Kaikan Phrase - Datenshi Kourin (Playstation)

I've covered a lot of anime license games on here before, but this might be the game licensed from the most obscure anime so far. Released during the late nineties bishonen boom alongside the likes of Gravitation, Weiss Kreuz, and Yami no Matsuei, Kaikan Phrase is a show about a Visual Kei band made up of handsome young men. It's never had an official English release, and the only fansubs around as far as I can tell are rips of ancient VHS tapes!

 

Fitting with the theme of the show, the game is a rhythm game, in which you play the songs of the fictional band  Λucifer (which also became a real band, so singles and such could be released). There's only four stages in single player story mode, but each stage you pick one of two options. Though it's not a branching path, there are only two options for each stage no matter what, and the options only change the cutscenes that play before and after the stage. There's also only six songs in the game, and worst of all: they pad out the play time by making you grind to unlock them!

 

When you start a stage, you choose a song and a band member to play as. Since each member plays a different instrument, they each have different charts for each song, and naturally, different difficulty levels. To unlock more songs, you have to gain New Release points, which I think are scored 1:1 on the number of successful notes you play in a song. So picking a harder chart means more potential for points, but if you fail a stage, you get nothing. No matter what, though, when you start playing, you'll be hearing the first song at least three times before you unlock the second, and the gaps between unlocks only get longer and longer.

 

As for the game itself, it's incredibly simple: there's a bar on the lefthand side of the screen. Note markers appear on the bar, and a line travels down it. Although the markers appear in a number of different colours, you only ever have to press the X button when the line reaches them, and that's it! There's a meter next to the bar that fills up gradually as you hit notes, and if it's full at the end of the song, you pass the stage! As you progress through the four stages of a single player playthrough, that meter gets longer, but there's no other complications added.

 

Despite the grind problem, I still had a pretty good time playing this game. The songs are decent, and actually playing it is mindless and stress-free to the extent that it's a nice relaxing game to zone out to and play for 15 minutes or so. Obviously, it gets better as you unlock more songs, too.

Shin Senki Van-Gale - The War of Neo-Century (Playstation)

 I was attracted to this game not only because it was a Playstation fighting game I haven't seen anyone talk about before, and also because it seemed to be an aerial, projectile-focussed fighting game, like the Psychic Force games. It's not really much like Psychic Force, though. I'd say it's more like a cross between Bastard! Ankoku no Hakaishin and Senko no Ronde.

 

This is an assumption based entirely on the game's low budget-looking intro FMV and the fact that both the developer and the publisher seem to have only released a few games each, all in a window of a few years in the late nineties, but it does feel like it's a bit of an enthusiast's project. It's undeniable what the aim of the game was: to recreate one-on-one mecha battles, specifically in the style of those seen in the Gundam franchise. There's lots of zooming around, shooting and dodging laser fire, ruching in close to attack with beam sabers, and defending with beam shields.

 

It's also heavily influenced by Gundam aesthetically: as well as the robots looking like Gundam designs (one of them looks almost exactly lke The O, for example), the stages are straight out of that franchise, too. There's space, with the Earth in the background, a stage where the two combatants are burning up on entry into the atmosphere, a big cylindrical space colony, and so on. One bizarre detail is that you can set a time limit in the options screen, but it only seems to apply on the re-entry stage.

 

Unfortunately, though the game looks and sounds great, it doesn't play so great. It's not painful to play or anthing, but it's just not particularly enjoyable, either. I think a big problem stems from something that Psychic Force has that Van-Gale doesn't. In Psychic Force, there's an invisible line connecting the two characters; their positions and how the directions work for them are always in relation to their opponent, and more importantly, projectiles always fire directly at the opponent, and melee attacks always connect when the fighters are within range and the defender hasn't blocked or dodged.

