Shining The Holy Ark

 I played Shining The Holy Ark.

This is a dungeon-crawler RPG by Sega released in 1996 for the Saturn.
I played it on emulator.

Shining The Holy Ark is a classic-style first-person dungeon-crawler JRPG. You play as a mercenary named Arthur along with a party of other characters met throughout the journey. It's kind of cool to see a dungeon-crawler on the Saturn - normally these kinds of games were only seen on much older systems. This one seems to be a follow-up to Shining in the Darkness for the Mega Drive. I never really played that one. Maybe some day it'll get its turn.

The game takes place in the kingdom of Enrich and the surrounding lands - the story begins as the King of Enrich sends a band of mercenaries - Arthur, Melody, and Forte, into the mines nearby Desire Village in order to track down a rogue ninja named Rodi.

While encountering Rodi, a mysterious airship crashes into the mines and almost kills them all in the impact. Three spirits emerge from the ship and inhabit the bodies of Arthur, Melody and Rodi, which saves their lives and heals their wounds. Our friend Forte gets inhabited by an evil spirit instead, and suddenly leaves the group. Rodi suffers memory loss from the incident, and having lost his purpose, he decides to join Arthur and Melody in their quest to find out what's going on, and to find out where Forte went as well.

The rest of the story involves some bad guys known as the "Vandals" who have been manipulating the king as part of a plot to reawaken a 1000-year-old kingdom that would return the world to darkness. Or something like that. Arthur must gather the Three Sacred Treasures hidden in the three shrines in order to put a stop to this plan.

...The story does its job, but I wouldn't say it is particularly notable as far as JRPG stories go. It's fine. I don't have much to say about it. I'm gonna mostly talk about the gameplay now.

...

The game uses a very classic style of first-person 3D dungeon-crawling. You can move in single-tile increments forwards and backwards, and you can turn 90 degrees to face four different directions. You can also move sideways instead of turning by holding the B button, which is necessary for one puzzle, but is otherwise just for moving more efficiently. The dungeons in this game are mostly square rooms and corridors connected at right-angles, just like in the classic dungeon crawlers of old. But there are occasionally curved and diagonal corridors too. The game doesn't need to strictly adhere to the limitations of the past - it mostly does so out of gameplay design rather than actual system limitations. So even the occasional circular room is okay too.

The game has both dungeons and towns to explore, which are both viewed from the same first-person perspective. The environments are rendered in fully-3D polygons, while the characters and monsters are pre-rendered CG sprites. I think the graphics look quite nice - there is a lot of enemy variety, and they all have quite expressive animations during battles. The CG-looking human characters are cute, and I like the way the camera focuses on them when you speak to them, it makes it feel a touch more immersive.
Everything in the game is viewed specifically from Arthur's perspective - whenever he attacks in battle, the camera itself moves toward the enemy, whereas when one of the other party members attacks, you can see them leap out from beside you. Arthur is never shown on screen aside from his icons in the menus, and Arthur also never speaks. So the player can easily assume his place in the world.

Each town has a shop to buy equipment, a pub to heal your party, a church to save your game, and an assortment of NPCs to talk to.

The shops in this game have an interesting system where unique or rare items are saved in a separate inventory. Whenever you sell a rare item, instead of the item disappearing, it will be added to the shop's rare item stock. This also works for key items - which allows you to sell any keys you don't need any more. And you can buy them back at any time if it turns out you missed something and still need it.
Your characters' inventory space is limited in this game, so the fact that the shops can keep your key items is very nice. It's better than the system most old RPGs use where you cannot drop or sell key items and they just take up space in your inventory forever.

It might be interesting to note that this shop system works in pretty much the exact same way as the shops in Golden Sun, which is a top-favourite RPG of mine on the GBA. I knew that the developers of Shining did leave Sega to eventually join Nintendo, and so it's cool to see some of their gameplay ideas were transferred over too.
Speaking of which, Golden Sun does use a very similar graphical style for its pre-rendered CG enemy and character sprites too. ... It's almost like Golden Sun is a sort of follow-up to the old Shining games? Not in terms of plot or setting, but in terms of... general stylistic qualities?

Though Golden Sun did also refine the system - in Golden Sun, when a shop has a new piece of rare equipment for you to buy, it will simply be added to the rare item menu for you to peruse when you like. However in Shining The Holy Ark, there's a bit more to it - whenever you exit a shop, there is a chance the shopkeeper will say "Hold on a sec, before you go, I'd like to show you something real special". Only then will the rare item be added to the rare item menu. ....This is kind of cool in that it makes the interaction feel a bit more personal and realistic when it happens in the moment, but in gameplay terms, all this means is that a player looking for a specific item is going to have to repeatedly talk to the shopkeeper and quit the shop menu over and over and over in their attempt to trigger the item they want to appear. ... And it can sometimes take a LOT of attempts, as the chance is quite slim. ....while I appreciate what they were going for, I am glad that this was smoothed over when they later made Golden Sun.

...

So... this game's combat system.
It's good. It's nothing too special. It works well.
You have a party size of four, and there are eight total playable characters in the game. Party members can be swapped out at any time, even during combat (except for Arthur who must always be in the team), and they will automatically swap in when the current team is defeated. Everyone earns EXP even if they didn't participate, so it is pretty flexible. I like that I don't have to worry about who is or isn't getting enough EXP. I can just use who I use and there's no problem. Good stuff.

This game uses a pretty normal turn-based combat system. You have a choice of using a basic attacks with your equipped weapon, magic attacks that cost MP, or usable items from your inventory - extremely typical JRPG stuff.
For a large portion of the game, I found magical attacks were not significantly more powerful than regular attacks... Or at the very least, this is true for Arthur and Rodi. ... When you get Forte back in the team later in the game, his magic is pretty strong, but at that point I found myself preferring to use brute strength over magic most of the time. That being said, magic can target multiple foes - this is most useful against stronger enemies and bosses. So magic does have its uses, but overall, I find regular attacks to be the way to go the majority of the time.

It seems that different weapons can have various different effects upon getting a critical hit. Sometimes a critical hit from Rodi's katana can stun the enemy, or a critical hit from Melody's staff can absorb HP. This is fun, but it kinda just makes me want to use magic attacks even less, cause doing damage with the weapon + a chance to do something cool is usually always better than doing damage with magic + no chance to do something cool + use up some MP on top of that.
This is another thing Golden Sun took and improved on as well. Weapons in Golden Sun have specific unleash effects, it's another really cool thing about that game I love.
....ok I'll stop comparing this game to Golden Sun now. haha. Golden Sun just keeps coming to mind because it's so ingrained into me, you know? And seeing an older game that feels so proto-Golden Sun-ish in many of its systems is fascinating to me.

Oh, I should mention that some of the status spells are actually decently useful. Early in the game, the forest area has a nasty tree enemy that spews a swarm of bats at you, which targets the whole party. And a bit later on in the sewers, there's a crab enemy that shoots bubbles that do the same thing. ... Rodi has a sleep spell, which doesn't always work, but when it does, it can significantly reduce the amount of healing I need to do during these tougher encounters. Preventing a turn of party-wide damage is significantly helpful early on in the game. ...I found the usefulness of the sleep spell lessened the more into the game I went though, as later on you have more HP to take hits, so the possibility of the sleep spell failing was no longer worth the turn wasted not attacking.

...

This game has an interesting system in regards to how enemies appear.

Throughout the journey, you can search the space in front of you in order to examine your surroundings. Most of the time you just get flavour-text like "this tree trunk is tall", or "The rock looks heavy" etc, but in specific spots, you may come across a hidden item. And hidden throughout the game there are also these little pixies you can find if you search in specific spots. There are five types of pixie - Fairy, Pixie, Succubus, Incubus, and Leprechaun. ... and yes, one of the pixie types is just called "Pixie"... that's not confusing or anything is it.

You can have one of your pixie types selected by pressing L and R to cycle through them. And whenever an enemy appears, you can press the A button to unleash your selected pixie against the enemy at the start of battle. If the pixie type you selected matches the way the enemy appears, then the pixie will hit. If they don't match, then they miss and do nothing.

The way it works is: if an enemy's entrance animation shows it charging from the distance, then you need to use a Fairy. If an enemy's entrance animation shows it dropping from the ceiling, then you need to use a Pixie. If it approaches from the left side, you need to use a Succubus, and if it's from the right side, an Incubus. If an enemy emerges from the ground, then you need to use a Leprechaun. And if there are multiple enemies, then any of the applicable pixies will work.
When a pixie successfully hits, it deals damage to every enemy in the battle, and it also increases the amount of gold and exp received, as well as increasing the item drop rate. In fact, I believe there are some rare items from certain enemies that can drop only if you got a successful pixie hit at the start of the fight. The more pixies you have, the more powerful these effects become. There are 10 of each type of pixie in the game, so 50 to find in total.

