What I can only describe as relentlessly addicting. Judging by the admittedly cheap-looking presentation, it seems like this would be another bare-bones Facebook game formula that by no means should be anything more than forgettable shovelware - but instead this employs one of the most aggressive "Okay, just one more..." mentalities I've ever seen in a puzzle game (to the point where I swore it was my last try 12 consecutive times in a row and suddenly an hour of my day was missing). Just impossible to put down, constant fast-paced frenetic thinking where you can't put your guard down for even a second or it's all over in a flash. Even on easy mode some of the later stages offer a real challenge, and all three modes are excellent. Shame this got ripped off into obscurity because this has been one of my favorite puzzle games for years. Always a good pick-up-and-play blast.

I added this game to igdb so I could log it here (apologies for the horribly formatted cover they have those strict requirements remember) so I thought I should say something at all.
This is the first game I've finished in Japanese, and I wrote about the contradictions of that experience here, it's rough and messy i didn't really have much time but it's there if you're interested: https://zweiteturm.neocities.org/posts/2023-01-17-overlapping-through-translation
It was somewhat interesting to me how this game is very specifically designed around the gendered play of clothing, so for me who is relatively comfortable in a specific aesthetic and presentation it often felt limiting and running into the rough edges of a mid 2000s doujin adventure game where I had to do /things/ for the sake of doing them in order to progress even if it didn't match how I conceived of my gendered self. Interesting little piece of history, at least. I got Yuu's ending.

Abstracting and replicating patterns in harmonizing ways are some of humanity's greatest strengths as a species. Everyone knows nothing is created and that it’s all transformed, but the way in which we apply this logic in creating media is what determines whether our names shall be salvaged by history books or left to rot alongside us. When a groundbreaking title, such as a videogame, is released, everyone wants to have a piece of their own, inevitably trying to subtract what was essential for its success and applying it in different areas, in the hopes of either improving the new established norm or trying to find some success with different audiences drawn out by its newly attained fame. We always fail to take into consideration however, that even the most revolutionary discoveries like gravity, needed some sort of apple like object from somewhere else, to be fully remodeled into a genuine theory.

Dodonpachi, the cult bullet hell from ‘97 didn’t invent the shmup wheel by any means, but it improved on it massively, to the point that the symbol of the game, a quirked up bee, slowly became a cult icon for gaming as a whole. Taking direct inspiration from what it worked previously from games beloved by the recently formed STG fans, it abstracted what worked from games made by Toaplan and Raizing, to produce what some consider to be one of the most important titles to the genre of all time. One of the areas in which Dodonpachi is really memorable, is the story which it tells, mostly because you are treated with no explanations ingame for what's happening until shit hits the fan. The style in which Cave would later adopt regarding exposition would improve in their subsequent titles, however the lack of questions answered in obtuse narratives was not only kept as an already established genre tradition, but was also utterly solidified as one, as the question "Why copy this part too, sir?" wasn't asked enough times.

A lot of classic 90's and 00’s shoot ‘em ups have stories that pass flashing by as remnants of a proper one, due to the nature of how arcade titles were consumed, and how expensive it was to produce cutscenes, usually being reserved for openings made solely to attract new players. What is happening to the characters during the screen flashes of ESP Ra.De? Who are they fighting for in Progear? What do Ikaruga passages between levels tell me about the world? Even games that try to be more in your face, without the previously established archaic arcade limitations, that uphold proper dialogue such as Zero Ranger, Radiant Silvergun and the Touhou series, still give a sensation that something you can’t quite point out is missing whenever you think about the grand scheme of things, almost as if you joined a movie in the second half. The narrative of a classic shmup game are most of the time just the aesthetics, and that's not necessarily bad.

