Akanbe Dragon (MSX)

This is a game with an interesting premise, and the quick and easy way of describing it would be to compare it to a combination of chess and the Game Gear game Godzilla Kaiju Daishingeki (though it predates that game by a few years). Unfortunately, it scuppers all the goodwill generated by the concept through a few terrible design decisions.

I have to make an admission here: I never got past the first stage of this game. I played for hours, and made many attempts, and I did come close a few times, but in the end, the odds are stacked way too heavily against the player. But I should get onto actually describing the game. There's a map with a grid on it, and each square contains a different kind of terrain: mountains, plains, water, and so on. At the top and bottom of the map, there are two groups of monsters, the player at the bottom, and the enemies at the top. Each type of monster not only has four stats: HP, strength, speed, and jump, but they also have a chess class, which affects how they move on the grid (and like in chess, the aim is to kill your opponent's king).

When two monsters try to occupy the same space on the map, the game has them engage in a real-time, side-view, no time limit battle to the death. All the monsters attack by shooting stuff, though there's still a fair bit of variety in the attacks: some can fire a bunch of shots that quickly go in a straight line, others might only be able to fire off one shot at a time that takes a more wibbly path that's harder to dodge. Though the AI seems pretty good at moving its monsters around the map to keep a tactical advantage, in battle, the enemies all seem to just randomly bounce around the screen shooting at random. They'll still win a lot though, due to the game's biggest flaw: no matter what the situation, the enemy monsters always have significantly higher stats and more HP than your own, making every battle a precarious and miserable slog. Making things more annoying is how the strength is dealt out among your own monsters, with your pawn (amusing mis-spelt ingame as "porn") being second only to the king in strength, while your queen and knight are so weak as to be almost completely useless.

An interesting aside is that entering battle with the enemy king does something slightly different to normal enemies: he has his own specific battleground that overrides whatever terrain type on which you encounter him, and the battle feels more like a boss fight from a platform game. As far as I can tell, the best strategy to take is to get as many of your monsters to fight the king and wear him down before sending your king in to finish the job. I almost won with this method, but I guess the enemy had the same idea, as by the time the enemy king had taken out all my underlings, my king was weakened doing the same. On my last attempt, my king succumbed with only a sliver of the enemy king's health left. Unfortunately, I'd completely lost all patience with the game by this point, and had no desire to make any further attempts.

It's honestly a shame, as I really wanted to like Akanbe Dragon, but the atrocious balance means that I can't recommend it at all. If only playing it didn't seem like a futile uphill struggle, it mgiht have been a hidden classic.

Bunmei Korokoro Game Egg (Playstation)

It's really amazing that even though the Playstation is one of the most popular consoles of all time, and even though it's one of the systems that's been featured on this blog most of all, there are still weird obscure little gems to discover in its incredibly vast library. Of course, Bunmei Korokoro Game Egg is one such gem (the title, I believe, translates to something like "Civilisation Rolypoly Game Egg", in case you're wondering).

So the basic premise of the game is that you control some kind of cosmic god-egg, that rolls across flat, barren plains, leaving civilisation in its wake. Of course, you aren't alone in what I assume is a young, fledgling universe, as each plain also has another, differently-coloured egg rolling around in it. A cool little touch is that each colour egg has its own architectural style for the buildings that spring up whereever it goes, and they range from styles based on various realworld civilisations, to futuristic sci-fi type settings, bio-organic growths and even brightly coloured abstract solid shapes.

I haven't been able to play the Versus mode, so unfortunately I can't tell you about that, but the single player mission mode sees you taking on your rival eggs in a series of battles, each with different objectives, like an olympic games for ovoid dieties. But let's not get ahead of ourselves: first, let's describe the basic mechanics, or at least, as much as I've been able to figure out of them.

