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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

GripShift (PSP)

 This is a review that doesn't feel good to write. The thing is, GripShift is a game with many admirable aspects: it's unique, it's full of innovative and interesting ideas, it feels good to control and move your character around, and so on. Unfortunately, a few negative aspects are so overpowering that they undo all of the above, and the game ends up being less than the sum of its parts as a result.

 

The game's concept is a pretty simple one, that I can't believe I haven't seen being done before or since (well, I guess Sonic R is pretty close, but not quite): it's a combination of 3D platformer and racing game. More specifically, your character is always in their car, and it always controls like a racing game, but while there are a few races, most of the stages in single player mode are 3D platform stages, complete with collectathon items and so on.

 

The stages are of the "islands floating in space" style, and you fail the stage if you fall off it. This is frustrating, but forgivable. Obviously, it's the kind of game, like say, Speed Power Gunbike (a game I love), that gets better the more you improve your skill at playing. The problem is that completing a stage isn't necesarily completing a stage. To explain, the aim in most stages is to figure out how to get to the exit, and then actually get to it before time runs out. If you manage to do this and also beat certain goal times, you'll also get a medal, and some credits. (You get credits for collecting all the stars in a stage, too.)

 

The bronze goal time is shorter than the stage's time limit, and the silver and gold goals shorter still. They really should have just had the bronze time as the time limit, though, as you get no credits unless you get at least a bronze medal, and you need a certain amount of credits to unlock more stages. The credit thresholds aren't low, either: after I'd played through the beginner stages, I had sixteen out of twenty-five credits needed to unlock the easy stages. At the end of the easy stages, I had fifty-two out of eighty-five needed to play the intermediate stages! Now, most of my non-review game-playing time is spent on arcade and arcade-style games, so I have no problem with score/time chasing, but to make it a mandatory part of progression like this is to turn it into an annoying chore. 

 

So that's it, then. GripShift is a game I wish I liked, and I wish I could recommend, just on principle. It's just a shame that all those good ideas are sunk by that one albatross of bad progression. Since this was published by Ubisoft, I'm going to be generous to the devs and assume it was the result of some suit-wearing moron deciding that they couldn't possibly release a short game and trust the players to enjoy it, they had to crowbar in hours of compulsory repetition.

Desi Adda: Games of India (PSP)

 Like Chandragupta: Warrior Prince, Desi Adda is a product of Sony's short-lived effort to have videogames made in india, specifically for the Indian market. It's a collection of five adaptations of traditional games, and the main thing to learn from it is that various games that we might think of as being traditionally British are actually Indian in origin, or at least derived from these games, some of which are apparently thousands of years old.

 

The first game is Pachisi, which is almost identical to the game known in the UK as Ludo, which has you gradually moving four pieces around a cross-shaped board, and is just as boring. It's made worse by the fact that the AI player will always roll so much better than you do, and there's pretty much no skill or strategy involved in whether you win or lose anyway. It's not worth bothering with in real life or in videogame form.

 

Another board game is Aadu Puli Aattam, an asymmetrical strategy game, where one player controls three tigers, and the other controls twelve goats. A tiger can jump over a goat into an empty space to kill the goat, and each side has different win conditions: the tigers have to kill half of the goats, while the goats have to trap all the tigers so they can't move or kill. This one's probably the most playable in the compilation, and could probably have been sold at a super-low price on its own.

 

The other three games are different sports. Gilli Danda is a game that's kind of similar to Cricket and Baseball, but there doesn't seem to be any running on the part of the guy with the bat, and the ball is actually a small wooden stick. Kite Fighting has overly complicated controls, and I really think they overreached in trying to turn it into a videogame. I tink the aim is to fly your kite in such a manner that your kite's string cuts the strings of other people's kites. But it's hard to tell what's going on or the position of the kites in relation to each other and it just doesn't work.

 

Finally, there's Kabaddi. This game has a lot of similarities to British Bulldog or Red Rover, and it involves a field split into to halves, each controlled by a team of five. The teams take turns sending one of their members into enemy territory to reach the other side, tag members of the opponent's team, and get back home again. The defenders, of course, try to grab and stop them. I'm sure there could probably be a better interpretation of the game into a videogame form, but this one is competent, if not particularly exciting, and so far, it's the only one that exists (as far as I know).

 

There's other stuff in here, too, like a story mode where you slowly walk around a village somewhere in rural India and have the locals teach you the rules of the various games, but it's the games themselves that are the draw here. Unfortunately, none of them are really very good, and unless you're very curious, I wouldn't bother playing this one. Finally, because I know at least some of you are wondering this: yes, the players do constantly chant "kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi kabaddi" while playing that game.

