Exile

released on Mar 29, 1991

The Age of Chaos is upon the Chaltar world! The source of this chaos is rumored to be at the heart of an ancient tower. Join Sadler, Rumi, Kindi, and Fakhyle as they begin a new quest: to learn the secret of the ancient tower and stop the madness spreading over the land. Choose from 5 different characters as you hack, slash, and bash your way through the foreign lands, putrid pyramids, and deadly dungeons while enjoying intense cinema sequences along the way. Will Sadler be able to unlock the secret of the ancient tower and stop the insanity that is spreading throughout the land? Only you can decide that as you guide Sadler through this heart-stopping Action/RPG


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It is an early try at combining story-driven and action RPG mechanics together, using lore based on Arabic culture, which is uncommon to see.

If you give it a bit of slack from the sloppy combat, it can become an enjoyable experience.

i enjoyed it.

i didn't adored or hated it, it had its quirks and good moments, this is an action rpg in the most barebones form possible, yeah it has a level system but the cap is level 17 and even hitting the cap, the infinite enemy spawn will make sure your overpowered ass is put back in your place, the game at times throws you a ball and expects you to find it by making you go around searching for something you have no idea what it is, fortunally the map is never too open that you'll spend too long looking for it, but the battle levels are mazes, they are the most problematic.

still, the animation, the writing, it all screams a person passion project, and it probably was for the pc-88 as this is a remake of the second game.
i wish the pc-88 games were translated because they look like such my jam, unfiltered artistic whim, in the original you could use drugs to boost yourself for a short time, yeah drugs, LSD, weed, canabis, all sort of weirdies, all that's left of that drug system is some different names for this remake and saddler holding what resembles a cigarrete in his mouth despite the original version clearly having him preparing and smoking a joint
still, despite the shortcomings, i still enjoyed my time with it, its hard for games to try out different world settings and this one hit right up my alley with its culture and setting (even better than alladin, screw that twink).
the Music is a BOP, it hits that weirdcore with sone funky tunes to go along and that arabic desert feeling, but nothing like the usual you expect from desert soundtrack, you gotta hear to understand.

side note : play the hacked un-working designs version, i heard awful things about the balance, another side note, grind and grind, it won't take long till you hit peak level and trust me, you'll need it

Cleared on July 8th, 2023 (SEGA Genesis Challenge: 21/160)

This game is... whatever. There's nothing really out of ordinary, but the presentation is nice. The graphics in the 2D segments are detailed enough for a Sega Genesis game with a variety of locations like a town under siege, temples infested with aberrations, and forests swarming with deadly bugs. The soundtrack is also quite good too. It's not something I'll go out of my way to listen to, but I did vibe with the overworld desert theme so that counts for something.

The story is... there. I suspect I'll end up forgetting about it in a few days or so. The majority of the events amount up to mundane fetch quests to save someone that got kidnapped although there are some highlights and attempts to make things engaging with some philosophy and lore. The Turbografx CD version has Voice Acting during key cutscenes, and for a 90s video game that translated from Japan, it sounds... actually not that bad. I mean, it's not what I would say is professional, but I did like Yuug's VA at the least.
Edit (March 10th, 2024): I haven't quite forgotten about the game's ending at the least, but you know what else I didn't forget about? Off-screen deaths of important characters, lol.

However, what really hinders the game is its gameplay. On the surface it looks pretty fun with a 2D action RPG where you swing your sword, use magic, and explore to get to the objective. But I take some issues with the game. For one thing, the jumping and platforming feels really clunky as sometimes I'll jump up to another platform and find myself bumping into collision which makes me unable to get higher until I get it right. Jumping forward from one platform to another didn't really feel that great either. The enemy placement can be quite unfair as some of them will even attack you the moment you enter a room which gives you no time to react, and yet somehow the game ends up being piss easy because of one thing I don't think the developers really factored in.

An issue that I hear some people with some video games are infinitely respawning enemies. Just when you thought you got them out of the way, another one comes in and gimps you. This could be an issue here since you have to deal with a a barrage of enemies which are almost sure to hit you except being an RPG where you can level up, it actually works to your advantage. As early as Level 2, you can walk towards a building, take out 2 guards, walk out, walk in, take out 2 guards, walk out, walk in, and repeat again and again until you get a comfortable enough level to take on the rest of the level and even with all the crap the game throws at you, you'll just come out perfectly fine and find yourself taking down bosses in very few hits. So depending on what you do, the game is either really frustrating or just really easy and there's no in-between.

At the very least, though, it has the courteousy to be short enough to knock out in a few hours which is more that can be said for the last Sega Genesis RPG I played, so it doesn't overstay its welcome and feel like I'm torturing myself just so I can say that I finally got it done, and it's not like I got that bored. The music is well varied enough to not drive me insane. But nevertheless, it's a game that I wouldn't go out of my way to play again.

Used a romhack that restores the difficulty back to the original Japanese release.

