Game 14 - Song Master

Song Master (ソングマスター)
Released on 11/27/92, published by Yanoman

This game has a bad reputation, but so far I don't think it's terrible -- this is a sign of how low my expectations have gotten. If a game can just be played normally that already puts it above the bottom 25% of the games so far. It's really not that good, though, still suffering from a lot of the problems that early RPGs have -- slow battles, poor balance, clunky interface, etc.

The instruction manual gives the general background for the game. Tiris, an island in Limerick Kingdom of Albion continent, is known for its Singers Guild. King Kain, who founded the kingdom, passed down the secret of the Sacred Song after defeating the powers of darkness. These songs can drive away evil, heal, etc. So Kain was called the Song Master. The main character is Yuri, the grandson of the Song Master Robinton (I assume named after the Masterharper from the Pern novels). He has trouble with controlling his song magic, although he seems to be quite powerful, and so Robinton sends him out to find his one-time rival Ferion, who he hopes will be able to help Yuri out.
 

Robinton and Yuri

He is joined by Shion, a warrior who was once studying Song magic and can't return to his village because of the shame, and an elf king El Ran. Robinton also gives Yuri some surprising news -- he's not really Robinton's grandson, but an orphan picked up from a burned down village.

Yuri, El Ran, and Shion

Unfortunately the whole "song magic" system doesn't have a real effect on the game, it's just a veneer over a standard magic system. It has a few unique qualities, but when I think of song magic I can't avoid thinking of Ar Tonelico.

 Yuri leaves Tiris for Tiris Noa, a larger city, by ship. Once there, I went to the rumor guild and got a sidequest, to recover a lost pendant in a nearby cave. You can't explore the world map; leaving a location by an exit automatically takes you to the next place.

The world map

 The cave was fairly easy with level 10 El Ran around. Levelling up recovers all your HP and MP, and this is the first game I've played for this blog where MP restoring items are affordable and easily available. This means that you can actually use the characters' magic freely, which makes sense since your main character is supposed to be a magician.

The battle system is simple, but also confusing.

A boss battle

The system looks like it has some element of strategy RPG in it -- you can set up your people in three lines, and move them around in battle. But it's hard to tell what this actually does. You can attack anyone from anywhere on the screen. The manual says that you can increase a character's defense by moving them to the back of the formation but I can't tell what penalties they might occur for doing that (lower attack?)

The song magic is the usual array of attack and healing spells, but there are also summons. You can summon a spirit (like the little gnomes in the screenshot above). They become actual characters and will attack and use spells, although you can't control them. If they lose all their HP they die but that has no permanent effect on anything (as far as I know).

As is common for games of this age, the battles are quite slow, and the random encounter rate is relatively high (though not the highest I've had). I'm looking forward to Tuesday when I can start using the speedup key.

I easily found the pendant, although it also had a magic circle nearby. Returning to town, we found out that Davy was the one who set it, although he was under the influence of a dark spirit, who is the next boss.

Evil spirit

Afterwards it's time to move on with the main story. Our ultimate goal is Bernisia, but right now we want to get to Meritus to visit the singer guild there. Yuri decides it's a good idea to travel with a caravan, but unfortunately we all oversleep and the caravan is gone. Pursuing the caravan we come across a grisly sight:

They're not sleeping

Goblins have attacked the caravan, and we are soon taken captive. But then it turns out that it was actually mountain bandits who attacked: they've been trying to get the goblins and humans to fight to further their own goals.

The captives

Also with us are the mayor's daughter of a nearby town, and Cat-eye Jack. Along with them we escape, and then have to convince the townspeople not to attack the goblins. The mayor lets us go on a diplomacy mission to talk to them.

The Goblin King

Of course the goblins are suspicious, and even more so when humans capture the goblin prince. Of course it's the mountain bandits, but El Ran is able to convince the king to let us go save him, as long as the mayor's daughter stays as a hostage. Once we catch up to them, the bandits want to run away, but a random cyclops comes in and finishes them off.

