Gunnm: Martian Memory (Playstation)

 Gunnm (under its English title Battle Angel Alita) is one of my all-time favourite manga, so it's a mystery why it's taken me so long to get around to playing this adaptation of it, when the fantranslation has been out a few years already at this point. Though I also haven't read the second sequel series, Mars Chronicle, so maybe I have some subconscious aversion to stuff with Mars in the title? Anyway, none of the sequels were out yet when this game was made, but it does apparently adapt the entire original series, with all its tragedy and misery and a severely toned down version of its violence.

 

In case you don't know, the manga details the life of a cyborg girl named Alita or Gally (depending on the version), who is revived by a doctor in a post-apocalyptic world after literally wasting away on a scrapheap unconscious for an unknown, but presumably very long amount of time. The world in which the series takes place is an incredibly horrible one, of constant violence, suffering, and all-new levels of inequality made possible by the mass adoption of artificial bodies capable of replacing almost the entire human body (except for the brain and spinal cord). Even one's own bodily autonomy is subject to sale or theft, and the threat of losing everything to debt or crime is ever-present. Furthermore, everything seems to be filthy and rotting on Earth, while some unseen class with absolute power live in presumed luxury in a city in the sky. It is, essentially, the world in which conservatives want the rest of us to live.

 

Anyway, in this world, you play as Alita/Gally, and you find out that you've got deeply buried memories of being a master of Panzer Kunst, a powerful martial art created on Mars. So you become a bounty hunter, a participant in violent future sport, and more, in search of your place in the world, and hoping you'll find the secrets of your past and where they might lead you in the future. I've played about five hours of the game, which got me through the first couple of arcs, with Makaku's killing spree and Hugo's tragic obsession, and then a little way into the Motorball arc of the manga. The game's got a semi-open world structure, though it is a very small world compared to ones that would come later, and pretty much all the NPCs you meet will only ever say things related to where you need to go next.

 

The first couple of hours will mostly be spent wandering the backstreets and wastelands killing minor bounties to get the upgrades and items that'll let you beat the first few bosses. It's fine, the combat is pretty fun, and these enemies go down quick enough that the grind never feels too heavy. Something cool that happens here and there is that at certain points in the story, you get new bodies, which tend to look cooler than those before them, as well as being big upgrades statistically. Eventually, all this street combat is replaced (presumably temporarily) by Motorball matches, short beat em up-like stages with an all-new control scheme in which you smash a whole bunch of jobbers until the boss player turns up for you to fight. Structurally and mechanically, it's a pretty simple game, but there's just something about it that's very gripping, and while most of my sessions have been about an hour long each, that time flies by.

 

I think a lot of that can be attributed to the game's presentation. It looks incredible, with the Playstation's low-poly models and those dirty low resolution textures used to amazing effect at realising the grimy, horrible world of the Scrapyard. There's also some nice use of lighting, too, as each location can be lit for daylight, dusk, or night time (though these change dependent on the story, not on your actions or the passage of time), adding a whole bunch more atmosphere. Something that carries over from the manga is also the unspoken horror of the world: there are no monsters, mutants, or aliens here. Not even any autonomous robots. Every weird creature you fight, all those semi-sentient deckmen you meet who exist only to provide basic, specific services, every giant freak, or pathetic wretch put together from spare parts is someone that was once human, and still is a human brain who has found themselves, through some kind of circumstance, in the bodies you see there.

 

If you're a fan of the manga, this game is definitely worth playing, it follows the story very closely, and though the NPCs are incredibly vapid, it still does an amazing job of creating a very atmospheric theme park version of the scrapyard to explore and fight weirdos in. It is a shame how much the violence is toned down, too. Obviously, it could never have been as violent as the manga is, but this game is almost completely bloodless! Still, the flaws are relatively small compared to how fun, atmospheric, and engrossing the game as a whole is, and I definitely recommend giving it a try. Such a shame it never got an official translation at the time, too! Especially since the manga and its animated adaptation both did. 

