Monthly Archives: August 2024

Atelier A2 – Atelier Elie (PS1) (Round 1)

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Atelier Elie (エリーのアトリエ〜ザールブルグの錬金術士2〜), released 12/17/1998, developed and published by Gust

This is actually at the end of 1998, but I decided to do a first run-through of the game now, and then I will return to it later. After the unexpected success of Atelier Marie, Gust seems to have immediately started developing a sequel. It came out about a year and a half after Marie, so it’s no surprise that the game is very similar. It takes place in the same town as Marie, with many of the same places and characters. The main character Elie, like Marie, is a struggling student hoping to graduate the alchemy academy.

The new gameplay elements are minor. This is the first game to allow you to affect the quality of an item (this time by changing the formula), although the quality has relatively little effect on the game in comparison to later entries. You can also do “original” crafts where you can choose any items you want to combine, although you have to get reasonably close to pre-set formulas to be able to get items. Elie’s levels are now split into an Alchemy level and an Adventurer level.

What is different is the scope of the game, which is larger than Marie. Marie’s seven endings can be gotten in one playthrough fairly easily (maybe with a bit of backtracking to old saves). Elie has 12 endings, and they are different enough that it would be hard to do them in one playthrough. There are more items, and more events. On the whole it is still fairly simple compared to the later entries but it’s more robust than the first game.

The main character Elfill (Elie) is from a rural village. She had her life saved by an alchemist (Marlone/Marie) and now her goal is to become an alchemist herself and reunite with Marie. The basic gameplay is the same as Marie — go out and gather ingredients, make items, and get money by fulfilling requests in the bar. As you level your alchemy you get access to the academy library and you can make more items, and by hearing rumors in the bar you can access more gathering locations. There are a number of events that either activate at certain dates or seasons, or when you get someone’s friendship level up high enough.

Every year on 8/1 there is a contest at the academy, where you have to craft an item, answer quiz questions, and then try to break a barrel without damaging the contents within. After the contest you can check the next day to see how well you did. To get the best endings you have to do pretty well in the contests. Beyond that I am not entirely certain what the effect is — in my experience it seems like if you skip a contest entirely you get a bad ending regardless of your other conditions, and that doing poorly in the contests does not affect the game unless you are going for one of the top endings. But I am not certain about either of these things.

One of the early events I saw was Shia’s wedding (she is Marie’s friend from the first game; the “best” ending of that game has you crafting a medicine to cure her illness).

One of the rivals of Elie in the academy school is Aizel, who I recognize from Atelier Viorate (one of the top Viorate endings involves her). Here she’s just a student, though, under the tutelage of Helmina, who I gather also shows up in some other Atelier games.

I played without a walkthrough for a while; the “regular” ending is as easy to get as in Marie. All you have to do is make a level 4 item, which I had already done by about halfway through the second year. After that you can just rest until each year’s 8/1, do the contest, and then Elie will graduate and set up her alchemy shop where Marie’s was.

At this point I looked at a guide to see what endings there were. I was hoping I could get what seems to be the “best” ending, but I had already messed up some flags that would make it very hard — in the end I was not able to activate an event and I couldn’t get the best ending.

The battle system is nearly the same as Marie — there’s some kind of weather effect but it rarely seemed to do anything.

To find Marie, you have to raise the friendship of one of the companions (a dancer, who I didn’t get any screenshot of apparently). If you have activated a few of the Marie-related flags, she will eventually tell you about a coastal town you can go to, although it takes a month to travel there.

Once you get here, it opens up a bunch of new gathering locations, and you can pay 100 money to have the items sent back to your home town. You can’t do any crafting here, though. It seems that Marie has left here to go across the sea to a different town, but no ships are going right now because of a sea monster.

By seeing some events related to a woman in this town, she will eventually agree to let you use her ship if you can beat the monster.

The monster is powerful but if you use a sleep medicine on it, it won’t wake up at all and you can defeat it with a few shots of the ship cannon.

Elie then reunites with Marie in the town there, and you can hire her for your party. However, to actually get the ending associated with this, you need 8 out of the 11 possible “marie points” from various things throughout the game. I had already messed up 3 of the points, so theoretically I could still do it, but there is an event that can give you a point that I was never able to get to activate correctly.

So I went ahead and stopped with the “Maister Rank” ending, which you can get by fulfilling some not-so-difficult conditions. This gives you an extension of two more years and allows for the three “top” endings, of which one is just getting the Maister Rank and doing none of the other conditions. Elie graduates the academy with this top honor and decides to go back to her hometown to start a new life there.