Shinseiki GPX Cyber Formula VS (PSP)

 You might not have heard of Shinseiki GPX Cyber Formula, but it's a series that's interested me for a while. Originally an anime that aired on Japanese TV in 1991, obviously trying to cash in on the popularity of Formula 1 racing in Japan at that time. It's not a massive franchise, but it does seem to have been a bit of a cult hit, spawning several straight-to-video sequels over the course of the 1990s, and a seemingly endless stretch of videogame adapatations, with the most recent being released in 2018. Despite all this, and even despite the existence of an English dub that aired in parts of Southeast Asia, almost nothing of it has ever reached North America or the UK, with the one exception being the SNES game, released in the US as "Cyber Spin".

 

This entry was released in Japan only in 2008, and it's pretty good! When it comes to racing games, I'm usually more interested in the glamourous likes of the Ridge Racer series than the grey world of Gran Turismo or F1, but having seen a few episodes of the source material, I decided to give it a chance. It mostly plays like an arcade-style racer, rather than a psuedo-realistic simulation, which is definitely fine by me. There's plenty of different things to hold your attention, too.

 

There's three main modes of play, ofr a start: Survival, which has a very arcade-like structure, and sees you competing in races until you fail to finish one in first place. Unfortunately, I've only managed to get a few races deep into this, so I can't tell you if it's endless or if it has an ending. The fact that the tracks are always presented in the same order suggests to me that there's an end to it, though. Conquest is the one of the three I've played the least, and seems to be made up of shorter, harder, one-on-one races. The real meat of the game seems to be in the GPX mode, in which you pick a set of stages, and race through them in sequence, with the usual system of points awarded for higher finishing places, and so on.

 

What's interesting about GPX mode, is that the higher difficulty courses add more laps to each race. This is interesting because the cars in the game have a boost function, limited by the amount of fuel it uses up. It's essential to winning races, and as the races get longer, it'll run out a lot sooner before the ends of the races. So, as you progress through th ranks, you'll have to get better at both rationing the use of your boost, and in timing your visits to the pit lane to refuel. This probably doesn't sound like much to people who are more used to simulation-style racers, but in most racing games, I pretty much never enter the pit, so it's interesting to see a game that necessitates doing so, without slowing down or over-complicating the action.

 

There's a couple of other side modes in there, too: a solo drag race time trial mode (called ZERO 4000), and a mode called "Max Speed Attack", which sees you racing round part of a track, attempting to reach as high a speed as possible when you go past two specific points. I've made a few attempts at beating both these modes, all unsuccessful.

 

Anyway, I'm not even sure if most of my readership is even interested in racing games (which is why I try and keep a bigger gap between each one than I do with other genres), but if you are, this is one that's definitely worth a look. It looks great, it's fun to play, and it's fast. All you want from a racing game really, right?

Hyakumanton no Barabara (PSP)

So, it's only after playing the Japanese version of this game for a few hours that I learn that it actually had a western release, under the name "Patchwork Heroes". But I think the fact that I've never seen or heard anyone speak about either version makes it fine material for an obscure videogames blog. Anyway, if, like me, seeing screenshots of it makes you assume that it's some kind of quirky tower defence-type thing where you build flying battleships with cannons and turrets and things. It's actually kind of the opposite! What Hyakumanton no Barabara is is an imaginative twist on the old Qix formula, that sees you cutting apart huge flying battleships while working under the pressure of a strict time limit (since you want to destroy the battleships before they reach your hometown), and while under attack from the ships' various defence systems, mobile and otherwise.

So the way it works is that you climb around on the side of the ship, and you can cut swathes across it. If you cut in such a manner that the ship is split in two, the smallest part is destroyed and falls away. Your mission on each stage is to keep destroying bits of the ship until it falls out of the sky. Some stages also add little extra objectives that need to be fulfilled alongside your main goal, like ensuring one certain part of the ship remains intact, or collecting all of a certain item that's strewn around the ship.

There's many different kinds of enemies crawling around the ship triyng to stop you, and they each have a skill, like being able to repair the ship, or being able to fly, so they can't be killed when you cut away the part of the ship they're standing on, and so on. You can take two hits from enemies before dying, represented by the fact that you have two other people climbing alongside you at the start of each stage. There's also prisoners to rescue from cages dotted around the place, and if you have less than two remaining, they'll step in to replace them. Otherwise, they'll fly away with a balloon. There's also a few power-ups, which are the same as usual for Qix-alikes: faster movement, stop time for all the enemies, and so on.

The game looks and sounds really nice, too! Like you could guess from the game's western title, everything looks like it's made from big, colourful patchwork quilts. What you can't tell from the title is that the music is really bouncy and fun, sounding like a kind of eastern european marching band? It's pretty unique, as far as videogame soundtracks go, at least.

