Club Retro 2020: February - Game Gear

Erm... well, I hope Blast doesn't sour you from trying Chaos and Triple Trouble later. I guess starting at the lowest rung first makes sense.


I want to mention to you and Sarge , that Compile also made two Aleste games for Master System. The English SMS versions are called Power Strike and Power Strike II. Those are NOT the same games as the GG versions, they're unique to Master System. I've not played them yet personally, but plan to someday.

Gave Moldorian a quick try. It has an unusual battle system. It's turn-based, but if you don't act quickly enemies will attack you again, so it's kind of like the ATB system without any gauges. Also, you don't pick actions from a menu; instead, you press forward for attack, back for defense, etc. The battles seem to go by very fast. Definitely read the manual, which the fan-translators were nice enough to translate as well. In the readme, they claim that the game is known for its great soundtrack. The composer is Hitoshi Sakimoto, who's done a ton of video game music, including pretty much every Matsuno game - Ogre Battle, Tactics Ogre, Vagrant Story, FF Tactics, FFXII, etc - and many, many more. I do have to say that the little I've heard is quite nice. Definitely in the upper tier of Game Gear soundtracks. The only thing I don't know yet is how the encounter rate will feel in the long term. I'm not nearly as patient as I used to be with random encounters, and that tends to be especially true with 8-bit RPGs.

EDIT - Finished GG Aleste. Twice, because I was sleepy the first time and I wanted to beat it on one credit. Ended up with 9 lives. I also tried Special Mode; it has enemies fire a parting shot when they're destroyed, so you have a lot more dodging to do. It's a bit much for the GG to handle, though, so you start to get a lot of slowdown. In Normal mode, the game performs really well, though. I've already talked about it a bit, but I'll just add that there's a nice variety to the level design for something with such a typical setting (ie space). The two bonus areas are a nice little break from the core action, that multi-floor spaceship feels sufficiently epic, and the water level is nice too. The final boss is quite easy, but it looks really cool. A lot of the music is good, too, which is not always the case on the Game Gear. Sarge's 7.5 is probably the exact score I'd give it, meaning it's solid.

I just finished Donald no Magical World. Sounds like a Disney game, right? Wrong! Not that Donald...

...this (Mc)Donald.



It really doesn't help that Disney's Donald also starred in a "Magical Adventure" title on SNES.

At any rate, surprisingly, it's not a bad time at all. The game does suffer from copious slowdown, though, and Ronald's range is pretty pitiful. But it is pretty competent at what it does.

The stages typically follow a formula of getting past a few sub-sections by finding a key to a door and getting to an exit. Sometimes, you'll be avoiding an enemy or hazard that is trying to pull you in, eventually getting a key and moving on. The next-to-last segments tend to be massive vertical climbs, and once you get there, you get to fight the boss of that stage. You can start over at any section except the boss if you lose your lives; in that case, you end up at the start of the section before the boss.



There are some scattered temporary health extensions along the way, and a few minigames if you find the "M" sign that can get you extra stuff. The match game was the easiest, but there's also a tile that ends things immediately, so be prepared to get trolled.

Other than that, I can appreciate that the sprites are a little smaller. There's a reasonable amount of room to operate, and cramped quarters are a flaw in a ton of portable games of this vintage.

I'll say this is a... 6.5/10. Most vets will finish it up in less than an hour, although there are passwords.

So I finished Moldorian, one of a just a handful of traditional, turn-based RPGs on the Game Gear, which was fan-translated last year. It was developed by a company named Rit's, headed by the illustrator Kensuke Suzuki aka Hiroshi Kajiyama. Though you've probably never heard the name Rit's before, chances are everybody who posts here has seen some of their work. This is because Rit's and its president provided graphics and character designs to most of Camelot/Sonic Co.'s games, from the classic Shining Force series (starting with the first Gaiden) to the Golden Sun series. Aside from their collaboration work, Rit's also made a few games under various names, notably the Dragon Master Silk series of first-person dungeon crawlers, as well as some eroge for Japanese computers.

Despite this connection, Moldorian doesn't look much like the Shining games, apart from the use of character portraits during conversations, which was still somewhat unusual at the time, though here the artstyle is more realistic. The towns are set up like old-school Dragon Quest, everything on the same map with just the walls visible; the sprites outside of battle remind me a bit of NES Final Fantasy; and the battle sprites, seen from the side, have a pretty unique style, with relatively realistic proportions. All in all, it's a decent-looking game, though not quite as 16-bitish as Royal Stone or Defenders of Oasis. It looks more like a 16-bit remake of a 8-bit game, if that makes sense, like Dragon Quest 1 & 2 on SNES.