By being exposed to small glimpses of the situation your character finds themselves in, only the pastiche of war stories such as Aces High or Secret Invasion, and other heroic warfare tales being told by shonen anime lenses, remain. In the end it wouldn’t make much of a difference, would it? Your very nature as a player of just assuming the position of an underwhelmingly small war machine, bravely dismantling a whole army just by yourself, requires no explanations, instead just being relegated to something similar as the climax of a mindless yet amazingly produced power fantasy movie. Of course, not all games need to have complex stories (or stories at all), but it makes me wonder if this was a deliberate artistic choice or one made to maximize profit. I believe this unpronounceable title to be the first legitimate subversive shmup story, but to properly explain that let’s talk first about this genre's conventions.

Both in game and in the menus, your eyes will be assaulted by 28 different symbols that substitute not only our usual aramaic alphabet, but our precious arabic numbers as well. Trying to understand what’s happening in the game might seem like an easy task at first if you ignore the dialogue, however eventually you’ll notice that the alien appearance of the game also extends to the way your trusty weapon works. You only have 2 buttons besides the one that pauses, one for shooting and one for switching weapons, which I’ll be calling the cross arrangement since it has no official name and because I think it sounds cool (also because until you master it, you better pray for it).

The way the cross arrangement works is that you’ll spend approximately half a second without shooting and the last input in which you pressed (moving, shooting or even doing nothing at all) will change your shooting pattern, from wide, to more focused, aimed backwards, X shaped, auto guiding… and so on. Early on you have 4 patterns to which you can transition easily, however you can find up to 24 more by shooting on the screen in some specific areas to unlock way more, expanding in your options. Ranging from a curse and a blessing, you might panic sometimes not knowing to which pattern you can transition from. It’s a very unique sensation that I felt during a desperate struggle to maintain control of my own weapons, in an increasingly difficult double edged overly complicated system.

There is a menu dedicated to leveling up, however because you can’t interpret what’s on screen, it’s a question of trying to decipher how far off from getting an upgrade you are. Even worse, if you gather points by playing solely the last levels, the algorithm doesn’t bend back to upgrade your early necessities, in an incredibly bizarre way that feels like you can only buy such upgrades if you have enough money, but not too much in your wallet. Applying and understanding how each and everyone works (except the obligatory life upgrade), is another challenge in itself, even after beating the game 2 times to make this review, I still don’t properly understand what they do. Googling for help the day before was hilarious, because not only I was trying to understand a really cryptic and specific tool in the game, but also I couldn’t find a way to look for the title’s name itself, as just searching ‘_____’ showed me results similar to the peculiar I’m Feeling Lucky button.

The way in which the story is told is not exactly what you think it is from such an offbeat shoot ‘em up. Riding through different planets with small transitions only to fight against seemingly similar enemies from the ones before, just to encounter a rival that fights using your own moves while speaking complete gibberish, is something that feels oddly familiar, even if you can’t point out a specific title that does it. The alienation to which we have been exposed to STG narratives existed even in its infancy in the 80’s, when it was filled to the brim with nonspecific all-encompassing space odysseys, striking back once again with added relatively modern shmup anime lenses from the 90’s and 00’s laid back game design choices of continuing in a multitude of ways, to the mix. The proper ending of the game made it all worth it, explaining not only the stylistic choices found in this peculiar galaxy adventure, but also the very nature of this game release, which I won’t spoil because I think it is particularly genius. Consider this a challenge to beat the game, for everyone who’s reading.

For a title to have such a unique and hard way to find, it sure was made by a studio that covers itself with unusual stylistic choices aimed directly at those who end up stumbling on the title, like someone who just found out a secret pile of gold. Just to give some small context about Platine Dispositif, they had a game vanish from Steam, in which you had to unlock the ability to walk. Obscurity by choice in a game that plays itself as being an abstracted version of repeating the genre’s usual staples while still carrying purposefully unfamiliar visuals and mechanics that forces you to abstract the genre’s conventions on your own, is what some may call ‘art’. Being inventive even in the way in which it was released, as to having such a name that the only video I could find about it attached a "?" to the game’s title, is a very unfamiliar sensation in the medium of video games. From a regurgitating genre full of familiar sameness, this unpronounceable title shines, in the bottom of everyone’s obscure radar, as a certified shmup ultra obscure classic.

Now, pray and tell me oh local Backloggd user.

How did you even find this page?

