Arabian Nights: Desert Spirit King (SNES)

Arabian Nights: Desert Spirit King (or Arabian Nights: Sabaku no Seirei Ou, if you prefer) is a game I wanted to play long ago, back in the time when there was an overlap in the latter stages of the RPG phase I had after having played Final Fantasy VII and Breath of Fire III, and the early days of the Dreamcast giving me access to SNES emulation for the first time. I wasn't able to, though, as at that time, there was no translation. But the idea of an RPG with a middle eastern-influenced fantasy setting had me interested.

 

It eventually did get a fan translation in 2012, but my RPG phase was long since dead by then, and I was well into my "strong distaste for RPGs" phase. But in recent years, that feeling has waned heavily, and so I eventually got around to playing Arabian Nights. It's an incredibly okay game! It's got a few interesting elements, a lot of boring stuff, and they all kind of cancel each other out.

 

The plot is surprisingly dense: centuries ago, a wizard named Suleiman enslaved the eponymous spirit king, Ifrit. Then, a while after that, some unknown evil attacked, and though Suleiman was unable to save his own life, he did seal Ifrit away in a magic ring, telling him that after he's granted a thousand wishes for a thousand masters, Ifrit will be strong enough to face this threat and avenge him. The game starts with a young girl finding that ring, and being the thousandth to do so, wishes to bring peace to the land. Ifrit finds this highly inconvenient, since the previous 999 wishes were all easy stuff like riches and immortality.

 

To bring peace to the land, Ifrit, his new master Shukran, and a boy-thief they meet called Harty go off on a quest to find the eight crystals containing Ifrit's sealed powers. Along the way, they'll also find other spirits, some of them have been sealed like Ifrit was, some of them have been up to other activities in the intervening centuries. All of them happen to be various flavours of bishounen, though, and whether they're friends or enemies, they all talk to each other in a certain way. Like, if there had been an English version of this in the year 2000, the Geocities fujoshi would have been eating it up, posting their fanfictions and character shrines and such.

 

So, back to the game itself. The positives: it looks great all-round. The character portaits, backgrounds, battle sprites, it's all just really high quality pixel art. The battles themselves also bring up some aesthetic poits of interest of their own! Battles take place on a diagonally-aligned rectangular field with a really cool border around it. The field will be themed to the kind of area you're walking through, but unfortunately there's only one border, as nice as it is. Furthermore, the game's main mechanical gimmick is the cards system. You or your enemy can play a card before the turn starts, and they all have various effects on the battle, as well as changing how the field looks.

 

There are forty cards in total: eight elements that come in levels one to five. The effects they have include inflicting elemental damage on all the caster's opponenets at the end of each turn, nullifying the enemy's attacks, boosting or reducing the stats of one of the sides, and so on. Playing cards happens before the turn starts, and if it's not replaced, a card will last a few turns. If the enemy plays a card, you can replace it with one of your own, but it has to have the same element and/or level as the one currently in play. It's an interesting system, but it's one that doesn't really meet its potential, for reasons I'll now go into.

 

The game's got some problems, and most of them are related to battles. THe encounter rate is incredibly high, so by the time you get to anywhere you're meant to be, you're going to be overlevelled. Even boss fights only take a couple of turns of spamming attack. So you can pretty much ignore the cards altogether, as well as the other magic and special attacks to which you get access. Also, there's some weirdness regarding walking: when you're in a town or dungeon, you walk pretty quickly, but only in the four cardinal directions. On the world map, you can walk in eight directions, but you move incredibly slowly. A few hours into the game, you do get given a magic carpet that speeds up your world map movement, and partially fixes the encounter rate problem too, but it's weird that the two kinds of movement are flawed in different ways.

