Game 44 - First Queen: Record of Olnic War

First Queen: Record of Olnic War (ファーストクイーン　オルニック戦記)
Released 3/11/1994, developed by Culture Brain

 

This game is an interesting mix of real time strategy and RPG that I had a lot of fun with. I'm not sure if this qualifies as an SRPG for me or not.

Kure Software released a number of these RTS/RPG games, starting with Silver Ghost in 1988, then First Queen later in 1988, and then sequels in 1990, 1993, and 1994. The original 1988 First Queen was ported to the Super Famicom in 1994, and that's what we're playing here. As is often the case with these Japanese computer RPGs, they don't really play like anything else out there -- the game clearly draws inspiration from the "run into enemies" action RPGs like Ys, Hydlide, and Bokosuka Wars. The last one in particular makes me wonder if Kure Soft wanted this to be a faster-paced, more expansive version of Bokosuka Wars.

The box and other art was done by Yoshitaka Amano, who is most famous for doing Square art (Final Fantasy and Front Mission, for instance).

The story is fairly simple, as you might expect from a game of this age. Olnic Castle has been taken over by Catherine, who is now trying to conquer the whole land. The main character is Richmond, who starts out with a small group of soldiers setting out to beat back the forces of Olnic and defeat Catherine. There are only one or two story developments and no big surprises.

You begin with your one force, and a large map covered with enemies.

If you scroll up to the top you can see Olnic Castle, the final destination. Each of the grey squares is a location that can either be a town/castle, or an overland place. Most of these places have monsters in them, and if one of those enemy sprites is there you have to fight the monsters in addition to the enemies. Some of the enemies stay where they are, and others will move downwards. New enemies will also spawn during the game. I'm not sure what happens if you let an enemy get all the way down to Gardic Castle at the bottom; I never tried to find out.

In the first town to the left you can pick up an additional commander, Jane. There are ten or so commanders you can recruit during the game (sometimes you have to make choices between opposing factions). Each commander can have around 15 troops.

Each troop can carry one item. When they reach a certain level (usually 10 or 15) some of them can class change in town.

When you get into a battle, it's a big free for all.

You can take control of any of the characters, and you just run into the monsters. Hitting or being hit will often result in losing act time, but the system is a bit opaque. You have to watch the HP of the troops at the bottom, and if they get low enough (green or red) you can take control of that character and try to have them retreat from the battle.

Once you're done, you can move on, or Camp, which regenerates the monsters but also lets you save your game or switch to a different commander.

The first part of the game is basically moving everyone forward, clearing out locations and getting new commanders. I never found that it was worth using more than 3 commanders -- I eventually settled on Richmond (who is necessary for the game), Isolde (the Amazon chieftess), and Roy (the elf). I don't know if there's really a "best" commander; you can probably train up any of them to be decent.

Eventually you get magic arrows and rings that can make all kinds of things happen in the battle. It's always hard to tell when an enemy is actually getting hit or damaged, or how effective you are in combat. It's especially tricky when there are archers or flying enemies because they can be hard to approach or hit, and tend to run away.

There aren't that many tasks that you actually have to do in the game. You have to revive Richmond's home town so that they'll build a bridge over a cavern, and meet a witch who will dispel Catherine's confusion spell for you. I think I may have missed another thing or two, but the majority of what you do in the game is optional, mostly just to get extra items (like the Excalibur for Richmond) or additional characters or commanders. I skipped an entire castle that would have let me upgrade priests because I wasn't using that commander.

Once you reach the next to last place there's a massive battle where most of your commanders and troops join the fight and there are probably 100-130 enemies, though they come in waves. This feels really epic, and you end up losing a lot of characters (death is permanent in this game, including commanders). Basically I think it's the most important to watch Richmond's troops, since he's the only one that can enter the final area, although you can pause before then and transfer any troops from another commander to Richmond.

The final area is the castle, which has a number of areas, but eventually Richmond finds Catherine.

She goes down pretty easily, but then there are three gargoyles

And then the final Manticore boss. There is no saving in castles so you have to do this all in one go, which can be pretty tense if you start losing characters.

I found it really hard to tell where to go to hurt the final boss, and it was hard to tell if I was doing any damage, but then I won.

