Game 10 - 3x3 Eyes Seima Korinden Review

After I wrote the last post, I learned about a trick that got me past the final boss. Due to a bug, if you successfully run from the final boss, it counts as beating him. Although he always starts with a fire breath attack, it sometimes will do 100 or 50 instead of 300. So if you just load state enough (or actually go through the entire dungeon again), eventually you can get lucky enough to not die and then run. This is the only alternative to hours of grinding. Since Guptar's XP is glitched (it starts at ~700 for the next level but then jumps to 18,000 after your first battle, and her defense goes down), I feel it's only fitting to use another glitch to get past it.

The ending is pretty short; Guptar uses the power of the demon statue to restore her clan, and Pai and Yakumo go off to rest. After the credits there's a teaser scene; I don't know if they planned another game which was never made, or if they were simply encouraging you to read the manga.

On to the review.

Story/Characters: These are both problematic. Although the game provides enough background for you to understand the basics, this is clearly intended for fans of the series. None of the characters are fleshed out more than just brief outlines, and there's very little dialogue in the game beyond where to go next and what to do. The story feels incomplete -- it's adapted from the manga, but it doesn't start at the beginning, and the manga wasn't finished yet when the game came out. The story is more like a series of episodes than a unified plot. If you're not familiar with 3x3 Eyes it's going to be hard to appreciate what's going on.

World: The game takes place in the real world. You're based in Hong Kong but you travel to India, Greece, and Tibet. The areas have different designs and classic locations like Mount Olympia and the Himalayas. Not bad, I guess.

Game Flow: The dungeons are quite long, and often involve essentially repeating the same task several times -- for instance, finding 5 separate statues in five sections of a dungeon. Although the dungeons are large and confusing, they're fairly easy to map because they're a grid-based layout like the early Zelda games. 

Of course, the largest problem with the flow comes from the XP bug that afflicts both Haan and Guptar. It means that unless you're willing to use save states and other glitches, you're going to spend many hours grinding levels. Playing this on a real console would be an exercise in masochism.

One other issue, if you're not using a walkthrough, is that flying around to the various areas costs $4000. This is a significant sum of money even later in the game. If you go to the wrong place, or it turns out you forgot items (like the Plastic Bombs), you have to spend $8000 to rectify your error.

System: Pai and Yakumo have plenty of MP, and can afford to constantly spam their magic and techniques. This makes most of the monsters quite easy to deal with, including the bosses. The biggest problem with the game is the fact that you get a game over if anyone other than Yakumo's HP reach 0. If it weren't for this, the game would be sleepwalk easy. Unfortunately, Haan and Guptar join with very low HP that makes them sitting ducks for the enemies. A game over sends you back to the title screen and your last save.

But even beyond that, the RPG elements are undeveloped. Equipment is almost non-existent in the game, and getting more than the first buyable stuff involves a complicated method that's not worth the tiny benefits. Most dungeons have no chests, and the ones that do aren't very good. There are few monsters, and even in the final dungeon you can encounter monsters from the first dungeon. Pai and Yakumo gain very few additional spells, meaning that what you start with is basically what you'll have for the whole game. 

One feature that is interesting is the white pieces of paper you can buy and then turn into talismans that have various effects (healing, curing status effects, escaping from the dungeon). It's a bit more interesting than the standard items.

There's no inventory limit!!

Side Quests/Optional Content: None

Graphics/Sound: The music is fine. 

• Dungeon theme 1
• India

The graphics are normal for the era. The opening and conclusion have some nice cutscene graphics, and there are one or two other instances of this in the game. The map sprites have no faces, but I guess that's something I can overlook.

Interface: Standard for this era. You can't see the stats of equipment before you buy it, or what any of the items do. Fortunately there is one button for talk and search so you don't have to choose that from a menu.

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I am finally at the end of the 5 game "kusoge" sequence. Out of the five games, I would say Villgust was the best -- it's dull and tedious but playable. Maka Maka is interesting and if you can deal with the bugs it's OK. Fist of the North Star is more or less playable but requires a lot of grinding at parts and is extremely slow and tedious to play. Light Fantasy is unplayable. 3x3 Eyes is boring, but decent up until the final dungeon, when it becomes unplayable unless you're willing to use glitches.

