Title: Light Fantasy (JP)
Release Date: 7/03/1992 (Japan only)
Developer: Advance Communication Company
Publisher: Tonkinhouse
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.
