12/23/1992, published by Hudson

What a disappointment. Legend of Heroes is one of my favorite series; I played Sora no Kiseki in 2007 or so and have played all the games since then except Sen no Kiseki III (I don't have a PS4). I certainly didn't expect the earliest entries to be masterpieces, but I hoped they'd at least be playable.

Legend of Heroes was originally part of the larger Dragon Slayer saga, a series of PC games by Falcom. Like most of Falcom's games, it was originally developed by them for PCs and then ported to all kinds of different consoles by other companies. The PC Engine version was developed by Hudson. Zenic covered the first game, which did come out in English. It doesn't sound like he had any particular problems with it.

The game begins with an animated introduction showing the main characters, the staff, their VAs, etc. The music is awesome as usual for Falcom -- they've been consistently producing high quality music in their games for over 30 years, especially when they get access to the CD technology.

Then we begin the game.

The way the screen is laid out is typical of PC games; to reduce the processing and graphical power required, they often had parts of the screen devoted to static elements (like the name of the chapter at the top or the status information on the right. There is a lot of voicing in the game, even outside of cutscenes. This is something normal in the PSX era and beyond, but it's not so common in the PCE games I've played so far. Rather than half-assing the port like the Xak crew (see the next post) they put a lot of effort into using the CD technology to enhance the game.

The main character is Atlas, the son of Serios, who was the hero of the first game. At the beginning, Serios tells him to go out into the world with letters to four kings, to prove his worth and also to register towns with his warp wing so that he can go back to them later (yes, Serios actually says this). Currently the world is at peace so there are only easily defeated slimes around. As in LoH 1, you can see the enemies on the world map. I always like this over random encounters. If you run from battle, though, you appear right next to the monster and if you don't immediately run away, it's back to the fight again.

Along the way Atlas is joined by Rando, a magician who can also fight. After visiting only two castles, though, Atlas attends a festival. Monsters come out all over the world, and this is where the game begins for real.

A cutscene

So I was really prepared to like this game and play it to the end -- a simple, classic RPG with a fast battle system and movement, lots of voicing and cutscenes, and great music. So what's wrong? It is by far the grindiest game I have played on this blog yet. Maybe it gets better later in the game, but at the beginning you have to grind 4-5 levels earning only a few XP per fight. And each fight takes most of your resources. I tried to move ahead to the next dungeon several times and couldn't even get past the top floor. Richie, who has written a ton of walkthroughs for SNES games, is very reasonable in his level suggestions and does not recommend ridiculous grinding. His recommendation for this dungeon is level 9, and I was at level 5. There's no way I'm spending hours grinding up four levels at 1-3 XP a pop. If this were a Super Famicom game I'd have to power through it but for a PCE game I'm going to move on. Sorry!

EDIT: Here's a comparison screenshot between the Super Famicom (left) and the PC Engine (right).

PCE Game 17 - Burai II

Burai II: Revenge of the Dark Emperor (ブライⅡ闇皇帝の逆襲)
Released 12/18/1992, published by River Hill Soft

This is the second half of Burai. On the PC Burai came out in two parts, and the first part was ported to the Genesis, Super Famicom, and PC Engine. But only the PC Engine got the second part. So if you have any interest in Burai, you should definitely play either the original PC version or the PC Engine version. I covered the first part of this game in an earlier post, and at the end of the review I said this:

"The story and characters are pretty entertaining but the gameplay is not very good. There's too much mandatory grinding, and money is too scarce and healing is too time-consuming (especially with 8 characters). I will try Burai II when it comes up though, to see if they improve on the system at all."

The answer is no, they did not -- the system is exactly the same. So I recommend reading the earlier post first. I'm not going to play a lot of this game since pretty much everything I said about the original game applies to this as well. The main differences are in the graphics, interface, and cutscenes, which are (for the most part) much improved.

Our heroes

After defeating Darl at the end of the first Burai, the 8 heroes go back to their separate homes. But of course evil is still plotting.

Evil

The game starts out like the first Burai, with separate short chapters for each character. The first chapter is with Sakyo and Ninetails. Sakyo is still without most of his powers due to the events of the first game.

