Motorbike King (PS2)

On paper, it almost seems as though Motorbike King (also known as Simple 2000 Ultimate Series Vol. 13: Kyousou! Tansha King ~Kattobi Baribari Densetsu~) was made specifically for me: it's a Bosuzoku-themed racing game, in which you can choose to play as a sukeban, and not only is it a Simple Series game, but it was even developed by those B-grade legends at Tamsoft! It was a disappointment, then, to actually play it and find an awkward game with motorbikes that handled like shopping trolleys and an absolutely merciless difficulty curve.

Luckily, I stuck with it for a couple of hours, bolstered by my love for the aesthetic the game was presenting, and once you've got a grip on the weird handling and you start winning races, it becomes a lot more satisfying. The main problem is, as already mentioned, the brutal difficulty curve: the fact is that even if you have a decent lead on your opponent, if you mess up once, that's all they need to not only overtake you, but to zoom off into the distance, never to be seen again. Once you get a couple of upgrades for your bike, you might be able to regain the lead, but only if you lost it early in the race, and you drive perfectly from that point on.

Anyway, as you might have gathered, the game takes place over a series of one-on-one races, all on public roads, and all at night. As far as I can tell, there are three underling opponents you have to beat, before you can face off against the two bosses. There might be further races beyond those two bosses, but I haven't managed to beat either of them yet, so I can't currently confirm that. During the races, you'll get told at certain points in each lap (they're the same every time, so you can be ready for them after your first time round) "Appeal Time Remaining", an awkwardly translated prompt for you to partake in a bit of showing off. There's various tricks you can do by holding down R2 in combination with other buttons, such as standing up and dancing atop your bike, pulling a wheelie, or playing the start of Auld Lang Syne on your horn. While playing, though, I've learned that the best trick to do, in terms of risk taken, ease of input, and points gained, is simply taking your hands off the handlebars and waving them around, by holding R2 and L1 together.

At the end of each race, the points you get from performing stunts (AP) get converted into the points you can spend on bike upgrades and cosmetic items (KP). Win the race, and you'll get a couple of hundred KP, plus another one for every 200 AP you earned during the race. Lose, and you'll get ten KP, plus one for every 2000 AP you earned. So you can unlock stuff without winning races, but it's significantly more laborious. A nice little touch you'll notice while navigating the game's menus is how colloquial they are: rather than every confirmation prompt offering Yes and No, each one is different, and they're all a lot more casual than that.

In fact, the translation and localisation of this game is really interesting generally. It's a game themed around a very specific Japanese subculture, and yet there's been almost no effort to try and shoehorn it into looking or feeling like some kind of western equivalent. I assume this was done to avoid the additional costs and time involved in that kind of aggressive localisation, but remember that only a few years before this, we had the Playstation port of Gunbird being stripped of all its personality and localised as "Mobile Light Force". So whatever their reasons for doing it were, some thanks should go to 505 Games for leaving this one intact.

I've actually had a few people asking me on social media sites to recommend Simple Series games for them to play, so I'll probably be covering a few more in the near future, too. In this case, I'll say that if you like the aesthetic and setting, and you have the patience to get through the steep learning curve, Motorbike King is one that's worth seeking out.

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?