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button-mash · 2 years

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What I played last week #2

I figured I'd better update this lest it be another near-decade long hiatus until the next time. I didn't actually get to play a whole lot of games last week as real life got in the way, but I still managed to tuck into a few games here and there, and actually managed to finish off a childhood favourite, so that's where I'll start. Soleil / Crusader of Centy [Mega Drive]

Over the past few years this game has become quite a bit more well known among retro circles, but I've always considered it as true of a hidden gem as you can get. Usually when people talk about 'hidden gems' they almost always seem to be these games that literally everybody remotely into the hobby knows, but maybe just weren't the banner releases for a system. This is a rare example of a game that for the longest time honestly felt like nobody ever knew of it when I talked about it. I'd only discovered it myself because one of my best mates growing up had it on the Mega Drive when we were kids (shout out Meadey) and I've literally never seen anybody else ever own it, or even spoken to someone else outside of him that's played it - even the cart I own today is actually his cart which he very kindly sold to me years back knowing it would go to a good home.

I'm surprised there wasn't more of a fuss made of this game - not just because it's very good, but also because there were just surprisingly hardly any action RPGs on the Mega Drive, and the console was always crying for something to compete with Zelda. The broad format of the game is the same - it's ostensibly a top-down action RPG where you're moving around on an overworld map into different areas and defeating various dungeons and solving puzzles along the way. The main hook of the game is that fairly early on you lose the ability to talk to humans but gain the ability to talk to animals, and as you go on in your adventure more and more animals join your cause - they essentially become abilities you equip, so the Cheetah helps you run faster, a Flying Squirrel allows your sword to bounce off walls, the Butterfly allows you to control your sword in the air etc - basically how animals make your sword react in real life is how they tend to act in the game. It's quite a neat idea and opens up the dungeons and bosses for some cool puzzle potential to think about who you have at your disposal, and you can equip 2 at a time to come up with different ability synergies and stuff.

The game can feel really uneven in parts and often doesn't lean enough into it's puzzle potential though - some of the puzzles or dungeon areas are excellent and make you use your head a little bit, and then others inexplicably just won't have any puzzles or combat at all, or the puzzles will be so basic they just border on pointless

like in the above pic, I wonder where those blocks have to go... It's almost like they were placeholder puzzles they never actually went back and added in properly. Still, even with a lack of difficulty, the game does an admirable job of constantly changing up what you're doing, making the areas feel visually and mechanically distinct, and it's pretty well paced where it never really feels like a slog. There was actually a point during my playthrough where my save corrupted, meaning I had to start way back from where I was. That'd usually be an automatic playthrough killer for me, but it's all so straightforward once you know where you're going, that it was fine just catching myself up. The biggest peril in terms if difficulty in the game was actually just trying to constantly remember there is no checkpointing or autosaves in games like this, and forgetting to save my game as I went. Can be brutal sometimes if you lose track

The game undoubtedly has some flaws - the combat is pretty bad - your sword swings in this slow arc with questionable hit detection, and enemies don't get knocked back, meaning you can sometimes get caught in a situation where enemies are just sitting on top of you draining your health (plus the noise when you take damage is unbeliveably annoying). The bosses also feel like a bit of a missed oppourtunity - they're both incredibly imaginative and varied mechanically, but almost all of them are trivially easy, making them feel redundant and robbing them of a chance to feel truly memorable. However, the game just feels like it's more than the sum of it's parts. The art style is colourful with crisp sprites, and it has some genuinely impressive parrallax and transparency effects that make areas of the game look beautiful. Each area has a tonne of visual variety that really helps give the different areas a lot of personality, bolstered by the fantastic music that really adds to each area and making it feel distinct and offering it real identity.

