Game 67 - Daikaiju Monogatari (Part 1)

Daikaiju Monogatari (大貝獣物語)

Released 12/22/1994, published by Hudson

This is a followup to the 1988 Famicom game Kaiju Monogatari. The title is probably meant to play on 怪獣 (e.g. Godzilla, Mothra), but the first kanji is replaced with the kanji for "shell". It looks like it is set up as a direct sequel, with a new "fire shell" hero but some of the same supporting characters, and the same villain Fat Badger. (The Wikipedia article claims this is not a direct sequel, so it may just be that the names and setting are reused). There's a sequel (Daikaiju Monogatari II) which will be one of the last games I play for this blog.

There is a fan patch for the game, unfortunately it's marred by an excessive freedom -- there are numerous references to pop culture, as well as multiple right-wing rants against the Affordable Care Act, taxes, regulations, Socialism, etc. It's a shame because (so far) this is one of the better games I've played on the system and it deserves a better translation than the one we got.

The game begins with something coming down from space, causing tsunami sweeping the world as well as other natural disasters (comets, etc.). It also appears that Fat Badger will return.

So a wise man calls forth the Fire Shell Hero, who you name (Kurisu). Despite being summoned out of nowhere he decides to take on the task. The man sent out some other people too but they get separated. Kurisu takes a ship but is immediately wrecked at Chikri Village, which is then attacked by robot soldiers. Kurisu hides while the town is destroyed (great start for the hero!)

Afterwards, Kurisu sets out. The villagers remaining have some basic stuff to sell you, and then we begin. One complaint about this game is the high encounter rate -- it's nowhere near as bad as Last Battle, Monster Maker 3, and some of the other games I've played. I'm conditioned to accept mediocre as great, I guess?

 

The battle system is basic but works fine. One nice feature is that you can set up four strategies where you pick a command for each character and then they will execute it. So I made a "fight" strategy that picks fight for everyone, which speeds things up -- along with the emulator speedup it makes the encounter rate not so bad.

The battle graphics look nice too. Unfortunately I got poisoned in the first battle and didn't have enough money for an antidote so I had to reset -- levelling is quick in the beginning. I headed down to Sandside.

In Sandside we learn that the Aura Ball, which we need, is in possession of Doglar. Also here you can form a party with various characters. I took Zardon (basically a fighter), Linda (priest), and Babu (can use boomerangs which hit all people, and some buff magic). Linda has the incredibly useful Angel Song ability, which costs no MP and uses sleep on all enemies plus kills undead. I'm over halfway through the game as I type this and I'm still using it constantly (I have a 3 fight + angel song strategy set up).

The interface on the whole is OK. There's no item limit, you can see the stats of equipment and who will benefit when you buy it, and there is a "best" option in equip. The only wrinkle to me is that you can't see who can equip an item from the item menu, and you can't L and R to switch characters in the equip screen. But compared to the horrid interfaces in a lot of these games this is a minor complaint.

I also rescued a thief from a well. In addition to the party members you can get "helpers" that perform various tasks -- let you climb areas with a rope, view the surrounding area, increase the encounter rate (haha), and other things.

We set out for an underground passage to other parts of the continent (the asteroids and tsunami have destroyed a lot of the bridges). Coming to Bridgetown, we learn that Doglar definitely has the Aura Ball, and continue on to the waterfall cave. An herbalist joins up and has a special potion; very suspicious but I drank it. We came across Piggy, who can get rid of boulders, but then the herbalist turns out to be a follower of Doglar and attacks. We start poisoned, but he's not too hard.

Doglar himself is in the next dungeon; we overhear him talking to a mysterious woman. But she's not actually there so we fight Doglar.

He's got a pretty nasty all attack, but with speed/defense buffs and some healing I took him down. Now I have the Aura Ball, and freed all the girls that Doglar captured. Continuing on, I came to Lamir, which is one of the outlying towns of Dorado City where we can probably find Fat Badger. But all the bridges are broken and there's no way to get there. Lamir itself was totally destroyed by asteroids. You can free a slave here for 5000 pearls (I didn't have the money then but I came back later. She just leaves on her own; I don't know if this does anything later).

