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.

Dragon Drive: D-Masters Shot (Gamecube)

 After a long run of excellent games right from their formation, across the Mega Drive, Saturn, Dreamcast, Playstation, N64, and Game Boy Advance, Treasure entered the twenty-first century with a lot of goodwill from a lot of people. Unfortunately, they quickly squandered it with a bunch of games like Wario World that weren't bad, but they also weren't up to the high standard people had come to expect from Treasure. (And there was also Stretch Panic, which was bad, but weird enough that people were willing to overlook it a little.) Dragon Drive is one of their games from this era that didn't get released outside of Japan, and as a tie-in to a long-since forgotten anime and manga, probably would itself have been completely forgotten by now were it not from such a famous developer.

 

The first thing you'll probably think upon starting the first stage of Dragon Drive is "hey, this is like Panzer Dragoon, but in the modern day and also one of the free range stages from Lylat Wars!", which is fairly accurate. You start the game as a kid dangling underneath a baby dragon, flying over a modern city, shooting at other dragons. The dragon quickly grows to full size, and you have a boss fight. Then there's a linear rail shooting stage, to make things even more like Panzer Dragoon! And those are the three main stage types in the game: free range-style stages where you fly around an enclosed area shooting down enemies, linear rail shooter stages, and boss fights, which are like the free range stages, but there's only one enemy that has insane amounts of health.

 

The plot concerns a competitive virtual reality game about dragon piloting, and the bosses you fight are the other players. I do find this kind of plot pretty weak, especially in a videogame: I'm already playing a game, why am I playing as someone else playing a game? Where are the stakes for the characters here? However, it does allow for some variety in where the stages take place, without having to justify all these different locales. In the couple of hours I played, I saw the aforementioned modern city and attached highways, as well as a desert decorated with giant monster skeletons at sunset, a fantasy castle town at night, and a small jungle island. And of course, the sight of huge dragons flying and shooting breath weapons at each other is really cool.

 

There's power-ups too, in the form of various cards you can collect in the stages. You can hold up to four of these, each assigned to a direction on the d-pad for use. They come in three flavours, too: red ones increase your attack power for a while, green ones restore some of your health, and yellow ones do various different things, like having a big explosion emanate from your dragon, damaging all nearby enemies, or creating a holographic copy of your dragon to draw enemy fire. The use of cards in this way feels very much of-its-time. A lot of Japanese kids shows that weren't specifically about card games had some kind of card element to them around this time: Digimon Tamers, Kamen Rider Blade, and so on.

 

Dragon Drive D-Masters Shot is a decent enough game. I've definitely played much worse rail shooters, and if it were developed by someone like Tamsoft or Sandlot, it'd probably be enjoying a re-appraisal as a forgotten classic of the Gamecube library. Unfortunately, it's by Treasure, and like the aforementioned Wario World, it's one of those games that broke the spell they had over a lot of people around the turn of the century, by being merely okay instead of the excellent games we'd grown accustomed to them releasing. The biggest shame is that they don't seem to have ever recovered from this era. They haven't released any new games in over a decade (another kids' anime tie-in on 3DS, Gaist Crusher God), though they announced a comeback in 2022, we've seen nothing of that yet. Anyway, this game's pretty good, you probably won't regret seeking it out and playing it with the recent translation patch applied.

Time Stalkers (Dreamcast)

 Time Stalkers (also known as Climax Landers) has been on my radar for a long time, mostly by virtue of it being a Dreamcast RPG that's available in English that isn't one of the more popular few, like Skies of Arcadia or Grandia 2. There aren't many of those around (but it seems like there are people working on translating SEGAGAGA and El Dorado Gate, which is exciting)! Another point of interest is that it's a crossover game, featuring characters from a bunch of Climax's earlier games, like Landstalker and Shining in the Darkness. 

 

Oddly, this wasn't used as a selling point when it was originally released (at least, it wasn't in English-speaking places. Maybe it was in Japan?), and as hard as I've tried to find one, it seems that no-one (again, in the English-speaking world) has cared enough to list all of the characters and the games they're originally from. And unfortunately, I'll have to pass that disappointment forward: I probably could, with an hour or two of research, be able to place all the characters and their source games together, Time Stalkers just isn't a good enough game to be worth that much effort.

