Showing posts with label JRPGs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label JRPGs. Show all posts

Friday, September 18, 2015

Hardcore Gaming 101 video articles are go!

Welcome to Hardcore Gaming 101’s official video channel. We’ve been asked about more video content a lot, and video is the future of games writing, so finally here is our attempt to launch some regular programming.

We’re starting out with two series. The first is a new topic in our popular Inventories line. Super Mario Bros. has just turned 30 this month – what better excuse could there be to take a look at all the platforming games from before that paved the way for it?

The other series is JRPG Chronicles, where we explore the history of RPGs in Japan from the very beginning. This is an extended reboot of the blog series we launched a couple of years ago, and we’ve been looking for an opportunity to do more of this for a while. These aim for deeper research than the old blog posts, and so we’re launching with 1982’s Dragon Lair. We only grazed over it in the original series, even though it might just be the very first computer RPG ever published in Japan (among a few other games of which we know only a vague 1982 release date).

But producing the videos takes a lot of time, and the current site budget cannot support doing it consistently, so we’re adding new milestone goals to our Patreon. They won't be up by the time this is published, but look out for them very soon. Once we reach $1250 (it's currently hovering around $1070), we can ensure one video per month, alternating between the two series. If we manage to get to $1500, that means three videos each month. This will be in addition to all the usual articles we put on the site, so even if you’re already a patron, please take a moment to consider whether this kind of added content might be worth increasing your pledge to help us go on and get better at this.

Mind that the quality isn’t quite where we want it to be yet. I obviously need to work on my delivery a lot, but I also haven’t figured out the acoustics yet, so please view these initial two videos as a proof-of-concept rather than the final standard of quality. We plan to go on with both series even before we reach sufficient funding, but the schedule will be much less reliable.

We’re also going to try out how ad revenue pans out with these. If it contributes in any significant way, then that means even more videos for you. Patrons will get ad-free download access to all future videos a few days before they go on Youtube. Later down the line we will also have votes on Patreon every once in a while when we try to decide on a new series. As ever, as a patron you also get access to all our eBooks at the $5 level and physical copies of future books at the $25 level. An official announcement for a new one will be coming up soon, too.

If you’re into this kind of content, be sure to also check out Dr. Sparkle’s Chrontendo, Jeremy Parish’s Game Boy World and PlayStation Year One by Adventure Pals, all of which informed the style of our videos a lot. Also don’t miss the official channel of our own GameClub 199X crew, where you can find long form discussions about many overlooked games. See our subscriptions on Youtube for all these and more recommendations.

Go to the Hardcore Gaming 101 Youtube channel.


Posted by derboo at 7:07 AM 4 comments
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Monday, June 9, 2014

Dark Age of JRPGs (11): Mugen no Shinzou

Mugen no Shinzou (夢幻の心臓) - PC-88, PC-98, Mz-2500, S1 (1984)

I promised we'd meet XTal Soft again soon, didn't I? Mugen no Shinzou ("Heart of Fantasy") is actually their first RPG and one of the most well-regarded Japanese computer RPGs. The Japanese Wikipedia entry on Hydlide describes it as one of the "big three" of Japanese CRPGs (the other two being Dragon Slayer and Hydlide), although that distinction may mostly come from its sequels. All in all, the series spans three titles, which were released about a year apart from each other.

Mugen no Shinzou was developed by Kazunari Tomo and one K. Kawahara. Lunar fans will probably remember the former as the creator of that series; after Mugen no Shinzou he did a few more games for Xtal Soft (including Mugen no Shinzou 2) before switching to Falcom, where he worked on Sorcerian and Dinosaur. As for Kawahara, I couldn't confirm 100% that it is the same person, but "K. Kawahara" appears credited for the Surlent scenario in Rudra no Hihou and a Katsuyoshi Kawahara directed the Final Fantasy remakes for PlayStation.

The game is also frequently cited as one of the influences for Dragon Quest. While I'm not sure Koichi Nakamura and Yuji Horii conceded as much directly (this lengthy conversation between Horii and his friend and later Dragon Quest collaborator Akira Sakuma seems to imply that they have at least played it), it sure does seem to make a lot of sense when playing it.

According to the plot, the protagonist is nearly killed in the real world, but gets rescued and spirited away by a god, ending up in a fantasy world full of dragons, goblins and other monsters. If those who enter don't find their way back to the real world soon, they are turned into monsters themselves and damned to eternal suffering. Thus the game actually has a "time" limit (although since the game is turn-based that translates to a turn limit) of 30,000 days. Moving every few steps advances the timer.