 

What this results in is really long fights where two robots shoot at each other, only occasionally doing damage. Even rushing in to melee attack isn't great, because melee attacks only seem to actually trigger sometimes, and when it does happen, it usually just awkwardly whiffs. Sometimes a little "LOCK ON" crosshair thing appears over your opponent, though it doesn't seem to actually do anything. Attacks that you're supposed to aim just fire straight ahead whether the crosshair is there or not, and homing attacks kind of vaguely home in on the opponent whether it's there or not. I don't know if it's just an aesthetic touch or it does something that I haven't figured out, or even if it's supposed to do something, but some kind of programming error prevents that.

 

Like I said earlier, Van-Gale isn't a terrible game, but it's also not a good one. If you're curious about it, you might as well take a look, just don't spend a lot of money on it.

Asuncia: Matsue no Jubaki (Playstation)

 In my opinion, the latter half of the nineties was a golden age for RPGs, with a lot of the best ever appearing on the Playstation. Asuncia is a Playstation RPG from 1997, and though it can't stand among the timeless classics of the era, it can stand on its own as a game that took different inspiration, and set out to fulfill a different vision of what RPGs are. That is, it seems to be inspired both mechanically and aesthetically by very early tabletop RPGs.

 

The aesthetic influence is obvious: pretty much all of the art in the game could have been taken from a 1980s TTRPG rulebook, and it's set in a downbeat, grimy fantasy world, with dirty buildings, unpleasantly violent monsters, and magic use something of a rarity. It's set in a world where isolated towns cower in fear, surrounded by vast, monster-infested hinterlands, waiting for a hero to come along and save them.

 

And that's what you do: each stage takes place over a massive area, and there are two important numbers displayed at all times: the time remaining, and the monsters remaining. Your goal is to reduce the monsters to zero before the time gets to zero. It's not real time, instead the timer counts down a little every time you move a space on the map, or take a turn in battle. Dotted around the map are towns, each of which will give you an item or some money on your first arrival, and they also have a few facilities: blacksmiths, inns, ite shops, and so on. The blacksmiths and magic guilds in the towns are actually the only way of strengthening your characters, which seems like a very old school TTRPG way of doing things. Also, conversations had in certain town locations can aid in recruiting new party members.

 

There are also a few dungeons in each stage too, which are smaller maze-like maps where you can find a bunch of treasure, and also fight a boss, who's a lot stranger than all the other enemies. Oddly, these seem to be the only bosses in the game, and they're totally optional. The enemies in the dungeons don't count towards the enemy count of the main stages, and the main stages end as soon as you kill all the enemies in them, there's no bosses to finish them off. (Apparently there's an ending you can only get if you kill every dungeon boss, but I only found out about that after I was a few stages in.)

 

Another weird little quirk is that you get a score for each stage, not only based on things you'd expect, like how many times you died, how many turns were left on the clock, and how many towns survived, but also on a weird system involving the order in which you kill enemies. There are three types of monster in each stage, each of which is assigned a colour: red, green, or blue. You can score bonus points by killing three or five of a single colour in a row, as well as killing sets of different enemies in certain patterns that are shown on a screen you can access before choosing your actions every turn in battle. If the game was more popular, I could imagine people figuring out exactly how to maximise their score on each stage.

 

Asuncia is a unique and interesting game, and it's definitely worth playing. Just don't go in expecting the deep plot and characters you might normally expect from an RPG of this era, and also, don't try to play more than one consecutive stage in a single sitting. Each one takes about thirty to forty minutes, and while that makes for an entertaining diversion, the repetition will start to wear on you if you don't take a break after that.

TAMA: Adventurous Ball in Giddy Labyrinth (Playstation)

 I had originally planned to review the Saturn version of this game, since on that console it was a launch title, and I thought it'd be interesting to see a Saturn launch title that wasn't a port of one of SEGA's arcade hits. But that version doesn't really emulate very well, so I settled for the Playstation version instead. As far as I know, they're pretty much the same game though, and it was a launch game for both systems, so it's not too big a compromise.