The next actual destination is the Seaman Temple.

A huge fish comes in and captures the chieftan, but once we beat the fish, we receive the Water Shell (we started with the Fire Shell so that's 2 of the 4; these are somehow connected to defeating Fat Badger but it's not clear yet how.)

My notes aren't clear here so I don't know why this opens up a new area -- I know you have to find a crystal in the next mountain area and get a blacksmith to forge a sword to free people from the cocoons that the robot attackers put them in. Anyway, once you do this, one of the people freed is Milmy. She's one of four sisters that is the daughter of the Great Gnome and a human. We need to seek out the Great Gnome to find out more about Dorado City.

In the next area, we come across a tree full of mask-wearing people. The tree is sick, and the medicine needed to cure it is in Sandler city to the south. There, Zenim (a former underling of Doglar) has made himself rich off the backs of the people. He offers us a nice place to stay but of course it's another trap. I was not clear on how we escape this, but the screen goes black and we find ourselves in the poor area of town. From here it's time to put an end to Zenim. Apparently he has a magic book and armor that protects him. His mansion dungeon is fairly long, and the key item comes from a little kid who gives us a water pistol. For some reason this nullifies Zenim's armor.

Zenim begs for his life after being defeated, but when I spared it he just attacked again. This time he dies for good. We get the medicine for the tree (healing it doesn't seem to have any immediate effect on the story). Perhaps more importantly, Zenim had the shell ship that Kurisu sailed out on in the beginning. With that, we can sail around the shallow areas of the world map.

I jumped to the next continent, where one of the other Four Sisters in Mosswood makes me some protective equipment to cross the snowy mountains to where Great Gnome lives.

Oh right, you can also found your own town and build stuff in it, and name it.

Great Gnome's house is across the mountains, but unfortunately he's sick. The person that can heal him is Fairy -- I had apparently missed her all the way back in the second dungeon, where I took a right instead of a left and missed the chest she was in. She also gives the hero use of special abilities. But with her help, Great Gnome has the potential of being healed, but we have to get a remedy from a bird village. There, five stone heads send me on a quest to get 5 items (just basic items you can buy at shops).

Once Great Gnome is back up, he gives us an item to melt a snowdrift that will let us pass through a dungeon to Dorad City. On the way, the Aura Ball breaks, releasing a robot that immediately bonds to Kurisu. Also along the way, Korikot, another one of the sisters, heads back to Great Gnome's house. There, Great Gnome tells us we can combine the 4 shells into a Combine Shell that will help us defeat Fat Badger. He gives me a map that shows where the other shells are. One can be gotten just by getting Genji, the fisherman, to dive into a lake and grab it. The other involves a dungeon.

This is a prison island, where one of the prisoners found the Earth Shell and used it to gain power. But he's pretty easy to beat up.

Now with the 4 shells, Great Gnome creates the Combine Shell. We also learn that the Love Sword will be necessary to defeat Fat Badger, but fortunately it's in Dorad City, where we can finally reach now. Dorad City has encounters in it, and just an inn for services.

This is another relatively long dungeon. It's filled with creepy statues and pink goo. We need the Love Sword to remove a barrier before the throne, and finally Fat Badger appears.

You can't hurt him until you use the Combine Shell. He's pretty easy, actually, although you do have to fight him twice. I think in general the high random encounter rate and relatively quick advancement make the bosses pretty easy.

So that's the end of the game!

No, of course not. Now a UFO comes down and Gyag Far declares himself the ruler of the universe. He tried to revive Fat Badger and will now show us just a bit of his power.

He fires a huge beam at Shellland which destroys continents and sinks much of the world underwater. How will we defeat Gyag Far!?!? Join us next time.

