Shiren the Wanderer 4 Plus: THe Eye of God and the Devil's Navel (PSP)

 Once again, a Shiren the Wanderer game has been fan-translated, so I thought it'd be worth covering, like I did with Asuka Gaiden almost exactly a year ago. Especially since I recently got the disappointing news that the translation for the first Game Boy entry in the series is on indefinite hold. I really want to see how such a complex game pans out on such low-powered host hardware! It also helps that I played a lot of this once it came out last week, finishing the main story dungeon in a couple of days.

 

Unfortunately, I'll have to start the review like the game does: with a negative. One of the first things you'll see upon starting the game is probably the reason why this one never got an official translation: some absolutely horrific racist caricatures of black people. This game takes a break from the series' usual old-timey Japan setting in favour of a tropical island (and, in a rare bit of male character fanservice, Shiren gets a very skimpy little outfit for the occasion, too.) Luckily, other than the way they're drawn, the locals all talk and mostly act like normal people and not stereotypical "savage natives". Except for the short scene where they think Shiren and Koppa are monsters and try to burn them at the stake.

 

It's really a shame that the game is soiled by the presence of these character designs, as in every other respect, it's great. It plays as you'd expect from the finest series of roguelikes there is, including the series' staple of improving the towns you pass through on your journey by helping and building relationships with the people living in them, and stuff like the in-dungeon day/night cycle wherein the nights have their own monsters that can only be killed with limited-use spells. Plus, once you complete the main dungeon, there's also the traditional wealth of bonus dungeons. 

 

So far I've seen the monster cave, which is an old-fashioned 99 floor dungeon that doesn't allow outside items, and most of the items in there are unidentified until you use them, and the Two-Strike dungeon, which has its own special rule: any creature (including you) with more than one HP will be reduced to one HP if they take damage, and will be killed if they take damage at one HP. This makes for a fast and addictive game, especially since you still heal a hp by stepping away from an enemy once. You just have to avoid getting surrounded, or by momentarily forgetting the rules and making a silly mistake.

 

As well as the game itself, there's also an enjoyable little story, which actually has an evil villain, which feels like a departure from the series' norm, which usually sees the dungeons as forces of nature that have to be traversed to obtain some mysterious treasure that'll solve some other problem. Unfortunaley, I can't really go in to any more detail than that, since the plot does have a few twists and deceitful characters that'd be spoiled by any more information than what I've given.

 

I'm sorry to say that the racist NPCs make it very difficult to recommend The Eye of God and the Devil's Navel. In every other respect, it's an excellent game that stands well alongside its seriesmates as the pinnacle of roguelikes as a genre, plus I did really enjoy the plot, PLUS it's a fantranslation, and I always want it to be known that fantranslators are pillars of our community and their work is always values. But the NPC designs are a big, undeniable problem, and if you're like me, you're going to be playing this on a PS Vita anyway, so you might as well play that console's port of the fifth game in the series, The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate instead.

Keio Flying Squadron (Mega CD)

 This is another game where I'm not totally sure on its obscurity, but I'm going to go with the excuse that a moderately popular Mega CD game that's been mostly forgotten is still going to be obscure to most people. I wouldn't go as far as to say that any Mega CD game outside of Night Trap, Sonic CD, and Thunderhawk is obscure, but I also don't think it's too crazy a statement. But anyway, this is a game that surprisingly got a lot of coverage in UK magazines when it came out, even getting a demo disc given away with one of them!

 

It's a horizontal shooting game, and I think a large part of its appeal is that it was made specifically for the Mega CD, but it's also just a game that happens to be on CD instead of cartridge. Of course, there's lots of voice acting, an FMV intro, and a bunch of full screen pixel art cutscenes, plus a CD audio soundtrack, but as a game, it's just a regualr old shooting game with regular old pixel graphics. I suspect that it might take advantage of the increased onscreen colour palette the Mega CD offers over a stock Mega Drive, but it might also be that the artists were just really good atre-using colours and dithering. Maybe both!