The story is nothing very original, but I'll say that it's pretty well told, with little details here and there, particularly in terms of character interactions and relationships, that indicate that some care was put into it. It's more also developed than the plot of most 8-bit RPGs - it's probably on the level of some of those late NES RPGs that came out in the '90s, but, being a Game Gear game, it's more compact, with the whole game taking about 8 to 10 hours to finish. 

The battle system is mostly turn-based, but there's a slight real-time element, and it does away with menus almost completely. Basically, each action is mapped to a button, and each character and enemy has its own turns. When a character's turn comes up, they step forward, and you have a small window of time to choose an action; if you do nothing, their turn is wasted (though their next turns tends to come faster when that happens). It's a bit like Final Fantasy's ATB system, except you don't have to wait for gauges to fill up. To give some examples, to attack, you press Forward, then you can pick a target; casting a spell requires that you hold Button 2, then press a direction corresponding to one of your four equipped spells. Items also have to be equipped in order to be used. It takes a while to learn and get used to the controls, but it does make things a little more exciting, particularly if you set the Battle Speed high in the options menu, which I recommend doing. You can save anywhere, and bosses are usually visible before engaging in battle, so punishment for getting it wrong is quite light. It's not a terribly hard game, either, and level-grinding isn't required except in the very beginning.

The main downside to the game is that the encounter rate is really high. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the dungeons are pretty small and the battles go by very quickly, but it still gets annoying at times. The worst is not during dungeons, but when you're looking for the next town or dungeon on the world map; for some reason things are often much further from one another than in most RPGs, and the world map is needlessly large considering there's really no incentive to explore it. I was fine with the dungeons, but I got really sick of it all once or twice while searching for a town "East of" whatever other town I'd left from. Thankfully, warping out of dungeons and from town to town is possible from the very beginning. There's also a spell you can buy to lower the encounter rate, but I'm not sure exactly how it works. Either it only gets rid of weaker monsters relative to your level, or it only works outside; it even seems to be cumulative. When backtracking towards the end of the game to go unlock all the previously locked doors and get the treasure, I would cast it three or four times and the monsters would leave me alone for a nice stretch; when I tried casting it during a few dungeons, however, it had no apparent effect.

This is the game's second, lesser flaw: a few things are weirdly obscure because the game just doesn't tell you. While you can see how equipment affects your main stats before you put it on, there's a lot of special equipment which will have some kind of effect that you won't know about until it happens in battle or while taking a close look at your stats. One sword I had would occasionally attack twice; one armlet which seemed particularly weak but was worth a lot of money resurrected a character who died in battle, then shattered; a hat I got late in the game would restore 1MP to my main magic-user per step. It's definitely worth experimenting with stuff that doesn't seem that good initially. Where it becomes an actual flaw, though, is that the game doesn't tell you when you're cursed. I equipped some helmet early on, and since it seemed quite good, I kept it on for like half the game. Some time later, I noticed that my main character only got to act once for everyone's else two turns, but I assumed there was just some hidden stat determining turn order and everyone else's was higher. It was pretty annoying, though. Then I finally see a helmet with better defense in a store, go to equip, and find that I can't unequip the old one; that's when I finally realize it's cursed (and go to the shaman to have it removed). The game never told me! Nothing in the stats menu, no visual cue, no warning message... I wish I'd known about that sooner. Another thing that's worth knowing is that although there's nothing in pots and cabinets in the first town and no message when you press the button in front of them, it's actually worth searching them, because there's some great stuff to be found later on.

All in all, I'd say it's still the second best traditional, turned-based RPG on the Game Gear, behind Defenders of Oasis, and it's probably better than any of those that are playable in English on the old black-and-white Game Boy. I'd give it either a 7 or 7.5, because I thought the endgame portion was really strong.

Finally, the Hitoshi Sakimoto (every Matsuno game, lots of Square Enix stuff, some Tekken stuff) soundtrack is one of the few really good ones on the system. It's very reminiscent of some of the better NES RPG soundtracks in style: melodic, nostalgic, etc.


BTW, that girl with the bow and arrows and the angel wings is not in the game.