So, the game is turn-based, and you move your egg by selecting a direction, then chosing your speed on a moving power bar, like the kind you get in old-style golf or bowling games. Most of the time, when you move, you cause buildings to sprout up behind you, but not always! There are five options you can choose from before you move (though the offensive options aren't always available): the egg is the standard movement that lays buildings, the signpost lets you turn already-laid buildings into protective barriers over which your opponent can't roll, the ocean wave and sunrise both cause massive destruction in the surrounding area where your egg stops rolling, and the coloured zig-zags work similarly to the egg, except they cause earthquakes in your wake instead of growth.

It should also be noted that when an area of blank squares is completely surrounded by your buildings, that area will then completely fill up with your buildings too. The first time this happens in a stage, a strange spinning, swirly tower will also spawn. This tower will get taller and more elaborate the more area on the map you've taken over, too. Your egg can take damage, either by bashing into the walls around the edges of the map, by rolling other enemy territory, or by being bashed into by the opponent's egg. I'm not 100% sure on how healing works, but it seems that you slowly heal by rolling over and stopping in your own territory, and sometimes if you stop in a particularly large piece of your own turf, a big cryogenic chamber thing will appear around you, and you'll have healed a lot by the start of your next turn. But like I say, I'm not totally sure on how accurate these methods are, or exactly how to make the chamber appear. Your tower is something of a weakpoint for your empire, too, as if the enemy bashes into it, it'll shrink a level or two, and a whole bunch of your land will disappear.

Now on to the actual missions. I don't know how many missions there are in single player mode, but I got up to mission five, the objective of which I couldn't figure out at all. Each mission takes about 20-30 minutes to get through, as turns go by pretty slowly, and you usually have a pretty hefty task ahead of you. The first two missions are both simple enough to figure out: take over 30% of the map, and bash your opponent's egg until they crumble to bits. Mission three is a little more complex, as the mission is to wait until your opponent has built a tower, then destroy their tower. I had the most success on this stage by eschewing any kind of defensive tactic, and just going straight in to bash their tower down. Waste too much time, and you risk breaking your own shell before you've knocked their tower down. The fourth mission was interesting, but very easy: build your tower up to the maximum height (level nine), which you do by simply claiming a lot of land. The AI was really terrible on this stage, as they seemed more interrested in rolling over very tiny portions of my land to cause me almost unnoticable amounts of damage, while I just went about my busniess claiming more than half the entire map.

So that was a good few hours I got in on this game, and I definitely intend to play more of it, and hopefully get others interested in doing the same so we can all learn more about this strange and original game. Of course this means that this review is ending in an unquestioned recommendation, so go and track it down and play it at the earliest opportunity!

Shadows of the Tusk (Saturn)

It seems slightly strange to me there there are two obscure Saturn games that use pre-rendered sprites and have character designs by Susumu Matsushita. (The other one, you might remember me covering a while ago, is Willy Wombat.) Anyway, Shadows of the Tusk is a turn-based strategy game, that, to add onto the unusuality of the whole affair, had online play via the X-BAND modem, though there's still plenty of single-player fun to be had, so that's fine.

The online element does seem to have had an influence on the design in general, as a lot of things seem streamlined to cater to the low bandwidth that would have been available to a dialup modem attached to a four-year-old console in 1998. For a start, there's no levelling up for any of the characters, though there is some kind of power progression in a different way. In single player mode, you have a "deck" of characters to build, and you get more characters by winning battles. Your deck screen has you putting characters on two rows: the smaller row has the characters that are summoned automatically at the start of battle, the character who starts on the middle space of that row will be designated the leader, meaning that the battle ends if they're defeated, and they also have the ability to summon characters that you've placed in the other row of the deck. Summoning costs mana, and your force has a shared mana pool that's also used for casting spells, and regenerates by ensuring that characters start their turns on certain spaces on the map.

