Inuyasha: A Feudal Fairy Tale (Playstation)

 Just like TV Animation X: Unmei no Tatakai, this game (also known as Inuyasha: Sengoku Otogi Kassen) is a fighting game based on an anime with a large female fanbase that was released very late in the Playstation's life. Also like TV Animation X, it takes full advantage of its late release by having really impressive graphics, though this time it's a 2D game. But while that game was built upon an existing series, being essentially the secret third Psychic Force game, this one is totally its own thing, with mixed results.

 

The second thing you'll notice about the game is how great it looks: the character sprites are all really well drawn and animated, and their animations are all full of personality, too. The stages are also really well-drawn, and even more impressively, they all have different lighting. I mention this because the character sprites actually react to the lighting in each stage. And it's not just that they'll be dark in the dark stages or what ever, but there's stages where different parts of the stage have different levels of light coming from different sources, and the sprites are lit appropriately depending on what part of the screen they're in. It's something you don't often see in 2D fighting games, and in 2003, I think the only similar examples would have been the Capcom Vs. SNK games, which were on much more powerful hardware than the Playstation.

 

Another feature you really wouldn't have expected to see in a Playstation fighting game are tag battles! Even Capcom had to make massive sacrifices to get them working in their games, and they were able to work miracles on 32-bit consoles. But of course, Capcom's games were arcade ports with massive sprites, while Inuyasha is a Playstation original, so everything about it was custom-tailored to the hardware. Furthermore, there is a couple of seconds of loading whenever a tag happens. But I do think they did a fairly decent job of hiding these pauses, and you can have any combination of four characters fighting each other on any of the game's stages.

 

It's not all good, though, unfortunately. There are a couple of things I really don't like about this game. I mentioned earlier that the graphics would be the second thing you'll notice about the game. That's because the first thing you'll notice is that you start with only two playable characters! You've got to unlock the rest by playing through story mode, where you travel around a map encountering characters to fight, and mini-games to play. While doing this, you have a quota of jewel shards to collect. You get these by knocking them out of your opponents, and each character has one specific move that knocks shards out of an opponent. Imagine if you bought this game and wanted to play versus mode as soon as you got home! This'd really knock some of your enthusiasm out of you, wouldn't it? 

 

Another disapponting thing is that the special move inputs are very simple. Normal attacks are performed with the circle button, and specials are done by pressing a direction and the square button together. I get why this was done, the target audience of the game was more likely to be fans of the anime, rather than fans of fighting games, and simplified inputs have even been tried a few times in original fighting games in an effort to try and attract new players. The problem is that in my opinion, it never really works well. Move inputs in normal fighting games are designed so that performing moves can be a part of how a character plays, and how it feels to control them. These simplified input games though, lack that kind of satisfying, fluid flow, and they never feel especially good to play.

 

Despite all of that, I think that for fans of the show, I think there is some value to be found in a great-looking game where you can have the characters fight each other, and most importantly: you can play as Sesshomaru, the best character. It's a shame that all the work that went into making it look so good ended up being attached to a game that's so mechanically flawed. I got a Japanese copy of it dirt cheap a few years ago, and prices don't seem to have risen a great deal in the time since, but make sure you don't accidentally uy a copy of the JP-only RPG, also on Playstation.

Chaos Seed: Feng Shui Chronicle (SNES)

 Is this the first game where you're charged with the task of building dungeons, and defending them from invading would-be heroes? I don't know of any that came earlier than it, but I can believe that something along these conceptual lines might exist on some eighties microcomputer somewhere. Either way, Chaos Seed: Fengshui Chronicle (also known as Chaos Seed : Fuusui Kairouki) is a very early entry into the genre, and  it is a little different from the more famous games that came out after it.

 

In most dungeon building games, a large part of your goal is to create an environment to which monsters will be drawn, and will want to stay, so that they can defend your base at the centre of it. Instead, Chaos seed has you placing certain kinds of rooms with the goal of generating various resources, most prominently energy and sentan. The actual aim of your dungeon is to generate energy that you can absorb and then redirect into the dragon vein (which I think is the Asian equivalent of Europe's ley lines), and revive the blighted lands above. Sentan, the other resource, is used for upgrading the abilities of the rooms you build, as well as other things like summoning monsters to whom you can assign patrol routes to help defend your dungeon.

 

The Fengshui element mentioned in the title comes in the from of a system whereby every room you build is assigned one of five elements, depending on where you build it, and invisible elemental energy flows down the corridors from room to room, and adjacent rooms can have beneficial or detrimental effects on their neighbours' efficiency, depending on how their respective elements match up. A few years ago, when I was less patient, I never would have been able to get into this game. It starts out with a (definitely necessary) tutorial dungeon, where you're constantly being bombarded with (annoying, but still necessary) dialogue boxes explaining every mechanic in detail. Then, at the end of that dungeon, an angry dragon defeats you in battle and casts a spell that scatters your soul simultaneously across multiple different universes, and each subsequent dungeon is a dragon vein in one of those universes.

 

What's less clear is why soldiers are constantly invading your dungeons. For some reason, everyone's very angry about you trying to revive their desolate lands, so they constantly flood your dungeon with goons in an attempt to destroy it and kill you. You fight them in a typical SNES action RPG style, where you have a few normal attacks, you can open a menu to cast spells and use items, and so on. Occasionally, a plot-important character will also invade, and you have to watch them go an a rampage in your dungeon, killing any monsters they encounter until they find and fight you. Though any damage your monsters inflict won't be healed before they character gets to you, so even if they're all killed, they'll still be helping you a little bit.

 

I've played through the first few dungeons, and so far, each takes between one and two hours to complete. Things will speed up a little once you get used to things like how to maximise the efficiency of your energy-generating rooms and so on, as well as a few random factors,like days where enemies don't invade. It's one of those games that's pretty fun, but due to the nature of it, I can't imagine being able to sit through more than one dungeon every couple of days. It's got a problem that I've seen in other real time building/management games, like Sim City: once you've collected and used all your resources in a period, you're left wasting time and doing nothing until the next period starts and causes another round of generation.

 

Still, it's a decent enough time, and it's a pretty unique game, both thematically and mechanically. Plus it looks great! Well, your dungeons are always going to be made up of differently-sized copies of the same few rooms, but the places you see in the cutscenes are beautifully realised! Villages, temples, natural scenes and more, all in an east Asian fantasy style, and all looking great. I'd say Chaos Seed is a game that's definitely worth a look, at least, though I will re-iterate again that you've really got to persevere through the very long tutorial, because it's a complicated game, and you do kind of need to be told how everything works.