--

So this is actually a good game! The story is surprisingly dark (at least in what happens; all the characters are pretty cutesy) and it's easy to play. I'm looking forward to the second half(?) of the game to see how it concludes. School is starting again so I may have a bit less time to play than I did during the summer, but I'll keep the weekly updates going.

PCE Game 40 - Record of Lodoss War 2

Record of Lodoss War 2 (ロードス島戦記2)

Released 12/16/1994, published by Hudson

 

  

This is the second of the two Lodoss War PC Engine games; you can look back at the post I made on the first one for general information about the series. Like the first game, this is based on one of the computer games, which itself is based on the second group of Lodoss stories. The main character of these is Spark, with a new party of his own (although some of the characters from the original stories appear as well).

 

 

What I appreciated about the original game is that it seemed to capture the tabletop RPG origins of the franchise better than a normal RPG. There are not many random encounters, and you don't win them just by mashing buttons. Most of the XP you get comes from finishing quests rather than killing monsters, and you don't level up that many times during the game. It had a different feel from the typical RPGs of the time, and to me it was similar to the Sword World SFC games (especially the first one) in this respect.

Unfortunately the second game walks most of this back. Random encounters are now more along the lines of a regular RPG, most of your XP comes from them, and you'll end up auto-battling the majority of the encounters. Level ups are also much more frequent, and you can now grind levels and money in a way you really couldn't in the first game.

 

After the opening movie, the game begins with Spark, who is a knight in training. King Kashue (who I believe is from the original party) and Slayn are in the palace, and charge Spark with the mission of figuring out what's going on with the Flame Tribe, who seem to be plotting a rebellion. Evidently Spark should be the head of the Flame Tribe but I'm not entirely sure what the backstory is there. Specifically we're supposed to head to Hilt and Hebun towns.

The towns are "select a building" type

 Spark is on his own at first. While looking around for the towns I hit level 5 and bought most of the good equipment; there are other towns that have better equipment to the left. Hilt was easy to find; there some ruffians attacked but with all my equipment and levels it was fine. Hebun is on the right near the desert; here we're attacked by Flame Tribe nomads (easy fight as well).

Spark heads back to Kashue to report. For now, Kashue is interested in settling new areas, particularly the dangerous Fire Dragon Hunting Zone -- Spark is supposed to deliver a secret message to Raiden port town to enlist the help of the people there. Spark also gets his first companions, Garack the fighter and Ald Nova the magician. They're a bit lower leveled and have bad equipment so I got them some better stuff and then went to Raiden.

 

The mayor of Raiden seems to be having trouble with bad dreams; it turns out he's being affected by a succubus. This was still the age where nipples are acceptable in games/manga.

booba

Anyway, after the Succubus goes down, the mayor pledges to give whatever money Kashue needs, and we also get a new party member, the thief (scout) Lyna. At this point we can go to the guild and take on submissions. I did all three -- recovering a child from a cult, clearing out thieves from the town, and delivering weapons to a nearby town. This gets some additional XP (the rewards from the quests themselves are quite low but you fight monsters along the way, and there are some good weapon and armor upgrades).

 

Now back to Kashue, where Dark Elves are attacking. After they're beaten, it seems that the expansion into the Fire Valley has begun, but the new threat of the Dark Elves means it's time for Spark to head south to Valis.

This is where I stopped. For me, this game is a downgrade from the first one -- it's by no means a bad RPG (it's in the top class of the PCE games) but I miss the more tabletop RPG feel of the first one.

--

I'm playing Sakura Taisen for my other blog but I'm on the last stage so I will most likely have a Daikaiju Monogatari post up next Saturday. If you want to see what games are coming up, you should look at the completed games list, where I put in all the games I'll be playing up to the end of 1994.

