Super FamiComplete #60- Dragon Ball Z- Chou Saiya Densetsu (Redux)

 

Title: Dragon Ball Z: Chou Saiya Densetsu

Release Date: 1/25/1992 (Japan Only)

Developer: TOSE

Publisher: Bandai

This blog's first Dragon Ball Z game, though certainly not the last one we will see. Dragon Ball (and its many subsequent iterations of Z, GT, and Super) is a series that has maintained popularity up until present day, and there have been a multitude of tie-in games made for most every console created. Many of these games are fighting games, which following the story of the show, makes the most sense. For this entry, though, it is an RPG instead. 

Background

Dragon Ball Z, for even the anime neophytes, is easily one of the most well-known anime properties to ever exist. It is one of those rare pieces of media whose popularity transcends genre conventions, and it became one of the staple animated programs to American kids and teens in the late 90's and early 2000's. I first became aware of it through Cartoon Network's Toonami block, which originally played the old Hanna-Barbera action cartoons (Space Ghost, Bird Man, or The Herculoids); this shifted in the late 90s with a more anime focused block with Dragon Ball Z leading as the flagship. 

Dragon Ball Z follows Akira Toriyama's manga of the same name, and is a sequel to the series known as Dragonball. Dragonball followed Son Goku, a rambunctious little scamp who mirrors the Chinese monkey god Sun Wukong from Journey to the West; he flies around on a Nimbus Cloud, fights with a bo-staff, and has a monkey tail. The manga/anime follows his adventures to protect the seven Dragon Balls, seven precious orbs which, when gathered in one place, can summon the Dragon God Shenron to grant any wish. It is a cute adventure style shonen anime, with a good deal of martial arts action mixed in (there is the grand martial arts tournament mixed in intermittently, which are always satisfying arcs), and it is definitely targeted to a younger audience. The anime ends with Goku growing up from a kid to a young adult, and with a satisfying fight against the evil Piccolo. 

Dragon Ball Z comes along and changes the formula quite a bit; what preceded was a cutesy adventure anime for kids, now caters to those kids who've grown up to be teenagers. Z focuses on the now adult (and new father) Goku as he protects the Earth from more massive, world-ending threats, and still protects the Dragon Balls from those who would use them for nefarious means. It is a pure battle oriented fighting anime, though it moves less from martial arts battles to more fantastical flying-around, huge ki-explosions, smacking people across the world style fights. It is visually striking, super goofy at times, and the fights are oh-so-satisfying. In pure shonen style, the arcs are long, drawn out, and some of the fights could take up to 30 episodes. This was the series that seemed to create the "little did you know I was only using 5% of my power this whole time" cliché, or the "haha, little did you know this is only my second of four forms" trope. Overall, it is a lot of fun. 

 

Now this game is a card-based rpg, one of the first we have encountered so far in this series, but a genre that certainly survives up until today (usually as a good spin-off to other popular RPG series, such as Kingdom Hearts with Chain of Memories). This RPG follows the very beginning of the series with the Saiyan Saga, up through the Namek/Frieza Saga, roughly the first third of the anime/manga. 

What is a card RPG you may ask? Well, ostensibly, it plays like a normal RPG of this era; you travel around an overworld, going from dungeon to dungeon, talking to NPCs, and progressing the story. This changes, though, once you enter a battle. Each battle, you have a deck of cards which replaces your action commands. For example, say you choose attack; you may choose from a Ki Blast, a couple normal attack cards, or some other special ability, and once these attacks are used, they are replaced by another random card. Your cards, overall, are generated by situation (they tend to follow the story beats), and completely at random. You can, of course, gain new cards, build out your decks, and generally make it so that your little Z fighters are tough cookies through proper planning. As far as card RPGs go, this one is actually pretty simple to pick up and play. 

Now the developer of this game, TOSE, we have seen twice before with Super Bases Loaded and Super Tennis; TOSE seemed to have the lock on Dragonball Z related video games, as they would develop almost every game from this franchise for the Super Famicom. TOSE had a very close working relationship with the "Big N" as they were allowed to work as a close second party developer, even getting to eventually handle the sacred Game & Watch brand with a slew of Gameboy games. They are still around today, but they mainly support as a "ghost developer" working clean-up or support for a lot of games without actually putting their name on it; they even worked on Breath of the Wild and helped port it to the Switch. This sentiment can be summed up by the president of TOSE saying "As a company, we have no vision of our own. We follow the customer's vision." 

