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postgamecontent · 8 years ago

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Square/Enix Misfits: Final Fantasy Mystic Quest

Original Release Date: October 5, 1992 (NA)

Original Hardware: Nintendo Super NES

To be fair to the other games I've talked about this month, Final Fantasy Mystic Quest is not treated with nearly as much indifference by its owner as the rest. It received a Virtual Console re-release on the Wii, and the lead character of the game appeared in Theatrhythm Final Fantasy Curtain Call, along with a couple of songs from the soundtrack. Its existence is acknowledged, if nothing else. But when you take into consideration the fact that this is indeed known as a Final Fantasy game in Japan and North America, the hesitance with which it is ever mentioned is really something. There doesn't seem to be a lot of pride in Mystic Quest for anyone currently at Square Enix. I suppose in some sense it's an embarrassing reminder of how poorly they read the international market at the time, but I think it's more a case that there's apparently nobody left at Square who worked on the game, leaving no one to champion for it.

It's a well-known story by now, but we'll go over it again for posterity's sake. After Nintendo gave the first Final Fantasy game a mighty push in North America, by publishing it and marketing it themselves, Square decided to follow in the footsteps of Enix and try to keep the series going on their own through their American branch. Plans to localize the second game on the NES were scuttled due to the age of the 8-bit market, so they got started by localizing some unrelated games under the Final Fantasy banner. The first was Game Boy title Makai Toushi SaGa, which was developed by many of the same people who worked on Final Fantasy 2. Square released it overseas as The Final Fantasy Legend, and it sold reasonably well. SaGa 2 and Seiken Densetsu followed, localized as Final Fantasy Legend 2 and Final Fantasy Adventure respectively, with similar sales results.

As Square became more and more of an RPG company, the gap in popularity of console RPGs in Japan and overseas started to look like an important problem for them to crack. Even the full weight of Nintendo's impressive marketing machine combined with the most well-liked games in the genre wasn't sufficient to generate broad interest in RPGs among console gamers. At some point, someone at Square got it into their heads that the lack of interest must have been due to how difficult and complicated RPGs were compared to more popular genres like platformers and shooters. It was believed that Western gamers just couldn't get on with their complexity the way that Japanese players could. Looking back, it was a silly conclusion to draw. Even without hindsight, you would think someone would have noticed that far more complex RPGs were quite popular on personal computers in the West. But it was what the decision-makers at Square firmly believed, and it would shape their localization choices for the next several years until they proved themselves wrong.

With this perception in mind, Square's localization of Final Fantasy 4 toned down both the difficulty and complexity of the game. Certain character abilities were removed, along with a number of spells and items. The Training Room tutorial area was expanded with more advice. Prices on equipment and items were decreased, and the paths leading to secret areas were practically highlighted. Again, the game appears to have sold reasonably well, but nowhere near what it did in Japan. Square wasn't out of ideas yet, however. Perhaps it wasn't enough to modify an existing game to fit the perceived needs of the Western market. Someone at Square decided that they needed to create a game that would help Western players understand the basics of a JPRG. The team that had been assigned to the third SaGa game on Game Boy was just finishing up with that project and was ready to move on to their next job. They were given what must have looked like a real heaven-and-hell task. They would get to make a Final Fantasy game, but one designed specifically to teach Westerners how to handle these beautiful console RPG unicorns.

Those are the circumstances that brought forth Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. While I'm sure the team did their best with it, there's really very little chance this was a passion project for anyone involved. Assuming their goal was to create some kind of bridge between Western gamers and the main Final Fantasy games, I have to say that they failed miserably. As many things as they grabbed from the main Final Fantasy games, Mystic Quest has a very different feel from those games. It's light on story, puts a far heavier emphasis on solving puzzles, and in terms of its presentation, has far more in common with SaGa than Final Fantasy. That doesn't make it a bad game, but it does make it a fairly poor trainer for Final Fantasy specifically.

Suffice it to say, Mystic Quest did not succeed in igniting the JRPG genre overseas. The game was panned by critics and players alike for its simplicity and brevity. The hardcore fans Square had already built up felt like they were being condescended to, and the more casual fans the publisher had hoped to court simply ignored the game the same way they did with every other JRPG. In spite of all of that, the game sold fairly well. It ended up moving 800,000 copies worldwide, and though half of that total was in Japan, 400,000 was nothing to sneeze at for a JRPG in the West. I suspect its low price of $39.99 had as much to do with that as anything else, but the game certainly didn't bomb. It wasn't universally detested, either. A lot of people enjoyed the game for what it was: a no-frills turn-based RPG with lots of puzzles and a goofy sense of humor. That contingent of fans was at least big enough to get Square Enix to find a place for Mystic Quest in Curtain Call, and I doubt we've seen the last of Mystic Quest's cameos in Final Fantasy cross-overs.

