Category: Dreamwidth mirror

Posted by: jackvambrace

Wild Arms came out in 1997 (United States), about the same time Final Fantasy 7 did. FF7 had the legacy of all the other Final Fantasy games before it paired with awesome new technology, so Wild Arms just kinda got overshadowed.

At it’s core, Wild Arms is a JRPG, with special moves, random encounters and all that good stuff. Numbers! Swords! Tropes! What sets it apart from the others is presentation. The game strikes a pretty good balance of typical eastern rpg elements, anime, and a distinct wild west feel.

See?

Like many good rpgs, the cast is a key part of the experience. I really like how the characters are introduced and built up in this game, and the series as a whole. Each character is a Dream Chaser, a sort of professional wanderer. From the bottom left, Hanpan, wind mouse companion to Jack, Jack, the professional treasure hunter and swordsman, Rudy, the wandering youth, and Cecilia, the freshly graduated crest sorceress. At the start of the game you play through each character’s prologue. Playing with each character individually gives you insight into their backstory and motivations, as well as serving as a decent tutorial for how each character plays. Some games have a distinct protagonist followed along by a supporting cast of characters. Xenoblade is definitely Shulk’s story. Breath of Fire is Ryu’s. Wild Arms is all three character’s stories.

The music is really well done, this game definitely benefited from being released on a disc based system just for the music alone. The action segments get your blood pumping, the emotional bits tug at your heart, and the weirder dungeons sound positively alien. Outside of battles, everything uses 2d graphics, so there was only so much they could do to convey the mood of a scene. I remember being little, and sticking a tape recorder up to my tv because I wanted to just have the music to listen to.

The gameplay is that of your typical rpg, explore towns, explore dungeons, fight monsters. Each of your characters has a set of items at their disposal that allow you to interact with the world. You can get bombs to blow open doors, a lighter to set stuff on fire, Jack’s first item is just Hanpan, who can grab items and flip switches. The tool system reminds me a bit of Zelda and Metroid, especially in the sequels where you can find loot and bonus items by coming back to some areas later with new tools.

Battles don’t have much in the way of tricks that you have to pick up on, you just kinda hit the enemies till they go away. Each character has a pretty set class, you won’t be whacking anything with Cecelia, and Rudy has 0mp the entire game. Each character has different skills that shape how they contribute to battle.

Rudy has the titular ARMs, which are mostly firearm type weapons that have a set number of uses before needing to be reloaded. If you run out, you have to use a special item to reload them, or visit a specific shop to purchase ammunition. You can also upgrade the ARMs to improve their stats with money. Jack has Fast Draws, special sword techniques that consume MP. Fast Draws are learned at set points in the game, sometimes from events, sometimes from other Dream Chasers, a few are even learned from a boss. These can’t be upgraded like Rudy’s ARMs, but mp restoratives are much more common, and you can reduce the mp cost with an item. Cecilia has hands down one of my favorite magic systems in any game. Crest Sorcerers use a crest graph to store a set combination of magical crests, allowing them to use magic. They are reusable. She starts with cure and fire, and you can swap them out for any magic spell in the game. You want lightning and strength up at level 1? Done. Reflect and Revive? Done. A rampaging disco ball that does all eight elements of damage at once and speed up? Done and done. There is a high level shop that let’s you get stronger spells or spells that hit more enemies, but a lot of the low level stuff is still perfectly fine even on to end game.

Each character also has force abilities, which work kinda like your regular skills, but they run on fp instead. I think Lufia 2 had a similar system, where you get points for stuff happening in battle, and can use them for skills outside of mp based skills. These are pretty useful, gives you things like guaranteed critical hits, 100% accuracy, and group item use to name a few.

So far as the story goes, it’s pretty good. There are a few twists that are actually pretty neat, and there are some bits so obvious that you could call them in the first 20 minutes. There’s lots of silly, a bit of sad, and a few dashes of bitter. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll just say it’s worth your time.

No game is without it’s flaws, this one included. The graphics are a little dated, everyone looks kinda like a bobble head during battle.

The script is a little more coherent than Wild Arms 2, but is less consistent with the rest of the series as a whole. This is the kind of game you probably want to play with a guide of some kind available, as you can get lost and there isn’t much in the way of direction sometimes. It’s also hard to find some of the bonus items and the secret dungeon. If these things are enough to put you off you might try the remake for ps2, Wild ARMs Alter Code F. I prefer the original release myself, but both are good.

