Other Stuff Monthly #26!

 Testament is a trading card game released in 2008, where players compete to save the most souls before the world ends in the book of revelations. Luckily, Testament is also a board game released in Japanese in 2017 and in English in 2021, which has players working together to fight a series of big RPG-style bosses and their respective minions. It's this one that I'll be reviewing in this post.

 

It can be played with one to four players, though no matter how many actual players are involved, there always has to be four player characters, so really, you'll most likely want there to be one, two, or four players, since a three player game would have two players with a character each, with the third player controlling two characters.Anyway, though you can assign any skills to any characters, the manual suggest a recommended starting skillsets for each character that really do make the most sense. Going by these recommended skillsets, you've got a healer, a tank, a hard-hitting melee attacker and a group-hitting magic attacker. There's also two extra characters that I think were only added as extra stretch goals in the Kickstarter for the English version, but to be honest, I haven't looked into them much.

 

Each round of the game has three main phases: all the players do their actions first, then the regular enemies, then the boss (if it's appeared yet). Furthermore, the first five stages (of six) have two phases: the first few rounds will be the "exploration" phase, where most rounds have a few enemies turn up to cause trouble, but they can be beaten by the players to build up power on a super meter for a big powerful one-use attack (or a mass heal by the healer). There's also keys that can be found during this phase, that will weaken the boss very slightly when it shows up, at the end of the final round of the exploration phase.

 

When the boss appears,it also has actions it performs every turn, which include (but are not limited to) devestating attacks on the players, healing itself and its minions, summoning additional minions, and so on. The boss has three "health bars", and you've got eight rounds to get each one to zero. Go eight rounds without reducing the boss' health to zero, and you lose instantly. Get the boss' health to zero three times, and you've won the stage, and you can go on to level up your characters' skills!

 

Levelling up is kind of complicated: there's a few colour-coded skill trees (white is healing, red is melee attacks, yellow is support, and so on), each with seven skills numbered 1, 2A, 2B, 3Ai, 3Aii, 3Bi, and 3Bii. When levelling up a level 1 skill, you pick skill 2A or 2B, and if you picked 2A, you can level that up into 3Ai or 3Aii. On top of all that, each skill also has a rank value. Once you've done all your levelling for a character, adding the rank values tells you the character's new rank, though this mostly just determines their maximum HP.

 

So that's how it plays, but is it any good? Yes, but it's a complicated game that takes a lot of concentration, and it's really not a very accessible game for people who aren't experienced in playing board games. There's a lot of stuff to keep track of: skills characters have and haven't used, damage taken by characters, enemies, and bosses, special effects of boss attacks, and so on. But if you're the kind of players that can handle a game like this, it's worth a try. THe battles are very difficult, but because of this, it's very satisfying to win them, though it's a little disappointing that there isn't any kind of ending text in the manual for when you beat the final boss (the eponymous dragon Testament). That one niggle aside, the presentation is excellent, with great art on every card and board, and the Kickstarter price of 50USD doesn't seem above the odds. Assuming the retail price is about the same, Testament comes recommended for groups who want a very rules-heavy co-op game that'll last a few sessions (or one massive long session, as the box suggests a playtime of 500 minutes!)

Bullfight - Ring no Haja (PC Engine)

 

 Or maybe it's Ring no Hasha, depending on who you ask. Either way, it's a boxing game, of the lesser-spotted side-view variety (as opposed to the more common behind the shoulder/first person view popularised by Punch Out). But it's not just a boxing game, as it attempts to spice things up by also being a single plane beat em up!Unfortunately, neither game is very good. The boxing is actually okay, for the first fight, then the second fight pits you against an opponent with the fists of god, requiring you to get in at least three or four times as many hits in as they do to get them down. You pick one of eight boxers, then one of eight managers (though it seems some managers won't work with certain boxers?), then go into fighting your way up the ranks.

 

Whoever you pick, you block with one button and puch with the other. Pressing a direction with the punch button gives access to a few different kinds of punch, and the first two times you get knocked down, you hammer the punch button as fast as you can to get back up. The third time you're knocked down, you'll lose no mater what. (The same applies to your opponent, too.)