Cyclops

 

This boss is somewhat tough, but with a summoned Flame Bird I was able to keep up the healing enough to outlast him.

The equipment system in this game is unusual in that anyone can equip anything. But some people are not proficient in certain weapons. Armor seems open to everyone, though. All equipment increases all four attributes generally (attack, defense, speed, and "rhythm"). It's odd for a sword or hat to increase your spellcasting power, and the instruction manual offers no justification for that.

After saving the prince, we are able to use an abandoned tunnel in the goblin cave to reach the next destination -- unfortunately Jack steals Yuri's circlet and runs away, so we'll have to get that back. First, El Ran wants to make a detour to the fairy kingdom.

The Queen of Fairies

El Ran seems to be in love with the fairy queen. That night Yuri overhears them talking about something; it sounds like they're talking about some destiny that Yuri has to face that he's not ready for. Probably a cliche "chosen hero" plot, but we'll see.

We now set off for Lankafan to find Jack and/or the circlet. The enemies in the next section are hard, and I had to run from a lot of battles because the enemy spellcasters did way too much damage. At some point I get the ability to increase the number of musical notes for a spell, which increases its power (at the cost of more MP) but I guess I'm not high enough level for that yet.

Game 13 - Hero Senki Review

Story/Characters: The main problem with this category is that the game assumes too much knowledge. It was clearly intended for people who are fans of all three franchises (Gundam, Ultraman, and Kamen Rider). Characters are barely introduced, backstories are assumed, and a lot of what goes on is either a parody or combination of elements from the source franchises. If you don't know each franchise, you're going to be confused a lot of the time. The main plot is run of the mill.

World: There are three continents, one for Kamen Rider, one for Ultraman, and one for Gundam. Unfortunately they all look the same. Every town looks the same, and the dungeons are all almost the same as well. You can't tell which continent you're in just by the look of the area.

Game Flow: For the most part this isn't a problem. It's usually obvious where to go next, and the difficulty is fairly steady. Even in the annoying single-character parts of the game I only had to do a little bit of grinding.

That being said, it does get repetitive. All the dungeons feel the same, and because the plot is largely a series of episodes, it doesn't necessarily feel like you're making narrative progress.

System: This is a basic attack-technique-item-defend system. Each character has a variety of techs they can use in battle taken from the shows. Unfortunately they're poorly balanced and the higher level ones cost too much TP; there's also a lack of variety. One unique feature is that TP can only be recovered by using items (non-buyable until the end of the game) or by attacking in battle. Even resting at the hospital doesn't heal TP. This can be a little annoying when you need to refill TP after a boss battle, but it does allow you to use your techs in battle without feeling like you need to save it all up for a boss.

You cannot revive a character defeated in battle, which means that lucky critical hits or enemies with multiple attacks per round can screw up your chances. They'll come back after the battle with 1 HP but that's no good in a boss fight.

Side Quests/Optional Content: There are a few hidden things at the end, but that's it.


Interface: An average mix of annoyances and decent things -- you can't see the strength of items in the shop but the more expensive thing is better. At least they do have one button control for talk, open chest, etc.

Graphics/Sound: The graphics remind me of RPG maker -- as I said above, they don't distinguish between the cities at all, and the Kamen Rider and Ultra characters all looked the same to me. Average for this time, I guess.





The music is not good. The entire OST has only 16 songs, and 5 of those are for the title screen and ending sequence. 1 is the game over music, 1 is used only in a single story scene, and 1 is for the final boss. That means that 8 songs are the majority of the game's music, and you'll be hearing the same tunes over and over again.

Overall, bleh.

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.