Altogether this is a really good game that is very dear to me for a variety of reasons. I really liked it as a game, and a ton of other stuff that I found when I was younger came my way by virtue of looking up stuff on this series. I really hope someone sees this and tries it, cause I know maybe one person who had played it, and this game deserves so much more love than that. For anyone interested, it’s on sale for USD 1.80 on the Playstation Store until september 15. (I’m in the US, so prices may vary elsewhere)

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Source: rainbowgames DW

Posted by: lunarsystem

Space Fishermen (Land Ho!, 2002)  is a game that I learned about from the obscurevideogames tumblr. I saw these super enchanting gifs of the game and wanted to try it myself, but it took me a long time to end up buying a copy of the game. I found one for about $20 or $25 AUS on eBay and holy moly, this game is fantastic. It might actually be one of the best games on the PS2.

The title of the game kinda speaks for itself: you’re a fisherman, in space. (You can choose from three characters: a woman named Swallow, a kid named Masabo, and a buff dude named Diver. Diver’s the one in the gif.) You start out catching small fry fish in a pond called Kids’ Pond, and every successive fish you catch doubles as a lure. So the more fish you catch, the more lures you get, and the more lures you get, the more fish you can catch. You can sell the fish for cash, but your lures remain in your inventory, so there’s almost always more progress you can make. The ultimate goal of the game is to catch all the Nushi, or “big ones,” from the various planets. If they sound like boss fights, it’s because they absolutely are.

Actually, this game could be considered entirely boss fights, since each encounter with a fish can potentially be an intense, exhausting workout. You have to pull on the fish with the left analog stick to build up enough power to shock and stun the fish, twirl the right analog stick to reel them in, and move both analog sticks in tandem during quick time events. Some of the “big one” fights can take five or more minutes, though, which means at the end of it you’re probably pretty sore! I’ve really put my old PS2 controller through its paces with this one. 

In that sense, the game reminds me a lot of Gitaroo-Man: it’s blisteringly hard sometimes, but it really pushes you to learn a lot about the systems of the game. For instance, I’ve been working on one fish for a half hour at least, and I’m slowly getting closer and closer to beating it. It’s part memorization and part exploration, for sure, and at least part of that is due to me not knowing Japanese, but a lot of the game is surprisingly intuitive. For instance, you can identify which fish are which on the radar due to which bait they gravitate towards and the intensity of the vibration when they nibble. The bigger the shake, the bigger the fish!

One last thing: the music in this game was composed by Soichi Terada (composer of Ape Escape), AKA Omodaka. One of the songs is his incredibly catchy instrumental version of Honjou Oiwake. It’s a really incredible score and I recommend it a lot!

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Source: rainbowgames DW

Posted by: TepidSnake (Twitter: @SarahSSowertty)

    

This is less about Balloon Kid as a whole- a neat little platformer by Nintendo and Pax Softnica that serves as Balloon Fight’s sequel, turned into an auto-scroller- and more about one specific thing that’s always kinda fascinated me about it. For the most part, the game is pretty cute, with tiny enemies like birds and insects that can’t even hurt Alice, your player character (beyond popping one of her balloons). This is how about 80% of the game is, as you can see in the screenshots above (the first one with the pencil building in the background? That’s Alice’s home town, Pencilvania, arf arf!)

     

But what really interests me about the game are the tone and feel of its later stages, primarily Stage 4 (the belly of a whale), Stage 7 (a giant cave) and especially Stage 8 (some kind of factory. These stages use slower, more foreboding music, and aside from some cute enemies like the octopi who can’t hurt Alice, they’re full of far more threatening traps and enemies like giant fang-like spikes that drop from the ceiling, jumping flames (admittedly seen in earlier stages), faulty lightbulbs that can explode and launch deadly sparks, and flame-pillars that spit out some of the strangest sounds you’ll ever hear from a Game Boy.

It’s just a little unusual for a game that goes from being pretty cute and relaxed- listen to the first stage music, how laid-back is that?- to developing a mean streak like that, even if it’s only mild. It’s accentuated by the Japan-only Famicom retooling, Hello Kitty World, which alters the enemies and graphics in these areas to be far less intimidating, taking away this odd little mean streak and, with it, some of the charm of the game.