A friend told me about this game around the time I was finishing up Necromancer. I like to consider myself fairly familiar with the Super Nintendo’s library, and so I was quite surprised that there was an RPG of all things on the system that I just had no memory of hearing about before. She told me it was a favorite of a friend of hers when they were little, and they called it a forgotten classic. While always skeptical of such claims, I tried to go in with an open mind as I always do. Opinions seemed quite split for this game online, and I tend to fall on the more favorable side of such things when I end up playing games with this kind of split reputation. Regardless, now that I’m done with it, I’ll just say that I certainly wish I could see this game as a forgotten classic! XD. The game doesn’t record your playtime, and I slowly made my way through it over a couple weeks, so I reckon that it took me around 25~30 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game using emulated hardware (and liberal savestate and speed up use in particular areas I’ll get to later).

Paladin’s Quest is, ironically, not the story of a paladin at all (though given that this is an Enix-localized game in English, it’s unsurprising that the translation is kinda crap XP). The Japanese title is Lennus: Kodai Kikai No Kiroku (Lennus: Memory of the Ancient Machine), and it’s far more accurate in its description of the game’s contents. The game takes place on the world of Lennus, and you play as Chezuni, a young boy attending a magic school. One day, his younger friend Ducas dares him to enter the forbidden tower on campus. Not one to back down from a challenge, Chezuni goes with Ducas into the tower where he ends up almost immediately accidentally activating an ancient, evil machine that beats him up. Upon regaining consciousness, Chezuni is informed by the school’s principal that the entire academy has been destroyed and all the staff and students KILLED by the ancient machine he woke up, and he’s now the only one who can stop it!

This game is from late 1992, so it probably won’t amaze you when I say that the story isn’t particularly incredible. That said, it’s frankly got some pretty steep competition in that regard, as Super Famicom RPGs really started picking up that year. Final Fantasy V, Dragon Quest V, Shin Megami Tensei 1, and even Hero Senki (that Gundam X Kamen Rider X Ultraman licensed RPG I played a year or two ago) all came out that same year. Paladin’s Quest ends up falling behind all of them, to be perfectly frank. While the story does have some cool reveals and twists, it doesn’t have much at all in the way of character. It sorta tries to have an overarching theme, but the narrative as a whole really struggles to make much of an impression in large part due to just how slowly paced it feels.

It’s mostly just another RPG where you go from town to town solving problems and collecting Big Plot items here and there, and then things ratchet up near the end until the story finally comes to a close. It’s so by the book that it honestly feels far more like an 8-bit RPG that was pushed forward onto 16-bit hardware without much consideration to how the narrative would need to be changed to accommodate greater hardware and storage capacities. This isn’t a badly written game by the standards of the time, sure, but it wouldn’t have been anything impressive then, and it certainly isn’t going to be anything impressive now either.

Mechanically, Paladin’s Quest has a lot of interesting and clever design choices that almost make it a compelling choice for a beginner’s RPG (in the same way something like Earthbound or Super Mario RPG did on the same system). While you have relatively standard turn-based combat, the actual way you navigate combat is very fast and snippy due to how you actually barely need button pressed to navigate battle menus. Just pressing the four cardinal directions on the D-pad will select any option you could want in battle, and you only really need the B button if you want a dedicated cancel key. It takes a little getting used to, but given that you can also even rebind the buttons from the options menu, this is a game that gives the player an unusually large ability to customize their experience, particularly for the time it was released.

Additionally, the game’s battle system is quite simplified (even for the time), as it lacks any kind of MP system. Instead, casting spells simply consumes HP. While this does mean that you never have any HP healing spells, it also means that your healing is instead all tied to items in the form of HP bottles of varying strengths. The game has quite a lot of spells, but very few total items. You actually can’t even use items in battle outside of the bottle you’ve equipped to that particular character’s belt slot.