I enjoyed this game quite a bit despite being kind of primitive and with a semi-obscure system. It's pretty fast moving, and there's a lot of tension when you're overpowered and trying to keep your troops alive while positioning everyone to fight the enemies. You can't always just rush in do whatever you want. And while you're advancing forward, you also have to make sure that you have a couple of strong commanders in the middle part of the map to deal with new enemies that come from the castles or enemy areas.

First Queen II and III were not ported to consoles, but IV came out for the Playstation in 1996. I have it on my SRPG list so I'll eventually do it on the other blog.

Game 43 - Kabuki Rocks (Part 2/wrap-up)

At the end of the last session, I had faced Tensai but it was clear that we could not win in our current state. So Rock sets off to find some magic users and weapon crafters who can help, starting with a weapon crafter Shingoro. Unfortunately his lover Oshichi is missing, but we're willing to find her in exchange for Shingoro's help. Eventually we do find her, but the enemy catches up with us and tries to bring down a bridge in the lava.

Shingoro and Oshichi both sacrifice themselves to save us, adding more to the body count. But, around the same time we determine that Benkei is still alive, and we can save him by going into his sword and defeating Doman.

Chasing Doman out of the sword and rescuing Benkei is fine, but then we have to go to a devil mountain to beat Doman, and he's quite difficult. I had to grind about 6-7 levels to beat him -- fortunately grinding is fairly quick in this game, and being able to use Kiyosuke's haunt power to increase the stats helped a lot. Once I was high enough level I used the buff spells and constant healing and it was enough to take him down.

Unfortunately this is followed by Hokaibo having to sacrifice himself to save us, meaning yet another party member lost (and the one with the buff spells!) Fortunately, it turns out that Shingoro survived, and he joins the party.

Now we have to go to the frozen land of  Ezo and free them from Kiyohime. This requires going to a side dungeon to recover an item that will help us beat her.

 

She has a devastating attack, but it will be blocked for a while by the item -- this eventually runs out though, and lacking the buff spells it was a tough fight, and I barely managed to beat her.

Next up we go to Mutsu to find out about someone who can supposedly call back dead spirits. This is the final party member Itako. Once we prove our worth to her, she joins. Her main benefit is the buff spells. She can also bring back the dead party members and attach them to the characters (sort of like Kiyosuke), but I found these were weaker than the monsters Kiyosuke could bring. You can also switch to the actual character once they are attached, but I didn't find this helpful either.

Also around this point all the karaoke boxes get closed down, so you can't learn any more magic. I don't know if there's some sidequest I could have done to reopen them, but I found this fairly annoying because it basically eliminated the magic. For Rock you can create songs using this:

I never found anything in game to suggest how you're supposed to know which songs to use; obviously it's impossible to get these just by random guessing. In any case they're just for Rock so they're not overly useful.

Meanwhile Kiyosuke leaves the party because he's intimidated by Itako, and goes to Osore-yama to train up more. To chase him down we have to face Doman again, but rather than a boss fight, Itako and Kiyosuke just team up to destroy him, and we've got Kiyosuke back.

Now we have one obstacle remaining on our quest to reach O-Edo to finally beat Tensai. This boss:

The remaining bosses basically have the same strategy. Macky can heal, and she can do a "chorus" with Rock to fully heal everyone at the cost of 30 mp for both of them. Itako buffs, and everyone else attacks.

Now there's a silly part on our way to Oedo, where our ship transforms into a mech for a boss fight.

And finally we reach the last land. Oedo is a big city surrounding the final dungeon, and after buying some supplies I went in.

And got my butt kicked. This guy sucks -- as you can see, he's like the early game boss where he puts all your guys to sleep. They don't wake up when hit, so this often just means hitting A until you get a game over. I left to level and buy the best equipment I could along with stat healing items, but even then I could barely touch him before he just killed everyone. The only way I found to beat him was to use items that cancel spellcasting for everyone. This is rough because it's hard to heal and you don't get any buffs. But with enough levels and using some healing items I was able to do this eventually.

The final boss is much easier.

He has several forms, and the last form has very high defense. I just had Itako keep casting the strength buff on Benkei (it stacks) until he was doing 2000+ damage every hit, and with that plus the full heal and some occasional revives or anti petrify, he went down.

