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.