 

The plot is pretty generic crossover stuff, withfragments of different worlds all being drawn into some new pocket dimension by a mysterious force. An old man designates someone from each realm as a hero, giving them the ability to enter dungeons. The dungeons are procedurally generated, and you have a hunger meter that goes down as you explore them, like in a roguelike. But the combat is pretty generic turn-based RPG combat, but slower. It's so slow and so pointless and such a big part of the game. You'll dread missing an attack (which happens a lot in this game) not becuse you're scared of the enemy getting another chance to kill you (they mostly only deal a single point of damage), but because it means the battle will drag on for another slow, labourious turn.

 

There's other roguelike stuff in here, too, like how you return to level one every time you enter a dungeon. Which wouldn't be a problem in an actual roguelike, because they're all about learning how each enemy works, how to position yourself, how to use items effectively and so on. But Time Stalkers is all about getting through so many identical fights where you and the enemies slowly trade hits back and forth until somebody's dead. you could theoretically just run past the enemies and avoid entering battle, but every dungeon ends with a boss who's significantly more of a threat than the entire rest of the dungeon's enemies put together, and if you don't grind, you'll stand no chance against them. You do, at least, get to keep your equipment between runs, so you're not completely back to nothing every time, I guess.

 

There's also a mechanic whereby you can capture enemies and use them as party members, but since they're all so weak, it seems kind of pointless, unless you want to partake in even more grinding. The one kind thing I can think of to say about this game is that it looks kind of charming in that specific "low-poly models with high resolution textures" way a lot of low budget third party Dreamcast games are. Sometimes it's actually really ugly, but there's also plenty of times where the camera's at just the right angle to make it look kind of cool. Still, it's not enough to make suffering through the game worth your while. I hated Time Stalkers more with every additional minute I spent with it (I played for about four or five hours, up until the end of the third dungeon. Some of that time was spent running circles around the tiny overworld, desperately trying to find the next person I had to talk to to advance the story), and it definitely doesn't carry my recommendation.

Magical Date (Playstation)

 Back in the ancient past when I reviewed Graduation, I mentioned that I've never been able to do well with the stat-heavy micromangaement of games like that and Tokimeki Memorial. Which is kind of a shame, as when I was about 14, the idea of there being games themed around dating like that was really interesting to me. Of course, none of them were available in English at that time, so the distant curiosity is all there was. And by the time translations for them did start to appear, I'd already long since lost interest in them! If only I'd known back then about Magical Date: Doki Doki Kokuhaku Daisakusen (Magical Date: The Great Heart-Pounding Love Confession Strategy).

 

This is a game about going on dates, and though I'd not played it until the recent translation patch came out, it would have been almost completely playable without Japanese knowledge. And almost as importantly, without an interest in complex and detailed stat management. Instead, it's a collection of minigames, all completely unrelated to the situation you're in. You pick one of three girls, and then a date destination. You're then shown a path made up of a few squares leading to the destination, each of which represents a mini-game. You could compare the set up to Bishi Bashi, or Tanto-R, but personally, it feels to me a lot like Tenkomori Shooting, but without the shooting (mostly). Maybe it's just the polygons making me feel that way, though.

 

The games are pretty varied, there's stuff that really takes advantage of being in 3D like identifying a giant 3D letter that you can only see from the sides, or counting the number of cubes in a rotating formation. Simple classics like the old "find the pairs of cards" memory test, and skill/reaction type games like flying a seagull through some rings (this once being excellently entitled "Seagull Aeronautics"), shooting down Adamski-type UFOs with your laser eyes, or punching giant faces that grow out of the walls. One per date, you'll also be asked a series of yes or no questions by your paramour, and while you can't lose lives in these bits, you are still scored on them, and doing well and increase your affection meter a stage. These parts are the only ones (that I've encountered) that would have required Japanese knowledge if the game hadn't been translated, and like I said: even they aren't super-important. Possibly a concession to the fact that you're expected to know which answer would be preferred, when the questions are being asked by an approximation of a mid-90s Japanese teenager as written by who I assume was an adult male game developer.

 

Magical Date is a decent enough game, but unless you have someone with whom to play it competitively (The empty space for a second player is marked on some screens with "Love Rival Wanted!", so I guess you're both vying for the affection of the same girl, rather than some kind of boy versus girl aggressive date situation), it probably won't hold your attention for long. The big draw is probably the very charming mid-90s polygonal graphics, which are admittedly very nice, and the minigame format means that there's a bit of variety to them to, unconstrained by the necessity of any kind of cohesion. Download the fan translation, play it for a while, take some screenshots or gifs, and move on. Though I do think it would've got a lot of playtime if I'd known about and been able to get a copy of it back around the year 2000.