Game 66 - The Last Battle

The Last Battle (ザラストバトル)

Released 12/2/1994, published by Teichiku 

 

  

Commenter Carlos warned me about this game a little while back, and he was right. This is by now a familiar story -- a game with some good ideas, which are torpedoed by bad design. The three most common bad design features are all present here: cumbersome interface, ridiculous random encounter rate, and bad game balance. Sometimes the game remains playable and average, but in this case I think The Last Battle is one of the worst games I've played so far.

Many Japanese sites seem to regard this as a スルメゲー, literally "squid game", named because squid gets better the more you chew it (supposedly). These kind of games are garbage at first, but once you get used to the system and figure things out, it gets more interesting. I personally never found that to be the case, but usually the Japanese players agree with my labels of kusoge. In this case it seems like there are some people who like the game, so maybe you should give it a try?

Anyway, on to the game. It was developed by three studios working together, and some of the designers worked on games like Metal Max, Jungle Wars, and Shin Momotaro Densetsu, so you wouldn't expect it to be bad. But the development was delayed several times, and maybe all the different cooks never worked well together. It was released by Teichiku, which is a music/record company and only ventured into video games a couple of times.

 

The game begins by asking your name, and then introducing the main character Kult. One bizarre decision in this game is that his name is クルト (Kult) and the evil empire is グルド (Guld) -- I thought maybe they were going for something there, but as far as I can tell there's no reason for them to have such similar names.

So why did we put in our name? It turns out that at 16 years old, people undergo a coming of age test, and then receive their true name in secret. They need that true name in order to use magic. So the beginning of the game has Kult doing this test, which involves recovering an item from a nearby cave. First Kult can buy and equip some things. The walking speed is very slow, and the interface for everything is quite cumbersome. To equip something you have to do A->item->equip->Kult->dagger->Kult, and the opening of each menu is fairly slow. This is a huge problem with the game and really unacceptable for late 1994.

On the way to the cave, you'll meet the first encounters, and find that this is another auto-battle game. At least in this one you can issue commands (through a typically slow interface) and there are some AI settings. But I continue to not particularly like the way these systems work. You can never get the people to do what you want to do, and they move into danger and do stupid things (trying to command them all in every battle would be a nightmare).

You will also discover that the random encounter rate is ridiculous. Even among the SFC games I've played, which generally have high encounter rates, this one stands out. 

I also died in my third battle in the cave, so I also discovered very early on that the game balance is not good. This game required more grinding than any other game I've played up to now, and that's with the fact that you already fight a ton of battles just going through the dungeons. I think emulator speedup is a must for this game. You can hold down the Y button to make the battles go a bit faster as well.

I leveled up a bit and then went into the cave. With a few levels and Kult's cure spell, the dungeon isn't so bad. One odd thing about this game is that enemies don't drop money. Instead, you get "jewel bags" every so often from the enemies that you can sell. This is annoying because the inventory space is limited -- not as severely as some games, but there's no item stacking and you need a free inventory space to be able to equip things, so it can get frustrating.

When you get back to the village, Guld has attacked. This is the first appearance of a common gameplay element -- you have to avoid (or fight if you want) the soldiers on the map and make your way to a boss. Once you beat the boss, the you win against Guld and the area is freed.

After this, the mayor sends Kult up to Silveil Castle to deliver a letter saying they were attacked. There, Kult meets captain Yuri as well as the elf Mei. Mei joins the party and there's another war event as Guld attacks the castle; some birdmen have managed to breach the walls. The dialogue indicates that you will fight the birdmen while the other soldiers will take care of the other enemies, but in fact the bird enemies are endless and you have to make your way to the boss like normal (who is not a birdman). After that, we have to escape the castle and leave Yuri to an uncertain fate.

Mei is an annoying companion because it's so hard to keep her away from the enemies. Even if she casts a spell against the enemies she runs into the middle of them. So she dies a lot.

From here we head to Febenels' house, a mage who helped out at the beginning. He decides that we should become full fledged magic users, which requires undergoing a trial in a nearby tower. It has a bunch of puzzles to complete; this is the only dungeon in the game that has any construction other than rooms and chests.