I find the pixie system... really cool, actually. Some of the enemy animations are longer than the others - and in fact, they seem to have specifically given the enemies with quicker animations better item drops. For these, you have much less time to select the correct pixie when they emerge. You sort of have to anticipate them.
...You can even create little strategies - When you've run around a dungeon enough to get an idea of which enemies are around, you can have equipped the correct pixie for the quicker enemies, and if you encounter one, press A straight away. And if instead you encounter an enemy with a slower intro animation, it at least it gives you enough time to select the right pixie for the job. ...it's kind of silly how you can optimise this sort of thing. But yeah, there is a reaction element to this whole pixie biz, it's not purely luck of the draw to have the right one equipped for whoever appears.
I enjoy having this kind of low-stakes micromanagement to think about as I run around the mazes. It's not all that important if you fail it, but when you do get a successful pixie hit and it results in a cool item drop, it makes you feel special. :D

The enemy encounter system seems to not actually be entirely random - enemies are located in designated spots around the dungeon, with a percentage chance to appear whenever you pass over these specific tiles. This allows them to create some very context-dependent enemies, such as the Ice Siren, a water elemental who only emerges from blue circular puddles on the floor. Or zombie enemies who like to appear emerging from behind a corner at crossroads. I also appreciate that this means that enemies don't have the capability to appear on literally every tile in a dungeon - it gives you some nice safe zones here and there, and reduces the randomness of the dungeon progression.

I will say that the combat in this game is a little on the slow side due to all the enemy attack animations. Encounters are frequent, and animations are slow. Thankfully I could use the emulator speed-up function, making it more bearable ...but if I was playing on a proper Saturn, I think I may have had to have YouTube running in the background or something. ...it seems the more old RPGs I play, the less patience I have for slow encounters, huh.
It also doesn't help that, in certain parts of the game, it can lag pretty heavily...which makes encounters take even longer.
Encounters being so frequent and also so slow to resolve was the main reason why I ended up preferring brute-force over using spells. It was so much easier to just hold down the A button during my turn, which auto-selects regular attack for each member, than it would have been to go into the spell menu and select a specific spell to use. ...

...

The dungeons in this game are actually pretty interesting and unique.
There are ten or so dungeon areas in the game, and each of them has its own unique theming and gameplay mechanics.


There's a forest with a graveyard connecting to an underground passage.
There's a.... second forest with a graveyard with a different underground passage. Okay maybe this one isn't so unique.
There's an underground sewer beneath the castle town, which has puzzles to move the walls to create the way through.
There's an abandoned mansion with locked doors and furniture-pushing puzzles to solve.
There's a cave with a huge snake that blocks entire corridors, which must be approached from the head to fight off to clear the path. Plus some ice-floor puzzles for good measure.
There are three shrines that each house one of the Three Sacred Treasures:
The South Shrine has a unique twisted gravity path that lets you walk on the dungeon's ceilings.
The West Shrine features lots of water passageways where you ride on turtles to proceed.
The East Shrine features a gigantic tree that has grown through the whole dungeon, with lots of smaller vines used to get up and down each floor.
There's a mirage tower which has many floors that each have their own gimmick, plus holes to fall down to reach otherwise unreachable spots on lower floors.
And finally, There's the mines from the prologue, which is explored as the final dungeon at the end of the game. It features minecart puzzles, and long stretches of tough enemies.

...
Okay that's ten, right? Yeah. Only one dungeon theme is re-used, that being the forest graveyard theme. Overall it's a ton of variety!

This is way way way more variety than I would have expected from an oldschool dungeon crawler game to be quite honest. The environments never felt repetitive, and I never felt bored with them at any point. I was really engaged with each dungeon (encounters aside), and they each felt very distinct.


As far as dungeon-crawler RPGs go, this game is very very user-friendly. You have access to the current dungeon map at all times, and it is very helpful. It fills out as you explore, so you can tell exactly where you haven't been yet. It shows differences in elevation with different colours, and it lets you scroll through each floor of the current dungeon you're in.
In this game, if your party is defeated, you simply wake up at the previous church, without having lost any progress. And furthermore, the power of the spirits inhabiting their bodies means that if Arthur, Melody or Rodi get defeated in battle, they will revive themselves after the fight with 1hp. This is extra helpful because Melody gets a resurrection spell, so as long as you manage to win, she will be able to restore everyone back to life no matter who died. (as long as she has enough MP for the job, of course).
I also like how, when you revive someone mid-battle, they don't waste their turn - they pick a random action to perform the moment they get up. Pretty cool.

I would say that the overall difficulty of the game is on the low side - however, the bosses can prove to be quite a challenge.
For a majority of the game, I wouldn't really care who's holding which items as I could breeze through the enemies just fine... but for some of the later bosses, suddenly I was having trouble, and I had to prepare everyone's inventories before trying again, and come up with backup plans for when my main healer died, and things like that. The RPG combat actually became genuinely interesting for these bosses, as I had to use everything I had in order to get through. In actuality, it's really not a bad oldschool JRPG combat system at all, but it does suffer from only getting to fully shine in only a small number of difficult bosses, and not much anywhere else.

...

One of the aspects of the game that wasn't so easy to figure out was the locations of optional hidden stuff. Mostly the pixies. I had to use a guide to gather all 50 of them, because some of them were located in some incredibly nondescript spaces that I would never have found by myself.
Normally, hidden items and hidden pixies are found by searching at the end of dead ends. So whenever you reach the end of a path, it's good practice to use the search command, and this will get you the majority of the pixies.... with the exception of a few who are just... not in dead ends. There are a few that are like... one or two tiles before the dead end for some reason. Very annoying, and practically impossible to find without a guide if you don't want to literally search every single tile of floor and wall in every dungeon.
At the very least, each pixie is given a unique name, so searching for their location online is not a big problem. You always know which ones you're missing.

There's also the matter of Doyle, the only optional party member. He's a ninja wolfman who appears throughout the game helping you out of predicaments from time to time.
In order to actually recruit him to the team, however, you have to............ go back to the first town and examine a tree that wasn't there before. Doyle was using a ninjutsu to disguise himself as a tree, and was just standing there waiting for Arthur to come find him.
I would have NEVER found Doyle without the use of a guide! That's a little bit too much, to expect players to have to notice that there's a tree there that wasn't there before. It doesn't particularly stand out. ...
The only hint you get is the chief of the ninja village saying "Doyle already left to go look for you". ... apparently this is supposed to indicate that he's in the first village, but... idk. seems like not enough of a hint to me.

Doyle ended up being my strongest damage-dealer and he was indispensable for the trek through the last dungeon. I'm so glad I didn't end up missing him.

There don't seem to be any actual missables in this game, thankfully. Every dungeon and location is fully-backtrackable at any time, and no location ever becomes locked after completing it. I definitely appreciate this.

Hm...
I guess i'll start complaining about minor things now:


Sometimes when using the search command, the descriptions can be very misleading. "Arthur checked the stone statue. It looks like it's going to move". .... well, it doesn't move. It never moves. When I first saw this text, I assumed that moving the stone statue would be part of a puzzle. But it really isn't. You can't do anything with it at all. No matter how many times you bump into it or try searching it, nothing happens. It's just flavour text.
The intent seemingly was for the text to say something like "the statue is so lifelike, it's as if it could move at any moment". But the translation doesn't really get that feeling across. Instead it feels like a hint that doesn't work. .... well, once you keep playing and notice that every examinable statue in the game has the same flavour-text, you'll realise that it's not important. It really was just the first statue I came across that made me think something was up.


There were some bizarre moments that made me wonder about the game design. The mirage tower has a floor full of panels that make you spin around and lose your orientation. .... but you can just open the map at any time and see exactly which direction you're facing. ...Was this floor of the tower designed at a time during development before they made the map show your facing direction, I wonder? Because as it stands, there isn't really a puzzle here, it's more of an annoyance to have to keep opening the map.

...there was a moment in the west shrine turtle dungeon where you have to use an item called the Eye of Truth to make a hidden bridge appear. I was going a bit crazy trying to work out exactly where to use the eye. When I finally found the place, my only reaction was......... "you know, I guess this does kinda make sense". it wasn't a bad solution in hindsight, but it wasn't obvious beforehand either. idk.

The puzzle to enter the tower of illusion is awful. You get instructions telling you to "raise your right hand" as you walk into a specific spot, which is absolutely completely not obvious what that entails. Does it mean pressing the R button maybe? Does it mean "using" your equipped sword from the menu? I mean, how on earth can we tell Arthur to raise his hand, huh??? ....well somehow the solution is... to walk sideways. ... ... ???... I hated this puzzle the most. it's complete nonsense.


There's a kid in Enrich town who tasks you with finding his missing father. They even put a "Yes / No" prompt so you can formally agree to the task. However, his father is nowhere to be found. I was so confounded with being unable to find this kid's dad, so I looked it up - and apparently there is no dad, and this line of dialogue is just there for foreshadowing for Shining Force III ??? okay then. I mean that's fine i suppose, but don't present it like a quest and confuse your players like that, c'mon.


Every so often, the text box interface has a glimmery shimmery effect going on. I thought this meant something at first, but then I realised that it's completely meaningless. it's kind of distracting tbh.