Game 13 - Hero Senki Part 2

One thing that separates good RPGs from average/bad RPGs is memorable locations. In Dragon Quest V, each dungeon and town has its own personality. Sometimes it's just aesthetic, like the underground waterway with its streams and moss, or the haunted castle with the dancing ghosts and torn hangings. Other times it affects the gameplay, like the mine carts or the pits. The goals are also different -- sometimes you need to find an item, sometimes beat a boss, sometimes get through to the other side.

The flip side is Hokuto no Ken 5, where every dungeon looks and feels exactly the same. You wander through featureless corridors fighting random monsters and finding useless treasure chests, until you fight the boss at the top. Repeat for the whole game.

Unfortunately Hero Senki is more like the latter. The dungeons are a bit more varied than HnK, but they're still pretty cookie cutter. The random encounter rate is not as high as HnK and you walk faster, so it's more bearable, but it still gets boring after a while.

I said last time I was going to give more plot information, but the plot is hard to follow and not very organized. Unlike SRW, this game doesn't make it easy to follow things if you're not familiar with the source material. New characters get very little introduction, and there are a lot of in-jokes and parodies that don't make much sense. They want to let you use as many characters from Kamen Rider, Ultraman, and Gundam as they can -- this is probably nice for fans but is confusing to me. I can tell from the Gundam parts of the game that I would appreciate this a lot more if I knew more about Kamen Rider and Ultraman.

A conversation

One interesting feature is "discuss", where your guys will talk to each other and tell you what you have to do next if you forgot. This occurs soon after I broke off the post last time; a villian steals Dan's Ultra Eye, rendering him unable to transform into Ultra Seven. Another being named Windam comes in to fight for him instead.

What's wrong with Kamille as a boy's name!?

Soon after, the Kamille-Jerid eternal rivalry begins the same way as it does in Z Gundam, and Kamille joins up for a while. We're working with the Titans (at least for now) to protect towns. Fortunately the original Ultraman joins and with him along it's easy to beat up the enemies and recover Dan's Ultra Eye, restoring Ultra 7 to our team. Meanwhile we hear rumors of a revolt in Axis City, and also come to understand that behind the three leaders of the various enemy groups (Scirocco, Shadow Moon, and the Ultraman villain) seems to be a single unknown leader.

I'm going to gloss over the next couple of sections because it's mostly just dealing with various Ultraman and Kamen Rider enemies with the help of Kamen Rider V3, X Rider, and other characters.

Eventually the group decides that they need to power up if they're going to deal with the terrorist organization, and the three heroes split up. This is a tough part of the game because you are often fighting with just 1 guy. First up is Amuro, who has to go get the Nu Gundam, stolen by the Black Tristars.

The Tristars again

This is the kind of battle I don't like in these RPGs. The 3 vs 1 style, where your 1 has no healing power, makes the entire thing just depend on your level. If you haven't done enough grinding, you're never going to win. Fortunately you don't have to do that much, but I think battles with severely limited strategic options should be fairly easy to win.

Afterwards, a big surprise: Masaki Ando, an original character from Super Robot Taisen.

He lost his way again

So far he's only been in Super Robot Taisen 2 (for NES). What surprised me is that he mentions Langran, has his familiars Shiro and Kuro with him, and gives his "knight" name from Langran -- all of these elements aren't in Super Robot Taisen until EX, which doesn't come out for another 2 years. I don't know if these things were in other materials beyond the games, or whether this really is the first mention of what would later become the Masou Kishin franchise. Anyway, all he does is help you take on a boss and then leaves, chasing after Shuu. We'll see if he shows up again or if that's his only cameo appearance.

Next up is Ultra 7, who is looking for Ultra King to get a powerup. After getting the runaround for a while, he eventually comes to Yapool and Ace Killer. After fighting a losing battle, Ultra King appears and powers the Ultras up so they can defeat the enemies.

Yapool and his hostages

Finally, Kamen Rider, who is going to power up to Kamen Rider RX. There's another losing battle against Shadow Moon, and once they throw him in a trash chute somehow the sun powers him up? I'm not sure what's going on. Anyway, RX makes his way back to the town, and now the game commits the unforgivable sin of an RPG.