 

In the early days of the 32-bit consoles, there were a lot of games that saw developers trying to figure out how classic genres would work in 3D: what changes would need to be made for practical reasons, and what innovations would be birthed from the newly discovered Z-axis. 3D Lemmings and the Bug games being two high profile (at the time) failed experiments. TAMA is another experiment, essentially taking the old Taito ball-in-a-rotating-maze arcade game Cameltry and putting it in 3D. There aren't really any compromises that need to be made to make the concept work, and there are two main innovations brought in.

 

Before I describe them, I should explain the game, for those who aren't familiar with Cameltry. ach stage is a maze with a ball in it. You've got to get the ball to the goal before time runs out. In Cameltry, you could only rotate the maze left and right, while being in 3D allows TAMA to also offer the ability to tilt the maze in any direction, giving the player a lot more potential precision in controlling the ball's speed and direction. The other big hange is simpler and more obvious: the stages are multi-layered and see you going up and down ramps, riding moving platforms across gaps, and so on.

 

As for how the game itself is: it's pretty good. I love the way it looks, the very low-poly models and simple textures really work for the toy-like setting, and the physics never feel weird, which is crucial in a game like this. It's not going to blow your mind, but it's a mildly amusing distraction, executed as well as it could have been. The only real negative point I have to make is that Stage 2-2, very early into the game, has a point near the end that's completely unforgiving and needs perfect execution. It took me something like half an hour and many attempts to get past this stage, and then it was plain sailing for the next twenty or so stages, so it's a weird little difficulty spike.

 

TAMA is a nice little game, and the fact that it was a launch title for two competing consoles released only a few weeks apart makes it an interesting historical footnote, too. It even managed to get reviewed in a few US and UK magazines as a result of this, though they weren't particularly impressed (though to be fair, I definitely wouldn't be recommending anyone play it if mid90s import prices were the barrier to doing so).

Ling Rise (Playstation)

 When you look at the screenshots of Ling Rise, I'm sure you'll probably think the same thing as I did: it looks like some kind of Japanese Crash Bandicoot clone. Once you actually play, though, that similarity only extends to the fact that the whole game takes place in long, narrow corridor-like areas full of enemies and pits. The actual platforming is done at a much slower pace than the Crash games, and there's a bunch of other stuff in the game besides that, too.

 

So, you play as this very androgynous character (in-game they look like a girl, but the boxart makes them look like a boy?), who's acoompanied by some small floating creatures that are called Lings. You only start off with one of them, but you quickly accumulate a Ling posse. These guys are the way you attack, since your character can't do it themselves for some reason. They shoot forward and ram enemies with their bodies! There's a little bit of a virtual pet element going on with the Lings, too, as you not onlt have to feed them to ensure they have energy to attack with, but you have to feed them the right foods, or their energy will refill, but they'll be in a bad mood and not want to attack. Sometimes you'll meet other characters accompanied by Lings, but I've played for a few hours and done a couple of bossfights, and none of them have used Lings to attack, preferring more traditional methods like magic swords.

 

I have no idea what the plot is about, but in the time I've played so far, I've done a lot of stuff that's very reminiscent of the legendary RPG Grandia: climbed mountains, explored ruins, walked along train tracks, escaped military prison, and so on. On the subject of RPGs, a lot of database-type sites online have this listed as one, but it's really not. There's some very mild RPG elements, like raising the stats of the Lings and being able/required to revisit earlier areas, but most of your playtime and the bulk of the game's challenge is in 3D platforming. 

 

The platforming itself takes some getting used to: judging jump distances took me a while to get used to, and I was constantly falling into pits like an idiot for the first couple of areas. It did gradually get easier, though, and there was a stage a bit later on which sees you navigating a lot of moving platforms, while also counter-intuitively moving towards the camera instead of away from it,  but by that point, I'd gotten the jumping down to an instinct. For some reason, collecting the items that enemies and smashed boxes drop never stops being a weird experience of perspective nightmares.