Undercover Cops Gaiden - Hakaishin Garumaa (Game Boy)

 It never really became a mainstream hit like Streets of Rage or Final Fight, but for a short time after its original arcade release and subsequent Super Famicom port, Undercover Cops had at least built up a sizable cult following in Japan. Which makes sense, it's a fun game, with great-looking, unique, and stylish graphics. Its popularity didn't last long enough for it to get a sequel unfortunately, but it did get this: a Game Boy exclusive spin-off that's a kind of board game/RPG thing.

 

So, you pick one of the characters from the original game (but let's be honest: everyone's going to pick Rosa. Can you even remember the names of the other two guys without looking them up?), and you traverse a board game world with branching paths and differently-coloured squares and a few special squares here and there. Movement takes place in the same manner that would be used in Sonic Shuffle years later: you have a hand of cards bearing different numbers. You pick a card, and then there's a roulette that can land on a number up to that of the card you picked, telling you how many spaces you'll move. White squares do nothing, grey squares give you a little money, and black squares result in a battle (or occasionally a whack-a-mole minigame).

 

The battles are turn-based, and a little more complex than you might expect from a 1993 Game Boy game. First, you and your opponent will pick a card, with the highest number determining who is the attacker for the current turn. If that's you, you pick a body part, then pick another card from your hand, and you might do some damage, or maybe nothing will happen. If you're the defender, you only have to pick the top or bottom half of your body to defend, and again, you pick another card. Then you might take damage or you might not. This carries on until someone runs out of hit points, which can take ages, since it seems to be completely randomly determined whether or not damage is dealt each turn. It doesn't take much strategy to ensure that you're almost always the attacker, at least. Especially as you level up, which puts higher-numbered cards in your deck.

 

There is a kind of mindless compulsion that can keep you playing this game. Like it's mostly luck-based, but there's also a lot of really nice pixel art in here, and there is even a plot running through the game. But that's all there is, and if you're going to play on real hardware, you won't have access to save states or a fast forward button, which will also really dampen the game's appeal. What really killed my enthusiasm for it, though is the fact that the branching paths don't lead to different routes or even alternate storylines. What they lead to is dead ends. You can't scroll ahead, so if you do end up going down the wrong path, you have no choice but to go back and then go down the right path. 

 

The problem here is that the process of moving is incredibly slow. As described above, you pick a card and then you spin the roulette and then you move. And then if you land on a grey square, you've got long seconds of reading the line of text telling you about the tiny amount of money you've picked up. And the black squares don't go away after you've landed on them, so the incredibly slow and random number generator-based battles are something you'll be enduring again and again. 

 

The pixel art in the battles and cutscenes is really nice, and near-miraculous when you consider this is only a couple of years into the lifespan of the original Game Boy. But unfortuantely, that's really all this game has going for it, and the mountains of tedious timewasting through which it puts the player is unforgivable. I'm glad it got a translation patch, because it was a game that had caught my attention and my cuiosity a long time ago. But I don't recommend actually playing it.

Time Stalkers (Dreamcast)

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Arcana Strikes (Saturn)

 Because of how terribly managed the Saturn was outside Japan, very few of its RPGs ever got official English translations, and some of the ones that did were just used for some talentless hack's stupid comedy routines. But thanks to the brave and noble efforts of fan translators in the modern age, we're finally able to see some of the interesting exclusives the Saturn got in Japan, and Arcana Strikes is definitely one that's unique and worthy of note!

 

There's a few things that make Arcana Strikes unique, and at the core of a lot of them are the things the game doesn't have. Most important are the things it deliberately doesn't have: there's no items, equipment, no spells in the way that you might usually think of them, and strangest of all, there's no attack option in battle! All of these things are replaced with cards. You have a deck of up to twenty-four cards (and if you have fewer than twelve, the difference will be made up with useless spam cards), and they come in various categories. There's cards that just inflict an elemental attack on an enemy, cards that can buff an ally or debuff an enemy, and most important of all: cards that summon monsters to fight alongside you!

