An experiential and analytical look at the medium of video games in a particular order. Currently there is "Capcom A to Z," a look at the games of Capcom in alphabetical order, and "Super FamiComplete" a look at all of the games of the SNES/Super Famicom in chronological order.
Another sports game, but our first game about bowling! This will be a quick review overall, because there is not really a ton to this game.
Background
This game was developed by KID (Kindle Imagine Develop; really sounds like education software) a Japanese development company that we haven't seen on this blog as yet. KID was mainly known as a bishojo game developer, which were Japanese style choose your own adventure games. They also were a workhorse developer who would make licensed games, such as a few GI Joe games and, most importantly...
Yup! They made the Pepsiman game. Sadly KID is no longer around, shutting down in the aughts.
The Game
Super Bowling is a bowling simulator with a fun 70's cartoon aesthetic (it reminds me of the cartoon Wait Till Your Father Gets Home). You play as a cast of young hip kids who are into bowling, and I really enjoy the sprite art on display on the character select screen. You only have a choice of four characters...well two characters with Caucasian/African American variants.
Speaking of characters, the game also has a mascot in its Turkey (yes that weird thing in the logo is supposed to be a turkey). This funny fella constantly comments on your game, and is a consistent presence throughout the experience.
The game has three modes: normal play, golf, or practice mode. Normal is a classic ten frame game of ten pin bowling. Golf is a fun take on bowling: you get a different assortment of pins each "hole" and you try to knock them over in as few rolls as possible. It really tests your knowledge of the general physics of bowling. Practice has the same kind of mentality behind it: you can choose the arrangement and number of the pins and then practice with that arrangement.
The bowling itself is similar to what you might think of with golf games: you have a power meter which represents your wind-up, and then a meter for spin that plays as you walk towards the lane to roll your ball. The trickiest part is the speed of the meter and the time limit you have to roll your ball in, but otherwise the timing can be learned to the point that you can bowl strikes and spares fairly consistently. Basically I played the game once and rolled a 140/300, and then on the second game I rolled a 250/300.
Music
The music isn't bad! Sports games of this area have some surprisingly good OSTs, and this is no exception. Try the Golf Bowl theme out for sure.
Overall
That's basically it! This game is not even a snack. There are just too few metrics and variables that you have to consider when playing this game. This game is too easily learned and mastered. I think of Mario Golf and all the variables you have to consider between strokes: which club to use, where to aim your ball, what type of hit, do you put spin on it, ball placement, the power meter, wind, distance to the hole, type of terrain, etc. This game has two, maybe three things to consider at a time. I slammed the "yup that's this game" button in about 15 minutes. The other main gameplay mode is much more interesting and I played that for about 30 more minutes, but...yeah that's about it! Charming design, shallow game. I would have hated to have paid full price for this.
Prince of Persia is another game that is considered a minor hit and classic for the SNES that I had little to no experience with before arriving upon it with this blog. This game also has the distinction of being a port of another early computer game. Let's jump (over a pit of spikes) in!
Background
Prince of Persia is now a pretty long running franchise that I also have little experience in. In fact, the only game I have played was the most recent(ish, I haven't played the early access roguelike, Rogue Prince of Persia) entry, Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, which was a metroidvania with intense boss fights and some light maso-core platforming ala Celeste. From my understanding and light research, the game has bounced from genre to genre with the same middle Islamic Golden Age pastiche: sometimes a God of War character action game with time mechanics, sometimes a cinematic 3D platformer based around climbing and parkour, and sometimes just fitting the mold of whatever is hot and popular at the time. This original Prince of Persia is a cinematic platformer based around trial and error, very similar to games like Out of this World or Heart of Darkness.
The story of the game is pretty classic 1001 Arabian Nights: you are the titular Prince (though not a Prince yet), and the Sultan of your land has been betrayed by the Vizier to the kingdom, the wizard Jaffar (apparently just the name of every evil medieval advisor). He wants to rise to the throne, so he has given the Sultan's daughter an ultimatum: marry him and legitimize his rule, or die in the dungeon in two hours. Your hero, who is the actual love interest of the Princess, must save her within that time limit from the dungeons or lose her forever! These dungeons, though, are filled with traps, guards, magic spells, and a bunch of other nasties that will kill you instantly, all up against a fairly strict time limit (though in the original PC release you only had an hour to save the Princess).
