One thing I've noticed about the Playstation's library over time is that there's quite a few games (often by smaller developers) that seem to be heavily inspi
red by games that were, at the time, exclusive to SEGA consoles. The most well-known examples being Gunner's Heaven/Rapid Reload and Panzer Bandit, which pay "homage" to Gunstar Heroes and Guardian Heroes, respectively. Gamera 2000 and to a lesser extent Omega Boost are very similar to the Panzer Dragoon games, and there are a whole bunch of Virtual On imitators (including Reverthion). Brave Prove is another one of those games, with the inspiration in this case being the Story of Thor games (called Beyon
d Oasis in America, for some reason).Not that being an imitator is a bad thing, Gunner's Heaven and Panzer Bandit are both great games! Brave Prove is, too.
Most of the game is spent fighting enemies and exploring dungeons (or exploring the countryside between towns). Like in the Thor games, you fight with a short sword, and have a few special moves that are done with combinations of the d-pad and attack button. Also like Thor, you gradually meet and recruit various elemental spirits who allow you to use magic. There's even a type of enemy that's almost exactly like an enemy you fight in the Thor games.
I've enjoyed playing this game a lot, and it's often hard to get me to like RPGs. Where Brave Prove succeeds is that there's very little in the way of dialogue and cut scenes. Of the five hours I've played so far, I estimate that less than 10 minutes has been spent skipping through boring text boxes. The lack of text also makes the game accessible, 
despite being untranslated. Although there is one guide for the game on GameFAQs (amazingly, written all the way back in 1998, only a month after the game's release!), I've only had to consult it once or twice, and those times were just when I'd gotten lost. You aren't missing anything from being unable to read the text (except the plot, but that's almost definitely boring cliched tripe anyway).There's not really much else to say, really. It's an action RPG. It looks and sounds really nice. It's fun to play. It's very similar to the Story of Thor games. There's practically no language barrier. The End!
Good find. The Japanese PS1 library is a treasure trove of finds like this. Everyone who cares about games like this was so busy huffing about the Saturn's superiority back in the day they didn't notice all the great stuff that came along and quietly vanished into the racks.
ReplyDeleteThe situation was also helped by the fact that before emulation, it was a lot easier to play saturn imports than playstation ones (just sticking in an action replay cart vs. modchipping your console).
Deletehow do you keep finding awesome ps1 imports i have not heard of
ReplyDeletewhat is your secret
say, do you take requests? i've always been curious about brightis and spriggan: lunar verse...
and incidentally, gonna recommend you take a look at community pom, cause it's pretty swell!
MY secret is downloading a bunch of random games that have cool sounding titles from underground gamer! For every game I write about, there's a bunch more that got deleted minutes after i loaded them up.
DeleteBut in this case, it was actually dais from sb that told me about this game. I'll look into those you mentioned, I haven't played any of them, as far as i can remember!
ok that is a pretty good secret
Deletei tried that for a while some time ago, but just got so tired of having to grab files in ten different parts off rapidshare every time i wanted to try out jailbreaker or mermanoid or whatever
of course that was back when snesorama existed. :\
i have no idea if the first two will be any good at all, but community pom is a good time; at least until you get to the highly confusing actraisery build a town part.