Monster Maker

~ MONSTER MAKER ~

NEC Avenue / U-Plan / Show Kikaku

Super CD-ROM

1994

I initially liked this traditional-style RPG thanks to its fine soundtrack and visuals. It's not among the system's elite or anything in those respects, but it offers a lot of quality red book material, and its battles feature nice backgrounds and enemy animations.

Plus, its interesting character art makes the game stand out from its peers. The funny-looking folk it features are quite appealing.

Unfortunately, MM is a real slogger, and my patience with it eventually wore thin. By the time I played it, I'd already been spoiled by the elaborate dungeon designs and fast gameplay in titles like Neo Metal Fantasy and Tenshi no Uta. Monster Maker's battles unfold very slowly, and its dungeon designs are uninspired. Pits and "trick walls" are neat ideas for a labyrinth or two, but they get old. The numerous castle mazes are the worst, as they're very similar to one another in appearance and even in layout.

The game is pretty standard RPG stuff aside from a disappointing monster charming/combining side element. The Charm spell seems to fail quite often, and I've never actually needed to summon monsters into battle anyway.

And there are other little things that bug me. Battles sometimes experience hiccups when loading or freeze up altogether mid-fight. The townspeople have an annoying tendency to block the heroine's way and stand as immobile obstructions for what seems like forever. And speeding through dull "talking scenes" with the I button is always a risk, as it often causes the game to freeze.

And that's just the beginning of MM's issues. It also has a severe glitch that people really need to be aware of before they get started with the game. Many valiant warriors have played far into it only to get stuck in a tower room with two stairways, both of which essentially lead to dead ends (they both lead to the same next room, but the walls of the room "magically" reconfigure themselves so that you can't proceed regardless of which stairway you take).

This is the "trick" of the matter: when you enter the tower in question for the first time, you must not leave it until you reach that spot. This can be hard and annoying, as the tower is quite large and you have to find a "hidden" stairway in order to make it to the tricky spot in question. When you reach the room with the two stairways, take the left one up. You'll be at a dead end, but this time, your characters will have a conversation. Take a few steps forward and walk behind a wall. More text will come up, and then the stairway that leads to the next part of the tower will be revealed.

If you enter and then leave the tower without making it to that room first, your characters will never have that conversation, and you will be stuck at that spot FOREVER. Yep, all those hours it took to get that far will have been wasted. If you manage to evade the adventure-ending glitch, you'll reach a conclusion that isn't very satisfying, as it's a cliffhanger that was never resolved because the sequel (which was in the works) never saw the light of day. Just as I was thinking, "Hey, this cinema isn't so bad," the proceedings were interrupted by this:

This cliffhanger crap might've been acceptable if the game weren't such a pain in the ass to get through due to the glitches and if, you know, the sequel had actually come out. There isn't even what I would consider a proper final boss, as the last beast is a total wimp. Actually, pretty much all of the bosses are wimpy. If you're at a high enough level, you can use the Freeze spell over and over again to render them helpless.

Extremely nice combat graphics don't make up for the slowness of the battle system and the general bugginess of the product. Monster Maker isn't bad, but whether or not playing through it is worth the risks and trouble is debatable.

Astralius

~ ASTRALIUS ~

IGS

CD-ROM

1991

There is no other video game that pisses me off quite as much as this one does.

What's so awful about this seemingly innocuous RPG? I don't even know where to begin...

Well, the heroes walk slowly. I mean RIDICULOUSLY slowly. Perhaps you think the Faussete Amour and Beyond Shadowgate protagonists are slow. Well, they're Sonics compared to this bunch. And as if the game weren't inflicting enough agony upon you by making you plod along from one point to another, it also forces you to participate in a battle every slow step of the way. Yes, I do mean that quite literally. Take a step. Battle. Step. Battle. Two steps! Battle. Time slips away, and after a while you realize that for all the battles you've fought, you've explored but one small segment of a realm that's absolutely massive compared to your small, slow, dimwitted characters.

The slow traveling speed is annoying even when you're simply strolling about a village. Did you think you'd be allowed to save and heal in the same spot? Think again. The respective buildings are often located at opposite ends of town, meaning you have to trudge S-L-O-W-L-Y from one to the other. If you aren't familiar with the layout of whatever poorly drawn village you're stumbling through, this can take quite a while. And you'll have to watch out for "obstacles" as you go: I once encountered a SHADOW that my character bumped into and was unable to pass!

The inconvenience doesn't end there. Want to sell an item? You can hold plenty at once, and items you doff get placed at the very bottom of your inventory. You can't just hold down on your control pad to move through the items; you have to press down repeatedly. And you can't sell more than a single item at once. So if everyone in your party has just acquired new stuff, selling off the old junk can take forever. You can store things in a bank, but that would mean slowly walking to the building in the first place and then "scrolling" through your stuff until you get to the object you'd like to stash. Hell, you can't even talk to a townsperson without going through the trouble of bringing up a window and selecting a command.

Combat, too, is carried out in a remarkably goofy way. You'd have to view the "action" firsthand to understand just how goofy it is, but here's a hint: you actually have to utilize a menu command to see what your enemies look like, as you'll spend most of the time in battles looking at nothing but text windows on a black screen.