 

Then there's the beat em up mode. You slowly walk across a short stage, beating people up (the most effective way to do so is to crouch and keep kicking them, since none of them can crouch), and sometimes jumping for the bags of gold that float by overhead. There's also occasionally mysterious flying knives that atack from offscreen that are nigh-impossible to avoid, so watch out for that. The money from the floating bags, and from defeating enemies is used in the shop to buy various things: a boxing license that lets you fight the stage's boss, a first aid box that acts as a continue, and various training items that sometimes increase your stats a little, and sometimes do nothing.

 

Get to the end of the stage without the boxing license and you're sent back to the start. If you have the boxing license, you go on to fight that stage's boss, which happens in the form of an actual boxing match as seen in the game's main mode. Also like the main mode, the second boss' stamina stat is so high that your punches have almost no effect on him, and after many attempts, I was never able to knock him down more than once. I did try and grind to get stronger, by repeating the second stage over and over to buy training items, but as I mentioned, they only sometimes increase your stats, and I just didn't have the patience to keep doing it.

 

So, Bullfight is mechanically and conceptually an okay boxing game, but the way those ideas are implemented are not so great. And the beat em up mode doesn't feel good to play at all, with its stiff movement, weak-feeling attacks, and flying knives. Also, that thing where the boxing match is already booked, but to participate in it, the boxer has to fight his way through the mean streets and buy a single-use boxing license with his own money from some seedy-looking shop in a bad neighoburhood. This used to be one of the cheapest PC Engine games you could get, but that was a few years ago now, and there aren't really any cheap PC Engine games anymore. If you could still pick it up for less than £5, it might have been worth a look as a weird curiosity, but now that it typically goes for more than ten, I really wouldn't bother.

Armed Dragon Fantasy Villgust (NES)

So, Villgust is a big franchise, that's probably mostly known among English-speaking fans for the two episode OAV from 1993. I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think the original incarnation was a combination of a tabletop RPG with a series of randomly packaged keshigomu figures. So, of course, the videogame versions of it (there's this one and another one on SNES) are also RPGs. Though this version attempts to make things a little more interesting by having real time action battles.

 

How that works is that you walk around the maps and get into random battles like in pretty much any other traditional videogame RPG, but when the battle starts, the enemies will be split into small groups, and each member of your party fights one of those small groups. This is done in a little single screen platformer-style area, and you can walk, jump, and attack, and some characters can also learn and equip magic spells, which you cast in a very traditional NES action game way: pressing up and attack together. It's pretty fun though the balance between the enemies' strangth and your party's is never quite right: when you first enter an area, the enemies will be very tough, but after only one or two level ups, they'll quickly become trivial wastes of your time, rather than an actual danger.

 

Unfortunately, that's not the game's biggest problem. That comes in the form of a particularly egregious case of 8-bit RPG obtusity. More precisely, talking to the right people in the right order is compulsory in order to advance through the game. You might easily fight your way through the dungeon near the town, but until you've spoken to the person in town who tells you that that dungeon is where the boss is, the boss just won't be there, and you can't get any further. The game has a fan translation, but I was still regularly consulting guides as I played, because there's just no in-game indication of exactly who the magic game-advancing NPC is. They all mostly say pretty generic borderline meaningless NPC lines, too.

 

Despite all its flaws, I did actually enjoy the few hours I played of Villgust. However, despite that, I think the flaws are too glaring to allow me to recommend anyone else play it. I guess there are some people out there who do actually enjoy that whole "talking to everyone multiple times is compulsory" thing, so those people should have no problem with it being such a big part of this one. As for everyone else? Don't bother.

Kowai Shashin - Shinrei Shashin Kitan (Playstation)

 Or "Scary Photos: Tales in Spirit Photography" in English. This is actually a game that was on my "to play" list for a few years, after I saw a clip of it in an "every Japanese Playstation game" video, and it looked like it wouldn't have too much of a language barrier. It turns out that procrastination worked in my favour on this occasion, since in 2021, an English translation patch came out!

 

Now that I've played it, there's technically not much stopping you from getting through the game without being able to read the text, though you would be missing out on a large part of the experience. Playing the game has you moving a cursor around a haunted photograph, trying to find the spot where a ghost is lurking, then exorcising the ghost. This part is done first by doing a couple of simple quick time events to block the ghost's attacks, followed by some high speed precision button pressing to chant the words to seal them. The chanting requires you to press the right buttons in the right order, but only asks that you do so as quickly as possible, rather than keeping to a specific rhythm.

