Black/Matrix AD (ブラックマトリクス AD), released 9/30/1999, developed by Flight Plan, published by NEC Interchannel

I’ve known about Flight Plan for a long time because of their Summon Night series, which I really like. I had heard of Black/Matrix but never actually played any of the games until now. The series has essentially four games — Black/Matrix (with two ports), Black/Matrix 2 (for PS2), Black/Matrix Zero (for GBA) and the semi-remake Black/Matrix 00 (for PS1).

The original game first came out for Saturn in 1998, then had two ports: AD for the Dreamcast in 1999, and Cross for the Playstation in 2000. From what I read, it seems like AD is regarded as the best version with the exception of some criticism of the graphical changes, so I decided to play that one. I’m using the Flycast emulator which is working well (it runs more efficiently than the Saturn emulator).

The setting is based on a mix of Christian and Jewish elements (including extra-Biblical things like Lilith as the first wife of Adam), although it takes place in essentially a fantasy world. The opening narration tells you that in the past, the world was ruled by the Evil God called “God”, but Mephistopheles defeated God in the name of the Good God “Satan”. The followers of God, who have white wings, were made eternal slaves of the followers of Satan, who have black wings. The world is run by the church devoted to Satan, who stamps out the Seven Deadly Sins: Love, Freedom, Justice, Righteousness, Weakness, and Equality.

The first thing you do is choose your main character’s “master”. There are five choices, although it’s kind of odd because the master only shows up in the first chapter and then at the end of the game. In the original Saturn version the other 4 didn’t appear at all, but in the Dreamcast version they added the ability to get the others in your party. I chose Domina (which the cursor starts out on).

Chapter 1 is different from the rest of the game. Domina has apparently nursed the main character Abel back to health, but in the meantime has fallen in love with him. The enslaved white winged people are generally not allowed to wear clothes or walk around without a neck collar/chain.

What you do in the beginning is walk around Domina’s house and do various tasks that increase Abel’s stats. You can make this go on for quite a while if you want. You have a certain number of AP each day and can do things like cook, read books, plow the field, and such. I’m not entirely sure what the purpose of this is, or how long it can go on, but you can end this part by going to town. There, people react badly to Abel having clothes and being without his master, and later, inquisitors come to take Domina away for being in love with Abel, and Abel gets taken to jail as well. The SRPG proper starts with chapter 2.

In the cell, you get to try out the battle system against Lebrobes. There are two features that I recognize from Summon Night — you can set each person’s reaction style (evade, counter, block) whenever you want on your turn. Also the levelling is all done after the battle; you get XP as a lump sum that you spend to level up characters. I vastly prefer this to the system where you have to spread your kills around to make sure everyone is levelling evenly.

Each turn you have two “action points”. Most actions take 1 AP and you can’t repeat the same action twice. Using an item takes 0 but can only be done once. The “blood refill” command takes 2 AP. You can take the actions any order you want, and you can move one character, then cast a spell with another, then do an attack with the first character, etc.

The magic system works off the “biorhythm” graph at the top right. Each action advances the counter one bar. A green bar is increased effectiveness and a blue bar is reduced. When you use a spell of a particular type it changes the gauge to that type; each type has its own progression. So when you use spells you want to wait until the biorhythm is favorable.

When an enemy is reduced to 0 hp, they are dead, but any heal spell or item will bring them back. An additional hit on a dead character will reduce them to bones, preventing this (if this happens to your guys, they are permanently dead unless they are a core story character).

The fact that the dead character comes back still able to move and act creates an annoying balance issue with enemy healers, especially later in the game. The main healing spell in the game has a very wide area. It can be pretty easy for the enemies to revive multiple units and get them all back to full HP on their turn, so often you need to make sure you are eradicating the enemies and not just killing them.

When you defeat enemies you get “blood points”, and sometimes you get more blood points for eradicating them (but not always). These blood points are used in two ways. First, you can give them to characters before the battle starts, and they are used to cast spells and use special abilities of weapons. Any remaining blood points are carried over so there’s typically no reason to not just max everyone’s BP out. During battle you can use “blood refill” as a 2 AP action to use blood points you’ve earned so far in that battle to supplement what you have.

The other use for blood points is to use “ritual” to awaken abilities of weapons. This is a cryptic part of the system (apparently the series as a whole is known for this kind of thing). You spend blood points to awaken three abilities on each item. But what the abilities actually do is obscure, and some of them are negative. But apparently if you do things right (in the right order?) you can unlock hidden abilities and such. I never figured out how to do this; there’s no explanation in the game or the instruction manual. From what I saw in videos you can get game-breakingly powerful weapons through this, but by the end of the game I hadn’t even found half of the available abilities.