Once this is complete, we get access to the magic crafting system. This is one of the original aspects of the game. There are 4 different types of mana (earth, fire, water, air) and by combining them you get new spells. For instance, Water + Earth gives you a lightning spell. By varying the amount of each type of mana you put in (1-100), you change the area of effect, damage, and MP cost of the spell. There are also three special items in the game that allow you to make special spells like Escape and Teleport.

Although this system is interesting, the main problem with it is how long it takes to build up the mana needed to create good spells. You only ever get a tiny amount from a battle (1-2 of a couple of types) and so building up a good stock of spells is a hassle.

After the tower we get our other two companions -- Bolg, a "yak" (sort of a bipedal dog race), and Regina, who is actually the daughter of the king of Guld, but she thinks her father has been tricked or controlled. These are the four companions for the rest of the game.

I made a paralyze spell, which is one of the most useful spells in the game because of how long it lasts. Other useful spells are heal (which you can remake periodically stronger -- if you do 100 water mana as the second ingredient it will heal all), Protection, lightning, and earthquake.

The rest of the game is basically just taking over a series of castles and towns from the Guld empire. Next up is Belkstat, but we need the Yak's help to do a battering ram to knock down the gate. So there's one war event at the Yak town and then another at Belkstat. The Belkstat one is quite challenging; I followed a Japanese walkthrough's advice and got Bolg a max effect Earthquake, which immediately kills the grunts in the boss battle. You still need to do some level grinding even after that, but I beat it eventually.

In Hanstad we get knocked out and taken to a prison island, and find out that Yuri is still alive. So we manage to rescue him and a number of other prisoners, and then escape, but there is a war event on the ship as you leave.

Back in Hanstad we get a ship. Now you can go around the world and there are actually a lot of side things you can do; by using the paralyze spell you can defeat enemies that are somewhat above your level and get a lot of powerful equipment. Some of the possible things you can get are the strongest armor in the game, and Mei's best weapon. Now we can retake Silvel castle, and then head to Wood in the desert to continue the fight against Guld.

One of the places you can go is this raft town

From Wood we continue to Belgderen, which is the hardest and most annoying place in the game. There's another huge leap in enemy strength, you have random encounters in a long confusing dungeon, and a tough boss. This was the point where, more than anywhere in my whole blog, I regretted my rule that I have to finish games that don't have patches. And so I broke down and used cheat codes -- an unlimited money code, unlimited mana, and no encounters. Even with all of that, and the 10 or so levels I had gained before using the codes, it was still challenging.

Next up is Guld castle itself, but we can't get in without the Dragon's Tear. This comes from going to a dragon cave with two specific items. Kult also learns that he's actually a prince who was abandoned at birth because of a prophecy that he would destroy the kingdom.

After defeating King Guld's strongest warriors, we learn that he's actually being controlled by Ice Queen Iskar, who pulls us into an underground world for the final war event.

Finally, we reach Iskar.

 

And the world is saved.

Phew. As I said at the beginning, this game does have some decent ideas. The auto-battle system is actually not as bad as some of the other games -- I felt like I had more control over it. But any good ideas they had are completely ruined by the slow pace, the ridiculous random encounter rate, and the game balance. If you want to play this game legitimately you will need to do a lot of grinding. More grinding than in any other game I've played up to this point. That's just not my cup of tea.

--

As a side note, Blogger has been getting worse and worse since I stared blogging here with successive updates. I'm no longer able to deal with the sidebar information except as a mess of unformatted HTML code, so I'm removing the "recent and upcoming" section (which isn't visible on mobile anyway). If anyone really misses that I can try to find a way to add it back. If my blog weren't already established here I don't think I would start a new blog with Blogger.

Energy Breaker

No post this week, check out Energy Breaker (a 1996 Super Famicom game) on my SRPG blog. Back next week with The Last Battle, a game with slow movement, insane encounter rate, and a cumbersome interface. Fun.