Out of all the games I would say Light Fantasy is the worst.

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Next up on the list, from this site, is Shodai Nekketsu Kunio-kun. This is a game in the long-running Kunio-kun franchise, which Western players know from games like River City Ransom and Crash 'n' the Boys: Street Challenge. These games were heavily modified in localization. As for Shodai Nekketsu Kunio-kun, it's marginal as an RPG. It's basically a beat-em-up game but you can level up and equip things, and there is some degree of exploration. As I posted a while back, I find it very difficult to objectively define an action RPG in a way that includes games like Secret of Mana but excludes games like Castlevania II.

For me Kunio-kun is borderline, and because there is a translation patch and walkthroughs, I'm going to skip it. Which means next up is Dragon Quest V. Finally, a game that should be good!

Game 10 - 3x3 Eyes Seima Korinden Part 2 (Final)

This game ends in failure, which is perhaps the best it deserves. But let's go through the steps anyway.

The last post left off with me heading to Mexico to find the remaining keys to sealing off the pillar of light. The primary location in Mexico is Teotihuacan, where you have to visit the temples of the Sun and Moon in order to gain the favor of the gods -- essentially the same story as in Greece.

The dungeon is very long, and the encounters aren't very interesting. Some of them are from the early parts of the game, but no matter what the encounter is you can beat it by using Yakumo's Tuchao magic, one of Pai's summons, and an attack from Jake. This is true for basically the rest of the game -- even the strongest monsters in the final dungeon fall to a single spell from Yakumo or Pai. Sometimes when you first get to a dungeon the monsters will be faster than you and be able to get in one attack, but since you regain HP on level up you don't even really have to heal.

Eventually we reach the first bosses of the game, over halfway through the game:

The game's first boss

These are three Inca or Mayan priests of some sort. On my first try I got killed before I got a turn, so I had to do a bit of grinding to be able to survive. Once you can survive one turn you're fine because you can heal whoever got hurt. This is actually the hardest boss fight in the game with the exception of the final boss. Once the priests go down, you get the 4th key, and find the 5th key in a chest. Now we can seal off the holy land.

The holy land itself is another very long dungeon. You have to go to five separate areas and find five statues, who question you about their element and its relation to the human body. Once you find all five you can proceed to the last area.

One of the five statues

There are no chests in this dungeon. This is fairly common in the game; probably half or more of the dungeons have no chests. Items and equipment are not very important -- weapons help, but armor really doesn't do that much. The amount of defense you get from a piece of armor is equivalent to about one level up, and the later game equipment is annoying to get. You have to spend not only money, but jewels as well, which requires going around to shops in the various countries and buying them. It's not worth the trouble. You also don't really need items since you can create anything you need using those blank papers you buy for 10 dollars.

Finally we reach the center of the holy land and take on Taisoei.

Taisoei

He went down in two attacks. That seems weak for such a major enemy -- I wonder if they made a mistake in his HP?

Now that we've completed this major goal, Ling Ling has another job for us. It seems rather anticlimactic but since they're following the manga (which hadn't ended at the time this game was made), it's not going to have a real plot arc. Jake leaves the party and Haan joins, which is unwelcome. Haan's HP are low, and there's some sort of glitch or mistake with his XP. Normally you need about 500-600 for each level, but Haan needs 8000 for the first level. I think this is because they set his level but then set his total XP to the wrong value.

You suck Haan

After getting a few new summons for Yakumo, the next task is to go to Greece again to help Haan look for magic books. With a new labyrinth key we can open up a dungeon and find a couple of magic books and a good weapon for Pai. Then it's off to Tibet, where a demon named Nauthiz is causing problems in the Himalayas. There's another large dungeon where you have to blow up 9 statues to get stone fragments, and then place them in 9 altars at the end. The door then opens up and you can face Nauthiz.

Nauthiz, the next boss

Nauthiz will kill Haan in one hit, which is a game over. So you basically have two options -- grind levels until Haan can survive a hit, or just try the fight a few times and hope he doesn't attack Haan. This is what I did (using save states). It would be annoying on a real console because the dungeon is long. Unfortunately you have to fight a second boss, who can also kill Haan in one hit. Both bosses go down very quickly as long as you use 99 power spells, you just have to hope for luck.

