I have officially created my new site: https://www.rpgblog.net
This site will have the SFC, PC Engine, and Strategy RPG posts. I've already imported all the posts and comments from here, but I will have to manually rebuild the "played games" page and add categories to the posts.
Here's a link to the post for this week; I will continue to do links here for a few months. I hope everyone will continue reading and commenting on the other site -- thank you all for following me for almost 5 years!
This is a stupid game -- that is, a "bakage" to use the Japanese word. It falls into the same category as Maka Maka in that it relies heavily on humor based on parody, gag manga tropes, poop jokes, puns, and occasional racist humor. It was originally developed for the Famicom and apparently completed in 1994, but then the release was cancelled and it was ported to the Super Famicom.
The game begins with the weak-willed "mothercon" (Jocasta complex) main character at his wedding with his fiance Yuka. But then suddenly Yuka disappears, and the main character goes on a quest to find her.
The game takes place entirely in various areas of Tokyo. There really is no coherent plot; it's mostly just a string of parodies and jokes as I mentioned above, as the main character travels through various regions of Tokyo. I've never liked gag manga-style humor, and I didn't really think most of the game was that amusing. Along the way you're joined by two main helper women. The first is Haruka, who works as a cashier in a store.
In the end, you finally discover Yuka on a ship in Yokohama harbor. It turns out she ran away so that you could go out an earn experience and money, which makes you a more attractive husband. The main character is so upset by this that he rejects her and marries either Haruka or Reiko instead (depending on choices you made earlier). He throws away all his XP and gold, and the final scene is the new couple's life where they have no money and he can't get a job because he has no experience.
The game itself is a pretty normal RPG. It has a lot of usual bad features of old RPGs -- slow walking with no dash button, no way to see the stats of equipment, no explanations of what the techniques (spells) do, etc. Rather than fighting monsters, you encounter women, and the "attack" command is replaced by "flirt" (kudoku, which can also just mean "persuade" -- I don't know if the game is using that as a kind of double meaning or whether the "persuade" meaning has become obsolete.)
Once you get party members, they don't participate in the battle, but you can ask them to heal you or to "protect" (I never fully understood what this did). The main character's techniques are color coded based on their effect, but it still would have been nice to have some explanation of them.
Some of the "foreigners" you meet are depicted in pretty stereotypical/racist manner, like the black person in the illustration above. Also at one point you visit the Indian embassy where they're all walking around eating curry, and later they are contentedly eating a huge pile of poop, having mistaken it for curry.
On the whole, I'm not sure this game is really worth playing. Maybe if you really like Japanese-style humor it might work for you, and at least I can say that the setting is original and it's not the same old "defeat the demon lord" sword and sorcery game. There are a lot of townspeople to talk to. The enemies are colorful and detailed, and the graphics on the whole are fairly good, especially when you consider that this was ported from a Famicom game.
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After yet another frustrating week with Blogger (having a lot of difficulty uploading the pictures, which has been broken ever since they switched to the new layout), I have decided almost for certain that I am going to transition to a Wordpress site, where I will most likely combine my two blogs into one (using the more flexible layout to make it easy for people to find the various posts). It may be a while before I actually do this, and I will continue to post links on the Blogger site for a good while after I switch, but in the end I think it will be better. And if I continue to do posts after I finish the SFC project, that will be even more convenient.
Also, I may not have a post next weekend due to the Thanksgiving holiday, but we'll see.
I'm on the last chapter of Vandal Hearts so I should be back here next week. Until then, a short post continuing my "old RPGs" sequence -- this time the Famicom Disk System game Deep Dungeon.
The story is pretty simple -- a princess has been captured and you have to go into the underground dungeon (just like Wizardry) to find her. There are 8 floors about the same size as Wizardry ones. The game is also quite similar to the first Wizardry in that the main activity of the game is making maps of the dungeon. There is very little to find in the dungeon -- for instance, the first floor has a couple of places where you can find gold, and one message. There are some places with guaranteed encounters and adventurers, but other than that the maze is empty. This is something that I found fun when I was a kid and hadn't played many of these games, but now I feel like there has to be stuff to find in the dungeons or it's not fun just to wander around.
One other clear indication of Wizardry's influence is that you have to press a button to kick a door down rather than just walking through it.
Saving requires you to switch sides of the disk, which takes a long time (of course in a modern emulator you can just use a save state).
There is a translation patch (and a full set of maps on GameFAQs) so this can be played, but it's hard to imagine many people finding it fun. I think I would have enjoyed it in 1986 when it came out, because these kinds of RPGs were still fairly new. But I can't see playing it now except for some kind of masochist completion.
The series takes steps forward in successive entries, by adding multiple dungeons, more characters. The second game came out about 6 months after this one, suggesting that like Dragon Quest I this was more of a trial run and the next game is a more polished entry. If I keep doing these early games now and then we'll see Deep Dungeon 2 before too long.
As you can see from the title screen, the character designs are by Inomata Mutsumi. She is best known for her work on the Tales series over 20 years; this is an early video game she worked on (I believe she had done some anime work before this as well). This game has a feature I wish SFC RPGs had -- inset graphics and face graphics.
Maybe there was a feeling that it's better for all the action to take place in one style of view, but I like these graphical insets, especially for games when you can barely tell even what the characters look like without the instructions.
The story starts out pretty cliche -- the main character, Muu, is waking up to go through a ceremony to confirm him as crown prince. But as the ceremony starts, monsters attack and seemingly kill everyone, including Muu himself. But a "time rabbit" comes out and restores Muu's life, leaving him in an unknown place. But since he's a silent protagonist we don't know who he is or where.
Immediately in the town he wakes up in, bandits attack the magic shop and steal away a girl, and Muu finds himself assisting a local guardsman who is in love with her to free her.
The combat system is interesting; it's a realtime system where you choose an action while a glass sphere fills up. When it fills, the action happens (but magic takes additional time beyond that). Then they will just keep doing that action until you change it. Muu starts off weak; he seems to be the only magic user (at least judging from the status screen, which has no space for any other characters to have MP).
The interface is rather frustrating to use, particularly the spellcasting. There are 6 types of spells you can get and there is some complexity in that, but to choose a spell in battle you have to use this confusing wheel and a number counter; I never found it convenient to use (I notice that richie, in his walkthrough, says that the system is bad -- I've never seen him criticize a game in the ~40 or 50 walkthroughs of his I've looked at up to now).
So this is a pretty short post as these off-week ones usually are. This isn't a terrible game and it seems generally competitive with the quality of games that were coming out for the SFC. I'm surprised that it wasn't released on CD.