The original Apple II game was made by the early gaming icon, Jordan Mechner, the creator of the the martial arts dueling game Karateka and eventually the wildly ambitious train mystery simulator The Last Express. Karateka was known as an early technical marvel for its fluid animations achieved through rotoscoping, where the animators draw their animations over live actors performing the movements. This same style is used here in Prince of Persia: each movement has weight and grace to it, with the animations making use of each and every frame for even the most basic movements. Apparently Mechner based the animations off of recordings of his brother performing stunts and swordplay. It really is something to behold on a game from 1992, and the animation firmly cements this as a cinematic platformer.
The developer of the SNES port was Arsys System Inc. Not too much to really say about them; similar to other workhorse developers like Tose, but on a much smaller scale. They eventually became a company called Cyberhead, and closed in 2001 without too many credits of their own to their name. Another more anonymous company that lent its efforts to ports and other groups' projects.
The Game
The basic idea behind this game is to create the perfect run through each section of the dungeons. The Prince does have a life gauge that allows three minor missteps (sword slashes, etc) but most mistakes will lead to immediate death, and you will be sent back to the beginning of the last checkpoint (luckily this doesn't count against you in the time limit). Due to the animation, movements must be planned, considered, and generally practiced through trial and error, for once you are committed to a movement you are locked in. Your jump has a set length, so when you stop to leap over a pit, you need to make sure you are jumping at just the right distance to clear the gap or grab onto a ledge. This means that the pace of play is quite slow at first, but once you start to memorize the lay out of the stage and begin to intuit the feel of controlling the Prince, you will start to clear the beginning levels of the game quite quickly. The dungeon is incredibly trap filled (especially in this SNES version which is really quite difficult), with spike traps, swinging blades, collapsing ledges and bridges all trying to stymie your progress.
The game also mixes in some sword fighting and combat At first, the dungeon guards are impenetrable sword shields blocking your path with certain death, but in the first level you do claim a scimitar of your own with which to fight. The combat is a bit more elaborate rock-papers-scissors match, where you are matching enemy attacks with side-steps, parries or blocks, and trying to sneak your own slashes past their guard. The enemies, even the final boss, have a three hit lifebar just like you, so you are trying to wear them down quickly while maintaining your own lifebar, as yours doesn't replenish after a battle. As the game progresses and the enemies become more elite, they play much more defensively and will require many parries to open their guard. In the end, the combat is simple but rather tense, as any mistake could pooch that level's run.
There are some red jars of healing potion within the dungeon, but you must also be careful not to pick up blue jars of poison, which will instead take off a point of damage. Some of the potions are in plain sight, but some are hidden in secret rooms and caches, so the game does reward poking your nose into every available corner of the dungeon.
The game also mixes in some light puzzles, usually simple stepping on floor switch and then rushing to the newly opened gate before it shuts on you. Some of these can be quite tricky, as their are almost always traps between you and the gate.
This is basically the entire game in a nutshell, but the game eventually starts playing with this formula a bit. Eventually you face skeleton guards who can't be killed with swords, but instead must be knocked backwards into pits. As well, you have a doppelganger who through a magical mirror and chases you throughout the dungeon, and can't be killed as your lives are linked. He serves as a similar role to the SA-X from Metroid Fusion as his appearances, while deadly, are much more scripted.
The SNES version really increases the difficulty and the length of the game from the original version, remixing many of the puzzles/traps and boosting the level count from 12 up to 20. It can be quite challenging to make it through all the levels in under two hours, and the game even (cruelly) lets you finish out the adventure after you fail the time limit, with your Prince escaping the dungeon with his life, but having failed to save his beloved.
