Tom Mason's Dinosaurs For Hire (Mega Drive)

 For some reason, SEGA of America had a strange habit of making Mega Drive games based on comics that no-one had ever read. There was Ex-Mutants, Chakan: The Forever Man, and this one, Dinosaurs For Hire. Chakan's probably the most well-known of the three, though that definitely has more to do with the videogame than the comic. In Dinosaurs For Hire's case, it could have turned out a little differently, as there was a cartoon in development that never came into bring, according to Wikipedia. Then it could have formed a trinity of 90s cartoons about gun-toting dinosaurs alongside Extreme Dinosaurs and The Terrible Thunderlizards.

 

The game is, at its most basic level, a Contra-esque platform shooter, which sees you pick a dinosaur, then go from left to right (or sometimes from bottom to top) shooting soldiers and monsters and vehicles and so on. There are a few twists to the formula though, to the extent that the game almost feels like some kind of experimental take on the genre. The smallest, but most obvious twist is that because the player characters are anthropomorphic dinosaurs, they dwarf all the human enemy soldiers that are running around. That's a nice little touch.

 

But the weirdness starts as soon as the game does, opening with a boss fight against a giant turtle-like monster that's climbing up the Hoover Dam and breathing fire. After you kill it, the credits start rolling before a cheeky little pterodactyl appears and tells you that was just a prank and the game actually starts now. This fight is also the first time that your HUD disappears, which is presumably some kind of resource-juggling programming trick based on the presence of the giant monster here, and the fact that it happens again when other giant bosses are onscreen. One thing you can always say in SOA's favour is that they were always trying different tricks and techniques to get fancy effects out of the Mega Drive hardware.

 

With that in mind, it's a shame that some aspects of the game's presentation are kind of terrible. I'm not saying the game itself looks bad: the sprites and backgrounds are all well drawn and animated, and the player characters are especially full of personality, with little touches like gleeful facial expressions as they blast away when you hold the fire button for a couple of seconds. But there's some little things that bug me, like how all the text in the game uses a font that I assume must be the default in Mega Drive devkits or something, since it can be seen in things like leaked betas, and the notorious homebrew Crazy Bus. I know i'm nitpicking here, it's something that really jumped out at me from the start, and made the game feel a little cheap, maybe even unfinished?

 

I do have a more legitimate complaint, too, though: some of the stage design is really bad. For example, early on there's a stage where the main threat comes from tiny mounted security camera guns, which are constantly firing at you from all angles, and in another game, it might not have been so bad, but in Dinosaurs For Hire, the characters are too big and not maneuverable enough to deal with this kind of situation. Even something as small as a Gunstar Heroes-style fixed aiming mode might have made this stage a lot more palatable. Then a few stages later, you're making your way upwards through a spooky cave, and for some reason, as you climb, if you fall back down below, the areas where you just came from are now an instant death pit, with no kind of warning or signifier that this might be the case.

 

Dinosaurs For Hire is a game that's almost great. I wonder if they ran out of money or time during development and had to rush it out before they could polish up the presentation or sand the rough edges off of the game itself. But either way, if you want to see a game that's more ambitious than it is actually good, then give it a look. Otherwise, don't bother.

Generations Lost (Mega Drive)

 You could say that Generations Lost is a game with a lot of ambition. Or, if you were less generous, you could say it's a game that's surprisingly pretentious for a mid-nineties platformer. In terms of how it plays, it lies somewhere between a traditional action platformer, and the very precise cinematic platformers like Another World or Flashback. It's also got a plot that feels like it must be licensed from a movie or comic, even though it's not, as you play a guy on what appears to be a post-apocalyptic earth, where sciences and technology are considered to be mystical artefacts by the now-primitive inhabitants, and you see things like people bowing in worship to walls of monitors, and so on.

 

According to Wikipedia, the game was originally meant to have a totally different plot and an X-Men license, which seems a little odd to me for one reason. Your character is equipped with a futuristic bracelet gizmo, that shoots out a grappling energy beam, which is mainly used for grabbing onto platforms directly above you, though it's occasionally used for swinging, too. The thing is, the sprites for when your guy is hanging or swinging from the grapple beam look a lot like poses Spider-Man would take in similar situations, a lot more than they do any member of the X-Men.

