Merry Christmas

 Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates.

I'm playing games but won't have any updates until after New Year; expect Farland Story 2 on the other blog probably next weekend, and then back here for Kishin Korinden Oni.

Game 54 - Tenshi no Uta: Prayer of the White Wings

Tenshi no Uta: Prayer of the White Wings (天使の詩 白き翼の祈り)

Released 7/29/1994 by Telnet

 

 (I meant to schedule this for Sunday but I accidentally posted it instead, I'll just leave it up.)

This is the third (and last) game in the Tenshi no Uta series. I played the first two, which were for PC Engine. Some places (such as GameFAQs) incorrectly say this is a remake of the PC Engine game, which it is not. 

The first game took place in a fictionalized Britain, with Christianity explicitly replacing the pagan religions. The second game was a direct sequel and began in a different world but ended up in Britain again. This game is still a sequel to the first two but takes place many years later, entirely in another world, and has only a tenuous connection to the previous games. The plot it mostly a rehash of elements from the first two games.

 Of course this lacks the voiced cutscenes of the first two games, but they still tried to capture some of that feeling with cutscenes featuring pictures. I don't know why more games didn't do this.

The battle system is pretty standard AMID (Dragon Quest II style). The only innovation is a negotiation system. Before each battle, you can choose to talk to enemies instead of fighting them. They might get mad and attack you (usually with a free turn for them). Otherwise you can choose a language to speak to them in. At first you only have gestures, but you can learn other languages throughout the game. After that they still might get mad with the same result. The negotiation can also fail. But if it succeeds you can ask them for money, gold, items, or friendship. Any way it turns out you gain some negotation experience and if you at least tried to talk to them your friendship level with that monster goes up. Sometimes monsters will show up randomly in combats and attack the enemies if you're friends enough with them. This all makes the random encounters somewhat more interesting than normal.

 

The main character, Reyard, is the son of a blacksmith. One day he encounters a mysterious girl named Krana in the woods.

Soon, Krana is abducted by Rannell, the son of a local Duke. Reyard of course decides to go after her along with some friends. He meets up with Leon along the way, an expert swordsman who helps Reyard train. It turns out there's a resistance movement against Rannell. Reyard is able to join up with them and beat up Rannell, rescuing Krana. Now Rannell is sought out by demonic powers and becomes a demon.

 

The next part of the game is just running away from the Duke's men while we encounter various characters and enemies. There's another Kurisu:

 

Kurisu always seems to be a girl's name in JRPGs.

Eventually we meet the angel Raphael, who reveals that Krana is an angel that was sent to the world to judge humanity. This is the same story as Tenshi no Uta II except that in that game the heavenly powers were going to destroy the world. Here they're just going to leave it undefended so the demonic powers can take it over. But Krana judges that there are a lot of good humans, and so Raphael pulls back and lets Krana join the attempt to defeat the demons. This begins with beating Bern, who is actually Belial.

After that, one of Lucifer's main generals comes in and turns Krana to stone. In order to turn her back, we have to go to the underworld and beat the generals and Lucifer himself. This requires getting five different elemental symbols, so it's time for the usual world-spanning fetch quest.

For the rest of the game your party is Leon, Reyard, and Revi and Sophia -- these are two friends of Leon. Revi is supposed to be a wizard type character but I didn't find attack magic very useful in this game, so he's not all that useful. Sophia is the healer. Leon and Reyard are the front line attackers and tanks.

One odd aspect of this game is that at certain points, you are just awarded bonus levels (4-6 levels, but it may depend on how much grinding you did). Overall the difficulty level is not high, but there are parts where the enemies hit hard and it's tough to run away from them. There were one or two dungeons where I got a bunch of game overs,  but by the end of the game it's not too hard.

Once we get the five symbols, we're in the last stage of the game. The three Lucifer generals are in a long cave leading down to the underworld.

By this time I did not find the game very difficult. Sophia heals, everyone else attacks, and a few buff spells make it pretty easy.

Lucifer is at the bottom in the underworld. 

 

Once defeated, Krana is able to convince him to abandon his hatred for humanity and join you (as a summon monster). Now all that's left is Satan.

 

Satan was also the boss in the previous games. I didn't find him that difficult.

 

After he's beaten, Krana learns that her parents are Kearu and Claire (from the first Tenshi no Uta game). They come to take her back to heaven, but she decides to live as a human and marry Rayard.