The presentation of the game is all on point. Again, I cannot reiterate how cool the animations and rotoscoping effects are when seen in motion; it makes the game really stand out from the other games from the first half of the SNES's lifespan. The music, too, is appropriate and good, but nothing that I would consider earwormy or memorable after the experience.
Overall
This, while not really my type of gaming experience due to its shooting for perfection and skin-of-the-teeth victories, was an enjoyable experience and I can see how it captured the imagination of people to the point where this became a big name franchise. I did play this on an emulator with the ability to rewind, so you can count my experience as "tainted" if you so choose, but I probably wouldn't have finished this game otherwise. As I played it, though, it was a unique snack of a game! I am glad I can say that I checked this off my list of SNES games I had little to no experience with aside from brand awareness.
Title: Parodius Da! Shinwa kara Owarai he (trans. "It's Parodius! From Myth to Comedy")
Release Date: 7/03/92
Developer/Publisher: Konami
The shmup genre, as compared to other video game genres, has always felt like a creatively constrained genre. Each shmup is a take on the same gameplay loop: autoscrolling levels, eye catching backgrounds, power-up systems that reward perfect play, devilish bullet patterns that require precision reflexes or rote memorization, and big, impressive boss fights to cap off each stage. Generally, each game is the developers take on these core systems.
The more critically impressive schmups, historically, have been the ones that play with the gameplay aspects of the genre: Ikaruga with its black and white phase state mechanics, or Cave's pushing the bullet patterns to the limits of human response times. Most developers, though, choose to differentiate their games through the art and aesthetic, which is where the "cute-em-up" genre has its roots.
Shmups, more often than not, are rooted to the science fiction genre: what's more fun than flying a supersonic jetplane, than flying that jetplane into an alien dreadnought. Konami's Gradius series is high science fiction: Vic Viper and his little plane that could taking down legions of bio-mechanical and techno-organic monstrosities in order to save the world. It is grim, it is isolating at times, and the designs of some of the bosses can be quite freaky (I always think of the giant plant boss in Gradius III). Perhaps the Parodius series was a response to this style of "serious" science fiction; perhaps, for some, that grim-dark science fiction was off-putting? Why not, instead, catch some more flies with honey? Konami already started the cute-em-up genre with Twin Bee, so Parodius feels like a logical extension; why not take the workings of one of our more hardcore shmups and dress it up as a cute-em-up?
Parodius is adorable; it is a cute-em-up through and through. the color palette to the game is mainly bright vibrant primary colors, the music is cutesy versions of public domain classical music, and even the bosses seem more "stunned" than killed by your weapons fire. It is alluring, it is attractive to look at, and in an arcade next to what I picture as late 80's and early 90's arcade games, must really have stood out. While this game is adorable, though, under the hood it is basically GradiusIII, just with a thick candy shell around it. This is both welcome; that system is a well-crafted and fun upgrade system that rewards perfect play and memorization of patterns (in a nice balance), but also quite off-putting as the "poor gets poorer" difficulty from the Gradius games and high level of difficulty is also present.
While this game started in the arcades, this game was ported to most every contemporaneous console or handheld at the time, though only in Japan. Certain versions, including this Super Famicom version, have unique content such as bosses or portions of stages.
This game is the first in the series, as well, which would go on to have several sequels, and even a "sexy" version (named Sexy Parodius of course) for the older horny teens in the arcades. We will even get to play some more of these games for the blog.
Characters and Power-ups
The game allows you to choose from four different characters and/or ships: Vic Viper from the main Gradius series, who plays and upgrades exactly the same as he did in Gradius III. He has the most forward facing offense and therefore the highest DPS of any of the characters. This means he can melt through bosses, but struggles when enemies are above him especially.
Octopus, who is actually considered the protagonist of the Parodius series, is a good choice who focuses on options and has a wide spreadshot of rings. I enjoyed playing as him, but he really struggled on a particular stage where you have to navigate a maze while destroying colorful balls.
Twin Bee the animate plane from Twin Bee, who I did not play as, but I saw that he throws his hands like in his own series...