Game 65 - Breath of Fire II, Part 3 - Defeating God

In the last post, we had gained a way to fly on the world map at a cost. This was in order to fly to the Evrai temple to deal with the problems they were causing. Unfortunately we get trapped in the town and they want us to convert to Evrai.

Fortunately there's a resistance group we find that leads us into an underground tunnel. The place you escape has the best fishing rod, allowing for fishing the most powerful sword for the main character -- the best way to do this is with Coins ("gold" in the English translation), although I noticed that bsnes' turbo feature does not register fast enough, at least mapped to the middle DS4 pad, to do it. So I had to mash.

Now joining up with the resistance, time to storm back into Evrai? No, we need money, meaning we have to find everyone's favorite thief Patty. Once we do this, we can break into Evrai. I don't know what boss this next picture is but it must be around this point.

This might be the fight against the Dragon that gives the main character the G. Dragon power, which does 999 and is very useful against future bosses. In any case we launch the assault on Evrai church but the leader is more powerful than we thought. As we continue to chase him, there's a sad scene with Rand:

His mom sacrifices herself to let Rand go on and join the party.This is a long dungeon, but eventually we reach the boss:

There are three endings to the game -- one bad one, and then two others that I've seen called "normal" and "good" although both have sad/happy parts. If you want the "good" ending you have to avoid killing the old man here (hurting him is fine). So no Dragon powers, which makes this fight one of the harder boss fights.

The old man Ganer then puts himself in a machine at Community so it can fly. I'm not sure what happens if you defeated Ganer instead because the machine has to fly for the rest of the game to work.

Unfortunately you lose the bird which is dumb because the bird flies faster, and I believe it locks you out of some of the fishing areas.

 

Now we finally can go back to Gate, the town from the beginning of the game. This is the final sequence of dungeons. I created some MP restore items through the cooking guy (although not enough as I found out later) and some Biscuit items (hard senbei) that restore everyone's HP and add defense.

I didn't really bother with the shaman fusions because they get removed when someone gets to low HP, and this happens constantly (especially since so many enemies in the final dungeon have instant death attacks). This was a really poor decision by the designers and made the shaman fusion much more of a hassle and less important than it could have been.

Before we can enter the final battle, we need...Patty? Yes, it turns out that she is the main character's sister. The villagers foolishly decide to bomb the dragon out of the way, but this just opens the gate

At this point you can choose to have the Dragon continue to protect the gate. This leads to the bad ending, where the demon in the gate eventually gains enough power to overwhelm the world. So instead we should have the Dragon move aside so we can go in and kill it.

The final dungeon is long, although it has several places where you can rest, save, and one place with shops. I needed the levels from the dungeon to do the final boss. Midway through the dungeon, we happen on an underground village with the remnants of the Dragon clan who tell Kurisu that his destiny is to defeat Death Evans, the "god" that the Evrai church has been following. There's also a long flashback scene with Kurisu's mother.

First, though, we have to beat Barbary.

My first try I had a lot of trouble, so I left the entire dungeon and got more Wisdom Balls (+100 AP) which let the main character use G Dragon every other turn. This helps a lot.

Now in the final boss Kurisu uses the Infinity Dragon to make Death Evans vulnerable. There was a long sequence indicating that Kurisu would have to sacrifice his life to use this -- maybe I've forgotten how they dealt with this but he doesn't die. Death Evans is much easier than Barbary, though. 

Now after the fight, if you didn't save Goran, Kurisu has to become the dragon to guard the gate. If you did save Goran he'll use the town to block the entrance. And the game ends.

The ending sequence goes through the "chapters" of the game and lists all the characters that were in each scene.

 The end!

I think Breath of Fire 1 was a better game. BoF2 has some pretty severe balance issues that make large stretches of it not very fun to play. The plot doesn't really do anything until the last section. The shaman system is hard to use, and the Dragon breath system is not as robust as the first game. I also didn't think the dungeons were as creatively designed as the first game. On the whole I had much more fun with the first game than the second -- Carlos in the last post said that BoF2 is an objectively better game but I'm not so sure about that.