As for the game itself, I can easily see both perspectives on it. I had good memories of my initial playthrough of it more than 20 years ago. I think I found it better than I thought I would at the time, much the same as I would feel when I later played Secret of Evermore. Replaying it for this series of articles, I didn't have as good of a time as I thought I would. In large stretches of its running time, it's as dull and grindy as a lot of people fear JRPGs to be. The optional monster lairs are a bit too on the nose as a means of grinding levels, and as much as you don't really need the experience they provide, some of the items you get for clearing them are very useful. Capping party size at two members leaves little room for strategy in battles, and would-be interesting decisions like having limited ammo on some weapons become moot by the game handing out said ammo like candy on Halloween.

The dungeons are probably the best parts of the game. They have some interesting designs, but they also involve a lot of backtracking and useless treasure boxes. Most of the time, solving an optional puzzle and heading down a winding path will reward you with nothing more than some arrows, shuriken, or bombs. You usually have to make your way back along the same route to take another branch, but since defeated enemies stay defeated, it's a pretty boring walk every time. I like how weapons double as tools to solve puzzles, though. The only problem with that is that you need to be careful you don't accidentally use the wrong weapon in battle if you had it equipped to solve a puzzle. Not that it matters all that much. Most weapons for the main character take two hits to kill whatever normal monsters are around no matter which one you're using. Just bomb everything, there isn't really any downside to it.

I remembered the story being quite thin, but there's even less there than I had thought. Hero Benjamin has to wake up the crystals to save the world from the evil that is threatening it, etc. Most of the other characters are one-note cardboard cut-outs who jump in and out of the plot at semi-regular intervals. The game's silly sense of humor saves it from being a total wash, with Benjamin obviously not buying into most of what is going on around him, but going along for the ride nonetheless. There's a half-hearted stab at a late-game twist, but the plot never gets more complicated than "some bad guy is doing bad stuff with the local crystal, go beat him up and save everyone". Now, I'm not saying the main Final Fantasy games were high literature, particularly at this point in time, but the winding character-driven plots are usually considered one of the main attractions of the series. Mystic Quest has none of that, for better or worse.

Though the pacing is kind of poor, the game doesn't overstay its welcome. There's almost no way to stretch it out any longer than the 15 or so hours it's meant to run. The game is very strictly segmented and you can't go any farther than you need to at any point. You can almost always backtrack, but there isn't a lot of point to it unless you miss a spell book or something. On the topic of magic, one interesting choice the developers made was in how they simplified the magic system. There are only 12 spells in the game, and they get more powerful as you level up. The spells are divided into three groups. Depending on your level, you have a certain number of castings from each group you can make before you have to rest. So a casting of Cure costs you just as much as a casting of Life, basically. There are elemental weaknesses you can take advantage of, but magic is in general quite strong compared to your basic attack no matter what.

The unusual magic system is, I think, emblematic of why this game didn't reach the masses the way Square had hoped. Although I could see the average person having some issues parsing the Vancian magic system of Final Fantasy 1, I'm not so certain that Mystic Quest's attempt to simplify things actually produced something that players could understand more easily than the basic magic points system seen in most other JRPGs. I also don't feel like people really had a problem understanding that, say, Cure 3 was a stronger version of Cure. I feel this way about many of Mystic Quest's design elements. For the most part, its efforts were largely spent on simplifying things that weren't hard to understand in the first place. In some cases, such as the magic system, the result was something of a lateral move. In other cases, for example the monster lairs, it made things less enjoyable for little gain. I'll tip my hat to one very good decision, however. Letting the player save anytime they wanted to was something that was already long-overdue in 1992.

Ultimately, the path to success in the West for JRPGs had nothing to do with how easy or hard they were. When games like Final Fantasy 7 and Pokemon broke that barrier down, they did it not through misguided hand-holding but by communicating to the player why they should care to invest themselves. Check out this cool-looking world and characters, don't you want to see what happens next? There are 151 monsters out there, do you think you can catch them all? Once the genre broke out, re-releases games like Final Fantasy 4 didn't need any alterations to make them sell well overseas. The message and marketing were clear by that point. Maybe that was what Square should have been focusing on instead of weird commercials with Mog and Ogopogos. But hey, it's easy to look back and say things like that. I'm sure Square had the best intentions with Mystic Quest. Considering its mission statement, the game isn't half-bad. But it could have been a lot better if they had put their full efforts into making a fun puzzle-based RPG without the appeal to a phantom demographic.

Many of the team members who worked on Final Fantasy Mystic Quest went on to work on the Japan-only Super NES game Treasure of the Rudra before completely falling off of the game development map. One notable exception is Chihiro Fujioka, who wrote the game's story. Fujioka served as a director on Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars and has contributed to just about every Mario & Luigi RPG in various design roles. He's also the drummer in the Earthbound Papas, a prog-rock band led by Final Fantasy series composer Nobuo Uematsu. The composer of Mystic Quest, Ryuji Sasai, worked on a few other games in the years that followed, including Bushido Blade 2 and Tobal No. 1. He has largely withdrawn from video game work in recent years and is now part of two rock bands. Those sweet guitar licks you hear in Mystic Quest were sampled by him. Curiously enough, he also did the music for a recent Kemco mobile RPG called Fairy Elements.