...and finally Pentarou the Penguin, who would go on to have a little cult following of his own! I actually beat the game as Pentarou. He is useful as he has a "bubble" invulnerability item, and his attacks do a great job of covering the floor and the ceiling.
Each one functions as a different load-out to play as, and generally will fit personal preference for the "spread" of your bullets. Vic focuses on strong frontal attacks, while the other three are variations of choosing spread over concentrating shots.
Each, as well, upgrades using the Gradius style of upgrades: defeating a chain of enemies will reward you with a power-up that will push you up the upgrade chain. The more power-ups you collect, the more you can bank for powerful upgrades. Like Gradius, there are some traps: you can upgrade your speed (the least costly of the power ups), and this is necessary to an extent; you can also upgrade your speed, though, to the point where a slight movement will inevitably throw you into a wall, killing you instantly. As well, there is a ?! upgrade which is right next to the final upgrade, which will instead nuke all of your upgrades and put you back to square one. Like Gradius, this creates a balancing act of controlling and monitoring the action on screen while also actively your upgrade path.
In addition, the game adds the bells from the Twinbee series, which can be shot to either gain more points or to change color to grant temporary power ups, i.e. a screen clear, or an megaphone which eats bullets and enemies while granting temporary invulnerability. This helps even out the difficulty curve of the game somewhat.
Difficulty
Like Gradius, Parodius pulls no punches. Any upgrades are lost any time you die, and in any of the later stages this mean pretty much a game over. Your base speed is incredibly ponderous, and in the later levels you have to upgrade, or you won't survive the first curve in a maze segment.
As well, this game uses checkpoints rather than immediate restarting upon death. Overall, this means that the game really is about sustained perfection and memorization of hazards. This wouldn't be too bad if the game was just about memorizing enemy and bullet patterns, but there are also mazes that you must navigate with obstacles you must destroy, and even touching even a single pixel of wall or obstacle in these mazes results in immediate death. Here are some sections that are particularly atrocious...
Stage 3: There is one ball-pit maze that is incredibly egregious especially, as you have narrow corridors, small multi-colored balls you must destroy, and plenty of enemies lobbing projectiles your way. You can choose wrong paths in the maze and not know it until it costs you a life.
Stage 4: This is a fun level in a "whacky" Japan, where a cherry tree marches back and forth across the screen. The tree takes up half the screen, and there is another tree hanging from the ceiling. You only have a precise and limited window to fly through the area before the walking cherry tree blocks you in and crushes you across the scrolling scren.
The Yokai boss is a "speed check." This ghost woman begins by chasing you relentlessly around the screen to make sure you have above base speed. If you aren't decently leveled up then you will immediately be caught by the ghost and its a game over.
The final boss, in order to challenge him, is hidden behind a door that will start shutting. You have a very limited window to shoot through a bunch of dross and octopi guarding his final chamber before you are locked out of the final boss room and it costs you a life.
Like the base game of Gradius the game isn't just about shooting, but navigating the stages themselves.The stages in this game utilize a floor and a ceiling, and part of the game is managing creatures that appear on both the floor and the ceiling. If you let too much in one area build up, or don't deal with the projectiles or path that is appearing right in front of you, it is really easy to be overwhelmed or pinged by a stray bullet.
Finally, this game is also LONG, with ten stages, each with multiple segments and usually with at least two bosses. On my first attempt, I was able to make it to stage three, the dreaded candy castle with the ballpit maze. It took me three more attempts to clear the ball pit, where I was immediately squashed by the volcano stage 4, and finally on my best attempt was destroyed by the Maoi head boss of stage 5. This is only half the game (technically just shy of half) after multiple hours of attempts. Death at stage four or five meant either a game over and restart, or a very lucky scramble to quickly upgrade my speed and get back to fighting weight. At that point, it was save state time, which allowed me to finish the game and beat the final boss.
