- Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster's Hidden Treasure (GEN)
- The Revenge of Shinobi (GEN)
- Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi (GEN)
- Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master (GEN)
- Go Go Ackman (SFC)
- Super Wagyan Land (SFC)
- Super Mario RPG (SFC)
- Shin Megami Tensei if... (SFC)
- Front Mission: Gun Hazard (SFC)
- Steep Slope Sliders (SAT)
- Valkyrie Profile (PS1)
- Sakura Taisen (SAT)
- Shenmue Chapter 1: Yokosuka (DC)
- Shinobi (PS2)
- Gungrave (PS2)
- Assault Suit Leynos 2 (SAT)
- Sakura Taisen 2: Kimi, Shinitamoukoto Nakare (SAT)
- Kino no Tabi: The Beautiful World (PS2)
- Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri Douchuu (FC)
- Ganbare Goemon 2 (FC)
- Sakura Taisen 3 ~Paris wa Moeteiru ka~ (DC)
- Capcom vs SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 (DC)
- Capcom vs SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 Pro (DC)
- Capcom vs SNK 2: Millionaire Fighting 2001 (DC)
- Sakura Taisen 4 ~Koi-seyo Otome~ (DC)
- Street Fighter Zero 3: Saikyou-ryuu Doujou (DC)
- King of Fighters '99 Evolution (DC)
- Madou Monogatari I (MD)
Well, unpopular opinion time: I think the original Capcom vs SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 might be the best of the Capcom vs SNK games on the Dreamcast. Technically Pro should be the better of the two, just because it fixes some things, but I don't really care about Dan or Joe, and I just had more fun playing the first game. CvS2 is just not that fun to me. It had fantastic presentation, and a decent roster, but I just find it to be a lot less fun to play than other crossover games like the aforementioned CvS, or MvC, X-men vs Street Fighter, Tatsunoko vs Capcom, etc. I think it really just has too much going on for its own good. I really don't like all the different grooves, and it might really just be that I don't like grooves that much at all. I also don't really care much for SF Zero 3, and think it's substantially less fun than SF Zero 2, or Zero 2 Dash. The roster is a lot bigger, but I just don't see the point in adding a bunch of SSFII characters to a series meant to take place before the original Street Fighter, and again, the Grooves and stuff just feel like extraneous bull crap to me.
Sticking with fighting games here, KoF '99 Evolution is kind of an underwhelming game for me. I played a lot of KoF Dream Match '99 on the Dreamcast, back around the turn of the century, and I've never really played much KoF since then. Evolution feels pretty decent, but suffers from terrible SNK boss syndrome. I don't mind the striker system, but the roster is just confusing. Why are there
three friggin' Kyos! Maybe that just upsets me because Vanessa can't be used as anything other than a striker. At any rate, Evolution is okay, but I don't think I'd actually recommend it.
Unfortunately it was a fair amount of time ago that I finished Sakura Taisen 4, and it's not really very fresh in my mind. It was pretty good, though. I had a really tough time getting used to the character portraits, because they chose to redraw a bunch of them, and they just didn't look very good to me. Especially Kana's. I mean, they slapped the game together in about a year, so I don't really understand why they would have put the effort into new character portraits when they had a bunch of perfectly good ones for the original cast from 1 and 2. They even used a couple of the portraits from 2, anyway, so, like, what? The redrawn portraits tended to have more of a budget feel to me. I can understand that there would have been a much tighter budget, but I would think that would expressly lead to reusing what they already had! All right, enough about the portraits. The very first impression is actually really good in Sakura Taisen 4, because on top of a new eye-catch opening animation, once you actually start a new game, there's a very fancy, in-game engine, 3D rendered cutscene that looks pretty fantastic. In general, Sakura Taisen 4 is really more of what we got with Sakura Taisen 3, but back in Tokyo, and much more toned down in scale. There are only four chapters, and the there aren't even any title cards between chapters like in previous entries. The main focus here is really getting all of the 13 girls together, and making you choose between your 1&2 heroine, and your 3 heroine. Oogami is placed in charge of stage production for the Hanagumi's upcoming performance of Les Miserable (I had no idea it was Les Miserable when I was playing the game, because I don't really know that play, and they used a Japanese title for it in the game). The wedding scene at the end prompts Oogami to think about marriage a bit more, under the guise of getting the scene right. So, he asks every single one of the girls about their thoughts on marriage, which obviously causes a right kerfuffle, I'll tell you what. I've never really felt like more of a cad in these games than I did in Sakura Taisen 4. Sakura made it kind of tough on me, and it could have been recency bias, but once Hanabi showed up, I was set on her being the heroine. I was pretty happy with that choice until I got to her ending, where she just seemed to completely regress. It was kind of upsetting. It also made the end of the game way more emotionally difficult than I was expecting, by choosing one of the Paris girls. The ending was a rough ride, with all that finality and closure to it. I was fairly happy with the game, overall, though.
