I only found out this game existed a couple of years ago as my interest in the Sakura Wars franchise grew thanks to work by fans on patches bringing them over to the West in English for the first time. Sakura Wars: Go Forth Young Cadet! as translated is kind of an interesting game. It seems to be set during the latter half of the first Sakura Wars game (1996) and to be honest I feel that playing that first is a necessary perquisite to play this. Knowing the characters makes a huge difference.

You play the role of a young unnamed candidate with high spirit power scouted by Vice Commander Ayame Fujieda of the Imperial Assault Troupe. If successfully chosen you are invited to a month long trial with the troupe to see how you perform. The premise is kind of...odd to be honest. This is never mentioned in any form to my knowledge anywhere else (so probably isn't regarded as cannon?) and recruiting someone off the street for only 30 days to teach them everything about a top secret military unit hidden in the heart of Tokyo with no intention of keeping them permanently? It seems a little tactically unsound.

Regardless the premise sets up for a clean slate to meet the girls from the unit and spend time with them either training or just socially. The cadet has several attributes to manage over the 30 days. Stamina, Intellect, Spirit Power, Guts, Agility and Accuracy. You can spend time training up to twice a day to improve these at the cost of stamina or skip a training session to recover your stamina by having a nap (as apparently sleeping over night doesn't do that?). At the end of the 30 days you are given a rank based on your performance. I got rated as an Usher though the description made that sound like a positive thing at least.

The morning training sessions are mapped out for you over the course of a week training with Sakura, Sumire, Kanna, Iris, Kohran, or Maria. Each character builds up a different stat and you can choose who to train with in the afternoons if you want to specialise further. At the end of each week you have a mock battle in one of the Koubu mechs. It's a turn based affair with which Koubu you choose being directed by the stats you've built or relationships you want to increase further.

This is where the game comes across as a little odd again because it takes the almost dating sim / visual novel elements of the main game with talking with the girls in-between training. You select dialogue options on how to respond resulting in neutral, positive or negative retorts. At times it's a bit flirty but will never go anywhere due to set ups from the original game. The girls are spread all over the theatre you all work from in the morning, noon and evening though there is no way to tell who they are until you begin the conversation. If you build up a good enough relationship with a character you will get extra scenes and endings with them. I focused on Sakura to see most of hers. Some conversations will give you minigames to play like shooting targets or hitting wood blocks with swords as the most interactive part of the whole game. Some conversations will also lead to instant game overs which was irritating. In my case on my recent run I ended up with some permanent damage from a situation I couldn't get rid of and there is no way in most cases of knowing a possible outcome. In that conversation it was instant game over or permanent stat damage as my two options having rewound on emulation to see.

I really dislike the trial and error nature of the visual novel having such frustrating effects with no way of knowing and it's not that frequent that it's possible to play through without even knowing they are there. So when it does happen it's like a bolt out of nowhere. Whilst it is designed to have multiple play throughs to see all events (Someone trying the worst possible run without game overs amuses me) in it's short play length. Having the character icons on the map hidden at a cost of 5000 points per girl when a single playthrough only earns you 2000 is one hell of a grind. (Though this game also had an extra peripheral of a modified Tamagotchi called pocket Sakura that worked as a pedometer to gain points for the shop when connected to your gameboy) You can also buy music, voice clips and bromide pictures of the girls from the shop for these points too.

This brings me to my last point and the most impressive is the production values. Maybe because it's more visual novel than game but Sakura Wars on the Gameboy colour looks and sounds phenomenal for the system. The character sprites, art design and backgrounds are so far of anything else I've seen on the system. They really did manage to bring the game to a portable without losing the aesthetic that makes this series what it is. the music transitions amazingly well too. The theme title is instantly recognisable albeit without the singing. Other Tracks from the original game transition just as well.

So an odd game in some ways but I must admit despite that I kind of like it? It's technically extremely impressive and getting to spend more time with the Sakura Wars cast on a platform I didn't think was capable of capturing the essence was a pleasant surprise. I hope Sakura Taisen GB2 gets translated at some point in the future as I understand that is more of a dungeon crawler so would be interested to know how it fares.

+ Amazing visuals and music considering the platform limitations.
+ Getting to spend more time with the Sakura Wars cast is great for fans.
+ Lots of replayability and things to unlock.

- Some instant game overs just aren't fun.
- The unlockable extras to navigate the game easier are way too expensive.
- Game's story premise seems slightly out of place in the grand scheme of things.

The first Phantasy Star on the Sega Master System was a surprise to me. Maybe it's a feeling I had that because it was the oldest one in the series on an earlier console it would be bad? It's dated in many ways but bad? Not even close. Impressive art, music and technical feats on the system made it a really fun little game. The second Phantasy Star title is equally a surprise to me but literally in the polar opposite direction. I assumed because it was on the megadrive it and a sequel it would be an improvement on everything laid before it.

I was wrong.

I actually kind of actively hate this game and I just didn't expect that going in. The story starts with an interesting premise. Set 1000 years after Phantasy Star the Algol star system is ruled by a super computer called Mother Brain that has made every decision for it's residents. Controlling everything to make their lives easy but when something goes wrong they are not equipped to deal with it. As an agent of the governor you are chosen to find out the cause behind a new wave of monsters appearing due to Mother Brain not taking action. I like the idea a lot of people becoming too dependent to act on their own though the game never feels like that in the actual world.

The 80s/90s anime sci-fi visual design is still quite striking. Characters have mixture of, knives, boomerangs, magic, laser swords and plasma pistols in a mixture of high fantasy and sci-fi. It's a great blend the game works well cohesively with the character designs of shoulder pads and big hair dos with obvious Star Wars influences. Whilst I like the art and atmosphere I did find it actually less impressive from a technical standpoint than it's predecessor. The dungeons losing their first person view into the more traditional top down exploration with that was disappointing though, but that's the least of the dungeons problems.