This is not a bad game at all. It's no masterpiece but it's definitely worth a play, especially with the patch. The lack of voice acting is unfortunate compared to the first games but I thought this was a more fun game to play. The story isn't as interesting because it lacks the real-world Britain of the first games and the idea of the conflict between Christianity and the pagan religions. Instead this is just a normal RPG world with demon names taken from Christianity. I think if we could have Tenshi no Uta II with the SNES game's system that would be the best of both worlds.

PCE Game 35 - Dragon Knight III (short post)

So I was going to make a short post about this game but I'm not sure I could add anything to the Hardcore Gaming 101 coverage of it, and CRPG Addict's series on Knights of Xentar (the English localization). The game is not really worth playing.

The main mystery surrounding this game is why Megatech Software decided to make the changes they did in the localization. In the original DK3, Takeru comes to a town during his journey with no real goal, and thieves accost him. He normally doesn't like to draw his sword against humans so they're able to beat him up and take his stuff. In the English localization, he stumbles into town drunk, and the same thing happens. In DK3, he goes to beat up bandits to get his stuff back and figures out that the leader is actually a demon. In KoX, there's this bizarre dialogue about the bandits coming to the town and impregnating women with "demon seed". Desmond (the KoX main character) smells really bad and has a tiny penis, neither of which is in DK3.

So why did they do this? My only guess is this. They were trying to introduce the world of Japanese eroge to western players who were totally unfamiliar with it. Perhaps they felt that they needed to make it more crassly comic and insulting to make it less creepy or offputting to an audience who might not have reacted well to a cartoon porn game that took itself (fairly) seriously. But I really don't know. I also wondered if the localizers themselves found the game creepy and were taking a kind of revenge by translating it this way.

There are two more Dragon Knight games that I will be playing -- I will at least start the Dragon Knight 1 remake for PCE which is still another year or so away. Dragon Knight IV is an SRPG that was released for SNES, Playstation, and PC-FX (the followup to the PC Engine). I'll be playing the Playstation version (which seems to be the most polished remake) on my other blog relatively soon.

I've already finished Tenshi no Uta so that post should come out this weekend.

Game 53 - Sword World SFC 2

Sword World SFC 2 (ソード・ワールドＳＦＣ２）

Released 7/15/1994, T&E Soft

 

  

This game is a followup to Sword World SFC, a game based on a popular tabletop RPG in Japan. The game is still going in Japan, with 2.0 released in 2008 and 2.5 in 2018. It seems that in successive versions they have abandoned the more realistic (D&D based?) art of the original and gone with a contemporary anime art style. But this SNES game is still based on the original version.

The system and the way the game works is nearly identical to the first game, so please review my post on that game. The only major change is that you can now level your classes up to 10 instead of 5. There are also more missions than the first game, and there is more story. The game shares the same flaws as the first game, but I liked it in spite of that -- the game was clearly created by people who were familiar with playing tabletop RPGs, and each mission feels like an abstracted tabletop gaming session. In my experience, only Pool of Radiance shares that quality, and I would say that in some ways these two Sword World games feel even more tabletop-like than the AD&D Gold Box ones. (However, I think that this game goes further towards standard video game RPG elements than the first game did.)

As in the first game you start out creating a character. This time I went with a Dwarf Fighter-Priest. One visual change in this game is that you have the option to see the dice rolling for everything. This slows down the game a lot and I did not enable it, but I think that if you knew the actual SW tabletop rules this would be a useful option. Although I don't know how authentic it is; if you had the SW rulebook could you actually know exactly what die roll you were aiming for? The game itself does not tell you.

 

You can then go around the Inn and recruit some characters. I went with these:

• Cynthia, a human with Sorcerer 2 and Sage 2.
• Materia, a half-elf with Thief 3 and Shaman 2.
• Salem, a human with Sorcerer 2, Priest 2, and Sage 1

I had initially taken another fighter but the enemies on the first mission are almost impossible to hit for some reason, so magic is necessary. You also quickly get Arveil, who apparently is from one of the supplemental books for SW. He's a fighter and stays with you the rest of the game. 

The first mission is to discover what's going on in the tombs underneath the city. As I said, these missions feel like the way we would play D&D as kids -- you get some kind of mission, have to gather information, then explore a dungeon and do some fights and find treasure. Some of the missions don't involve much (or any) fighting.

