Alshark

~ ALSHARK ~
Right Stuff / Victor Entertainment
Super CD-ROM
1994

Alshark is quite reminiscent of Fang of Alnam, another traditional-style RPG released by Right Stuff. Both games feature excellent battle systems, but they share the misfortune of being plagued by abysmal visuals, and neither lives up to its vast potential.

As appallingly primitive as Alshark's field graphics are, they're hardly a major concern, as the strikingly speedy characters need little time to scurry from one location to the next. Interruptions occur in the forms of overhead-view combat scenes that play out in entertaining fashion. Your party consists of heroes and heroines who wield lightsabers and mow down their foes with missiles and machine-gun fire.

Not nearly as engaging are the spacecraft duels that take place as your fellowship travels amongst the stars. You can allow the game to carry out each visually unimpressive orbital scrum in a predetermined manner, or you can take matters into your own hands and partake in the rudimentary VCS-shooter-like action.

Complete an important mission on a given planet and chances are you'll get to view a lengthy cinema, but these occasions are seldom worth getting excited about, as the quite-cool main characters usually aren't displayed in the most flattering of fashions.

Almost every aspect of this fairly ambitious effort ends up dragged down to some degree by the poor visual work. Even the battle scenes, which remain entertaining for the duration of the quest, could've benefited from superior sprite design. The few bosses that appear are tiny and nondescript.

The soundtrack, which travels a back-and-forth line between goofy and generic, is of little help, but superficial elements are hardly the most significant concern here. A far more serious issue is the immense slowdown that frequently occurs as your characters are strolling about towns (of all places). With some villages being quite expansive and requiring plenty of mundane, here-and-there fetching and conversing, the sludgy hiking constitutes an absolutely unforgivable flaw.

The game does get its act together to some extent during its latter half, as it turns its focus to dungeon-depths combat and away from in-town antics. The labyrinths themselves are never particularly innovative in design, but there are some dramatic plot points to be experienced within them.

It all culminates with a surprisingly fantastic ending, but in typical Right Stuff fashion, the dreadful accompanies the awesome--the dreadful in this case being an atrocious end-credits tune.

De Ja

~ DE JA ~
NEC Interchannel / Elf
Super CD-ROM
1996

Positive initial impressions led me to believe that De Ja had the makings of an elite digital comic. The opening cinema and first few moments of play acquainted me with an Indiana Jones-like protagonist and seemed to promise high adventure of the treasure-hunting, monster-battling sort, with Elf's typically charming anime femmes tossed in for good measure.

But after spending a great deal of time on a single dull scene with no apparent method of tale advancement in sight, I realized what De Ja is truly all about. Ridiculously lengthy back-and-forth discussions and wordy internal monologues temper high hopes for fast-paced plot progression. Even "climactic" encounters with evildoers are drained of tension as the garrulous characters prattle on and on and on. A solid soundtrack ends up wasted on a comic that clocks in as an epic for all the wrong reasons. Being a somewhat-rare late release, the debacle commands a relatively hefty sum on auction sites, and thus should be dismissed out of hand even by fans of the genre.

The opening moments are pretty misleading.

Forget about acquiring wealth and dueling with villains; your character spends most of his time contemplating matters or engaging in terribly dull discussions.

Once he's done with any given chain of seemingly interminable chats, he's able to undertake heroic endeavors like panty pirating.

There's no shortage of fruitcakes to come across while you're out and about.

After you've put in a significant amount of time wandering around town and harassing the local women, you'll finally get to do some adventuring--which will mainly consist of hopping aboard trains and planes to reach destinations where not much of anything is going on.

A typical late-game maze sequence is dressed up as a walk through the woods.

As for good parts, there's a fairly amusing (and all-too-brief) fight scene that sees the main lout finally get what's coming to him.

And, well, there's this, too.

Persist beyond those unforgettable episodes and you'll encounter some "puzzles" that may prove troublesome. Here's the correct solution to one of them, though it won't get you anywhere until the protagonist himself realizes what needs to be done.