Sakyo, Ninetails, and her children

One of the servants of the Dark Emperor, the the Water Beast General Barbara, appears, wanting to learn the strongest techniques from Sakyo. Sakyo refuses to teach her, and can't in any case while his power is sealed. She doesn't believe Sakyo and steals away Ninetails' children to try to force Sakyo to obey.

Sakyo and Barbara

Of course Sakyo and Ninetails go to find her and release her children. The graphics and interface of the game, with the exception of the tiny map sprite, is a huge improvement over the first game.

The status screen

But the game still starts the same way, where you have to run around grinding until you're strong enough to advance. There is a heal spring which is helpful if you find it.

A tiny map sprite

In the first section, we find a castle that we can't enter without a bunch of stones. This comes with a cutscene and voice -- in the first game, there were only cutscenes between chapters, but this adds many more of them during the chapters as well. To find the stones you have to go to the stone heads; certain ones give you the stones. Others attack, which I found to be an instant game over -- unlike the first game, you don't get survive a lost battle as long as you're not already weak when the battle starts.

Once we find the stones, there's a 5 level castle that gives some new equipment and ends in a fight with Barbara.

Barbara and the children

Afterwards, Sakyo convinces her that he can't teach her anything without his powers being restored. So she allows Ninetails to leave and try to restore the powers while Sakyo and the children stay there as hostages. This ends the first chapter.

Start of Chapter 2

That's as far as I played. As I said, I didn't really enjoy the gameplay of 1 that much so I don't really need to play 2 that much. If you liked 1 you'll like 2 also; if you don't like 1 there's no reason to play 2.

Game 26 - Shinseiki Odysselya Review

Story/Characters: For the point I've reached (mid-1993) this is not bad at all. The story is based on mixing together a bunch of different mythologies and providing "explanations" for certain myths and religious elements. There's reincarnation, gods, ancient intelligent lizard people, and more. Sometimes I found things a little hard to follow but overall this is a strong point of the game.

  
World: It's earth! There are three time periods -- prehistory (ice age), 1300 BC, and 550 BC. Each has areas roughly appropriate to the time period. Maybe the individual towns and cultures could have been a little more developed but overall it's not too bad.

 
Game Flow: The game plays smoothly. You can turn on fast running in the options, and there are several auto battle options including one that automatically exits autobattle when someone is in critical. Some dungeons have ridiculously powerful grunts but you can run from them. The bosses don't require grinding. Perhaps the only issue is that sometimes it doesn't seem like there are enough hints for what to do next.

System: Basic AMID for the most part. You can equip magic, and each magic can be used either offensively or defensively, and you can raise the power level as your caster gains levels. This game shares a quality with GDLeen and a few other games on this blog -- innovations or unusual features that don't affect the game much. In this case I never changed my stat allocations or the style of attack. Although maybe you can make the main character an effective magic user; that might work.

Side Quests/Optional Content: None that I know of.

Interface: No big complaints here, but we still can't see the power of weapons/armor before selecting them. I also don't like that you can't buy a weapon without equipping it on someone.

Graphics/Sound: Commenters pointed out that the enemy art is well-done. Other than that, we're slowly moving towards the richer, larger graphics of the later SFC rather than the Famicom-style graphics of earlier games. The music was fine -- maybe a bit above average but none of the songs stuck in my head.

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Next up on the list is Estopolis, released in the US as Lufia and the Fortress of Doom. I played this a few years ago recovering from the flu -- at the time I thought it was slow moving and tedious but having played 26 games on this blog it's really not that bad. It's the kind of average, plodding RPG I thought I'd see a lot on this blog.

So the next game then is Silva Saga II, which I will get to after a few more PC Engine games.

Game 26 - Shinseiki Odysselya Part 2 (Finished)

After beating Nebuchadnezzar, it's time to get our third permanent party member by finding Kari and releasing her from a curse, transforming her into Yasha. Along the way we also met Buddha, who ascends into heaven.

