Rastan Saga 2 is the sequel to Rastan, containing the same hack-em'/slash-'em gameplay as the original. You are a warrior who must get through a number of levels, and trying to collect gems which can only be obtained by defeating the end-of-level bosses. Collecting power-ups along the way awards you with extra life or better weapons.
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It has some decent sprite work, but also the sprites are half the size of the play area. Rastan didn't exactly set the bar high, and this manages to limbo just under it with very dull gameplay.
Definitely a lot less frustrating than the first game, but that's only because it's barely even a game. The level design is so unremarkable outside of some of the most clownish jumps I've ever seen and the mechanics are so bland that you hardly even feel like you're interacting with something. That's not even mentioning the sluggish controls and horrible bosses that never die. I feel like I just dreamed this game up.
I have played many different medieval-themed platformers from the good ol’ arcade days, and let me tell you, the original Rastan was certainly one of those games. It wasn’t anything too bad, and it did have certain qualities about it that were admirable, but it was too basic and too arcade-syndrome-y for me to really say it is anything more than just simply being “good”. Nevertheless, it was still pretty successful around the time that it came out, and since this was only the beginning of this supposed “saga” for Rastan, a sequel was inevitably going to happen, whether anybody was asking for it or not. So, this sequel would come out as Rastan Saga II, or for us Americans, it would be known as Nastar Warrior. I have no idea why they bothered to change the name in the first place, but whatever, you do you, Taito.
Not gonna lie, I was actually looking forward to playing this. I thought that, since it was a sequel, it would fix up on a lot of elements from the original game, while also making it much faster, more vibrant, and more engaging to check out. After all, that is what a sequel to a game is supposed to do, right? However, then I actually ended up playing the game, and that excitement that I felt in the beginning quickly faded away. This was all for one simple reason… Rastan Saga II is FUCKING TERRIBLE, oh my god! It manages to get everything wrong in what it sets out to do, not just as a sequel, but as a game in general, and it is just overall not enjoyable whatsoever.
The story is simple as fuck, with it continuing the tale of Rastan and how he saved the kingdom of Rastania from “The Wicked Group”, which are about as uncreative and had as much thought put into them as the rest of this game (which was none at all), the graphics somehow look WORSE then the original, looking like a gross hybrid of Sega Master System and Sega Genesis graphics, and it just looks ugly as sin, even though it is “supposed” to look better then the original, the music is decent enough, I suppose, and I did enjoy the tracks that were there, but it is too bad that they use the same two tracks for almost all of the levels of the game, the control is simple enough, with there just being a jump, attack, and aim button, and while most of it is easy to get a handle on, the jumping feels absolutely horrendous, and the gameplay is basically the same as the original, except much more simple and dumbed down to where all the thought put into the original game is completely gone.
The game is a 2D hack-’n-slash platformer, where you take control of Rastan once again, go through a set of five levels through plenty of medieval settings, slash your way through many different enemies on your way, gather plenty of different weapons, items, and extra lives to help you out on your journey against the foes you will face, and take on several bosses that will… not challenge you at all, but we will get to that later. So yeah, in terms of the main gameplay itself, nothing was really changed to further enhance the main mechanics or progress the series forward. I would be bummed out about that, but I am too distracted by how GOD AWFUL everything else is.
So, for the most part, the game mechanics themselves work well enough. They feel like how an arcade platformer should, except for the fact that you walk at the speed of a slug, and the jumping is pretty terrible, being extremely heavy and imprecise most of the time, making it feel like it takes a million years to complete just one of them. But even then, you won’t have to worry about that most of the time, given the fact that the level design throughout the whole game has been completely dumbed down. Throughout the entire game, you are just slowly moving right and stabbing dudes, with you sometimes jumping across a couple of platforms and swinging across some ropes (which feels awful to do, by the way). It is just completely mindless, making you feel like you are just on a conveyor belt taking you towards to the end. To be fair, the original game didn’t have the most complex level design ever, but at least in that game, there were different layers to it, and you feel like you are compelled to approach everything in a different way.
But not only is the level design mindless, but it is also just plain bad in general. There are plenty of terrible design choices that can be seen EVERYWHERE, with enemies being placed in areas where you have no choice but to get damaged by them, and having Rastan himself being so fucking huge to the point where you have to be pixel-perfect when it comes to many different jumps that you have to make. There was one part of the game in particular that really stuck out to me, because it just perfectly encapsulates how horribly this game is designed. In Round 4, there is this platform that you have to fall down onto, but there is seemingly no way to step on it normally, and you can't fall down onto it through the space they give you. In order to actually get on this platform to progress through the game, you have to start falling down, press down to put Rastan in this one specific pose, and then at the LAST MILLI-SECOND, press right to put him in this other pose, which will have him standing on the very edge of this platform. This shit, right here, almost caused me to quit, it is one of the worst aspects of game design I have ever seen before. If you wanna see what I am talking about, check out this video and skip to the 13:41 mark, because me describing it here doesn’t do enough to describe how bad it is.
Aside from those infuriating aspects, there isn’t much else this game has going for it. Arcade syndrome is still here, where there will be plenty of enemies thrown at you to impede your progress, kill you, and waste your credits, which is always a pain to deal with, and made this more of a slog than anything else. In addition to this, the bosses that you face in the game completely suck. Sure, they can be hard enough, as you can take a lot of damage from them pretty fast, but for the most part, you can pretty much just stand there and slash at them until they explode, with no further effort needed from the player. Yeah, you’ll die a couple of times, but you will most likely still have credits, so it really isn’t that much trouble at all.