I really enjoyed this game. I'd even go as far as to say  that playing it is the most fun I've ever had playing a Qix-alike game! That might be damning with faint praise, since most of them have more of a "addiction through frustration" thing going on, rather than genuine enjoyment. But yeah, Hyakumanton no Barabara/Patchwork Heroes is a great little unsung hero of the PSP library. I think it might also be the first PSP game I've featured on this blog that I recommend without reservation? That's nice.

Glorace: Phantastic Carnival (PSP)

There's not much love in the world for the PSP, outside of a few games, and there's good reasons for that: it was uncomfortable to hold, the d-pad was garbage, and people mostly only bought it for either emulation or Monster Hunter. Sony did seem to be putting some effort in getting it to take off (unlike the PS Vita, which they've barely bothered with, and which would be pretty much dead by now if it weren't for anime and RPG fans. which is a shame, because for me, it might well be tied with the original DS for the title of "best handheld ever"), even going so far as to make games for audiences outside of the "big three" markets of North America, Europe and Japan. Last time I wrote about a PSP game on this blog, it was Chandragupta, a game made especially for the Indian market. This time, it's Glorace, a game made (and only released in) Korea.

It's a cute racing game, where you play as a kid who rides around on the backs of weird monsters, racing against other, riderless weird monsters on tracks that look like amazingly colourful fairy-kei dreams come to life. The tracks are pretty amazing in their layout as well as their visual design: some of them are double-sided, and a lap will see you riding across both the top and bottom of the road, as well as slightly Sonicesque loops. Other stages have pitfalls, not only from falling off the side of the track, but also through holes in the track, and by failing to get about moving platforms at certain points.

You've probably made the assumption that mechanically,  Glorace skews closer to Mario Kart than it does Gran Turismo, and you'd be right. There's a bunch of less-than-realistic additions to your tactical options, though they are handled a little differently than in the typical licensed MK knock-off. Firstly, you start off with three boosts that you can use at any time. There's also power ups on the track, though you don't get to store them like you'd expect. Instead, after you pick up the power up, you have a couple of seconds to activate it by pressing the left shoulder button or risk losing it. I don't know why they did that instead of just having them be activated on collection. Another way the power ups differ from the norm is that none of them are the typical projectiles, but rather weird state-changing magic spells. There's a shield, which stops you from slowing down when you bump into walls, obstacles or other racers, there's snow, which puts a white filter over your opponents' screens, very slightly obscuring their vision and there's quake, which causes a mild tremor, slowing down all your opponents for a few seconds.

There's a story mode and a race mode, which covers single races in both single- and multi-player. The big problem is that you can only (as far as I can tell) unlock tracks in race mode by completing them in story mode. This is only really a problem because the fifth track (and presumably the ones that come after it) add mission objectives besides "end the race in the top three". Maybe these missions are pretty simple, and easy to execute, but unfortunately, they're all in Korean, so I don't know what they are. It's a shame, because most of the game's other functional text, from menus to power up names is in English, otherwise leaving just cutscenes and flavour text in Korean. (The cutscenes, for what its worth, are very nicely presented, though, being made up of very nice storybook-style illustrations. I stilled skipped them all mercilessly, though, obviously.)

Glorace is a very charming game, and has some of the best-looking 3D graphics on the system. It's also decent fun to play, though it's nothing earth-shattering or life-changing. If you're curious, it wouldn't hurt to give it a go, and if you do, and you figure out any of the later mission objectives, please tell me what they are.

Chandragupta: Warrior Prince (PSP)

Chandragupta: Warrior Prince was released on PS2 and PSP by Sony in 2009, exclusively in India (GameFAQs lists a European release, but I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that this happened. Also, GameFAQs only lists that release, with no mention of India. I haven't played the PS2 version, but on the PSP it's a single-plane beat em up with some platforming bits.

When I first started playing it, I hated this game. The first stage has enemies that are constantly blocking and awkward to fight, constant tutorial messages abruptly halting the action andsome truly awful platforming sections with almost unavoidable traps. I perservered though, and in the follwing stages, I actually found myself having a lot of fun: the enemies were more numerous, but also a lot more co-operative in my attempts to kill them, making the action flow a lot better. Furthermore, the platforming sections were less frequent, shorter and a lot less sadistic.

Another positive the game has right from the start is the fact that it looks amazing, presented as it is in a 2.5D style reminiscent of the likes of Pandemonium or Klonoa, that goes great with the beautiful ancient India setting, one which I think has always been criminally underused in the medium of videogames (and comics, action cartoons, etc. too, come to think of it).