Kari

She's another magic user, although I often had her equipped with a bow and she did pretty good damage with that. There were some BS monsters in this dungeon that did huge damage and sapped MP. Since you can save anywhere, I just ran a lot. We then return to Dappa, where Kurisu starts talking about being reborn and something about Valhalla, but it's not coherent and she forgets she said it. Next up, we need some vehicles. The ship comes from Thebes, where there's a strange encounter with a masochistic nipple-slip woman:

Wardrobe malfunction

Now with the ship, we can go to the Minotaur labyrinth and get the Wyvern, who will let us fly around the world (but not over mountains). Unfortunately the Wyvern has to take time to grow since it's just a child...but Dappa is able to use his god powers to accelerate that a bit. The next major part of this game is defeating five enemies to release five seals, which have locked away Ashura, the master of the guardians. Then we can reach the heavenly world to face the Heaven Emperor and get him back for exiling all the guardians to the Earth.

So this section of the game involves traveling around the world to various locations -- a lot of the map is fairly empty, but we visit China, Japan, South America, Britain, and Africa. Along the way there are a lot of references to actual mythology and such, but I won't give them all in great detail. 
Eventually we break all the seals. Now with Garuda's help, it's off to the heavenly kingdom.

Garuda

The Heavenly Kingdom is pretty large and the castle at the end is long as well. By this point I have people who can cast level 8 magic; it costs 800 MP but does a huge amount of damage. A few of these spells is usually enough to send the bosses packing. There are 5 bosses in the castle, ending with the Heavenly Emperor...

Tentei

...which is an auto-loss fight. But a mysterious figure comes in while he's gloating and steals his wand, which was the item he was going to use to take over the three worlds. The figure turns out to be Ashura, who has manipulated us all to get to this point. Dappa is also working with her, so we have to fight him too, and then it's time to make the final excursion into the demon world to finish off Ashura. This dungeon is not as long as the heavenly kingdom one, and levelling is pretty quick. The final boss has two forms -- the first is easy; you just summon level 7 Lucifer who can absorb all her spells. The second is harder.

Lucifer 7 is still helpful, but since she regenerates 9999 HP a turn, you have to continuously use heavy damage spells to have any hope. This quickly saps the MP but there are good healing items to recover, so ultimately it's not too bad.

In the ending, it turns out that Kurisu was some guardian (it sounds like a Valkyrie although they never use that name) who committed some sin and was sent to Earth to pay for that. As Ashura dies, she opens a portal to send a bunch of demons into the world to kill everyone. How do we deal with this?

Yes, that is what you think it is. The Guardians send telepathic messages to people all over the world to gather in Noah's Ark, and then I thought Kurisu was sacrificing her spirit to cause the flood -- but then she was still there at the end, so evidently I misread.

So there's obviously a lot more to the story than the outline I gave here -- at times I had a hard time following it, partly because it's in all hiragana and I'm sometimes too lazy to look up words I don't know. But there may have been some moderate incoherence to the plot itself. Overall it was pretty good, though. I think this has possibly the most dialogue of any of the games I've played up to this point, which shows some progress towards later games. The gameplay is fairly average -- it's typical of this era that it's the normal AMID system with some innovative features which turn out to be fairly useless. One I forgot to mention is that you can change the way your characters attack, raising their damage in return for lower hit rate. I never found this to be useful, though.

I'll post the review later in the week and then it's back to the PC Engine. I'm going to be gone for about 2 weeks in late June and early July but I'm hoping to have some scheduled posts during that time.

Game 26 - Shinseiki Odysselya

Shinseiki Odysselya (神聖紀オデッセリア)
Released 6/18/1993, published by Vic Tokai

Back to the Super Famicom, with a mythology themed game. Apparently this game was on the slate to be released in the US as Lost Horizon, and even got reviewed in Nintendo Power (by someone who didn't like RPGs), but was cancelled before release. Nintendo's release criteria could be a little slapdash, but it seems surprising to me that they ever considered this game. Not only does it have heavy mythology elements but it involves Old Testament figures and stories -- perhaps this was not as "dangerous" as if it had involved Jesus or the New Testament. But it still suggests that the Bible stories didn't actually happen like the Bible says. There's also some nudity they would have had to censor.

Nintendo of America would not have liked this

The game takes place on Earth, in three time periods. The first two (prehistory and 1500 BC) are short and serve mostly as prologue segments. Most of the game takes place in 550 BC. The history is obviously not completely accurate, but they do seem to have taken some effort to fit the time -- for instance, Rome is a tiny town, although someone in Athens tells you they have the feeling Rome is going to get a lot bigger later.

