Simple 1500 Series vol. 99 - The Kendo ~Ken no Hanamichi~ (Playstation)

 Something interesting about budget hames in particular is the way in whih the best of them manage to get a maximum amount of game with a minimum amount of resources, especially when they manage to do it without resorting to boring grinding or other timesink tactics. And The Kendo is a good example of that! Most of the characters in the game are represented by the same model with different coloured versions of the same textures. And yet, there are three single player stories, a survival mode, and a versus mode for one or two players.

 

The story mode is the most interesting part of the game, in my opinion. Everything's in Japanese, but it's easy enough to understand what's going on anyway. As mentioned, there are three stories, and they're all told with kendo matches interspersed between visual noval-style dialogue scenes using static character portraits and textboxes. The first story is about a teenage boy entering a kendo tournament, and along with winning the tournament, he also hopes to beat his bishounen rival to impress his girlfriend. 

 

Finishing that story lets you play the second, which stars a young policewoman, apparently investigating a kendo crime ring. So she corners suspects in a shady boiler room-style place and uses kendo skills to make them confess, eventually leading her to the mob's headquarters, and its leaders: a curly-moustached European knight and a sinister figure in a suit and hooded mask. The boiler room fights are done in a single hit, rather than the two-hit fights in the previous tournament story, so it's clear that the developers were doing what they could to add a little variety to what could have easily become a very repetitive game.

 

The final story mode has as its protagonist a man in his late forties, who seems to be working in some kind of industry that's a combination of pro-wrestling and kendo, complete with a sleazy McMahon-esque promoter and the involvement of organised crime. Unfortunately, this is where my Japanese illiteracy causes problems: it seems like in this story, you have to ensure that specific things happen in the match to progress, and I'm not sure exactly what those things are. I manage to eventually luck my way to the third stage, but it eventually became clear that I wasn't going to get any further.

 

The actual kendo action is pretty good. You can move forward and back, as well as into and out of the screen, and each of the four face buttons represents a different offensive or defensive move. You can even feint by pressing two buttons in quick succession, letting you stop one move midway and immediately perform a different one. The obvious comparison to make is to the SG-1000 game Champion Kendo, since it's both a game I love and as far as I know, the only other kendo game. The Kendo focusses on one-on-one matches that are decided by first-to-two-points, as opposed to Champion Kendo's five-on-five elimination matches. It's also a lot more fair than Champion Kendo, which, as much as I love it, does seem to rely a lot of randomness. There's definitely a lot more skill involved in this game. 

 

Whether you speak Japanese or not, this is a game I think is worth playing. Despite being tehnically a better game, it won't replace Champion Kendo in my regular rotation, but that's because I like that game's more arcadey score-chasing structure. But this game is a smartly-conceived and well-executed exercise in game design, and in getting the most out of limited resources. So I do recommend it, especially if you are interested in videogames as a creative medium.

Steel Dragon EX (PS2)

 Steel Dragon EX is a compilation of two games: Steel Dragon, which is a port of the 1997 arcade game Shienryu, and an all-new game, Steel Dragon Evolution, which was called Shienryu Explosion on the Japanese version of the disc (Simple 2000 Series Vol. 37: The Shooting ~Double Shienryu~). I'm going to be talking here mainly about the latter, though, since there's a much more interesting home port of the original Shienryu that I want to give its own review someday.

 

Shienryu Explosion (though I've been playing the PAL version, the JP title sounds so much better) is a surprisingly simple game, considering it came out in 2003. You only have your regular shots and your bomb, no secondary weapons or any other Cave-style weirdness. Furthermore, the scoring system is also simple, though it seems like it hasn't really been properly implemented. When you shoot enemies, they'll almost always die with a 256x multiplier applied to the points scored from them. The exceptions I've seen being the third ship's homing missiles, which give a 128x multiplier, and when you kill enemies with your bomb, which gives a 512x multiplier. 

 

Enemies also drop little gold cross-shaped stars when they explode, and when you use your bomb, enemy bullets are also turned into stars, as are a boss' bullets at the time of its death. Obviously, these are points items, and less obviously, they give extra lives when you collect enough of them. As is the case with destroyed enemies, there's also a multiplier applied to the points you get from them. unlike with destroyed enemies, the multiplier seems to have been (somewhat) properly implemented: if you're shooting when you pick up a star, it's worth 1x point, if you're not, it's worth 256x. You also move a lot faster when you're not shooting, so that's nice. But if you're zooming around collecting stars and not shooting, there's still going to be new enemies appearing onscreen. So you get more points essentially for letting more weak enemies spend time onscreen shooting at you.

 

There is, according to legend, a reason why aspects of Shienryu Explosion might feel (or even be!) a little half-baked, though. Supposedly, this whole project was put together as a kind of fundraising exercise, and Explosion in particular was kind of jimmied together from a very early version of a game that would release on Dreamcast a few years later in 2007 (and on several other systems long after that), Triggerheart Exelica. I think the fundraising pat of the story is almost definitely true, and I think the other half of the story is pretty believable, too. Triggerheart Exelica is definitely a much more mechanically complex game, and it's also a lot more sophisticated aesthetically, too. But it also came out four years after Shienryu Explosion. So there's plenty of time between the two for the project to go through a lot of evolution into something completely different.

 

Shienryu Explosion/Steel Dragon Evolution is a pretty good game. If you can pick it up cheap, or if you just want to try out a PS2-exclusive STG via emulation, it's definitely worth doing so. Oddly, the PAL version's price seems to fluctuate wildly: some places list it for the merest pittance, while others are charging hundreds of pounds for it. Strange.