 

Every fight in the game will be against a main enemy who stands opposite your character. You both have a space at either side of you, into each of which you can summon a monster. Monsters will always attack straight in front of them: the monster on your left will attack the monster on your opponent's right (which is the left side of the screen, since you're facing each other), and vice versa. If a monster doesn't have a monster in front of it, they'll attack the main opponent directly. You have more freedom, and can attack anyone on your opponent's side, or use other cards for other effects. A battle goes on until the main fighter on one side is killed. Monster cards can be bought from shops, and there are also capture cards that let you steal them from opponents! 

 

Monsters also have elements assigned to them (though there are some neutral monsters), and of course, each element is strong against one other and weak against one other. Your attack cards are mostly also elemental, and if you have more than one of the same card in your hand, you can play them at the same time for more powerful attacks. To explain further, you have your deck of cards, and in battle, you'll have a hand of four of them. You have the option to play a card from you hand (or more than one if you've got multiples), recall a monster from battle, discard one or more card from your hand (you'll draw back up to four on your next turn), or play an arcana card. There are twenty-two arcana cards in the game, any you only get them on special occasions, like completing dungeons. You can play each one once per battle, and they have big effects like healing your whole team, damaging everyone one the playing field, and so on. Finally, each battle happens pretty much in isolation, as your HP and that of your monsters is restored after each one, and all cards (except the single-use disposables) are returned to your deck.

 

The arcana are what the plot revolves around, too: you're some random guy who was brought into the dream world to find and reclaim these twenty-two arcana who are meant to keep things balanced in the world, but have been stolen by monsters and other evil-doers. It's a pretty bare-bones, generic plot, and it's clear that the developer's focus was on the mechanics. While you do navigate the dungeons in a fairly traditional top-down manner, you don't get to do so in either the overworld or towns. The over world is a series of static map screens with dots on them representing towns and dungeons, and the towns are each just a single screen with a few characters stood in a row waiting to be addressed. 

 

The game's presentation is something worth talking about, too. First, it's clear that the artists were having a lot of fun with their computers: there's lots of very charming 90s 3DCG renders for things like the map screens, and the establishing shots you see before entering a location. Furthermore, the dungeons and the background for the towns are just full of every effect they could think of: garish translucent cloud effects, big shiny lens flares, and more! It's ugly, but in a very charming way. What's not ugly, though, is the spritework use in the battle screens! All of the monsters are detailed and all have their own attack animations, and on top of that, because of how the battles work, they all also have front and back versions of all of their sprites! Another really nice detail is that even when it does the traditional RPG thing of recolouring enemies, there'll be some slight other edits done to each variant. For example, there's a series of enemies that are like little elemental spirits. There's a bunch of them in different colour palettes representing each element, but they also have the element they represent growing from the top of their heads, so they're not completely identical palette swaps.

 

Unfortunately, for all its charm and originality, there was a very specific point where Arcana Strikes wrecked all the goodwill it had built up. That point is the start of the fifth dungeon. It's off to a bad start already, as the first four were a dungeon for each of the four elements, and this fifth is just another water dungeon like the first one was. Then, to make things worse, the jester character, who appears every now and then to introduce new concepts to you, turns up and tells you that from now on, you'll have to maintain two seperate decks, and to make sure you actually do it, you'll now have to fight every boss twice, once with each of your decks. I tried to persevere, but this knowledge weighed heavy on my mind, and I just had no more interest in playing the game, realising that it was going to continue gradually becoming more and more labourious as it went on. If you've got the patience for this kind of thing, maybe you'll find Arcana Strikes to be a rewarding game in its ever-increasing complexity. But for me, it was just too much hassle.

Arabian Nights: Desert Spirit King (SNES)

Arabian Nights: Desert Spirit King (or Arabian Nights: Sabaku no Seirei Ou, if you prefer) is a game I wanted to play long ago, back in the time when there was an overlap in the latter stages of the RPG phase I had after having played Final Fantasy VII and Breath of Fire III, and the early days of the Dreamcast giving me access to SNES emulation for the first time. I wasn't able to, though, as at that time, there was no translation. But the idea of an RPG with a middle eastern-influenced fantasy setting had me interested.

