Shinobido 2: Revenge of Zen (PS Vita)

 I actually wasn't going to review this, as I didn't think it was really obscure enough, so it's been mentioned in the monthly Patreon posts where I talk about other games I've been playing that I didn't review. But then I realised that despite its big budget look and feel, it's the sequel to a late-era PS2 game that wasn't massively popular, plus it's a game I've never seen anyone talk about, and finally, fourteen years after its release, it's still an exclusive to PS Vita, a console that never got the attention it deserved from most people.

 

It's a ninja-themed stealth game, and it's by Acquire, so the obvious comparison to make is to the timeless classic Tenchu Stealth Assassins on Playstation. It does feel quite a lot like that game, and you do do a lot of running along rooftops, then jumping down to silently kill some hapless guard who never even knew you existed. The big way in which it feels different, however, is that it feels a lot more like it's designed around speed. You have a run button, you can perform stealth kills while in midair, and the way you use special items and your grappling hook is different.

 

In Tenchu, all of your items were displayed on a bar at the bottom. You switched between them with the shoulder buttons, and you pressed triangle to use them. For items that needed to be aimed, like the grappling hook, you held triangle, aimed with the d-pad, and released triangle to use. In Shinobido 2, You only have four items equipped at a time (though you can swap three of them out at any time). They're each assigned to a direction on the d-pad, with the grappling hook always assigned to down. To use the grappling hook, you just tap down on the d-pad, and you'll throw it at the nearest appropriate surface in the direction you're facing. Again, you can even do this in midair! For thrown weapons, you can lock on to an enemy that's in your field of vision and throw directly at them. 

 

It all adds up to a game in which you're speeding around, killing your enmeies and it all feels so good and satisfying. The only real downside is that there's very few different stages to play in, and they're reused for different missions, with different enemy layouts and different objectives for you to complete. Outside the stages, there's a few things to get your attention too. There are three factions vying for power in the region where the game's set, and you can pick missions to complete for any of them. If you stick with one faction, they'll gradually grow more and more of an appreciation for you, resulting in higher payouts and other benefits. Similarly, if you've got it in for a certain faction for some reason, you can keep accepting missions where they're the target, and if you eventually dwindle their resources down, you'll be hired to assassinate their leader, after which that faction will just no longer be a part of the game!

 

I'm sure there are other ways to get endings (Acquire are also the developers of the Way of the Samurai series, after all), but once there's only one faction left, you'll get the ending that shows them taking power in the region, and also expressing their thanks for your help. The other big extra-curricular activity in which you can engage is alchemy! You don't often find ready-made items in the field, but instead there are lots of weeds and mushrooms with various effects lying around. You can put a bunch of these into a jar (generally they all have to have the same effect, which is enhanced by putting more and more in the jar at once), and then you can extract the ingredients as either elixir (which you drink to gain the effects), sushi (which you leave around for enemies to eat and gain the effects), and bombs (which you throw to cause the effect). The effects are stuff like HP recovery, speed increase, confusion, fainting, explosion, and so on. All the effects can be put into any of the three forms, so you can make a healing grenade or a potion of makes you explode. There's also mechanical dolls for distracting enemies, but I think that these are mostly found, bought, or received as gifts.

 

I've played through this game once, and though I've deleted it now (I'm too lazy to get an SD2VITA card so I'm stuck with a mere 16GB on there), I'm sure I'll go back to it in the future to seek out other paths and endings. It's an excellent game, and even though it's fourteen years old, and I've owned a Vita myself for almost a decade now, it's still amazing to me that a handheld game can look so good! I highly recommend giving Shinobido 2 a try, should you have access to a PS Vita, especially since it's one of the system's few exclusives.

Super Zangyura (PS4)

 Also known as Maid-san wo Migi ni: Shooting Star, this is a game by doujin veterans Platine Dispositif! Which makes it all the more amazing that I played this via a standard edition physical release for a console in the PAL region!  What a time to be alive. Contrary to what you might expect from them, it's a platformer rather than a shooting game, though it does have a lot of their typical hallmarks: cute character designs, nice pixel art with beautiful colour palettes, brutally sadistic difficulty, and so on.