4 General Shadows (one is dead)

This game allows you to save anywhere. When RX enters this building, he has to fight three battles. You can save after the first one, but can't leave the building until all three are beaten. The final battle is impossible unless you have 5 or 6 of the most expensive healing item (or are grossly overlevelled). It's 4 vs 1 and the enemies do way too much damage to beat them any other way -- what's worse, they can blind you, making your attacks miss. This means that you can save in an unwinnable position and have to restart from the beginning of the game -- this should never be allowed in any game. I know you have multiple save files, but in my opinion that's no excuse. Fortunately I had a save outside of the the building, since I had been warned by ritchie's walkthrough about this.

Once this screwover part is over, the three heroes rejoin. Now Zeon has started a war against Axis. Dakar is under Titan control which means we can't get back to headquarters, and Emma and Kamille have been stranded in Zeon territory.

Sneaking in requires the help of Haman Karn:

Looking for Mineva Zabi

We have to fight her because of a misunderstanding, but after that she's willing to show us a secret way into Solomon City. Unfortunately, Jerid is in the passage, and we find out that the Titans have predictably joined up with the terrorists, blocking that way. Thanks to an ex-Zeon soldier (and Haman's help again) we find a second way in, and that's where I've stopped.

I'm still only at about the halfway point of this game. I feel like I should start looking up who all these Kamen Rider and Ultraman people are, but I guess I'm too lazy.

Game 13 - Hero Senki

Hero Senki: Project Olympus (ヒーロー戦記 プロジェクト オリュンポス)

Released on 11/20/1992, published by Banpresto

 

This is the first RPG in the "Compati Hero" franchise, a series of games that combines Gundam, Kamen Rider, and Ultraman. Prior to this game they were all action or sports. I'm fairly knowledgeable about Gundam (at least the series that were out in 1992), but I know next to nothing about Kamen Rider and Ultraman. That makes the franchise hard to fully appreciate -- judging from the way Gundam is used in this game, I'm sure they're using a lot of characters and situations from Ultra 7 and Kamen Rider, but I can't appreciate this aspect of the story.

The character designs are "SD" (Super Deformed) style, which allows them to fit together the series without it looking ridiculous due to size differences.

Gameplay is pretty standard RPG, with a few special features. Each character has a free move they can use, although it's not clear what they do -- the instruction manual tells you to try them out to see, but I don't like this kind of coy thing they did in old RPGs. I can't check to see what they do until my 1 week is up so until Monday it will be a mystery. The other special moves use TP, but you can't heal TP in town. Instead you get a few points back when you attack, and a substantial amount back if you kill something. This is an interesting change and lets you use your moves a little more regularly.

The beginning of the game introduces you to ZEUS, a group composed of Amuro Ray (Gundam), Kotaro Minami (Rider Black), and Dan Moroboshi (Ultra 7). They're the main three characters in the game. The fourth spot on the team rotates. At the beginning it's Gilliam Yeager in the Gespenst, a character who would later appear in Super Robot Taisen 4 and then the Original Generation games, and is still appearing. Here he is in 2nd Original Generations:

There's also a running joke where Gilliam tells you to play Hero Senki; this made sense when he first did it in SRW 4 (for SNES), but now it's just become a tradition. Gilliam has lost his memory; all we know is that his Alpha Squadron was destroyed.

The main purpose of ZEUS is to fight terrorists, who have conveniently appropriated all kinds of mechs and other things from the enemies of the various franchises (or in some cases the actual enemies have joined the terrorists). The graphics remind me of RPG maker.

Kikka, one of the little children from the original Gundam

There's no explorable world map. Instead, to go to different places you leave out an exit and then travel on a road of some sort to the next location.