--

With this game I am halfway through my quest! (65 games out of 130). I'm playing Energy Breaker (SFC) on the other blog and then we'll come back here for The Last Battle. I'm done with vacations so we should see fewer "gap" posts in the next few months (although probably there will be one next week).

The Magic Bells (Deadly Towers)

(This is a scheduled post while I'm away on vacation. I've beaten BoF2 so that final post will be up next week.)

This is another action game, and an infamous kusoge both here and in Japan. I think there's a perception that Japanese players liked these games better than we did, but this one got bad reviews in Japan as well. It's clearly in the lineage of Druaga, Hydlide, Zelda, and such. You have a (small) open world, most of the game content hidden with no hints, and a protagonist who starts very weak compared to the monsters. But it's closer to Hydlide and Adventures of Valkyrie in that the initial difficulty is quite high, and you're going to die a lot before you even come across the basics of what to do. One thing that Zelda got right is that you can make a fair amount of progress at the beginning of the game before you run into the really difficult hidden stuff or nasty monsters.

I vaguely remember playing this game as a kid -- I may have rented it or just played it at a friend's house, but I didn't play it much.

Although the reviews are mostly negative, I have seen some that defend some parts of the game, at least. It really seems like the main problem with the game is how weak you start, and how difficult it is to make any early progress. Unlike Valkyrie and Hydlide, there's no XP, so fighting the initial enemies gets you nothing but a few Ludder (the money). And in order to spend that Ludder, you have to find the hidden dungeons and then the shops within those dungeons.

Here's what the dungeons look like (credit to GameFAQs):

S is where you start, X is the exit, and the other letters are the shops (the green blocks are just what the walkthrough writer used to show where you should go). These dungeons seem unnecessarily large given that most of those rooms have no purpose. So you have to deal with a lot of game content to just get even basic upgrades for your character. There are heart containers you can find early in the game (and easily) that raise your max HP by 10, but these provide little help at the beginning because whenever you die you start with 100 HP regardless of what your max is.

So I think this is where a lot of players get frustrated and give up early; it's hard to keep playing a game when you don't feel like you're making any progress. I think it would have helped this game's perception quite a bit if there were a basic shop near the starting location and if the starting enemies were a bit less hardy.

I'm going to try using a walkthrough to see what the game is like if you know where the secrets are.

The problems with the system are well known -- you shoot out a sword, but only one can be on the screen at a time. The enemies take tons of hits to kill, and any time you get hit you get moved down the screen, and if you fall off the bottom you die. Sometimes you get hit back into a previous screen and then immediately hit more enemies.

The first goal is to get stronger equipment, so I headed to dungeon 4.

Using the map it's not too tough to find the shop, and there's a certain enemy that is very useful for earning Ludder -- it's a large enemy but if you stunlock it as soon as you enter the room you can kill it easily. It still takes a lot of enemies to get enough money to buy stuff. I got the Hyper Boots, Chain Helmet, and Shield.

I then headed to a second dungeon to get some Armor and a glove to increase attack speed, but I was dying a lot. And I figured that I should be playing BoF2 instead of this so I quit.

The goal of the rest of the game would be to find the hidden areas that have seven bosses, each of which has a bell when you defeat it. You then have to destroy the bells by using a magic fire in the main castle, and then you can progress to the final boss. The areas with the bosses also have additional secret rooms with the most powerful equipment in them. All of these hidden areas (including the dungeons and towers) require you to step on specific places on the maps, that aren't marked in any way.

So is it more tolerable with the walkthrough? Marginally, but it's still not a good game. With the walkthrough you can at least avoid the problem at the beginning where you're making no progress, but even with the additional equipment, Prince Myer is weak. You get knocked back by enemies, often into other enemies that then knock you further. You can enter a dungeon room and die before you even see what was there. 