 

You play as a maid armed with a morning star, in a parody of/homage to classic-style linear Castlevania series, with the plot even having you storming the castle home of an evil immortal vampire. It's a little more puzzle-centric than Castlevania, though, with a lot of the game focussing on the acquisition of coloured keys for opening doors. As things proceed, just getting the keys won't be enough, since the game starts introducing elements like red herring doors that waste your keys, and while destructible walls appear early in the game, they actually become essential for progress later on. There's usually some contextual clues to look out for with regards to hidden stuff: invisible platforms will have torches on them, spikes that suddenly fall on unwitting players will have bloodstained floors beneath them, and the presence of destructible walls might be signified by a number of less clear clues, like oddly-placed enemies, suspiciously-shaped rooms, and so on. 

 

So while it's a difficult game, an observant player isn't subject to trial-and-error Rick Dangerous nonsense. And all of the above is just my describing the default game mode, the end of which reveals that you've actually been wasting you time storming the castle of the vampire lord's next door neighbour. But you've now unlocked overture mode, which is the actual vampire lord's castle, and it goes by the Super Mario Bros. 2jp principle of "they've completed the main game, so the first stage here has to be harder than the final stage there", and shamefully, I haven't been able to get to the first boss in this mode, let alone the final. You also unlock Knightmare mode, which is a completely merciless masocore version of the game. Also, after you complete the game for the first time, everyone's voice actor is swapped to be the voice of the pumpkin guy who runs the in-game shop. I don't know why, or if there's a way to get the normal voices back.

 

The difficulty all comes from the stage design, too: the controls are perfect for what they are, and it would be interesting to see a version of this game that focussed more on action and combat, rather than puzzles and investigation. We do get a little hint of this (and of the developers' STG heritage) during the boss battles, which are a lot of fun, but unfortunately very brief and the long stages space them out to be very far apart. It's a good game, but I wouldn't say it's one of Platine Dispositif's most exciting. It's definitely worth your time, but I would recommend waiting for a PSN sale, rather than getting excited and buying a physical copy like I did. Especially since there seems to be some kind of fault with the physical copies: when you first put it into your console, it'll register as an unrecognised disc. To get it to work, you've got to reset the PS4 with the disc in the drive, a solution I only found by chance and laziness. It'll work every time after you;ve done this once, though. And I assume it's a fault with the whole print run, since when I discovered the trick, I'd already returned one copy under the assumption that it was totally unplayable.

Nostradamus (Arcade)

 Though the game bears the name, and the title screen bears the image of the famous french fortuneteller, it's not about him. It's about a war (or possibly alien invasion?) that occurs at the end of the century, which was probably one of his predictions. You know how vague they are. But anyway, this is a shooting game that, as far as I know, has no home ports, and I suspect the reason for that is that in more ways than one, it comes between two eras.

 

The first, and most relevant way it does this is in the same as lots of arcade games that didn't get home ports. It came out in 1993, and graphically, it's beyond what could satisfactorily have been done on the Mega Drive or SNES, but by the time the Saturn and Playstation came about, it would have been old hat, and it's definitely not a popular or famous enough game to have made up for that. It does look really good, though. There's not much in the way of special effects, but there's a lot of amazing-looking super-detailed pixel art in the backgrounds and sprites alike. 

 

The other way in which it stands astride two eras is less relevant to its unported status, since it's an aspect it shares with games that did get ported to home systems, like Grind Stormer and Batsugun: it's one of those games that bridges the gap between classic-style shooting games and later danmaku-style shooting games. There's never super-elaborate or particularly dense bullet patterns, but there is still a fair few enemy bullets coming your way from very early in the game. Furthermore, while you don't have a screen-clearing, bullet-cancelling bomb, you do have a charge shot that, when being charged, manifests as a small energy field following your ship around. This energy field does cancel enemy bullets, so with a bit of skill, you can maneuver around in such a way that it keeps you safe. Of course, that means you aren't shooting, so you aren't killing enemies or revealing the score items that remain invisible until you shoot their hiding places. (I almost called this a danmaku shooter thing because of the hidden bees in the Dodonpachi games, but then I remembered that it's something that goes as far back as 1986's Star Soldier).

 

Something else that's of interest is that the bosses have a unifying theme of modularity. That is to say, each boss is made up of various smaller parts that come together to form the whole boss. What's interesting about this is the way that sometimes you'll destroy one of a boss' constituent parts, and  a different one will fly in, and attach itself to the core and give it a new set of attack patterns. Sometimes, you'll fights some of the segments during the stage as larger enemies that escape before you destroy them, then they come together at the end of the stage to form a boss.