Gameplay

When the game starts, you are on Master Roshi's island, with Goku's son, Gohan, being kidnapped by the evil Radditz (every name in Z is based off of food; Gohan is Japanese for rice, Radditz for Radish, etc). You then are given a Dragon Ball radar to find Gohan (as he has one on his hat), which you then use to fly to the first encounter with Radditz. On the way, you fight different types of Saibamen (little vegetable men that the main antagonists of this arc, the Saiyans, employ as grunt soldiers). Thus, the main gameplay loop of the game is set-up. Fly to find a Dragon Ball, fight little grunts on the way, and then fight a main boss; rinse and repeat. Half-way and at the end of the game, you fight a mega boss or series of bosses, following, roughly, the main story of the anime. For the first half of the game, this is the main Saiyan Prince himself, Vegeta, who you fight in his normal and Great Ape form, and the end of the game you fight Emperor Frieza himself in all his many different forms. 

Goku is not alone on his quest; you get to fight with the whole regular cast at various points: members of the main cast like Krillin, Piccolo, Gohan, and Vegeta, and even the second and third stringers such as Tien, Yamcha, or Dende. Now as far as adversaries, pretty much every major or minor villain from these arcs makes an appearance: Dodoria, Zarbon, the Ginyu Force in its entirely, and even barely memorable characters like Banan and Appule. 

Now the gameplay is pretty simple (as long as you play a good translation that is). Now I am heavily citing from this games post on the DBZ wikia, as it does a great job of summarizing the battle system. Every character in battle starts with 5 cards; these cards are of four different colors (white for normal attacks, yellow for strong,  and blue for Ki attacks), a dragon ball for attack (going from 1-Z in terms of strength) and a defense dragon ball (symbolized by dashes from 1-Z in terms of defense). For each attack turn, it plays kind of like the card game War; if you choose a card with a higher attack value than your opponent, then you win the turn. If you choose a type of card that is more powerful than the type your opponent chooses, then you win as well (ie. a strong attack vs. a normal attack). You also have character cards which can boost the attack power of the cards in your arsenal, or grant items to use. Attack order is determined by the overall power of the card.

 

Now the neat thing is that certain battles follow story or character traits. For example, Vegeta the well-known hot-head, will interrupt others attacks to get his attack first. Piccolo, after he fuses with other characters like Nail (a trait used by his race of people), gets a major boost in his attack strength. The best is Captain Ginyu, who can swap bodies, and thus decks with the enemy. OH! Another great little story gimmick is that cards for the Scouters will literally "explode" if you try to use them to scan an enemy that is too powerful (a callback to a memorable moment the show). 

Presentation

 Well the world design is very bland and boring. The world's are sparsely populated, the environments are all the right hue to evoke that nostalgia, yet they are empty and samey, and the character sprites are really crunched and small (like they don't look like the characters sometimes).
 
On the other hand, the battles are pretty well done. The fights are animated well, the game uses Mode 7 to great effect, and the battle sprites are well rendered. I would only knock it with the fact that many enemies, even Frieza at one point, are sprite rips of other characters; like after you beat the Ginyu force, the individual members become normal enemies of different colors and names.
 

Music

Here are some quality tunes for you...

Overall Impressions

The game is a bit of a slog. The flying and movement around the world map is super duper slow, and the gameplay loop, for such an exciting source material, is very plodding. You pretty much just fly around a map, with no proper guiding of the player; you just follow a radar until you hit the next goal. 
 
Now I stuck this one out because I do love the story of the anime, and it was neat to play through it in an RPG format. It was boring, but pretty easy overall. Most battles I tended to just pick cards at random and I did just fine.

Bottom line, for fans of DBZ? It's worth checking out. RPG fans? This is a very bare bones affair. Overall, this is one you can most probably miss.

Super FamiComplete #59: Super Adventure Island (Redux)

  

Title: Super Adventure Island (NA) Takahashi Meijin no Daibouken Jima (JP) (translates roughly to
"Master Takahashi's Great Adventure Island")

Release Date: 1/11/1992

Developer: Hudson Soft

Publisher: Hudson Soft

This is an entry in the very storied Adventure Island series from Hudson Soft. I have only played Super Adventure Island II before this, which plays very similarly to a Zelda or Metroidvania game. I haven't played any of the other "Adventure Island" titles, so this should be a treat. 

 

Background

This series, along with Bomberman and Wonder Boy, is considered one of Hudson Soft's classic series. If you don't know anything about Hudson Soft, they were an incredibly prolific developer and publisher from the 80's almost up until modern day. They developed for most every major platform, and have created some classic video game icons. 

This series, in particular, had three previous entries on the NES (with one additional for the Famicom). The series follows the protagonist Master Higgins (Takahashi Meijin in Japan), a young lad who jetsets to the titular Adventure Island, a small island in the South Pacific, to make his fame and steal the heart of the island maiden, "Miss Jungle" Tina. 

