In my opinion, the latter half of the nineties was a golden age for RPGs, with a lot of the best ever appearing on the Playstation. Asuncia is a Playstation RPG from 1997, and though it can't stand among the timeless classics of the era, it can stand on its own as a game that took different inspiration, and set out to fulfill a different vision of what RPGs are. That is, it seems to be inspired both mechanically and aesthetically by very early tabletop RPGs.
The aesthetic influence is obvious: pretty much all of the art in the game could have been taken from a 1980s TTRPG rulebook, and it's set in a downbeat, grimy fantasy world, with dirty buildings, unpleasantly violent monsters, and magic use something of a rarity. It's set in a world where isolated towns cower in fear, surrounded by vast, monster-infested hinterlands, waiting for a hero to come along and save them.
And that's what you do: each stage takes place over a massive area, and there are two important numbers displayed at all times: the time remaining, and the monsters remaining. Your goal is to reduce the monsters to zero before the time gets to zero. It's not real time, instead the timer counts down a little every time you move a space on the map, or take a turn in battle. Dotted around the map are towns, each of which will give you an item or some money on your first arrival, and they also have a few facilities: blacksmiths, inns, ite shops, and so on. The blacksmiths and magic guilds in the towns are actually the only way of strengthening your characters, which seems like a very old school TTRPG way of doing things. Also, conversations had in certain town locations can aid in recruiting new party members.
There are also a few dungeons in each stage too, which are smaller maze-like maps where you can find a bunch of treasure, and also fight a boss, who's a lot stranger than all the other enemies. Oddly, these seem to be the only bosses in the game, and they're totally optional. The enemies in the dungeons don't count towards the enemy count of the main stages, and the main stages end as soon as you kill all the enemies in them, there's no bosses to finish them off. (Apparently there's an ending you can only get if you kill every dungeon boss, but I only found out about that after I was a few stages in.)
Another weird little quirk is that you get a score for each stage, not only based on things you'd expect, like how many times you died, how many turns were left on the clock, and how many towns survived, but also on a weird system involving the order in which you kill enemies. There are three types of monster in each stage, each of which is assigned a colour: red, green, or blue. You can score bonus points by killing three or five of a single colour in a row, as well as killing sets of different enemies in certain patterns that are shown on a screen you can access before choosing your actions every turn in battle. If the game was more popular, I could imagine people figuring out exactly how to maximise their score on each stage.
Asuncia is a unique and interesting game, and it's definitely worth playing. Just don't go in expecting the deep plot and characters you might normally expect from an RPG of this era, and also, don't try to play more than one consecutive stage in a single sitting. Each one takes about thirty to forty minutes, and while that makes for an entertaining diversion, the repetition will start to wear on you if you don't take a break after that.
No comments:
Post a Comment