--

There's a lot of plot stuff I didn't touch on, so I hope if a romhacking group ever takes this game on it can still be enjoyable. Like I said in the last post, it's no masterpiece. But it's very playable, not very long, and has a fun sense of humor. I wish they had fleshed out the spell casting a bit more and made it a little more thematic with the music -- they tried to do something with Rock's ability to make spells himself through songs; I wish they had made this a bigger part of the game.

But it's nice to finally be able to recommend a game!

Next up is First Queen, a strange game that seems to have elements of SRPGs and real-time strategy in addition to RPG.

Game 43 - Kabuki Rocks

Kabuki Rocks (カブキロックス)
Released 3/4/1994, published by Atlus

There's a band called Kabuki Rocks in Japan, that uses kabuki costumes, makeup, and dancing on their stage shows. This game seems to have been made to capitalize on their popularity, but the designers (or band) made the decision to make it basically unrelated to the band. Apparently the lead singer makes a small cameo in one area, but other than that they mainly took the kabuki aesthetic and made a game where magic is done by rock songs and where there are a lot of kabuki trappings to the game (both in the story and the visuals).

It's interesting because if I had played this game before I started this blog, I would have considered it an average or even below average game, since my points of comparison would have been FF6, Chrono Trigger, Lufia 2, etc. But having 42 previous SFC RPGs under my belt at this point, it now seems much better.

The story seems to be (maybe intentionally?) a very direct good vs. evil story, perhaps following in the footsteps of actual kabuki plays. The game takes place on a series of connected platforms in space, each representing a different old area of Japan. For a while now the lands were ruled by a wise ruler, but he suddenly died, and the new ruler Tensai is a despot. The main character Rock, along with his friend Macky, decide to go on a journey to rid the lands of Tensai's dictatorship.

Rock quickly discovers that the former ruler of the lands was actually his father, who secretly took over from the real ruler who wanted instead to enjoy life. This gives him an even stronger reason to want to defeat Tensai (who may have killed his father).

The battle system is pretty standard AMID. Despite the music theme, when you use magic there's not actually any music that goes along with it. One welcome feature is that you actually have enough MP that you don't have to save every bit of it for a boss fight. You'll also see that the fights take place on a sort of kabuki stage. When you win, fans throw money on the stage to represent the gold you get, and your XP is kabuki experience which then raises your actor level.

Anyway, Rock heads out on the adventure and crosses the first cave. When you are walking, you can press the Y button to change between normal, Search (which shows hidden passages), and Look for Enemies (which increases the encounter rate). At the next town, Rock sees Benkei in a performance but then is captured and thrown into a prison forest, supposedly for fighting the monsters outside the town. Escaping, he goes back to defeat the local ruler who is using the monsters for his own purpose.

Even though we have the help of Benkei, this is a very annoying battle because he puts your guys to sleep. I had to try this battle 6 or 7 times to get through it -- like most bosses he has an attack that hits everyone, and that plus sleep can make it hard to win. The game is divided into 18 short chapters, and that's the end of chapter 1.

Chapter 2 introduces the musical instruments, which you equip to raise your magic power. Then to learn spells you visit a karaoke box.

I'm not sure what actually influences learning new spells -- whether it's magic power, level, or just reaching new areas in the game. But everyone gets spells (Benkei gets them late because he's tone deaf). The characters also have these powers called "eighteenth" but I'm not sure what they do; they often seem to have no effect. This is a place where the instruction manual would probably help.

The next person to join up is an old man Hokkaibo. He has very useful buff spells. After that we get Jiraiya, a young thief, and Kagekiyo. He has an interesting power -- when you defeat monsters that are below his level, they will sometimes leave behind a soul he can take, and attach to one of the characters. This gives them additional stats (a lot!), that last until the character (or Kagekiyo) dies. I found this incredibly useful.

After a few dungeons and towns the party gets access to a ship, which lets us travel between the platforms. There's also a "black jizo" house in each town that lets you revisit any town you've been to so far.

We beat up four women in the next area to recover a giant sake barrel.

They tell us we need to save a merchant who they serve, by feeding him fresh water to overcome his hangover.