 

It eventually did get a fan translation in 2012, but my RPG phase was long since dead by then, and I was well into my "strong distaste for RPGs" phase. But in recent years, that feeling has waned heavily, and so I eventually got around to playing Arabian Nights. It's an incredibly okay game! It's got a few interesting elements, a lot of boring stuff, and they all kind of cancel each other out.

 

The plot is surprisingly dense: centuries ago, a wizard named Suleiman enslaved the eponymous spirit king, Ifrit. Then, a while after that, some unknown evil attacked, and though Suleiman was unable to save his own life, he did seal Ifrit away in a magic ring, telling him that after he's granted a thousand wishes for a thousand masters, Ifrit will be strong enough to face this threat and avenge him. The game starts with a young girl finding that ring, and being the thousandth to do so, wishes to bring peace to the land. Ifrit finds this highly inconvenient, since the previous 999 wishes were all easy stuff like riches and immortality.

 

To bring peace to the land, Ifrit, his new master Shukran, and a boy-thief they meet called Harty go off on a quest to find the eight crystals containing Ifrit's sealed powers. Along the way, they'll also find other spirits, some of them have been sealed like Ifrit was, some of them have been up to other activities in the intervening centuries. All of them happen to be various flavours of bishounen, though, and whether they're friends or enemies, they all talk to each other in a certain way. Like, if there had been an English version of this in the year 2000, the Geocities fujoshi would have been eating it up, posting their fanfictions and character shrines and such.

 

So, back to the game itself. The positives: it looks great all-round. The character portaits, backgrounds, battle sprites, it's all just really high quality pixel art. The battles themselves also bring up some aesthetic poits of interest of their own! Battles take place on a diagonally-aligned rectangular field with a really cool border around it. The field will be themed to the kind of area you're walking through, but unfortunately there's only one border, as nice as it is. Furthermore, the game's main mechanical gimmick is the cards system. You or your enemy can play a card before the turn starts, and they all have various effects on the battle, as well as changing how the field looks.

 

There are forty cards in total: eight elements that come in levels one to five. The effects they have include inflicting elemental damage on all the caster's opponenets at the end of each turn, nullifying the enemy's attacks, boosting or reducing the stats of one of the sides, and so on. Playing cards happens before the turn starts, and if it's not replaced, a card will last a few turns. If the enemy plays a card, you can replace it with one of your own, but it has to have the same element and/or level as the one currently in play. It's an interesting system, but it's one that doesn't really meet its potential, for reasons I'll now go into.

 

The game's got some problems, and most of them are related to battles. THe encounter rate is incredibly high, so by the time you get to anywhere you're meant to be, you're going to be overlevelled. Even boss fights only take a couple of turns of spamming attack. So you can pretty much ignore the cards altogether, as well as the other magic and special attacks to which you get access. Also, there's some weirdness regarding walking: when you're in a town or dungeon, you walk pretty quickly, but only in the four cardinal directions. On the world map, you can walk in eight directions, but you move incredibly slowly. A few hours into the game, you do get given a magic carpet that speeds up your world map movement, and partially fixes the encounter rate problem too, but it's weird that the two kinds of movement are flawed in different ways.

 

For all its problems, though, I have been enjoying Arabian Nights: Desert Spirit King. It's a nice little RPG, and the plot keeps introducing new twists that have had me playing more to see where it all goes next. When I first started playing it, I neglected to save, like an idiot, anddied in the first dungeon, losing nearly half an hour's progress. It's a good enough game that I just started again, instead of just giving up in frustration! If you've got any affection or nostalgia for old-fashioned RPGs in the year 2025, this is one you probably haven't already played, and is worth your time.