 

Ling Rise is a really cool and fun game, and other than one small hiccup near the start of the game, there hasn't been much of a language barrier in the way of me playing it. I'd still definitely play a fan translation if one ever comes out, though, since it'd be nice to know what's going on in the game. It's a shame it never got an official English release at the time, actually, I think it's thematically and aesthetically something a lot of people would have gone for during the turn-of-the-century anime boom, and the game itself is unique enough to stand out while also being familiar enough to draw people in. For those reasons, it's also surprising that it doesn't seem to already have any kind of western fanbase. Hopefully that'll change sometime soon, because it's a game that deserves a wider audience.

Critical Blow (Playstation)

 I originally played this game just because of the graphics, which are amazing. It's got a lot of charm in its low-poly anime style. But not only did it actually turn out to be a fun game, but also an all-round aesthetic masterpiece that really captured the feel of a certain culture at a specific time. Maybe even more than Evil Zone/Eretzvaju, Critical Blow is like a time capsule of anime fandom in the late nineties!

 

The way all the characters look the world they inhabit, the high-quality animated FMV intro, and even the music will take you right back to that time. It even infiltrates the way the game plays to a certain extent! One of the modes on the main menu is "Theatre Mode", which I assumed would be just a menu where you can view unlocked cutscenes (as well as the intro, there's also an animatd ending for each character in Arcade Mode). What it actually is is a story mode in which you play as the game's main protagonist Ricky, and have the game's plot told to you via a mixture of still images with text captions, and yet more fully voiced, fully animated high quality FMV cutscenes! Of course, whenever a fight breaks out. that's when the actual game part kicks in. 

 

As well as Theatre and Arcade, there's also another single player mode, called Trading Mode. This is an instance of something that was very fashionable in console fighting games at the time: a mode where you take a character, fight lots of opponents, and gradually increase their stats and unlock new abilities. It was probably popularised by Street Fighter Alpha 3's famous World Tour mode, but I think it might have started in the Flash Hiders games on SNES and PC Engine. It's fine I guess, but I think it speaks to the quality of Arcade and Thatre modes that it's easily the least interesting part of this game, and that's coming from someone who can't even understand any of the text or dialogue in Theatre Mode. The art and FMV are really that charming!

 

There are some bad sides to the game, especially if you're hoping for a well-balanced, competitive fighter. Like how the super meter is filled by any blocked or connecting attacks, including super attacks. So one character in particular, who has a long range, multi-hit super, once they have one meter, they essentially have infinite supers as long as they either hit or get blocked (and the super in question does a not insignificant amount of damage even when blocked, too). There's also a possible issue with the camera: as the fighters get closer to one end of the stage or the other, the camera will tilt slightly to make a dramatic angle, which does look really cool, but might raise some questions regarding fairness, especially among the kind of players who insist on always fighting in plain training stages, or banning custom costumes in modern fighting games.

 

Mostly, though, Critical Blow is a game I strongly recommend, especially if you're nostalgic for the era in which it was originally released. I think the music especially is going to make a certain section of my audience lose their minds when they hear it! I learned only after already having played it for several hours that it's also the sequel to game from 1996 called Genei Tougi, so that might also be worth checking out too (though I haven't played it yet, so I can't say for sure).

Wander Vehicles - Doggybone Daisakusen (Playstation)

 So, this is a game that I instantly knew I had to play as soon as I saw screenshots of it, though, seeing it was a strategy game, I was worried about potential language barrier problems (which I'll address later). It's about small-scale tank battles between the armed forces of two countries: The Doggy Bone Republic (your guys, who are all anthropomorphic dogs) and the Banana Slip Kingdom (the enemy, who are all anthropomorphic monkeys). A third country, the Cat's Eye Confederation (anthropomorphic cats, of course), seem content to play profiteers, selling supplies to both sides. At least, that's how it looks to me, without being able to actually understand any of the dialogue.