 

So, with the story and atmosphere removed, there really isn't much of a game here. But they haven't been removed, so we can look at this as a complete package. As a complete package, it's pretty entertaining! It's got a similar feel to it as other urban legend-themed low budget Japanese horror, like the animated shorts Yamishibai, or the charmingly cheesy live action faux-tabloid mockumentary Tokyo Videos of Horror series. Furthermore, some of the stories behind the photos you exorcise seem to be lifted from real life urban legends that I'm sure I've heard about in the works of Japan-focussed folklorist Tara A. Devlin

 

Though the scenes showing your character are CG, the photos are actual digitised photos with ghosts edited into them. OR ARE THEY? Because, of course, this game has an urban legend of its own attached to it: according to this legend, one of the photos in the game (the one of the guy in the subway station) is a real ghost photo, and because it was used in something as frivolous as a videogame, the game is now cursed. Unfortunately, this photo is as silly-looking and obviously fake as the other photos in the game, so the legend is probably not true. It's easy to see how it could have spread, though: not only is it a spooky-themed game that uses real photos, but it also appeared late in the console's life, meaning it most likely had a small print run and wasn't as easily available as most games. So a rumour that a friend of a friend's cousin played it and died a week later could definitely spread with no easy way to play the game and disprove it.

 

Of course, that small print run means prices for a legit copy are now absolutely ludicrous online. But a legit copy ouldn't be in English, so if you're reading this, you'd probably be better off emulating anyway. And if you like Japanese horror (and you're not a snob about it), you probably should give it a look! It's not a great game, but it's a fun little diversion for an hour or so.

Fatal Fury (Mega Drive)

 

I recently got copies of the Mega Drive ports of Fatal Fury and Street Fighter II on the same day, and playing them back to back in this manner really got me to wondering why Fatal Fury wasn't a bigger hit on the system, if only as a poor man's SFII. And I mean that in a literal way, and in no way a disparaging one. At the time, Capcom's fighter was the most expensive game on both the SNES and the Mega Drive, and the MD port had the added cost of needing to also buy a six button controller.

 

Fatal Fury, by contrast, was a normally-priced game, and the Mega Drive port was designed to only need three buttons (since it came out before the SFII port, and the six button pad that launched alongside it). Furthermore, on a superficial level, Fatal Fury, on the Mega Drive, at least, should have been more attractive to the casual observer. The sprites are much bigger, and the game is a lot more colourful in general. There's a little scene of the game's villain Geese Howard reacting to every victory you achieve in single player mode, and the characters and world feel a lot more real and fleshed out than the cartoony national stereotypes of Street Fighter II.

 

Of course, a lot of this stuff was by design: most of you probably know this, but the original Fatal Fury is kind of an alternate sequel to the first Street Fighter. According to legend, Street Fighter's lead designer (Takashi Nishiyama) was dissatisfied with various decisions made in the development of Street Fighter II, and wanted to make a fighting game that expanded on the original's "protagonist fighting different enemies" concept, rather than SFII's "ensemble cast fighting each other" concept. An emphasis on storytelling to egg a single player on towards seeing the ending, rather than on egging on multiple players to challenge each other, I guess. It seems kind of similar to how Nishiyama's first game for Capcom, Tatakai no Banka, expanded on concepts from his last game for Irem, Spartan X.

 

Playing Fatal Fury now, I think I would have taken to it as a kid in a way I didn't take to Street Fighter II (I wouldn't get into the Street Fighter series in general until a few years later when I became obsessed with the Playstation ports of Alpha 3 and Pocket Fighter). I loved beat em ups, and its emphasis on storytelling, characters, and creating a believable world makes FF feel like it's cut from the same cloth as the Streets of Rage series. Plus the simpler controls of having a button each assigned to punch, kick, and throw would have appealed to me, too. I guess unfortunately, it just didn't stand a chance of making itself known when put up against the massive cultural phenomenon of Street Fighter II and the lowbrow horror camp of Mortal Kombat.