The game takes a lot of inspiration from Ultima, although like in Poibos the hero is merely a rectangle on a tiny window view of the map during overworld exploration. Another characteristic Mugen no Shinzou shares with Poibos is the fact that you won't survive most enemy encounters. At least the game starts next to a town, which is navigated in menu form. Resting in the inn to heal is fortunately quite cheap, but everything else is ridiculously expensive, resulting in the game's big similarity to Dragon Quest: It's basically just one huge, long, boring money grind.

The first enemy I was actually able to defeat was the above thief, but he poisoned me before he went down, and curing poison costs a lot, so I ended up spending more money than I earned on the fight. Which I soon learned is characteristic for most fights in this game.

Then I finally happened upon a peasant. Human characters usually don't attack you rightaway, and you can choose between three different attitudes when encountering them. It's also possible to flee or hide on sight, but doing so costs a few experience points. Experience points don't seem to do anything, though, so it's not too bad a deal. The peasants probably are the most friendly enemies, but killing them really is the only way to make any (very slow) progress. The drop shit for money, but are not too hard to defeat, and if you're really lucky you can get their sickle to sell in town for like 25 gold pieces.

So after heroically slaughtering peasants for a few hours I saved up some money to spend. The most important stop in the town is the hospital. Here you can heal the hero entirely (which costs 100 gold vs the 4 gold to heal 25 points in the inn, so it's only worth it much later as you start with a mere 100HP), cure poison for 20 gold or extend the maximum amount of HP by a few. The next town you get to when traveling west has a castle. Getting an audience with the king costs 500 gold, so I never met him, but you can train strength, agility and dexterity, but the amount you can learn here is limited. At least it makes enough difference so you can successful fight most human enemies.

You may save for better weapons or armor to get a bit stronger, but you'll soon find out that every piece of equipment is destructible, and especially armor is so expensive that you better get used to fighting most battles naked and unarmed, until you get lucky and capture an enemy's weapon. Luck is a huge part of things, anyway, as the random factor is much too high. You may defeat an enemy with ease, only to get hopelessly slaughtered in the next encounter with the same type. There's not much tactics to the fights, either, as you got only one guy who can either attack, change his gear or try to escape. There's a "spell" option during combat, too, but I never got far enough to learn any magic.

Don't ever run off the path, cause in the woods and mountains you're likely to get attacked by beasts, and they mean always trouble.

Sometimes when you're being nice to road encounters, they tell you some piece of information, usually the location of an interesting point of the map. I was directed to a poisonous well in the woods once, but usually the destination was a dungeon.

Entering here resulted in a pitch black graphics window, so I had to go back to town to buy a lamp and oil (at least there's no food management). This reveals a wireframe grid dungeon like in the early Ultima and Wizardry games. The tower I went into seemed rather huge, but had no distinguishing features other than a single trap right near the entrance, which just draws a lot of health when triggered. Apparently it's possible to get a map of the dungeons, but I never found one. The monsters here are quite a bit stronger than the human enemies outside (though nowhere near as destructive as the beasts in the wilderness), so usually after two or three fights I'm forced to back out. Mugen no Shinzou might be the most mechanically sound game I've played so far for this series, but the odds are still stacked far too heavily against the player. After 6-8 hours, I had just barely grinded my HP up to 200 and yet could barely make any money to get it up further.

Xtal Soft have to be lauded for the graphics, though. The world map view and wireframe dungeons may not be too special, but the game contains a ton of detailed enemy graphics. I hardly got anywhere in this game, and still met more than 20 different enemies.

Here is a Japanese Blog of a guy who actually managed to finish this game. You can see some more great monster graphics in some of the later posts.

