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.