Brandish 3: Spirit of Balcan

 Let's round out the trilogy with Brandish 3: Spirit of Balcan.

Just a quick and kinda rambly one for this game, because I don't really have much to say about it tbh.

Released by Falcom in 1994 for PC-98. I played on emulator of course.

Unlike Brandish 1 and 2, the third entry never got a Super Famicom version. 

I think the reason for this is pretty simple... If Brandish 2 was already too big to fit on one SNES cart (which led to them having to remove several locations for the SNES version), then the even bigger Brandish 3 would have had no chance. I'm not surprised they didn't bother. 

And to be honest.... the length of this game was a bit fatiguing. The gameplay hasn't changed all that much compared to the previous games, but now there's just so much more of it to get through in this third entry.

Unfortunately for me, I had to play in Japanese. Brandish 1 got an official USA release, and Brandish 2 got two different fan translations, but Brandish 3 has none of that as of this moment. It's Japanese or nothing. I did read about a fan translation that was in the works, but it was a forum post from many years ago, and it seems they hit some kind of technical snag and gave up. ... Maybe one day the project will be picked up again and we will be able to play Brandish 3 in English. But it doesn't exist yet.

My Japanese language skills aren't strong enough to figure out puzzles and riddles, especially if I need to follow vague instructions or understand idioms... so I did have to consult a guide several times throughout my playthrough.

....the guide I found online was also in Japanese, haha. But at least they had map layouts for me to look at.

The guide website I found was so old that, every time I navigated to a new page on the website, it would automatically download a midi file. .... did you know that websites used to be able to play music in the background? This was especially common with fansites and whatnot. Nowadays browsers don't know what to do with that, so instead of playing the midi file, it just downloads it. ... ... I had to delete so many .mid files from my downloads folder lol. But yeah. Brandish is an old obscure Japanese series, and as such there aren't really any modern Englsih resources out there to rely on. 

Anyway. So what is the story of Brandish 3? Well, Ares and Dela are here again. Back in Brandish 1, Dela was trying to kill Ares because she believed that Ares had murdered her master, Balcan. Well, in Brandish 3, we do see the ghost of Balcan. ...But beyond that, I'm honestly a bit at a loss. Because the game is in Japanese, I wasn't able to follow the story that well. ...I had to collect a pair of sun and moon artifacts and put them in an altar, and that seemed important I guess. And... I obtained a gemstone from a mermaid at one point. ... uh. I dunno. There's a new evil guy, and instead of the hero taking him down alone, there seems to be a resistance group fighting him off too. A fighter from Brandish 2 named Fred makes a few appearances as part of this group. At least that's something I can recognise.

...

New to the series is the choice of character at the beginning of the game. There are four choices: Ares, the main hero of the series. Dela, a sorceress and Ares's rival. Umber, a gladiator from the arena, who was previously an optional encounter in Brandish 2. And Jinza, a ninja. There were ninjas in the previous games, though they were never the main focus. 

I picked Ares. My initial plan was to play the game four times to see what the differences between each character were, but....after my Ares playthrough, I was kind of done. I wanted no more. The game was too long for me to do multiple playthroughs. :/

So unfortunately, I'm not too sure what the differences between each character are. Ares played mostly like he does in the first two games, though I did noticeably not get any of the higher-tier magic spells from the end of Brandish 2. I suppose Dela would be the one to get those. Also, occasionally, I did come across boomerangs I could not equip (they are for Umber), and shurikens and ninjutsu spells I could not equip (those are for Jinza). 

So.... as far as I'm concerned, with me playing through normally as Ares, Brandish 3's character system kind of just made the game slightly more annoying to play. Because occasionally I would find items that aren't for me.

Maybe my opinion would change if I actually did give the others a playthrough later on. If the others offer a significantly different gameplay experience, then that would be pretty good. But somehow I doubt that it'll be substantially different.

...

Brandish 3 has a similar kinda open-plan world structure to Brandish 2, though in practice it is actually a linear progression. You have a few towns with multiple exits, each leading to a new area. But the exits only open one at a time in the order you're supposed to do the areas, so in practice, it is still a linear game.