Anyway, you can get Balloon Kid on the 3DS eShop if you’ve ever been curious, it does take a little time to really get going, but it offers a decent challenge by the end, so give it a try!

Posted by: lunarsystem

I know Final Fantasy doesn’t exactly count as a “niche” series, but I’ve been playing it for the first time recently and just marveling at what a weird, weird game it is. It’s a pretty clear forerunner to the SaGa series, and IIRC it was even directed by the person who would go on to create the SaGa games.

First of all, the straight-up leveling system from the first game is gone, replaced with a “use certain attacks to power them up” system. This is cool if you want your characters to be equally good at everything, since you can just slap whatever weapons on them and fight a few battles to level up their axe/sword/dagger/etc skills, but unfortunately the same thing happens with magic. So as a result, ALL of your magic starts out really weak. I tried to use Esuna in battle to cure a status effect and it ended up missing because I rarely used it in the first place :’^)

It’s a real shame that the game is so mechanically lopsided and grindy, because I really like the story so far. It’s one of those “rebels fight against the evil empire” stories, except you actually do clash with the Empire at nearly every turn, infiltrating their warships and falling into their traps. It feels way more tight-knot and intimate in that way than, like, FF6 does, since 6 has a much bigger world and you’re constantly exploring little tangential stories in it.

Anyway, I very rarely hear anyone talk about FF2, so I was wondering if anyone else here has played it. (For the record, I’m playing the Dawn of Souls version on the GBA.)

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Source: rainbowgames DW

Posted by: TepidSnake (Twitter: @SarahSSowertty)

Magica x Magica is an odd little endless runner game released for iOS and Android by Magic Cube, a Korean developer  which combines running with some light shooter elements. As an unnamed witch, you must run an unending gauntlet of platforms and monsters to try and save your unnamed friend (the game’s description calls it ‘the saddest run shooting game’,, probably because you can never save your friend, as there is no end). It’s a very simple game, with a jump button and shot meter on each side. You can tap the Jump button twice for a double-jump, and you slide your finger across the shot meter to angle your shots up or down. Your standard shots are weak against the fish/sea creatures you fight (including boss monsters like the giant sunfish), but earning coins lets you buy upgrades that include new weapons like a spread-shot and rapid-fire attack. You can also pick these weapons up mid-stage, along with health top-ups and a limited-time item that doubles the size of your shots.

On the one hand, there’s a lot of little flaws- while you have a health meter it seems to decrease inconsistently with some attacks being one-hit kills, and actually aiming your shots can be difficult as the standard shot sprays quite wildly. There’s also the upgrade system, as earning new weapons and upgrades takes a lot of time (unless you go for the in-app purchases). Having said all that, I just love the aesthetic of it, and it really sticks out (especially amongst Magic Cube’s other games). The visuals have a strange storybook-like feel to them that strongly appeals to me, and the game does some odd stuff with its ‘endless’ theme (after each run you see an hourglass get turned over, resetting an otherwise-unseen timer, and the title screen tracks each time you play as a ‘loop’, suggesting the main character is being sent back to try again). One of those games that’s worth a look, and it’s pretty suited to a phone seeing how short each run is!

As a bonus, here’s the game’s gorgeous-looking title screen.

Posted by: TepidSnake (Twitter: @SarahSSowertty)

Helen’s Mysterious Castle is.a Windows RPG, created in RPG School 2000 by Satsu (who’s made several other small-scale RPGs) that was translated and released on Playism in 2014. Normally this isn’t my sort of thing as I am completely terrible at RPGs- I almost never complete them- but with a recommended playtime of about 4 hours, I figured I might actually finish this one. As Helen, a girl who can’t remember her origins and can only speak in ‘?’ and ‘!’, you set off to find your way off the floating castle she lives in. The story isn’t too special, although it’s got a lot of charm and a lighthearted tone that still sticks around even after the serious parts of the plot kick in. That said, the story is told in a neat way- a lot of details are things you have to find yourself after you’re allowed to read the game’s signs and books, and a character who joins later has expository chatter for every room in the game.