 

For all its problems, though, I have been enjoying Arabian Nights: Desert Spirit King. It's a nice little RPG, and the plot keeps introducing new twists that have had me playing more to see where it all goes next. When I first started playing it, I neglected to save, like an idiot, anddied in the first dungeon, losing nearly half an hour's progress. It's a good enough game that I just started again, instead of just giving up in frustration! If you've got any affection or nostalgia for old-fashioned RPGs in the year 2025, this is one you probably haven't already played, and is worth your time.

Lord Monarch - Tokoton Sentou Densetsu (Mega Drive)

 I first tried this game out a few years ago, when the translation patch first got released, and I immediately bounced off of it. It seemed to be a boring, passive game that mostly played itself, with little input or agency for the player. I recently gave it another chance, though, ans this time, I don't know what's different, but it really clicked with me, and got me hooked!

 

So, it's a real time strategy game for the Mega Drive (a cohort which is stronger than you might think, also including games like Herzog Zwei and Dune II, which is basically the start of what people think of as real time strategy games), and since it's from a time befroe the genre was really codified, it's pretty unique one. You mostly don't have to take charge of building or directly controlling units. They'll just kind of do that themselves. Your soldiers will build forts and roads, and the forts will generate more soldiers.

 

Your input, especially in the ealry stages is pretty much managing the tax rate in real time, and even there, there's a marker advising you on where the best place to put it is. Building forts (and bridges, and other projects) takes money, and your income is determined by some secret algorithm that takes into account the number of forts you have and how high the current tax rate is. However, you need soldiers to do your building and fighting, and their generation is controlled by a similar algorithm that takes into account the number of forts and how low the current tax rate is. 

 

For the first few stages, you'll probably be able to get by pretty easily by just adjusting the tax rate how the game tells you to. Before long, though, you'll have to start telling soldiers to do things like building bridges and fences, sealing up monster-spawning caves, and even directing the directions in which they expand your territory, rather than just letting them spreadout wherever's closest. Another thing you'll start finding use in is ignoring the tax guide and setting it to maximum or minimum for short bursts when you feel like you need a quick injection of either resource.

 

Something I haven't yet mentioned that deserves a mention is how the game looks. Lord Monarch was originally released on Japanese microcomputers, and has been ported to a bunch of different systems. I think the Mega Drive port might be the best looking of them! The graphics ingame are small but detailed, being both full of character as well as clear and readable. Out of actual gameplay, there's an overworld map and a bunch of cutscenes, both of which look amazing. The map is full of really nice isometric graphics, while the cutscenes are made up of big, beautiful pieces of still pixel art. And in all cases, the colours are incredibly bright and bold. It doesn't make use of any special trickery like some Mega Drive games have, but it's still one of the best-looking games on the system.

 

Lord Monarch is a really great game! It's a shame that it never got officially translated at the time of its release, but luckily, yet again, twenty-first century fans have stepped in to fic the mistakes of twentieth century corporations. It's a little odd, and very different to most other strategy games, but it's definitely worth giving it a try. Or even two tries, as my story attests.

Raging Fighter (Game Boy)

 I was going to review a different Game Boy fighting game this week, Fist of the North Star: Ten Big Brawls for the King of the Universe, but I thought covering three anime tie-ins in a row might have been a bit much. Luckily, Raging Fighter (Released in Japan as Outburst) actually provides an interesting contrast to that game in a few ways, and the two can serve as examples of how and how not to make a good fighting game on the Game Boy. Well, almost. Fist of the North Star isn't that great. But it is better than Raging Fighter, and it's specifically a better Game Boy game than Raging Fighter.

 

I won't talk about the other game too much, since I probably will give it its own post some day, but the big, most noticable difference between the two is found in the character sprites: FotNS has small character sprites, but they're full of character and detail, all very distinct from each other, and their animations are simple but quick. By contrast, Raging Fighter might have been the first to fall into the trap that Game Boy ports of Street Fighter II and the Mortal Kombat games would also fall into: its character sprites are large and detailed, and they look great in still screenshots, but their animations are stiff and they slowly flicker their way around the screen in a way that varely feels better than a cheap, low quality LCD game.