For the doorknob puzzle, enter 6 and 9 (of course).

The game's "final challenge" calls for you to spread eight "visits" amongst eight different girls. If you go about things correctly, you will have encountered one of the ladies more than once, leaving another unseen.

The ending is actually pretty nice but stands as insufficient reason to endure the monotony that precedes it.

Susa-no-Oh Densetsu

~ SUSA-NO-OH DENSETSU ~
Hudson Soft / Kadokawa shoten / Dynamic
HuCard
1989

Susa-no-Oh Densetsu doesn't do things in typical HuCard-RPG fashion, a fact it makes clear by kicking off with a very violent, very bizarre succession of images.

However, the promise of the opening sequence might be forgotten as soon as one begins play and lays eyes on the overworld, where everything seems to assume a microscopic stature. But take a few steps and watch as monster sprites begin peeking out from the seas and forests. Battles here aren't random; instead, they commence when one of those sprites manages to collide with your avatar. Pull off a few nifty maneuvers to avoid immediate contact and you may end up making a mad dash across the field with a gaggle of pursuers hot on your trail.

You'll be caught eventually, but don't let it get you down, as the fights are the best part of the affair. Each rumble sees a variety of creatures--some very large, some very odd--surround your warrior, who brandishes weapons as disparate as axes and rocket launchers. Indeed, you'll need to make good strategic use of both your long- and short-range weaponry, not to mention your mystical powers, to survive the game's monster-laden mazes.

Those mazes don't even bother to switch out of the up-close perspective utilized for scrums, so mid-labyrinth combat ensues the very instant you happen upon an adversary.

Backing the fighting and reconnoitering is a fantastic score that composer Takahito Abe himself cites as his best work.

But while the music is unquestionably wonderful, and the affair on the whole is compelling, Susa-no-Oh struggles for a good long while to make its mark. It treads along in "solid if unmemorable" territory as its plot, while not quite a cookie-cutter tale, lacks the sort of captivating moments that would help elevate the production to the tier where the greatest RPGs reside. Indeed, the game just seems to embarrass itself when it strives to create drama by presenting bosses and dungeon entrances in "cinematic" fashion.

Only when Susa-no-Oh forsakes its attempts at fanciness and focuses on doing what it does best--presenting fun, rewarding combat scenes--does it finally manage to assert itself as a title worth remembering. The all-out brawls that take place towards the end of the adventure are sure to leave lasting impressions on those who survive them.

Unfortunately, it's not a given that everyone who plays the game will get to experience those late-game showdowns. Susa-no-Oh is not a good first choice for people who would like to delve into the PCE-RPG library but are unable to read Japanese. Lots of helpful information can be garnered here, but some essential, well-concealed items will remain undiscovered unless the player has luck on his side.

Regardless, being that the card can be had for under five bucks, purchasing it is hardly a massive gamble. The excellent music and enjoyable battles make it quite likely that most players who make headway in it will ultimately consider it a winner.

21 Emon

~ 21 EMON ~
NEC Home Electronics
HuCard
1994

Roll the dice, move around the board, and make some good cash--those are the tasks you're charged with in NEC's 21 Emon, which is something of a light, cartoonish rendition of Monopoly. Constructing (and subsequently upgrading) hotels is the main method by which you can amass your fortune.

Emon mandates that there be four participants in the goings-on, but all four can be of the actual-human sort if you have pals who for some reason are interested in playing such a game. They'll likely be repelled immediately by the assortment of "merry" tunes on offer, but perhaps you'll be able to lure them back with the prospect of selecting from three different playfields, one of which is stationed in the depths of outer space.

Clearly, the basic premise, unabideable audio, and limited options will "win" the chip nothing but detractors. Also of little allure are the simplistic mini-games that players must occasionally partake in, among which are whack-a-mole and a tile-flipping memory test.

Tossing additional wrenches into the mix are the here-and-there "pick-a-card" spots, which enable contestants to earn a fast buck or put a quick sledgehammer to their opponents' work.