...

ok here are some more random thoughts that didn't fit neatly elsewhere:

Occasionally as you explore the game, you find stat-boosting consumable items. Whenever I play a game where you cannot take the main character out of the team, I always like to pile every single stat booster on them. It probably isn't the best strategy, since Melody probably needed some more defense compared to Arthur who has plenty, but my reasoning is that.... if this guy is never not on the team, then i'm never NOT making use of those stat boosts, right??? ... as long as Arthur is alive that is.
I just don't like to have to worry about this stuff.

The south shrine had a gemstone puzzle where you had to calculate the value of a group of gemstones relative to each other based on the hint signs on the wall, and then distribute the value evenly between two vessels. I had to actually get a notepad out and properly work it out, which was fun, but kind of required me to shift my entire mindset into puzzle mode. Cool game haha.

There was a little girl NPC who gossips about one of the bad guys. If you keep talking to her too much, the bad guy suddenly appears and.... takes her away. forever. In the same area there is a mother NPC who is worried that her daughter is missing, and for the entire rest of the game, her dialogue is nothing but worrying about her missing daughter. ... ... I feel kind of bad for activating this cutscene... I guess I shouldn't have kept talking to her??? wow game designers, why would you make it my fault like that???


There seem to be three joke equipment items in the game that can randomly be offered to you as "rare items" when you exit a shop.
The Squeaksandals make your footsteps squeaky. it's funny. But not the kind of funny I would actually want to use, because it'd get old fast.
Then there's the "Courage Suit" that can only be equipped by males, and the "Vigor Scarf" that can only be equipped by females. They censored these item names in the English translation, but they didn't change the icons, so I can still see exactly what these items are supposed to be: The Courage Suit is actually a fundoshi, and the Vigor Scarf is actually a pink pair of panties.
This game doesn't really have much in the way of overt silliness like this aside from these items. But I suppose the Japanese game designers just couldn't help themselves.



Anyways. I really like this game. That's all I have to say!

Panzer Dragoon Saga

I played Panzer Dragoon Saga.

This is an RPG by Sega, released for the Saturn in 1998.

I played it on emulator.

 

Among retro enthusiasts, Panzer Dragoon Saga is mostly known for how rare and expensive it is secondhand - Sega released this game in extremely limited quantities, and have never re-released it since. Apparently the entirety of Europe only got around 1000 copies of the game, which is a frighteningly tiny number. ...There are way more than one thousand Sega fans in Europe, do they all gotta fight over who gets to have this game, or what???

Well. I didn't want to buy this game secondhand. Absolutely not. I played on emulator.

I was very curious to play this game. All this time, my only knowledge about this game was how rare it is, and not really anything about the actual game itself.

Panzer Dragoon Saga is an RPG in the Panzer Dragoon series. All other games in the series are arcade-style rail-shooting games, similar to Star Fox. But PD Saga is a full-on RPG.

I have not played any of the other Panzer Dragoon games, but from what I can see, they did do a good job at keeping the style of Panzer Dragoon intact with this game despite the genre shift.

The game makes extensive use of pre-rendered CG-animated movie cutscenes, which were very popular during the CD-ROM era of gaming. The opening cutscene is quite long, and quite a lot of things happen during it: We are introduced to our protagonist Edge, who works in the mines for the Empire. A monster appears in the mines, Edge is told to flee, but he attacks it anyway. Edge comes across a strange dormant girl in the ruins, and suddenly bad guys appear, kill all of Edge's friends, kidnap the dormant girl, shoot Edge, knock him into a giant chasm, and then we see a scene where they detonate a bomb to destroy the Empire's capital city, and... .... we haven't even started playing the game yet, why's so much plot happening already??

Edge is rescued by a dragon, and now we get to play the game. Except not for long - we can fly around on the dragon briefly, but when we land, we see another cutscene where Edge finds his dying captain, in an emotional scene to set him off on his journey. Then the battle tutorial menu appears, in what feels like a harsh tonal shift. You're not even gonna let any of the dramatic story moments settle before shoving battle tutorials in our face??

I think this game has a bit of a pacing problem. It feels like an entire prologue chapter's worth of storytelling went by in the span of one cutscene.

...

The battle system is quite interesting.

All combat in Panzer Dragoon Saga is done while riding atop the dragon.

The game has a menu-based RPG battle system. Encounters appear randomly as you fly through the areas, and it seems like the chance of an encounter can vary depending on several things, such as how much of the area you've completed, or which landmarks you're nearby, and things like that. I'm not too sure tbh. There's an item you can find called the Telepathy Shard that makes your radar change colour depending on the current encounter rate, and I still haven't worked out what changes it.

Quite often, there are large stretches of exploration where encounters don't appear at all, which I feel is quite unusual for a on old JRPG. 

But anyway.

Edge is the only playable character in this game, and the combat system revolves entirely around him flying on the dragon.

Combat is somewhat turn-based - you have an action gauge that fills up over time, similar to the famous Final Fantasy "ATB" system. Enemies also have a gauge that cannot be seen.

There are three segments to the gauge, and you spend full segments to perform attacks. Basic attacks cost one point, and spells can cost one, two or all three points depending on their power.

You have two forms of "basic" attack - Edge's gun, and the dragon's laser-breath. Edge's gun hits a single target of your choosing, while the laser hits multiple targets, but you don't get to specifically choose which ones.

A significant part of the battle system revolves around repositioning yourself around the enemy. You can circle around the enemy by pressing left to go clockwise, or right to go anticlockwise. There are four possible positions - to the left of the enemy, in front of the enemy, to the right of the enemy, and behind the enemy. 

Each position is also marked with a colour - if you're in a green position, that means the enemy can't currently reach you with any of its attacks. If you're in a neutral position, the enemy can currently hit you. And if you're in a red position, the enemy is currently capable of hitting you with a particularly strong move. So you need to keep adjusting your position in order to stay out of harm's way. But at the same time, the enemy is capable of repositioning itself too. 

In addition to dodging attacks, some particularly large foes, such as enemy airships and fortresses, may have weak points only on one side. Like, for example, shooting down the barrel of an enemy cannon for extra damage. There's a strong risk vs reward dynamic at play in this kind of scenario, since you need to be in the line of fire to hit the weak point.

Repositioning pauses your gauge accumulation, so doing it too much is detrimental, as the enemy will take their turns sooner than you. But this also applies to the enemy - so making them reposition around you can give you a few extra moments of gauge accumulation as well. You have to figure out what works best depending on what you're fighting.

As you level up and grow stronger, your dragon will learn spells - Spells cost BP, which is this game's magic points. It stands for Berserk Points.

I find the spells in this game to be difficult-to-understand. You get lots of different attacks that all seem to do variations of the same thing - namely, dealing a lot of damage to the enemies.

 Some of them cost more BP, some of them seem to do more damage than others, but overall.... the game doesn't really do a good job of informing me what the functional difference between all of these spells actually is. And I don't feel like the game gives much opportunity to experiment with them either, since most spells are strong enough to wipe out regular enemies anyway, so it's only on bosses where the differences would matter... and during bosses, the opportunity cost of experimenting with the different spells is too high. I don't want to try comparing effectiveness of spells when I have a boss bombarding me with attacks at the same time.

...

The fact that the whole combat system relies entirely on flying on the dragon is the main reason I think the pre-rendered cutscenes have to do the bulk of the scene-setting and storytelling. Because there doesn't exist any gameplay systems for Edge being able to fight while not atop the dragon.

You can't have Edge actually fighting against the monster in the mines seen in the prologue, because that's before he gets the dragon. So it's only shown as part of the cutscene.

To illustrate this issue further: later on in the game, Edge infiltrates an imperial airship. What happens is: we break a way in, Edge dismounts and enters, and a cutscene plays showing Edge sneaking around the inside of the ship, getting noticed, captured, tied up, tortured, left for dead, rescued by a shady character he met earlier, escorted out, and then reunited with his dragon.... now we're on the dragon again, we can finally stop being in a cutscene so we can have a boss fight with the imperial troops in the sky.

 ........this entire section of the story had to be conveyed through a prolonged cutscene, because there doesn't exist any way for the game to have combat gameplay while on foot. ...

This makes me feel like the game is at odds with its own systems and limitations.

...

A decent ways into the story, the dragon unlocks the ability to transform. At any time you can decide to adjust sliders for your dragon's Attack vs Spirituality, and their Defense vs Speed. So if you want, you can have a dragon that's all about defense and attack, but is slow and bad at magic. In this system, Attack is the opposite of Spirituality, and Defense is the opposite of Speed, so it is not possible to create a dragon that is both defensive and speedy, or strong at both attacks and magic.

This not only changes its effectiveness in battles, but also affects things like BP costs, available spells, and also how cool the dragon looks aesthetically - higher Attack gives it a longer horn, and higher Defense makes it look chunkier. Each mode also has different passive effects - my favourite is the Normal type dragon, where the stats are balanced equally, because its passive ability is to heal HP whenever you have a full gauge of three segments. This means easy healing mid-battle if you can position yourself well.