Another concession is that though there are different backgrounds available, every battle takes place on a tiny five-by-five grid. This, in combination with the "kill the leader" tactical element ensures that the game has an almost chess-like emphasis on where you move your characters, and there'll even be plenty of times when you'll sacrifice characters to either make way for stronger characters stood behind them, or just to postpone your enemy's soldiers reaching your leader. Another thing to take into account while talking about character placement is that any spell or attack you can cast that affects an area will not discern between friend and foe, meaning that you might end up sometimes have to decide if you want to heal your enemies or immolate your allies.

Obviously, I haven't played the multiplayer mode around which the game is clearly centred, but there's enough meat to the singleplayer game that it's still worth your time. Best of all is that though all the plot-related stuff is in Japanese, all the menus, including those during the battles, are entirely in English! So, this is a pretty fun game that mostly looks great (the small sprites on the grid look really nice, while the bigger sprites used for the attack animations look like the most awful mid-90s CG), and is totally accessible to the JP-illiterate. I definitely recommend it!

Tsuushin Taisen Logic Battle Daisessen (Dreamcast)

I feel like I'm playing a lot of games recently that can be described as a kind of combination of elements from other games, and this is one of them. The constituent parts in this case being Battleship and Minesweeper, both grid-based games about naval combat, though this game is themed around the inhabitants of a floating island where it's always springtime, but is currently suffering a terrible winter. That's really all I know about the plot, so let's just move on to the game itself, the explanation of which is going to be fairly lengthy.

The first thing you do before you even try to enter battle is decide your formations. You start with twenty soldiers, called "Bingos", and you can place them on your 10x10 grid in small formations called boards (kind of like your different ships in Battleship, but more varied in shape). As you win battles, you'll gradually be given more Bingos (Bingoes?) to play with, and you'll earn currency that can be spent on buying more boards, in bigger sizes and a wider variety of shapes. The importance of the boards you pick and wherre you place them will become apparent when you actually get into battle, which is where things get a bit more complex and nerdy-sounding, so be warned as you enter the next paragraph.

In battle, you start off with ten power points, and your choice from the boards you have on the grid. Whichever board you choose costs as many points as the number of bingos of which it is composed, and you use it to attack, in a Battleship-esque manner, placing its shape on the opponent's grid. If you found any of your opponent's bingos, they'll be revealed, and once you reveal one of your opponent's boards entirely, it'll be destroyed and they can no longer attack with it. Missed attacks aren't completely useless, as on your subsequent turns, places where you've attacked but there wasn't a bingo will be marked in one of two ways: if there are no bingos vertically or horizontally adjacent to the empty square, it'll show as a white cross, and if there are, there'll be a green exclamation mark there. At the start of a new turn, you'll get back one power point, plus any bonus power points you got for destroying boards. Obviously, once you're done, your opponent will do the same until one of you is left without bingos and declared the loser.

It's a pretty amusing game, but nothing special. I have to say that there are multiplayer modes that I wasn't able to play: one online, and one offline. The offline multiplayer mode apparently has the players' grids shown on the VMU screen in their respective controllers for the sake of privacy, like your hand of cards in Sonic Shuffle. It's a shame it's fallen into the Mariana Trench of forgotten games, as a nice convenient PC version to play for 10 minutes while wating for something else would be really nice.

If you like the sound of it, I recommend Tsuushin Taisen Logic Battle Daisessen. The thing to remember though, is that it's one of those Windows CE Dreamcast games, and as far as I know, the only emulator that runs them is Demul, which can be a bit weird and temperamental.

Asameshimae Nyanko (SNES)

Othello is a classic strategy board game that's been around since at least the late 19th century, and has been adapted into videogame form many times over the years, dating back all the way to the Odyssey2's Dynasty. Rock Paper Scissors is an even older game, though it's a lot less strategic, and really more of a way of randomly deciding things than an enjoyable pastime. Asameshimae Nyanko is a game from 1994 that bravely seeks to answer the question "what if we combined the strategy of Othello with the randomness of Rock Paper Scissors, and there were also lots of kittens?"