Chokai

Once you beat these, there's a long story sequence. Pai is upset because she thinks all the fighting is because of her. On the flight home, a magician named Guptar attacks the plane, capturing Pai to try to capture the secret of immortality.

Lots of plane flights in this game

You fight Guptar:

A doomed battle

This is a story loss, though, and the plane goes down, killing everyone. Yakumo can't die, of course, and Haan gets away through magic. Pai is captured by Guptar. Yakumo then goes searching for Pai at Aberdeen (Hong Kong, not Scotland). I don't know what happens if your HP reach 0 during this part, since it's only Yakumo. It's unlikely to happen anyway. In a laboratory at Aberdeen, Yakumo defeats Guptar and then learns the secret of her clan:

Guptar's race inside capsules

She needs the immortality power to keep her clan from dying off. After a quick boss fight, Guptar runs away and we head back to India to find Pai. She's being held by Galga, the final foe of this game. After going to a treasury for a key, it's off to the final dungeon. Here we recover Pai, and then fight Galga, who goes down pretty quickly.

Galga, the final boss?

But no, this isn't quite it. Galga is trying to fuse with a devil statue to become Gasshin Galga, who will be the true final boss. Unfortunately, Guptar joins. Here's her stat screen:

Utterly absurd

As you can see, she needs 17000 XP to move up a level. The final boss uses an attack that does 300 damage to everyone, so you'll need to raise Guptar at least one level to survive. It will take over 100 battles to do this, possibly as many as 130 or 150. I tried to use a cheat code to increase XP after a battle but it didn't work. This game is not worth grinding that much XP, so this is where my playthrough will end.

(Incidentally, if you're playing without save states you also have to deal with random enemies that can do the 300 damage fire breath as well. If they get a surprise attack and use that, all your hard work is gone. This is a low probability, but it can happen.)

Gasshin Galga, you win this round. Or really, bad game design wins.

So that's 3x3 Eyes. It joins Light Fantasy in the "unplayable" category. But thankfully I'm done with this "5 kusoge in a row" sequence and I can move on to some games that should actually be good. Review to follow in a few days.

(EDIT: I discovered there's a bug where if you successfully run from the final boss it counts as defeating him. Since the last boss doesn't always do the 300 damage fire breath, this means I can use save states to "beat" him. I may do this to see the ending, so if so I'll post that along with the review.)

Game 10 - 3x3 Eyes Seima Korinden

3x3 Eyes: Legend of the Advent of the Divine Demon (3×3EYES 聖魔降臨伝)

Released on 7/28/1992, published by Yutaka

 

Fifth and last in the series of 5 crappy games in a row is 3x3 Eyes: Seima Koriden. This is based on a manga (pronounced "sazan eyes") by Yuzo Takada, which ran from 1987-2002 and has a continuation that may still be running. I'm not overly familiar with the series. I know that the main character, Yakumo, is immortal after being resurrected by the demon Pai. Pai's goal is to become human, but they have to fight off all kinds of demons and monsters throughout the series.

Supposedly this game is based on stories from the manga, but I won't be able to comment on this since I only read volume 1, a long time ago.

The big problem with this game seems to be the system where any death (other than Yakumo, who can't die) is a game over. I never like the systems where you get a game over when certain characters' HP drop to 0. It seems to introduce too much tension into the game just based on luck of critical hits and the like. But this system has been used so far in GDLeen, Light Fantasy, Hokuto no Ken 5,  and I think Villgust. What makes it so bad in this game is that Pai is too weak, and the third character that changes from time to time tends to be weak as well. Also there's no system in this game where you can keep your levels and items gained since your last death, it's just game over. 

But most of the complaints seem to center around the final dungeon, where you get a party member who dies in one hit to the final boss. People say it takes 3-5 hours to build up the character to the point where he can survive, and you can't save your game, and the grunt monsters can also sometimes kill the character in a hit. I can guarantee right now that when I hit this point I will use a cheat code to make the levelling fast.

Anyway, let's get started. The opening story is hard to follow since I don't know any of the characters or what happened in the first 5 manga volumes, but essentially a pillar of light appears. Pai, who has been away, reappears, asking for Yakumo's help again. A great demon named Taisoei will soon enter the world through a hole that has opened up to the Holy Land.