 

Luckily, the game at its most basic isn't hard to figure out without being able to read Japanese! You have a few squads made up of three tanks each, and so does the enemy. You pick a squad and tell them where on the batle field you want them to go, by stretching a line out from their current location. When they encounter an enemy squadron, they'll ask if you want them to attack or carry on moving. Every squad is also marked with a rock, paper, or scissors hand sign, which obviously tells you who'll come out on top in a straight 3v3 fight.

 

So, your task in most of the stages is to figure out which of your squads to move to which locations, and at which times, to ensure they don't end up in battles they can't win. Some stages just want you to wipeout the opposition, others want you to get all your tanks to a certain location on the map, and it's one of these stages, the fourth in the game, where I came up against a (literal) barrier. In this stage, you make your way across a jungle swamp, with a few enemy squads lurking about. The battle part is pretty complicated, as attacking one squad will summon a nearby squad of a different element to back it up, so you've got to try and occupy different enemy squads at the same time. On my third attempt at this, I managed to wipe them all out and cross the swamp.

 

Unfortunately, this was a "reach the location" stage, and the location was behind some electric forcefields, and I couldn't figure out how to pass them at all. I'd been really enjoying the game up until this point, so I sought a solution online, only to encounter the big disadvantage inherent to writing about obscure games: if no-one's played it, no-one can help you. There's one attempted let's play on Youtube, which ends when the player dies near the start of this very stage. I found a series of videos on niconicodouga that appeared to be a complete playthrough, and got excited. Then I clicked the link to the video for stage four, and found that the videos only contained the cutscenes, and no actual gameplay footage.

 

Hopefully, someday, I'll be able to pass this stage, either because someone with better Japanese literacy than me will play the game and make a guide, or maybe someone will even make a translation patch, someday, since the Playstation seems to be growing in popularity among that scene. But until then, I can unfortunately only recommend Wander Vehicles (sometimes mistransliterated as "Wonder B-Cruise") to those who can read Japanese, or who have the perseverence to figure out this kind of thing through trial and error. However, I was thoroughly enjoying it until I got stuck, so if the language barrier isn't a problem for you, or if someone does reveal the solution for all to see at some point in the future, it's definitely worth playing.

Magic Castle (Playstation)

 Some of you will already know about this game, but for those who don't, it started life in 1998 having been created using a Net Yaroze as a pitch to be shipped around to various publishers in the hopes of getting funding to turn it into a full commercial release. Unfortunately, none of the publishers were interested, and the game was put away and forgotten about for over twenty years, until the creators rediscovered it, finished it up, and released it for free online!

 

What the game is is an action roguelike, where you pick one of four characters (Knight, Fighter, Wizard, and Archer), and attempt to make your way through twenty floors of a castle full of monsters and treasure, that is, of course, different every time you play. To get from floor to floor, you have to keep killing monsters on your current floor until one drops a giant bouncing key. Attack the key, then go onto the next floor. It might sound like a pretty generic concept, but it's executed so well, that I can't hold that against it at all.

 

The fact is that the game is a ton of fun to play! All four characters play differently, but you'll have a good time whichever one you pick. Not only do they have different stats, but also special abilities, some of which are only unlocked when you find better equipment for them, though. For example, finding the Wizard's upgraded staff lets them fly around, and getting the Archer's upgraded bow makes their arrows fly through enemies, hitting them multiple times, and so on. There's also various rings and scrolls and stuff that all have various different effects, too, though I don't want to spoil too much by listing them here.

 

As well as being fun, Magic Castle is also a game with a ton of charm. Though the graphics are very simple, I love the way the game looks, and the castle being furnished with paintings, grand pianos, bookcases and so on just adds so much character to the game. Bridging the gap between mechanics and aesthetics are all the secrets and other little things to discover, not just in the game world itself, but also there's a whole menu of mysterious "unlockables"! Even the fact that the game isn't one hundred percent finished can create some funny moments, like the "blue leaf" item, which just gives a message of "IT'S NOT FOR THIS GAME. THERE'S NO POISON HERE."upon use. Also, though the mltiplayer function is apparently not yet properly implemented, you can use the first controller to move players one and three simultaneously, which can provide a bit of extra amusement.