 

Anyway, you navigate through the stages, there's enemies to punch, switches to punch, and sometimes devices to interact with using your science bracelet. That last thing is mostly just a slightly differently-flavoured version of hitting switches, but it does look cool. The stages themselves also look cool, especially the first two. They're full of detail, and the whole aesthetic is a combination of overgrown jungle and ancient ruins, but with parts where bits of technology and loose cables are exposed. Unfortunately, the latter half of the game takes place in locales that are pure technology, which while competently drawn, isn't as interesting to look at. 

 

The big problem the game has is the difficulty. Or rather, it's not that it's difficult, it's more that it's unfair. There's lots of Rick Dangerous-style situations where traps aren't visible until you trigger them, whether it's because they're hidden in the scenery, or because they're at the bottom of one of the many leaps of faith the game requires you to take. Even when you've learned where the traps are and how to avoid them, and despite your guy being able to take a few hits before losing a life, it often does feel like the game was designed with near-perfect play in mind: there's only a few stages, but they're big and long, and healing points are few and far between. I guess that goes along with the "cinematic platformer" thing, though: you're kind of an actor in the story and you're expected to get all your stunts right, maybe?

 

There's a fair few positive things to say about Generations Lost. The developers clearly weren't content with churning out a generic platformer, and they seem to have had some aspirations towards making a game that was really special. It also looks excellent, like I already mentioned. Unfortunately, it's not much fun to play, and that's really the most important thing, isn't it? I think the best recommendation I can give to this game is to go and watch a video of someone else playing through it, just to see the great backgrounds of the first couple of stages.

Mick and Mack as the Global Gladiators (Mega Drive)

 

If you went back in time a couple of decades, the level of fame enjoyed by the two McDonalds licensed Mega Drive games was pretty much the exact opposite: Global Gladiators was pretty well-known, and has a lot of advertising in magazines around the time of its release, while McDonalds Treasureland Adventure was a much smaller release, that I didn't even know got released outside Japan until fairly recently. But with the Treasure-mania that followed in the wake of Ikaruga in the early 2000s, their game got a lot more attention, and Global Gladiators got forgotten among all the other licensed platformers from the 90s.

 

I actually had Global Gladiators as a kid, and even I had mostly forgotten it (other than the surprisingly good music, which is a far cry from the usual farty rubbish you usually see in American-developed Mega Drive games) until I recently decided to load it up on a whim. The thing is, this is a game that doesn't deserve to be forgotten! It's actually a fast-paced and exciting platform shooter, which sees you playing as one of the eponymous  Gladiators (actually just two kids with super soakers full of brown slime), and shooting monsters in various locales.

 

There's lots of cool little touches that just add to the quality of the game, like how your character's walking/running speed not only builds up as you go in one direrction, but the acceleration rate is affected by going up or down hills, too. Just like Sonic! Your weapon has infinite ammo and shoots as fast as you can hit the fire button, but you still have to pay attention to what you're doing, as the recoil knocks you back just a tiny bit per shot, and can have unattentive players falling to their doom. Another quirk is that there's no bosses: every stage just ends with Ronald McDonald waving a flag.

 

The game's got an overall theme of environmentalism, even having a bonus stage themed around picking up pieces of rubbish and putting them in the right recycling bins. This theming comes trough in some stages better than others. The first stage, for example, is a great subversion of the usual Green Hill Zone knock-off so often used to open platform games: there's lots of green all over the place, but it's actually toxic slime, rather than grass or leaves! And the monsters in that stage fit the theme too, being various kinds of gooey slime monsters. Then that's followed up with an actual forest stage, looking like the Pacific Northwest, and seeing you shooting beavers, fish, and plant monsters. It's obviously not a game-ruining problem, but it is a mildly annoying bit of ludonarrative dissonance.

 

Global Gladiators is definitely a game that deserves a bit more recognition as being a high-quality platform shooter, albeit one with a somewhat strange and ill-fitting license attached to it. If you haven't played it, or if you played it long ago, I recommend giving it a look.

Pyramid Magic (Mega Drive)

 

 It's yet another puzzle platformer, even though every time I need to mention I'm not a fan of the genre. On the plus side, I have at least realsied that there are things to like bout them. For example, they definitely adhere to the idea of "purity" I've talked about in past reviews, as they're pretty much all made up of a small number of easily-identifiable parts that have a very specific purpose. 

 

This especially applies to Pyramid Magic, as it was a download title, and as you might imagine, a download title in 1991 really did have to be economical with the filesizes. So, every stage is made up of seven different kinds of thing (well, every stage I saw, at least): the blocks that make up the walls, floor, and ceiling, the blocks that you can pick up and move around, three kinds of boxes that have to be opened in order (the wooden box has the key for the red box, whih has the key for the green box,  which contains the magic... thing that banishes the ghost blocking the exit), and of course, the player character himself and the aforementioned exit-blocking ghost.