For some reason this first mission is quite difficult; as I said above the enemies can barely be hit by the fighters so you have to rely on magic. The characters' MP is not very important because you just buy Magic Stones that can be used as MP.

 

Once you complete this quest, Arveil is called by the King. He used to be a knight but had his title stripped; he can gain it back by doing this task -- go to the western town of Palmia and borrow a secret document they have, and return it to the king. The game from this point basically divides into two parts. The journey to Palmia takes you through a number of cities or towns. Each one has additional missions, some of them you can skip and some you have to do.

Along the way we start picking up bits of information about the giants. They seem to be attacking humans more than usual. They're upset about this great road that was made connecting all the cities -- while it increased the trade and prosperity of the human cities, it also caused the humans to encroach onto the giants' lands and start to kill them and rob their things. At one point we befriend a captive giant who has been made to fight in an arena. The ruler of the city was going to use poison and other means to make sure he lost, but we also enter the tournament and ensure that we win, requesting that the giant gets freed in return.

A lot of the other missions are small, side-quest type things like protecting sheep from wolves, finding herbs to cure sick people, etc. In this first part of the game, Sleep Cloud is by far the most useful spell. It has a huge range and puts most enemies to sleep, allowing the fighters to pick them off. 

This game shares the problem of the last one in that you don't feel like your guys are getting stronger. This is partly because the numbers are all hidden -- there's no in game indication at all of what it does to level up from Fighter 2 to Fighter 3. The instruction manual for the original game did not specify, and I suppose you would have to look at the TRPG rulebook to find out.

My main party was Arveil and Kurisu who were focusing on fighters (I leveled up Kurisu's priest ability until he could use Cure Disease since that seems to be the only way to heal it), and one Sorcerer and Shaman. 

Eventually we reach Palmia and recover the secret document, which turns out to be the method by which the Great Road was constructed -- the King wants to construct another one apparently. But before we can head back to the King, the giant problem becomes more acute. It turns out that one of the giants is going to do a ritual involving human blood that will result in the resurrection of a god. I was somewhat disappointed by this because it seems like this is where the game goes back into standard JRPG territory. That's not to say that D&D games never involved this kind of story, but they could have gone with something else.

 

First we have to be allowed by this wise old giant to go in and stop the ritual. After this is the final dungeon, and this is also very JRPG like -- you have to find 4 orbs and use them in the right rooms to unlock doors and move on.

The final boss has two forms (JRPG again) and it's a rather annoying fight because he can only be hurt by three things -- a special sword you get, one spell, and an item that casts that spell. I got basically no use out of the spell so it was just up to the sword, meaning that there was some luck in whether the boss chose to attack the sword guy or not.

Once we win, the people at Palmia warn us that the King may want the road building document to build a new road to the east in preparation for new wars and conquests, just as they did against the giants before. But there's no choice; we return the document, Arveil becomes a knight again, and the game ends. Now there is one other ending if you take a different choice earlier in the game; maybe in that case you don't give the document to the king?

Overall I enjoyed this game as much as I did the first one. The story is much better, but I wish they had not gone with the JRPG-style conclusion. I think this would be even more enjoyable if you actually understood the Sword World system, but it's playable even if you don't.

 

This seems to have been the last of the Sword World based RPGs. There are some mobile games that I can't find any information about, and then in the 2000s there were several games based on Sword World 2.0, but I'm not sure any of them are RPGs. There was a DS game but it seems to be a choose your own adventure style game (maybe more like the Lone Wolf books if anyone remembers those).

Next up is Dragon Knight III but I'm only going to be making a short post on that; I've already started Tenshi no Uta (which has a patch).

Doing more with this blog

I got a comment from an anonymous user that aligned with something I had been thinking for a while -- the progress on this blog has slowed down too much because of the SRPG blog. I want to do both projects, but I think doing a 1-to-1 alternation is naturally prioritizing the other blog because the SRPGs tend to be longer. Lately I haven't even been averaging one game a month on this blog, which is far too slow.

I have two possible fixes for this -- one is to do 2-to-1 favoring this blog unless the SRPG is very short (like Tenchi Muyo! I just did which only took me 4 days). The second is to play SRPGs and the SNES RPGs at the same time so that I always have a post to make here each weekend. This might be a better option although I have never liked playing multiple RPGs at once. Or if readers have any other ideas?