I managed to get three of the 12 endings (a bad ending, the “normal” ending, and the Maister Rank ending). I don’t know if I am going to play this game to get all twelve of the endings, but I would at least like to retry to get the Marie-related ending that I didn’t successfully do this time. Along the way I will see if there are other endings I can pick up, although as I said, it’s not as easy as it was in Marie to do this.

One other thing that’s in the game are love events that can set Elie up with some of the characters; I didn’t really do this at all. This is partially because a lot of the love-related flags conflict with the Marie flags.

I’m planning on making another post to just list the endings and conditions, partially for my own benefit (although I suppose since there is a translation patch for the PS2 version this could help someone). I will probably then return to the game once I actually reach December 1998 in the SRPGs and give it another try. Other goals i might try are crafting all 200 items, and getting all the event pictures.

(Actually I may not need the post with the endings…)

SRPG 98 – Zanma Chou-ougi Valhollian (SAT)

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Zanma Chou-ougi Valhollian (斬魔超奥義ヴァルハリアン), released 8/6/1998), developed by Datt Japan, published by Kamata & Partners

I will be playing 3 more Saturn SRPGs (there are a few more for the Saturn but I will be playing them in other versions). When I was checking out information about this game I saw that it was only 16 stages so I expected it to be a quick play, but each stage takes several hours so it was longer than I thought. Surprisingly this game has a translation patch, making it one of the few 1998 games that can be played in English (it’s also the first Saturn game I’ve encountered that is too expensive on ebay for me to buy it right away). Frequent and longtime commenter cccmar is listed in the translation patch credits as a “major tester”.

The story is pretty light. Not only is it only 16 stages but each stage only has a bit of dialogue before and after the stage. It’s a serviceable story and has some twists, but I don’t think it would make you play just to see how the story turns out. I wanted to say a little about the story but I didn’t make any notes and I can’t find any description of the story online..it has typical elements of “beat the evil enemy” and some surprised betrayals and reveals.

The basic gameplay is standard player turn-enemy turn. You can move, attack, and use special moves (the “ougi” of the title).

Each character has a certain amount of SP that rises as they level (I think 5 is the max). You learn several regular ougi (costing either 1 or 2 SP) and one “super” ougi that is basically a boss killer move. Most of the characters will learn this around level 20-23, with the four magic users at level 25.

For equipment, you have a weapon, armor, and three accessory slots. There are treasure chests in the stages, and between maps you can buy equipment from a merchant that travels with you.

You can turn off animations

The main distinctive feature of the game are the combo attacks. You can have two characters participate in a single attack. As they do this, their “combo level” will rise, making their combos more effective in certain ways.

Each stage is quite long; the maps are large and you are typically presented with 30-40 enemies (sometimes a bit more). There is a basic strategy that works on most stages — enemies will mostly stay put unless you either enter their range, or reach some point on the map. Once you see enemies move towards you, you can just wait out of their range and try to draw them into a narrow area, and then take them down. The enemies tend to be pretty powerful in general, and you can’t rely on anyone to tank. Characters with high speed can often dodge the enemy attacks which is useful in drawing the enemies in without dying.

The only way to recover HP is with the ougis — most characters have a heal move, and two characters have area heals. In the beginning stages you usually have to use most of your SP for heals, but once you can rely on Tea and Rilfy to heal, you can spend more SP on the area effect attacks which help a lot. The super ougis are mostly for boss killing.

If the main character reaches 0 hp it’s game over (UGH), if anyone else goes to 0 they will have to sit out the next map unless you use a revive skill (which brings them back with 0 SP). Generally you do not want this to happen since you need your whole force to make the maps go smoothly.

You can save any time, so often you have to retry turns several times until you can get everyone in the right position so that no one dies.

There are a few maps where this basic strategy doesn’t work:

  • Stage 3 begins with new characters on their own in the middle of enemies so you have to rush up to save them; it’s hard to do this without anyone dying but with repeated attempts it is possible.
  • Stages 7 and 9 have summoning circles that Dark Cardinals can move onto and summon enemies. Stage 7 is particularly rough in this regard, you have to go quickly and face a lot of enemies to get there early enough (Rilfy’s teleport magic helps). Stage 9 is more forgiving; you need to get to the first one quickly but the Dark Cardinals by the other two won’t start moving until you get closer to them. I believe that the circles do run out of enemies eventually, but not until they summon 40 or so (on top of the 40 starting units).
  • Stage 10 you don’t have Rilfy so you need to be more careful with your heals.
  • Stage 13 seems hard at first with the separated parties, but it’s something of an illusion — the boss and his entourage begin moving towards you at the start of the stage, but stops after a few turns. So you can turtle up near the castle with the starting party (I also lost a mage on the other side and revived her with the MC for an additional unit)
  • Stage 14 – I think they may have made a design mistake here; you can get in the boss’ range near the starting point so you can take the boss down with a few super ougis and not have to deal with the majority of the stage — a welcome relief this late in the game.