They. Are. Terrible.

Initially they aren't too bad but as the game progressed further and further my drive to continue lessened with my progress. Each dungeon is a giant sprawling maze filled with warp points zooming you from floor to floor. It's full of unrewarding dead ends and twists with no in game map to help you navigate the labyrinthine nightmares. It's no wonder on release the game came with a guide book with a walkthrough and maps, they knew. I followed an online walkthrough in the end because I couldn't see myself brute forcing through without one. At one point the guide describes a new dungeon you come to as: "The first floor has no less than 69 chutes leading up to the next floor (No, I'm not kidding. There really are 69 chutes. Stop laughing.)" and many later are even worse. In an interview in 1993 whilst promoting Phantasy Star IV the game designer Kotaro Hayashida discusses Phantasy Star II and when asked about the dungeons he is translated as stating:

"Another issue was related to the dungeons, which were created by a new employee. Because he was new, he put a ton of effort into the maps and kind of overdid it… the game became more about the complex dungeons than anything else. I think you really see that on the Dezolis dungeons. They were really well done, and when Chieko Aoki saw them she didn’t want all the new employee’s work to be for naught, so we ended up using those maps… albeit with some mixed feelings. They contributed to the latter half of the game being unbalanced"

I agree with this though think Phantasy Star II being generally unbalanced from the get go. Due to the huge twisting warping bland looking dungeons and encounters every two steps the amount of combat in the game is kind of staggering. The amount of experience you get from them though is pitiful to the point that grinding and battling over and over just to gain one level up that does little towards improving your overall strength made the experience of playing extremely tedious. (Fans have created a double money, double experience hack due to this) I was even using fast forward playing this on the Playstation 4 Megadrive collection so god only knows how it would have felt at the original speed. To compound matters the games combat feels slightly unwieldly but to it's credit also a little ahead of it's time in some ways. There is a button to fight where the party will just auto combat each turn. In between you can manually select orders to the team to make them use spells, items or defend but it means going through extra menu steps each time unnecessarily. The menus generally feel kind of poorly implemented and equipping items, giving them to each other or using healing spells outside of battle was irritating every time. Despite all of this I did continue on as I wanted to see all the game had to offer only to reach an ending that actually made me think all the effort flat wasn't worth it.

In the same interview mentioned above on shupcompilations they discuss the game originally being made on the Master System then changed and ported in an extremely short amount of time. It sounds like it was a miracle and hard work the game came out at all to which I respect them greatly. I'm glad I finally finished the first RPG released on the Sega Megadrive and such a pillar of gaming history I was missing. It doesn't change my opinion though that Phantasy Star II is actually pretty poorly designed and not actually very fun to play.

As a Sega fan, retro gaming fan and RPG fan, this hurt to write. Half a star for the art design though, especially the cover art. Hitoshi Yoneda's work is stunning.

+ I like the story premise.
+ The ingame art design and promotional artwork is wonderful with a blend of high fantast and tech heavy sci-fi.

- It has possible the worst dungeons of the nearly 150 JRPGs I have played. Extremely tedious. Every one made me want to quit.
- It's a huge grind but feels unrewarding with it.
- Story is generally unsatisfying.

Nottolot is part of a Namco Bandai programme to help give experience to some of it's junior developers. The games are published on steam for free for people to try and gain feedback, The first batch of games were initially released in Japan only with the three 2024 titles (Nottolot, Doronko Wanko and Boomeroad) being released internationally for everyone to play.

Of the three games the one that interested me the most was Nottolot. As a fan of Sci-fi, Wall-E and Astrobot the appeal of a cute robot escaping it's production factory to see the sky should be immediately apparent. First thing I need to highlight is this game will start in Japanese but thanks to other steam users advice it does have an English menu option. (In order to change it to English click on the second menu tab, here are the options and now go to the last menu tab at the bottom and change it to English.)

The game itself once that is sorted is extremely simple. Your robot, Rolly is a ball that can jump, dash, move around by...rolling and hack as a small set of abilities. You need to sneak and solve some basic puzzles on the way across three stages that in total take about an hours playtime. As you travel through the production facility there are plenty of other robots that are on alert for you. There isn't really any stealth needed though getting in their line of sight is an issue but fortunately Rolly can hack other robots inserting itself in their back socket and taking control of them making it invisible to the other robots. Whilst controlling them there is a timer for how long you can control them before being thrown out and the robot exploding though you can do the same of your own accord any time. There are three robot types to control, a little walker, a flyers and spiders. Each robot (apart from giving Rolly invisibility) is needed to pass certain basic puzzles to get keycards to go to the next area. Switches, platforms and lasers mostly involving the robots. Walkers can go over electrified panels without damage, flyers can reach areas others can't and pick up and drop walkers and spiders can crawl along certain walls and ceilings. None of the puzzles are remotely hard and the little game feels very family friendly in both gameplay and art design.

The visuals are cute and crisp. Rolly itself despite being just a ball with eyes is quite a cool little character. He has a nice animation where if you stop rolling around he will hop onto the side so his face is forward rather than at the ground or sky I thought was a nice touch. The whole game is set in the production facility but it comes across as unrealistically super sleek with bright clean metal panels, pipes and boxes. It has a nice visual style where everything is clear to see.

For free this was a great little experience and like an extremely well polished student project in some ways. I don't feel that scoring a free project made for developers to gain experience is the right way to do this so I will just say I had fun during it's playtime. The art style and gameplay mechanics have quite a lot of potential and I would love to see an expanded version of this with more robots, puzzles, chase scenes, areas and mechanics.