Tomorrow or Sunday I will have a new update with Sword World SFC 2 and I have started Tenshi no Uta so I will have updates here for the next few weekends and hopefully I can go more quickly here in the future.

Game 52 - Samsara Naga 2 (Finished)

I started the game over and made it to world 3 with the Blue and Red dragons this time. The "feed" part was still annoying -- I saved every single monster I fought up to that scene and I still ended up having to grind another 100-150 monster corpses. I get the idea of feeding your baby dragons, but did they have to make it that much?

World 3 is a lava world. As usual Amrita screwed things up by stealing their Sisilla Drops that they use to freeze the lava, so we have to get those first. Afterwards we actually catch a glimpse of Amrita at an inn, but before we wake up she leaves, leaving behind a note telling us not to follow her. Heading on we come to the Dragon Guild for this world, which (surprise) has been destroyed by Amrita, who was trying to find out something about the dragons. Most of this world is taken up by a large dungeon (Asura's dungeon) that is done in parts. The minotaur dungeon is especially good because you fight one at a time, they're easy, and they give big XP.

World 4 is a water world, and it's been totally flooded. The water areas have annoying catfish monsters that poison you, and you can't run from them. Eventually we have to get diving equipment to go under the sea to various temples. Finally here we meet Amrita for the first time.

She reminds us that it's pointless to try to take her in since the previous worlds no longer exist. She's not going to fight us, but if we want to find out what would make her betray the guild we should keep following her up the worlds. Later we meet Pannaga, a god of some kind. Amrita came to him to find out why dragons were born in the first place, but he has no idea. This seems to be something she was searching for at the Guilds as well.

World 5 is a wind world. The baby dragons finally grow some wings, and with a flight helmet our main character is able to fly on the dragons as long as they leave from a helipad or dragon catapult.

Another sleeping Dragon, a god like creature, says that Amrita asked her the same questions about dragons. She's also been among some of the Wind Dragon Riders turning them against the Guild.

World 6 has a colosseum and you have to exchange your Rupees for Megarupees, so try to save some selling items and monster corpses.

You have to win 8 battles to proceed (though not all at once). Some walkthroughs claim you have to be alone to do this, but this isn't actually the case. You do have to be alone to register, but once you've done that you can recover your dragons and fight. I only found this out because the final fight is nearly impossible alone because of the Sleep status all the enemies inflict.

Next we find that Dragon Knights and Dragonriders are in conflict on this world and are constantly fighting each other. After being accepted by the Dragon Knights, Kurisu becomes a girl in the King's harem, but after escaping, the two sides attack each other leaving every place open for looting (tons of treasure chests!)

World 7 is interesting. All it is is a long tower with eight Haratama restaurants. Six of them represent the previous worlds, and you learn how each one was destroyed after you left it. After that, going back to them you see a replay of Amrita visiting them, and learn more about her. Apparently the Guild tried to destroy her black dragon, which is why she fought back against them. The Guild has been framing her for all the bad stuff that happened on each world. But she herself believes there might be something wrong with her dragon, but how could a dragon master kill her own dragon?

World 8 is the last one. It's a sequence of areas that are mostly various kinds of mazes. 

Amrita is at the end. She was impossible when I fought her at first, looking at a walkthrough I found that you should be at least level 55 by this point, I was at 41. With the tedious battle system of this game there was no way I was going to grind that many levels, so I used a code -- unfortunately the only code I could find was a level 99 one, so the last two fights were very easy.

Amrita's worst fears have come to pass -- her black dragon will become the Chaos Dragon, who is responsible for the destruction of the worlds so far and will eventually destroy everything. After fighting you to make sure you're strong enough, she asks you to kill the Chaos Dragon for her.

The Chaos Dragon is the "Final Dragon" that all dragons were leading towards, and the goal was to bring Kurisu's White Dragon together with the Chaos Dragon. Indeed, the white dragon (Ruth) has to sacrifice herself to destroy the Chaos Dragon in the end.

 After the fight, you're suddenly back in the first town, but now the main character is named Ruth. Amrita is there. Canth and Ramoth (my baby dragons) have been reincarnated as people, and Al Sinha (who helped us throughout the game) is a cow. Once again, Ruth had been found clutching an egg -- the egg hatches, and the white dragon Kurisu is born. Roll credits.