The next new character is Fujimaru, a crossdressing man who looks like a woman. She (not sure about her pronoun preference) isn't all that strong but has an interesting power that whenever she gets hurt, her fans throw a zabuton cushion that hurts all the enemies.

This may all sound pretty silly but there's a lot of death in the game too. On our way to find a local corrupt leader Kurotsuka, we have to go through a have that has exploding "mine grass". Jiraiya throws himself on the grass to save Rock, killing him.

So that's down one kid. Fortunately Kurotsuka isn't that hard, so we take him down and get revenge. This will not be the first party member to die.

We finally reach the capital, where Tensai is. There's a big party; unfortunately the ship gets used as a float in the party and ruined, and Tensai recognizes Rock in the crowd. Benkei sacrifices himself so we can get away.

But a new companion arrives as well, Jirokichi. How long will he stay around? In any case, he helps us sneak into the dock where the ship is being kept, and we repair it and take off for the next area. The main goal now is to find better song magic and weapons, and strengthen the party to take on Tensai.

Overall this is an entirely playable game -- it's no masterpiece, but I definitely think if some romhacking group wanted to take it on it would be well worth it.

PCE Game 30 - Kaze no Densetsu Xanadu (Part 2)

I'm going to structure this post as more of a review than an account of my playthrough -- at times I've considered that the whole blog should be like that; one initial post covering the first few hours of gameplay and story in detail, followed by a review post. This is partly because it's easier to write, but also I notice that when I read other blogs like CRPG Addict I find myself mostly interested in the first and last post, and tend to skim the middle posts unless I've played the game and know what he's talking about. In some cases (like Dragon Quest V) I've found a lot to write about in each post, but often I struggle to say much because the gameplay is so repetitive and the story is not that interesting.

Anyway, back to Xanadu. First, the gameplay.

The game's 12 chapters are mostly structured around the same idea. You warp into a church in the area, and then have to solve a problem in the area to be able to move on to the next place. This involves a great deal of running back and forth from place to place. The NPCs and towns do have a lot of life, with memorable people whose dialogue changes as the game progresses. It reminds me a bit of the Trails series in embryo. It's also an interesting touch that you knock on the doors to the houses instead of just blundering in.

The backtracking gets excessive at times. You will find yourself having to talk to person A, then go all the way out to a cave or area to talk to person B, then go back to A again, and then once again back to B. This to me is the weakest aspect of the game and I've seen Japanese players complain about it as well. The only thing that saves the game from being unplayable is that the travel speed is very fast and you can buy Wings to warp back to the towns (which are trivial to afford after the first few chapters).

Another issue is that it's often not clear what you're supposed to do next. There are a lot of places where you have to talk to a specific person or go to a location to make the next plot event happen, but sometimes they don't give you any real clues. You'll stumble upon it eventually because the areas are fairly small, but I found this game a lot more tolerable with a walkthrough.

The final stage has a 31 floor castle that puts the Darm Tower of Ys to shame; this is possibly the longest and trickiest final dungeon in any game I've played (Ao no Kiseki had a pretty long final dungeon too). Overall when you think about how short the Ys games tend to be, this game has an impressive volume.

The combat is Ys style. As I mentioned in the first post, the distinctive feature here is leveling up your weapons and armor. This means a lot of sitting in place letting the enemies beat you up, but eventually you'll have a strong enough armor to survive everything in the chapter.

Death is interesting. If you get to 0 hp with no healing items, you turn into a ghost. This actually lets Arios fly freely around the map (through walls, etc), but cannot interact with anything or use stairs. Sometimes this is actually helpful in a dungeon to figure out where you need to go to get to the stairs or item, but you have to make your way back to the town where the priestess can revive you. But this means that there is no such thing as a game over.


I found the side-scrolling action scenes to be the weakest part of the game. There are only two healing items in the game -- one that heals 1000 HP and the other that heals you fully. The full heal elixirs are very rare until the final chapter where you can buy them (for a huge price). So you rely mostly on the 1000 HP heals. In the early chapters, you can easily get enough of these that the action stages are trivial. You just run through them and let the items heal you, and the bosses go down without much trouble as well.