Where the game shines is the battle system, which is simple to pick up but has a lot of neat little details that make fights really fun! Each weapon you can use is set to a ‘wait’ timer- wait the allotted time and you’ll use it, but every enemy attack also has this timer, so they’ll go first if your wait time is longer. The four core weapon types have different attributes tied to this wait time- bows are weak but have short wait periods, swords have medium wait times but let you defend, shields don’t attack but reduce/nullify damage taken while you wait, and spells are powerful and pierce through shields but have long wait times. As a result, the battles are pretty engaging as it’s a matter of timing and planning ahead- with the right move choices, you can conquer any foe with little damage!

The way the game handles its inventory and levelling-up systems is a little different too- you earn EXP during battle but use this to level up your items (except stat-boosting ones) which you can only have eight of at a time, and raising a weapon’s level can make it more powerful or reduce its wait time. Later you also get access to a blacksmith who can refine items (including stat-boosters) to make them even stronger. There’s only a handful of each type of weapon and item, but there’s enough differences between them that you’ll pick a favourite. This simple inventory stuff ties in with another of the game’s strengths, that it’s super-friendly, with a lot of features added to make the game easier to get to the end of- you’re very clearly prompted if you want to fight or run before a boss battle, a room you find later in game keeps any items you’ve had to drop so you can get them back, and dying restarts you either at your home or the inn with a steak ready for you which permanently raises your HP. While this doesn’t make the game challenging, the fact that you have to plan a little for battles and figure out strategies for each enemy means it still feels satisfying to progress, there’s just a few safety nets to help you along.

I often find that I enjoy short games a lot more, and Helen’s Mysterious Castle is a gem of a tiny RPG, with the one downside being that it can sometimes be easy to have no idea where to go (as a hint, there are some areas where you can go into the walls, and these are usually telegraphed in some way) but aside from that this is an easy recommendation to try- it’s available from its Playism page. Beyond the cut, we just have a few extra screenshots of other parts of the game, and while I’ve done my best to avoid any spoilers, if you’d like to go in completely blind then go no further!

( Just some choice moments and enemies from the game beyond the cut! )

Posted by: softchassis

 Sometimes the simplest games are the best ones, and Gekitotsu Yonku Battle (which can be roughly translated as “Four-wheel Crash Battle”) certainly fits that bill– Irem’s NES output seemed to range from unique and complex like Sqoon to just simple and fun like Gekitotsu Yonku Battle.

In what could be described as a “vehicular combat game”, all you do in Gekitotsu Yonku Battle is drive your Formula One car into other Formula One cars.  Any time the front of one vehicle collides with any other vehicle, the latter vehicle gets knocked away.  How far the vehicles get knocked away depends on the car’s speed.  Knock an enemy car into an obstacle such as a wall, and that car will take damage until it explodes, and the same goes for you!

You start each of the game’s levels with a quota of rivals (teki) to destroy, though this number can be decreased by picking up special flags.  Every few stages is a bonus stage where you have to pick up a number of flags under a time limit.  You also unlock more cars as you go along, though the differences between the cars is mostly cosmetic.

The challenge arises through the increasingly complex stages, which get more and more congested with walls to get bumped into, as well as oil slicks that make you lose control of your car.  As an additional challenge, when you get knocked away, you don’t regain control until your car loses all its momentum, meaning you can bump into one wall and keep sliding and bump into another wall.  This can combo a lot of your health away, and before you know it, you’ve lost!

There isn’t much more to the game than that!  It’s a simple little time waster that I stumbled upon on one of those online NES emulators in middle school that wasn’t blocked by the school’s internet filter.  Give it a try if you have some time to kill and just want to play a silly little game with fun sounds and visuals.

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Source: rainbowgames DW

Posted by: softchassis

When I was in Middle School, I bought one of these, one of those unlicensed “[impossible number]-in-1” NES on a chip controllers with tons of NES games on it. I saw it in a little toy shop in a mall, hooked up to a TV as a display model, and even though these kinds of things had been around for ages, this was the first I’d ever heard of one or seen one. It was such a novel concept to young teenage me, someone who had grown up on emulators because we couldn’t afford many games.  How did they manage to squeeze all those games into one controller? Amazing! I of course know better now, but I still remember being amazed all the same.