Super Adventure Island is a direct continuation of those three games, with the game starting with Master Higgins enjoying some alone time with Tina on top  of a palm tree. Right about as he is about to plant a kiss on Tina's cheek, she is turned to stone by some evil dark wizard type (who is aptly named Dark Robe). Master Higgins sets off after him to defeat the wizard and return poor Tina back to her living state. 

Gameplay

The gameplay is one of those "easy to do, tough to master" kind of deals. Unlike its sequel, Super Adventure Island is a platformer with the simple goal of making it from Side A to Side B of a stage. Higgins can run (though more at a plodding pace), jump, duck, super jump by holding down before jumping, and attack if he has a weapon (either a boomerang or a stone club, both of which are used as projectiles). If he finds a skateboard, he can ride on top of it to gain additional speed.

This doesn't mean that the game is simple. The game pushes you to continually move forward towards your goal. To help with this, you have a meter on the top of the screen. This might look like a lifebar, but it is actually a "hunger" meter. You see, tropical island life really takes its toll on poor Higgins, and he has to continually replenish his energy as he moves or performs actions by eating food he finds throughout the level. If his meter runs out, poor Higgins dies. Now some things can also expend his energy too, such as tripping over a rock or continuously jumping, so this all must be carefully managed. 

This is exacerbated by the fact that Higgins also dies in only one hit. Even brushing up against enemies will put Higgins down for the count. You have two lives to start, two continues, and once that is done your game must be restarted. Now you can earn more lives with high scores, but that takes some practice. The game is 5 stages long, with each stage being broken into four sub-levels. Each stage ends with a boss fight, as well, so you have to be a very careful player to make it to the end. 

The game feels like the prototype to what would eventually become the "runner" series of mobile games, and I am very curious to see if an endless runner of this series has been made yet. The levels are very quick and breezy, and the game rewards that ever pushing forward with higher scores and more lives. This makes the game a nice palette cleanser coming off what else I have been playing for this blog. It is a quick, pick-up and put-down game. A total run takes only about a half hour; mayhaps a bit more with practice.

The aesthetic of the game is nice and cheery. You have adorable characters and enemies with big cartoony eyes. It reminds me of some of the old "horror" manga about cute ghouls, yokai, and ghosts. Everything has just a bit of personality to it. 

The game is really hard. The first level is very manageable, but the second sub-level immediately cranks up the difficulty a great bit. Poor Higgins has a huge sprite, and he slips and slides as if he is on ice. His jumping, as well, can be finicky. Higgins has a high jump, but very little forward momentum, making you never feel quite confident in his movement. I messed up what I thought were simple jumps constantly. Plus enemies are frequent, are tiny and hard to hit with your weapons, and sometimes shoot projectiles with very little time to react. There is very little randomness to the enemies, though, so you get the idea that the game wants you to adhere to a strict dominant path. You learn the pattern of each level until you can execute it flawlessly.

The bosses themselves are not too difficult, but it still takes a couple tries to learn their pattern. The issue with this is the fact that you have to redo the stage before challenging them again. It is like a killer "bonfire run" each time you die. And remember, your chances for the game are limited. This very much feels like a game that you chip away at and slowly hone your skills. 

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Music

The music is really quite sweet and cute. 

Ads, Commercials, Art

Verdict

Nowadays this game would be a quick mobile or Switch game you could pick up for like $5 or $10. Ironically, that is about how much this game sells for nowadays as a used, cart only copy. 

Super FamiComplete #58: SimEarth (Redux)

  

Title: SimEarth: The Living Planet

Release Date: 12/29/91

Developer: Tomcat System

Publisher: Imagineer (JP), FCI, Inc (NA)

I have said this before with the inscrutable Populous and even the pretty groundbreaking Sim City, sim games are not my cup of tea. Probably the closest I have truly enjoyed is Sid Meier's: Civilization for the PC, but even that is half steeped in the 4X strategy genre rather than the sim genre. I think part of the problem is these games don't age well, and the user interface just doesn't translate from computer over to the consoles. Games with heavy menu systems, in general, just don't work as a console game, which is probably part of the reason games like Drakkhen or Nobunaga's Ambition haven't aged as well (though I don't think Drakkhen was ever considered good).  

Background

I feel there was a fascination in the early 90's in the realm of PC and Western gaming to use the relatively new medium of video games for their creators to start "playing god." There are many games, from actually a couple different genres, that focus on the player guiding humanity, or even organic life itself through its various cycles; from single celled organisms all the way to the space age. E.V.O.: Search for Eden and Populous are all such games; this trend even continues to the more "modern" era of gaming with classics such as Black and White, Spore, or Godus (okay looking at this list of games, maybe just Peter Molyneux has a fascination with playing god).  SimEarth is this type of game. 