Previous Episodes:
(1) The Dragon and Princess
(2) Some games we cannot play
(3) Danchizuma no Yuuwaku (NSFW)
(4) Ken to Mahou
(5) Dungeon
(6) Seiken Densetsu
(7) Panorama Toh
(8) Do Dutch Wives Dream of Electric Eels (NSFW)
(9) Some more games we cannot play
(10) Courageous Perseus
Posted by derboo at 7:50 PM 7 comments
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Monday, May 26, 2014

Dark Age of JRPGs (10): Courageous Perseus

Courageous Perseus (カレイジアスペルセウス) - PC-88, FM-7, X1, MSX (1984)

Hey, this is the first game in this series where I actually saw the end of it! Mostly because it has almost no text, and what little is there is in English, as this is the first Action RPG, actually one of the very first Action RPGs from Japan. If the usual Japanese databases are to be believed, it was released the same month as Dragon Slayer, and one month before Hydlide. While the other two have spawned successful series and became two of the most revered CRPG names in Japan, Courageous Perseus has been mostly forgotten. In its time, however, it seems to have been a pretty big deal, and publisher Cosmos Computer is said to have done a lot of marketing for the title. One of the staff members on Hydlide recalled how seeing an advertisement of Courageous Perseus had filled Hydlide designer Tokihiro Naitou with despair.

In a way, Courageous Perseus is more advanced than its two contemporaries, but ultimately it may well be the worst of the lot. It starts out promising enough: As Perseus you get to steer a raft to land on an island full of mythical beasts. The task is to slay the dragon and save the girl, of course. There's no character creation, but at the beginning, we get to put in our birthday, for whatever reason. If you were born after the year 2000, you're out of luck, though.

Perseus starts with 2000HP, but his health is constantly being drained one point per second. Enemies are attacked simply by bumping into them while holding the Space bar pressed. The problem: Almost all enemies are invincible to Perseus, at the beginning he can only kill the light blue soldiers and the unicorns. Every slain enemy raises his attack and defense values, though, and eventually gains the strength to try and kill a new enemy type. But the game never gives any hints as to which would be the next one, so it's all trial and error, often quite punishing as some enemies can consume hundreds of health points within seconds. Trying to find any rhyme or reason in the order, like determining which enemies "look" stronger, is futile. After the initial two, the next beatable enemies are the equally wimpy-looking Satyr, but after that come the Centaurs, which look more impressive than most of the others.

Really the only way to survive is to find all these bells, but it's not always easy. For some of them Perseus has to use his raft - there is a lake in the middle of the island with another one - to reach some smaller isles. But giant crabs jump out of the water, and if the raft happens to be above them, that means instant game over. It's possible to swim really far out into the ocean, but there's nothing but sea monsters there.

The island is filled with rocky mountains and thick woods that turn it into a maze, and the game is very good at showing you paths you cannot reach from your current location. Unfortunately, you usually have to drive your current target species near extinction before tackling the next one, which means a lot of confused backtracking over the island to find all of them. Enemies in general don't respawn, except some of them do. They're so few and it takes so long that it's not sustainable to try and grind for them, though. It's also kind of an eerie feeling to wander over the increasingly depopulated island. Makes you wonder if Perseus isn't the true villain here. Kinda surprising that he doesn't grow horns at the end.

The caves make it possible to get around a bit faster, but where you come out is determined at random. You also have to leave the screen once before you can re-enter, putting you in danger from the nearby enemies.

Monsters move around randomly and haphazardly, but are often positioned to block your way, so it's not unusual to lose a lot of health while trying to find the one available prey. Even after learning the order of enemies, I had to cheat for a refreshment of health to have a chance at survival.

Since Perseus is most famous for slaying the Medusa, she's also in this game. Getting close to her is enough to drain your health, but once Perseus is strong enough, she is slain just like any other enemy.

The dragon is actually the most peaceful creature on the entire island. It just sits on its mountain (odd, considering the "dragon" the mythical Perseus slew was a sea monster) and doesn't do Perseus any harm unless he attacks it first. It's invincible for most of the game, but in the end it goes down really fast.

Most of the screenshots here are from very early in the game so you can see all the different monsters still alive, but Perseus actually gathers a lot of items on his quest. Some are just specimen of the different creatures, others like the jar and the bow look like tools, even though nothing can be done with them. (And a bow would have been so useful!) The trophies also include four women... well, it WAS the '80s.