So, I bought the little controller, and I probably spent an equal amount of time–if not more–playing it as I did my Wii. I learned about a few neat NES games I would’ve never heard of otherwise through this little controller, such as the (in my opinion) superior version of Tetris by Tengen, Yie-Ar Kung Fu, Karateka… but the game which wowed me the most, which I still play to this day on occasion, was Sqoon.

Sqoon is a horizontal shoot-em-up like Gradius, except in a novel-for-the-time twist, you control a little pink submarine underwater instead of a spaceship in space. Aside from having a unique setting, Sqoon is also a fairly unique shoot-em-up all its own.

A little intermission on the title screen, complete with an SOS in Morse code, says that Neptunians have invaded the Earth and are melting the ice caps. It’s up to you to pilot the Sqoon submarine and beat back their assault, before it’s too late!

In actuality though, it seems you may already be too late! Each stage starts out with a peaceful little tropical tune as you travel over an underwater city, appearing to be based on various locales from across the world.

Still, those Neptunians have to pay. How does Sqoon fight these alien invaders? Well, you have two weapons at your disposal in Sqoon–a torpedo that shoots straight ahead, and a depth charge that travels diagonally towards the sea floor. While the torpedoes and depth charges can both hurt any biological enemy, you need to use the depth charges specifically to destroy flashing things which your torpedoes have no effect on.

The main enemies in the game are the Neptunians, which are cute little alien things which travel in all sorts of unique ways. These big one-eyed creatures travel in a loop-de-loop across the screen, for example. The enemy patterns keep the game fresh and interesting.

Towards the sea floor is a container with a flashing cap on it, which we need to destroy with the depth charges. What’s in the container?

Captured earthlings! We need to rescue them before they drown or get eaten by the killer whales which always follow Sqoon around.

Once you have 9 earthlings aboard Sqoon, a ship appears on the surface of the ocean where you can deposit them. Your reward is either a stronger weapon or more fuel, the latter of which you can also get from bombing crabs with depth charges.

And that’s the basic formula of Sqoon–shoot alien sea creatures and free their captives. The levels get longer and longer and the enemy patterns get more and more complex as the game goes on. Being an early NES game, it’s very arcade-y, but it’s a lot of fun! The colorful yet grim setting is also a neat anachronism which I think adds to this game’s charm.

Sqoon doesn’t appear to have been very popular at the time, as it hasn’t had any re-releases or really any mention at all outside of its initial release, which is a shame as I think it’s one of the better horizontal shoot-em-ups out there.

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Source: rainbowgames DW

Posted by: jackvambrace

Wine and Roses is and RPG Maker game published in late 2012. You play as a trio of exorcists under the employ of Luc Francisco, Lord of Fort Adder. The fort has been taken by monsters and spirits and such, cursing everything and everyone in it and leaving Lord Francisco a skeleton.

The game presents as a typical top down jrpg, with some uniqueness. There are no random encounters, instead each enemy you can fight is visible on the map, allowing you to choose when and what you fight. When you win a fight it disappears forever. and you are gifted upgrades, loot, skills, and story tidbits. It feels kinda like Megaman, you fight a boss and get a new weapon or power and most of the time another enemy is weak to your new equipment.

During the fights you control the three exorcists, Carmanth, Argent, and Nynavae. Luc is incapable of fighting in his skeletal form, so he instead offers advice and color commentary on the fight as it progresses. This is used as a gameplay mechanic to kinda help you figure out what to do against some of the tougher enemies, but it is also used a storytelling element. Luc is usually not being a smarmy jerk he sometimes offers insight into his past and personality, I really liked this part of the game.

The maps are laid out so that you can pretty much go everywhere at the outset, it reminds me a little of Demon Souls. Some fights are definitely easier at the start (I think the ice sector was way harder than the rest) but you can try whatever you like. If you lose a fight it just boots you back to the map where you were, so there’s no real penalty for losing. This may be the most forgiving and inviting RPG I’ve ever played.

At the end of it all Wine and Roses was fun to play. On top of that, it was funny, emotional, and challenging without being off-putting. Only real complaint is that it’s short, maybe four hours, although there is a fair bit of replay if you like toying around with the exorcists loadouts. I recommend this to anyone who likes rpg’s or silly skeletons with dressed like red mages.

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Source: rainbowgames DW