I think the idea is that by beating the Chaos Dragon, the world is now reborn in a more stable form, without the Chaos Dragon? It doesn't really explain what happened.

The story and world are pretty interesting in this game, although I would have liked them to flesh out the ending a bit more. The graphics are ugly, as I said before.

But the big problem, as usual, is the battle system. The battles are just so slow and plodding, the grunt monsters so strong, and the random encounter rate so high, that the game becomes a chore to play. I ran from most of the fights in the last few worlds and used a code to strengthen my guys; I would have never finished this game on a real console.

Also the equipment breaking system is incredibly annoying and totally unnecessary; I don't know what the designers thought it added to the game.

No more Samsara Naga games were made, but in 2001, the first two games were remade for Game Boy Advance. The graphics are a lot better and the interface looks better too, but I don't know if any of the fundamental problems of the battle system were addressed.

Update

I just finished Tactics Ogre, and restarted Samsara Naga 2. I'm going to use a cheat code to get the necessary monster corpses to pass that stupid baby feeding part, but hopefully I can quickly get back to World 3 with the correct dragon combination, and can make an update next weekend.

Game 52 - Samsara Naga 2 (Part 1)

Sam̊sāra Nāga 2 (サンサーラ・ナーガ2)

Released 7/15/1994, Published by Victor Entertainment

This is the sequel to a Famicom game from 1990. It looks like a Famicom game in many ways -- the graphics are definitely the low point of the game. It's party the ugly character designs of Oshii Mamoru, but also just the generally low quality of the graphics.

The story background is that the main character was found as a baby abandoned in the Dragon Guild Ryuen, with a small egg. The egg never grew or hatched, and people made fun of her, except for Amrita, who was her only friend. But one day Amrita suddenly burned down Ryuen, taking her egg and running away. Her goal is to reach the top of the 8 worlds that constitute the universe. At the same time, the main character's egg grows and hatches, producing a White Dragon, something seen only once in 100 years. Since Amrita destroyed all the other dragons and eggs, it's up to Kurisu to take her White Dragon and chase after Amrita.

The main character does not level. Instead, each time you advance to the next world (out of 8) you get 200 more HP and some other stat upgrades. There is a lot of equipment, but it wears out and breaks after a while. This is incredibly annoying, and I don't understand what they thought it added to the game. It just means that you're constantly having to juggle equipment, buy extras of everything, check after battles to see if anything broke, etc. It also means that if you find a cool new piece of equipment in a dungeon, or receive one from the noodle shop stamp collection, it's not all that exciting because you know it's just going to break in a little while.

The game is standard DQ2-style. The dragons have "Mantras" which are spells, but the main character has nothing but attack.

When you finish a battle, you get the choice of eating the monsters (which recovers some HP/MP for your dragon and gives them a little XP bonus), or taking the corpses. The corpses can be sold at any Haratama Noodle Shop for money. There are 64 shops in the game and each one gives you a stamp; every 8 stamps you get a prize (which will soon break, so what's the point?)

The first goal is to get a helmet, since every dragon rider needs one as the symbol of their position (the helmets may be unbreakable). Since Amrita burned down the equipment there's none there, so the main quest of the first world is to get this helmet of a previous legendary dragonrider Al Sinha. This involves solving some minor problems typical of RPGs -- a town being controlled by a selfish power hungry guy, etc.

In the Naga cemetery you learn more of the backstory of the dragons. All the different dragons in the world are descended from one egg, and the goal of all the dragons is to produce the Final Dragon, who has already been born. Al Sinha's spirit gives the main character his helmet and repeats the command to go find Amrita.

So now we move on to the second world. When you move on, you can't return to the previous world (and at the end of the second world we learn that the previous worlds cease to exist once you move on).

My dragon (Ramoth, named after the Pern series) is pregnant with twins! I have to buy two charms at the end of the first world, which will determine the colors of the dragons. I decided on Blue + Red, which seemed like a good combo (the other choice is Green, which is a priest type character, but Ramoth can already cast healing spells).

 

There's a convenient cave in the second world for her to give birth, but she's worried about the egg thieves that everyone is talking about. So first we have to deal with that. This involves mostly a large investigation quest with two feuding companies, Taj and Mahal.