 

Another aesthetic quirk I'd like to mention is that, as well as the in-game graphics looking so good, there's a fair bit of thought that's clearly gone into the game's overall presentation, with the aspect I'd particularly like to highlight being the player characters. There are two characters, though you unfortunately can't pick which one you get: player one is always Dalas (sic), and player two is always Joanna. I don't recognise them, but their faces on the screen that appears after you insert a coin really look like they must have been traced over photos of real people. There'sa possibility that the developers actually hired models themselves, since there's different pictures of the pair on the high score screen, this time in profile. Dalas has a lit cigarette in his mouth in both situations, of course! I wonder if there were plans for more to be done with these characters?

 

Nostradamus is a pretty good shooting game. It won't blow your mind or change your life, but it's still fun enough, and worth pushing through the high level of difficulty to see more of the beautiful pixel art it contains. Luckily, even the animation for your ship exploding looks great!

Outrun (Game Gear)

 It's once again the time of year where I post about a game that's not obscure, and most years, It seems to be a SEGA or SNK game. This time, it's SEGA's turn, with an ambitious handheld port of their classic racing game. Something that the best Game Gear games do is that rather than desperately trying to squeeze a game down from more powerful hardware, they make a version of the game that plays to the Game Gear's strengths.

 

Those strengths being the bright colours, and the fact that it's a system that somehow seems to have really brought the best out of pixel artists who worked on it. So again: rather than just scaling down all the graphics, everything's completely redrawn from scratch, and as a result, it's an amazing-looking game. The backgrounds especially look great, though it feels like there are more stages featuring ancient ruins than in more standard versions of the game.

 

As for the game itself, it plays like Outrun! At its most basic level, at least. You drive against a time limit, there's branching paths, low and high gear, all the standard stuff. There are a few changes compared to earlier versions, though. There's one negative change, so I'll get that out of the way first: you only drive through four stages in the main mode, meaning that there are only ten stages in total, compared to the standard fifteen. There's two additions to kind of make up for it, though. First, you can choose between automatic and manual transmission, which I'm pretty sure you couldn't do in the original, and second, there's a whole new racing mode!

 

You can play against a CPU opponent, or a human opponent (has anyone reading this ever played a Game Gear game over link cable, by the way? Pretty much every one at least linked up for Pokemon on Game Boy, but I've never known of anyone linking two Game Gears together). The races are always duels against a couple driving a blue Ferrari, and they take place on your choice of the the game's ten stages. It's a shame that you can only do single races, and there's no option for a single player series or anything, but it's a nice little extra, and it's a surprise it took so long for it to exist, since there'd already been ports to Master System, PC Engin,e and a bunch of microcomputers, plus a Mega Drive port that came out the same day as this one, though that one definitely makes more of an attempt at being like the arcade original, with nothing much extra besides a new BGM track.

 

I think, in the modern day where Hamster Corp. are releasing a new perfect arcade port every week, and everyone has constant access to at least three devices that can emulate arcade games at all times, it's easy for people to write off old home/handheld ports of arcade games as being necessarily inferior, and unworthy of attention. But Game Gear Outrun stands as one of many examples that many of them are interesting and unique creations in their own right.

Samurai Deeper Kyo (Playstation)

 

 Like TV Animation X and Inu-Yasha, this is yet another fighting game released late in the Playstation's life, and based on a then-current anime. Unlike those other two, I've never seen the anime Samurai Deeper Kyo, and I know pretty much nothing about it, except that there's videogame tie-ins on Playstation and Game Boy Advance. If you wanted to be glib and more than a little unfair, you could call this one "a poor man's Last Blade 2". Unfair both because most games pale in comparison to Last Blade 2, and because Samurai Deeper Kyo's not a bad game at all.

 

Another thing it has in common with the Inu-Yasha game is that the controls and special move inputs are a lot simpler than those seen in "proper" fighting games. In fact, there are two control methods, one with single button specials and a truncated movelist in general, plus one that's a little more complex ( but not by much). There's also an assist system, which under default settings, triggers automatically every time your assist meter fills up, which makes things mildly chaotic in a fun way. Also, I don't know the plot explanation for this, but in story mode, a lot of the time, each opponent you beat will be your assist character for the next fight. Is this just the old shonen "defeat equals friendship" trope manifest in videogame form?