You can even transform your dragon to any configuration mid-battle, at the cost of one gauge segment. This makes it pretty fun and versatile - you can respond to a boss that doesn't give you anywhere to hide by increasing your defense right there and then. Or increase your magic when you realise that a boss isn't taking much damage from your gun. 

There is an interesting reward system from combat. Depending on how long the encounter took and how much damage you took during it, you are rewarded with a grade. The grades are: "Excellent", "Great Fight", "Good Fight", "Close Call", "Narrow Escape". 

The amount of EXP you obtain after combat is affected by which grade you earned, with the best grades rewarding a ton of extra EXP. Additionally, enemies can only drop items if you score a Great Fight or Excellent rank. Anything below, and you will not get any item drops at all. ...

This system does reward player knowledge above all else, but I find it a bit unfair that me stalling for HP recovery often causes me to get a Close Call rank, despite the fact that I'm actually playing it safe. ...

The majority of item drops from enemies is either regular healing potions or just junk for selling. However, annoyingly there is one sidequest that requires an item that is only obtained from boss monsters. So the only way to get this item is to already know how to score an Excellent rank on a boss, which you can't really know how to do on a first-time playthrough. ... And by the time you find this guy's quest, there aren't even any more bosses that can drop this item until after the quest becomes unavailable anyway. .... no fair!

Overall, I like the combat system in this game. It's unique and easy to understand (aside from the spells), and the enemy encounters are varied and make good use of the positioning system to keep things interesting throughout the adventure.

...

So there does exist gameplay on foot, but this is limited to town exploration. There are only a small number of town areas in the game, but they are very detailed.

This game features full Japanese voice acting for all characters and all lines of dialogue. ... ...Except, for some reason, during the opening prologue cutscene, and the epilogue scene at the end of the game. For whatever reason, the first and last scenes of the game have voiceovers in a made-up fictional language. .... but everything in between is entirely voiced in Japanese. 

I'm personally not a fan of the inconsistency here. why not just voice the whole game in Japanese??

...I also want to complain about how the English subtitles go by really really quickly. You have to be a really fast reader in order to play this game if you can't understand the Japanese voices. It's a bit jarring, but I suppose there wasn't much they could do about it without significantly restructuring the game. And no localisation team wants to have to go through that kind of effort, especially if they are only planning on printing limited quantities of the localised version anyway. ... I can forgive them.

But overall, I am impressed with just how much incidental and contextual dialogue is in this game, all of which is fully-voiced. I can understand why they did not dub this game into English since there is just so much dialogue.

The town area isn't very big, but every NPC is named and unique, and they all update their dialogue after every major story event. And there are tons of hidden item rewards and sidequests that are found only at very specific points in the story if you go looking for them. 

When walking around town, you have a cursor which is used to interact with the environmental objects and people. You can interact from far away or from nearby, and both have different results. From far away, you get a general description, from nearby, you get more specific information.

Far interact: "It's a durable wooden box". Near interact: "This box is locked". ... stuff like that. 

This means that everything in the game has two descriptions, and it can get a bit fiddly if you want to read it all. Sometimes, actually getting far enough away from the thing to trigger the Far description while still keeping it onscreen to select with the cursor isn't always easy...

I do enjoy how the Far interact can be used to eavesdrop on NPC conversations. If you approach NPCs talking to each other and Near interact, they'll just say "Shoo kid, we're busy here". but you can hear what they're talking about by Far interacting. That's a nice detail.

...

.... The overall tone of the story and the world is very serious. This is a world oppressed by imperial rule. The town we see the most of in this game, Zoah, is a town ruled by the religious elite class, segregating themselves away from the working class citizens whom they treat as unworthy. Yet the whole town remains under threat of imperial occupation if they don't stay in line. There's a whole political situation at play here that gives the storytelling a rather bleak tone. And even after the Empire is out of the picture towards the end of the story, that doesn't mean the world is no longer in a rough state by any means.

And there aren't really any moments of levity to break the dreariness up. There are no optional minigames, and no silly characters or moments of comedic relief.  

I suppose I prefer my stories on the more whimsical side... because I found myself not fully invested in this world, unfortunately. 

Though I do respect the amount of worldbuilding and storytelling in the game. There are plenty of small little interactions and pieces of dialogue, you can tell the designers truly cared about every small detail.

This game's tone is not 100% up my alley personally, but I can respect it for doing a great job at being what it wants to be.

ok actually. before i continue, let me think about this point a bit more.

... When I play RPGs, what I enjoy most is the fantasy of living within the world. ....but when the world is this dour, I find myself less inclined to want to do so. 

I think the fact that we don't really see any thriving civilisations also adds to my feelings. ...in Panzer Dragoon, the only people I can see are subject to this depressing oppressive regime. My only example of the what the world is like to live in is just... miserable. Which makes me as a visitor of this world less invested in wanting to involve myself with it. 

...That being said, when it's just me flying on the dragon in the desolate barren landscapes, there is a sort of serene beauty to the world. I'm not saying there's nothing to appreciate about it.

Of course, I was interested in seeing how the storyline progressed. I wasn't bored by the actual story, and it does have some cool fantasy shenanigans going on with dragons and monsters and ancient relics and even an alternate dimension toward the end. I could watch all the low-res pre-rendered CG cutscenes and stay interested in the plot the same way as if I was watching a movie, no problemo. 

...But I guess I just found myself not having much of an attachment to this world. And that's what I personally find to be what makes me care about an RPG the most. In fact, being able to explore a world is what makes me love videogames more than any other entertainment medium in general.

This is just the kind of player I am - I value the world above the plot, and if I don't develop an attachment to the world, then I tend to become less invested in the story as a result.

... And it's not just the story of the world that matters either - what's also important for me is how the world feels to traverse as you play. Which brings me to the game's level design.

The level design of this game is... ... ... ... honestly not great.

There seem to be two types of environment design in the game.... linear corridors, and big open squares.

Despite being a game where you have full 3D flight capability on a dragon, the map design is extremely flat and uninteresting. You can fly up and down, but there isn't a whole lot of verticality to the level design at all. 

The interior dungeon areas are extremely boring, you're essentially just flying through tubes the entire time. There's nothing going on except following the one and only path forward. Even the big scary "Tower" area, the largest dungeon in the game that has a lot of buildup leading up to it.... is still mostly just flying through tubes when you actually get to it. It's immensely uninteresting to play.

And the wide-open areas aren't all that much better either - they mostly take the form of a big flat square with stuff sticking out from the ground. Like a piece of ocean with rocks and pillars and sticks and stuff. All of these rocks appear on your map as if they're some interesting landmarks, but when you actually approach them.... yeah, they're really just rocks and sticks and they don't really do anything.

There are item boxes to break open for some goodies, and occasionally there's a mechanism to activate to open a path forward and all that... but I think this game really dropped the ball in the level design department. 

The way I see it... this is a unique RPG where your primary form of movement is 3D flight on a dragon. That's quite a cool idea, and it's a concept that has so much potential. And, unfortunately, they do absolutely nothing with this premise at all. The ability to fly up and fly down is largely irrelevant. It's as if I was playing a regular old top-down RPG, except with a 3D camera.

 It feels so sad how much they didn't care to design levels that truly require you to explore in the sky in 3D space. To me, this is the game's biggest missed potential.

...

Overall..... I'm happy I finally know what Panzer Dragoon Saga is all about. I'm glad I finally know something other than "it's the game that's really rare and expensive". .... I think the game has some really cool and interesting things going on, but ultimately, it didn't appeal to me enough for me to truly fall in love with it.

moon: Remix RPG Adventure

I just finished playing a very unusual game called "moon: Remix RPG Adventure". Also known as simply "moon" in lowercase.

Originally moon was released in Japan only, for PlayStation in 1997.

In 2020, moon was released on Nintendo Switch, with a brand new English translation. This is the version I played.

This game likes to describe itself as an "anti-RPG", which is a peculiar thing to claim. What does it even mean?

Well, after having played the entire game.... I'm still not entirely sure. 

moon isn't really an RPG, despite having "RPG" in its title. moon is more of an adventure puzzle-solving game.

But it is a story about an RPG, sort of.

The beginning of the game shows a young boy playing an RPG on his game console.

The RPG is about a Hero knight on a quest to slay the evil dragon who has eaten the moonlight from the sky. On his quest, the Hero needs to travel across the land, defeating monsters in order to gain experience.

It's as typical an RPG as you can imagine.

This opening prologue sequence shows snippets of the boy's RPG adventure across multiple play sessions: The boy skips past the long exposition text at the beginning of the game, the Hero explores the castle town and acquires legendary armor from the innkeeper, the Hero defeats a slime monster outside the town with powerful magic, the Hero destroys boulders blocking the path forward, the Hero protects a family terrorised by a monster... and eventually, the Hero slays the Dragon in a climactic finale.

After defeating the Dragon, the boy's mother tells him to turn the game off and go to bed. ...

However... the console mysteriously turns itself back on, with a television screen full of static. The boy approaches, and he is drawn into the screen... The boy wakes up in "Moon World". From here, he can see the world from a very different perspective.

In this world, the boy is not the Hero. The boy is completely invisible, almost as if he doesn't quite fit in this world.