 

Once this is dealt with, Ramoth is ready to give birth, so we head to the hospital. This is by far the most annoying part of the game. We learn that Amrita was here and her black dragon wasn't born by an egg but tore her way out of her mother's womb; the nurses who saw the bloody scene are scarred and never want to deliver another dragon.

The babies are born safe, but now we have to feed them. You need a huge number of monster corpses for this -- at least 200, maybe as many as 300 or more. I was warned by a walkthrough to save up corpses but I didn't save enough. Also you lose Ramoth for this section so you have to fight enemies with the main character alone, while her equipment breaks over and over again.

Finally we get enough corpses for the food, and now you have to register the babies, which involves what I guess is supposed to be a parody of bureaucracy, running around talking to different people in a huge office and getting forms. The parody is just as fun as the real thing.

Then as you progress a bit, your dragons get an illness. You have to go back to the hospital again and wait a long time for the doctor to fix them. I don't get what the point of this whole sequence is.

I was also really upset to find out as you can see in the above screenshot, that I had accidentally gotten a green dragon instead of blue. Green + Red is the worst combo for beating the game. I moved on to the third world and found myself in a tough situation.

At this point I can barely win a single random battle, I can't get to a Haratama to sell things for money, and I don't like my dragons. I think I have to start over with the Blue + Red combination and make sure I'm a little more ready for the third world. My rules say I have to beat this game because it has no patch or translation, but I don't think I can face starting it over right away. I'm going to at least play Tactics Ogre for my other blog. After that if I still don't feel like playing this game I will just move it back a few games on the list so that I can come back to it in 4-6 months when hopefully I can come back to it fresh.

Game 51 - Slayers

Slayers (スレイヤーズ)

Released 6/24/1994, Banpresto

 

 

I've played quite a few games based on anime/light novels for this blog. In general, they've been cheap cash grabs with none of the charm or interest of the original series. Slayers is a popular light novel series that was made into an anime; I remember watching all three seasons in college. The Slayers video game is different from some of the others in that the original writers of Slayers was involved in the project and it fits in with the series better than games like Ranma or Fist of the North Star.

Often the difficulty the creators have is how to transfer the original context to an RPG. For instance, Fist of the North Star involves people who can kill others with a touch, and who can only be matched by one of the few people who also have skill in these martial arts techniques? How did the Fist RPGs deal with this? By completely ignoring it and having Kenshiro and the others fight grunts with nunchuks or regular punches.

Slayers has a similar problem -- in the original series, Lina Inverse is supposed to be one of the most powerful magicians in the world, able to use devastating magic attacks that can destroy towns. So this game begins with Lina having lost her memory, as well as all but a few of her magic spells. This allows for the growth that you expect in an RPG without violating the storyline of the original. It may seem like a cheap way out, but it is involved in the story more than you might expect at first.

There are a large number of characters from the series in the game, including a number from the novels that I was not familiar with. Other than Lina you can't choose who you want to have until very late in the game. Each character has the same basic RPG choices but with a special move. Sylphiel can use her magic on everyone, and Lemmy does an all attack, to use two examples. Most of the time the characters do what you tell them to do, but certain characters (particularly Naga and Amelia) will do their own thing from time to time.

The graphics are good in some parts, like the character portraits in the status screen:

The battle graphics are relatively good too.

There are also occasional cutscene style graphics.

 But the map sprites are really disappointing; they could have done a lot better with these.

The equipment system is pretty disappointing as well. There's no money from battles, only from chests, The equipment upgrades are fairly limited (and as usual you can't see the stats of items until you buy them.)  On the whole, the RPG elements are not as robust as they could be. The battles tend to be quite simple; you regain your MP whenever you level up so you can use spells a lot (which I always appreciate). The bosses are typically highly resistant to magic so you basically have to buff and heal for them. Resurrection, which heals 9999 HP and brings characters back to life costs only 10 MP so you rarely have to worry about a game over except in a few fights. By the end your party is three level 99 characters plus Lina, which makes the final battles quite easy.

 

The story gains some interest later in the game when you learn more about why Lina's memory is missing; it's nothing amazing but it's entertaining enough. Then once you beat the main game you get a short post-game storyline where you can choose any party, giving you a chance you use your favorite characters in the end part.

This game has a translation patch. It's definitely worth playing if you are a fan of the Slayers anime (or light novels); as an RPG it's somewhat lacking but it's a smooth playthrough and doesn't have anything that will frustrate you.

Next up is Sansara Naga 2.