 

Other than the basics of the game itself, there's some other points of interest I'd like to address. First, one of the playable characters is a blonde girl with a handgun, who, through her end poses and other flavour animations, seems like she's meant to at least partially be a joke character. But, she's also the only one who brought a gun to a swordfight, and as you'd expect, she's a very effective fighter, with a moveset almost totally made up of projectile attacks. Another character has a spider theme, and can send spiders to attack her opponents, as well as summoning webs. She can even use webs to entangle her opponent's assist meter, though I only did this once and never figured out how to replicate it.

 

Something else that really stands out is the backgrounds. All of them really well-drawn pixel art backdrops, with cherry blossom trees, moonlit nights, soft rain, sunsets, and more. Unfortunately, this is an area that really does draw comparisons to the Last Blade games, since they're so thematically similar. Of course, in such a comparison, Samurai Deeper Kyo falls short: its backgrounds are very sparsely animated, when they're animated at all, and oddly, there's no people or animals in any of them. It gives that a strange, empty feeling. It's only a very minor complaint, but it is something that really stood out to me as I played.

 

Samurai Deeper Kyo isn't anything particularly life-changing or roundbreaking, but it's a decent enough game, and in my experience, you can never have too many decent enough fighting games. It's also one of those games that I feel like would've been a hit among my friends, if we'd have known about and had access to it at the time of its release, even if we didn't ever get to see the anime itself. It's definitely worth your time.

Stealth (SNES)

 This is a game I'd never heard of before last week, when the name stood out to me for some reason while I was looking for something else. I looked it up online, and the idea of a turn-based strategy game with a focus on stealth sounded appealing, despite the unpleasant thematic aspect of playing as American soliders in the Vietnam war. Unfortunately, this wasn't a lucky find, as the game turned out to be awful.

 

The first thing you need to know is that this isn't a game where you're being stealthy, it's a game where your enemies are being stealthy. Furthermore, they have some ludicrous advantages over you. First, you can only see them on the map when they're attacking you during their turns. On its own, this wouldn't be too bad, and it could add a little memory test aspect to proceedings, having you shoot where you saw the enemy's gunfire originate. However, it's couple with another advantage that pretty much makes the game unplayable: unlike your men, the enemy can move after they shoot.

 

So you're essentially blindly wandering around the jungle, maybe shooting at random squares in the hopes that there's an enemy there, while every time they take a turn, they'll be able to damage multiple of your men. One of your guys does have the limited option to call airstrikes, but even so, you're still firing blind, and in the several attempts I've made at playing the game, an airstrike has never killed more than one enemy, and sometimes doesn't get any at all.

 

So, it's not a fun game. It's not an attractive one, either! It's ugly enough that I would've suspected that it was originally intended for release on the original Famicom and got shifted over to Super Famicom as that market shrank, were it not also for it having been released in 1992, and also being (as far as I can tell) the first game from its developers. It's not the first time their work has been on this blog, though, as they were also responsible for Tarot Uranai on 3DO, which at least looked nice.

 

Stealth is a game that, as far as I can see, has no redeeming qualities, and you definitely shouldn't bother playing. It's boring, slow, and fundamentally broken. The most interesting thing I think can be said about it is that GameFAQs listed five other, completely unrelated games also just called Stealth. Maybe some of those might be better?

The Police 24 (PC)

 Despite the name, this game isn't to be confused with Konami's light gun arcade game Police 24/7, and despite the general look of the title screen, it's also not to be confused with an entry into the Simple 2000 Series. It is, however, from DesireFactory, the developer(s?) of the Fighting Oddball series of fighting games, and like those games, it makes heavy use of digitised photos for its sprites and backgrounds. (I actually have a physical copy of one of those games lying around somewhere, but iirc, I failed to get it running on a modern PC).

 

It's a single plane beat em up, made in an engine designed for fighting games. This awkward situation shows in some little things, like how regular enemies have little health bars above their heads while bosses have proper full size ones across the screen from your health bar, like your opponents would have in a fighting game. There's also something of an abundance of buttons, maybe the most I've ever seen used in the genre. You've got three different levels of regular attacks, a King of Fighters-esque dodge roll button, a taunt button, and a guard button. Plus, you have a burst-type ability that you execute by pressing roll and taunt together. PLUS there's a bunch of special moves with fighting game-style motions.