Farther simplifying things still (in a sense), you only have two out of your four party members to worry about equipment for. Chezuni and his friend Midia are your two permanent party members, while your other two slots will be filled in by either temporary plot-mandatory party members or the much more common mercenaries that you get to tag along with you. Some of these mercenaries have odd or unfortunate downsides (two or three are basically traps), most of them are simple, straightforward upgrades to previous ones. However, if you like a particular mercenary, you don’t necessarily even need to get rid of them! While you can’t change equipment or buy new spells for a merc, they level up with EXP just like your main two party members do. Equipment doesn’t actually boost your stats that much in the first place, truthfully, so just getting another level or two instead of worrying about new armor or weapons will often keep an old favorite merc just as strong if not stronger than a new merc might’ve been (at least until the very late game).

Bundle all of that together with how relatively short and straightforward dungeons are and how relatively well signposted the story is, and you have a simple, approachable RPG to help any newbie get into the genre... at least in theory ^^; While I started out with lukewarm but still positive feelings towards Paladin’s Quest’s design, the devil is in the details, and they really came out more and more as I got further and further into the game. There are a few fairly major design choices that really bring down the gameplay experience of Paladin’s Quest to the point that it very well might end up scaring off as many RPG newbies as it invites in.

On the more minor end of things, we have the menu and UI design. While not bad in and of itself, it’s very cumbersome both in and out of battle. Everything being D-pad based makes things easy for doing stuff with one hand, which I certainly appreciate, but it also means you’re doing a lot more button presses with far less efficiency than you would be if you were using both the D-pad and face buttons like a more normal game does. Out of battle, healing is done by going into your inventory and using the healing bottles you’ve got, but after every use, it closes your inventory completely. Given that you’re usually using like 4 or 5 or more charges of these things per healing session, that makes for a very big pain in the butt to lick your wounds after any major fight.

Difficulty in and of itself is a weird thing as well. The game has very little in the way of bosses (much like was the case with old Dragon Quest RPGs and such things). Until the final boss (who is a truly miserable slog and where I did all that aforementioned save state abuse), there’s barely a truly challenging fight through the whole game as far as mandatory fights go. Encounter design, however, is really messed up to heck and back. The end of the game is absolutely lousy with miserably tanky and hard-hitting enemy packs who will often take five or more minutes per encounter to put down (and the encounter rate is not nearly low enough to make that reasonable), but that is in no way an anomaly. In just about every other area, you’ll always be running into really mean packs of enemies who are way stronger and more annoying than anything else in the area who take forever to put down. The battle system just isn’t dynamic or deep enough to make these long, drawn out combats fun or interesting, and it makes random battles a real chore very fast (and they basically never improve).

The biggest problem, however, is one that weighs down on all others, and that’s the way the magic system works. In a rather unusual move for the time, Paladin’s Quest actually has no dedicated “intelligence”-type of stat that in most games would scale your magic power higher as you level up. You also don’t actually learn new spells from leveling up either. Instead, magic as a system is effectively completely segregated off from the power curve of leveling up and split into eight different stat bars (one for each magic element). As you progress through the game, you’ll slowly accumulate more elements you can draw from, and gaining a new element will saddle you with a big new pile of spells for both of your main characters as elements automatically mix to make new spells (getting the water element when you already have earth will give you the water + earth spell, for example).

It’s already very annoying that you can’t actually check what your huge list of spells does in battle. You can only check them in the stats screen out side of battle. However, far more annoying than that is how these spells actually power up. One use of a spell will increase the power of that spell’s element by one point. The higher your power in a particular spell, the more your offensive AND defensive power for that particular element increases (so if you want to have a higher natural defense from lightning magic, you better get spamming lightning spells). However, while your normal levels actually increase fairly quickly, your magic affinities increase extremely slowly, and it just comes off feeling like a fool’s errand to try and power any of them up. Add in that magic as a whole tends to do pretty pitiful amounts of damage even with your points in an element completely maxed out, and you have a system that’s a real pain in the butt to try and interact with much (especially when what you’re trying to defend against is some element you don’t have yet or, in some cases, can never possibly actually acquire).

