Title: Kouryu Densetsu Villgust: Kieta Shoujo (trans. Legend of the Radiant Dragon Villgust: Missing Girl)
Release Date: 05/23/1992
Developer: Winkysoft
Publisher: Bandai
Another Japanese exclusive RPG; luckily this one has a pretty decent fan translation, so let's jump in.
Background
Winkysoft is a developer of primarily Japanese only titles that saw its heydey during the Super Famicom/Gameboy era; never growing wildly popular with any of its titles, but still working consistently. We will be seeing more of their games with the Super Robot Wars series (another SD Gundam series).
Bandai Namco nea Bandai has is the megacorporation toy and entertainment company that owns the licenses of many a piece of pop culture: from Pac-Man, Naruto, DBZ, and even the license to Stranger Things. We will cover plenty of Bandai games over the course of this blog, and with how wide and varied their portfolio of products is, I am sure we will see more unknown games such as this one.
Narrative
The story follows Shun, a Japanese high school student who gets whisked away to the fantasy world of Villgust quite randomly. In the opening cutscene, both him and his girlfriend Michiko spy a strange red-eyed rabbit named Usagi who warps them both to this traditional JRPG world. The rabbit, weirdly enough, is also the image used for your menu and UI cursor in battle. When Shun awakes in this world, he is alone and immediately attacked by monsters; luckily a group of adventurers slay the monsters and rescue him. These adventurers are members of an organization called R.A.G.E., standing for "Resistance Against the God of Evil." Shun joins up with them as they promise to help him look for his girlfriend, Michiko, hence the "Missing Girl" in the title.
Gameplay
This game reminds me of a story if you, as the reader, will humor me. I remember my Dad, whom I only saw for a little bit each year as a kid, asking me about what sort of video games that I enjoyed. I mentioned Final Fantasy, and he asked how you played such a game. Was it like "the Mario" where you had to "get the coins and jump on mushrooms to get the high score?" I started to explain that it was an RPG. "An RPG? What's an RPG?" My brother cuts in "Ugh Dad its really stupid. You have a team of people, and each one has a number value set to them, and you fight monsters and they have a number value too. You pick commands off a menu like "attack" and your characters just attack without you controlling them. The team with numbers remaining after a battle is over wins. They try to add fancy colors and graphics, but that's basically it." As much as I tried to explain to my Dad and brother that his explanation was a gross simplification, and these games actually were about crafting a party and strategizing, my Dad's mind was made up and RPGs were wastes of time (my brother ended up putting literal months of time into Everquest so I feel like I got the last laugh as far as games being trivial wastes of time).
Anyways, the point of this story is that my brother must have been playing games like Kouryu Densetsu when he made that statement, because my goodness is this game incredibly spartan for a JRPG. If I had played this game back then, my interpretation of the JRPG genre would probably be much the same. This is a game that made me realize how much polish Squaresoft and Enix put into some of their SNES era titles, and how much that polish really adds to the enjoyment of a title. This game lacks the polish and the artfulness of titles like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.
You start the game on the world map which looks like a decent world map for a JRPG: it's colorful with trees, deserts, beaches, and bodies of water to help break up the monotony of the grasslands. So far, pretty stock standard. You will then notice that your characters are gigantic on the world map; they tower over everything. This is made more clear when you enter into the first town, you notice that all the character sprites are still huge. You tower over building and trees to the point where it looks like you are entering a village of doll houses. It just rings as odd.
The game really doesn't give you a goal off the bat, so instead you head to the first town. The town is pretty stock standard for a JRPG, so you do the JRPG thing and talk to the residents, who either talk about how dangerous it is outside the town, and how that the "Tornado Tower" is a might dangerous! The town has a shop, an inn, a pub (where the owner just says "yes"), an item/armor/weapon shop, and a church to revive characters (the priest looks like a weird bug alien, though I think it's supposed to be the rabbit character Usagi). No goals, no cutscenes of any kind, so I figured I would head to the Tornado tower.