Soon after arriving in Moon World, he meets a kindly old Gramby who seems to recognise him somehow. She gives the invisible boy a set of clothes, including a big pair of gloves and shoes, and a sleeping cap for good measure. These clothes give the invisible boy a physical form within Moon World. 

For the rest of the game, we play as this walking set of clothing.

...during the character naming screen, there are no capital letters available. only lowercase. The default name for the invisible boy is "popepe". This is what I decided to name him. Interestingly, Gramby calls him "POPEPE" with capital letters. Is this just a strange quirk, or is something else going on?

In the Moon World, popepe can see the Hero's actions in a very different light. On his quest to gain experience, the Hero has been slaying all of the creatures of the Moon World. Leaving a trail of carcasses in his wake, their lingering spirits still haunting the land. 

And it's up to popepe to find out what's going on.

...

The overall presentation and style of this game is very surreal, and I very much like it a lot.

The game combines pixel art for the characters, pre-rendered CG for the backgrounds, and clay sculpture models for the various critters. It's a visually interesting combination of styles.

The game world is very absurdist, but it remains grounded too. This is a world where all sorts of unusual things can happen, yet everything is taken seriously and treated as normal by the people who live there.

The first area of the game is Castle Town - in stark contrast to the generic RPG town we see in the opening, the people who live in Castle Town have a lot of interesting unique things going on if you care to pay attention to them. They aren't just static generic NPCs, each one is an individual with their own daily schedule.

Later areas of the game stray further and further away from the realm of "generic RPG" to the point where that's not even in consideration any more. There's a record store guy practicing his electric guitar in a cave. There's a classic "all-American" family home, complete with white picket fence and mowed lawn. And toward the end of the game, we see a techno society full of robot businessmen who go to the nightclub every night to pretend to dance. ........this is just the kind of bizarro world I'm a big fan of. Especially with how it's never drawn attention to how "weird" it is. It just exists the way it exists, without the need to make sense, without the need to point out how it doesn't make sense. I love a game that is confident in itself to this extent.

The game is also full of metaphysical and metaphorical imagery too. Moon World feels like a dream world. Every time you go to sleep, the background changes to show a blurry image of an indistinct location. the fisherman says that the fishing bait likes to "eat moonlight". the waitress mentions how the cactus salad tastes more like cactus than mushroom, right? and their special wine lets you hear the ingredients.

...It's very abstract, and you just have to let it all wash over you. Not everything you see in this game is there to be made sense of. Just vibe with it and you'll be fine.

A lot of care has been put into the character designs of this game  - everyone has a unique appearance that conveys their personality, with plenty of exaggeration and stereotype in their designs. When you speak to a character, their text appears with gibberish sound bites that seem to be chopped up remixed pieces of audio taken from who knows where. I think the sound bites used for the Baker character are from something spoken in English, because I can make out bits and pieces of English phrases whenever I talk to him. It actually gets a bit distracting. 

And I want to give my praises to this game's brand new English translation. I think it's absolutely wonderful. The dialogue is so off-kilter in a way that perfectly suits the subtle sense of humour the game has. Small things such as the old lady being "Gramby" instead of the more normal "Granny". There's a guy who says "Nice to konnichiwa you!" And all sorts of other not-quite-perfect phrases that gives every line of dialogue so much personality. I genuinely love the dialogue in this game.

...

The gameplay of moon is mainly exploration and puzzle-solving. Talking to NPCs and finding items. Like a classic point-and-click adventure game.

The game runs on a clock system, complete with seven days of the week. Time runs pretty quickly in this game - a full day is about ten minutes. And popepe's walking speed is quite leisurely, so it can feel like time is flying a bit too quickly as you explore.

You have an energy gauge - staying up for too long will cause popepe to collapse into a Game Over. You can extend your energy timer by eating food items, or recharge it fully by going home to sleep.

At first, popepe's energy is very limited - he can only stay up for half a day long. But you can extend it as you progress through the game by collecting "Love".

Love is the main collectible in moon. 

Love is the reward for helping the NPCs. Listening to their problems, learning their secrets, finding their missing items, inspiring their inventions, completing their little sidequests, winning in their minigames... all of these interactions will reward you with Love. 

The other main way to gain Love is to catch the spirits of the creatures killed by the Hero.

All across the world, you will find dead carcasses of critters, left behind by the so-called Hero. Examining their body will bring up information about the creature - its behaviour, its habits, its likes and dislikes, its role in life... 

This information is useful for tracking down where the creature's lingering spirit might be hiding. Some of them are in plain sight but are difficult to reach, while others require very specific circumstances before they show themselves.

Upon finding and catching the spirit, it will revive the creature back to life. It will then be taken away by an octopus UFO to safety, and you will earn some Love.

Essentially, popepe is cleaning up after the Hero, righting his wrongs.

...

There is no formal quest list in this game - in order to find the tasks and rewards to earn Love, you need to be very observant and have a good memory. You may need to be good at remembering small details mentioned offhand. 

The tavernkeeper lady mentions how sometimes the Baker returns home so drunk he forgets to lock his house. If you keep this small fact in mind, you might at some point try seeing if it leads to something - you can wait for a day Baker visits the tavern, wait for him to return home, and follow him inside his house. Once inside, popepe can discover Baker's secret, which leads to earning a point of Love. 

As you gain more Love, popepe's energy meter increases, which allows you to explore further and further.

At the beginning, your main concern will be to find as much Love as you can so you can venture further without collapsing.

But the energy system starts to lose its relevance in the second half of the game. Once you have enough Love to last a couple of days awake, there isn't anything that's truly closed off to you any more.

Reaching the ending of the game does require a large amount of Love, however, so even if you don't really need the extra energy, you still need to keep finding more Love to progress.

To be honest.... I am not a fan of the fact that running out of energy causes a Game Over - it makes you load a previous save, undoing everything you may have accomplished since your last save. This is a slow-paced game about observing the characters, and I feel like having such a harsh time limit hanging above your head the whole time clashes with this gameplay style horribly. I'm glad it gets better later on, but during earlygame, the timer really does feel unnecessarily oppressive in a way I think does not enhance the mood. I think they could have come up with a better way of doing things. 

That being said, the timer system is used in interesting ways throughout the game that do force you to treat your energy like a resource. For example, there's a desert area with high ledges that normally cannot be reached. However, there are bizarre plants that are flat in the daytime and tall in the nighttime. If you stand on one of those plants when it transitions from day to night, the plant will extend upwards with you on top of it, allowing you access to the ledge. However, in order to get back down, you need to again wait for the night-to-day transition to occur. This means that you need to spend at least one full day of energy if you want to explore the ledge here. I do like the resource management aspect at play here.

Another example is with Yoshida, the little birdie who runs a travel agency from within his birdcage. He offers to take you to his hometown island, but the journey takes one-and-a-half days to complete. You need to have enough energy to last the whole trip if you want to go.

This also brings me to another big complaint I have with the game - the sheer amount of waiting you have to do! Because there are so many things dependent on time-of-day or day-of-the-week, you often have to do a LOT of waiting around in order to progress. And due to the cryptic nature of the puzzles, a lot of the time your only way of figuring out puzzle solutions is to wait around to see if it works. If you suspect a character will be someplace at a specific time, the only way to test this is to wait there to see if they show up. And if they don't... well, you've just waited around for nothing. 

While exploring, the timer feels like it goes so fast, but when waiting, there isn't any way to actually speed it up, so it feels like it takes forever. 

.......this game actually predates The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, which has an ocarina that lets you control the time of day with a song. ... while playing moon, I was craving something like this... I wanted the ability to manually skip ahead to the next day-night transition without having to sit there doing nothing for ten minutes. But it doesn't exist, so we have no choice. ...

...

As a puzzle-focused adventure game, you accumulate an inventory of various items as you play.

You can show any item to an NPC in order to ask about it - normally the response is just "what is that?", but sometimes you might be able to gain some interesting hidden information by showing the right item to the right person.

For example, showing the Castle Town residents a picture of Gramby can lead to some interesting pieces of information regarding what happened before you arrived. 

One character, Yoshida the little birdie, will respond usefully to almost any item in the game, making him the go-to NPC for hints. 

Again, I have some complaints about this system. And this time, my complaint is simply... there just aren't enough lines of dialogue written for it. It seems like the only characters who even have anything to say about your inventory items are all in Castle Town - characters in later areas basically never have anything to say if you show them items, and for many of them, trying to show them items doesn't even work. It feels like they kind of gave up implementing this system half way through the game?

...If you show the King in Castle Town a dud firework, he becomes quite interested, and reveals he was planning on making a huge fireworks show, but the firework makers couldn't quite get it to work. He gives a hint as to how to find the firework maker.

Later in the game when you finally manage to acquire a working firework, if you show it to the King, he doesn't have anything to say about it at all. It's just the generic "I don't know" response ... ... and it just feels wrong. It kinda feels like a piece of the game is missing. And there's examples of this all throughout the game - there are so many items that I feel should absolutely have an interesting reaction, yet they only give the default nothing message. 

I feel like this inventory system is severely underbaked.