The opening tells us that the all-powerful gave various duties to the gods they had created, separated between light, darkness, and the in-between. Eventually the guardians of earth attacked the heaven dwellers, but were defeated and scattered around the world. Early people called them the Titano Guardians. Now life developed on earth, and about a billion and a half years later, the highly evolved dinosaurs, the Ryuujinzoku, were at the apex of their civilization. But they misused their technology and knowledge, and brought ruin upon themselves. This is where the game starts, with a young woman appearing among them.

Kyle, a dragon, finds our main character lying in a field after a fight with some monkeys. She doesn't remember her name, but decides to use the name Kurisu. The Ryuujin are in big trouble; there's an ice age, and they're down to just a small number of them left. But Konlon, the leader, wants Kurisu to break the seal on the Holy Road so that they can defeat the apes.

The battle system is typical AMID, with a few innovations. There are several auto battle options, which is always appreciated (one automatically exits auto battle if you drop into critical HP). There are front and back rows, and with weapons like spears and bows you can attack from the back rows without problems. One interesting feature is that most magic has two forms, an attack and defense. For instance, Thor is a thunder attack, and a revive spell. As characters level, they can put more power into the spells (from level 1 to 8) at the cost of more MP. The magic is split between Talisman magic, which you equip, and special magic, which is learned with level ups.

There are a few other aspects of the system that aren't much use. The back of the box trumpets the fact that you can control the stat gains on level up, but this doesn't seem very useful -- the characters come with settings that are pretty good to fit their fighting type, and I have never changed them. You can also combine two weapons to make a third. But it's a frustrating process because there's no way to know what the combination will be, and most combinations don't do anything. Worse, there's a glitch that makes the items disappear sometimes. The combined stuff isn't even that useful anyway...I did a few combinations at the beginning with the recipes from the instruction manual, but not after that.

The leader, Konlon, wants us to find a statue that will supposedly enable the Ryuujin to unleash their true power and then defeat the monkeys (some of whom are primitive humans). But when we find the statue, it's the god Naga, who tells Kurisu that part of her mission is to find the guardians who were defeated in the heaven war. Konlon comes to smash the statue, which he thinks will give him power -- instead it kills all the remaining Ryuujin. We also learn that the humans and apes were genetically engineered by the Ryuujin to be slaves. But they will now inherit the earth. Kyle is still around, and wants to get revenge on Draken, the guardian that caused the destruction.

But it turns out Kyle is an avatar of Draken, and so attacking Draken also hurts Kyle, and eventually they are both defeated. Naga then appears to tell us we just witnessed the end of one civilization and the start of another; she will give the humans fire. Kurisu is now sent 100,000 years in the future, to 1300 BC, in the town of Doran (most of the cities are real-world but I'm not sure what ドラン is.) She quickly meets Loos, who is a reincarnation of Kyle, and wants to travel with Kurisu again. They hear that Naga is in Thebes and go off to find her again. Instead, we find Ezen, who seems to be filling the role of Moses. He also recognizes Kurisu and wonders what she's doing "in that form" but won't say any more.

Go down Ezen, way down in Egypt land

This section is a version of the Exodus story, with Ezen asking Pharoah to release the people of Zion. Of course he refuses, so we (along with Sarai) have to sneak into the labor camp and find Joshua, the leader of Zion. With his help the slaves escape, but Pharoah pursues us to a river. Sarai sacrifices herself to give Ezen the power to part the river.

The red sea parts

From here, Kurisu and Loos arrive in Babylon, then climb the Tower of Babel to reach a garden in the sky where they hope to find one of the guardians.

Dappa

In the garden is Dappa (who I also don't think is any real mythological figure). He mentions the world's destruction by a flood many years ago thanks to the Heavenly Emperor, and sends us forward to 550 BC, which is apparently the original time for both Kurisu and Loos. This is where most of the game takes place. It turns out Loos is the son of the Persian King. The first task is to save Canaan from Babylon (the Sack of Jersualem was in 587 BC so I guess this is based on that). Loos is able to convince his father to send some troops at Babylon, and we break in and fight Nebuchadnezzar, who has turned into a monster.