By this point you will have definitely bumped into one of the frequent random battles (at worst I counted about 1 every five steps). The combat is where this game ground to a halt. It is generic turn based, but just a poor implementation of such a system. Similar to a SNES Lufia game, your characters inhabit the bottom of the screen while the enemy sprites occupy the top of the screen. You choose all of your character's actions, and then you watch a full turn play out between your characters and the enemies. When a character or enemy attacks, they a two frame animation where they appear before the recipient of their attack, swing their weapon, which makes a "pung" sound, and return to their original position. While it sounds standard, there are some points that just make this ring false...
1) To enter a battle there is no fanfare really; there is the "pung" sound the screen just blackens briefly and the fight starts. No classic Final Fantasy static sound and smash screen to the fight, or even Playstation era Final Fantasy color whirl.
2) As the turns play out, you lose the UI screen that tells you how much health your character has, as this instead changes to a window that tells you how much damage is being dealt. You don't get to see your characters health until the end of the turn. What I find most hilarious is that if the enemy kills one of your characters, it doesn't even say how much damage the attack did, it will just show the animation of them getting struck and it will say "Shun died."
3) The level up sound is a piercing bell sound that is super grating on the ears. Also there is no fanfare when you win a battle you just get unceremoniously dumped back to the world or dungeon map.
4) No matter where you encounter an enemy on the world map, the background of the fight is always a green "grassland" layer. This does change, thank goodness, when you go into a dungeon.
4) This doesn't have to do with the battle system but the previous point reminded me of this...When you rest at an inn there is no "good night, sleep tight" music or anything; the screen blackens for about half a second and that's it. Such a skeleton framework of a JRPG.
The biggest problem with the combat, though, lies in the play. The enemies, even the basic slimes, are super tanky. It took four of my five characters striking one slime for them to kill them, while the slimes were easily taking off half of my characters' life with one attack. Your characters will die left and right, which will require you to trek back to town to revive them; that trek, if it is long enough, will certainly kill the rest of your party as well. The game shows its hand right away that it is going to be a grindfest. They want you to park yourself outside the first town, struggle against the slimes until you level up and get some gold, go buy better equipment, level up some more, and then tackle the tower. If you try to step outside this framework at all, you will just get wiped over and over again. And it is not like the game is generous with levels. It took me three battles to get one character to level up, and the rest of my party was spread out over the following three battles.
The sprite work, too, is incredibly muddy: they try to give the character sprites a faux-3D depth to them, like they are little lego people in a playset. The effect of this, though, is that details of the sprites are hard to see. Shun, your main character, is pretty clear, but the caster character you get looks like she has three blue orbs in the middle of her face instead of normal facial features. One of the issues is that they are trying to add shadows to the sprites; instead of adding dynamism, though, it leads to too many colors that are similar shades next to each other. There is little contrast between the colors, so the details become lost. This extends, too, to the enemy sprites. While the enemy sprites aren't going for the faux-3D look, they are just not good examples of sprite art. The slimes have gigantic human bug eyes, and the werewolves look like blocks of grey with red eyes. The boss fights, from what I have seen, do fare better, but they are still no great shakes.
Overall, this game was horribly uninviting for a JRPG; it was a non-starter and really didn't have any gimmick that would want to make me keep playing. I played through Maka-Maka and Romancing Saga and even made it a good chunk into GDLeen, but this was just so...bleh. At a certain point I am going to respect my time over the sake of completion. So I made it to the first dungeon and then got too frustrated. I mean, who wants to grind just to start a game?
Music
The music is also nothing too spectacular.
Art
Interestingly enough, the game was an inspiration for an OVA set in the same world. Here are some images from that, which gives a good sense for the style of anime aesthetic they were going for with the game.
Final Verdict
Sadly this is not a hidden gem, but an instead an exercise in "you didn't realize how good you had it" with other classic RPGs. This is one I am glad to have to have in the rearview mirror.