Pai's return

In order to close the hole, we have to find 5 keys, make a covenant with someone at Kunlun mountain, and then defeat Taisoei. Helping us find these keys is Ling Ling, a magazine editor. Fortunately one of them, a sword, is right by the light pillar so we're already on our way. Pai calls Takuhi, a large bird thing, to take us to Hong Kong.

Takuhi

Our next clue is an incense burner, which is sold in town, but unfortunately a man named Jake already used it, so we have to fly all the way to Tibet to find him. The ticket costs $4000, and this is one of the second complaints I've seen about the game. There are various things you can do in the game due to poor design or bugs that can leave you stuck. In this case, if you fail to buy Plastic Bombs before you go to Tibet, you'll have to spend $8000 to return to Hong Kong and back to Tibet again. You can't afford to make many mistakes like this when the monsters give you little money at the beginning (and there aren't any monsters at this point in the game).

Jake's not happy to see a little kid free him

Anyway, once we do reach Tibet with the bombs, we can free Jake from prison. He's a treasure hunter who is looking for immortality, and he gives you the incense burner as long as he can come along. Yakumo has a sword and there's a dagger for Pai, but at this point in the game you can't buy any equipment and Jake has no weapon. There are a lot of little strange design choices like this throughout the game.

One interesting feature is the "white paper" you buy for $10. You can use these to create talismans, which have various effects (healing, escape from dungeon). I'm not sure exactly how the system works; you say which type you want to create and then how many, but you don't always get the number you specify. You can do it on the fly, though, which is helpful in dungeons.

Now that we have the Incense burner (key #2), Ling Ling has more information -- the next key (a sacred spear) can be found in Greece. So it's off to Athens. Here we go to the Ruins of Agora which is the first actual dungeon of the game.

 

The battle system is nothing unusual. You take turns attacking, defending, or using items. Yakumo has a few spells he can use and Pai can call on various demons. These are quite powerful and stick around for several turns. They have a base MP cost but you can spend extra points for more damage. They're cheap to cast, and you recover all MP and HP on level up, so Pai can pretty much use these any time she wants. From what I can tell, nobody gets any additional moves on level up, so what we start with is it.

There are two other options. Yakumo can heal himself but it heals so little that it's not worth it. Pai has a move called "Sanjiyan"; I'm not sure what it does. In the manga she gets more powerful when her third eye on her forehead opens, but maybe Pai has to be low HP or something like that for it to work. 

Pai summons Feioh

When you get a critical hit, there's a cutin image of the character:

Our goal in Greece is to find the Holy Spear, which will require meeting various Greek gods and going through dungeons. The dungeons are all laid out on a grid system a little like Legend of Zelda:

A dungeon

This makes it fairly easy to map things out. Like a lot of games from this era, there's basically nothing in the dungeons except for a few treasure chests (most of which are worthless) and the goal. In general there seems to have been a stronger feeling in older games that simply wandering around and fighting monsters was its own reward.

This is what we do in Greece:

• Go into Agora to find the statue of Agora
• Trade it for Hadrian's key, which opens the next dungeon
• Find Zeus' statue, get a book, and blow the statue up with a Plastic Bomb (hope you brought one or it's time to spend $8000)
• Go to Olympia, where you can finally buy armor (though it's pretty expensive). Yakumo has to use a knife to draw his own blood, which along with the Zeus statue fragments, opens the next dungeon (Hera Shrine)
• Go through the Hera Shrine to a secret entrance to Zeus shrine, find the Sacred Stone
• Show the stone to a priest at Athos
• Go to Delphi, buy Medusa Eyes, go through Apollo's temple and show Apollo the eyes, then go to Mount Olympos and use the eyes on Medusa statue to go to the Temple of the Sky

  

  The statue of Medusa

• Find the Propylia key, go back to Athens, go in the Parthenon Temple, and get the Holy Spear from Zeus.

There's a certain sameness to all of this. The dungeons are all very similar. There aren't any bosses, and there really isn't any story other than "here's where you go next". At least the encounter rate is low, so exploring the dungeons doesn't feel like a slog. So far the game is pretty easy as well. I did encounter one monster that did almost Pai's max HP but with Jupiter Talismans (which heal full HP) and Pai's spells it wasn't really that difficult.