How that magic stuff interacts with that wonky difficulty is also a fairly major sticking point with me for this game. Because the game lacks much in the way of bosses, it’s hard to actually know just how over or under powered you really are. While a more typical RPG from the time would have you grinding until you can safely progress through an area without healing all that much, that’s not really the case in Paladin’s Quest. Your healing reserves run SO deep because your spells consume HP, virtually every dungeon in the game is more of a question of “how deep are your healing resources and are you brave enough to just keep going, trusting that they’ll not run out?” more than how resistant to enemy attacks you really are. This can mean that when you actually do get to some huge fact mulching boss (particularly the final boss), it can come off as a real shock even if you’ve been not running away from encounters and have the best gear you possibly can (as I was).

All in all, the gameplay is just really uninteresting and tedious. If the game weren’t very hard, then the simplicity wouldn’t really be an issue worth mentioning, but because the game actually does get not just hard, but very time consuming, we end up with a big negative feedback loop of boring: slow trudging battles to slow monotonous healing to dull interesting story, rinse and repeat for 20+ hours.

The aesthetics are quite pretty and striking, at least in the visuals. I don’t think saying that the graphics look primitive really gets across well enough how they look. It’s almost like they went for a minimalist style that was still 16-bit in nature (what a friend and I dubbed as looking like from a “12-bit” console, halfway between 8-bit and 16-bit). Monster design and world design overall are very cool and unique, and at the very least for visuals, the game doesn’t fail to live up to expectations for a game from late ’92. The music is all around okay, but nothing special. It uses some interesting instruments for its tracks that certainly made them stand out a bit more at first exposure, but there just really aren’t that many songs in the first place. What’s there isn’t bad, but I’d struggle to call any of it particularly good or memorable (especially comparing it to other RPG OSTs that were gracing the SFC that same year).

Verdict: Not Recommended. I was fully planning to ultimately hesitantly recommend this game until the last 1/3rd of it or so, at which point it just really started to sink in just how poorly put together the whole thing was. While it’s not a crime to not excel at anything in particular and just provide an approachable, competent experience for beginners, it really starts being a problem once it starts getting frustrating and boring, and that’s a sin that Paladin’s Quest is absolutely guilty of. It even had me fondly remembering the mind-numbing grinding of Necromancer, which was what really pushed it over the edge for me that this was something I just really couldn’t recommend at all XD. Simply put: Your time is worth more than what you’ll spend playing through Paladin’s Quest. Paladin’s Quest would’ve been underwhelming and filled with outdated, mean design even back when it came out, and time has been nothing but more and more unkind to it since. Do yourself a favor and look elsewhere for your SFC RPG fun times, as there is no hidden classic waiting for you in Paladin’s Quest, just something that’s unremembered for very valid and fair reasons.

A strong argument against this lingering notion that many gamers seem to have that a fan-made “fixed” remake, remaster or otherwise invasive revision of a game that actively changes core aspects of its identity should ever be taken in as a first impression of, or worse replacement for, an original work of art. And to be perfectly clear, I don’t believe that on any step of the development and production of Black Mesa that Crowbar Collective sought for this to be the intent nor the response to their work. Above all else, Crowbar are very obviously fans of Half-Life, and that passion shines through even from an outside observation of the time, effort, and communication the team put into creating this reimagining. I am also a big fan of Half-Life. That is, a big fan of Half-Life, the 1998 game. The other titles in the franchise haven’t ever quite worked for me the way the first one did, but I can of course acknowledge their very real and important place in both the history of Valve Software and of course the greater gaming industry and its progress at large. With that in mind, the permeating thought I simply couldn’t get out of my head with every later-entry-adjacent puzzle, every bombastic music cue, every chopped-in tie to the later Half-Life series, was that the developers and I were fans of the original game for flat out contradictory reasons.