All screenshots so far are from the PC-88 version. Most of the others look the same, except for the MSX, which is much more ugly:

In case you want to have a shot at the game, but don't want any of that random guessing bullshit (only the endless backtracking bullshit and unfair enemies bullshit), here's the order in which the enemies become vulnerable to Perseus' attacks:

Light Blue Soldier
Unicorn
Satyr
Centaur
Devil Soldier
Scorpion
Pegasus
Bull
Blue Knight
Blue Cerberus
Manticore
Red Griffon
Cocatrice
Twin Soldiers
Red Warrior
Giant
Medusa
Dragon

Previous Episodes:
(1) The Dragon and Princess
(2) Some games we cannot play
(3) Danchizuma no Yuuwaku (NSFW)
(4) Ken to Mahou
(5) Dungeon
(6) Seiken Densetsu
(7) Panorama Toh
(8) Do Dutch Wives Dream of Electric Eels (NSFW)
(9) Some more games we cannot play
Posted by derboo at 10:58 PM 3 comments
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Thursday, May 15, 2014

Dark Age of JRPGs (9) - Some more games we cannot play

Greetings! The above is actually the cover for Dragon and Princess, which we already wrote about, but we couldn't find a cover scan back then. Well, here it is.

Circumstances have put this series on halt for rather long breaks, but in the meantime we've come upon a bunch of more games that don't justify a dedicated blog bost, because they're unavailable, unplayable, or otherwise elude a more detailed examination. Without further ado:


Tokugawa Ieyasu 1. Shounen hen (徳川家康 1.少年編) - MZ-700, FM-7 (1983)

This was supposedly a very early game we've missed before. As the numeral implies, it was meant as the start to a whole series depicting the live of the famous-infamous warlord Tokugawa. This first episode deals with his youth, but it's easy to see that it doesn't take things strictly historical and young Ieyasu fights monsters made out of extended text characters. Apparently there was a second part, which was more of a strategy game, reflecting Tokugawa's rise as a warlord, but that seems even more obscure than this RPG.


Poibos Part 1 (ポイボスＰａｒｔ１) - PC-88, X1, FM-7 (1983)

Poibos Part 1 - there never was a part 2 - is notable for probably being Japan's first RPG in a SciFi setting. The advertisement clearly channels Star Wars.

The tiny graphics window doesn't betray much of the setting, though. In case that isn't clear from the very minimalistic graphics, it shows a top-down view of a planet surface, where the player (the hero starts out alone but apparently can recruit companions later) can move around freely.

Every few steps occurs a random encounter, which offers some options, but always seems to result in a fight or the player's escape. The odds are stacked severely against the player, however, and it seems impossible to survive more than two encounters. Without any apparent means to heal or find companions before dying, this has turned into a very short trip.

Around the turn of the millennium, there was actually a fan remake of Poibos Part 1, which offers a glimpse of hope in the form of selectable difficulty levels, but since it was made A) for a Japanese OS and B) old versions of Windows, it reliably crashed upon every single encounter during testing.


Parallel World (パラレルワールド) - X1, PC-88 (1983?)

Parallel World is notable as the first RPG published by Enix, although the later Dragon Quest crew had nothing to do with it. It's also about the only RPG that was first programmed for the Sharp X1, which among Japanese computer enthusiasts was more known for its arcade ports. It was programmed by one Toshiyuki Nagase, and the back of the box advertises it as "A true role-playing game with 26 verbs, 100 characters, 10 monster types, 20 types of food, 26 swords, 26 crystals, 21 dungeons and 100 ilnesses", where the player would travel between 7 parallel worlds.

A tape image of the PC-88 version could actually be found, but in the only emulator that supports tape image files, it crashes right after the title screen (which contains the hilarious message: "Loading Data. Please wait 15 minutes").


Bounded (バウンドット) - PC-88 (1983)

Bounded by the little known Nihon Micom seems like a more typical fantasy RPG, once again mostly using a text-adventure like interface with just a tiny graphics window. We could never find a disk image of it, so there's not much else to say. The screenshots below say they come from a "vol. 2", but we got no clue what that actually means, as the Japanese databases only seem to list this one title.


Grand Cross (グランドクロス) - PC-88, FM-7 (1984)

Another very elusive game, this one was made by Xtal Soft, whom we shall meet again several times later in this series. It appears to be a SciFi dungeon crawler with more of an adventure game angle


Super Dangeon - PC-88 (1984)

Published by Fuji Onkyou RAM (yes, we've never heard of them, either), the hilariously misspelled title is a wireframe dungeon crawler. Once again, that's all we've got.


Kamen Rider (仮面ライダー) - PC-88, FM-7 (1984)

Kamen Rider of course is based on the seminal tokusatsu show. The game tie-in by Bandai seems to have been a rather typical dungeon crawler, but with huge sprites showing the hero and his enemies fighting.
Posted by derboo at 9:43 PM 11 comments
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