Now we're off to Mexico to find the next key.

As I said in the last update, I'm going to be on vacation this week so I don't know when the next update will be. I may not be able to get one out next Saturday but definitely July 15th at the latest. Every other chronoblog seems to be on summer break too so I guess I'm just joining the party.

Game 9 - Fist of the North Star 5 Review

This might be the worst game I've played so far.

Story/Characters: The story of this game is an entirely new one, in an odd way. From what I've seen, most games based on existing franchises like this take one of three routes: (1) An adaptation of the original story, (2) A sequel or episode starring the main characters, or (3) a side-story with new characters and maybe cameos. The story of this game is unusual in that it's an original story that uses nearly all of the characters from Fist of the North star but in ways that make it incompatible with the original manga series. It's a complete parallel story.

One site I found described the story as "30 elementary school kids throwing together their ideas in a week." I can understand this -- there are a lot of silly elements to it, and a good deal of the story is recycling plot points from the original series. The overall story involves Makoutei, who has revived after 2000 years of sleep. Kenshiro dies in the opening scene, leaving it to the main character to go out and defeat him. There are a fair number of plot twists but they often don't quite work. 

The characters are all the familiar people from Fist of the North Star, and fans of the series may like the opportunity to control characters that are villains in the anime or die quickly.

World: The game world is the post-apocalyptic world of the manga. Of course it's constrained by the manga itself -- there was no real sense of geography in the series, just a bunch of towns that were all kind of the same except for what person was controlling them. In that sense this game does a good job of mimicking the manga, and all the identifiable places in the series are here. But as an RPG it ends up being pretty dull since everything's the same.

Game Flow: As usual for this era, the random encounter rate is way too high. You can escape from dungeons for free, so I suppose at least you can try to explore the dungeons while leveling. There are a few places in the game where the bosses are a significant leap in difficulty, and there's very little strategy you can employ, so you basically just have to grind. The dungeons tend to be far too large, especially considering there's usually nothing of interest in them aside from the boss.

Even when you're making progress it doesn't really feel like you are because everything looks the same.

System: Straight, old style RPG. Battles are debuff-attack-attack-heal. Dungeons are just mazes with mostly worthless treasure chests and virtually nothing to do besides that. No mini-games or anything.

I mentioned this in the opening post, but the biggest disappointment here is that so little respect was paid to the Fist of the North Star series in terms of the fighting. The characters are superhumans who fight with their fists but can kill people instantly. Kenshiro, Rei, and the others can deal with normal people without even breaking a sweat. Of course this is hard to directly translate to an RPG, but they didn't even try. You equip knives and nunchucks, which they never do in the series, and you have the ridiculous sight of Kenshiro, Toki, and Rei having to slowly wear down random grunt fighters. It's not as bad as 3 where Bat, a little kid equipped with a knife, starts out with a higher attack power than Kenshiro. But why was this even a Fist of the North Star game?

Side Quests/Optional Content/Replayability: None. I suppose that you could try the later part of the game with different characters, but since all the characters are effectively the same, just with slightly different attacks, it's not worth it.

Interface: Ugh. Everything is slow. It takes forever to buy and sell things, and to equip stuff. Of course there's no single-button talk/search. There's some sort of bug in battle if you take back moves that causes you to have to enter moves twice.

Graphics/Sound: The in-battle graphics are not bad, but they could have done a much better job making the characters look like their manga/anime equivalents. Out of battle the graphics are shameful. Everything is brown and gray (I guess this does fit the source). The walking animation looks terrible. The map sprites barely look like the characters. All of the dungeons look exactly the same, and the floor tiling is eye-splitting.

The BGM is acceptable. The sound effects are mostly good; they even put in some "ATATATATA" and other voice clips to add to the show atmosphere.

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The next game I have on my list from this source is Sandora's Adventure, a spinoff of the Valkyrie series that had a limited English release as Whirlo. I have no clue how this got on any RPG list -- as far as I can tell it's a straight platformer that has no RPG elements whatsoever. So an easy skip.

So next up is the last in the "5 kusoge" continuing series -- 3x3 Eyes, another game based on a manga.

