Giral (PC)

 This RPG Maker game (or, it at least uses tilesets from RPG, I don't know if it was actually made in the engine) drew me in with two promises on its DLSite page: combat in the style of the first two Ys games, where the dedicated attack buton is eschewed, and you strategically walk into enemies to defeat them, and a protagonist whose sprite and artwork changed when you changed their equipment.

 

Unfortunately, it doesn't really deliver on the first, and while it does deliver on the second, there isn't really a lot of equipment to see in the game (though, to be fair, it is a game that was clearly made on a tight budget, and the character art there is is really great). The problem is that it's not really an Ys-like action RPG at all, instead being a kind of endurance testing game.

 

Enemies attack you once when you touch them, then they die. And each kind of enemy will always deal the same amount of damage to you. So you've got to look at what enemies you can see ahead of you, and judge whether you've got enough HP to make it through them or not. It's really just a question of counting rather than strategy or skill. If you don't have enough HP, go back home and spend the money you got from killing enemies to increase your max HP (one hundred points for every thousand gold).

 

And that's it, really! The entire game is about an hour and a half long, and the final fifteen minutes will be made up of you grinding for enough money to get your max HP to 30100, since the final boss deals 30000 damage, and you need at least 100 left over to win the fight. There's not much more to say about it. The character artwork is nice, I got the game in a sale for next-to-nothing, and I guess it's a potentially interesting idea, that just needs some work to make it into more of an actual game. I hope the dev sticks with it, at least.

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.

Beyond The Labyrinth (3DS)

 

Unfortunately, this is a game to which I've had to concede defeat. I really wanted to get further into it, if only take screenshots of more areas, since it is a visually beautiful game, but the first boss is just too hard for me. My save file says it has a little under three hours of playtime, but I've played at least that much again in failed attempts at beating that boss. There's still a lot to say about it, though, so let's go!

 

Its official title is Labyrinth no Kanata, and unusually for an RPG in the (relatively) modern era, it never got an official English release, though there is an unofficial translation patch. It's a dungeon crawler that recognises the old-fashioned nature of the genre, but at the same time, brings a lot of new ideas to the table. The game starts with you playing a faux-online dungeon crawler with kind of MSX-looking graphics (that is, if the MSX was capable of full-colour texture-mapped 3D mazes). As you make your way through the maze, other players join your party, and there's a little banter between them, until you're suddenly taken away to another world: one that not only has more modern graphics, but also a cute silver-haired girl who instantly befriends you.

Your presence in this world is a bit of a mystery, even to the characters in-game: it seems that "you" are actually present in the world, while your party members are still just at home, watching everything through their screens. They can talk to each other and you using the game's text chat, but they can't talk directly to the girl, even though she can somehow see them (or is at least is aware of their presence), and they can attack monsters, since all the combat is done through the medium of magical projectiles.

The combat itself is fairly original. It seems simple at first, as there are only three elements (working in a rock-paper-scissors kind of way), very few different types of items, and no spells or special attacks. Things mainly hang upon the interplay of the three elements, and the order in which everyone takes their turns. If you attack an enemy with the element that's their weakness (or vice versa), not only do they take double damage, but the damage is stored in the corner of the screen, and the next time a character (good or evil) of that element attacks, they'll absorb all the stored damage of that element as recovered HP. So it's not always the best option to attack the enemy upon whom you'll deal couble damage, if they're just going to re-absorb it on their next turn. Furthermore, when you attack, you can choose the strength of your attack, with stronger attacks putting you further back in the turn order. During battles, you can see where everyone is in the turn order, and exactly what damage you'll do when you attack, so though there aren't a lot of options like you'd see in most RPGs, there's still a lot of strategy involved.

 

As for the girl (as far as I've got in the game so far, she hasn't been named, and is literally referred to ingame as "the girl"), right from the start, she takes a place in the turn order, though at that point, every time her turn comes around, she just picks up a pebble off the ground and throws it at an enemy to deal one point of damage. After a few floors, though, she has magic powers awakened in her. Her turns don't come around as often as everyone else's, and the damage she does is non-elemental. The damage she does is also based on a equation involving the percentage of her own HP she has remaining multiplied by the amount of damage all of your party memebers have inflicted on enemies since her last turn. If you plan things well, she can do pretty devestating attacks, though you don't get to choose which enemies she attacks, unfortunately.