Parts of the game seem underdeveloped to me. There are only 16 different enemies (not including bosses), and I think these are all palette swaps of 4 basic types. The same bgm is used for all the stages except the final one.

I have a feeling that most people are going to find this game too slow-moving and unrewarding. It’s far from the worst game I’ve played, but it does require a lot of patience (or just queue up a ton of podcasts).

Chester Field: Challenge to the Dark God (Famicom)

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Chester Field (チェスター・フィールド ～暗黒神への挑戦～), released 7/30/1987, developed and published by Vic Tokai

This is another early action/RPG hybrid for the Famicom, and it pretty much continues the pattern of involving more frustration than fun, despite having a lot of potential.

The first mystery is that when you turn the game on, it labels it as “Episode II: Challenge to the Dark God.” As far as I can tell, there never was an Episode I, but maybe there was a fad at the time for doing things like Star Wars Episode IV. Here’s a story summary copied from Moby Games: “The Kingdom of Guldred has been invaded by General Guemon and his dark forces, who have killed their king. A brave knight named Gazem fled for a paradise of sun and pleasure named Chesterfield Island with the deposed queen and their daughter Karen. But Guemon’s forces were right there and sunk their ship, killed the queen, abducted Karen and left Gazem for dead. Fortunately for Guldred, Gazem barely managed to breathe the kingdom’s sorry plight to a brave knight named Kein before he died. Now the fate of Guldred rests on Kein’s broad shoulders…”

The game plays out over eight stages, although you can travel between them (in a somewhat cumbersome way). The hero Kein can jump, duck, and attack. He begins with 100 HP and can get up to 200 by healing with items, resting at an inn, etc. You get XP for beating the monsters, and each stage you can level up twice (so by the end of the game you can be level 16). You also earn money that you can use to buy weapons, armor, and shields.

Each stage has some sort of dungeon you need to go through. On each stage you need to find an item as well as defeat the boss at the end of the area. The outer areas of the stages have houses that you can visit to get hints, or buy things.

The characters remind me of the Golgo 13 NES game, which is also by Vic Tokai

The game plays decently, although the movement Kein is a bit stiff, especially when you try to turn him around. You can get passwords from the inn, and if you die you lose half your money and go back to the beginning of whatever area you are in, but you keep any XP or items that you got.

There are two big problems with the game that make it not really worth playing, in my opinion. The first one is that there are a lot of pits that cause instant death (including ones that require you to jump on small moving platforms). This is common from the action RPGs of this era — Zelda II, Castlevania II, Getsu Fuumaden, and other games all have them, I suppose because pretty much all side scrolling action games of any type had them. But it’s annoying to have 200 HP but then have to go back to the beginning of the area because you couldn’t hit a jump on a tiny platform.

A second problem is that the dungeons are extremely difficult to navigate. This is the map of the second stage. You have hidden pits (and the outer areas and other places often have hidden areas in the ceiling or hidden walls you have to find). There are also loops at the side, and a lot of one-way passages. This makes the map hard to navigate because all the screens basically look the same, and it becomes really difficult to tell whether you are in a new area or whether you looped around.

As with the pits, this is typical of games of this era. I would love to read any kind of history or interviews with designers of this period to know what they were thinking when they made the games. Reviews often criticized these games for being too difficult so it’s not just that it was a different time and nobody knew any better. Maybe they were just too limited in the ways they could make a game challenging or take longer for the player? (Or as I’ve said before, they just wanted to sell strategy guides)

Another complaint I saw from Japanese players is that for some reason the opening and ending text is in English. There’s a video of the game on Youtube titled “Chester Field: You Need an English Dictionary to Play.” The comments are all saying “This is nostalgic” but then “This was impossible to clear without a strategy guide” and “I started up the game and had no idea what I was doing.”

Anyway, I don’t think this is really worth playing now.

SRPG 97 – Epica Stella/Vanguard Bandits (PS1)

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Epica Stella (エピカステラ), released 7/30/1998, developed and published by Human Entertainment

There aren’t many SRPGs from this era with official English translations, but here is one. More surprisingly I actually played the English version (I’ll say why in a minute). The translation was done by Working Designs, who brought their usual “creative” translation efforts (including some unfortunate casual homophobia).

I started out playing the Japanese version.