Overall, despite the main gameplay itself not being too bad, a lot of the other elements and mechanics surrounding it make this not only one of the worst sequels I have ever seen for a video game, but quite possibly the worst arcade game I have ever played in my life. Seriously, I have played through plenty of them at this point, and none of them have infuriated me as much as this game did. Do not play this, even if you were a fan of the original game, or if you are a fan of old-school medieval arcade platformers, because it fails in every single aspect of what it tries to do, and warrants no reason for anyone to check it out. And to think, they still managed to make another installment after this, despite how bad this one is. Then again, we get a new Call of Duty game every year, so this isn’t that surprising at this point.
Game #461
Not gonna lie, I was actually looking forward to playing this. I thought that, since it was a sequel, it would fix up on a lot of elements from the original game, while also making it much faster, more vibrant, and more engaging to check out. After all, that is what a sequel to a game is supposed to do, right? However, then I actually ended up playing the game, and that excitement that I felt in the beginning quickly faded away. This was all for one simple reason… Rastan Saga II is FUCKING TERRIBLE, oh my god! It manages to get everything wrong in what it sets out to do, not just as a sequel, but as a game in general, and it is just overall not enjoyable whatsoever.
The story is simple as fuck, with it continuing the tale of Rastan and how he saved the kingdom of Rastania from “The Wicked Group”, which are about as uncreative and had as much thought put into them as the rest of this game (which was none at all), the graphics somehow look WORSE then the original, looking like a gross hybrid of Sega Master System and Sega Genesis graphics, and it just looks ugly as sin, even though it is “supposed” to look better then the original, the music is decent enough, I suppose, and I did enjoy the tracks that were there, but it is too bad that they use the same two tracks for almost all of the levels of the game, the control is simple enough, with there just being a jump, attack, and aim button, and while most of it is easy to get a handle on, the jumping feels absolutely horrendous, and the gameplay is basically the same as the original, except much more simple and dumbed down to where all the thought put into the original game is completely gone.
The game is a 2D hack-’n-slash platformer, where you take control of Rastan once again, go through a set of five levels through plenty of medieval settings, slash your way through many different enemies on your way, gather plenty of different weapons, items, and extra lives to help you out on your journey against the foes you will face, and take on several bosses that will… not challenge you at all, but we will get to that later. So yeah, in terms of the main gameplay itself, nothing was really changed to further enhance the main mechanics or progress the series forward. I would be bummed out about that, but I am too distracted by how GOD AWFUL everything else is.
So, for the most part, the game mechanics themselves work well enough. They feel like how an arcade platformer should, except for the fact that you walk at the speed of a slug, and the jumping is pretty terrible, being extremely heavy and imprecise most of the time, making it feel like it takes a million years to complete just one of them. But even then, you won’t have to worry about that most of the time, given the fact that the level design throughout the whole game has been completely dumbed down. Throughout the entire game, you are just slowly moving right and stabbing dudes, with you sometimes jumping across a couple of platforms and swinging across some ropes (which feels awful to do, by the way). It is just completely mindless, making you feel like you are just on a conveyor belt taking you towards to the end. To be fair, the original game didn’t have the most complex level design ever, but at least in that game, there were different layers to it, and you feel like you are compelled to approach everything in a different way.
But not only is the level design mindless, but it is also just plain bad in general. There are plenty of terrible design choices that can be seen EVERYWHERE, with enemies being placed in areas where you have no choice but to get damaged by them, and having Rastan himself being so fucking huge to the point where you have to be pixel-perfect when it comes to many different jumps that you have to make. There was one part of the game in particular that really stuck out to me, because it just perfectly encapsulates how horribly this game is designed. In Round 4, there is this platform that you have to fall down onto, but there is seemingly no way to step on it normally, and you can't fall down onto it through the space they give you. In order to actually get on this platform to progress through the game, you have to start falling down, press down to put Rastan in this one specific pose, and then at the LAST MILLI-SECOND, press right to put him in this other pose, which will have him standing on the very edge of this platform. This shit, right here, almost caused me to quit, it is one of the worst aspects of game design I have ever seen before. If you wanna see what I am talking about, check out this video and skip to the 13:41 mark, because me describing it here doesn’t do enough to describe how bad it is.
Aside from those infuriating aspects, there isn’t much else this game has going for it. Arcade syndrome is still here, where there will be plenty of enemies thrown at you to impede your progress, kill you, and waste your credits, which is always a pain to deal with, and made this more of a slog than anything else. In addition to this, the bosses that you face in the game completely suck. Sure, they can be hard enough, as you can take a lot of damage from them pretty fast, but for the most part, you can pretty much just stand there and slash at them until they explode, with no further effort needed from the player. Yeah, you’ll die a couple of times, but you will most likely still have credits, so it really isn’t that much trouble at all.
Overall, despite the main gameplay itself not being too bad, a lot of the other elements and mechanics surrounding it make this not only one of the worst sequels I have ever seen for a video game, but quite possibly the worst arcade game I have ever played in my life. Seriously, I have played through plenty of them at this point, and none of them have infuriated me as much as this game did. Do not play this, even if you were a fan of the original game, or if you are a fan of old-school medieval arcade platformers, because it fails in every single aspect of what it tries to do, and warrants no reason for anyone to check it out. And to think, they still managed to make another installment after this, despite how bad this one is. Then again, we get a new Call of Duty game every year, so this isn’t that surprising at this point.
Game #461
Taito with the bold approach here, taking the sequel to their smash hit RASTAN and choosing to make it really ugly and bad. Looks and feels like it was secretly done by Americans? Made for Nick Arcade-ass looking game. Good music, though.
Some of the enemy sprites are pretty cool. [END OF INTERESTING THINGS TO SAY ABOUT RASTAN SAGA II]
This game is hilarious in how bad it is. It makes no sense to how went from a decent action game to this. I reccomend paying no money for this but emulation or if you have Taito legends 2 its worth a laugh.