Graphics and Music
I'm glad I decided to save-state it, as the rest of the game is quite delightful and a feast for the eyes. Shmups, by nature, leverage your curiosity to "see what's next" after "one more quarter," and Parodius has that going on in spades. Each boss is a fun delight or spin on another Gradius boss or type of boss. Weird crab robot where you have to duck between its legs; how about we replace that with a Vegas show girl? The sprites are large, filled with personality, well designed, and appropriately detailed for novelty.
The stages themselves each follow a certain aesthetic theme. There is a yokai/Shinto underworld stage, a stylized Japanese countryside, an amorous bathhouse filled with women in bubbles, and the inside of a pinball machine. The last level is a fun one too, with an assault on the evil octopus, Emperor Zeo, in his dreadnaught, where you are taking on his elite Penguin Shower contraption (it's a thing) and finally take on the giant octopus himself.
The bosses are fun too: you have an Uncle Sam cosplaying Bald Eagle, a fat pig sumo wrestler, a Maoi statue in drag, and a pirate ship whose masthead is a cute pirate kitten.
The humor of the game is also very absurdist and "lol random;" it's a parody, nothing has to make logical sense. This might have better mileage for some; you definitely need to enjoy the novelty of random schtick.
The music, as well, is carnival takes on classical and public domain music. It...can be cloying and annoying, but these pieces of music are classics for a reason; even with the strange sound font, they are ear worms.
Overall
The first Parodius game is a fun shmup, and I am glad I played it, but the reliance on the difficulty and quarter muncher nature of the original Gradius really doesn't balance well with the cutesy aesthetic. If you are trying to lure in an audience who is not familiar with shmups, often considered one of the more hardcore classic game genres, and you choose an aesthetic that screams "accessible," why make it so difficult? If you are making a game to lure a younger audience, then they should be able to make it past the first stage. Even if the child is watching over their older sibling's shoulder, this game is too hard without some serious practice.
I'm just not sure who this series was for; is the joke implied by this games title on us as the player? Is it my fault that I assumed "cute" meant easy? I am not sure, but it feels like the game is laughing at me rather than with me. Perhaps this reliance on being tied to Gradius is part of the problem; I mean it is marketed as a direct parody and riff on that series, so maybe they felt people will expect higher difficulty. Would this game have been better divorced from that progenitor series, or worse for it?
Perhaps this liminal space between hardcore shmup and cutesy game is why this game was never localized for North America or Europe. I feel like other cute-em-ups are able to straddle this line much more effectively: Harmful Park, Gunbird, and the Cotton series all lean into this adorable aesthetic but don't show their teeth until after a couple of missions at least. In the end, this leaves me curious to see how this weird little sub-series will progress as we play through more of its games.
To start off July 1992, we have a Japanese only JRPG/SRPG hybrid that is incredibly obscure. There are no working english translation hacks for this game, and I will openly admit I didn't play beyond the first few random battles in this game. Tt has been overlooked by my normal research go-tos (it didn't even make it into the excellent bitmap books JRPG compendium book), but I did watch an entire playthrough and read an excellent written let's play (shout out to the Youtube channel Batista_Harpu, who is playing through the full SNES/SFC catalogue, and the blog SuperfamicomRPGS.blogspot.com by Kurisu respectively, of which I am using several images from their playthrough). While this won't be my experience playing through the game, this will be a brief overview of what this game is about, and why it might or might not be worth your time.
Background
While the developer and publisher may seem rather unknown, they have actually popped up on this blog before. Know for shoveling out kusoge and other filth, both Advance Communication Company and Tonkinhouse were the folks who developed and published the port of Ys III that we played earlier in the blog. If you remember, that was a game from a beloved series that was translated into a rather unfun 2D action RPG. Their mark of shame only continues as they were the folks who made the atrocious Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde game for the NES, which rose to ignominy due to the Angry Video Game Nerd making a popular episode about it.