Marie no Atelier GB (Game Boy Color)

 I've been vaguely aware of the Atelier series since the PS2 era, though they've been around a while longer than that, but this is the first one of them I've actually played (well, I did play the spin-off Mana Khemia on PSP many years ago, but they're different enough that I can call this the first). With that in mind, I don't know all of the dfetails, but I think this is a sequel to another Marie no Atelier that was on consoles, and has you playing as the eponymous alchemist in her post-adventuring days.

 

Marie now runs a little alchemy shop (or Atelier, if you will) in a nice walled city with European-style buildings, making the whole affair somewhat reminiscent of Kiki's Delivery Service. One day, she's given custody of a little fairy boy, who she's going to teach alchemy and generally look after for four years. So, rather than a traditional RPG, this is, like the in-game alchemical syntheses, something like a combination RPG, business management, and even a tiny bit of Princess Maker. There are dungeons and combat, but you just send the fairy out to do those things (you can hire bodyguards and buy him better weapons and armour to help him though) and fetch back items for you.

 

So what do you actually do, if you're outsourcing the dungeons and combat? You go to the bar to accept requests for items, then you either have to get the required items from a dungeon, or synthesise them in your Atelier. Despite Marie presumably being a veteran of the business, and the one you're controlling, you can only syntheise items up to the skill level of the fairy. This is advanced by making the recipes to which you do have access, by handing in requests, and by buying textbooks from the local university.

 

Sometimes certain special events happen, like Marie's birthday, or the fairy going off to celebrate fairy new year with his family. There's also more unique and dramatic events too, like the fairy nursing an ill Marie back to health, or the fairy becoming depressed and surly, gradually being brought back to his normal cheery self through the aggressive application of love and care from Marie. Those descriptions might sound a little cynical and dismissive, but those moments were actually really nice, and I feel like this kind of emotional warmth isn't something you often see in videogames, especially ones on 8-bit hardware.

 

This is a fun and engrossing little game, that's definitely worth your time. You can tell the developers really tried their hardest to get the best game they possibly could out of the Game Boy Color, and their work totally paid off. This is easily one of the best games on the system, and while it's understandable why it never got an official translation on its release, it's still a shame that that didn't happen. Fans have, of course, stepped in to correct that mistake more recently. At the time of writing, I've only played through three of the game's four years, and once I'm finished, I'm probably going to look into the series' main entries too. It's especially recommended to those kinds of people who talk about wanting "cosy games", as it's definitely one of those.

Oriental Blue: Ao no Tengai (Game Boy Advance)

 I was first drawn to this game because it was an RPG with an east Asian fantasy setting and also a lot of really nice pixel art. There's also some nice full screen cutscene pixel art, though it only shows up fairly rarely, because of the way the game's structured. Which brings up the big surprise I got from playing Oriental Blue: it's an open world game! On the Game Boy Advance! Like is so often the case, western publishers were very short-sighted and didn't bother translating it. The post-Pokemon/Tokyopop English anime and manga boom was still ongoing, as was the post-Final Fantasy VII RPG boom, and here's a really high quality RPG owned by lots of kids, with a sertting they'd love and an amazing selling point, and apparently none of them were interested. 

 

Luckily, it did get a fan translation a few year later, so you (and I) can play it without having to read Japanese. There's a lot of plot threads, but it all starts in a large city, where a big ritual is about to take place, and there's apparently also conspiracies afoot. The ritual fails, and there's also monsters roaming the streets, and bad stuff happening across the land, too. One particularly interesting thread I picked up involved the Oni. They're depicted as a stand-in for indigenous people (which is also done in the TTRPG Tenra Bansho Zero, which was orginally published a few years before this game. Is this a common trope, or is there a specific bit of direct inspiration going on here?)

 

The Oni are suffering some severe oppression at the hands of humanity: forced to live in a barren mountain village, subject to raids by slavers, and treated like dirt if they go to human settlements of their own volition. One of the first quests I got myself involved in was trying to re-claim a stolen Oni artifact from a human lord's palace, but it turns out to have been stolen again from him by a mysterious theif/murderer. I as worried that the Oni stuff would have been some passive background thing, just "that's how it is, I guess", but during that quest, one of them joins your party, with a view to improving the lot of his people and faning and getting their treasure back.