 

There are some good things about Raging Fighter, of course. Like I said and like you can see, it does look pretty good in screenshots, with its big sprites and detailed backgrounds. Also, and this might seem like damning with faint praise, but it has special moves and health bars that work like you'd expect them to. You'd be surprised at how some developers in the early post-SFII years would get one or both of those wrong. Finally, it might have secretly invented a staple feature of fighting games, a year before it's popularly-acknowledged advent.

 

There's two single player modes on offer, the first being tournament, which sees you pick a character and gradually work your way up a very MK-esque tower containing every other character in the game, topped off with a fight against yourself. The other mode is story, which sees you playing as the three good guy characters (or the Five Major Star Generals, as the end credits collectively calls them), and you fight in an elmination team battle against the three bad guy characters (or the Four Shadow Star Generals), with character health carrying over between rounds. As far as I know, this kind of match is generally considered to have first appeared in King of Fighters 94, which came out a year and a half after Raging Fighter!

 

Going back to the topic of fighting games on Game Boy, and how to do them, it would coincidentally be the port of King of Fighters 95 that provided the blueprint for it a couple of years later, showing that if developers did their best to get the feel of the game down, even if it means heavily simplifying the graphics, that it was possible to get fun fighting games running on even this hardware that was so vastly overpowered by all of its contemporaries. I don't recommend playing Raging Fighter, even taking into account its historical significance. If you really want a good figting game on the original monochrome Game Boy, Takara published a ton of them later in the system's life, and a lot of them can be found on actual cartridges for a pittance. So get those instead.

Koryu no Mimi (SNES)

 

 This game's based on a manga, which I haven't read, but a quick bit of searching online reveals that it's apparently about a guy who's heir to both his family's fortune and the family magical earring, which gives "easy access to wealth and women". In game, though, it mainly seems to allow him to go super saiyan, as when your power meter fills up, you press the R button to make him touch his ear, regenerating some health, temporarily increasing his attack and defence, and summoning magic effects to help fight the enemy.

But I've jumped the gun a bit, there. I should describe what the game actually is. It's a single-plane beat em up, that will, at first, seem like it's impossibly difficult. But this is down to two factors. First, the game has a surprisingly extensive movelist, and you're expected to make use of it, paying special consideration to figuring out the best ways to juggle enemies in any given circumstance. THere's even more moves that can only be performed when you're holding certain melee weapons! Plus there's guns sometimes! The second thing to take into account is more concise: the first boss, for some reason, is a slightly anomalous difficulty spike, and you'll have a much easier time once you've gotten past her.

 

There's a few more points of interest, too. Though it's a single plane beat em up, there are times where multiple enemies will be standing slightly higher or lower on the screen as if it were a belt scroller. This is a purely visual flair: you still intereact with them as if they're on the same plane, but it does solve the problem in single plane games whereby it can be difficult to show multiple enemies without them looking like they're all standing in a queue waiting to get hit. Also, this is the second SNES game based on a manga license with a stage where you fight enemies in a passenger train, after GS Mikami: Joreishi wa Nice Body. (Outside of the SNES, it's also the third game that I've covered on this blog with such a stage, after Kishin Douji Zenki FX - Vajura Fight on PCFX and the much more recent Cosmowarrior Zero on Playstation).

 

Single plane beat em ups are, I feel, a generally underrated genre with a lot of potential, that a lot of people unfairly write off as being an inherently worse or "more primitive" version of belt scroller-style beast em ups. Koryu no Mimi is a game that proves that there were developers seeking out the limits of complexity in the genre as far back as the mid-nineties. I think the creativity on display makes it worth playing on its own. Luckily, it is also pretty fun on its own merits, too.