Most of the monsters are able to withstand hit after hit after worthless hit from your incompetent, overmatched band of warriors. And this is one of those obsolete RPGs in which you select attack targets for your characters at the beginning of each round and if their target gets killed or runs away, they lose their turn completely rather than moving on to a remaining creature. When you finally win, remember that you're literally just one step away from having to repeat the agonizing process.

And then there's the camel. Our poor heroes couldn't possibly endure the pain of treading across hot desert sands, so they need to buy and ride a camel. For some reason, after each random battle that occurs, field play resumes with your characters standing beside the camel. So if you're accustomed to getting on with your travels after battles, you'll find yourself walking away from your camel (and getting scorched in the process). Then you'll have to trudge back to it (and get scorched in the process). You'll almost certainly be attacked again on your way back, even though you probably won't be more than two steps away from the animal.

During one stretch of camel riding, I was attacked over and over and over and over to the point where I LITERALLY was moving BACKWARDS. Eventually, I got off the stupid camel and charged onward, paying no heed to the damage I was taking from the hot sands. I came upon a strange building and acquired an item that allowed me to see the spots in the desert where battles would occur. Practically the entire screen was covered with these spots. The situation was so absurd that I just laughed ruefully and shut off my PCE.

You'd think a game that incorporates music as a major thematic element (the heroes play instruments to perform magic-based attacks) would have a decent soundtrack. Of course, this one doesn't. Its audio is quite irritating, in fact. Its monster art is also unimpressive.

All of these complaints I've expressed so far are gripes I had after playing through a mere ten percent of the game. I did eventually beat the thing, and it really is horrible, but I'd be lying if I were to say I didn't develop a certain fondness for it. Part of that fondness has to do with me being "proud" of myself for defeating such a hellish game, but the adventure does take you through some neat sequences if you suffer long enough to experience them. There's a town with living, breathing snowmen; a large tree that plays host to a family of talking birds; a funny hot-springs scene; and an upside-down continent.

There's also a beautiful cinema that shows a sword buried in snow with reindeer prancing about. It's a very memorable scene in a game that, for the most part, lacks impressive cinematic moments.

Heck, even the basic idea of starring traveling musicians instead of typical warriors and wizards is pretty neat; and by having said musicians "jam" together, you can pull off special attacks, a few of which are quite useful and one of which actually looks really cool.

The best part of the game is an area consisting of small islands separated by vast stretches of sea. You make your way from one bit of land to the next by jaunting along atop sharks who stick their heads above water and make for a pretty darn cool method of travel. The enemies in this area attack just as frequently as their cohorts, but some of them actually give you lots of gold and experience points for your troubles. Plus, the music suddenly decides to rule.

Unfortunately, every time I started to like Astralius just a bit, something would happen to remind me what an awful game it really is. Engaging in battle ten or more times while taking twenty slow steps is rather unbearable, especially when every adversary you come across is utterly merciless. Some enemies "curse" your characters (read: reduce their attack power to nothing), and, believe it or not, the "collision detection" for the curse spell is horrid. What I mean is that one character might be marked as cursed while it's really the person next to him who's screwed. And I mustn't neglect to mention the expansive final maze; deep inside the labyrinth is an outwardly typical staircase that actually took me right out of the structure, forcing me to begin my trek anew. Even more annoying was the time I was making my way through an enormous dungeon only for a random pillar to suddenly fall down and crush my flutist, abruptly wiping out thirty minutes' worth of progress.

For those who decide they're tough (or insane) enough to accept Astralius' challenge, I can at least tell you that the early desert stretch is by far the most tedious and annoying part of the trip. If you survive that area, you'll stand a legitimate chance of completing your mission, though there will still be many hours of severe hellishness yet to come. Thank goodness my benevolent cousin Zigfriedozlov wrote up an Astralius walkthrough, which can be found here.

Super Raiden

~ SUPER RAIDEN ~

Seibu Kaihatsu / Hudson Soft

Super CD-ROM

1992

Raiden veterans will find themselves in familiar territory when they begin playing Super. Actually, just about everything--from the bullet-heavy gameplay to the unimpressive visuals--will seem to be the same.

For this release, however, the game was blessed with a red book soundtrack (which was hardly a given--just ask owners of Altered Beast CD). The instrumentation is excellent, quite reminiscent of Hellfire-S'. Unfortunately, the compositions themselves are far from special with the exceptions of the Stage 2 theme (which is fantastic) and parts of the Level 10 number.

And yes, I did say "Level 10." While the original Raiden is an eight-board affair, Super tacks on two additional stages, a flooded Area 9 and a hard-as-hell final strip.

The concern here isn't with the new stages themselves; in fact, the last level will be appreciated by shoot 'em up experts for its high level of difficulty. The real issue is that Raiden already felt long as it was. Even the best of shooters start to push their luck when they extend beyond a reasonable six or seven stages, and Raiden was never exactly the strongest vertical around to begin with. It takes skill to make it to Level 10 in this game--and it takes incredible fortitude to begin the long journey anew after failing on that level. If you do survive the gauntlet, you'll be rewarded with a new bit of ending... but don't expect much from it.

Super Raiden will be a nice pickup for folks who are already Raiden fans and who'd like to experience the challenge of the new stages and the novelty of playing the game with red book music. For those who haven't yet purchased a PCE Raiden and insist on doing so, my advice is to go with this one, as it's more rewarding and boasts higher-quality audio. And here's one more bit of advice: if you make it to the last boss and you think you've got him beaten, well... you haven't.

So don't let your guard down.