 

So obviously, the game centres around moving the stone blocks around so that you can get to the exit, making sure you open wach of the three boxes in order along the way. Your character is two blocks high, and can jump two blocks high. He can carry one block at a time, and can move and drop blocks in increments half a block wide. You can only crawl throgh one-block-high gaps if you walk into them while carrying a block, and if you fall off an edge while carrying a block, it'll crush you to death. There's your basic elements, nd of course, they're arranged in increasingly complex ways, and there's usually one specific solution to each stage you have to figure out.

 

Like I always say with these games, it's really not for me, but if you like them, maybe you'll like this one. However, due to the circumstances of this game's release, the presentation is significantly more spartan than you mighht be used to, but maybe the curiosity of those circumstances is compensation enough for you? And if you do play and enjoy Pyramid Magic, you'll also like Pyramid Magic II, which is essentially just more stages of the same game. Pyramid Magic III is a little different, adding a breakable urn to the mix, and I couldn't even figure out what the goal of the first stage in that one was.

Aa Harimanada (Mega Drive)

You might remember all the way back in 2014, I reviewed the Game Ger version of this, or rather, the Game Gear game that's based on the same source material as this one. Because the two are very different: while the Game Gear game took a somewhat spartan , sports game-like approach, the Mega Drive version has a much flashier fighting game-inspired take on the concept of Sumo. There's even special moves and a health bar!

The most obvious difference though, is that while the Game Gear game's characters all used the same sprite with different colour palletes, this version has all the characters looking different. They're not totally unique, though: every character has a unique head, but it's put onto one of a few different body types, with a variety of skin tones. It's also nice that there are different body types, when you'd think most sumotori would have pretty much the same physique.

Well, they are all pretty mastodonic compared to regular people, but if we take the player character (single player mode has you playing through the story of the manga's protagonist Isao Harimanada) as being an "average" sized sumotori, with most opponents being the same size, then there's also some opponents who are noticably a lot smaller than him, as well as a few who are a lot bigger, standing like mountains of muscle. Body size doesn't seem to be any indicator of how difficult an opponent's going to be, though, which is mainly thanks to the ring out mechanic.

Though you can win by repeatedly slapping and headbutting your opponent into unconsciousness (and also picking them up onto your shoulders and putting them into a Torture Rack hold, in a feat of incredible strength!), most fights will be decided by ring out, sometimes only a couple of seconds after they start. The fighters lock upwhen thy get close enough to each other, and from there, there's a power struggle to get your opponent's back to the edge of the ring, or to throw him overhead to do some damage. Once you get to the edge, depending (I think) on how much health each sumotori has left, either one of them will be thrown out right away, or a new power struggle begins, this time based entirely on who can hit buttons the fastest. So an easy way to win fights is to walk straight into your opponent, keep pressing forward and B to get them over to the edge, then rub all three buttons with the knuckles of your fingers as fast as you can. Of course, I take no responsibility for any damage you might do to your controller or fingers in trying this technique.

I reservedly recommend Aa Harimanada. It's a fun game, and I'm sure it'd be a great laugh to play with friends in between bouts on "proper" fighting games, but even by the standards of a 1993 fighting game, there's not much to entertain a single player, due to there only being one playable character and all. Furthermore, I definitely don't recommend trying to buy a legitimate copy in this day and age, as the prices it fetches online are ludicrous.

Junker's High (Mega Drive)

Just for clarification, Junker's High is the beta title for Outrun 2019, and the only differences, as far as I can tell, are that Junker's High was intended to have the ability to save times and even replays, though it seems like these options don't actually work, even though they're there in the game. But still, Outrun 2019 isn't particularly well known as it is, is it? Until the Asian version of the Mega Drive Mini comes out, at least.

Despite the different working title, it's pretty clear that this was always meant to be an Outrun sequel: it looks and feels like Outrun, and even uses a similar branching paths system. Similar, but not exactly the same. Before you start playing, you pick one of four stages, each of which is made up of a collection of branching paths, like the one in Outrun. Though they don't follow the same big triangle formation as in the original game, instead being a selection of diamond and chain shapes. This means that each time you play a stage, the first and last areas will be the same as the other times you picked that stage, but there's a bunch of different routes to take in the middle. So while a single play will be shorter than a game of the original Outrun, there's a greater number of routes to go back and see.