In summary, Beyond the Labyrnth is a game that's very beautiful (it's been on my radar for almost a decade, since the first promotional screenshots were released) and also very interesting. It's just unfortunate that it's a bit far outside my usual wheelhouse, and as a result, way too difficult for me to get very far into. But if you are a big fan of dungeon crawlers, even I can tell that this is one made to a very high standard, and definitely worth your time. And if anyone I know does play it and get further than me, please show me your screenshots of later areas when you get there! One final tip: if you're playing the translated version, then you probably can't speak Japanese, and the subtitles for the girl's voice aren't switched on by default, so go into the menu and do that.

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.

Dokapon - Monster Hunter (GBA)

 You look at this game's logo, and the western boxart, and it's easy enough to tell that it owes its western release to a superficial resemblence to the Pokemon games. Though there is a monster recruiting mechanic in Dokapon, it's entirely optional, and the items needed to do it are pretty rare. Personally, I didn't bother with it at all, but the game has enough of its own charm and ideas that it doesn't need to be a Pokemon mockbuster.

 

I'll address the most obvious quality first: the way the game looks. Though there's not much in the way of animation, the spritework in the game is beautiful. The overworld sprites look as if someone took the typical blobby pre-rendered sprites seen in so many GBA games and drew over them to make them look good, but the in-battle sprites are the jewel in the game's visual crown. Every enemy monster is a very charming, well drawn creature or humanoid, and your own character's sprite is not only their equal in terms of being well drawn, but there's a unique sprite for every sword and shield you can obtain in-game. That's two hundred all together!

 

The dungeons aren't particularly interesting. There's a slight bit of roguelike-ness, with procedurally generated floor layouts, but the battles are all more traditional RPG turn-based battles, and you don't recover health while you walk around, nor is there a hunger mechanic. You also get to keep your level when you die, but not your items, equipment, or money. The equipment is the biggest loss, to be honest, as it levels up as you use it, so a sword and shield that have lasted at least one dungeon are going to be significantly stronger than anything on sale in the town shop. I've played up to the third boss so far, and I do like the game enough that I'll probably play it all the way through eventually, and I do like that after the first two dungeons taking the standard settings of mine and forest, the third takes place in a circus.

 

Another misconception you might have on your first play is that the battles are simple and boring, but there are in fact quite a few interesting ideas in there! First, there are attack and defence turnsl when you attack, your enemy defends, and vice versa. The reason this is interesting is because of the second big idea: rock/paper/scissors. Whether attacking or defending, you can either choose the standard attack or block, or one of three skills, each mapped to rock, paper, or scissors. Your enemies do the same. If, while defending, you pick (for example) your "rock" defence skill, and your enemy attacks with their scissors attack skill, their attack is totally nullified, and you get the effects of your defence skill. Defence skills are usually stat buffs or status recovery, attack skills might do more damage, or inflict status ailments, and so on.

 

You might have read the previous paragraph and think that this means that the battles are a totally luck-based affair, but that's really not the case at all. You can see what attack skills your enemies have equipped to each slot, and with this knowledge, you can make an educated guess as to what they'll do. Certain enemies will prefer to try and inflict certain status ailments, for example. Or, you might see a fire-breathing enemy that has a skill named "napalm", and you just use common sense to assume that they'll try and use that when they attack. It's actually a fun and interesting system, that brings a little more strategy to random battles against non-boss enemies that, in a lot of other RPGs, would just have you mashing the confirm button to attack until the battle's over.

 

If you like RPGs, Dokapon Monster Hunter has a lot to offer in most departments except plot (which is barely present at all, and what little there is is very cliched). If you don't, it probably won't do much to convert you. On the other hand, if you like pixel art, you should at least go and look up sprite sheets for the enemies and equipment because they're really, really good. It's good enough that it's also got me curious about other entries in the series, so expect some of those to pop up on the blog at some point in the future, maybe.