The story of Light Fantasy is relatively simple: the King of Light and his kingdom are being threatened by the King of Darkness, who demands a holy artifact (a magical mirror) or he will destroy the Light Kingdom. The Princess of the Kingdom, Lefina, let's herself be taken by the Dark King in order to buy the player some time to use the Light Mirror to instead save the world. The Light King orders the protagonist (you choose the name), to find the Light Mirror (which gets stolen) and then save the princess. Apparently at the beginning of the game, you can actually refuse to go on the quest, and the king gives you the ole' "but thou must" by throwing you in prison until you agree! The game is relatively short, about 15-20 hours, and has a second act twist where you beat the Dark King, but then the Dragon King Maryu kidnaps the princess and you have to charge up the legendary sword with eight spirits to fight him. Overall, pretty typical for this era.
The art style of the game is one of the stronger aspects. It is that delightful chibi random of children's manga and anime from this era; this is less Record of the Lodoss War style fantasy JRPG, and more reminiscent of anime like Ninja Nonsense in style.For a style reference, it's like a marriage between Slayers and Kirby. Even the boss demons, dragons, and goblins look kind of cute! The human characters are all chibi fantasy archetypes too: knights, princesses, peasants, bunny girl dancers on loan from Dragon Quest; each main and recruitable character has its own portrait when you talk with them to show off this art style. There are also plenty of anime styled narrative scenes (not quite cutscenes) which further show off the art style.
Gameplay
Sadly, the gameplay is really quite lacking and borderline broken, to the point where the developers added in workarounds to help juice the grinding economy. To start, the game world is rather small: encompassing five towns with all the surrounding dungeons. In a neat twist, you can recruit NPCS from the town to join your party; in the opening town, for example, you can recruit a bunny dancer, a bartender, and a dog. At certain points, you will also have "destiny characters" who are forced into your party due to story importance.
From here, you explore the overworld and dungeons, engaging in random battles. The battles do not shift from the world map, but instead are played out on the screen where you encounter them. The battles break into turn based combat fought on a grid. You have movement points and action points, which allow you to attack the enemy or perform other actions like casting magic or using items. Movement, unlike other SRPGS at the time, is extremely limited, though certain recruitable characters move like chess or shogi pieces, ie. far in one direction but limited in others.
Enemies, as well, are incredibly spongey and hit like dump trucks without grinding. The first random battle I witnessed, against one slime (the prototypical easy JRPG enemy), ended with the slime ruthlessly slaughtering the party of adventurers. The enemies also seem to love inflicting status affects, of which there are more than ten types. These usually prevent your characters from acting, moving, will move your characters in random directions, cause them to target friend as well as foe, or just deal light to heavy damage whenever you act. My favorite is the "food" status affect, which just turns your characters into apples.
Grinding for money and experience is, sadly, a must if you want to progress in this game. The game's difficulty curve is geared to make you grind up front for hours (the playthrough I watched was about five to six hours of grinding before starting the game proper) so that the rest of the playthrough is smoother. The bottom line seems to be that the combat is slow, tedious, and the encounter rate is incredibly high.
Another funny frustration in the battle is that most every enemy drops an item where they die, which can't be picked up until after the battle. This takes up the space in that battle, though, and you can move through the item but not stop on that space. This means there are situations where, due to the limited movement, you can't get through a line of items that you've made, and neither can the other enemies, so the game softlocks into this weird stalemate, forcing a reset. In both the playthrough and the let's play, this happened more than a couple times.
As I mentioned before, the game provided some workarounds to the grinding and the dull battles: one, there is a matching game in the first town that you can use to win easy money to buy new armor and weapons. You can actually enter a button combination that will make it so that you pick the right choice every time, giving you an endless fount of money to use. As well, there is an item that is easily attainable that, for several minutes, eliminates random encounters. This means that once you are done leveling, if you stockpile this item, you will never have to worry about random encounters again, and just blow through the rest of the game. It's a weird solution for the developers to make instead of fine-tuning the gameplay.
Music
The OST does have some solid tunes!
Overall
This is a weird JRPG that does have some merits as far as style, but is severely hampered by poor gameplay design. The people who play it nowaday are people who, like me, are interested in completing a catalogue or devotees to the system or JRPGs. Overall, this one is worth skipping. The next game, fortunately, is much, much, much better.