Cosmowarrior Zero (Playstation)

 I don't know much about the works of Leiji Matsumoto, but obviously his stuff is well-known enough that a lot of it is recognisable just from natural cultural osmosis. That's how I can easily tell you that not only is this game a tie-in to a TV show of the same name, released in the same year (2001), but also a big crossover dealie with characters, locations, and other stuff being drawn from the likes of Captain Harlock, Space Battleship Yamato, Galaxy Express 999, and others. Plus, it's a third person shooter released late in the Playstation's commercial life (but not late enough for it to have become a budget shovelware dumping ground), and as we already know from Gungage, that's cause to be excited.

 

The game's story mode has you playing as the eponymous Zero, as you visit various locations to shoot robots, monsters, soldiers and other enemies. The stages are pretty fun, though it's not always obvious where exactly you're supposed to go, and it was a little annoying that stages 2 and 3 both take place in boring deserts where every area looks exactly the same. The really exciting part of the game, though, are the boss fights! They're tense one-on-one gunfights taking place in various smallish arenas.

 

The bosses have similar abilities to you (something I'll get back to later), so all of the fights against them are exciting and well-balanced, and there's no "wait for the big thing to cycle through all its atacks until it reveals a weak point" nonsense. Just fast-paced battles between you and another character running around, hiding around corners, and taking shots at each other when you can. As well as shooting, you also have a melee attack that does a ton of damage, but it's risky, since of course every character has a powerful melee atack, and getting within range to deliver one also puts you in range to receive one. 

 

I should also mention that this game has one of the coolest boss fights I've ever seen! You fight against some lady (like I said, I'm not The Big Matsumoto fan, sorry) amongst some stone ruins at sunset. But a short time into the battle, the sun actually does set, plunging the arena into darkness, partially lit by the searchlights of an overhead zeppelin, along with the momentary light of the combatants' laser pistols striking out in the darkness. Not only is it conceptually incredible, adding a ton of tension to an already tense situation, but it's also very impressive, I didn't think the Playstation could do a scene so complex!

 

As well as the story mode, it's clear that the developers recognised what a great thing they'd put together in the game's boss fights, as there's a mode made up of nothing else. You can even play as other characters in this mode! Unfortunately, all except Zero and Captain Harlock are locked at the start, and I can't find any information online as to how the rest are unlocked. The absence of a versus mode is also sad, but I think the Playstation's abilities are probably being stretched to the limit already, without having to do it twice in a split screen mode. 

 

Going back to that mention of Gungage, I'm also pleased to report that Cosmowarrior Zero doesn't use standard 3D ation game controls! The D=pad moves you forward and back, and swivels you left and right, while L1 and R1 make you strafe left and right. I think this control scheme fits the action found in the game perfectly. There's just something about cautiously strafing around a corner, ready to shoot or dodge with these controls that really adds to the feel of a gunfight that would be lost if your character had more modern twinstick controls, that sometimes make characters feel like superhumanly flexible and dextrous heavily armed rubber chickens.

 

Cosmowarrior Zero is an excellent game in pretty much every way that matters. There's no translation available, official or otherwise, but there's also no language barrier to playing it. So anyone interested in low poly graphics being pushed to their limits, or even just anyone who likes 3D action games should definitely seek it out and play it at their earliest convenience.

Marie no Atelier GB (Game Boy Color)

 I've been vaguely aware of the Atelier series since the PS2 era, though they've been around a while longer than that, but this is the first one of them I've actually played (well, I did play the spin-off Mana Khemia on PSP many years ago, but they're different enough that I can call this the first). With that in mind, I don't know all of the dfetails, but I think this is a sequel to another Marie no Atelier that was on consoles, and has you playing as the eponymous alchemist in her post-adventuring days.

 

Marie now runs a little alchemy shop (or Atelier, if you will) in a nice walled city with European-style buildings, making the whole affair somewhat reminiscent of Kiki's Delivery Service. One day, she's given custody of a little fairy boy, who she's going to teach alchemy and generally look after for four years. So, rather than a traditional RPG, this is, like the in-game alchemical syntheses, something like a combination RPG, business management, and even a tiny bit of Princess Maker. There are dungeons and combat, but you just send the fairy out to do those things (you can hire bodyguards and buy him better weapons and armour to help him though) and fetch back items for you.