However, I am moving and then will be on vacation for almost a week for 4th of July, so updates could be sporadic. I should be able to post something this Saturday, but possibly not the week after that.

Game 9 - Fist of the North Star 5 Part 3 (Final)

Finally I put this game out of its misery. This game has a problem that was also in Villgust, to a lesser extent, and seems to be a recurring issue with crappy RPGs of this era. They don't give you enough resources to heal, and the dungeons are so long and the random encounters so frequent that there's really no way you can just play through the dungeons, fighting the enemies as you go. This is especially true when the grunts spam moves that hit all of your guys. There's no effective party heal item or move in the whole game. So in these cases you basically have the choice of overlevelling until the grunts pose no threat at all, or run from most or all battles (or use a cheat code to turn off encounters).

I will admit here that I did use cheat codes a couple of times for this game. I turned off encounters for the final dungeon, and I briefly turned on a "max xp after battle" cheat to speed up grinding in two places.

All of the dungeons in the game are exactly the same -- large, ugly, featureless corridors and rooms with mostly worthless treasure chests and nothing else of interest. So I'm not going to describe each one.

Last time I left off getting the ship. You go to a village where Shachi and Leia are; they're just cameos in this game and don't play any story purpose. Shachi is a follower of Kaioh here, which is completely opposite from the anime. After that we head to a castle where Kenshiro supposedly is, but it's actually Hyo (I thought it would be Jagi posing as him, but whatever). You fight Hyo but afterwards he lets you know that Kenshiro is still alive. Makoutei has sealed him away, though, and we need 7 experienced fist users to get him free. So the next part of the game is hunting down these people.

First up is Shin. We go through another dungeon to fight Mr. Heart:

It looks like those big dudes from Double Dragon

Heart has Julia's ring, and with that we can recruit drunken Shin to the group. Next up is Souther. To convince him to join you have to find his master's testament and show it to him, and he has the revelation sort of like in the anime, but doesn't immediately die.

But he fights you first.

Now we have our seven people -- Kurisu, Rei, Shin, Souther, Toki, Hyo, and Shu. By shooting out Atari 2600 beams we can revive Kenshiro:

Who knows.

Souther dies, but Kenshiro is restored -- unfortunately his heart has stopped, so Toki has to give up his life to revive him. That's two more heroes down. Next goal is to beat the "master hunter" Zariga, who killed Ryuken at the beginning of the game. I'll skip over that part and move on -- next up is really the final goal. Makoutei's castle is protected by a barrier, and we need 13 warriors to open it. The rest of the game is basically tracking down all the warriors we don't yet have on our side.

Fortunately in defeating Zariga, we get a very useful ally on our side, at the cost of Mizumaru's life. Mabie has no fist techniques, instead she just has a free heal, which is pretty good. As long as she's around we can actually fight most random encounters without too much trouble.

We also learn that Yuria is actually the one who freed Makoutei because she felt sorry for him! Nice job, Yuria. No time to scold her corpse, though, because Lin and Rui have been kidnapped by Makoutei.

More crucifixes.

Once we reach Makoutei he kills the main character(!), but fortunately the son of the main character (who wasn't even born at the start of the game!) is ready to step into his place.

Take my energy, my son.

To avoid this post becoming too long and tedious, I'm going to just quickly list the people we have to get to make 13 fighters:

• Fudou, who can only be recruited after defeating Jagi

  

  Say my name!

• Ryuga, who gives you his horse
• Judah, who fakes being an enemy but then kills his own guys and joins you

  

  The most beautiful enemy

• Falco, who is under some sort of mind control.
• Raou, who just shows up
• Kaioh(!), who Kenshiro has to invite

Now we have all of the people. While we're doing all of this, we have a crystal with seven stars, going out one by one. Each time one goes out, it means Makoutei is closer to perfecting the ultimate fist technique.

More Atari beams

In addition to these 13 guys, there's also a fetch quest where you have to get various Hokuto and Nanto items to release a seal and get the ultimate equipment for the hero. You're able to swap out guys freely at a secret hideout. Anyway, the 13 warriors above aren't enough, so Kaioh has to join in as well:

Kaioh and Raoh assault the barrier

Now we can finally go after Makoutei. After another long dungeon, it's time to fight him. He blows you down a pit, leaving the hero alone. Fortunately the hero encounters Kaioh, and the hero and Kaioh fight to the top of the castle and face Makoutei. Kaioh dies in the effort, and we find out it was just a projection and not the real Makoutei (sorry, Kaioh).