There are around 15 or so areas in Brandish 3, and all of them are between 2 to 5 floors long. 

The gameplay is pretty much the same as the previous Brandish games, with the same camera rotation system, controls, combat system, items, spells, everything. There isn't really much more for me to discuss about the gameplay, aside from the fact that... yup, it's more Brandish to play if you wanted more. ...which I did. :D

I do like the environmental variety in this game. There's now a spooky mansion level with a poltergeist boss, we've got ice caves full of slippery floor puzzles, a volcano with collapsing rope bridges, a desert where you can't rest and need to heal via oases, an underground lake with water current puzzles, a seaside, a jungle, an opulent palace... The Dark Zone makes a return of course, and who could forget the signature icky fleshy biomass level that every Brandish game seems to have.

There are a couple of new minor additions to the gameplay. Now shops can keep ahold of your items in a storage, though it seems to cost money to use it, so I never bothered with it. I didn't mind selling all my surplus junk instead.

And now, certain shops can bless your weapons with a holy attribute that allows them to kill undead enemies that otherwise self-revive. It's a bit more versatile than Brandish 2, where "holy sword" was a specific weapon you had to find. Now every sword can be made holy. 

This game adds status ailments. You can now be poisoned, confused, or silenced, which work as you would expect. Confusion scrambles your mouse cursor's controls, but... if you move and attack with keyboard controls instead, then you can play unaffected. Kind of funny.

All status ailments can be cured by resting for long enough, though you can also buy medicines in the shop.

Previous Brandish games had gold bars you could sell for money. Brandish 3 changes them into gold coins instead. Why? Because now you have the ability to flip a coin, heads or tails. ... Normally it does nothing, but there are maybe three or four puzzles in the game that require you to flip a coin. And one guy in town that will bet small amounts of money on coin flips. 

This is a very silly addition to the game, haha.

Brandish 3 also introduces a combat arena, located in the second town Fivelria. You can fight as one of seven arena combatants, including a samurai looking guy, a weird bug creature, a kung fu guy, a whip lady, and even a black panther. They all kind of play the same though, so I'm not sure if there is any particular reason to pick one over the other. They give you random gear, a couple of potions, and you kind of just have to hope the fight is possible to win or not. If you win, you get medals, which can be exchanged for prizes. You can win around 200-500 medals per victory, with more if you win several in a row.

The best prize you can get in my opinion is the amulet that gives a +10 defense buff, which costs 1000 medals. You can equip two of them at once, for +20. The reason I say this is because, the two accessory slots really don't have much else that can go in them in this game. You get anti-slip boots for the ice cave, and a darkness amulet for the Dark Zone, but aside from these, those accessory slots are gonna remain empty for pretty much the whole game. 

So I would recommend playing the arena until you win 2000 medals, and then not bothering with it any more. The most expensive prize is 50,000 medals, for an amulet that reflects enemy projectiles.... which is absolutely not worth the grind. There aren't really any unique or cool weapons or armour in here, which is a shame. Or maybe it's not a shame, because grinding the arena isn't all that fun after the first few times.

...

But yeah. to be honest, I don't actually have a lot to say about Brandish 3?

It's basically just more of the same. The same is still good, though I enjoyed it less due to the language barrier, and also because maybe I was getting fatigued with Brandish overload. After all, I had just finished playing the previous two games.

In isolation, Brandish 3 is probably the best and most refined of the trilogy. If I put my personal circumstances aside, I can definitely see that the game has been refined and improved, and it is a really nice entry in the series.

It's pretty good! I liked it! good game. ... But I don't want to play any more Brandish right now hahahaha.

...

Now, there does exist one final Brandish game. It's called Brandish VT, though the expanded Windows port was in fact titled Brandish 4. 

I don't have plans to play this yet, because I want to give Brandish a break for now.

And additionally, Brandish VT doesn't have Ares or Dela or any story relation to the main trilogy. It's its own self-contained game. So I think I will play it another time. We'll see.