I would say that I overall had a fairly good time with Black Mesa, but if I were to go down the list of pros and cons of the experience and then proceed to skin that list of the stuff provided by the original Half-Life, I think the list of positives is rather short. I’d like to address those first, because I want to come off at least somewhat positive about an experience I overall… liked. Some of the supplementary radio dialogue did well to add context without feeling invasive to the tone of Half-Life, especially late into the HECU breach as the Xen aliens begin to take over the rest of Black Mesa. I was happy to see the entire Half-Life tool-kit accounted for - Black Mesa was not so revisionist as to excise a weapon or two for the sake of streamlining the experience. Most play rather well but I do feel a greater imbalance was created leading players to favor the shotgun and SMG, which while fun to use shouldn’t and didn’t feel as overwhelmingly obvious selections in most scenarios in the 1998 title. I think the initial Tentacle encounter is probably a little better than the original game as far as detection of sound makers. For all the many, many issues I would have with this game’s take on Xen, I will admit that the abandoned base early on was really cool and felt in line with something the original game could’ve done tonally. And… that’s about where my Black Mesa-specific positives end, unfortunately.

I wish I didn't even need to acknowledge technical problems, but the loading times were worse than the original, my saves got corrupted like four or five times through a single playthrough, and sometimes flags just didn't work several times in a row. Much as I'd love to say these were my biggest issues with this project, sadly they're more of a negligible piece sitting in front of my actual, core problems with Black Mesa.

The overwhelmingly tone-deaf approach to reimagining Half-Life that plagues Black Mesa makes almost every change hard to swallow. I feel as if Half-Life was treated as a game to be ashamed of its own unique tonal identity in the execution of Black Mesa, given how many changes were contingent to keeping pace with the rest of the lesser entries of the series which would follow. And even then, I certainly can’t say that Half-Life 2, Opposing Force, or any of the other entries got nearly as bombastic and maximalist as this. Epic gamer metal tunes blast through previously alienating and uncomfortable hallways and gauntlets. Previously quiet and pensive strolls are stopped in their tracks for far less meaningful interactions than those they emulate from Half-Life 2. Tense, brief, but memorable boss encounters are stretched to the point of nearly a fucking hour at their very worst - frankly, the Gonarch encounter is embarrassingly bad. The entire heart and soul of some of Half-Life’s most curious locations is sucked out and spat out - is this supposed to be Xen, or application art to work on the next Avatar film? It’s frustrating how passionate this piece of art is, because there’s clearly a lack of mutual ground I share with why the game it’s trying to reimagine is so special.

Over twenty-five years after the original release of Half-Life, it remains my favorite first-person shooter ever made. It’s just as fresh, just as alien, just as unique as it was in 1998. Thanks to a massive rewrite of the sequel from its original 2001 concept and the subsequent influence it would have on both the remainder of Half-Life as a series and the greater market of first-person shooters, Half-Life remains one of a kind. There really is nothing quite like it. Black Mesa takes that ball, runs with it, and proceeds to make it feel more and more similar to everything else out there. The game is reimagined, but the heart is lost in the process. And no amount of polish can piece that together once it’s scrubbed out. That’s just my take on it, though. I really do send all the hardworking and passionate individuals at Crowbar my earnest congratulations. I respect the dedication, the execution, the grind. It clearly impressed Valve well enough, too. Keep making games, no matter what. Don’t let my equally passionate love for Half-Life put your flame out.

For this month's TR centered around Camelot-developed games, I had a few games to choose from, but I decided to go with the earliest one I had, the original Shining Force. Thankfully for me, it was recently released on the Switch Online Genesis service, so I played it there. It took me about 19.5 hours to play through the English version of the game with very limited save-state and rewind use (only used it a couple times when the fiddly UI made me end a turn when I hadn't meant to XP).

You play as Max, a knight in training in the tiny kingdom of Guardiana, whose life is suddenly thrown into disarray when the evil kingdom of Runefaust invades. Runefaust seeks to unleash the ancient Dark Dragon and destroy the world, but it's up to Max and his team, the titular Shining Force, to put a stop to the Runefaust's evil machinations. The story is pretty straightforward for a fantasy story of the time, but it's remarkable in just how excellently its translated for 1993. A colorful world full of silly characters and fun quips (from a talking space-hamster to a bunch of centaurs to an armadillo man in a steam-mech suit) make the world of Rune a very memorable one.

