Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland

 I was just browsing through lists of Game Boy Color games, and on a complete whim, I decided to play one of them on emulator.

The game I played was: "Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland". The screenshots of this game looked appealing and I wanted to give it a try.

This is a platforming game. It's quite short and not too difficult.

Most of the time the game is a sidescroller, but there are some top-down exploration sections as well.

The main thing that caught my attention when I saw this game was how beautifully fluidly-animated Alice's sprite animations are. Her movements are so incredibly detailed, and the motion looks so smooth. This game has some top-notch pixel art animation, I was not expecting it.

The first part of the game is a stage where Alice falls down the rabbit hole, and you have to move left and right to avoid incoming obstacles.

Once you land, you begin playing sidescrolling stages.

The main gameplay in the sidescrolling levels is just running and jumping. You jump on enemies' heads to defeat them. It's about as basic and simple as a platformer can get. Which is a good thing for a game like this. ...This game isn't trying to be particularly inventive, it just wants to be a pleasant little journey through some of the memorable parts of the movie. And I'd say it succeeds at providing that for the most part.

Alice runs at a nice fast pace and responds well to the controls. It feels nice to play.

I will complain a bit about how the ledges feel too short - the graphics are detailed, but the terrain collision is done with simple square tiles. So very often, the standable part of the platforms are shorter than what it looks like visually. It makes jumping a bit annoying in some areas. But overall it's not too problematic.

There are mushrooms placed in the stages, which change Alice's size when you touch them - sometimes you need to be tiny to fit through small gaps. You can go back to normal size by touching a mushroom again. ... ...it reminded me of the magic elves from Rayman 1, which work the same way haha. But indeed, size-changing is a very fitting gameplay mechanic for an Alice game. I like the detail where, when you're tiny, the main melody of the music becomes higher-pitched. Very cute.

The level design isn't great, but it isn't too offensive either. Sometimes there are trap doors that make you have to go all the way back up again if you fall down. it's annoying, but since the game isn't too long or challenging, I didn't mind it too much.

There are stars to pick up. If you collect every star on the current screen you're playing, the Cheshire Cat will award Alice with a health refill. It's not a particularly good reward, because you always start at maximum health whenever you enter a new screen, and collecting the last star means that you're almost at the end of the current screen anyway. ...but this game doesn't have lives or any other kind of commodity to worry about, so there wasn't really much else they could have given you.

After three or so platforming levels, the next level is Alice traveling in a bottle down a river. It's another level where you move left and right to avoid incoming obstacles, similar to the rabbit hole level at the start of the game. Though this one is more difficult.

After this, you arrive at a more open-ended hub area, where you have access to four corners of Wonderland to play in the order you choose - the Tea Party, the Caterpillar's forest, the Tweedles' area, and the White Rabbit's house. 

In order to fully complete each area, you need to find items from the other stages. Find a lost handkerchief, find a lost cane, find a lost hammer, that kind of stuff. So there's a bit of running back-and-forth between areas, but it's not too complicated.

...I actually kind of enjoy how the game becomes a bit open ended like this? It's a nice change of pace, and it gives me an opportunity to explore Wonderland at my own pace. And I kind of like the peaceful music in the hub area too. Sometimes it's nice when a game gives you a moment of downtime.

While in this section of the game, whenever you collect 100 stars, the White Rabbit challenges Alice to a race - if you win the race, you get access to a bonus level. In the bonus level, you can find a unique collectible teapot. Collecting the teapot unlocks some character artwork in the gallery on the main menu. 

In the gallery, you can rearrange the character graphics on the backgrounds to create your own little scenes. And it can be printed out if you have a Game Boy Printer.

... ah. This is the kind of fun extra stuff that GBC games used to do. Little interactive gallery modes and stuff like that. I remember Super Mario Bros Deluxe had a lot of things like this in it. ...I kinda miss it.

The worst section of the game is the White Rabbit's House. Alice becomes gigantic, and so you have to play as Bill the Lizard who carries a ladder, and you must continuously place down, climb up, and pick up the same ladder, over and over, in order to reach the top of the house. It is so monotonous and not very fun to play. And it's incredibly annoying when the birds keep knocking your ladder down to the bottom and you have to start from scratch. 

I would call this the only truly bad part of the game.

After completing all four sub areas, you continue on to the Queen of Hearts. There's section where you have to paint all of the roses red within a time limit, then you need to win a very simplistic croquet minigame, and finally, you have to win against a large number of the Queen's card soldiers, who are all defeated by jumping on them of course. It's an endurance test where Alice must defeat 52 cards to win. After this, Alice leaves Wonderland and the game is completed.

Overall... playing a small simple GBC game like this was actually making me feel really wistful.

Because.... this is the exact kind of GBC game I would have played a lot of as a child, if I had had it back then.

I remember as a kid, I played a lot of a really bad Simpsons game on my GBC, and a not-so-great Tom & Jerry game on my GBA...among others.  ... it didn't matter that the game wasn't all that great, it was just fun to interact with and spend time in a fictional world I liked. As a kid, you don't tend to care about bad game design.

...and this Alice game isn't even bad at all!

Playing this Alice game made me feel like.... yeah, in an alternate reality where I owned this game, played it on my GBC, took it on holiday, played it while sitting by myself introvertedly at events my parents took me to....   messing around in the gallery mode when I got bored... idling in the hub area just to hear the music...  in this world that never existed, it probably would have become a childhood favourite game of mine.

But in this current reality, where I only played it on emulator as a 34-year-old, well after it has lost all relevancy.... well, all I can really do is appreciate it and move on to the next game. ... ... ... ... ...

... ...mmm. am I mourning a nostalgia that never existed? ... I recently learned that the word for this feeling is "anemoia".

Uh anyway. It's a fun cute little GBC game. Nothing groundbreaking, but I'm glad I played it. And it made me remember how much I really loved my Game Boy Color as a child.

That's all.

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.