The structure isn't the only change to the formula, though: your Batmobile-looking vehicle also has a boost function, that works in a pretty unique way. If you reach and maintain top speed for a few uninterrupted seconds, the boost will activate, significantly incresing your speed until you slow down for any reason. It's a little more strategic than the usual limited-use boost items you'd see in other racing games, and what makes it better is that it really does seem like the tracks are designed around it. It pays to learn where the straight parts are in a track that let you really cut loose with the speed, and where you should tap the brake to stop the boost activating so that it doesn't send you careening off of a bridge.

Another interesting thing is that though it looks like it's going to be set in a grim cyberpunk dystopia, there's actually a bit of optimism in the game's backdrops. Most of the city stages seem clean, shiny and genuinely advanced, and there's a few stages set in  lush green paradises, too. From what I've seen, there's only one stage that takes a "glass half empty" approach, and that's a stage with you driving on bridges over clean-looking water, with a backdrops of ruined, crumbling skyscrapers in the distance.

If you like Outrun and want some more of it, then Junker's High/Outrun 2019 will give you exactly that, with a couple of new and interesting twists bundled in, too. The Asian version of the Mega Drive Mini probably has the best line up generally, and Outrun 2019 is a part of that, which is nice, since actual cartridge copies seem to be selling for the same price as they did when the game got released in 1992. (On another note, who would have ever have guessed it'd be Konami of all companies, that did the proper thing with their mini console by putting the same lineup on every version of it?)

Sword of Sodan (Mega Drive)

This is a game whose title I'd always seen in lists of Mega Drive games and never bothered to take any notice of, assuming it was some boring, ugly western-developed RPG or something. Then I learned that in 1995, the final issue of Beep! Mega Drive magazine had it listed as the lowest rank Mega Drive game of all time, by Japanese Mega Drive owners. The fact that a western-developed game had gone pretty much entirely unnoticed in the west, while enjoying such notoriety in Japan got my interest, so I investigated. Turns out it's not an RPG at all, but an ugly, boring single plane beat em up!

You start out picking from a nameless hero or heroine, and then you set out to awkwardly shuffle forwards, swinging your sword at everyone that crosses you path. The game was apparently originally released on the Amiga, though since it uses all three buttons on the Mega Drive pad, plus the start button, it must have been even worse on a system whose controllers had one or maybe two buttons available at best. Anyway, the C button attacks (and you also have to press it in conjunction with the d-pad if you want to change the direction you're facing), B does a little jump that's totally pointless until a few stages in, when you can use it to try and jump over the massive, invisible instant death pits, and the A button drinks potions.

The potions are probably the most interesting thing about Sword of Sodan. There's four different potions to collect, and you can carry up to four at a time. The twist is that when the game is paused, you can pick two of the potions in your inventory to mix together for various different effects, from extra lives, to flaming attacks, to pointless self-poisoning. Otherwise, though, you mostly just shuffle along, hacking at enemies, and hoping you don't get torn apart by the traps in the stages, which are near-impossible to dodge with your incredibly unathletic warriors. Another little point of interest is that some enemies do require a little extra technique to kill, for example, the giants that start to appear at the end of the third stage: press C and up to slash their faces until they take a knee, then you have to stand at he exact right distance to them, and press C and up a couple more times to behead them.

I don't think Sword of Sodan is the worst Mega Drive game of all time, but it is a very bad game, and it's not one you should waste any time playing. It's not really a surprise, but that's how it is sometimes.

Magical Taruruto-kun (Mega Drive)

It's yet another game based on an early 90s anime that never got translated into English. I guess this one must have been much more popular than Genji Tsuushin Agedama, as while that only had one videogame, Taruruto-kun had seven of them across four formats and in only two years! You'd think that kind of success would get the franchise earmarked for international release, but I guess not. Anyway, you play as the eponymous magical boy, who's a chubby little guy with a two-pointed hat and a magic wand, and obviously, it's a platform game.

It is a pretty high quality platform game, too! You can use your want to pick up items and throw them at enemies (for some reason, picked up items grow a smiling face), or just to hit enemies at very short range if there's no items around to pick up. You can also press jump again midair to sprout wings and perform a wide bowl-shaped swooping glide type action. Like any good platform game, it's designed around these abilities, with a few other gimmicks specific to each stage. One big fault I've found, though, is that while there are plenty of parts where you need to use the glide to reach power ups or squeeze through gaps, there's very few points at which you can really let loose and glide over a long distance without worrying. I know the devs were probably focussed on designing challenging stages, but the glide is really satisfying, and it's a shame you don't often get to enjoy it to its fullest.