Case of Dungeons (PC98)

It's time for that rarest of treats: a Japanese microcomputer game that has an English translation! Well, a partial one, at least. The character names are romanised and the names of the items and some of the enemies are translated, and not much else. But that does make it a lot easier compared to playing the raw Japanese version, and there doesn't really seem to be much of a plot to be missing out on, either. Anyway, Case of Dungeon is a simple isometric dungeon crawling RPG.

To start of with, you pick one of many pre-made characters from a little book at the start of the game. There's knights, mages, elves, thiefs, and so on, and one little odd thing I noticed is a few sneaky little Addams Family references, with some of the characters' names containing "Fesuta", "Gomezu", "Wenzudi", and "Motesha", though there's no "Paguzuri". The characters aren't at all balanced, with some having stats that just totally put the others to shame, even when you take into account the differing amount of points you can add to stats yourself when you select one. Once that's done with, you enter the dungeon, on your quest to (I think) kill the Black Dragon.

As mentioned, everything's seen from an isometric viewpoint, and the game is controlled with either the mouse or the arrow and Z/X keys. You don't directly move your character, you move an arrow around the screen, where it'll be pointing in one of four directions, then press Z to make them take one step in that direction. It's pretty slow, as the dungeon is procedurally generated and revealed one space at a time. Every now and then, you'll also enter a random battle. The commands for the battles aren't translated, so I'll tell you what they are here: from left to right, you've got escape, magic, and attack. Your item window is also open during battle, and oddly, using items and changing equipment doesn't use up a turn, so if you're about to die, you can just eat a load of bread until you get back to full health.

Something that was clearly done to extend the length of the game is that the stairs down to the next floor of the dungeon won't appear until you've explored every last tile on the current floor, except for those covered by locked doors. (On the subject of locked doors, you do start with a load of keys, and they're pretty commonly found in chests, too, but it's not worth the effort of going into your inventory and using them, as doors are almost always generated in frong of walls, or in the middle of rooms. So you can just either walk round them or they don't lead anywhere anyway. Weird.)

This, more than anything else, is what killed this game for me. I was actually fine with the incredibly slow walking speed and the slightly glitchy battle menu, but after I'd gotten a few floors in, I was traipsing around the place looking for the one last unexplored tile somewhere that would make the stairs appear for over 20 minutes. I saved my game and gave up. I might never go back to that file, but you never know. It's a shame, as despite having everything going against it, Case of Dungeon was, like The Hunter, it's a game that really held my attention despite really being quite boring.

I can't really say that I recommend this game after saying that, can I? But if you're more patient than I am, maybe you could give it a shot? Everyone like isometric graphics at least, don't they? Oh, and for some reason, the translated version doesn't seem to be listed on romhacking.net or on the "beginner's guide to PC98"-type articles going around, so here's the link.

Grand Master (NES)

Despite the martial artsy-sounding name, this is an action RPG with a western fantasy setting, in which you play as a young knight named Rody out to rescue a princess from a devil named Dante. It is the most generic plot possible, but it is at at least presented well, with nice-looking pixelart cutscenes, and there's little side elements too, like the failed hero of a land that's already fallen to Dante, and your sister who went missing after going off to become a demon tamer thre years ago. It's also a little different to most RPGs, since it has no save or password functions, so you're meant to be able to get through it in one sitting (I've managed about half, so far, though the way the game's set out means that I've been able to see much more of it than that).

From the start, you can choose which order you want to play the first five dungeons (and this game only has dungeons, no towns), though I strongly recommend going to the icy mountains first, since there you get the throwing axes, which make all the bossfights significantly easier. Every stage has some kind of item to make progress easier, too: a morning star, a magic wand, armour, and so on, and those items are avtually the only way to improve you attack power, since levelling up only improves your max HP and MP. As I mentioned, there's no saving or even passwords available, but if you do die, you can continue from the title screen as many times as you like, keeping your experience level, as well as any items you got from dungeons you've completed.

The nice thing about Grand Master is it's a proper, purely designed videogame, by which i mean that you can easily recognise each kind of enemy and each stage element and quickly learn what they do and how they behave, then you figure out how you best counteract that behaviour. It's not flashy or impressive, but it is simple and satisfying. Though that's not to say that this is a game with bad presentation, the aforementioned cutscenes look great for something in a NES game, and there's some cool little touches in the game itself, too, like when you go to the mountains, Rody's wearing a big thick coat, and in the desert dungeon, he's wearing lighter, short-sleeved armour.