While I'm not sure I would necessarily call Sakura Taisen 4 a game for fans only, one really shouldn't play it without playing the first three games beforehand. I mean, the ARMS system is pretty great, and that's no different in 4, so maybe it wouldn't be terrible to just go into 3 and 4 only. It is a bit shorter than the other games, but there's still a lot of replayability if one wanted to actually get all of the endings. I don't really have time for that. Once through each of them was probably enough for me. I do have to mention that the picture-matching minigame in 4 actually kind of taught me the rules to mahjong. The minigame in Sakura Taisen 4 is way better than mahjong, though. It's actually fun, for one thing.
There's a lot for me to get to with
Madou Monogatari. Where to start. Well, this is sort of a remake of the original PC Madou Monogatari I, which has a bit of an odd history. You see, there was originally a trilogy of games that made up the true debut release of "Madou Monogatari 1-2-3" for the MSX (later released to the PC-98). However, there was technically a Madou Monogatari game released on the MSX before 1-2-3, but it most resembled the second chapter of Madou Monogatari 1-2-3. Confused yet? Good. Madou Monogatari I on the Mega Drive is basically a tweaked version of the first chapter of Madou Monogatari 1-2-3. I haven't really played any of the other games, but from what I've gathered, the main differences, beyond some aesthetic changes, are rearranged/more floors, monster capturing mechanics, and huge changes to the battle system. The other versions of Madou Monogatari I have the player actually selecting attacks from a list, but the Mega Drive version puts the player into a bit more of a one-on-one fighting game style battle where the back button blocks, up jumps, down ducks, and forward (this is something I didn't actually figure out until the very last battle in the game) makes Arle attack the enemy with a
harisen. This is
Madou Monogatari, after all, so Arle also has a bunch of magic that she can cast by holding the magic button, putting in the corresponding directional combo, and releasing the magic button. A few of her spells (Fire, Ice Storm, Warp, and Ruipanko) don't use any magic power when cast, but the other six spells in the game will. Madou Monogatari is a bit of a funny RPG in that it doesn't put any numbers to anything like health, magic, speed, experience, etc. Instead, you have to pay attention to the vague descriptions of how Arle is feeling, or how much magic she has left. When not in combat, you can get a sense of these things by looking at Arle's face in the top left of the screen, or the sparkles in the crystal ball in the upper right. Similarly, in combat, you'll get messages on how the enemy is fairing, but it's kind of not worth waiting to see that: Basically, there are two message windows during battle (one for Arle, and one for the enemy), and when Arle attacks with a spell (and if it lands), the enemy's message window will first give the enemy's response to being hit, then a message about how effective the attack was, then a message indicating how much health the enemy has left, but you can pretty much attack as quickly as you can mash out the inputs without the game dropping them, so a lot of times it's not worth waiting to put in the command for the next spell to see the messages about the enemy's health. If the enemy decides to attack, it could interrupt the messages in response to Arle's attack spell anyway. Some aspects of the combat weren't planned out especially well, but it still works decently, and is fun to play, anyway.
The story in Madou Monogatari is a fairly simple one. Arle is a wee kindergartner at a magic school. The manual has a comic strip that gives some background that the intro movie doesn't, as well. Essentially, there's this somewhat gifted, and very stuck up classmate of Arle's, named Lala, who Arle accidentally (on purpose?) sprays down with Ice Shower a couple times. Lala wakes up with a cold the next day, which just so happens to be the day of the written exam at school, and blames it on Arle; Although the comic is quick to point out that the real reason she got sick was because she was sleeping with her stomach exposed (it's a Japanese thing--). Anyway, Arle is no good at written exams, so she goes with what she knows, and rolls her pencil for the answers (it's a Japanese thing--). Wouldn't you know it, the next day everyone gathers around the Magic Tower to hear the results of the written exam, when the teacher announces that Arle "earned" the highest grade. This doesn't sit well with Lala, and she secretly vows to get in Arle's way, as Arle's achievement means that she is the only one allowed to take on the trials awaiting in the Magic Tower.