Nebuchadnezzar

The character on the right, the Roc, is a familiar. There are several of these throughout the game. You can't control them, but they always go first and regain all their MP each battle so they can be quite powerful. I'll end this post here -- I should be able to finish the game in a few days but I'll probably need two more posts about it. It's a pretty average game so far.

PCE Game 16 - Cosmic Fantasy 3

Cosmic Fantasy 3: Adventure Boy Rei (コズミック・ファンタジー3 冒険少年レイ)
Released 9/25/1992, published by Telenet

Zenic Reverie's post on Cosmic Fantasy 2 says "It's the games like this: bland, mediocre, unpolished filler that makes it difficult to feel motivated to play another hour." I agreed with that assessment for Cosmic Fantasy 1, and I agree with it for CF3 as well -- in some ways CF3 is worse than 1. We have an uninspired plot, a bland battle system with a high encounter rate, and disappointing visuals and cinematics. The game takes place in the same milieu as the first two, with the "Space Security Force" and their team of space cadets solving various problems.

The game begins with Nyan, the cat merchant from CF1, being attacked by other cat enemies. He crash lands on a planet, and the story switches to Rei, the hero. He has mysterious healing powers. His first task is to sell some herbs of their small village at the capital.

The battle system is the same as 2. It's your basic AMID -- the only innovation is that you can choose the order your guys act. There's also an auto battle.

The first big problem is the random encounter rate, which is commonly mentioned as a bad point of the entire series. It's not only high, but seems very regular, about every 6 steps or so. The game balance is all over the place -- at times you can mow everything down, and you'll level up (and recover your MP) before you run out of healing. Other times enemies kill you from full HP with a single critical hit. There seems to be nothing in between those two extremes, although fortunately it was more often "mow everyone down." The bosses on the whole have low HP and can't really do much against you, except for the first boss which could critical everyone to death.

Without the manual I don't know what that DX is

Rei meets Doga, the bearded guy above, by healing his wife. We also discover that children have been kidnapped by some monster -- not Mamon, who joins the party, but Guru, who is the boss pictured above. The game has no world map, or even a transition screen between towns and the outside area. This at least is somewhat fresh compared to other games, but combined with the ridiculous encounter rate it's hard to find your way around. After the detour of saving the children, Rei heads off to the capital to sell his herbs. Afterwards he reads about Princess Diana's upcoming marriage. Now Rei heads north although I forget why -- he happens upon Nyan's crashed ship.

Making our way back to the capital, of course Nyan has to sell Rei stuff, including a bridge for 1000 gold. Back at the capital, there are new posters up for a battle tournament. The winner will become one of the candidates for Diana's hand. Nyan basically tricks/forces Rei into entering, selling him an item that lets him beat the leader. Now the king gives all the candidates a mission -- find the Sebulrakis Stone in the royal tomb and bring it back. Jay, a knight who is in love with Diana (but not one of the candidates) comes along in our party.

Along the way we save fairies and get a flute. It's hard to see where the story is going.

Finally we reach the tomb, and have to make it through three trials to reach the Stone. The first trial is just to return alone to the tomb (fortunately the encounters here are easy). The second is to solve a rock pushing puzzle. The third, which happens automatically, is to save one of the other suitors from a jail cell. Finally we recover the stone -- but it turns out one of the other suitors has faked a stone and "won" the contest!

But Nyan has another Sebulrakis Stone and is able to prove which one is the real one. Jay gets the princess, and Nyan gets the stone -- it turns out he is looking for seven of these stones on the planet for an unknown reason, and he ropes Rei into joining him on his journey.

Now the story switches to space, and the CF1 and 2 characters. The Space Pirates from the first games are back, with a convoluted plan to go back in time and prevent the Cosmic Hunters from being formed.

Yuu and Van

They're breaking into the Space Pirates ship to defeat them. This is where I stopped.

The CF2 crew

I guess it's nice to see the old characters again, but this game just isn't very good. The story is all over the place, the system is boring, and the encounter rate is too high. Unfortunately there is one more Cosmic Fantasy game in 1995 (split into two parts) -- maybe they will have fixed some of the problems by then.

Now it's back to Super Famicom with Shinseki Odysselya, a game with mythology influences.