 

Unfortunately, I eventually ran into a big problem: I was finding the starts of plot threads and questlines, but I wasn't able to actually advance any of them. Ships were stuck in docks, valleys were blocked by boulders, and other barriers stood in my way in various places, all making it so I couldn't go to new towns, in each of which I was sure at least one "next thing" I needed must be waiting. I'm sure eventually I'd be able to figure some way of making progress, but having so many brick walls being put up all at once, in seemingly every direction really killed my desire to continue playing.

 

If you've got more patience for this kind of RPG stuff, you'll probbly get a lot more out of this game than I have, and if it sounds like it would appeal to you, you should definitely give it a try. It's clearly a very high quality game, with tons to do, places to go, systems to figure out and so on. It also definitely feels like one of the strongest examples of a vague concept I've been chasing for years: the "portable world", a handheld game that feels like it contains a full world inside it. If it had goten an official English release, there'd probably have been a print strategy guide for it, and the problems I encountered wouldn't have been so insurmounted. Oh well, never mind.

Magicus (PC)

 I bought this game a few years ago, because the PC version also comes with a download of the Android version, and at the time, my phone was still just about capable of playing games, and I was interrested to see what stuff of interest might exist in the world of pre-paid phone games (a subject I'll get back to later). It's an RPG in which the battles take the form of match-three puzzles, but there's surprisingly a lot more to it than that.

 

When you enter a battle, the enemies will be at the top half of the screen, and the bottom half wil be filled with gems. Clicking any gem makes it disappear and also deals a little damage to the enemies. Getting three or more in a row makes all of the lined up gems disappear and deals more damage. After playing a while, you'll also get spells, which have various effects like damaging the enemy, healing you, or changing what's happening in your little gempit. Each spell has an associated colour, and to charge a use of the spell, you have to click or line up a certain number of gems in that colour. Around the same time as you get spells, you'll also get special gems. These are different-looking gems, each only appearing as a certain colour, and they all have special spell-like effects when cleared as part of a line.

 

Aside from battling, the main gimmick of the game is its one-dimensional dungeon design. You traverse the overworldby just clicking the name of a location you want to go to, but in dungeings, you can go backwards and forwards. Every step you take has a chance of causing a random encounter. This could be a battle, a trap, a travelling merchant, a fishing hole, or one of a bunch of other things. So, the main point of difficulty is resource and stat management. And there are a lot of both of these things. You've got items, experience points, coins, leaves, fish, lottery tickets and more. This might sound overwhelming, but they're all introduced very gradually so you aren't overwhelmed.

 

Some of you might also be thinking that this sounds a lot like a free-to-play game with dark patterns and so on, and I do agree: while playing it, I was heavily reminded of the time I've spent in the past playing Immortal Taoists. There is, however, one important difference that I've already mentioned: this is a game that you buy, and which contains no microtransactions. The problem with free-to-play games that are structured like that isn't just the cost of the microtransactions themselves, but the fact that the developers are financially incentivised to design the games in such a way as to make the microtransactions more attractive: make it possible, but tedious to make progress, give players daily login bonuses so they're hooked on comig back to the game, and so on. It's known as "Dark Patterns" in game design.

 

Using Immortal Taoists as the example, because it's the game of this type with which I'm the most familiar, the setting draws new players in, and the carrot of endless character progression is what keeps them coming back and either watching ads or paying money. It is endless, too. The "Live Service" nature of the games means they can always raise the grapes every time player get close to grabbing them (the player is Tantalus in this analogy, and the game developer is Tartarus). Magicus offers all the positive stuff those free-to-play games, but without the negatives: dying in a dungeon is a very minor setback, you're only shown new equipment when you're at least a significant part of the way to being able to obtain it, and above all: you're given a singular long-term goal at the start of the game (obtain seven magic orbs to save the land from monsters), that has a clear and definite endpoint. I kind of wish there were more games like this! There are interesting elements in free-to-play games, but they're poisoned by the psychologically harmful structure of those games.

