Fushigi no Dungeon Furai no Shiren Gaiden - Onna Kenshi Asuka Kenzan! (Dreamcast)

 Or if you'd prefer, Mystery Dungeon Shiren the Wanderer Sidestory - The Swordswoman Asuka Appears! So obviously, it's a spinoff from the Shiren the Wanderer series, which in my opinion are the absolute height of the roguelike genre, with very little else even coming close (in fact, the only rival the series has in my mind is One Way Heroics, and that must be a friendly rivalry, since Shiren characters have appeared in that series too).

 

This one just recently got fantranslated, and only partially: so far, the first "area" is translated apparently. I don't know exactly what that entails, but I've finished the first dungeon, and made a decent way into the second and everything's still in English. The story concerns Asuka, the eponymous swordswoman and a friends of the series' protagonist Shiren. She finds herself in a valley where the local ninja clan, who once protected the people from monsters, have begun robbing people and poisoning the river, and Asuka steps in to investigate. Of course, the ninjas aren't acting of their own volition, but I won't spoil anymore of the plot for you.

 

This mostly plays pretty much exactly like one of the regular Shiren games, with a few elements I haven't seen in the others. But even that's standard for the series, since they all seem to have a few unique elements to them. This time around, there's the Monboxes, which are items that can be used to summon monsters to act as sidekicks if you don't have any actual sidekicks. I haven't found much use for them, to be honest. There's also a new scroll/wand effect: being able to set fires that burn over a large area for quite some time, doing damage every turn to anything that's caught in them.

 

I wasn't keen on the graphics at first, as they eschew the series' usual high-quality pixel art in favour of pre-rendered sprites and backgrounds. The game's look quickly grew on me, though, as everything's detailed and sharp enough that it doesn't have the usual ugly blobby look associated with pre-rendered graphics. Coupled with the background music, there's a lot of atmosphere to be felt and enjoyed in this game's dungeons, too.

 

I don't really have a lot more to say about this game. If you like the Shiren games, this is essentially another one of them, and if you're not familiar with the series, I recommend going and playing the first game, either in its original SNES form, or its later DS port, which even got an official English release! (I'm not sure if this game even counts as being obscure, but it's been the majority of my game-playing this past week, alongside Shenmue 3. So sorry if it doesn't meet your obscurity standards!)

Phenomenon User Metropolitan Highway Invincible Legend Second Stage - Clash! Metropolitan Expressway Grand Prix- (PC)

 I'm not totally sure on the accuracy of that title, but this game doesn't seem to have an official English (or even romanised) title, so  I put the Japanese title into Google translate, and the result is what you see above. Anyay, it's a beat em up that appears to be about illegal street racers who all have superpowers for some reason. All the racing happens in the story mode cutscenes, the game itself is all about fighting enemies and bosses. So right from the start, this is a pretty unusual game.

 

Adding more to that weird genre situation is that it's made in a shooting game engine. Shooting Game Builder, to be precise. I've never used this engine, but I have a theory about how this game was made. This game has no jump button, and with one exception where there's an auto-scrolling background, all the stages take place on a single screen. So, I theorise that it was made in that engine using settings for a Galaga-style game, and the developer has chosen to push that engine to the edges of what can be reasonably done with it, instead of using an engine that's actually intended for beat em ups.

 

The game's a lot of fun, though. You can move left and right, and you have three buttons. The first is for your normal attacks, which are wildly different for every character. There are characters with melee combos, characters that shoot streams of projectiles, and even a character who summons giant swords out of nowhere to attack enemies. The second button is either for guarding if you hold it, or special attacks if you press it at the same time as a direction. Each character's got three specials, and again, they're all very different to each other. The third button is your super attack, which uses up fifty points of your power meter (which fills up as you fight, to a maximum of one hundred).

 

Most stages are structured in the same way: you fight lots of enemies until the boss turns up. One stage is different in that the boss turns up early and fights the enemies alongside you for a while before you face off against each other. Which leads me into the game's big selling point: how shamelessly chuunibyou everything is. The character designs, their attack animations, the fact that so much of the game is spent fighting in front of cityscapes at night, it's all the perfect encapsulation of that particular youthful aesthetic. There's even a Psychic Force reference, as a boss with wind powers has attacks that references various wind characters, including that game's Wendy Ryan, as well as Megaman's Airman, and King of Fighters' Leopold Goenitz.

 

As well as the main game, there's also a nice little PS1-style extra in the form of G-coins that you'll find a couple of every time you play one of the main modes. These are used to buy in-game trading games, of which there are twenty-four. It's only a little thing, but it really makes the game feel like a full, well-rounded thing that could have been on a console in days goneby. That's especially cool when you take into account that the game's free! Of course, I recommend that you go and give it a try, I enjoyed it a lot, and I look forward to the sequel that's teased in the story mode's ending, too.