Gaiapolis (NES)

 This is an unlicensed port of the arcade game of the same game. Double unlicensed, even, since they didn't ask Nintendo if they could make a Famicom game, nor did they get permission from Konami to make a port of their arcade game. Still, this is the game to show people when they, in their ignorance, parrot lazy old stereotypes about unlicensed Famicom games being low quality, as when it came out (circa 1994-95, according to people who probably know, like those to maintain the Bootleg Games Wiki), it might well have been the best beat em up on the console.

 

But before I get onto that, I should probably describe the arcade game for those who don't know it, and also address the inevitable differences that are going to happen in porting an arcade game to vastly underpowered hardware. The arcade Gaiapolis is a vertically-scrolling, top-down beat em up with a fantasy theme and even a little bit of RPG nonsense. The RPG stuff comes in the form of not only experience points and level ups, but also in passwords used to carry those over into future games (something Capcom would later also do in their single player-focused fighting game Red Earth/Warzard). You also get little buddies following you round to help fight enemies. A little robot knight or a little armadillo thing, etc.

 

This version is also a top-down vertically scrolling beat em up, and it does a pretty impressive job of replicating the game at this basic level. It includes all three playable characters from the original, has a simultaneous two-player mode and manages to put you up against several enemies at a time, all feats that even some SNES beat em ups famously couldn't manage. The levelling up is also present, though there's no passwords to carry it between games (and since you always fight the same enemies and get the same items, this means you always level up at the exact same rate). The little buddies are also gone, which is understandable, but still a little sad.

 

On its own terms, without compared it to the original, Gaiapolis is a good game. It looks amazing, there are very few Famicom games that can boast of such detailed backgrounds (there's some really impressive animated rivers and stuff that look amazing!), or of throwing around so many big characters around the screen all at once. There's a few points where a discerning eye can see the metaphorical strings (one big example is that your screen-clearing magic attack and the large sprites used for certain bosses are both made of background tiles, so they can only appear on alternating frames), but honestly, that kind of thing only makes it all more charming. And most importantly, it's fun to play, too.

 

Obviously, you can probably play the arcade version in 2026 just as easily as you can this one. Maybe even easier! Which does make this version a little obsolete from a totally objective standpoint, but I think it does still have some value. It's a fun game, even though it's so heavily compromised, truncated, and abridged, and more importantly: it's interesting. It's so far beyond most (maybe all) of the officially released Famicom beat em ups, and it really shows that the people at Sachen really had a handle on how to get the most out of the system, which was a decade old when this game was released. If you are interested in developers drawing miracles from ancient hardware, it's definitely worth your time.

Merchant in Dungeon (Switch)

 The English translation of the PC game Recettear came out back in 2010, and as much as I've enjoted playing its addictive combination of Ys-like action RPGing and menu=based shop management (it's one of an exclusive set of RPGs that's I've played all the way through more than once), I've also long wished for a game that scratched the same itch, but on a handheld. Merchant in Dungeon might not be the first game I've played in this quest, but it is the first I've written about. (I'll get to the others someday, honest!) 

 

It has almost the exact same premise as Recettear, too: you've been lumbered with a huge debt by a relative, and you've got to run an item shop to pay it off. There's also a heavy emphasis on item crafting, or at least, on ordering items to be crafted for you. There's a blacksmith and an alchemist/chef in town, and you can bulk order items to be made to fulfill orders that have been made by your customers. You can also buy multiple shops, restaurants, and so on, where your items could theoretically be sold. And as well as the manufactured items, you can also venture into dungeons to kill monsters for loot and hunt for treasure.

 

The dungeons aren't top-down action stages like in Recettear, though, instead being a bunch of rows of five cards, from which you can select from three at a time. The cards represent things like monsters, treasures, empty spaces, and so on. You keep picking cards until your party (made up of yourself and the strongest of the employees from your chain of shops) runs out of HP, or until you find and choose and exit card. With the battles being taken care of automatically, your input here is mainly down to deciding if your party has enough remaining HP, and choosing the next card accordingly.

 

That hands off approach extends to a lot of the game's other portions, too. The crafting, for example: all you have to do is pay the respective shopkeeper, and you can make the order. There's none of the ingredient gathering of the sort you might see in the Atelier games, for example. You'll be doing this a lot, too, as fulfilling the orders is your main source of income, the shops you open being mostly useless after they've sold a few restocks' worth of items. Fulfilling the orders also helps increase the affection each of the game's female characters has towards you, so you can choose to marry one at the end of the game. You can offer them gifts to make it go up even faster, but you really don't need to: by the time I'd finished the game, they were all 100% in love with me, without me even trying. There's a slightly unsavoury aspect to this part of the game too, as shallow as it is: while all of the female characters are drawn as adults, and they're also all employed in adult jobs, two of them are listed as being underage in their (well-hidden) character profiles. What a weird and pointless thing to add in there, to make your otherwise adult characters kids in that way. It's the opposite of the old "draw a little girl but pretend she's an immortal demon" thing, too. Bizarre, but then, the whole romantic aspect of the game feels like it was added as an afterthought and might as well not be there at all, anyway.

 

The main challenge of the game is raising the money to pay your next installment, but once you've completed a dungeon or two, you'll start getting such easily-fulfilled, high-value item requests that while you're given a few weeks for each repayment, you'll be doing it in less than one, and you'll probably be able to pay the last few one after another in one go. It kind of feels like the developers thought up all of these systems for different things to do in the game: the mass production, the card-based dungeon exploration, the management of employees and keeping multiple shops stacked, but then they didn't balance the numbers properly, meaning that getting through the game is so easy that you never have to engage with any of those systems on any but the most shallow level. (What a long sentence!)

 

Merchant in Dungeon is an okay game, and it'll probably keep you occupied for a couple of hours. But that's all. In fact, if you aren't writing a review of it, once you realise you can just charge towards the end of the game, you'll do just that, and get through it even quicker than I did. You can continue your save after paying off your debt, but there's no longer any goal to work towards, nor is there anything interesting enough to get you engaging more deeply with the game's mechanics. Hopefully, a sequel might come out that fixes the problems with this first game. I can't really recommend this one, though, unless you're curious enough to pick it up for a pittance in an eShop sale.