 

Each of the three stages has you fighting through a few screens of yakuza guys, in either dark or light-coloured suits, then there'll be a cutscene and a boss fight. It'll feel a little awkward at first, but once you get used to the controls, and to how enemies react to being attacked, it quickly becomes a lot of fun. You'll be figuring out easy and amusing little juggle combos and so on, and the comedic aspect is obviously enhanced by the digitised graphics. There's just something about these actual little photo people being kicked in the face and bouncing off the sides off of the screen. The bosses are Mario, Luigi, and a bigger yakuza guy. Judging by the cutscene in the first stage, it looks like the Mario Brothers are importing some kind of illegal mushrooms, which provides a sobering reminder that lazy, tedious gamer humour is not something that's restricted to the anglosphere. (Also, it obviously wasn't the dev's intention, since this game is well over a decade old, but: you're a cop beating up Luigi! Has a slightly different feel to it in the year 2025, doesn't it?)

 

The biggest problem this game has is that it's got a lot of promise in the way it plays, but it doesn't have enough actual game to really explore those mechanics. There's a massive movelist, and as mentioned, it's a lot of fun bouncing and chucking those yakuza guys around the screen. But the problem is that the game in its totality comprises nine screens of regular enemies (of which there are only two varieties), three boss fights, and that's it. There isn't even a score! A longer game, with more enemy types would provide more scope for playing with the mechanics and exploring the movelist. I know I'm asking a lot from what is probably a solo developer, but I'm reminded of Treasure's Tiny Toon Adventures game on GBA that felt a lot like it was a proof of concept demo for their later Astro Boy game on the same system. So, if this game ever got a sequel (and there's a chance it already did years ago, and I just haven't found it yet), I assume that game would probably live up to the potential.

 

I don't know if it's possible to actually buy this game anymore without scouring Japanese sites that sell pre-owned games, but it's definitely floating around online in various places, and if you like beat em ups and their potential as a genre, I definitely recommend giving it a look.

Martial Masters (Arcade)

 Even down to the most basic level of their PGM hardware being a lot like the Neo Geo, it was always clear that IGS were very heavily influenced by SNK, and in keeping with that, Martial Masters seems at first glance to be an ttempt at making a Taiwanese equivalent to Last Blade 2. I say at first glance, because when you start playing, the period setting (seventeenth century China in this case), slightly brown-heavy colour palette, and smooth animation really bring Last Blade 2 to mind. But when you look a little deeper, you'll discover that this is a game that has its own identity.

 

Before going further, I'm going to contradict that a little by saying that the setting and characters do borrow very heavily from martial arts movies, especially Once Upon a Time in China. However, this actually does serve to make it stand out among fighting games, since there are far fewer games than you'd expect that focus specifically on kung fu, and every character in Martial Masters represents a different style. 

 

This does seem to have posed a challenge for the game's animators, as some of the characters appear to have been animated using rotoscoping. Maybe it was too hard to capture certain styles in 2D without doing that? Whatever the reason, it does result in some very unique-looking fighters, and even though the characters play in similar ways to ones in other fighting games, with traditional special move motions and so on, the different look provided by the overall kung fu theme makes the game stand out in the genre for the way it feels to play.

 

Martial Masters isn't a game without a few features of its own, though, some of which, while maybe not innovated here, were at least uncommon at the time of its release. You can store up to nine pwoer meters, though it's rare to go higher than three, since they're not just used for supers! You can' perform a Guilty Gear-esque burst action by pressing HP+HK while blocking, which is useful, but not as useful as it might have been if you could do it while taking full hits, too. Especially since if you instinctively press HP+HK when you're not blocking, your character will do a taunt. There's a few other uses for meter, too, like launchers, a Vampire Savior-esque power up, and a kind of throw that doesn't deal damage, but does stun the opponent.

 

I briefly touched upon how the game looks earlier, but it does look very good. Mostly. Some of the portraits on the character select screen look bizarre, and as mentioned, the rotoscoped characters stand out a lot in a way that's not necessarily positive. But none of that's bad enough to really spoil the game, and the backgroudns and most of the characters look excellent. To bring up the general kung fu theme once again, it does make all of the attacks, specials, and supers really stand out in a way that is positive. 