Yeah, so this is a game of othello in which the piece are not small black and white discs, but blue and pink kittens. For some reason, you also get to pick which breed of kitten is used before you start a game. There's also a few locations to play in, too, like a roof in the city, a grid of rocks in the wilderness and a luxurious carpet in a remote palace. The different locations do offer slightly differently shaped boards, but are otherwise just cosmetic changes like the kitten breeds. The big difference between this game and a normal game of Othello is that after each turn, the current player can choose one of their opponent's kittens to take, and this dispute is decided in a seperate little one-on-one battle.

As you might have guessed, these one-on-ones are where the Rock-Paper-Scissors element comes into play. You press A, Y or B on your controller, your opponent does the same, and a winner is decided. I've only played single player, so I can't tell you which button beats which, but I'm not sure it really matters that much. It's not just the one solitary kitten that's at stake, either: if the kitten changes hands and this causes two kittens of that colour to surround a line of the opponent's kittens, that line is taken, as if the changed kitten was placed as part of a normal move. (I know that sentence is confusing for people who don't know how Othello is played, but I'm assuming those people are in the minority.)

Asameshimae Nyanko is a very well-presented game. The kitten sprites look cute, and though there would be a risk of them looking lifeless when placed on the board in large numbers, the game cleverly animates each kitten individually, so they're all doing dfferent things at any one time, which really adds a lot to the character of the game. It looks really great in general, actually, with nice, soft colours and well-drawn sprites and backgrounds.

Unfortunately, there's really nothing more to this game than playing one-off games. There's no kind of story mode or arcade-style mode with opponents of gradually increasing difficulty, so playing single player is an experience you'll get bored of in less than half an hour. On the other hand, if you can somehow convince someone to play a partially-randomised videogame adaptation of Othello with you, then Asameshimae Nyanko is that game!

Powerplay - The Game of the Gods (Amiga)

If Powerplay's claim is true, and it is actually the game of the gods, then it tells us three things about them. The first and second things it tells us are that the gods have both incredible patience and a lot of time on their hands, as a single glaically-paced game of Powerplay took the better part of two hours. The other thing it teaches us about the gods is that above all, they value knowledge of trivia.

Powerplay takes the form of a board game, each player (either a human versus the CPU, or up to four human players, though I struggle to imagine a situation where that has ever happened) picks a greek god and four champions to represent them on the board. Each turn you pick one of your champions to move, and then you answer a general knowledge question. If you get it right, you score a few points and you can move your chosen champion one space in any direction. If not, your turn ends. That's what happens most turns, anyway: sometimes, your champions will just wander around the board at random, and you do nothing. When a character reaches 25 points, they'll "mutate" into another character.

Should one of your champions meet one of your opponent's, a challenge will start. There's two types of challenge: either a tug-of-war held over a lava pit, or some kind of bizarre trial, over which the gorgon Medusa presides. It doesn't matter which you get though, as they're both exactly the same, mechanically: you answer more trivia questions. Get three in a row right and you win, get three in a row wrong and you lose. You also lose if your champion runs out of strength, which depletes for both sides at a rate of one per question. The losing champion will either go down one level of mutation, or if they're in their default state, be taken off the board entirely.

Once only one god is left represented on the board, they win. You get an animation of Zeus congratulating you, and then the game asks if you want to play again. Which is pretty presumptuous, considering you've just spent two hours answering stupid questions, and they already started repeating half way through.

Powerplay is a terrible game. I had it in the box of pirated disks that came with my Amiga when I was a kid, and even then, I knew better than try to get someone else involved in trying to play through a multiplayer game. As an adult, I wouldn't recommend bothering with single player, either.