That leads into the goal of the game, which is essentially to make it out of the tower, but just that on its own isn't enough. Arle must also receive a score of 90 points or better. She gets one point each for opening one of the 40 treasure chests, or correctly answering one of the 40 questions, and the remaining 20 points are allocated based on Arle's good deeds. So, it's really a dungeon crawler's dungeon crawler, with a bunch of minor objectives, or "quests" if you want to think of them that way, although most of the questions just require you to follow some basic commands like casting a particular spell, handing over a particular item, or bumping into a wall 3 times. The main draw to the gameplay, in my opinion, is how the tower feels like a layered puzzle box. The game regularly requires certain items or spells to proceed in the tower, but with a number of floor gimmicks that require fairly thoughtful solutions.
There's really a lot to like about the game. Actually there's a lot I do like about the game. It's pretty terrific: The music is outstanding, the graphics are quite nice, the puzzle solving is very rewarding, the characters and enemies are full of humor and charm, it's a game that's full of quirky humor and abject cuteness. My only real complaint is that the progression doesn't feel quite as fun toward the end of the game, because you're pretty regularly running back and forth between seven or eight of the 16 floors in the tower, trying to complete tasks, and warp into otherwise inaccessible parts of other floors. The first half of the game was pretty expertly crafted, but that's not as much the case later into the game. I still had a hard time putting the controller down, anyway, so that's a pretty minor complaint, really.
I finished the game with a perfect 100 points, and while I was able to do just about everything without any walkthrough assistance, there was a really late question that asked for an item that creates a sapphire when mixed with an exploding egg, which was a recipe I had done before, but I just couldn't remember what the other ingredient was. So I looked it up to save time. When I looked that up, I kind of peeked at the spell I needed to use in order to get the last spell from Mrs. Eve, and even though I forgot what it was, the spell I needed to cast in order to get the magic makeup to complete the Legendary Accessory set. I'm a little sad that I bothered to look anything up at all, but it did save me a fair amount of time at the end of the game. I found it to be a really nice difficulty, overall, but while the normal battles tend to be relatively easy, the boss battles can be pretty tough. The last two boss battles especially are totally nuts. I was loaded to the teeth with everything I could have needed, and they still took me at least five attempts each to actually beat. I kind of unintentionally cheesed the final boss, too. He has these two near insta-kill moves, and with one of them, he teleports and reappears behind your character. I sort of panicked one time when he did this, and launched off a fully powered ice storm right as he was about to reappear, and potentially kill me. At fully boosted power, Ice Storm, and Fire change the background and throw all kinds of junk around the screen. After it all cleared away, the boss was just gone, and I was standing there without an opponent. I thought I might have soft locked, until I used Jugem a couple times, and actually got the giant pillar of energy attack out of it (it's a super powerful attack, but it rarely does anything useful). After that attack animation finished, it came back to the battlefield. The final boss was also magically there again, and going into his death throws. It was a pretty interesting bug.
Anyway, really fantastic swan song for the Japanese Mega Drive. Shadowrun on the Mega CD was also quite good, but I think this one might have taken up a bit more of Compile's resources at the time. There are a bunch of notes in the manual from the development team, and apparently the game had a pretty rough road to release. The sound engineer was pretty upset that he couldn't get all the voice samples to play simultaneously with the BGM. Honestly, that might be another small criticism I have of the game, because while the voice samples are numerous, and pretty good, the music is better, and in combat you rarely hear much of the BGM because Arle and the enemies are shouting things out whenever they do something. I had a really good time with Madou Monogatari I, though. It was just about the perfect amount of time at around 10 hours to complete, and was a real treat.
Finishing the Game with 100 points also gave me a "present" from Arle's teacher, and what a present it was. It unlocked a sound mode, with all the music, sound effects, and voice samples, which is all excellent. On top of that, it allows me to watch the Madou Ondo anytime I want. The Madou Ondo can be viewed in one of the very late game floors by paying 10000 gold, which is about 1/5 of my total gold at the time of completing the game. That 10000 gold gets you a viewing of three Carbuncles dancing to probably my favorite track in the game (
here), while lyrics scroll along the bottom of the screen, karaoke style. It's legit. I love it.