 

Martial Masters might not be able to stand up to its contemporaries in that subgenre of "turn of the century fighting games with big sprites and unusually smooth animation" like Street Fighter III, Mark of the Wolves, or Last Blade 2, but that doesn't mean it's not worth your time. It's a fun game with a unique setting and feel, and it feels good to play. If you want to play it legally, a PGM cartridge would cost you a few hundred pounds, but apparently there was a somewhat recent collection of IGS games on Switch which is presumably a lot cheaper, and includes Martial Masters and a bunch more games (including previous review subject Demon Front).

Speed Power Gunbike (Playstation)

 Some of you might remember that I've already written about Speed Power Gunbike. If you don't remember that, don't worry: it was in a print magazine nearly a decade ago, and I'm probably a lot more clever and better at writing now. Probably. Maybe. This is also one of those cases where I'm taking into account the breadth of my readership and their knowledge of videogames. A lot of my regular readers will be at least somewhat familiar with the game, but plenty of them won't be. And it's not only worth telling those people about because it's a good game, but also because it's an interesting one.

 

It's an Inti Creates game, and if GameFAQs is to be believed (and as I'm increasingly discovering these days, it seldom is), it's their first. If true, they really got off to a strong start, foreshadowing the reputation for excellence they'd go on to  cultivate, though it's a 2D platformer, the genre for which they'd eventually become the most famous. Instead, it's a 3D update of an old concept that's mostly dead in 2025, and was pretty much dead in 1998, too: those road-based action games where your timer is also your health bar. You know: Dash Yarou, Masked Rider Club Battle Race, Mad Gear, and so on.

 

You play as one of three special operatives who get about on special Mospeada-like motorbikes that can transform into trikes and power armour. In bike mode, you go very fast, but it's not very manuverable, and you'll be sent flying if you take damage. In rally mode (the official name of the trike), you're a little slower than in bike mode, but steering is a lot easier, and you just get knocked back a little upon taking damage. In power armour mode, you slowly walk about as you please, or you can charge straight forward for a few seconds, plus you've got access to a whole bunch of weapons and can shrug off most enemy weapons without flinching (though you'll still lose time). 

 

On top of the properties of the different forms, you've also got the transitions between them to tak into account: You can switch between bike and rally mode near-instantly, and either of them can transform into srmour mode in about a second at the touch of a button. But when you transform into armour mode, you'll be charging forward for a couple of seconds, damaging any enemies or destructible scenery that's in your way. But the damage is greater depending on how fast you were going when you transformed. Conversely, when you transform back out of armour mode, you'll go back into the form you were previously. So if you were in bike mode going fast to get that big transform-ram damage, and you need to transform to make a quick getaway while there's still enemies about, you'll be transforming back into the more vulnerable bike mode when you do.

 

The lesson to take from the above paragraph is that Speed Power Gunbike is a game that requires its players to learn it. It insists that you learn its controls, the various systems at play and how they interact with each other, how to best navigate the stages, and the most effective strategies for fighting both the regular enemies and the bosses. The first time you play, you'll find a difficult, weird game with clunky controls, and in which you're constantly crashing into things andgetting hit. But the more you play it, the better you get at it, and the better you get, the more fun it is. Once you get the hang of playing it, you'll be speeding along, transforming right when you need to. It all results in a feeling of satisfaction, like that of gliding a pair of scissors down a big sheet of wrapping paper. But better, because you're not cutting wrapping paper, you're destroying stuff at high speed using transforming motorbike power armour in a setting that looks like all the best sci-fi OAVs you watched on VHS in the 90s.

 

That brings me onto the subject of how the game looks. Like you can see in the screenshots, it looks great. But unlike some Playstation games that look great by pushing the system to its limits, like Ridge Racer Type 4 or Vagrant Story, Speed Power Gunbike's secret is slightly different. This is instead a game that looks great by really leaning into what the playstation does well, in a way that few others do. Most of the things in-game are machines, buildings, and bits of big futuristic infrastructure, all depicted using big chunky polygon models, and textures that use lots of simple, solid colours to show the smooth metal and concrete surfaces that are so prevalent in this world. Even going down grey underground tunnels, it still looks great, and those grey moments mainly just make the big colourful moments of spectacle stand out even more.

 

Though this is an excellent game, it's excellent in a way that I can't recommend it unconditionally. If you're likely to just give it one go and give up on it upon the first failure, then don't bother. It's just not for you. Not every game is for everyone, don't worry about it. But if you're willing to meet it on its own terms, and put some effort into developing skill at playing an idiosyncratic action game, then you should definitely look into Speed Power Gunbike, as it's a game that'll give you back as much as you put into it.