 

Another thing that's interesting is the option on the main menu labelled "Training", which isn't actually a training mission like you might expect, but a kind of test mode, that shows off various functions and features of the game. If you pick this mode, press select to goto the next scene each time. It might not be interesting to some people, but I enjoyed pulling the curtain back for a peek. 

 

I definitely recommend that everyone goes and plays Magic Castle. I've already played it for hours, and I think I'll be playing it for a long time to come, too. Plus, it's free! One final thing I should mention, for those who aren't already in the know: Net Yaroze Europe has a mountain of information on this game, including developer interviews, an online manual, and more. So go have a look there, too.

Noon - New Type Action Game (Playstation)

 Disregard the title: it's a puzzle game, not an action game, and it can be played by anyone, not just newtypes. It is, though, a game with a lot to hold your interest, and there's even a bit of mystery outside of the game itself to enjoy, too! But I'll get back to that later. First: the game itself.

 

It's a versus puzzle game, but not of the "stuff falling into a well" variety. Instead, you and your opponent are doing battle in a square arena. Near the top and bottom of the arena, there are two rectangular grids of coloured squares: one blue and one green. Also, coloured orbs randomly appear throughout the arena. Each player also has a timer, that starts at ten seconds, and depletes whenever every square of their coloured grid is full of orbs. If your counter reaches zero, you lose.

 

Now, you can push the orbs around, and there are two methods of clearing them from the arena. For the sake of convenience, I'll called them "squashing" and "smashing". First, squashing: if you push an orb against a wall or another orb, after a couple of seconds, it'll break and your power meter will fill up a little. When the power meter is full, you can use a super attack, which is different for each character: making a bunch of same-colloured orbs appear, making a few rainbow-coloured wild orbs appear, making a tond of junk orbs appear, and so on.

 

Smashing is a little more conventional: get three or more orbs of the same colour in a straight line and hit them with your melee attack, and they'll all disappear, and some junk orbs will appear in your opponent's grid. THere's also boss fights where your opponent has a health bar instead of a grid, and you damage them by smashing orbs. It all took me a couple of games to get ahold of, but once I did, I was having a pretty good time.

 

The presentation is also really high quality! There's a ton of excellent pixel art in here, for the characters, the stage backgrounds, and the story cutscenes. Even the main menu is pretty cool, being made of a big cog-power machine thing. This might not make sense, but it siimultaneously feels like both a medium-budget title, and a small creator-driven passion project.  Which leads nicely into that mystery I mentioned earlier!

 

Before the titles screen, along with all the usual company logos you'd expect to see at the start of a videogame, there's also a plain black screen with the white text ""Kouji Oono Original Version 1993", and every mention of copyright includes a 1996 copyright for Microcabin, and a 1993 copyright for Kouji Oono. Now, the obvious part of all this is that the Playstation version of Noon is a remake of a game made in 1993, by Kouji Oono. THe mystery is the fact that all my searching hasn't been able to turn up any information on either the pre-Playstation version of the game, or its creator.

 

I have a few assumptions and educated guesses, at least: if the game was commercially released, it wasn't on any consoles, since  there would be some documentation of it online somewhere, since pretty much every official console game release is documented, and almost all are ripped and uploaded too. My guess is that it could have been released on a microcomputer, since the gaps in generally available knowledge in that field are significantly bigger than the gaps in knowledge of console games. My guess is the X68000, based on nothing, really, except that the game itself jst has a kind of intangible X68000 feel to it. As for Kouji Oono, I could only find a short list of games he had development credits in. So short, in fact, that neither version of Noon was among them. The only other solution I can think of is that the 1993 game had a different title, in which case the only chance we have of finding it is to play every Microcabin game released in 1993, and hoping it's one of them.

 

Mystery aside, Noon is a fun, exciting game, as well as being pretty unique and vety aesthetically pleasing. It's definitely worth your time, and I recommend giving it a try.