I don't think there's really much more for me to say about Grand Master: it's just a simple, well-designed, fun-to-play game. So obviously, I recommend that you give it a try!

Sword and Fairy 6 (PS4)

Okay, so this game only came out a month ago, but I don't think it's got the coverage it deserves, so just this once, that's obscure enough to get it on the blog. It's a Taiwanese-developed RPG, and the latest entry in a series that's supposedly as popular in Taiwan and China as Final Fantasy is everywhere else. Like Final Fantasy, all the games are standalone stories, so we aren't left in the dark having missed the previous seven games (there were a couple of non-numbered spin-offs, of course). I'll start by addressing the twin elephants in the room, that every other review seems to have obsessed over.

The first, and biggest elephant, is the fact that this is a pretty unstable game. It glitches a lot: every time a new scene loads, the framerate takes a nosedive for a couple of seconds, battles start with a split-second of character models freaking out a little, and sometimes the menus act in strange, and unintended ways. The second elephant is slightly more subtle, and it's the fact that the translation is far from perfect. Some other reviews I've read and watch would have you believe that the dialogue is reduced to gibberish, as if it was translated by Alta Vista's Babelfish in 2001 or something. Really though, it just amounts to sentences sometimes reading a little awkwardly and occasionally the wrong word's been typed. But it's totally understandable.

Now that I have those two points out of the way, I can tell you the truth about them: they don't matter at all. I bought this game on a whim, since I just happened to be online when the limited edition went on sale, and it was pretty reasonably priced. So I decided to satisfy my curiosity about Taiwanese RPGs and get a game that sold out within a couple of hours. And I'm glad I did! The reason the above negatives don't matter is because over the past week of playing Sword and Fairy 6, I've totally fallen in love with it. It's hard to know where to begin in describing it!

The first thing you'll notice, and you can see it in the screenshots, is that this is an aesthetically beautiful game. It stars beautiful characters in a world made up of beautiful locations. The writing is also good enough to shine through the issues the translation has, too. I don't want to go into too much detail, because I really want you to go and play this game, and I'm trying to avoid spoiling anything so you can go into it with almost as much ignorance as I did. The story itself is a pretty decent fantasy saga (so far, at least. At the time of writing, I'm "only" about twelve hours into it), it starts with the protagonists investigating a cult that's been scamming and kidnapping people, and gradually escalates to involve gods and demons and hidden realms and so on. The best endorsement I can give is that as much as I normally hate cutscenes in games, this game's story is good enough that I can sit through some very long scenes of almost nothing but dialogue with no problem at all.

But it's the characters that are Sword and Fairy 6's real strong point. Every character has their own distinct personality and motivations, and they all feel like real people, not the usual scenery-chewing videogame hams made of stereotypes and cliches. Also of note is that in your own party there's a character who has trouble understanding interpersonal relations, and needs help knowing how to talk to people, and what people mean when they talk to her, and a character who suffers from depression and low self esteem, yet isn't depicted as a moping, spineless sadsack. The other characters are all interesting and unique in their own ways too, but again, it's hard to talk too much about them without spoiling anything.

It's not a perfect game, of course, and there are some lesser faults to add to the two big ones, like how the battle system is poorly explained and will take a few attempts to get to grips with (but basically: it's real time, but you only control one character at a time, which you do by selecting their actions from a menu. You select which character this is going to be by going into the "queue" section of the out-of-battle menu and putting them in the leftmost space in your party.) The subtitles are also a bit of a problem. All the cutscene dialogue is spoken in Chinese, and there are English subtitles. The problem is that these subs are small and white, and there's no thick outline or backing box, so that if the background behind them is light-coloured, they become pretty hard to read. This is a nuisance, but again, it's not a dealbreaker.

In summary, I strongly recommend Sword and Fairy 6 to anyone who has ever liked RPGs, and I honestly think it's an instant classic and one of the all-time greats. Playing it has made me feel the same way I did the first times I played Final Fantasy VII, Grandia, and Shining Force III. Can you give a stronger RPG recommendation than that?