The gameplay of Shining Force is a strategy RPG very much like Fire Emblem (a series also in its infancy at the time, as FE2 predates this game by only about a week), and reads very much like Sega's answer to Fire Emblem. Very much like Fire Emblem, you (effectively) have different classes of units composed to NPCs you recruit throughout the game, these units level up semi-randomly upon level-up, and they can equip weapons to make themselves stronger. Unlike Fire Emblem, Camelot decided to lean more into the RPG aspect of things rather than the strategy, having towns you can walk around and talk to NPCs in, mages that learn spells with levels rather than items, and simply buying items that have no durability, but there are also a lot of less than ideal consequences to that.

But first, let's start with some good and welcome innovations (or at the very least things I like) compared to Fire Emblem. First of all, there is no perma-death in Shining Force. If an ally goes down, they can be resurrected for super cheap back in town if you get a game over (i.e. your main character is taken out) or win the battle. There are also virtually no consequences for getting a game over, as you just get sent back to the last church you saved at but keep all of the items and experience you gained in your last encounter. Being able to level grind like this is a really cool feature in a game with semi-random level-ups and lots of characters (many of whom are admittedly not worth using). You also don't recruit characters in battle, and recruitment is always done in towns by just talking to people. Even level-ups have a really nice feature in that they have a built-in stabilizer for just how many bad level-ups you can get. If you're stuck with a few bad levels in a row, you're much more likely for the next one to give you BIG bonuses to get you to where the game thinks you "should" be at that particularly level. These are all really nice features that make the game, on a surface level at least, a very welcoming and forgiving experience compared to the (certainly at the time) far more brutal SRPG of Fire Emblem.

However, Camelot make a lot of baffling and (I would argue) bad choice in their further RPG-ifying of Fire Emblem's formula. First and foremost above all of them is how turn order is handled. The order each character goes in is determined by their respective speed stat combined with some hidden RNG, and this effectively means that you have no idea when a character's turn is coming. You can get an idea sometimes, if you're in a map with only a few enemies, but in larger maps, an enemy very well might get two turns and run forward to snipe your character before you had any meaningful chance to react. There are global turns limiting this (so they at least can't get like, three turns in a row), but with how hard many enemies hit and how hard the game can be at times, that's pretty cold comfort. This is made an even further problem by having no real way to tell how far an enemy can move, as while you can see their movement stats, you can't see how terrain affects it, so you can only hazard a guess at how safe you are from any given enemy. The game also lacks counterattacks of any kind (automatic or otherwise, at least so far as I experienced), so if you aren't getting in the first strike, you're getting the crap kicked out of you. And then on top of all THAT, the enemy AI is AWFUL, so it's a total crap shoot on if the enemy won't just stand there while you pummel their head in because something in their AI has bugged out so hard that they just don't know what to do.

The end result of all of this is that it's very, VERY difficult to meaningfully strategize in this "Strategy RPG", and it can lead to a lot of annoying game overs with your most valuable units getting sniped (robbing you of the DPS necessary to beat the many auto-healing bosses). A lot of them wouldn't even be THAT big of a problem if there were just turns like Fire Emblem (and so many other SRPGs) use. Thankfully, the fact that the penalty for dying is so minute and how you can grind whenever you want means that these aren't game-breaking problems. They're still big problems, and they make a lot of maps feel more like RNG chores to slog through rather than strategic puzzles to solve, but they keep the game from descending from "annoyingly bothersome" to "unforgivably mean-spirited".

Then on top of that there are some other problems that are more just things you can chalk up to the game's age and a lack of proper foresight in their design. Something that's sorta in between both of these spaces is how mages work. They level VERY slowly, and they have very low MP, so healing is a very limited resource compared to a lot of Fire Emblem games. It's not nearly as bad as Fire Emblem 1, where healers need to get attacked and survive to level up (because healing doesn't give them EXP), but it's still glacially slow compared to the rest of your party, and it makes those cheap shots earned by bad luck on the turn order feel that much worse and cheap.

