Wachenröder (バッケンローダー), released 8/6/1998, developed by TNS, published by Sega

Game 100! This is the second to last Saturn game I will be playing. It takes place in a steampunk like world, an island that has been cut off from the rest of the world by some kind of mist that keeps people in.

The game begins with a very dark backstory for the main character (Lucian); he’s born in a slum in one of the six districts of the island, where there is a heavy water treatment plant that fills the area with pollution and magnesium. His little sister is one of many who suffer from a wasting disease that prevents them from being able to go out into the light. Eventually he decides to enter some kind of tournament to earn money for her medicine, but while he’s out registering for it, she dies. He vows vengeance on Sword Master Duran, the leader of the area. The game then switches to 4 years later, when he is wandering around aimlessly.

Lucian soon meets Carol, a woman who is also looking for Duran — but Duran is soon overthrown and forced to flee for treason, which brings a bounty hunter into the party as well who is looking to get the money for Duran. The plot proceeds from here, involving the mysterious “forest dwellers” who seem to have unusual technology, the six “sword masters” who rule the areas, and the secret of a disaster that sunk a nearby island.

The story is fairly good, and has voiced dialogue for a good part of it. It’s a bit short and the ending is cursory but overall it’s entertaining. There are a lot of names in the game that are taken from real stuff, like Titus Groan (the hero of the Gormenghast books), Fatboy Slim, and Franky Zappa.

The story is partly narrated by Verbet, a blind woman who also appears as a character in the game, and partly just regular story sequences.

The game is the usual player/enemy turn. Each character begins with 99 action points, that can be used to move, attack, and use special moves. Any AP left over can be converted to “cool down”, which is important for the overall attack system.

It doesn’t look like I got a screenshot of it, but all the weapons are these chainsaw-style motor weapons. You can choose a power between 1-5 for each attack, or use a special attack, or a super-special attack. These all add heat to your weapon, which you have to cool down — weapons will cool down automatically between turns based on the temperature and weather, but you can also redirect leftover AP to cooling down. If your weapon gets too hot, you will overheat and will not be able to act for a few turns.

A lot of stages also have switches that you need to manipulate to raise and lower barriers, open gates, and such.

Some characters have guns or bows that can make ranged attacks, but most are just “sword” attacks.

The system is interesting and fun to play with, but the game is extremely easy — one of the easiest SRPGs I’ve played. You usually only have to take on a few enemies at a time, and you can defeat them with powerful attacks and then cool down before fighting the next ones. There are only a couple of stages that require any thought beyond just basic move-attack, including the final stage which is slightly tricky (but still not that hard.)

You never upgrade your weapons in any way but you can equip three items to each character. The item equip is a bit confusing because you have multiple slots (head/arm/foot/etc) but it’s not always clear why certain items can only go in certain slots. There are shops before some of the stages.

Overall I would say this game is OK. The world is interesting and the atmosphere of the game is appropriately grim and grey, while still offering some interesting things outside of the typical “ruined city” cyberpunk situation. The story is serviceable and has some nice parts, but it’s too short and the ending is rushed (I wonder if they had to accelerate the development because the Saturn was in its waning period). The system has some good ideas but the game is so easy that it feels like you don’t often have to get particularly in-depth — in particular, the potentially interesting question of having to trade off attack power vs. heat often makes no difference because you can use powerful attacks and then just have other characters fight while you cool down. About halfway through the game you start getting the Sword Masters in your party, and they are far more powerful than your other characters.

In a way this is similar to some other late-system games I’ve played (like Energy Breaker) that seem to have been a bit rushed because they wanted to get the game out before the system was no longer viable…although I don’t know if that was the case here.

Go-jin Senki (鋼仁戦記), released 8/6/1998, developed by Santa Entertainment, published by Tonkin House

After suffering through Light Fantasy I and II, I was not happy to see Tonkin House’s name pop up with this game. While this game is nowhere near as bad as those, it’s still not a particularly good game and I didn’t finish it in the end. However, there is a translation patch so you are free to try it for yourself.

The setting is Kunagami, a world that is basically medieval Japan but with mechs called Goujin that are controlled by human spirits. The story begins with the king of Himuka, Raioura, attacking the Kuchina tribe’s village and slaughtering most of the inhabitants. One of them, Isamaru, is taken to a prison but is freed by Lakan, one of Raioura’s underlings who has defected to stop Raioura from his plan to take over the world. The story ends up involving not only Raioura, but evil demons and another member of the Kuchina tribe.

The story is told through a combination of VN-style narration and normal speech text boxes. The story is the best part of the game — while it’s not a masterpiece of RPG narrative, it’s interesting enough that I had some interest in how the plot would turn out in the end.

The game flow is a series of fixed battles with no alternate paths. You can retreat from most battles (keeping your XP and money), and you can do practice battles on any battlefield you’ve cleared so far, if you need to grind. The party limit is six, and you get a lot more characters than that. At first I was trying to use all of them but eventually I just focused on a small party.

The graphics in the battle are weird — they are polygon 3D figures on a normal 2D map. It doesn’t look that good and it slows everything down a lot.

Each character has a certain number of AP. Abilities take AP — in theory the attacks that take more AP are more powerful, but the system seemed poorly implemented because you can have a 16 AP attack that only does 10% more damage than a 4 AP attack (sometimes there are extra effects also, but the effects aren’t always good, like knocking a character back).

Characters recover AP between turns, but not very much — 1 at the start, but as you level you can recover a bit more.

A huge problem with the system is an inability to take back your movement after you do it. In general, the UI is plagued with issues — for instance, you often can’t check what abilities do, and you can’t see characters’ statuses in the screen where you are choosing who to send to battle.

Characters come in three types. “Generals” have two equip slots, one for a weapon and one for a magatama that gives a magic attack (or heal). Then there are fighters and spellcasters, that just have one slot. In general I found that the fighters were nearly worthless; I used all my generals and then spellcasters (one attack, one heal), and then filled the sixth slot with a fighter.

That leaves the Go-jin. You start with one, and get two more as you progress. A lot of effort was put into this part of the system — each mech has five equipment slots, and you can buy and equip a variety of weapons. Characters have specific skills that let them get extra effects out of the weapons (such as being able to attack everyone adjacent, or firing multiple shots). However, there are two aspects of the system that completely hamstring the gojin and make them essentially unusable in many stages.

The first issue is that people in Gojin don’t gain experience. Instead, any experience gained by the gojin is distributed equally to other characters. This means you have to constantly be switching around your characters (and the weapons).

But the much bigger problem is the “berserk” issue. Each map has a certain “power density” that adds each turn to your gojin’s counter. When that counter reaches 100, the gojin goes berserk and can no longer be controlled. I saw the enemies use things that (slightly) lowered their gojin’s counter but I never saw this. The main issue here is that so many of the battles are very long, with tons of reinforcements, that any gojin you send out are guaranteed to go berserk. I just stopped using them because of this, and I noticed that someone who did a complete playthrough on youtube did the same thing.

Another big issue with the game is that you can’t save during battle, and it’s pretty easy for the enemies to overwhelm you (they take a lot of hits to bring down and nobody can tank). I used save states, but even then I found the game tedious.

Eventually I got to a point about 70% of the way through the game where I was saddled with an NPC operating on bugged AI (she would only move next to the enemies and not take any actions), which took up a slot and left me with only 5 guys. I hit yet another stage with waves upon waves of reinforcements, and I finally decided that I was no longer interested in struggling through the slow battles and flawed system to see how things turned out. I probably should have given up a lot earlier but I tried to stick it out.

Next up is game #100! It’s Wachenroder, the second-to-last Saturn game for me to play.