 

There's other positive things I can mention about the game, too: its cute low polygon count graphics, your lovable companions and the slowburn bond that grows between them, the fact that though it's a first person game where your character is never shown, it's still canonical that your character is a woman, reflected in the equipment you can obtain and more interestingly (though only occasionally), in the attitudes various characters have in addressing you. Anyway, I definitely recommend Magicus, it's a unique, interesting, charming, and fun little game, and you can get it from DLSite for an absolute pittance.

Shadow Brain (NES)

 I think it's a pretty prevalent stereotype of 8-bit console RPGs that they're ugly, difficult, and just generally hostile to the player. It's not a completely unfounded stereotype, and I know there are people reading this who play those games specifically looking for those qualities. I'm not one of those players, but I do occasionally dip my toes into the genre, to seek out diamonds in the rough, and because I think the developers of games like these often came from the world of indie development on microcomputers, and there's a similar kind of creator-led energy to a lot of them to that seen in OAVs of the same era.

 

I found Shadow Brain in one such toe-dipping session, and I instantly took a liking to the way it bucks the trends in the genre at that time, both thematically and mechanically.  Thematically, it immediately stands out: it takes place in some kind of futuristic cyberpunk dystopia. There are only towns, no dungeons, but the streets of the towns are all plagued by roving criminals, rogue cyborgs, and mutated animals. The grimy look of both enemy and NPC characters juxtaposed with the incredibly sterile look of the faux-3D blobber maps really gives off the impression that this is a world that's still being maintained in terms of things being kept working, but also a world in which the actual inhabitants have been abandoned and left to fend for themselves. The closest thing I encountered to any kind of law enforcement are the gates between towns that require security ID to get through.

 

Mechanically, the first thing that proved promising is that while you're a solo adventurer who never gets any party members, you aren't punished harshly for dying. You're simply whisked away to the nearest ressurectionist, who provides the service you'd expect him to, and takes half of your current money as payment. Other than that, there's a lot of interesting little quirks. In battle, you have three attack options: punch, sword, and gun, and you can equip weapons to all three. There's no reason not to only buy and use the weapon that has the highest attack, but it's still a sign that the devs had a lot of ideas they wanted to include. Front Mission 3 fans might also be interested to learn that Shadow Brain also includes an in-game internet!

 

In the same way that Front Mission 3's internet reflected the real internet of 1999, featuring simple, charmingly gaudy webpages, Shadow Brain's internet reflects how things were in 1991. You can only access it via terminals that are dotted here and there around the towns, and when you do, there's a "live chat", where your character can converse with a few recurring characters, a BBS, where people post questions and information about what's going on, and an online shop where you can buy and sell things. It's very rudimentary, but it's still a fun little addition, and it really adds to the feels that this is a sci-fi game, and not just a fantasy game with a shiny metal skin. 

 

Another thing that you might be surprised to hear about is that you can go to the arcade and play minigames! In a 1991 Famicom game! There's futuristic Pong and futuristic clay pigeon shooting, and you can play them as much as you like to win money, plus there's a couple of points in the plot where you have to play special "if you die in the game, you die for real" versions to advance the plot. 

 

Anyway, though Shadow Brain is a lot more player-friendly than a lot of RPGs from that time, I'd say it's probably still a bit of an acquired taste, and while dying isn't a problem, there are still moments when it's not really clear what you have to do to progress. Still, I enjoyed the few hours I played of it (I got as far as the fourth town). I also really loved the way the game looks: the enemy and NPC sprites all look amazing, the world itself is really atmospheric, and even the UI elements feels as if they've been designed as a part of the game's world. This is a high quality work, and was clearly made with a lot of love. There's an English translation patch out there, and if this review has at all piqued your interest, you should definitely give it a try.