 

As for the game itself: it's pretty good! Nothing spectacular, but it does look really nice and it plays decently. I've got a few issues with it, like how your main weapon is incredibly weak before you've picked up a few power ups, and how the power up for your secondary weapon seems to take ages to cycle round to the one actually useful option. Also, it's absolutely merciless when you lose a life. It'll trick you at first into thinking it doesn't suffer from Gradius syndrome because when you die, you're only partially depowered, plus a couple of power up items appear onscreen, too. But the truth is, those power ups are all the way at the other end of the screen, and your invincibility time post-ressurection is woefuly inadequate in terms of getting you over there. There's been many times where things were going perfectly well, then I immediately lose all my lives in just a few seconds. It's infuriating, and I have to admit that Ihad to resort to using a level select cheat to take screenshots of later stages to add a bit of variety to the screenshots for this review! How shameful.

 

If wikipedia is to be believed, there's some weird stuff going on with the western versions of this game, that really flew in the face of the trends and accepted wisdom of the time. Apparently, the reason it's so aggressively odd and also set in a fantastical version of old-timey Japan is because they wanted to tap into the burgeoning popularity of anime in the US and Europe. The exact opposite of what most companies were doing up until almost a decade later! Also, Rami, the bunnygirl protagonist was intended to be bisexual? And another reason for the comedic themeing is to be as far away from the then-controversial Mortal Kombat as possible? I recommend going and reading that page, it's got an insane amont of detail for a mostly-forgotten thirty-year-old shooting game.

 

There's a couple more points of interest, too. The options screen, as well as looking unusually nice for an options screen, also includes the ability to slightly change the exact location of your sprite's hitbox, which is something I don't remember seeing in any other game before or since. There's also a secret hidden game! Inputting a certain sequence on the main menu takes you away to a faux-LCD (or LSI as they're called in Japan) game about a cat catching falling objects.It's not particularly exciting, but it's there, and that in itself is fairly interesting. I assume it must have been a while after the game's release that it was discovered, too, as I don't remember it ever being listed alongside the level select cheat in magazines (and hidden game cheats always stuck out to me, even for games I didn't have any access to. The very concept of them was fascinating, along with secret characters and stages back in the pre-32-bit days when those things were a lot rarer).

 

One final thing I want to mention is that, as stated earlier, some of the cutscenes are FMV, and some are full screen pixel art. But somehow,  the FMV looks almost as good as the pixels! It's big and colourful, and might only be bettered on the Mega CD by the ports of the Taito laserdisc games. Also, the voice acting is really reminiscent of English dubs of comedy anime from around the same time, which is nice and nostalgic, too. Keio Flying Squadron is a pretty good game, and it's full of charm, too. There are definitely better shooting games on Mega CD, but this is one that's still worth a bit of your time. The Mega CD is a system that seems to have been hit particularly hard with "the retro game curse", though, probably due to its unpopularity when it was new, so always assume that emulation is the only option for its games.

Natsuki Crisis Battle (SNES)

 One of the most interesting things about the SNES back when I was first getting into emulation at the turn of the century (via the oddly xmas-themed DreamSNES emulator on Dreamcast) was that it had a ton of licensed anime tie-ins. I was just starting to really get into anime, thanks in no small part to other features of the Dreamcast, and having access to lots of games based on the likes of Dragonball Z, Sailor Moon, Gundam Wing and other 90s TV classics was great. But so entrentched was the SNES' status as the anime console of the early 90s, that it got games based on OAVs barely anyone's ever even heard of, let alone seen.

 

Natsuki Crisis Battle is one such game, based on the OAV and manga Natsuki Crisis. The manga has never had any kind of English release, though the OAV at least got fansubbed in 2007. Anyway, it's about a schoolgirl who's good at karate, and ends up fighting people who are good at other martial arts. And so, as was the fashion at the time, this is a fighting game. There's a story mode where you can only play as Natsuki herself, plus a versus mode where you can choose your character, opponent, and stage for a single fight. Finally, there's the odd Hyaku mode, where you pick one of the characters, and fight off against (presumably) a hundred nameless opponents who gradually get stronger, all on a single health bar.