The goal of the game is to guide the planet from the Andean Age (the time where all life is undersea, taking the forms of mollusks and arthropods mainly, i.e. simple multicellular life forms) all the way up through to where they will begin to colonize the star systems around Earth. This play session plays over the course of 10 billion years. The player plays "god," as they can control everything from the lifeforms, to the climate, to the elevation of land, to creating lifeforms to populate their prototype planet. As in all good sim games, things can go easily awry, and your creation can run away from you, and I have heard this game opens up to some pretty spectacular results.

Now the original PC game was developed by the legendary Will Wright and his development company, Maxis, but the SNES console version was developed by Tomcat System. After doing a little research, they seem to be a Japanese based developer that is mainly known for porting other sims, like Sim Ant, board games like Othello, and most well-known for developing the Pokémon Stadium games for the N64 and Gamecube. They seemingly have been defunct since about 2008. 

Publishing was done by Fujisenki Communicatios International (FCIfor short) for North America and Imagineer for Japan, both companies that specialized in publishing Western RPGS, such as Ultima, Drakkhen, Hydlide, and Might and Magic. 

Now I do have a bit of history with this game. I visited my uncle and cousins out in California as a kid, and they lived in a double-wide in the Lake Elsinore area of Orange County (that is one of the areas that has been completely leveled due to the fires a few years back, etc). Now when I was a kid, this family had a SNES, and my cousin offered to show me his collection, the crown jewel of which was SimEarth. My uncle, especially, loved this game, and sunk hours upon hours into it (the same man who did show me the Soldier of Fortune series). As a child, I found this game inscrutable, as I couldn't figure out what to do with the games' series of menus, and figure out how they impacted the gameplay. 

Gameplay

First and foremost, this is a really fun Sim game. I have always heard that it was a classic, as during my research most of the reviews I have read confirm this. I was skeptical, as these games still don't age well, but I tried to go into this with an open mind. As an adult, the UI is very intuitive and much better laid out that its contemporaries such as Populous and even Sim City. They are still a bit clunky, and it can be frustrating that at times it seems like no buttons on the controller lead to any sort of action, but this is definitely a game based on patience. It is akin to having a terrarium or aquarium; you are literally waiting to see how your changes will affect the lifeforms on your little digital planet over a long period of time. Now this will not be every player's cup of tea, and it almost wasn't mine. The beginning of the game is a little slow to get going as you are waiting for more lifeforms to become available on land, and are trying to balance out the perfect atmosphere, temperature, climate, etc. for your little burgeoning lifeforms.

Now I am a teacher by profession, and upon revisiting this game for the blog I found the perfect way to play this game. Not to date this blog, but I am currently reentering the school year, and we are going to be completely virtual due to the pandemic. Right now, we are in training for this virtual learning. I had this game running on my tv in between trainings. During my five to ten minute down times, I would enter my commands to change my "terrarium" and then have it "percolate" in the background while I conducted my training. During the next break, I would revisit and see what happened during my absence. Finally, I see the value of sims: they are a game for background or absent minded mechanical focus. 

In one of the more interesting gameplay mechanics, you aren't trying to just evolve human life (that is an option), but you can evolve most any type of life into the eventual space age. You can create a civilization of lobsters, reptiles, or even machines if you so chose. My first game was insect people for the win. 

There is a ton of replayability to this game, as there are challenge modes, the most well-known of which is Daisy World. Daisy World is where the land is covered by a swarm of daisies. This doesn't sound like a problem, initially, but the daisies will have a large effect on the atmosphere, the temperature, and will compete for resources. They will even evolve, eventually, into man-eating plant like people if you let them, so you need to be much more focused in your strategy, and much more cognizant of the games various systems if you want your world to survive. 

In true Sim fashion, these games can be the most fun when everything goes wrong. Similar to the Sea Men episode of South Park, your little civilization is more often a danger to the planet rather than the planet being a danger to it. They can cause pollution, global warming, or lay waste to each other in warfare. It causes the player to always be on their toes, and it was never dull to see what mischief my little people got up to next. Playing god was never easy. 