It should also be mentioned that this game looks amazing. It's so colourful, and the sprites are all chunky and cute, and it's kind of got a SNES-ish look to it, if you think of the stereotype that SNES games were cuter and more pastel-hued than the Mega Drive's grittier, darker games, like if the SNES was TV anime, and the Mega Drive was violent OAVs, if you will. Despite the looks, though, it still plays in the harder arcade style you'd expect from the Mega Drive: it's a lot harder than it looks, it can definitely be played for score, and it's definitely designed around mastery of the mechanics and controls. (That's not to say that there aren't SNES games like this, but it's obvious to anyone that the Mega Drive's library, especially in the early years, was heavily skewed towards being a home arcade). Sorry about that overly-long foray into system comparisions, got a bit carried away there I think.

Magical Taruruto-kun is an amazing-looking game, that's also definitely worth playing. It strange how a game of such obvious high quality never really had much attention from western importers until the modern era. I guess being based on a kids show and not being an arcade port meant no-one in the west bothered to take notice of it on release. It's also left me interested in whether any of the other games based on the same show are any good.

Outlander (Mega Drive)

This is a game I first encountered years ago, in my earliest days of emulation, but back then, I never figured out how to actually play it. Or at least, I never figured out how to play it for a decent amount of time. But before I get onto that, I should describe what the game actually is: it's a would-be sequel to a Mad Max game on the NES (that I haven't played), though the publisher apparently no longer had the license, so they just changed the name.

You play as some guy driving through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, constantly assailed by bikers, and later on, people in cars and helicopter pilots. You can fight them off with machineguns mounted to the front of your car, and when an enemy's coming close up next to you, a little side window appears and, if your timing's good enough, you can blast them with your shotgun. Eventually, the little left-pointing arrow on your dashboard will start blinking, telling you that you're near a town and you should pull over (which is done by stopping your car to the left side of the road, then turning the steering wheel left as far as it'll go).

That's the part I never figured out back then, and it's pretty important! The town segments take the form of single-plane beat em up stages, where you walk to the left, taking out any enemies you encounter (all the people you encounter are enemies, by the way), as well as destroying any barrels or crates you find, in the hopes of obtaining more fuel, food or water (to replenish you health), or ammo for your guns. If you don't visit the towns, you won't get any points, as they're totted up based on how many enemies you killed, your remaining fuel and health, and so on as you enter. But more importantly, you'll quickly run out of fuel! (Actually points are pretty important too, since you don't start with any extra lives and you can only get them through points).

If you run out of fuel, you'll come to a stop, and you'll have to do a beat em up stage on the road, which are much harder than the town ones, since there's now bikers trying to take your head off with chains, and you can only kill them with your shotgun, which has limited ammo. In the old days, I'd just keep driving until I reached one of these stages, then quickly get killed. I'm glad I gave it another shot as an adult, and finally figured it out, because Outlander is a pretty fun game!

It's no classic, and it has some big problems, like how the scenery during the driving sections never changes (I know you're driving through an endless wasteland, but with a bit of imagination you can easily come up with a few variants: toxic swamp, ruined city, dead forest, etc.), and how later on there's some unfair stuff like poisoned water that reduces your health, but it's definitely a game worth playing, and it's a shame it's not better known. I strongly recommend you also give it a try!

Shadow Blasters (Mega Drive)

Shadow Blasters, also known as Shiten Myooh, is an interesting case. When I first played it, I wrote it off as an unfair, too-hard kusoge. For some resaon, though, I kept being drawn back to it, and the more I played it, the more I saw the good in it. For a start, it's not unfair, or too hard, it's just a very old fashioned (even for 1990) game that expects you to learn it, and offers little mercy or concession while you do so.

You get four characters (two ninja, a swordsman and a monk), who also act as your lives, and you can switch between them at any time from the pause menu. One concession the game does make is that it allows you to play the stages in whatever order you wish. The four characters each have their own very slightly different attacks, not in my opinion, they're not really different enough to warrant switching often. One thing that really feels missing from this game is the ability to heal characters while they're "tagged out", either automatically over time, or through power ups with that purpose. As it is though, you might as well play with one character until they die, then go onto the next, until you run out or finish the game. Maybe it would make the game too easy though?

