Western-made Japanese style games
Aug 28, 2023 12:13:01 GMT -5
Post by toei on Aug 28, 2023 12:13:01 GMT -5
I mostly have RPGs in mind, but since this is a niche topic, might as well allow other genres. Legends (Amiga), Secret of Evermore, Shadow Madness, Septerra Core, Black Sigil... There are also VS fighters, platformers or beat-'em-ups made by Western devs in a Japanese style on old consoles, like, huh, Target: Renegade, which is one of the worst games of its genre. Those use to be relatively uncommon; with the advent of game maker software and platforms like Steam, they've become quite commonplace. I find that a lot of them still come off as very amateurish from a distance. They often use RPGMaker with generic assets. For those that don't, they've generally gotten good at sprites, but the character portraits tend to look off, in that "Westerner tries to draw manga for Twitter" way.
Secret of Evermore was genuinely pretty good. I didn't know the circumstances around it when I first played it as a kid and it seemed just as good as any other SNES RPG. I know I've played some terrible ones, but I can barely remember most of them. I disliked Pier Solar and dropped it. It's 13-years old now, so it's fine for this forum. It was like a bad Lunar fangame with asinine dungeon designs and bad art. I remember one of the creators stating repeatedly that the game was objectively, undoubtedly superior to Phantasy Star IV, then actually playing it.
As much as I talk about how I don't trust them, they still often make me curious. I wonder about Shadow Madness, especially, which seems to have been heavily inspired by FF7, Legends, and Black Sigil, which was the Sea of Stars of the DS era (ie an open Chrono Trigger homage that received heavy niche hype).
This is Legends, btw. Not to be confused with Legend the SNES Euro beat-'em-up. Apparently there's even another "Legend" on the Amiga, a first-person dungeon crawler.
I once tried to emulate it but I couldn't get it to run, and I wasn't really interested in any other Amiga game, so I'll admit I gave up pretty easily. There's a port of it on Steam, but the reviews say it doesn't actually work. It's probably decent at best, but it's the closet thing to a Zelda on the Amiga and Amiga CD32, so that's still something.
Secret of Evermore was genuinely pretty good. I didn't know the circumstances around it when I first played it as a kid and it seemed just as good as any other SNES RPG. I know I've played some terrible ones, but I can barely remember most of them. I disliked Pier Solar and dropped it. It's 13-years old now, so it's fine for this forum. It was like a bad Lunar fangame with asinine dungeon designs and bad art. I remember one of the creators stating repeatedly that the game was objectively, undoubtedly superior to Phantasy Star IV, then actually playing it.
As much as I talk about how I don't trust them, they still often make me curious. I wonder about Shadow Madness, especially, which seems to have been heavily inspired by FF7, Legends, and Black Sigil, which was the Sea of Stars of the DS era (ie an open Chrono Trigger homage that received heavy niche hype).
This is Legends, btw. Not to be confused with Legend the SNES Euro beat-'em-up. Apparently there's even another "Legend" on the Amiga, a first-person dungeon crawler.
I once tried to emulate it but I couldn't get it to run, and I wasn't really interested in any other Amiga game, so I'll admit I gave up pretty easily. There's a port of it on Steam, but the reviews say it doesn't actually work. It's probably decent at best, but it's the closet thing to a Zelda on the Amiga and Amiga CD32, so that's still something.