Contrary to my initial expectations, Exile is barely an RPG. It's a basic 2D "hold right and kill enemies with sword" gameplay loop, with lite RPG elements such as experience points, and top-down towns in which you buy equipment for the road ahead.

What's baffling about it is that the way it starts, will completely lead you to believe that you're in for a party-based RPG game. You start off in a town, and your main goal is to gather three party members for your journey. The game makes a point of telling you one of these party members has brute strength that could be useful. "Oh, like a tank-type character! Sure!" One of them looks like a mage, probably gonna cast some spells. It seems a bit odd that you can only buy equipment for your main character and no one else, but I figured "hey, less management sounds good."

So, your expectations are set this way, only to be swept under you like a rug. The moment you get to your first dungeon, all your party members get left behind as you fall into a trap. "Alright, fair enough, looks like we're starting off with just one character for now." But then you get to the later dungeons, and your protagonist just tells your party members to stay behind. Well then, why in bloody hell are they here at all? They're useless! And they stay that way for the rest of the game, they journey along with you, but fall back at the first sign of danger, leaving you to do all the work. That one party member's brute strength the game wanted to point out? Never actually gets used. It's like something got unfinished here, like, the game was supposed to be more than what it turned out to be.

So, there's no party members, there's no overworld to traverse, there's no Inns. What's left, is a very streamlined experience - and I don't mind streamlined - but this one's streamlined to a point where everything's moving at an insanely fast rate, with little room to process or develop any potential mechanics. You visit some towns for a bit of story, you visit some dungeons, none of which require anything else from you but to hold a direction and occasionally swing the sword, and by the time 3 hours pass, the game's already over. And I'm sitting there, wondering to myself, "That's it? Where's the other 4 hours?"

That goes for the story too. I feel like something interesting got set up here, and it had the opportunity to deliver a politically intriguing tale between different factions of Exile's seemingly screwed up world, but none of it leaned into things hard enough to matter in the grand scheme of things, certainly not enough for me to remember all the made-up names it introduced in the first 30 minutes of gameplay.

The writing itself switches quality depending on whether it utilizes voice acting or text to convey its story. The voice acting is surprisingly competent for an early 90's game, and delivers some of the best written moments of the entire experience.

Outside of the voiced cutscenes, the writing alternates between mundane and almost childish. I'm aware of Working Design's infamous tendency to rewrite things in their localizations, and it's not so bad here, but you'd still be excused for thinking some of these lines were written by a teenager with no sense of characterization. The moment my hardened assassin protagonist saw a bloodstain and said "GROSS!", was the moment all my immersion in this world evaporated, and I just started poking fun at the little things.

In short, Exile features monotonous gameplay, a disappointingly underdeveloped world, and a story that shifts between interesting and laughable in its execution. A real shame, this one. I can't say the gameplay can be saved here, but I really wonder just how much of the story could've been saved if it was translated with more care to the original script. After all, when this game kills off two major characters off-screen and tells the protagonist to just get over it, I doubt much care was placed at all. Perhaps I'll find out the differences one day, but knowing the obscurity of this title, it might be a long time.

pretty underwhelming. the kinda youthful, angry creative spirit of the computer game originals gets toned down in favour of more polished presentation and cinematics making it more palatable for the console game market. I don't think this is as much of a compromise compared to the translation situation, though.

Working Designs' CD translation is shameless about cutting down the text and shows that all this American studio really cared about were the cool cutscenes, which you won't be seeing a lot of. both it and the Mega Drive version suffer from garbled English scripts; the CD script renders the quest incoherent and pares things down to "go from point A to B", and both are way too liberal with names and places which makes figuring out the historical context and relevance of where you are a very tedious puzzle.
I understand that they couldn't say something like Christianity outright, but what's up Working Designs inventing a name given to the final boss and mangling other names like Hiram, Rama and Bacchus? I think there's some more foul play going on in both translations, but I'd need to confirm.

so what about the actual gameplay (on PC Engine, anyway)? it's basically a simpler Ys III. there's a cool visual indicator for the dice rolling but everything else is simple side scrolling early ARPG stuff. unfortunately the programming and design are played so fast and loose that it spoils most of the fun. there's busted hitboxes on both sides, poor level balance, no choices to make in building up your character, poor dungeon designs, it feels more like button mashing than a fun test of skill. I could go on.

the MD version has smoother action, a wonky but fuller English script and some really cool FM music (it's a Telenet game so you can expect cool music either way) that I feel makes it the better game over the CD. maybe you could watch the CD version alongside your MD playthrough to get the "full" experience? it'd make the story way more coherent.
if you can read Japanese, then just play the computer versions. the story is what I imagine most people are here for.

it's a game with a lot of cool ideas brought down by the poor quality of everything else. I especially like the concept of a foreign globetrotting protagonist being made to participate in a bunch of abstract rituals in an attempt to bring about world peace and enlightenment.

it was kinda boring and the plot goes WAY too fast. At least some of the music is good.