Moving on, in the Hokuto Shrine we find Yuria, who is not dead, but sick. 

Yuria!!

Yuria dies, and Atatata (MC's son) has to fight each of 13 friends just for a few turns each, and then he learns the final secret technique...which is pretty underwhelming, all it does is let you call the friends into battle.

And now the final dungeon. It's another long, featureless dungeon, indistinguishable from every other one up to this point. Finally, you reach Makoutei, the final boss.

The final showdown

He doesn't really have anything unique or special, just moves that damage people. By using the debuffs to lower his defense to nothing he's not too bad, although I may have been slightly overlevelled.

Afterwards, Kenshiro tells Makoutei he was defeated because he lost the love he originally had, when he separated from Tentei. In his dying moments Makoutei regains his love and uses it to revive Yuria.

The gang is reunited

Atatata then heads to his father's grave, where it seems like he dies (although it's a big ambiguous). And thus closes the curtain on this ridiculous story. Here are some of the chief offenders so we can hurl derision their way:

Eat shit

That's Hokuto no Ken 5. I'll post a review probably on Monday, but in short, there are a few nuggets of something promising hiding in the game, but overall it's a mess. It's seriously flawed in every aspect of the game, and not worth playing unless you're a diehard Fist of the North Star fan who wants to experience everything in the franchise no matter how bad. I can't imagine suffering through this game on a real console.

Rethinking the rules

One problem with a chronogaming blog of this kind is that a good number of the games will be bad. I'm in this slog right now of 5 terrible games in a row -- as far as I can tell there are no other stretches like this in the library, thankfully. But it has gotten me thinking again about how to approach bad or average/tedious games. This blog is primarily about fun for me. I do gain satisfaction from completing even bad games if it's in a structured approach like this, but that only goes so far.

Of course it would be nice to play every game on a real system with no walkthroughs, but I don't want the blog to stagnate because the game I'm playing is so tedious/boring/bad that I can barely bring myself to play it. On the other hand, if you do have walkthroughs and emulator speedup keys/etc, it's easy to dip into that well far too quickly.

It raises the question of whether it's better to play the game honestly and quit if it sucks, or if it's better to use save states, emulator speedup, walkthroughs, etc to at least get some of the experience and document the game.

So I think this is how I'm going to do things from here on out.

For the first week I play any game, I will play it on the nSide emulator (a fork of higan) and without using the speedup key or any other emulator features. I also will not use walkthroughs with the exception of basic explanations (what the buttons do, what the effect of spells and items are), or if I am seriously stuck and cannot progress. If this means I make slow progress because the game sucks, so be it. [My reason for using bsnes is the accuracy; I already ran into a bug in snes9x where Light Fantasy wouldn't save games at all.]

After the first week, if the game is bad or tedious enough that I would normally stop playing, I will begin to make use of the speedup key and limited walkthrough use, and possibly using snes9x to get even faster speedup (this is what I'm doing with Fist of the North Star right now). In extreme cases I may even use cheat codes or save state abuse.

My justification for doing this instead of just quitting a game is this: judging from comments I've seen on CRPG Addict (and a few on my blog), one of the purposes of a project like this is documenting games that have very little information on them in English. A good example of this is Fist of the North Star 5 -- the only information that I know of on this game is the walkthrough on gamefaqs which gives very little detail, but given that Fist of the North Star is a well known series even in the West, I figure it's worth it to struggle through the game using as many emulator tricks as I can just to have the experience documented somewhere in English.

This also explains why I was willing to abandon Dragon Ball Z after one post. The game wasn't all that good (to me), especially not being a DBZ fan. I was going to have to start the game from the beginning. Since there's already a full fan translation patch for the game and multiple walkthroughs on GameFAQs, interested people can experience the game themselves. 

Any thoughts?

PS: My controller is a PS2 controller hooked up through an annoying conversion cable to USB. Any suggestions for a better one? It has to have a good D-pad and have two R and L buttons (so that I can map one to screenshot and the other to speedup).