As players are asked to do very little in it, the game is quite accessible even to those who can't read a bit of Japanese (though it's doubtful that anyone would actually want access to this rubbish). Some menu scouring will unearth "deeper" functions such as property auctioning, but taking advantage of such "features" is hardly essential to succeeding.

Ultimately, its general simplicity makes the game a repetitive bore, and while its graphics are quite nice and colorful, there is nothing particularly cute or crazy to happen upon, which is a bit surprising for a product with an unquestionably cartoony base. In fact, the Super Momotarou Dentetsu games, perennially the butts of jokes along the lines of "I got this chip for free but I was the one who got ripped off," are much deeper and far more endearing than this title. And considering that Emon often goes for over eighty dollars in complete form, I suffer no qualms in suggesting that people avoid it entirely.

Record of Lodoss War

~ RECORD OF LODOSS WAR ~
Hudson Soft
CD-ROM
1992

This game has a reputation for being heavier on strategy than most other traditional-style PCE RPGs, but that's pretty much baloney. It's standard role-playing stuff with a battle system that has you view the action from an overhead perspective as your characters and their enemies run around the field--think Fang of Alnam or Emerald Dragon. Actually, the fights most remind me of the scrums that take place in old Ultima Exodus for the NES; so if that's your idea of good "strategic" combat, you'll probably have a ball with this. Just keep in mind that the battle graphics are ugly, each brawl can last an extremely long time, and you'll be rewarded with very few experience points for most of your hard-earned victories.

That doesn't sound very promising, but the game is actually pretty good. What makes the battles tolerable are the frequent item drops. It's fun to acquire pieces of special equipment and deck out your characters with them or sell them off for big bucks (which you'll often have to do, as gold is about as scarce as XP). And the names of all the weapons, spells, and items are presented in katakana, making the game a breeze to play--unless you can't read katakana, of course, in which case you'll have to put in a lot of time and experimentation to make efficient use of magic and equipment.

And you probably won't want to devote more time than is absolutely necessary to learning the game's fundamentals, as the Lodoss War expedition is a vast and lengthy one. This isn't a linear adventure, as there are many spots where you have a choice as to which part of the world map you'll explore next. There are also many secret paths to discover and certain entryways that either can't be accessed or don't even exist until you return to their respective areas at a later point in the quest. And some of the late-game dungeons are absolutely enormous, maybe too damn big in a couple of cases (but at least you can save your game whenever you want, and you'll typically come away from dungeon forays with lots of useful loot).

This is a long and hard game, and after all the trials and tribulations it puts players through, it comes to a very abrupt end, so some may not feel particularly satisfied when all is said and done. But I think most people who won't ultimately enjoy it will arrive at the realization very early on and quit before they've invested much time in it. The folks like me who'll dig the nonlinearity and equipment managing will find themselves spending plenty of long late-night sessions with the game. And fans of T's Music will want to check out the work done by the company for this title, although a lot of it isn't red book fare, and while it has its good moments, it has plenty of mediocre ones as well.

Lodoss War is a fairly dark game thematically, which is reflected in the field visuals.

The battle scenes also aren't particularly pretty, but they do give you a wide variety of foes to tangle with.

Few experience points are doled out to victors in randomly occurring fights, but you can earn lots by aiding certain people in completing special tasks...

...many of which involve taking down a tough boss.

Gold also is in short supply, but your enemies drop plenty of items that can be sold off in town marketplaces. You make your way around each town by selecting destinations on simply sketched maps.

There's no such easy way of navigating the oftentimes-enormous maze areas, however.

Sometimes, just discovering the entrance to a particular dungeon is difficult enough. If you can't read the in-game dialogue, you may not realize that a new route is available to you until you simply happen to stumble upon it.

The characters are a likable bunch, but they don't get to star in very many cinemas.

Windowed story scenes are effectively utilized to deliver most of the significant plot points. The game certainly doesn't lack exciting moments.