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Post by kurisu on Jan 7, 2019 17:05:22 GMT
Hi all, I'm happy to find this forum. I've had a soft spot for the PC Engine ever since I played Ys I&II on a friend's Turbo Grafx in about 1991 and was totally blown away by the music, graphics, and speech (compared to my NES!)
I'm working on a blog that I thought might be of some interest here. It's centered on Super Famicom RPGs but I've been doing PC Engine CD games as well. I haven't been playing the PCE games as much as the SFC ones but I have posts on all the ones that weren't released in English, that I've gotten to so far (I think 23 games, or something like that).
I'm planning on making some video posts starting with the next game, which will be Ruin: Kami no Isan.
I also have another blog focused on strategy RPGs. This is every console but I have played two PCE games so far: Lady Phantom, and the PCE version of Langrisser. There will be two more games later (Macross: Eien no Love Song and Sword Master).
It's interesting to see how companies made use of the CD capabilities -- with the extreme end being the Tengai Makyo games, while other companies barely used the CD at all. I guess it's not a big surprise that most developers didn't want to spend the money that Hudson did on TM, but it seems like with those examples out there, they would have felt the need to at least make a basic effort.
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Post by dshadoff on Jan 7, 2019 20:01:54 GMT
Hi, I read the blog (at least all of the PC Engine-specific entries), and appreciate the work that you've put into it. As several comments have mentioned, there isn't a lot written about these games in English on the internet, so every little bit helps. I can't help but notice that your comments tend to be slightly on the negative side (I'm not saying that this is unwarranted), but it might help to understand what expectations you have going in, or what games from this era would not warrant criticism. That is to say, based on the criticisms, it just seems like you aren't exactly enjoying playing these games. I see the following major factors involved:
Reviewed games are heavily-weighted toward the beginning of life for the CDROM systemIt's true that a lot of the earlier games were rough, and making the transition from HuCard to CDROM wasn't always easy, as people were exploring the medium. A huge amount of tech/media attention was focused on "how we can takeadvantage of multimedia". In other words, people were still trying to figure out what was "good". To be fair, most reviewers deliberately avoid these earlier games. It's rare to see anything written about pre-1992 CDROM games on the PC Engine, so it's refreshing to see *something* written about them. Terrible Encounter RateAgain, a completely fair complaint - it's good to see which games are affected by this. Actually, these days it is even possible to create a hack to 'rebalance' games (see here: www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=23436.0 ), so any sort of detailed feedback (for example, if it isn't consistent, where does it happen) is very helpful to somebody trying to adjust it. Poor Battle SystemI'm not sure if you were playing games during the era when these were originally released, but this is more a product of which year the game was developed, rather than a poor/lazy design choice. There simply wasn't a lot of variation for a substantial period - you had either Dragon Quest mechanics, or Ys mechanics (mostly DQ). So this criticism ought to be tempered against the exact year of release, I think. Boring GameWhile this is an *objective* fair criticism of some games, I feel this is also related to the era/year. Keep in mind that the internet wasn't available to the public before about 1992, and even watching a rental video was non-trivial, based on the effort required to visit the shop. Anime itself was in its infancy. Life was simply more boring then, although the bar was indeed raised each year. To sum up my opinion: older games are simply more boring (as a general statement), and as I said above, most reviewers deliberately avoid these games. Insufficient use of CDROMAgain, this is a product of an exact year, in my opinion - and to some degree, you might be underestimating the amount of impact that cut-scenes and CD quality music added (and still add) to gameplay. It's easy to be jaded today, where even a trivial game has anime-quality cutscenes of that sort embedded. Having said that, there were certainly a lot of games which "phoned it in" by releasing a HuCard-type game on a CD substrate (ahem: Kunio Soccer, Human Sports Festival, Star Mobile, etc.). Tengai Makyo II and Ys Book 1&II set an exceedingly high standard for this, and very few if any ever measured up to this level - though several did well - and indeed, the actual measure should perhaps be "is this something better than a cartridge could provide" and "does it effectively advance the story", rather than "does this have wow factor". Of course, most of your comments are spot-on, so I don't want to dissuade you from being honest. In summary, you're doing some great work - but it might be improved by indicating how a game compared to "state of the art" for the given year of release, as opposed to (apparently) measuring games against post-system-death standards. Dave
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Post by kurisu on Jan 7, 2019 20:34:34 GMT
Yes, I recognize that's a problem -- I have been playing RPGs since Dragon Warrior came out in the US, but I'm no longer satisfied playing the old simplistic RPGs. The reason I did a SFC blog rather than starting from the beginning is that I didn't want to play through those old RPGs. I try to evaluate the games primarily by how fun I find them to play now, which is somewhat unfair to the games. I try to give some indication of how I think it compares to similar games -- for instance, Startling Odyssey is lackluster even by 1993 standards. It's a perfectly playable game if you like old, no-frills, "attack/item/magic/defend" RPGs. But it doesn't do anything new or exciting, which other RPGs were starting to do at that time. I'm assuming the games in general will get better as I go into 1994 but that over half will be merely average/playable. I guess it may seem like that, but I do enjoy playing the games even if the games themselves aren't great -- that may sound odd, but it's why I'm doing one of these chronogaming things in the first place.
Thanks for the comments!