Along with Mode 7 graphics

Our first goal is to take out the terrorists in a nearby cave.The battle scenes are typical RPG, but move quickly:

3 Zakus

You walk very fast on the map and the random encounter rate is medium, plus there's no inventory limit (other than a 9 item limit for each item). You can save anywhere. All of that makes the game fairly easy to play. Fleeing from battle is automatic but you lose one "konjo" point. They can be recovered at a hospital, but the effect is fairly small. It reduces the amount of HP you recover when you defend, but you gain so little HP from defending that it doesn't matter. Supposedly it also makes it easier to get hit by certain status effects if it's lower.

Char and Garma

At the end of the cave are Char and Garma (from Gundam) who fight you but then realize you're not terrorists. After this it's off to Theis City, which I gather is something from the Kamen Rider series. The enemies here look like bugs or Mexican wrestlers:

Kamen Rider

Here we face off against the Shocker group from the original Kamen Rider, including Colonel Zol and Dr. Shinigami. The boss battles are generally manageable. Ultra 7 has a nice party heal tech. Regular attacks don't do much damage against bosses but I've always had just enough power to squeak out a victory. This city involved an abandoned building that was controlled by Shinigami, along with hostages -- but we can find a secret way in by getting the notes from the original builder. Gilliam gets trapped inside while trying to save a girl, so he's not in our party for a while.

Finally we headed to Lhasa City, which is controlled by the Titans.

Jerid and Scirocco

At this point they're not openly attacking us but they're insulting and hostile, and I wouldn't be surprised if we find out at some point they're working for the terrorists. In the next dungeon are the Three Tristars from Gundam. They're apparently working for the terrorists instead of Zeon.

Ortega, Gaia, and Mash

That's all the progress I made this week. I apologize for not taking more notes on the story; since there's no translation patch for this I should be a little more descriptive about what's going on. I'll do better on the next update.

Three skipped games

Next up on the chopping block:

Shin Megami Tensei

This is the third game in the long-running Megami Tensei series, which started with two games on the NES. I played both of them in their Super Famicom remake. They are clearly indebted to the Wizardry series but introduce the system of being able to recruit almost any enemy in the game to your team, which can then be summoned via a computer.

The main problem with both games is a problem common to a lot of early first-person RPGs -- large mazes with almost nothing in them. When I was 10 I thought it was fun just to walk around, map, and fight battles. Mapping a Wizardry level felt like an accomplishment even if I didn't find anything on it. But after playing the gold box games and later Might and Magics, I lost interest in empty dungeons.

Shin Megami Tensei improves a little on that, but not enough. There are more dungeons so at least there's more variety, and the story is certainly better than the first two, but I feel the game is a bit overrated. Maybe I just feel that this kind of game doesn't age as well as a top-down DQ type game.

As you can tell I've already played this one so I'm skipping it, but I have not played II or If..., so when I get to those they will be on the blog.


A translation patch is here (that's actually a bugfix for a translation but it links to the main patch.)


Lennus: Memories of Ancient Machines

This game was localized as "Paladin's Quest" in the US; the title has nothing to do with the game but apparently the localizers thought it sounded more like a game Westerners would buy. It's one of those localizations where they were too lazy or underfunded to expand the VRAM so the items have names like "Mid drs" and "Sct msg". A friend of mine had this when I was a kid and didn't seem to like it much.

Zenic and Shen will get here eventually.


Wizardry V

This is a port of a western RPG; the graphics are better but since it's a port and it was released in the US I'll skip it. I played the DOS version many years ago but I didn't get all that far. CRPG Addict has completed this game.

Game 12 - Cyber Knight Part 2

This game sucks. I've been procrastinating all week and then forcing myself to play it, and haven't made that much progress. I've gone back and forth on whether to quit playing or not, and I think finally I've decided to move on. It may seem odd that I played through crap like Light Fantasy and Fist of the North Star 5, but Cyber Knight has an English patch and a walkthrough, so anyone can play it. It's as bad as those "kuso 5" games I played earlier, though.