Regarding NPC text... A lot of the NPCs in this game like to revert back to their default text once you've completed their tasks. This feels especially wrong with characters you spend a lot of time with such as Yoshida the birdie - you travel with him to his hometown island, attend owl lectures with him, ask him for advice about countless items... but whenever you talk to him normally, it's still always his default text where he introduces himself and says "hey, aren't you popepe?" and all that.

I'm not a fan of this.

...

Figuring out how to actually progress the game is tricky - the critical path is not obvious at all. Once you reach the house in the centre of the map, you have three directions to go that all lead to dead-ends. It's not at all obvious which breadcrumb trails are optional and which ones are mandatory. You just get some vague hints about all sorts of different things, and you kind of just have to take it from there.

I don't mind this at all, actually. For the vast majority of the game, I was having a great time figuring things out by myself. I had enough leads to follow that I could decide what I wanted to focus on next, and with enough patience, I was able to solve the vast majority of the game.

However, this didn't last the whole game. There came a point where I was completely 100% stumped, and no matter what I tried, I just had no idea how to proceed.

I was stuck on a caviar quest for a while. I needed to feed caviar to a ghost inside a painting, but the only source of caviar was a restaurant that served it for popepe to eat right there, not as an obtainable item. I had no idea what to do from there. No matter how many times I ordered the caviar, the option to take it as an item never presented itself.

...As it turns out, I didn't even have the ability to find the real caviar without first solving an unrelated, almost impossibly-obtuse puzzle about eating five different mushrooms in the correct order.

I still have no idea how you're supposed to know the correct order. I managed to work out that I had to eat the five mushrooms, and I even figured out that it had to be done at night-time, but the hint for which order to eat them in... I just didn't see a way to get this information. It can be deduced, but it requires making huge assumptions about the meanings of nonsense words spoken by specific NPCs. You just have to assume that a specific NPC's five nonsense words correlates to the meanings of "first, second, third, fourth, fifth" without any indication that that's what they're talking about. I think this is a badly designed puzzle to be honest.

And when you do get the "caviar", it doesn't even have anything to do with the caviar from the restaurant whatsoever, and it's not even actually caviar at all...?? it is in fact a tadpole, and the only way to know that this tadpole is supposed to be the "caviar" the painting ghost wants is by asking Yoshida about it. He says it's sometimes nicknamed caviar for its great taste. or something. 

...There's non-obvious puzzles in adventure games, and then there's stuff like this. 

...

The caviar itself isn't a required item, but solving this horrible mushroom puzzle absolutely is required to beat the game.

It's not optional. Every player must suffer through this poorly designed hint, and then give up and look up the solution online. I can't imagine someone actually making the unprompted leap of logic the designers expect you to make to solve it without help. ...

...If you ever got stumped by an obtuse puzzle in a King's Quest or Broken Sword game, you'll feel right at home in moon. haha.

Anyway. moon has some other small things that really bugged me as I played. There's a character named Adder who gives you a series of obnoxious quizzes, which includes stuff like "what face did I just make?" after showing you a series of weird faces that only show up on screen for half a second. Thankfully the Nintendo Switch has a video capture button that records the previous 30 sec of gameplay, otherwise this guy's quizzes would have been significantly more annoying. 

Additionally, there's a horrible, absolutely abhorrent minigame called "XINGISKAN" that involves rhythmically tapping the A button with EXTREME precision in order to make a missile hit a sphere. It's one of the most infuriating things I've ever played. Thankfully this is optional, but I did strive to get every single Love in the whole game, so I had to suffer through it anyway.

The music in moon is also unusual. Some locations have background music as normal, but the majority of the game world is actually completely silent. Instead, popepe carries around with him a music player, and you can find music discs throughout the game to play whatever music you prefer.

...well, I say "throughout the game", but... there are 36 discs in the game, however only 4 of them are found in various places...the other 32 are just bought from the record shop guy in a cave. ... it could have been a fun extra collectible or bonus reward for sidequests, but they kind of didn't implement it that way. You just buy most of them.

The music discs have a wide variety of music on them - some of them are atmospheric, some experimental... I think the developers commissioned some indie bands to make songs for this game. It's quite unique. One of the songs even uses Pac-Man sound effects for its bassline, which..... I guess that's okay as long as Namco doesn't find out???

Overall, moon: Remix RPG Adventure is a game I like a lot. It is brilliant artistically, and I suppose it has something to say about the nature of regular RPGs by making the generic RPG Hero such a bad guy. I take a lot of issue with some of the gameplay design, but I enjoyed the game world enough to put aside my frustrations so I could enjoy the game for what it wants to be.

moon is a good game, but you need to have patience to put up with its shenanigans.

Plok

 I just played Plok.

This is a SNES game from 1993

I played it on the proper SNES. I bought the cartridge from CeX the other day.

This game has never been re-released on anything. It's been SNES exclusive since the day it came out.

I had seen this game mentioned before a few times here and there, but I had never actually seen much of what the game was actually like until I played it just now.

Plok is a platforming sidescroller starring a funny yellow and red cartoony character named Plok.

The graphics are quite cute in this game. It's very cartoony and colourful. The sense of humour is also pretty good - Plok himself is very irritable, and he always has something to complain about between each level.

Plok has the ability to throw his limbs forward - his two arms and his two legs. His limbs will boomerang back towards him and reattach themselves automatically. 

Plok throws his limbs primarily to attack enemies.

You can throw out all four of Plok's limbs rapidly, but then you'll be left hopping around on your torso, unable to walk normally until you get at least one leg back. 

Rapid attacks aren't too useful anyway, since enemies who take multiple hits to defeat have a moment of invulnerability in between hits. So don't spam the attack button! It rarely helps.

There are also certain switches that will require Plok to leave behind a limb to activate. Plok can then pick his limb back up from the corresponding coat hanger, which is usually nearby. There are several sections of the game where Plok has to leave behind a few limbs in order to activate a sequence of platforms. And if you don't come back for them, you'll kinda just have to play the rest of the level without arms. It's funny.

The character kind of reminds me of Rayman in some ways, though the limb-throwing system in Plok is actually a lot more meaningful than in Rayman.

Rayman is kind of just a regular platformer with animations that depict detached limbs, without it really meaning anything in the gameplay. Whereas Plok's main gameplay gimmick is the whole detached limbs system.

Plok has two jumps - a short jump, and a somersaulting high jump. The high jump doesn't allow you to throw limbs, which complicates matters a little - you need to make sure you're using the right jump if you also need to attack.

I think this system is decently unique and interesting enough for this game. They make good use of the high jump with the level design, as there are plenty of jumps that require the extra distance. 

There are two main types of level in Plok - regular levels where you just need to reach the end, and flea-hunting levels where you need to find and defeat every flea before going to the end. There are around twelve or so fleas to find each time.

Every once in a while during a flea level, an arrow will appear on screen pointing to the nearest flea to keep you on track. And additionally, you can collect little beehives that allow you to summon friendly hornets that will chase after enemies, including fleas. 

The flea levels tend to be more exploration-focused and open-ended, while the regular levels are linear.

The level design in Plok is.... honestly, a little hit-or-miss. Overall, I'd call it "...maybe not so great". I think the camera is just a little bit too zoomed-in, it's often difficult to see where the enemies and platforms are. They made the characters and background so big and detailed, which looks nice on-screen, but can be a bit of a detriment to the playability. A moving platform can take you directly into a cluster of spikeballs, without much opportunity to get out the way. Or other times, you have to make a blind jump because you can't really see where you're going to land. 

Plok is always centred on screen, even when moving quickly, which means that there isn't a lot of time to react to oncoming obstacles. It would have been better if they had some sort of system to pan the camera, but I can understand that that isn't always so easy to implement.

Some of the levels are pretty long, and this game has no mid-level checkpoints at all. You only have one health bar to do the whole thing, and if you lose a life, you just have to start again. Thankfully, if it's a flea level, any defeated fleas will remain dead, so it's not quite as bad as it could have been otherwise. Even so, it is very harsh, especially in the longer levels. Healing pickups are very few, especially later in the game where most levels only have one healing pickup in the whole level.

Many of the flea levels have quite confusing layouts as well - it's often a puzzle just to figure out how to get anywhere.

I get the feeling that... a lot of these levels weren't playtested sufficiently enough to iron out the unintuitive parts.

Plok starts with four lives,

Each level has collectible shells - 100 shells gives Plok an extra life, though annoyingly, the number isn't really shown on screen - instead, you get a little Plok head silhouette in the hud that fills up yellow the closer to 100 you get. Would have preferred seeing more precise numbers, but whatever.

The continue system is very strange in this game.

Whenever you collect four "Plok Tokens", you earn a continue. You can find them hidden in certain stages (pretty rarely), and you get given one token every time you beat a level without dying once.

When you lose all your lives and use a continue, it doesn't start you from where you died - instead it starts you from the level where you obtained that particular continue.

So if you earned a continue in level 4, earned another continue in level 7, and then lost all your lives in level 10... you would be sent back to level 7 to try again. And if you lost all your lives again, this time, you'll be going all the way back to level 4. The continues are single-use, and it remembers exactly which level you earned each one...