Arabian Nights: Desert Spirit King (SNES)

Arabian Nights: Desert Spirit King (or Arabian Nights: Sabaku no Seirei Ou, if you prefer) is a game I wanted to play long ago, back in the time when there was an overlap in the latter stages of the RPG phase I had after having played Final Fantasy VII and Breath of Fire III, and the early days of the Dreamcast giving me access to SNES emulation for the first time. I wasn't able to, though, as at that time, there was no translation. But the idea of an RPG with a middle eastern-influenced fantasy setting had me interested.

 

It eventually did get a fan translation in 2012, but my RPG phase was long since dead by then, and I was well into my "strong distaste for RPGs" phase. But in recent years, that feeling has waned heavily, and so I eventually got around to playing Arabian Nights. It's an incredibly okay game! It's got a few interesting elements, a lot of boring stuff, and they all kind of cancel each other out.

 

The plot is surprisingly dense: centuries ago, a wizard named Suleiman enslaved the eponymous spirit king, Ifrit. Then, a while after that, some unknown evil attacked, and though Suleiman was unable to save his own life, he did seal Ifrit away in a magic ring, telling him that after he's granted a thousand wishes for a thousand masters, Ifrit will be strong enough to face this threat and avenge him. The game starts with a young girl finding that ring, and being the thousandth to do so, wishes to bring peace to the land. Ifrit finds this highly inconvenient, since the previous 999 wishes were all easy stuff like riches and immortality.

 

To bring peace to the land, Ifrit, his new master Shukran, and a boy-thief they meet called Harty go off on a quest to find the eight crystals containing Ifrit's sealed powers. Along the way, they'll also find other spirits, some of them have been sealed like Ifrit was, some of them have been up to other activities in the intervening centuries. All of them happen to be various flavours of bishounen, though, and whether they're friends or enemies, they all talk to each other in a certain way. Like, if there had been an English version of this in the year 2000, the Geocities fujoshi would have been eating it up, posting their fanfictions and character shrines and such.

 

So, back to the game itself. The positives: it looks great all-round. The character portaits, backgrounds, battle sprites, it's all just really high quality pixel art. The battles themselves also bring up some aesthetic poits of interest of their own! Battles take place on a diagonally-aligned rectangular field with a really cool border around it. The field will be themed to the kind of area you're walking through, but unfortunately there's only one border, as nice as it is. Furthermore, the game's main mechanical gimmick is the cards system. You or your enemy can play a card before the turn starts, and they all have various effects on the battle, as well as changing how the field looks.

 

There are forty cards in total: eight elements that come in levels one to five. The effects they have include inflicting elemental damage on all the caster's opponenets at the end of each turn, nullifying the enemy's attacks, boosting or reducing the stats of one of the sides, and so on. Playing cards happens before the turn starts, and if it's not replaced, a card will last a few turns. If the enemy plays a card, you can replace it with one of your own, but it has to have the same element and/or level as the one currently in play. It's an interesting system, but it's one that doesn't really meet its potential, for reasons I'll now go into.

 

The game's got some problems, and most of them are related to battles. THe encounter rate is incredibly high, so by the time you get to anywhere you're meant to be, you're going to be overlevelled. Even boss fights only take a couple of turns of spamming attack. So you can pretty much ignore the cards altogether, as well as the other magic and special attacks to which you get access. Also, there's some weirdness regarding walking: when you're in a town or dungeon, you walk pretty quickly, but only in the four cardinal directions. On the world map, you can walk in eight directions, but you move incredibly slowly. A few hours into the game, you do get given a magic carpet that speeds up your world map movement, and partially fixes the encounter rate problem too, but it's weird that the two kinds of movement are flawed in different ways.

 

For all its problems, though, I have been enjoying Arabian Nights: Desert Spirit King. It's a nice little RPG, and the plot keeps introducing new twists that have had me playing more to see where it all goes next. When I first started playing it, I neglected to save, like an idiot, anddied in the first dungeon, losing nearly half an hour's progress. It's a good enough game that I just started again, instead of just giving up in frustration! If you've got any affection or nostalgia for old-fashioned RPGs in the year 2025, this is one you probably haven't already played, and is worth your time.