Godzilla - Kaiju Daishingeki (Game Gear)

The first time I played this game, a long time ago (so long ago that I was emulating it on the original GP32, which puts it in the early-mid 00s), I was so let down by the fact that a Godzilla game could be a boring-looking strategy game, which I totally wasn't in the mood for, that I switched it off, and then didn't play it again for years. A year or two ago, I decided to give it another try, no longer being the impatient teenager I was back then. I'm glad I did!

Videogames based on tokusatsu and kaiju properties have a bit of a poor reputation, the blame for which I place at the feet of the 1991 Ultraman arcade game and its ports to home consoles. It was a not-very-good fighting game, and by the time the home ports had come out, Street Fighter II had come out and pretty much changed the very meaning of the term "fighting game", making Ultraman look even worse. But there's actually a fair few decent toku games: the super sentai games on Playstation, the Power Rangers fighting game on SNES, and most of Godzilla's own games are at least playable, even if they aren't classics, even the critically-panned Dreamcast game Godzilla Generations is pretty decent, if you're in the mood for a kind of stress relief game about destroying cities and nothing else.

Godzilla Kaiju Daishingeki (translates to something like "The Great Kaiju Offensive", I think) is definitely playable, but not a classic. It's also pretty unique, as it's a turn-based strategy/side-scrolling action hybrid. When you start playing, you select a side (Godzilla and his monster allies, or the human G-force, and sometimes their monster allies. There's also unplayable space monsters, like Gigan and Space Godzilla) and a stage. Then, you move your units around in the time-honoured turn-based strategy manner, and when two opposing units are next to each other, they can enter combat. Combat comes in the form of little 2D side-view fight segments with very short time limits. Monsters and unique human units (like Super X or Mechagodzilla) have lots of HP, while conventional weapons (tanks and jets and the like) go down in a single hit, but come in "squadrons", which are kind of like lives in practice.

There's four stages, which can be played in any order, based on Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972), Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991), Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla II (1993), and Godzilla Vs. Space Godzilla (1994), as well as a secret stage based on the original 1954 Godzilla movie, though unlocking it means completing all the others in a single sitting, and since each stage takes twenty to thirty minutes, that's going to take some saintlike patience (or save states) to accomplish. Anyway, this gives you a good mix of playable units on both sides, and most of the battles are balanced pretty well, too (the exception being the Space Godzilla battle, as ol' spacey takes barely any damage, and can heal half his max HP every round. I guess there's some solution I haven't worked out). Most importantly, it's actually pretty fun to play. Whether you're playing as the humans or Godzilla and friends, the combat is fun and satisfying, despite being very very simple. The only problem is that at the start of each battle, it takes a few turns to get the units from either side to actually get near each other and for the battle to really get exciting. But once it does, you'll be having a great time.

Godzilla Kaiju Daishingeki is a fun little game, and if you givie it a chance, you probably won't regret doing so. A great little game for Godzilla fans, and definitely in the upper tiers of the Game Gear library, too!

Demon Chaos (PS2)

When Dynasty Warriors 2/Shin Sangoku Musou came out back in 2000, it wowed everyone with it's hge battlefields filled with dozens of enemies. As that series has gone on, the amount of enemies on the battlefield, as well as the amount of enemies appearing onscreen at a time have both increased. But even now, after tons of sequels, spin-offs and licenced tie-ins, none of Koei's games have been able to match the sheer number of enemies displayed in this PS2 game from 2005.

Developed by Genki and published outside of Japan by Konami, Demon Chaos (also known as Ikusa Gami) sees the player controlling a big, burly lion-man samurai, somewhat reminiscent of the 1970s tokusatsu series Taiketsu Lion Maru. They're tasked with saving feudal Japan from hordes of spider-like demons that are spewing forth from giant red gems called blood crystals. At first glance, it all looks like a fairly standard Dynasty Warriors clone, albiet with a fantasy coat of paint, and few more on-screen enemies.