The checkpointing system feels so harsh in this game. If you're dying just a little bit too often, you'll need to be prepared to replay a whole bunch of levels to get back to where you left off.

It's honestly quite demotivating.

Thankfully there is one saving grace - there are "Permanent Continue Positions" in the game. After specifically level 19 and level 29, the game sets a new starting point for when you Press Start on the title screen. So even after losing all of your continues and receiving a Game Over, as long as you don't turn off the SNES, starting a new game will actually start you from either level 20 or level 30, instead of the beginning. ... which is nice. Thanks for that. Though that still doesn't make me any less demotivated if I lose all my continues in level 27 and have to redo so many levels anyway.

Plok does not feature a save system, password system, level select menu, cheat codes, or anything else that can help. There is no way to fake it - you NEED to actually play through the levels properly in order to get to the end. 

There are a few hidden warp zones that can skip levels, but in order to actually successfully warp, you need to complete a challenge room first - and if you fail, the warp is missed with no opportunity to try again unless you die. They really want to make you work for your progress, huh.

The final stretch of levels take place in the Flea Pit, the home of the fleas. Annoyingly, every single Flea Pit level is a gimmick level where you need to ride vehicles through obstacle courses - there are seven: a unicycle, a car, a jetpack, a motorbike, a helicopter, a tank, and a UFO.  These levels really test your patience, because these are long courses with enemies shooting at you everywhere, very few healing opportunities, and each one has its own awkward set of controls to figure out. And it's during these levels that the poor camera really feels problematic, as the shooting enemies can aim at you even when they're offscreen.

To be quite honest, I'm not really a fan of this at all - the final levels kind of don't have anything to do with what the rest of the game is about, which is limb-throwing and flea-hunting. It would be one thing to have vehicle levels dotted throughout the game, but shoving them all in one after another right at the very end just doesn't feel right.

It took me two play sessions to finish Plok. The first time, I lost all of my continues and didn't feel like redoing seven levels just to get back to where I was, so I gave up.

The second time I played, I actually beat the whole game without using a single continue - I had managed to earn enough extra lives through collecting shells to last me the whole game. It was pretty close, though! I only had one spare extra life during my encounter with the Flea Queen in the final level. I was worried, but thankfully the final boss was actually kind of easy.

Phew!

Overall... I'm very glad I played Plok. It's a really interesting little game, and I had a lot of fun with it. I do think it has some very questionable game design choices, especially in regard to the checkpointing and continue system, but once you are skilled enough to not die too much, it matters less... so it's less of an issue. 

The level design unfortunately did not impress me, but the game is funny and charming enough that I am a fan regardless.

Hooray for Plok!

Lufia & The Fortress of Doom

I played Lufia & The Fortress of Doom

This is a SNES game from 1993. it was released in Japan under the name Estpolis Denki, and was never released in Europe at all.

I played the US version via emulator.

Lufia is a fairly typical Dragon Quest-style JRPG developed by Neverland, the same developer who would eventually go on to develop Rune Factory. ...I was not aware of this connection before I started looking into this game. I think Lufia was in fact their first game! 

The story involves a group of heroes who go on a journey to defeat the evil warriors known as the Sinistrals, who have revived after being defeated by a previous group of heroes 99 years ago.

This is an RPG that is extremely derivative of Dragon Quest. It has a very similar structure, a similar style of overworld, a similar style of dungeon design, a similar battle system - basically everything in this game reminds me of Dragon Quest, mostly Dragon Quest 3 in particular.

 

The exploration in this game is your typical RPG fare - the world has lots of towns dotted around a large overworld map comprised of multiple continents. At first you explore on foot, going across the overworld and through connecting caves in order to reach new towns. Eventually you get the boat, giving you more freedom, as well as a Warp spell to easily return to previous towns. And finally, towards the end of the adventure, you get the flying boat that grants you full freedom to explore every part of the map. This is very typical of not only Dragon Quest, but Final Fantasy and many other classic JRPGs too. But to me, it felt closest to Dragon Quest, specifically with how it feels to accumulate all the town warp locations, as well as the way the overworld feels to explore. It's difficult to describe exactly how DQ and FF and other JRPGs differ in this regard, but there are subtleties there I suppose. Lufia is mostly on the DQ end of the spectrum.

The way the dungeons are designed reminded me of Dragon Quest 3 in particular, because every single dungeon in this game is either a cave or a tower, with the exception of the titular Fortress of Doom seen during the prologue and ending. 

The dungeons are all mazes with the occasional puzzles to solve, and plenty of treasure chests to find. The mazes are not bad individually, but there are quite a lot of dungeons in this game, and the encounter rate is very high, so I did find myself getting rather fatigued as I played more and more of the game. 

I also found the treasure chests in this game to be disappointing, as there are just too many of them, and they generally don't contain unique or interesting items. Mostly potions and stuff. ...didn't stop me from compulsively wanting to open them all of course.

The tower dungeons let you fall off them - if you walk off the edge of a tower, you get to drop all the way down to the overworld map, as an easy escape. ...which is something pretty much taken directly from Dragon Quest.

The combat in Lufia is a very typical turn-based JRPG combat system. You have a party of four heroes (you start with two, and meet the other two as you progress), and you select Attack, Defend, Item, or Magic. Nothing out of the ordinary here. You can get attacked by multiple types of enemy at the same time, and when this happens, you cannot select individual enemies to target. If you get attacked by three frogs and one scorpion for example, you can decide to target either "frog" or "scorpion", but you can't select which frog to target - instead it's chosen randomly. This, yet again, is a gameplay thing lifted directly from Dragon Quest. And at this point, I'm starting to get a little annoyed with how on-the-nose Lufia is about copying its inspiration - especially considering this inability to target specific enemies is something I never liked about the early DQ games.

The four heroes in Lufia are:

The main hero, who doesn't have a canon name (so I called him Benjy). The main hero has the strongest stats, and gets access to healing and buffing magic.

The second hero is Lufia, the hero's childhood friend, and the mage of the group. She has extremely strong spells, but is rather fragile.

The third hero is Aguro, the captain of the guard in one of the later towns, and is the only hero who has no magic. His only strategy is to do regular attacks, or occasionally use items.

The fourth hero is Jerin, the half-elf who we rescue from being sacrificed to a monster. She uses a bow that hits multiple targets as her regular attack, and also has access to powerful magic spells.

The main hero is the son of Maxim, who was one of the four heroes who defeated the Sinistrals 99 years ago. Maxim was accompanied by three friends: Guy, Selan, and Artea. 

One interesting thing Lufia does is that the prologue of the game takes place in the original battle from the past - you play as the party led by Maxim, travelling through the final dungeon, the Fortress of Doom, on their quest to defeat the four evil warriors known as the Sinistrals. This prologue is quite interesting - it's a way for the game to show you the high-level spells you will get to use later on, and it also lets you see the main bad guys right from the start, which is a good way to introduce them into the story.

I also like how the front of the US box for the game says "Battle in the opening story!" as a selling point. I guess they were really proud of this prologue, huh?

After the prologue is over, the game begins with the hero and Lufia in the present day, as they learn about monster attacks suddenly occurring in other towns after 99 years of peace. They go out to investigate, which eventually leads them on a quest to hunt down the Sinistrals who have revived themselves through unknown means.

The plot of the game is not all that revolutionary - the hero decides to confront the Sinistrals in order to restore peace to the world. Lufia, his childhood friend, also plays a key part in the story, as she has a mysterious past that connects her to the Sinistrals in a way neither of them were aware of.

Overall, the story is nothing to write home about. Each new town you explore has a few scenes here and there to set up the local quests that progress the game, but there isn't all that much actual plot development throughout.

Some of the story scenes struck me as rather poorly-paced. The one that comes to mind in particular is when the team meets Guy, one of the original heroes who is now old and retired. The scene starts with Guy saying "I'm still alive and kicking!", but it immediately transitions to "well, it seems my time has come...", and then it immediately goes to show the heroes mourning at his gravestone. ... Like.. hold on a minute, this scene is moving way too fast! ... I mean, I get it. The point of showing Guy's death is to give our hero more resolve for completing his mission. I've seen storytelling before. But the way they handled this scene was very jarring and abrupt. Feels like it comes out of nowhere, just so the game can claim that it includes some important plot moments here and there. Not really a fan of how it was handled.

Regarding the story, there were some other minor moments that didn't make sense to me - for example, there is a thief boy who steals a ruby from a town in order to take it to his friend in another town. He seems perfectly able to travel between towns on foot by himself, yet whenever I have to travel between towns, I have to fend off random encounters with monsters. ... the game makes no attempt to explain how the boy is able to travel safely at all. It's a minor thing, but to me, it shows a lack of consideration for consistency in how the world works.

 

There was also a dungeon room that has a signpost outside of it saying, "Only women can enter this room" with no further explanation or justification. Lufia needs to enter this room by herself to retrieve an item. ...... but why though. Why can't the hero just go in with her. Why does he unquestioningly respect the signpost's authority over Lufia's safety? It's never even brought up again later or anything. There are no other points in the game where this happens. They don't even attempt to make it make sense. This completely baffled me.