On the other hand, something I did really find interesting about Shadow Blasters is the attack/power up system. Next to your health meter, there's a power meter, indicating how powerful your attacks are. You can charge it by holding the attack button for a more powerful attack. That's all fairly traditional, right? The twist that I really like, though, is that one of the power ups you collect makes it so a segment of your current character's power meter is always filled in, making charge shots take less time to power up, and gradually increasing the power of all your shots, until eventually, if you ever manage to collect nine of the items with one character, every one of your attacks is at full power. It's only something small, but I don't recall ever seeing it done in any other game, and I thought it was really cool.

Everything else about the game is fairly standard for an early Mega Drive action title: the stages are in forests, mountains, spaceships, and gritty inner cities, the enemies are a mix of humanoid troops who blindly march forward and weird small monsters that fly around, and the bosses are a decent enough array of big, weird monsters. It's not ground-breaking, but it is at least well executed. Shadow Blasters was apparently released in Japan and the US in the same week, but despite that, there's still some localisation silliness in there. In the JP version, the characters have the thematically appropriate names Kotarou, Ayame, Senshirou and Kidenbou, while the US version has the incredibly ill-fitting Horatio, Tiffany, Leo and Marco. That's more amusing than anything, tough the same can't be said for the disparity in quality between the two versions' boxarts: the Japanese copy has an incredible high quality painting, reminiscent of the best of the Heisei era Godzilla movie posters, while the US box has a laughable piece that looks like the cover of a self-published tabletop RPG supplement.

Whichever version you play, though, the game itself is surprisingly good if you have the patience to stick with it. You'll probably want to emulate, though, since it's apparently now rare and expensive. Though it was one of the built in ROMs on my chinese handheld Mega Drive clone, so that's also a nice way to get it!

Soleil (Mega Drive)

A lot of the reviews of Soleil (also known as Ragnacenty or Crusader of Centy) compared it to A Link to the Past. At first glance, this seems pretty apt: they're both top-down action RPGs, they both star young boys with swords, they both have you cutting grass to find coins. The thing is, it's only at first glance that comparision holds up. If you really need to compare Soleil to a SNES game, the one to go for would be Earthbound (or Mother 2). (It should be noted, however, that Earthbound wasn't yet out when Soliel was released. But that doesn't make the Zelda comparision any less lazy.)

Though they don't have a lot in common mechanically, or even aesthetically, with Earthbound being a Dragon Quest-style turn-based RPG set in a strange version of mid-twentieth century America, and Soleil being an action RPG set in a pastel-hued fantasy realm, they're both games that have narrative ambitions well beyond what was expected of console games at the time of their release, and conversely, well beyond their peers.

There's plenty of people who have written about Earthbound's setting and writing and so on, and I'm not a particularly big fan of it, so I'm not going to reitierate much about it, but basically, the people who do love tend to take from it not only a strong sense of nostalgia, but a real emotional resonance, and it's often said that the game does a good job of replicated the world in which a child lives. Clearly, its ambitions were loftier than most RPGs that existed at that point, which were almost all sci-fi or fantasy stories (that's not to say that there weren't good stories among them, just that they weren't literarily ambitious).

Soleil, though starts with a typical fantasy setting in which boys from the village long to become heroic monster killers when they grow up ,and so on, it quickly subverts it in a number of ways. The first subversion is seen when the village boys go to see off an older boy, Amon, as he leaves the village to go and kill monsters and be a hero. You encounter Amon once or twice later in the game, too, and there's the implication that in a more traditional RPG story, he would be the player character with the lofty destiny.

Instead of the normal heroic quest, Soleil's protagonist is embroiled in a number of bizarre events, during which they gain the power to speak to animals, temporarily get turned into a monster, and ever go to heaven while still alive. Possibly the most important of these, and definitely the most interesting is the section of the game where you're turned into a monster. At the risk of spoiling an important part of the game's story, you basically find out that monsters largely live in mortal terror of human heroes, and just want to be left alone, and that the monsters you kill do have families that mourn their passing. It's something that could have been just a throwaway joke in the vein of the henchman's family scene in one of the Austin Powers movies, but it's played totally straight, and though you do go back to kiling monsters when you retain your human form, you are given a new purpose in life: to find out why humans and monsters fight, and to strive towards ending that conflict.

So, that's Soleil. I can't say if the writers of 1994 were genuinely lazy or stupid in their easy comparisions, or if the climate of the time simply made the idea of thematic criticism of a videogame totally unthinkable to them, but either way, they were wrong. Soleil is a game that's worth playing on its own merits, and should hold a place in history alongside the Mother games as an early attempt to subvert and experiment with what's possible in a videogame's narrative.