What cracks me up is the game has a potentially interesting premise, essentially humanising the monsters and questioning whether they are even bad. There is a point early on where you get turned into a monster and you discover that they are just a scared, misunderstood family, etc…but the game is all over the place with it tonally. You're constantly being shown themes of unity and understanding and empathy, but you ultimately continue to kill monsters the entire game, who will all attack you without hesitation. Even your companions you win over and join forced with along the way are all animals and not monsters, it makes almost zero sense. I remember being really confused by the message as a kid and assumed it was going over my head - as it turns out, it's just an incoherent mess. I did wonder if it's perhaps partly a translation issue from it's origins as 'Ragnacënty', but I suspect it's just genuinely not very good. A missed oppourtunity for sure, but ultimately forgiveable Weirdly for me, this game always occupied a spot in my memory as a beloved childhood game I would borrow constantly from Meadey and has completed numerous times in my childhood. Yet when playing it through last weel, I soon realised that what I'd remembered as being the last boss was only actually about halfway through the game and I had zero memory of anything afterwards, even though I could remember everything else really clearly. That section of the game does kinda function as the end of an initial story arc... so now I am wondering if all these years I was just cheerfully turning the console off all these years thinking Id finished it, not realising there was an entire other half of the game to see. Idiot Anyway, good game that not that many people know about

I also briefly played a handful of games this week - namely the SNES port of Prince of Persia (which I had no idea was essentially it's own distinct, extended version of the original game), and the first couple of stages of The Legend of the Mystical Ninja also on the SNES. Mentioning them here for posterities sake, but I think I'll play some more of Mystical Ninja before writing more about it - the series is a complete blind spot for me despite me loving the SNES, and the Mystical Ninja (or Ganbare Goemon) series being fairly beloved. Prince of Persia [Super Nintendo]

As I was writing that last paragraph I was also going to save Prince of Persia for next week too, but deep down I don't think I am going to finish it to be honest. As mentioned, I had no idea that this was essentially an extended, remixed version of the original game, with new graphics and new stages. It looks absolutely fantastic, and I am a sucker for those rotoscoped animations that the game made famous, and we also saw in things like Blackthorne, Another World and of course Flashback - which is one of my favourite games of all time

(just an excuse to post a Flashback gif tbh)

....Actually maybe I'll catch this up next week after all because tumblr just deleted half this post when I tried to insert a gif - for some reason ctrl+z seems to revert you to a much much earlier saved draft rather than just undoing the last thing you did, and I cannot be fucked to write everything all out again because it already happened twice on this post and I reflexively keep hitting ctrl+z and I am going to lose my fucking mind. The general gist was that the SNES version is a longer and expanded port of the original (which I didn't realise going in), and ultimately probably outstays it's welcome because of it. It looks very beautiful - it's visually a huge upgrade on the original and it's visual variety fosters surprisingly potent atmosphere for a 16-bit game, but that extended length means that the game just starts to drag after a while. Also, from a mechanical perspective, I think that the deliberate, almost rigid control and animation based movement worked well in something like Flashback because the game is never demanding too much of you mechanically at once for the most part.

In Prince of Persia however, is at odds with both itself and you - it's encouraging you to go fast, hurry, experiment and take risks, but also pretty much requires that you go slowly and play methodically and risk averse, lest you die over and over and need to restart. You do get used to the controls for the most part, but the sword fighting in particular becomes more and more prevalant and it's a clunky mess that feels too random to be fun, even though its probably not random at all. It starts off as a fun challenge, but quickly devolves into an (often frustrating) chore. Considering that the punishment for dying is to start the entire level again (with the over-arching game timer still ticking), it quickly begins to become more of a test in patience than skill, and that increased length turns challenge into a chore - especially when deaths often feel unfair or a result of the controls rather than the consequence of a genuine mistake or a poorly calculated risk Prince of Persia is one of those games that has undeniable cultural impact and far-reaching influence, but was also something I'd never really properly played beyond maybe messing around on the first couple of levels over the years. I actually really wish I had played the original now - the SNES version has 20 levels and I got to level 15 before I really started to feel the fatigue of the difficulty and design. The original was only 12 levels I believe - which I think would likely be a much more paletable and well paced game. Actually, most of all I just wish I'd stop reflexively hitting ctrl+z every time I made a mistake - it's actually very fitting thinking about it, you can consider this the more poorly conceived, less well refined version of the blog update, with the original paragraphs I'd written being the more tightly designed and more enjoyable versions. There you go, I've somehow thematically bought it back around, and closed my own loop, so I am quitting while I am ahead, behind, roughly where I was in the first place. No more gifs because god forbid I have to write this piece of shit blog again

(Pic of me having to rewrite half the bloody entry)

#nintendo #retro gaming #sega genesis #sega mega drive #soleil #crusader of centy #video games #prince of persia #legend of the mystical ninja #super nintendo #super famicom #gaming #collection #90s games

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