Just as playing early SRPGs revealed to me how well designed Fire Emblem 1 was (for its time), playing these early action games has shown me how well designed Zelda was. Zelda certainly isn't perfect and I think the obscurity of its secrets would be unacceptable now, but it stands out from the crowd.

Game 65 - Breath of Fire II, Part 2 - What's wrong with the world?

The quest we're given by the Guild has to do with a demon near Gate town, which is the same demon that attacked Bosh and Kurisu when we were kids. So of course that's something that we have to investigate, but this will require a "grass person" to help us talk to the wise trees. Since the beginning of the game a grass person has been in the circus that appears here and there, so that's our next destination. But first, we have to get a way to sail around the world -- in this game that's not a ship but a whale.

 

The whale "grandpa" appears to have something wrong with it that makes it sleep -- of course we can guess it's some new monster. We go inside of it, and need Rinpu along to hit various places with her staff and open routes.

Once the monster inside him is beaten, he wakes up and we can use him to sail around the world. Now we can head out to the circus with our recruitable grassman.

 

Unfortunately the head of the circus refuses to part with him(?) unless we bring him a rare Uparupa. They live in a cave where we have to use bait to get them. This part is a little annoying because you can only get one bait in the cave, and if you fail to get the right Uparupa you'll have to do another fetch quest with a pretty difficult boss. But if you get it right the first time you can avoid that...although we decide to let the Uparupa go because we feel sorry for it.

So how do we get the grassman? Just threaten to beat up the circus runner, of course. What a surprise, he is a demon as well.

After he's beaten, it turns out Aspar could have gotten out at any time but was waiting for a group of heroes that could save the world (was there not a more efficient way to do that?) Anyway, with Aspar we can talk to the trees and find out what's going on.

 

The giant tree is having problems with its memory (shades of the opening sequence?) and we need a Therapy Pillow to help, which the Music Country has. Just as in the first game, we can't communicate with the Music Country people without a flute. This whole section is nested fetch quests.

The flute seems to be in Highland Castle, which is actually Sten's homeland, where he was a knight. This is by far the most annoying section of the game for me. The monsters are incredibly strong and you can't leave until you finish the quest. I got a lot of game overs here and had to retreat to heal pools many times. To add insult to injury there's a set of warps near the end of the dungeon that warp you one-way back to the beginning (I wonder if they intended this to be two-way so you could leave and heal?)

The kingdom is being ruled by yet another demon, who is strong but I managed to beat with only Kurisu left alive. And now we have the flute. Unfortunately the queen of the music country is sick...another demon? By enlisting the help of a dietician we're able to use a magic mirror to get inside her and clear out all the enemies. Fortunately this is a pretty easy dungeon. And now with the therapy pillow we can help the tree out, entering is dream to beat Alzheimer who is afflicting him. This area is a strange dreamlike world where you go to towns made of young, old, and middle-aged people.

It turns out that Alzheimer is the one that made everyone forget Kurisu at the beginning, as well as the tree, and he says the tree was in the way of God.

Now we head south through a fog valley...as soon as we clear the fog by convincing a wind spirit to stop making it (and adding it to our spirit inventory). This dungeon has underwater areas that you have to complete in a time limit.

We then reach Rand's home town, where this church of Eva seems to be causing problems. Rand's mom wants us to help farm and then go pray to Namamda, but after we do, she's suddenly gone and we're told that the Eva church has obtained her field for a church. So it seems like we need to deal with this Eva church, but their place is only accessible by the air. How do the believers get there? Oh well, in order to reach it we need to return to Windia where there is a legend that older winged humans could turn into birds.

 

Nina reunites with her parents, who are sorry for throwing her out just because she had black wings. She plans to become the big bird (a transformation that can't be reversed) but her sister steps in and does it instead.

Now we can fly.

I'm going to end there -- I'm on the last dungeon so I'll be finished soon. Next week is a scheduled side post, though.