There are some downsides to the game, though. Firstly, there's a "feature" that, in my opinion is something that works to the detriment of many modern action games: the fact that special moves and weapons are unlocked as you progress through the game. It's boring, annoying and adds nothing to games. Secondly, there's the whole mechanic surrounding firing arrows. There's some enemies that'll be lurking in the background shooting arrows at you while you fight melee enemies in the foreground (or vice versa). The only way to beat them is by shooting them with arrows, and this is done by holding down the right shoulder button, aiming your crosshair with the analogue stick and then letting go to shoot. All this time you're completely immobile and unable to defend yourself from other foes. Thirdly, it's only a minor complaint, but the boss fights are terrible. Each boss is just a regular enemy with more health, who will go into the background every now and then to summon a small group of regular enemies for the player to fight while they watch.

Another complaint that's not one concerning the game's mechanics, but still quite disappointing is the fact that Chandragupta himself is light-skinned, while the enemies he fights are dark-skinned. It's especially noticable and unpleasant in the second stage, featuring a young Chandragupta defending his village from "a gang of thugs". It's a phenomenon I've seen before in the Amar Chitra Katha series of comics that adapt stories from Hindu mythology and Indian history, but those comics at least have the excuse of being made in the 1960s and 70s. We should expect better from media made in this century.

All in all, Chandragupta is an okay game. It's nothing particularly special to play, but it does look amazing, and I don't know of any other games that were made in India or specifically for that market, so it's a bit of a curiosity, too.

Simple 2500 Series Portable!! Vol. 13: The Akuma Hunters - Exorsister

The first thing you should know about this game is that it bears no relation to the early 90s series of comedy/horror/porn films starring famed comic creator Ippongi Bang. I hope you can get over your obviously grave disappointment.
It's actually got more in common with the Oneechanbara series being, as it is, developed by Tamsoft, and featuring a group of attractive women engaging in combat with horror-themed monsters. Also like the Oneechanbara series, the game has only a few maps,

each having several missions taking place in parts of it. The game has a big flaw that its more famous sister lacks though, which is that most hated bugbear of modern action games, endless grinding. While the Oneechanbara series does have experience points and levelling up, the player's progress isn't particularly impeded by their low level, Exorsister requires re-playing stages over and over to grind for the materials to sell so you can play a stronger weapon that will reduce the awful slog of the next one.
When you do manage to save up for an adequate weapon, the game is a fairly entertaining (though repetetive) beat em up. You go about the stage,

beat up monsters (who do look pretty cool, and there are a fair few varieties of them, too), and while they're unconcious on the ground, you exorcise them. Each weapon has two stats: AP (attack power) and RP (I assume this means rosary power?), their functions are fairly obvious: attack power indicates how much damage the weapon does when attacking, and RP indicates how quickly monsters can be exorcised with the weapon equipped.
Fighting tough monsters, who will have three main advantages over the player, such as lots of health, lots of.. spiritual health(?) and an entourage of goons to protect them,

is simpler than it seems at first. You just need to stay locked on to the target, and wail on them, dodging out of the way when they look like they're going to attack. When they're down, the best way to exorcise them is to charge the spell up close (which makes it charge much quicker), then run away from the crony monsters before casting it, so they don't interrupt it with their attacks. And don't bother killing the cronies until you kill the target, as they'll quickly respawn.
Anyway, although I've enjoyed this game, and spent a good few hours playing it, I can't call it a good game or really recommend it. The fact is that the grind of having to repeat stages to get equipped for the next ones is just so boring, and there are much better things to do with your time than waste it on that kind of rubbish.

Flash Motor Karen (PSP)

I'm sure everyone reading this blog knows of Sokoban or Boxxle or one of the other names of the ancient shoving boxes onto certain spots-type of puzzle game. Flash Motor Karen plays kind of like a more complicated, but simultaneously more forgiving version of those games.
Each stage is a small area with a switch and a door. The object is to press the switch, then get to the door. You can take as many steps as you like getting to the switch, but each stage has a limit on how many steps can be taken between pressing the switch and getting to the door. So, in puzzle mode at least, there are two main kinds of stages: ones which introduce the player to a new concept, in which the puzzle to solve is usually getting to the switch, allowing the player more leeway in learning how to interact with the new element, and the main kind, in which the player is given

elements they have seen before, and the main challenge of the stage is to set up a path to get from the switch to the door in as few moves as possible.
There's also a story mode, chapters of which are gradually unlocked as you make your way through puzzle mode, which, as well as telling a story (entirely in Japanese, of course, and thankfully skippable), also adds another type of stage. The third type of stage has enemy robots walking around the map, who act in a roguelike-style manner, only moving when the player moves. In these stages, the aim is to "trick" the robots into moving into a square adjacent to your own, so they can be dispatched with a press of the O button. Conversley, moving into a square adjacent to one of the robots will result in the player's death.

Flash Motor Karen is a pretty good game, and unlike many puzzle games of this type, never feels impossibly hard (though there are hard puzzles, I've yet to be stuck on one for more than 10-15 minutes, nor did I ever feel that the solution was totally beyond my reach). Though this might mean that the game is offensively easy for hardened sokoban fans. (Sokofans?)