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.

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).