As you progress through the first cople of stages, however, things start to change a little. Firstly, you'll become a leader of men, having huge armies of human soldiers following in your wake. These soldiers are obviously a lot weaker than the player character, though you have to rely on them to destroy the blood crystals, which are unaffected by your own attacks. Secondly, you gain the ability to order your soldiers to build magic pillars. These pillars have various uses: healing soldiers that are near them, firing arrows at nearby demons, and destroying nearby enemy structures (including blood crystals).

The fact that your entire army follows you directly, and that you need them to build pillars gives the player more a feeling of responsibility when it comes to keeping them alive, compared to the Dynasty Warriors games, where you barely interact with your underlings, and their lives are of no consequence to you. I guess it also helps that there are constant on-screen trackers telling you exactly how many soldiers you have left alive.
There's more interesting things to be said regarding the pillars, too. As well as the main effects they carry, having them built is also the best way to fill up your power meter, which allows you to perform special moves and activate your "spirit release" ability, which essentialy turns you into a destructive force of nature ntil it runs out. There's also the whole "earth force" mechanic relating to the pillars too: as you walk around, you'll see ripples of energy at your feet. These ripples represent the earth energy, kind of like ley lines, and the more ripples there are in an area, the stronger pillars built there will be.

Now, the enemy count. It's insane. Only a couple of stages in, and you'll be killing hundreds of enemies in the opening skirmish, and thousands by the end of the stage. On top of this, you'll also have hundreds of your allies fllowing you around too, so there's always a sense of the battles taking place on a grand scale. Taking this to its absurd extremes is an extra mode aside from the main game called Massacre mode, which places the player alone in a flat, featureless field with 65535 enemies, where they have to attempt to kill as many as they can in 3 minutes.

Although the whole battlefield action genre has an (unfair) reputation for all being identical, boring and repetitive, Demon Chaos is a game that definitely does enough to stand out from the crown, both in its mechanics, and in the sheer spectacle of its battles. It's odd that no-one (as far as I know) has ever tried to match or even top the scale of the battles in this game, especially considering that it came out over a decade ago, and there's been two rounds of more powerful consoles since then.

Hard Brain (Playstation)

This was just going to be part of another Net Yaroze round up (and I do still intend to do one of those in the near future), but I totally fell in love with this game and thought it deserved more than a single paragraph. It's a cyberpunk-themed turn-based strategy game, and though it's entirely in Japanese, it seems to be about a small gang of three guys either raiding some high-tech offices or escaping from some high-tech offices that are under siege.

Mechaically, it's pretty simple: to win, you pretty much just have to try and avoid letting any of your guys get surrounded by the enemy, and keep an eye on their HP so that you know when to heal (every one of your characters has one spell, which is for healing, and plenty of MP to use it whenever it's needed). It's also only a few stages long, which is a shame, as it has enough charm in its aesthetics alone, and it'd be nice to see more of the great sprites and character portraits.

It feels, however, that the creator had to cut a lot back in creating the game, since as I'm sure you're all aware, Net Yaroze games had to fit entirely into the Playstation's tiny RAM. There's a bunch of options that are never used, as well as spells for each character that are, as far as I can tell, permanently greyed-out and unusable. I managed to find the creator's website on the internet archive, in the hopes that they might have made a lengthier, more fleshed out version for PC or something, but all I found was the download for this version.

Hard Brain is a game that's definitely worth playing, especially since it'll only take up about 15 minutes of your time for a full playthrough (of which i've had a few at this point). People hold up Team Fatal's Terra Incognita as the Yaroze game that's closest to "commercial quality", but look at the screenshots for Hard Brain and you can't deny that at least in terms of presentation it could stand alongside the likes of Breath of Fire III or Persona and no-one could tell it was the work of a solitary hobbyist.