 

Conspicuous by its absence, then, is a proper arcade-style mode, where you can pick any of the characters and fight all the others in turn, maybe with a character-specific ending to look forward to. While the modes that are present do offer a good few hours of fun (especially if you can get someone to play versus mode with you), this omission does hurt the game a lot, I feel. There's a lot working in the game's favour too, though: the realatively lo-fi feel of the fights is a nice change of pace, the small-but-detailed sprites look great(Rina, the wrestling character, has some really great-looking specials, in particular), as do the back grounds, and in the biggest surprise of all for a little-known licensed tie-in, it's a game that has a few ideas ahead of its time!

 

First, it's the earliest fighting game of which I'm aware that has character with more than one costume. Not just different colour palletes, Natsuki and Rina have entirely different outfits in story mode than they do in all the other modes, meaning they essentially had to have been drawn and animated twice. Furthermore, there's forwards and backwards dashing! This had already been done (and better) in Asuka 120% Burning Festival a year prior, but I think this is the first I've seen it done in a console game. And on top of that, it does it in an interesting, idiosyncratic way: the shoulder buttons make you dash in their respective directions, and when you deash towards your opponent, it comes with a built-in attack, with a different attack happening if you hold up on the d-pad while doing it!

 

Natsuki Crisis Battle isn't a timeless classic, and it's not the best SNES anime fighting game, either (since that's obviously the unassailable Gundam Wing Endless Duel). But it is a very interesting and charming game, and I think those things are at least as important as being good. Maybe more, even. It's definitely worth an hour or two of your time, at least.

Gensokyo Pro Wrestling Muscle Tag Match (PC)

 In the early 00s, there was a craze among doujin game developers to remake aracde and Famicom games from the eighties, but reskin them with the settings and characters of the various visual novels and slice of life manga that were popular at the time: To Heart, Azumanga Daioh, Clannad, and so on. A few years later, that trend was replaced with a slightly different one that still doesn't seem to have gone away even now: remaking arcade and Famicom games from the eighties, but reskinning them with the setting and characters from the Touhou series of shooting games. This is one such example, remaking Kinnikuman Muscle Tag Match (also known as Tag Team Match: M.U.S.C.L.E, because Americans in the eighties and nineties were just addicted to pointlessly rebranding Japanese properties).

 

I assume the developers of this game must have had some strong nostalgia for their source material, as it's a terrible game. Awkward, fiddly, and buggy to the point of being close to non-functioning. This remake is at least better than it in the respect that it does actually work properly, and it's also a lot more colourful and has much bigger sprites than its inspiration. It still suffers from its biggest problem, though, which is unavoidable as its a fundamental one: this is a wrestling game with barely any wrestling in it.

 

You pick two characters to form your tag team, and you'll fight other teams in the ring. Fighting mainly consists of just walking up to your opponent and punching them, or bouncing off the ropes for a flying punch. If you manage to get behind your opponent and press the attack button, you'll do a German suplex, and there seems to be some way for performing a running neckbreaker, though there's a chance that it just happens randomly. Occasionally, a glowing orb will enter the ring, and collecting it temporarily increases your attack power, and your movement and recovery speeds. Also, when you're powered up, you'll sometimes do a huge dramatic finishing move that summons portraits of other characters looking on in awe and instantly wins the round. But like the neckbreaker, this seems to be a random occurance.

 

There's not much more to say about this game. It's a slightly improved remake of a terrible game, and neither are really worth your time. I don't think there's anyone out there who's attempting to play every Touhou fangame in existence, but such a person is really the only one who should bother with this. Or someone seeking out obscure games to review, I guess. It's not painful to play or anything, and I did once play it for almost half an hour before getting bored of it. But still: don't even waste the time it would take to track a copy down, let alone the time you'd spend playing it.