PPS: The computer I'm using is an Acer Spin 3, which can easily run nSide at 60 fps and can get between 100-120 fps on speedup.

Game 9 - Fist of the North Star 5 Part 2

This game is really bad. In addition to all the stuff I said last time, everything seems designed to go as slowly as possible and take as many button presses as possible. When you use a heal technique, it completely exits you out of the menu so you have to do A->Tech->Character->Heal->Target each time you want to use the heal. This makes it very annoying to heal up between battles. Of course as usual you can't see the stats of equipment when you buy it. I don't know what most of the items do because the documentation for this game on the Internet is very scarce.

Also they obviously didn't program a way for an NPC to give you an item, because whenever that's supposed to happen, they tell you to search a treasure chest nearby. You can tell when you'll be getting an item in the future because there's an empty chest lying near a person.

At least the enemies say "ABESHI!" when you kill them.

Our next destination is to meet Tentei Rui, another character from the second part of HnK. She's blind, and wants to find Shuu, who is also blind, to help. So off we go to Hakuronost, where Shiba (Shuu's son) is waiting. He takes us to beat the Black Clan. In the show, Shiba dies in an explosion. Here he intentionally throws himself into a bomb trap to set it off before it can get us. Another character gone.

But this lets us heal Rui, by the power of Shuu and his son (which is residing in him or something like that). On the mirror behind her we see what is supposed to be Rin, although who would know without being told.

So now let's go find adult Rin to help us out.

It turns out, in another bizarre twist, that the main character is Rin's long lost younger brother. I saw one site that said this plot seemed like 30 elementary school kids pooling all their ideas in a few days. The timeline makes no sense. During the story we discover that Estelle (main character's wife) is the daughter of Makoutei, who only revived recently. In the opening scene, Estelle is captured while pregnant. By the time you meet the child about 1/3 through the game, he's old enough to talk and study martial arts, and eventually is a playable character. Also somehow your main character is younger than Rin. None of this makes any sense.

Anyway, the problem now is that there's a mist hanging over the continent that blocks you from going through. But fortunately the necklace the main character has lets you walk through it, so you can visit the towns underneath. The large goal of this section is to find Estelle, who is in the keeping of Gran Doll.

Forging through the mist

At a black gate, we meet Bat, another character from the original series. He starts out as a young boy following Kenshiro around, and then is an adult for the second part. Here, when you meet him he's already nearly dead, and sacrifices himself by ramming a truck into the gate to blow it up so you can enter!

Sorry Bat, you're already dead.

At Phantom Land they are having a funeral for Estelle, who was killed by Gran Doll. Makoutei fears Estelle and Kurisu's child because he's a combination of Makoutei and Tentei blood.

Next it's time for a prison where various numbered people are being held. One of them is the main character's son, who you get to name. I chose Atatata because I didn't realize he was going to be a major figure (he was just a baby!) but now that's going to be him for the rest of the game. Oh well. Now it's time to deal with Gran Doll.

After another bland, featureless, long dungeon, Gran Doll appears. One common feature of bad RPGs is battles that can't be beaten except by levelling up because there aren't enough strategic options. Gran Doll has a brutal all-attack technique that he spams. At this point we don't have any multi-heal techs and the heal tech we have barely heals more than Gran Doll does. So essentially you just have to grind levels until you can beat him before he kills you.

It turns out that Gran Doll was ordered by Makoutei to kill Estelle as a baby, and refused to do it. Makoutei ordered him to do it again, but instead he hid Estelle in a hut in town. Rei takes Estelle to "safety" in Rihaku City, but Makoutei immediately attacks it. We hurry back to Rihaku City but it's too late. Shuu was able to get everyone away from Makoutei, but Estelle sustained critical wounds and dies as Kurisu watches.

"Dear, please look after Atatata....cough"

Atatata goes off to train with Rei, and we head to the next continent with Shuu. For some reason Akashachi (the head of Red Pirates) lets you use their ship for free, with no conditions.

Arrrrrrr.

The goal at this point is to find various Nanto and Hokuto users so that we can unite to defeat Makoutei. Rumor is that the current master of Hokuto Shinken is holed up in a tower...