Monster Puroresu (PC Engine)

This game is a bit of a curiosity: it's a turn-based strategy wrestling game! Mechanically, it has more in common with Pokemon than Fire Pro Wrestling. This actually put me off the game when I first discovered it a few years ago: I saw the title and started it, expecting a probably-awful wrestling game along the lines of

Beast Wrestler or King of the Monsters, and greeted by many little boxes of Japanese text, I instantly turned it off.
Years later, I decided to give it another try and I'm glad I did! Although you'll be missing out on little, unimportant things like the plot or the names of moves, most of the stuff actually related to playing the game is expressed through numbers (and in case you're wondering, the plot, according to a website I found long ago is that an evil demon has taken control of the world, and a human scientist has created a group of mutant wrestlers to fight the demon's forces and liberate humanity).
Each wrestler has five stats: HP, ST, MP, SP, and GT. HP and MP are self-explanatory, serving the same purposes they serve in every game. SP isn't so obvious, and its purpose is still somewhat obscure to me. To explain ST and GT first requires explaining how the game works.
The matches are turn-based, and each turn both wrestlers select a move from their repetoire. Moves come in four categories: hold, hit, power and magic. On selecting a move, each wrestler also recieves a

semi-randomly generated number, the wrestler with the highest roll is the attacker and the other defends. Each move also has its own power rating, higher rated moves do more damage, but tend to get lower rolls. The ST stat also determines how likely a wrestler is to get higher rolls, and GT is a temporary stat, which is increased when a wrestler takes damage, and it can be decreased when selecting a move to slightly increase your chance of getting a high number. After moves have been selected, there's a few seconds during which the players tap button I as quickly as possible to affect a blue/red bar determining how much damage the attacker's move does. This repeats until one wrestler's HP is reduced to zero.
While all this is happening, the top half of the screen depicts the action. Although the animation is pretty limited, the sprites are huge and the animation that there is does do a good job. Moves look painful, even when there's very silly cartoonish things going on like heads being pulled off and limbs exploding. The

wrestlers also all have very expressive faces, and amusing reactions to dismemberment and pain, whether their own or their opponents.
Monster Puroresu is a pretty fun game, though it definitely isn't for everyone. If you like any combination of wrestling, monsters and strategy, and you don't mind wading through lots of Japanese text, you should probably give it a try.

Maze Heroes: Meikyuu Densetsu (Playstation)

Finally, I can post here again! The computer on which I play games and emulators was broken, and now it's fixed! (By removing and re-inserting the RAM.)
So anyway, Maze Heroes is a board game-style pseudo-RPG thing. The player moves around a multi-route path of tiles until they get to the tile with the boss on. Beat the boss and go on to the next stage. Other than the Boss tile, there are five types of tile making up the mazes: blank tiles do nothing, tiles with a bat on take

you into a battle with a regular enemy, blue tiles with a star on will either give an item or heal the player, and skull tiles will either poison or hurt you. The last kind, the question mark tiles will randomly give one of the effects of the other four tiles when you land on it. 
Obviously, you'd never bother stepping on skull tiles if you had a choice about it, so the number of tiles the player moves each turn will be a number between one and five, selected randomly. The random number generator is also seen in battle, deciding how much damage you and the monsters inflict upon each other each turn, though unlike movement, the numbers for damage rolls depend on various stats. Defeating enemies sometimes grants items, so fighting is always preferable to standing on a trap, which will only hurt the player with no reward.
The player can improve their stats either by strength/intelligence increasing items that can be won in battle, or by finding new equipment on the star tiles. Spells (which are mostly offensive) and healing items can be found either way. This leads to the biggest problem the game has: the only way to have a chance against the boss of each stage is to go around the board, hoping to get the items and spells you need to strengthen yourself to
fight it, then going and making an attempt at doing so. Luckily, getting killed just means going back to the start of the current stage, keeping your stat increases and new equipment, but even this small blessing only serves to make the game even more of a mindless, random slog.
On the plus side, the game does look very nice, with the artwork for the random enemies being especially nice, and the mindless nature of the game does make it a painless way to pass half an hour or so. Still, I can't really recommend Maze Heroes or anything.