The main problem, aside from the insane random encounter rate, is that the designers let realism get in the way of fun. I've encountered this in other games -- for instance, I'm typically very skeptical of any sort of system involving weapon or armor repair. It always seems like it adds more frustration and tedium than any sort of strategy or fun.

Cyber Knight's problem is the way you develop your characters, and the failure of the designers to properly balance the game to take account of it. As I said in the first post, the designers were after a more realistic type of character development. So you can't just go out and fight to strengthen your mechs, nor can you spend some nebulous "currency" to magically make your mechs stronger and stronger. Instead, you have to take parts off defeated enemies. And furthermore, it makes sense that you wouldn't be able to use the same parts over and over again to increase your strength to infinity, so each part only works once (or at most twice). This is more realistic, but it also imposes a hard cap on your mech stats. This is especially a problem for defense and Energy Points (i.e. hit points).

What are you supposed to do when you meet a random monster that can attack your entire team for over 1/2 their HP? You can prevent that attack by closing in to fight, but that takes at least one turn. You can't level up or equip better armor or anything like that. So basically just hope you can flee. If not, you're screwed. And even if you do run, you better hope that the next encounter you get in three steps isn't the same thing.

There are defensive barriers you can equip, but it's not clear what effect they have. I equip them but random encounters still kill me in 2 hits sometimes. You either dodge completely, or you take 1/3 of your HP. If someone dies there's no way to revive them, and there's no way to heal or repair in battle. This makes going through dungeons heavily dependent on luck. Even with save states I found it frustrating.

Finally, the combat system has some issues that are annoying me more the more I play. The worst is the enemy movement -- since you put in your commands before the enemies move, you frequently lose your turn because the enemy moves out of range. It adds yet another element of randomness to the battle.

Anyway, here's what I did do. I had to go back to the Trader planet to hear about the Red Crystal. Once I did, I was able to grab it fairly easily, extending my jump range. Now I could go to a planet with "primitive" people:

More descendants from the Europa

Some of them had been captured by berserker robots, so it was time for another Berserker base. These always follow the same pattern -- the enemies are a mix of old and new ones, and you have to find your way through the building. Often you have to deal with false doors or confusing passages, but finally you'll come to a boss who will appear out of nowhere. In this case the boss is the Hydra:

Hydra

The Hydra could kill one of my units, defending, with a single shot. The trick is that you have to close in on the Hydra as quickly as possible to prevent it from using its attacks. It took me 7 save state reloads to successfully do this and beat the other enemies. But once I did I was able to free the captives, and they gave me a wood carving that one of the Traders wanted.

The grateful "primitives"

Also from the same planet I got a video disc that I could go back to the Europa and play; it just gave a bit of information on the last days of the Europa.

Next up is a planet with pink whales.

This came out before Macross 7

They're upset that berserkers are on the planet, so it's another berserker dome very similar to the previous one. This time the boss was easier, and after destroying it I was able to get the whale song.

Doo doo doo

Back at the Trader planet I was able to trade the song for some information, but not a whole lot -- then it was off to find a Trader youth who had been trapped on a planet...and there's another berserker base there. Same deal as before, but the monsters were much harder here. There were two bosses. The first consisted of a strong enemy plus 1-3 of the boss from the whale planet. I had to save state reset until there was only 1 to survive.

The second boss

The second boss wasn't too bad. After the enemies are cleared I found a black cube in another area. Returning to the Traders gave me the information on the main quest -- if I find all 4 monuments and the black cube, I can talk to the Mentana (the "gods" who created people). I already have 2 monuments, so I went in search of the next one.

The next planet had yet another berserker dome. I met more monsters who slaughtered my party and began to curse myself for not skipping this game in the first place.

So unless someone who has played this game can come in and tell me I screwed everything up and that it's much easier if you understand the system better, I'm done. It's a port so I could have skipped it anyway by my original rules, but it's not something I like doing.

Here's the patch if you want to give it a try.