Speaking of arbitrary gender things, there are quite a lot of stereotypes in the game. Early on there's a town known for its big shopping centre, and of course Lufia is sooo excited to try on the dresses. ...I guess it's not too big a deal, but the game seems to lay it on quite thick. Lufia is very much a stereotypical girly girly anime girl, and it seems like the game is trying to make the player sympathise with the hero, who has to put up with her silly girlisms. ....kiiinda not a fan of that tbh. I prefer my stereotypes thoroughly subverted in my rpgs. ...but I guess I'll let it go.

Oh, and as long as we're talking about parts of the game that don't make much sense, I guess I'll mention the game's translation.

The dialogue is fine for the most part, but there are a few translation choices that made me question things. We recruit Jerin into the party by saving her from becoming a ritual sacrifice, however the game doesn't call it a sacrifice, it calls it a "ransom" instead, which is.... kinda not really the correct word? I mean, I guess you could say it applies, but it's certainly not the commonly-used term for this trope. Just comes across like the translator didn't know what was going on.

More annoyingly are the spell names. Spell names such as "Poison" or "Sleep" don't inflict statuses, but instead cure statuses. You need to cast Poison on a poisoned friend to cure them. Or cast "Death" on a downed ally to revive them. It's unconventional, but you can get used to it. But then we have some of the other spells. The main healing spell is called Strong, and the full-heal spell is called Champion. The party-wide heal is called Boost. The attack-raising spell is called Trick, and the agility-raising spell is called Fake. .... huh. it's a weird uncanny area, where the word choices don't make enough sense to be useful names, but still make just enough sense that you can kind of see where it's coming from. somehow.

The spell that inflicts silence on a foe is called Bounce, which is very confusing because the spell that casts a reflect shield on an ally is called Mirror. ........ these names are not so easy to get a handle on.

There is a spell called Float that lets you walk across swamp tiles without getting hurt. But it doesn't actually make you float for real it seems - if you walk over a hole with Float active, you'll still fall in the hole. ....... i mean come on guys. that's just poor. It feels to me like they just didn't even consider this basic interaction when they decided to name the spell. ....they should have just called it Stepguard or something, like how it's called in Dragon Quest. ... because, again, damage-dealing tiles with a spell to counteract them is a game mechanic lifted straight from Dragon Quest. Of course.

Item names are weird too - there's a shield called a "Brone Breast". what the heck is a brone? did they mean bronze? or bone? And if it's supposed to be a breastplate, why does it go in the shield slot? 

One of the magical staves that Lufia can equip is called a "Glass Robe". I'm sure they meant rod, not robe lol.

Sometimes you can come across cursed equipment - they have negative effects such as damaging the user, and can only be unequipped by paying the church in town. But I wanted to point out that two of the cursed items are called "Broad Sword" and "Broad Rod". ... ....do you think they meant it to say Blood instead of broad?? that would make more sense to me. Because otherwise, why would a regular old broadsword be one of the cursed items. 

anyway.

...

I do want to mention that some of the battles in the game are not too bad. I do remember thinking that some of the boss encounters were quite challenging in an interesting way. One of the earliest encounters is against three goblins, and they were tricky enough that they forced me to re-equip my party to maximise defense on Lufia so she could focus on healing the others. Later on, there was an evil spirit on top of a red tower who was so strong, it forced me to adopt the strategy of buffing up Aguro with attack up, buffing down the boss with defense down, and focusing entirely on healing with the Hero, Lufia, and Jerin - only ever attacking with buffed-up Aguro. I couldn't squeak by unless all three of my magic-users were on constant healing duty. 

The fact that the game can force me to come up with strategies like this is a good thing, I say.

Though ... I will complain about how the game doesn't ever tell you when buffs and debuffs run out and return to normal. You just have to pay attention to the damage numbers I suppose.

Despite liking some of the fights, I did feel like there was an important part of the battle strategy the game was not letting me take part in. You get so many rings with weird names like "Dragon Ring", Undead Ring", "Ghost Ring", Heavy Ring", "Sea Ring", " etc etc etc..., yet unless they provide a stat boost, there's no way to know what they actually do. I worked out that some rings boost the power of specific spells, but aside from this, I have absolutely no idea. There are no in-game descriptions for items, only for spells. It makes the game a lot more shallow because, without this knowledge, there is no way to make use of all my available options.

Aside from these few interesting bosses, though, combat is on the whole extremely extremely repetitive and overly frequent. There is an item, Sweet Water, which can help reduce the rate of encounters, but I still felt like the encounters were way too much, even when I had a Sweet Water active for pretty much the entire game. Since I was playing on emulator, I made ample use of that speed-up function. 

Enemy encounters have decently interesting strategies to them - such as which order to take them out, which ones to use spells on etc - all good RPG combat stuff.... and it's even possible to inflict statuses like confusion on enemies, which is a good thing - there are too many games where enemies are immune to statuses, so I'm happy to be able to here. But yeah. On the whole, there are just too many encounters, and it makes the game as a whole feel like a real drag.

There is one section in particular that struck me as overly pointlessly annoying - in order to repair a bridge in a cave, you have to find the architect in a distant town. He then moves to the castle of the town nearby the broken bridge. He tells you to go look at the bridge before he starts working on it. He doesn't join you, he just stays in the castle until you go. So you go there, look at it, and come back. Then he goes there himself ready to repair the bridge. So you have to go all the way to the bridge again. Then he says "ok now go stand on that ledge". So you have to leave the cave and enter via a different entrance to reach the high ledge area. He builds the bridge with you watching from the ledge. And then in order to actually cross the bridge, you need to go back out, go back to the other entrance, and go back in. What the heck is this part of the game, it's ridiculous. How many times do you except me to go back and forth? And for what, a scene where a bridge is repaired? That's not interesting enough to justify this much hassle!

Later on in the game, in order to create our flying ship, we need to collect 7 pieces of Alumina Ore. And each one is located in a different cave area. ..... it's at this point I was starting to really feel the fatigue of the dungeon exploration, and I finally resorted to using maps from the internet in order to get through the mazes more efficiently. That's sooo many caves in a row, come on. :( Give us a break.

Immediately after the 7 Alumina quest, the game throws the absolute worst puzzle at you:

You have to figure out a four-button combination lock by trial and error, and every failure forces you into an encounter with four pirates that cannot be ran away from, even if you use the Smoke Ball item that guarantees runaways. And these guys use party-wide sleep attacks and confusion attacks, too, so they're extra irritating to deal with. 

There are four buttons you have to hit in the correct order. So 24 possible combinations. And... that's all there is. You have to just guess??? Yeah. You need to just try each of the 24 combinations, one by one, until you get lucky. And... yes. That's literally it. That's actually all there is to this puzzle. 

There are two hint plaques, one that simply tells you that you need to hit the switches in the correct order before trying to open the door, and another that says "The door won't open if all the switches are already down". ...but this is an INCREDIBLY BAD hint! Because it's NOT TRUE. You do need to hit all four switches before trying to open the door, otherwise it will summon the pirates every time. 

This hint is trying to inform the player that the puzzle isn't doable before the point in the story where you're supposed to do it - if you get here early, the switches are all sunken into the floor and uninteractable. But if you didn't see what this room looks like beforehand, you'd never know - you'd assume that the hint meant that the switch puzzle requires you to only hit three of the four switches, and you'll be here forever trying wrong combinations because of it. Wow, what a horrible misleading hint to an already horrible puzzle. Honestly inexcusable. Especially bad considering this comes immediately after the quest to get 7 Alumina ores, which already was making the game feel like a huge chore. This puzzle is the icing on top.

I gave up around 10 failed guesses. After having to fight the most obnoxious pirate encounter ten times in a row, I just looked up the answer online. ...What an absolute disaster of game design this puzzle is.

... Any goodwill this game still had with me was entirely out the window after that ordeal.

So anyway. Toward the end of the game, we finally reach the Fortress of Doom and confront the Sinistrals. Interestingly, the final dungeon is in fact the very same dungeon from the prologue. It even has the same hint tutorial signposts, which is kind of funny to see right at the end of the game. 

But annoyingly, the game removes Lufia from the party for plot-related reasons. She's given back during the final fight, but this means that it's now impossible to re-equip her or level-grind her beforehand, since she's not given back before you trigger the end of the game. So if you save in an endgame state, you'll just be stuck in a world without your full team. That's rather annoying - I always feel like, in an RPG, the endgame just before the final boss should be the time to tie up all your loose ends, with free reign over the whole map. But since they take away Lufia, your options become significantly limited. Not a fan.

Anyway. I don't have much else to say. This game was okay, but not amazing. It definitely tested my patience. 

It is pretty much just a decent Dragon Quest clone, with some questionable game design decisions, and nowhere near the level of quality as actual Dragon Quest.

A bit unfortunate. But I don't regret playing it. 

I've heard that Lufia II is super amazing, so I look forward to playing the sequel in the future.

:)