The game is certainly educational, and educational in a way that could actually be beneficial to students. As a history teacher, I actually focus on Pre-history and the formation of the Earth/theories of life as my first unit of study for my students, and a great deal of this game covers a lot of what we actually cover in my class. The game is based off the popular Gaia theory, which is the idea that it is the interactions of the various biomes and lifeforms in those biomes which create a sustainable environment for all life to exist. In other words, if any sort of interference affects even just one part of a biome, the effect is felt throughout the whole. Often solutions in this game can take a more abstract route. For example, in Daisy World, I couldn't get my lifeforms to have a foothold on land due to the competitiveness of the Daisies. I tried lowering elevation, causing natural disasters to clear some land, adding different insects or animals to try to feed on the plants, and not much worked. Eventually, I played with the climate, which allowed me to freeze out some of the plants and gain an area where my lifeforms could thrive. It was the most intuitive, but also the most indirect way to achieve the results that I wanted.

There are very few low points in this game. I guess if you aren't the most patient or enjoy a bit of action in your game, then you may want to skip this one. The beginning of the game, especiallly, is really slow. You have to manage your energy (god energy I guess), and it can be a grind to wait for it to recharge or for you to have as much control over the systems of the game that you would like. 

 

Music

The music is pretty sparse but serviceable. 

Ads, Art, and Commercials

Final Verdict

The game is a must have for an SNES collection. It is arguably the best sim game yet for the system. Very very good! 

Super FamiComplete #57- Battle Commander: Hachibusa Shura no Heihou (Redux)

 

Title: Battle Commander: Hachibusa Shura no Heihou

Release Date: 12/29/1991 (Japan Only)

Developer: Arc System Works

Publisher: Banpresto

Here we have yet another Compati Hero game. It's only the THIRD game in franchise that we have played so far (more if you count that we have had an Ultraman game and two other Gundam games). If you don't remember, the Compati Hero series follows the "slightly deformed" and chibi versions of Gundam, Kamen Rider, and Ultraman. We already had SD: the Great Battle and a Super Dodgeball clone, and now we have a strategy RPG. Bad news is...it's all in Japanese, and there has not been a reliable translation made...so this probably won't be a long playthrough. 

Background

Well the title translates to something rather interesting; it is an invocation for good fortune in battle. It translates, very roughly to "Battle Commander: May Heaven bless your Armies, Children!"

Kamen Rider, Ultraman, and Gundam are each a piece of Japanese 80's pop culture, encapsulating the heart of  tokusatsu programs, anime, manga, and television. Each was the star of their own respective program, and were beloved characters. The SD format was pretty beloved in the world of Japanese video games, and had been done as a practice since the days of the NES, with titles like Kid Dracula (a chibi version of Castlevania). Even some modern games continue this style, such as World of Final Fantasy.

Now the developer of this game is Arc System Works. Nowadays, they have been known for their fighting games, such as the Guilty Gear and Blazblue franchises.

Gameplay

The game itself is a 4x strategy game (four x stands for exploration, exploitation, expand, and exterminate) in the vein of series such as Advance Wars or Masters of Orion. The goal of the game is simple: you build your base, expand your units, and slowly attack and diminish your opponents sphere of influence, units, and base. In other words, a simple strategy game with a Compati Heroes veneer over top of it. 

You move about the map in little squads of SD creatures. You build these squads by recruiting enemy monsters or purchasing them with resources. In a cute twist, the recruits you manage are purchased via a Japanese capsule machine; in other words, you could get a basic recruit or a super powered "rare" recruit depending on your luck. It seems that the key stats for a unit are how well it performs in land, sea, or sky, and how well it attacks vs those values as well, setting up a pretty rudimentary rock, paper, scissors style combat. Do you focus your units on one particular weakness? Or do you go for the jack of all trades style and take acceptable losses in one portion of your army? 

The maps themselves are quite large, and it looks like even the early battles take quite some time to complete. The game plays, similarly, to the Ogre Battle series, in that your squads patrol the map, and enemies are invisible until the fog of war clears (weirdly you can see the whole map, but the enemies just pop up out of the blue). If the goal of the stage is to defeat all the enemies, then the levels can take quite some time. Some of the missions, it seemed, lasted for well over an hour.

The sprites are really bright, cartoony, and adorable, much like the other games in the Compati Heroes lineup. The enemies, especially, seem to be lovingly designed. One enemy was a Pharaoh with an upside down skull for example. That's just neat. 

I am going to be honest; this game is inscrutable. Much of the notes I compiled was from watching about ninety minutes of a let's play of the game. This game is very menu intensive, with many different options for customization, not only to units, but also to squads as well as bases. I tried to play the game myself, but I couldn't figure out how to effectively attack with each unit. 

   

Final Verdict

This is a very obscure forgotten "gem" for the Super Famicom. It is so obscure I can't find any music for it on youtube, and only one playthrough. No art, ads, or the similar either. Should you add it to your collection? Probably not, as it is pretty inaccessible unless you read kanji.