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Post by elmer on Jan 8, 2019 3:51:50 GMT
Hi kurisu , and welcome to the forum! I found your site recently when I was looking for some info on Tenshi no Uta, and I really appreciate what you're doing in comparing and contrasting the evolution of the JRPG gaming experience. But, I have to agree with Dave that your reviews make it sound as though you're really not enjoying most of the games, and that you're getting a bit jaded by going through so many games in such a short time ... especially when you use a "walkthrough", which can defeat the whole story-telling aspect of an RPG. Now, I can kinda understand that with *some* games because, as Sturgeon's Law says, 90% of everything is crap ... but it does mean that I read your posts from a "glass half-empty" criticism of the things that went wrong, rather than a "glass half-full" celebration of what the games did well. I definitely preferred your earlier reviews, when you focused mostly on the story's initial setup and then the game-play, with the points of frustration that you found, rather than the more recent reviews where you (IMHO) give the Cliff Notes version of the story (with screenshots), and kinda ruin the point of playing the game itself. As you head into the 1994-and-onwards games, I do hope that you'll spend more time on the game-play, and things that you like or dislike about the games, and post less spoilers about how the story of each game unfolds. Please keep up the good work!
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Post by Mathius on Jan 8, 2019 5:37:32 GMT
Welcome to the forum! I will echo the two gentlemen above me (at least, I *think* they're gentlemen *yuk yuk*) and say that I remember when Ys came out on Turbo and even just the pics in EGM of those amazing cutscenes blew away my young mind. I couldn't believe what I was seeing! NEC/Hudson and Sega took separate paths through the uncharted waters of CD-ROM back then, and to NEC/Hudson's credit, their use of the medium aged far better than Sega's in most respects (Popful Mail, Lunar and Snatcher notwithstanding).
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Post by kurisu on Jan 9, 2019 14:31:15 GMT
Thanks for the insightful comments!
I've modeled my blog on CRPGAddict, who posts detailed accounts of the entire game, including the story. I have wondered if this is the right approach, but I personally like it better than simply reviewing because it gives me something to look back at later and remember the game. As far as the gameplay, one of the frustrating things I've found about the early SFC library is how cookie cutter the gameplay often is. I don't want to the posts to be as boring as the games sometimes are!
I think I was more willing to give games like ZIRIA and Cosmic Fantasy 1 a pass on gameplay since they came out in 1990-1. But as I get further into the libraries, for me it becomes harder and harder to forgive the companies releasing boring RPGs. I'm at October 1993 now -- Dragon Quest V has been out for over a year, and Final Fantasy IV and V are both out. Breath of Fire, while not as good as those, is a good quality game. I'm certainly not expecting every game to be DQV or FF5. But more minor games have at least been trying new stuff (Elfaria, Metal Max 2, Sword World SFC). On the PC Engine side there are decent attempts like Record of Lodoss War, Farjius no Jakotei, Dragon Knight II (sort of), and the Tengai Makyo games to a certain extent.
But I will keep that in mind in the future. One of the reasons I started the other Strategy RPG blog is so that I didn't get burned out playing all these SFC/PCE RPGs.
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Post by kurisu on Jan 20, 2019 17:22:35 GMT
I have a video of 45 minutes or so of Ruin: Kami no Isan, an action RPG that I didn't see any gameplay footage of on youtube. www.twitch.tv/kurisublogThis is the first time I tried a stream and unfortunately the sound quality is not the best -- I'm planning on getting a USB microphone for better voice clarity in the future. The blog post on Ruin will be up at some point this week, Saturday at the latest. It looks like a fairly short game so I may be able to finish it in one week.
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Post by soop on Jan 21, 2019 14:19:40 GMT
Thanks for this, it's really good. It's also something different to the shorter reviews on the Brothers Duomazov and the PC engine bible.
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Post by kurisu on Jan 26, 2019 16:08:25 GMT
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Post by nectarsis on Jan 27, 2019 3:47:52 GMT
Not a bad blog at all...though like others said less negativity (maybe play game genres that don't rub you the wrong way?). lol
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Post by Deleted on Jan 27, 2019 6:43:17 GMT
Say, what's your opinion about W-Ring's parallax scrolling? Asking for a friend.
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Post by kurisu on Jan 27, 2019 13:32:10 GMT
I'll be getting to Ys IV soon which should be good!
Also next up on my strategy RPG blog will be the Macross game for PCE which looks fun.
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Post by kurisu on Jan 29, 2019 13:28:01 GMT
Here's the first three stages of Macross: Eien no Love Song, an SRPG. The post will be up on strategyrpgs later this week. Apologies for the quiet voice in the first few minutes; I fixed it after that. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfpp8K2-nu0I will most likely be streaming the next part tonight at 7 EST.
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Post by kurisu on Feb 15, 2019 20:45:57 GMT
I finished Macross. Here's my wrap-up post: strategyrpgs.blogspot.com/2019/02/game-13-macross-eien-no-love-song.htmlI ended up streaming the entire game on youtube; I don't think I'm going to do that in the future because I can't commit to regular enough times to encourage people to watch, but I'm hoping to at least stream the first session of any PCE game I play hereon out. There's an unfortunate lack of videos of the more obscure PCE games.
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Post by spenoza on Feb 16, 2019 1:51:32 GMT
I enjoyed your write-up. It is too bad Masaya got away from the 2D strategy RPG later in its life, because it sounds like they know their stuff.
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