There is also height and facing in the system. The clock below the biorhythm chart is a bit unclear to me as well; some items work better at certain times but I don’t know if there is more to the clock system than that.

Finally, as your characters get these “armor” items, you can start using the armor power — I never really figured out how to use this well. The abilities have odd areas of effect and require a large amount of power (they take the turns of multiple characters plus a huge amount of BP). I think that if you really have a good handle on the area of effect you could use them to do huge amounts of damage but I hardly used them at all because it wasn’t worth spending so much BP and AP just to hit a few people.

Overall the gameflow is straight through the 12 chapters. There are a few places where there are alternate battles within a chapter, and you can skip one or two battles, but there aren’t any huge story branches. The original Saturn version had only one ending, but the Dreamcast offered multiple endings (I’m not sure how many — there are two possible final battles as well as a bad “game over” ending but there are multiple ways to reach each of the final battles and I don’t know if that results in more than two endings.)

One change in the graphics is that the original Saturn version had the story scenes take place on the 3D maps, whereas the Dreamcast remake has the style you see in the screenshot above. The character designs were also completely redone by a different artist, which resulted in some disappointment. There are also a number of brief video clips.

The game starts out quite hard, as you have few characters, and no opportunity to shop or do any side levelling. Eventually I found out that you can always use a shop before a battle to at least buy basic healing items, even when it makes no sense in the story. As far as the side levelling, in towns you can find a hooded guy that will give you a free battle, but it’s not really worth it. You barely even get half the XP necessary to level one character, so you would have to spend a lot of time grinding to have even a minor effect.

The game becomes easier when you get more people and get into the game, but it gets much harder again near the end. The enemy forces have a lot more healers in them and come in larger bunches. Also in the last few battles you lose your primary healer and you get stuck with pre-set parties. I was close to quitting on the third to last battle, but I found out that I could beat the game by exploiting poor AI to pick the enemies off one by one.

The storyline tends to be pretty dark. Abel sets out to save Domina, but first they have to find out where she is. As he travels through the land, he goes to various towns that exemplify the “virtues” like gluttony and greed, while picking up various companions. The goal becomes for the characters to find suits of armor that are connected to the seven “evil” angels (Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, etc.) To put these armor suits on the people have to rip their wings off and then the armor will fuse with them, but this will eventually result in their deaths.

The storyline is a bit of a mess; a lot of the information is revealed in info dumps near the end and involves all kinds of Biblical and mythological characters: Lilith, Adam and Eve, Moses, Noah, Jepetah (Noah’s daughter), Metatron, and other people.

Eventually we find Domina crucified, and it turns out that somehow the main character is both the reincarnated of Mephisto and Metatron, and the Pope (who is actually Jepetah as well as other stuff too) tells the main character that the world will soon be destroyed. He has a few options for dealing with it — the main ones are that he can sacrifice everyone else, save Domina, and he and Domina can birth a new populace to people the world. Another is that he can give up Domina in order to save the world as it is now, which includes the slavery of the white winged people. I’m not sure which of these endings was the only one offered in the Saturn version, but I think it was the second one. (There’s also kind of a bad/joke ending that results if you say you want to give up Domina and go off by yourself to find a peaceful place to live).

I decided to go with the first option because it seemed like the final battle was easier. You have to fight your own companions but they only attack you one at a time so you can easily pick them off.

The ending is really abrupt; a flood destroys the world and then you see this scene and it tells you that Domina became the new Eve, but she doesn’t look like she’s completely in her right mind. Then the credits roll and that’s it.

One other aspect of the game are the battle ranks — in each stage you get a rank based on a number of things. The main ones are the number of turns and actions you took, but there are some other things like not using magic in bad biorhythm phases, and a few other things of that nature. The rank affects the item rewards you get after the battle. This reminds me a bit of the “brave clear” system they put in later Summon Night games. One thing I do wonder about this game is whether you could funnel all the XP into the main character and clear the game easily.

Overall the game is OK. I think the story is a bit too ambitious; it feels like a lot of times all the biblical stuff is kind of thrown in there without a lot of coherency, and the ending is way too abrupt. I checked out a video of the original Saturn ending. The entire closing sequence was rewritten for the Dreamcast version, but the Saturn ending has the world being entirely destroyed except for the main character (who reverts to an adolescent) and the main “master” you chose, and the suggestion is that they are going to be the new Adam and Eve to populate the world again. So that’s kind of similar to the Dreamcast ending I got.

The system is not the worst I’ve seen, but the lack of transparency in the weapon system is annoying, and some of the stages seem unfair. But the game is playable and has some good ideas in it. I’ll be interested to see how it develops for Black Matrix 2 (for the PS2).