 

So what do you actually do, if you're outsourcing the dungeons and combat? You go to the bar to accept requests for items, then you either have to get the required items from a dungeon, or synthesise them in your Atelier. Despite Marie presumably being a veteran of the business, and the one you're controlling, you can only syntheise items up to the skill level of the fairy. This is advanced by making the recipes to which you do have access, by handing in requests, and by buying textbooks from the local university.

 

Sometimes certain special events happen, like Marie's birthday, or the fairy going off to celebrate fairy new year with his family. There's also more unique and dramatic events too, like the fairy nursing an ill Marie back to health, or the fairy becoming depressed and surly, gradually being brought back to his normal cheery self through the aggressive application of love and care from Marie. Those descriptions might sound a little cynical and dismissive, but those moments were actually really nice, and I feel like this kind of emotional warmth isn't something you often see in videogames, especially ones on 8-bit hardware.

 

This is a fun and engrossing little game, that's definitely worth your time. You can tell the developers really tried their hardest to get the best game they possibly could out of the Game Boy Color, and their work totally paid off. This is easily one of the best games on the system, and while it's understandable why it never got an official translation on its release, it's still a shame that that didn't happen. Fans have, of course, stepped in to correct that mistake more recently. At the time of writing, I've only played through three of the game's four years, and once I'm finished, I'm probably going to look into the series' main entries too. It's especially recommended to those kinds of people who talk about wanting "cosy games", as it's definitely one of those.

Team Innocent: The Point of No Return (PC-FX)

 For years and years, there were rumours of an English patch for this game being in the works, and a lot of people (myself included) were excited for it. It was another actual exclusive game for the PC FX that was about to become playable! But there had been no news on it for a long time, and a lot of people (myself included) had mostly given up hope of it ever coming out. Until December 2024, when it finally did! 

 

If you don't already know, Team Innocent is an action-adventure game where you movie a character around various fixed-camera pre-rendered screens, picking up items and using them to solve simple puzzles. Like an Alone in the Dark (Resident Evil would be a better refreence point for most people, but Team Innocent predates it by a couple of years!), but with the main difference being that because the PC-FX isn't a system with great polygon-pusing power, your character (and the rarely-appearing enemies) is a 2D sprite, that scales larger and smaller depending on their distance from the camera. I can't remember any other game that uses sprite scaling in this way!

 

The setting isn't a horror one, but instead you're a member of a trio of special agents of the Galaxy Police sent to investigate a series of abandoned space stations. All three of you also happen to have been grown in the genetics lab of the game's main villain, Dr. Chronos Enhancer, who, despite being presumed dead, seems to be behind all the strange incidents going on now. Since the places you're investigating are abandoned, you don't meet other characters while you're there, but you do get to see a bunch of video recordings via the various magno-optical disc video players that are lying around. There's recordings of news broadcasts, captain's logs, last will and testaments, and so on. There is combat in the game, and while it's not very exciting, it's also pretty rare, and very brief when it does happen, so it's not too much of a dampener on the rest of the game.

 

The presentation is generally excellent, the only thing that really stadns out as not being great in this department is your character's low resolution sprite, and the way it constrasts with the very sharp high resolution backgrounds. But that's more than made up for with things like the aforementioned video players, which make use of the PC-FX's trademark high quality FMVs, the interfaces of the various computers you'll use for controlling various aspects of the stages themselves, and the cool little specific full-screen animations that play when you die in certain situations.

 

Like I said earlier, there's been a lot of anticipation for this translation of Team Innocent, and in my opinion, the wait has been worth it. I've played through about half of the game so far (I think), and I've been loving it. It's a little slow, and very short on the action, but it's also very charming and surprisingly gripping. If you're able to set up a PC-FX emulator, I definitely recommend you do so to play this game.