Each character has a mech, and three equipment slots (weapon, jewel, and accessory). The jewel item can grant magic-type powers, while the weapon (and mech) grant general attack abilities. All of the power are based on the character’s stats — the attacks and spells work off the base stats with equipment bonuses, whereas the various “innate” abilities only work off base stats. When a character levels up, they get 3 points to spend on any abilities (with no automatic raises in any stat).

The big problem with the game is that neither the manual nor the game give you any information whatsoever on what the stat requirements for moves are, and this is a game where the difficulty ranges from cakewalk to impossible depending on how you spend your stat points. A further problem is that if you search the Internet for advice on how to distribute the points, you can find advice that is not well suited for people playing the game for the first time — they will say things like “DEF is a trash stat that you don’t need to put points into” or which may be true from the standpoint of a very experienced player who knows exactly which skills to get and how to cheapshot the enemies, but can get a beginner into hot water.

In any case, I followed bad advice (plus some of my own mistakes) and reached a point at about stage 7 where I simply could not beat the stage no matter what I did, because my units were too weak and didn’t have the right skills. Typically in this case I will just move on to the next game, but I decided to restart using the English version. I switched to the English version primarily because it adds animation skip, which the Japanese version doesn’t have.

Another curious thing about the English version is the “assist” bonus:

The English version shows a bonus you get to your attack based on how many other characters you have adjacent to the enemy. This bonus is not shown in the Japanese version nor is it mentioned in the instruction manual, and I’m really not sure what is going on here. Did WD think the Japanese version was too hard and actually add this system in? Or was it a hidden thing in the JP version that they simply hacked the game to display?

On this playthrough, I followed a fairly simple procedure for stat growths — I kept everyone’s stats pretty even, except for POW which I had 2-3 points above the rest. I think that if you do this, you’ll get a pretty decent team for the whole game. If you also look at a list of abilities, particularly the character-specific and elemental abilities, you can go for those and make your team even more powerful.

One playthrough of the game is 20 stages long, but there are 56 stages in the game. There are three separate routes, and one branching path on the “main” route. There’s a place from the main menu where you can see the total number of stages you’ve played, and a record of how many mech animations you’ve seen. Another curious thing is that in the Japanese version, these stats update automatically as you play, but in the English version you have to use this “load stats” command in the menu (which is not in the JP version). Many places recommend that after each stage you play, you quit to the main menu and use that load stats to make sure everything gets recorded. I wonder why that developed in the transition between the JP and EN version.

I only played the main “Kingdom” route, which is the basic expected storyline — you are fighting for the small kingdom against the big empire, and the main villain is someone in the Empire who is trying to use the power for his own greed. I don’t know much about the other two storylines (which people refer to as “Empire” and “Ruin”), but I would be interested to hear from people who have played them.

The turns are done on a speed basis. There seems to be some uncertainty over whether having a high AGL makes you take more turns — a lot of places say that it does, but I’ve also seen that people have used cheat codes to show that it doesn’t. In any case, on your turn you get 100 AP. You can move and then use one attack or power. The moves take AP based on the terrain, and the attacks/powers have a cost in both AP and TP (which I think may stand for “tiredness points” although the manual doesn’t say — in the English version they changed it to “FP”). When you end your turn, any AP you have left over reduce your TP. If your TP ever hits 100, you become frozen and all attacks have a 100% chance to hit (and there is no option to counter).

Managing TP is one of the key aspects of the battle system. You gain TP not only for using your moves, but also if you defend against an enemy attack or counterattack, you will gain TP there as well. So the goal is not to let your own characters’ TP get too high, but you want to try to freeze the opponents (particularly the bosses). There are certain attacks (like Turbulence) that make this much easier.

The other key is making use of back attacks and ranged attacks. A back attack cannot be defended against or countered. Range attacks often cannot be countered either — the enemy will usually defend, but that raises their TP/FP.

This game has the very annoying “Main character 0 hp = game over” element that I always dislike in games, but if anyone else dies they just lose morale and exit the battle. Every character has a morale value relative to every other character, but I’m not clear on whether this has any effect other than on the main route, you need a certain amount of total morale to avoid the bad ending. There’s another feature that I wasn’t really sure about either, the “emotion system”.

The diamond below the stats there is supposed to indicate the emotion of the character, and that can affect attack, evade, and other things. But I have no idea what causes it to change or how much of an effect it has — I just ignored that aspect for the game.

Overall this was an enjoyable enough game. I didn’t like it enough to do the other two routes. The story is a little thin, although the multiple paths do add some replayability. I think what most bothered me was just the opaqueness of the system (particularly in the Japanese version). Of course if I had been in Japan when this came out I would have just paid the $15 or so for the strategy guide to find out what everything actually did.