But there's a rather sudden change from this to the point where your HP is too high for these items to be worthwhile. Then the action stages are very difficult. There is no invincibility frame, which means a wrong move can cost you half or more of your HP. I used a lot of save states in these scenes; I would not have had the patience to go back to the church to get revived over and over again. The second to last one is by far the hardest -- I would actually recommend that you use all of your elixirs against the boss; you'll get more than enough in the last stage to make it through the final action stage (which is significantly easier, especially considering how easy it is to make it up to 999,999 HP). Now, I'm not all that good at action games so it's possible others won't have as much of an issue with this.

The graphics are serviceable but a bit disappointing; the PCE is capable of better, which Falcom will deliver in Xanadu II next year. The cutscenes between stages are not as good as the ones in other games like Emerald Dragon.

The music is good as usual for a Falcom game. It's unfortunate that all the music outside of the cutscenes are chiptunes, but they probably didn't have the space to make CD audio for all the BGM they wanted to use.

The story is fine. It relies on a lot of old cliches -- chosen descendant, legendary hero, age-old evil, etc. There's not all that much about the overall main plot that's unfamiliar (although the earlier chapters have some interest). What Falcom does do right here is flesh out all the party characters better than most games are doing in this era. They don't just join your party and then never talk again. This, coupled with the rich (for this era) NPC dialogue, makes the world seem more alive.

Overall this is a decent game for the period. I'll be interested to see what changes or improvements they make for Legend of Xanadu II.

Next up will be a return to Super Famicom with the game Kabuki Rocks (after Majin Tensei II on my other channel).

PCE Game 30 - Kaze no Densetsu Xanadu

Kaze no Densetsu Xanadu (風の伝説ザナドゥ)
Released 2/18/1994, published by Falcom

 

This game is part of the long-running "Dragon Slayer" franchise by Falcom. The title Xanadu first appeared as the second Dragon Slayer game, which CRPG addict did a review of (although he didn't like it). For a while I thought the PC Engine would be a remake of that game, but it's actually an entirely new title. Falcom normally did not develop console games, relying on other companies to make ports of their games to various consoles. But here they actually were behind the development, and of the 1995 sequel.

There is a fan translation in progress, but I believe it is stalled for a long time over the voice acting to dub the cutscenes.

It looks and feels like a combination of Legend of Heroes and Ys. The main gameplay is the top-down "run into the enemies" style of Ys, but each chapter ends with a side-scrolling action section that recalls the earlier Dragon Slayer games. This game also carries over from the older Xanadu the system where each weapon and armor has its own experience level. When you get a new weapon or armor it typically starts anywhere from 30-50% power. So if the sword has a max 100 power it might start only at 50. You level up weapons by attacking, but not killing, enemies (so once you start killing enemies in one hit, you can't level up the weapon on them anymore). You level up shields and armor by taking damage, although eventually enemies in an area won't be able to harm you anymore.

This system results in a rather comical growth in the numbers -- the first weapon has a max power of 12, the strongest weapon has a max power of 598,000. The game also does not have experience levels; you gain HP from resting and from getting hearts from enemies.

The game is divided into 12 chapters, each of which takes place in its own little area usually with a couple of towns and dungeons. This game is well known for having a lot of running back and forth between places talking to people, and it's not always clear who you are supposed to talk to or why. I definitely think this game benefits from a walkthrough.

The main character is Areios, a knight commander in the kingdom of Ishtar. He begins shipwrecked on a small island. His goal is to get back to the kingdom, but while he's waiting for the boat he decides to solve a problem happening in the island. Two towns, which produce different kinds of alcohol, are rivals, causing a bunch of problems.

The graphics are somewhat disappointing, but serviceable for the game. The music is good but unfortunately it's almost all chiptune music instead of the CD-quality music that Falcom used to such good effect in the Ys games. The only voiced sections are the short cutscenes between chapters.

The action scenes are not too bad; the enemies do a lot more damage than the ones in the normal areas, but you get to shoot a wave out of your sword.

If you equip the healing items, you get restored 1000 HP when you get to 0, so that makes the action scenes fairly easy -- even if you don't really figure out the boss patterns you can just sit in front of it and attack and you might use a couple of heal items, but that's easily replaced.

I'm up to chapter 3 now, so I'll say more about that in the next update. The story is not bad, and the NPCs and towns are memorable. Overall this is a pretty good game although the fetch quest nature of the gameplay can get somewhat annoying.