Magic is also incredibly dangerous almost the entire game, as there is no way to defend against it with stats. Until you get to higher HP values (which some characters simply never do), you're almost always one or two magic attacks away from being killed, no matter how high your defense stat may be. In one last move that I consider well-meaning but ultimately not very good, things such as double attacks, evasion, and critical hit chance are all linked to hidden, fixed values for each character and monster type, so you never know just how much danger you're going to be in (unlike a Fire Emblem where you generally have a speed or luck stat that determines when those things will happen). None of them are outright game breaking, sure, but it all contributes to that "this is a slog I need to get lucky to win at" feeling that plagues a lot of the game.

The presentation is quite good. It's a Mega Drive game from 1992, and it's a damn nice looking one at that. Character portraits are pretty, as are the environments. The monster designs are also very cool, bringing that "fantasy meets ancient high technology" aesthetic that the Shining series is known for to full bore through very pretty attack animations. The music is also very good, and makes the slogging times much more bearable when they happen.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Given the two points that the localization is so good AND Fire Emblem wouldn't be localized for roughly a decade, it is not that surprising to me how Shining Force captured so many hearts and minds back in the day and continues to be a fondly remembered game now. But in 2021, I think the game has aged very roughly with just how poorly the strategy elements are executed. This is a game you'll likely find charming in its presentation and not utterly impossible in its difficulty, but if you're more used to more polished strategy game or SRPGs, then you're likely going to have a quite boring if not frustrating time seeing Shining Force through to the end.

throws you into a promising, beautiful world with a mysterious atmosphere... but the initial interest wears off quick as you realize how haphazardly a lot of elements are thrown together: pick-ups that only serve a shield-refreshing purpose in a game where death is swift but inconsequential. platforming challenges that fluctuate between very simple to difficulty through jankiness. arduous narrative exposition. -- all a bit of a letdown coming from the people who made something as uncompromising and self-assured as hyper light drifter.

'i don't want this to happen, and yet it will.'

collages of inner life spread across digital pages: raw thoughts, wishes, guilt & regret. dreading the passage of time, circling mistakes made and words we can't take back. on wanting nothing more than to hold onto something//someone, a connection that won't fade with time. an abstract bearing of the soul in hopes of mending wounds -- of the guilt to subside.

inbetween it all, it gives you the space to express yourself - blank pages to be filled. and i think that's because it doesn't want anyone to feel alone with their problems. because it believes it will be okay in the end. beautiful.

// play in browser here

I'd played a few routes of this a while back and wasn't really sure what to make of it, but decided to give it another stab after Hazel had positive things to say in her summer recap video, and...

I was... pleasantly surprised by this? Takurou will always be a bit of a womanizer by nature, but he's surprisingly funny and it's possible to play him relatively respectfully, if you so choose. There's an absolutely insane amount of text in this game dedicated to inspecting items or parts of the scenery, and it's what gives this game a lot of its charm - forcing horndog Takurou to closely investigate and repeatedly comment on the underside of a table in a cafe instead of taking the opportunity to look up someone's skirt.

I don't really want to oversell this, because it's still fundamentally an eroge from 1992, but I do find myself wishing that other, similar games had a similar commitment to character consistency and granting their female cast some sense of interiority. I think the interwoven "routes" are one of this game's biggest strengths for the same reason, where pursuing one character's route might have you making time for three or four other girls in an approach that is less a sleazy "wine-and-dine everyone", instead forming a more natural social dynamic where getting to know someone means occasionally interacting with the people they're close to. Taking the battering ram approach and repeatedly interacting with the same character is not the way to find anything fruitful here, and it's refreshing to find a dating sim that tries to complicate the process - although it's not my favorite method, it's a damn good attempt for such an early entry in the genre.

Although the art looks good, I can't help but feel like we're missing out by not getting the PC-98 art in some form or fashion, even if it's just a toggle (a la the Steam version of Umineko). In addition to matching my own aesthetic preferences, I think having more convenient access to the game's old artwork would make it easier to appreciate the game's early contributions to the dating sim genre instead of simply having it fade into the background among the more modern games that are standing on its shoulders.