Strahl (3DO)

There's a lot of FMV games on the 3DO, but as far as I can tell, most of them are of the later, more complex variety that have you switching between multiple cameras and setting traps, and so on. In fact, I think Strahl might be the only old school Dragon's Lair-style game on the system (if I'm wrong on this, please let me know, of course). If anyone reading this somehow doesn't know how these games work, you watch a nice-looking cartoon, and "control" the action through a series of what would later become known as QTEs.

There's not much out of the ordinary in Strahl, mechanically speaking: It uses the four directions of the D-pad, as well as the A button when some crossed swords on the screen, and unusually, when a line of dots appears onscreen, you're expected to quickly tap the B button until they're all gone. The other big difference between Strahl and other games in the genre is that you get to choose the order in which you play the stages, so even hopelessly inept players can see a decent amount of different animation. (At the start of the game, you get 3 stages to pick from. After completing one of them, this opens up to six stages, and after them, there's a final seventh stage.)

There is actually a third difference between Strahl and its genremates: it's by far the easiest of these games I've ever played. The button prompts are actually pretty sparesly placed, and there's sometimes long stretches of onscreen action where you're not asked for any input at all. Furthermore, they're very forgiving, too: not only do you get a generous amount of time to press the button, but you're also not penalised for mispressing, as long as you do make the correct input before the prompt disappears. As a result of this, I finished the game on my first attempt, without continuing.

Strahl is only about twenty minutes long, but it's a nice twenty minutes. It looks and feels like the kind of 1980s OAV that would have been dubbed and released in the west as a kids' video on the cheap, no matter how inappropriate that decision would have been, like Birth, or that bizarre Marvel Dracula anime. I say it's worth a play if the sound of that appeals to you. One last note: I've read up a little bit on this game's history, and it was apparently originally made for arcades in 1985, but went unreleased until the 1990s, when it got ported to the Laseractive, the Saturn, and the 3DO, and apparently, all three versions play slightly differently (though I have no idea how).

Ruruli Ra Rura (PC FX)

It's a PC FX game! So let's get all the usual cliches out of the way first: it's got beautiful animated FMVs, it's a console with lots of wasted potential, this game was inexplicably released in 1998, I have no idea how anyone turned a profit making games for a console with such a tiny userbase. Anyway, Ruruli Ra Rura, is a kind of metrovania-type affair, though it leans heavily towards puzzles than action. Also, besides the obligatory excellent FMVs, it looks like it could have come out on the PC Engine a decade earlier. The in-game graphics are really simple, with really small sprites and so on.

You start the game as a Samurai guy, and as the game goes on, you meet and recruit more allies, all with different abilities: shooting fire to destroy ice walls, running across narrow ridges, swimming, and so on. There's a common complaint levelled at metrovaniae, as well as similarly-structured games in other genres, like the Legend of Zelda games, for example, that most of the abilities you acquire have no practical purpose except for acting as keys to unlock the specific obstacles they're designed for. I think Ruruli Ra Rura is the most egregious example of this I've encountered. You can only switch characters at save points, and when you're not specifically sending an ally out to get past an obstacle, you're better off playing as the Samurai, as he's the only one that's remotely competent at fighting enemies. Plus he's got a fast normal walking speed (which is still very slow. Slow walking speeds are a plague in this game).

Though I've got a lot of complaints about this game, I can't honestly say I haven't enjoyed playing it. There's just something slightly satisfying about the slow-but-sure progress you make through the world. There's a translation patch available that translates all the menus, making te game a lot more playable to the Japanese-illiterate, though unfortunately, unlike the patch for Tyoushin Heiki Zeroigar, it doesn't add subtitles to the FMVs, so you don't get the exact nuances of the plot. Although I don't think we're missing out on a great deal, since as far as I can tell, the tone is that of a very silly slapstick comedy, very much in the vein of all those Dungeons and Dragons-inspired OAVs of the 90s like Slayers, Dragon Half, Ozanari Dungeon, etc.

I think I've covered everything I need to here, right? It's a deeply flawed, but fun and charming game, with all the 90s anime polish you'd expect from a PC FX game.