Brave Battle Saga: Legend of the Magic Warrior (Mega Drive)

Brave Battle Saga: Legend of the Magic Warrior (also known as Barver Battle Saga: Tai Kong Zhan Shi and Final Fantasy) is an unlicensed RPG, released originally in Chinese, translated into Russian (and re-titled Final Fantasy) by pirates and later fan-translated into English. Though accounts of the Russian translation say it's terrible to the point of possibly being machine translated, their renaming of it is actually pretty apt: there's a lot in this game that would make the casual observer think they were looking at an actual lost game in Squaresoft's series.

Before you even get to the title screen, the intro tells us that there was an ancient schism between opposing factions in favour of technology and magic, and that the world is kept in balance by four temples, each in different kingdoms, and each representing one of the four classical elements. So pretty much the scenario seen in the first five Final Fantasies. Then, when you actually start playing the game, you'll see that the battle system is (as far as I can tell) identical to Square's Active Time Battle system, and when you start getting magic, the spells can be equipped to whichever character you like, and you can buy multiples of each spell to give to each character on your party if you like, kind of like a simpler version of Final Fantasy VII's materia system (though to Brave Battle Saga's credit, it does predate that game by a year). On the plus side, it's definitely one of the better-looking RPGs on the Mega Drive, probably down to trying to copy the kind of highly-detailed spritework seen in Square's SNES RPGs.

Upon the unoriginal foundation laid by the intro, the game's  plot doesn't really get any more interesting: there's runaway princesses, demons kidnapping people and trying to wreck the elemental temples, and all the other incredibly cliched RPG stuff. Chinese RPGs on PC have a reputation for being great, romantic epic adventures, but unfortunately, in this case, the developers seem to have been content to ape typical Japanese RPG tropes.

Unfortunately, thogh it's a clear copy of Square's games on a superficial level, it doen't have anywhere near the same kind of quality in scenario writing and game design, being as it is one of the most linear RPGs I've ever played. You're totally unable to to do anything or go anywhere except straight forward to the next plot destination, which makes it even more frustrating that sometimes you're arbitrarily blocked from advancing until you've spoken to the right people in the right order. You might notice from the screenshots that I didn't play particularly far into this game, not even far enough to obtain my fourth party member, but I did play for over four hours, which I think is enough to get a good enough grasp on whether or not the game is worth playing. And even if it's not, a game that expects you to play for hours and hours before suddenly getting interesting is a game that's just not worth your time at all.

In summary, Brave Battle Saga is an unusually high-quality production for an unlicensed game, but at the same time, it's not very interesting to play, it's way too linear for an RPG of this style, and there isn't a single original thing about it, aesthetically, narratively or mechanically.

Fluid (Playstation)

I don't know how well-known they are outside the UK, but there were a couple of music sequencing programs on the original Playstation entitled Music and Music 2000. They weren't the first on the system, though: that title (as far as I can tell) goes to this weird dolphin-themed thing. I've seen other sites write about this game, tying it into that whole cringewrothy "Playstations in nightclubs" thing Sony were doing in the mid-90s, that laid the ground for the awful trying-to-be-cool writing seen in games magaines of the era, parodied by Digitiser's "Cyber X" character. But Fluid came out a couple of years after that whole thing had mostly wound down, and I'd place it more alongside the Japanese experimental art-game movement of the time, along with the likes of Kaze no Notam.

Anyway, what is Fluid? It's an attmept to tie a simple, accessible music sequencer to a videogame. I don't know much (or anything) about making music, but I'd say the sequencer part is probably too simple, since it limits the player to creating a very short (about 4 seconds) loop of irritating beeps and buzzes.

The videogame part sees you guiding a dolphin around the sea, until you touch one of the slowly-rotating rock sculptures, each of which sends you into a different streaming FMV world wherein you can tap or hold the triangle, X and circle buttons to have the dolphin emit weird noises. While you're doing this, you can also move the dolphin round with the dpad, simultaneously changing the way the noises sound so you're playing the dolphin like a weird underwater theremin. Once you've spent enough time in a world, you can move on to the next one, and at any time, presing start takes you back to the ocean, where you can also find a spinning DNA thing that takes you to the sequencer, where you can mess with the BGM that plays in the FMV worlds.

I should really talk about Fluid's most appealing aspect: its aesthetic. It's like a perfect slice of vaporwave aesthetic cliche: you play as a low-poly dolphin, swimming through an ocean of abstract stone sculptures, which transport you to shiny, dreamlike worlds full of crystals and marble pillars and the like. If you decide to make all the music as slow as possible, that adds to the effect even more, of course If that sounds like enough to make Fluid worth your while, then go for it , I guess. I didn't really get much enjoyment out of it, and I can't see myself ever loading it up again after posting this review.