Final Fantasy Mystic Quest is the easiest game to access of the four I've written about this month. At the time of this writing, it is still available on the Nintendo Wii eShop. I don't imagine that shop will be around forever, so grab it if you want it. I'm not sure when or even if Square will re-release the game. For the moment, Mystic Quest is neither gone nor forgotten, but its low-key presence in the Final Fantasy brand certainly makes for an interesting case. It is likely to be the only Final Fantasy game to ever release in the United States before Japan, was one of the first spin-offs of the brand, and serves as an amusing reminder today of an era where Square didn't have the faintest clue how to sell Final Fantasy to Western gamers. I think those things make it worthy of mention in any Final Fantasy retrospective, even if I can't necessarily recommend playing it in the here and now.

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postgamecontent · 8 years ago

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Square/Enix Misfits: Secret of Evermore

Original Release Date: October 1, 1995 (NA)

Original Hardware: Nintendo Super NES

Like many game companies whose histories stretch back to the earlier days of gaming, Square has had a lot of one-off releases. There are lots of reasons why a game might not get a follow-up. Sometimes it's just business, sometimes it's a lack of creative desire, and occasionally, it's a case of bad happenstance. But of all of Square's one-offs, it's hard to think of a game more undeservedly treated as unwanted by its owners than Secret of Evermore. It's not too hard to suss out the reasons why games like Illusion of Gaia or Square's Tom Sawyer don't get brought up much by the company, but if there are any reasonable issues with Evermore being acknowledged, I certainly can't see them. But then again, Secret of Evermore was always an odd duck for Square, so it's perhaps fitting that it has met the fate that it has.

As was apparently the case with many Western Square fans of the era, I initially had a bit of a chip on my shoulder about Secret of Evermore. Right off the bat, it seemed like another attempt by Square to crack the Western market, a goal which often felt like it was patronizing non-Japanese gamers more than anything else. But things really got hot when Square announced that they would not be localizing the Japanese follow-up to Secret of Mana, Seiken Densetsu 3. The company offered reasons for that decision which, in hindsight, I have no reason to doubt. At the time, however, I felt they were making cheap excuses for what was obviously really going on: clearing the decks of all competing titles in order to force their pandering garbage down the throats of Western gamers. I was already not interested in Secret of Evermore, but with my belief that it cost me a game I really wanted, that lack of interest turned into hatred.

The truth of the matter was interesting but far less sinister. The 16-bit generation was drawing to a close, and the window for profitable releases was getting shorter by the day. Seiken Densetsu 3 was supposedly littered with serious bugs to the point that Square was worried Nintendo of America might not approve it. Some of those bugs were buried so deep in the code that it would take a fair bit of time to work them out, and time was definitely not something the Super NES had much left of in North America. There were also issues with the text compression that made it tough for a localized version to fit on the already-expensive 32Mbit cart it shipped on in Japan. In short, it would have taken a lot of time and effort to get the game in a state where it could be approved by Nintendo of America, and Square would likely have had to bump up the cart size to accommodate the English text. That means it would have been among the priciest SNES games released, dropped into a 32-bit console market that had no special love for Japanese RPGs yet. It just didn't make business sense to pursue it.

None of this had anything to do with Secret of Evermore, apart from tying a king-sized anchor around its legs with Square's small, dedicated fanbase. Evermore was produced by an entirely separate team from anyone who might have been involved with the localization of Seiken Densetsu 3. A glance at the credits shows virtually none of the usual Square localization staff, with the only mentions showing up in the Special Thanks. Indeed, Evermore's team was initially constructed by Square for the purpose of making Secret of Evermore and games like it. Square wanted a Western development team situated close to Nintendo, a team who could bring a Western flavor with Square's usual quality in order to help better connect with gamers outside of their typical demographic. Had plans continued as they were originally set, the Evermore team was going to work on an RTS game for their second project. Unfortunately, not long after Evermore's release, business circumstances between Square and Nintendo changed. Having a development team in the vicinity of Nintendo was no longer all that useful. Many of the team members ended up joining nearby developer Cavedog Entertainment, where they worked on RTS game Total Annihilation.

Looking back, what this team was able to accomplish with Secret of Evermore was just short of a miracle. Not only was this their first project as a team, but many members had never worked on a video game before in their lives. While the game mercilessly copies from Secret of Mana, they did not use its engine, choosing instead to make their own from scratch. It's close enough to Secret of Mana that it's almost hard to believe that, but there are enough small differences that pile up over the course of the game that I think I have to. The first time I played it, though, I concluded that they must have done a very good cut-and-paste job. So yes, the game was good, but it was only because of the parts that came from the Japanese side of the company! Yeah, I was a pretty obnoxious teenager.

It is fair to acknowledge, I think, that this game wouldn't have existed without Secret of Mana to copy from. The basic structure, the way most sub-systems work, the ring menus, how combat works, and even many of the animations were dutifully re-created by the American team in almost exactly the same forms that they took in Secret of Mana. That gave the team a proven core to work from, which is more than most first-time development teams are legally allowed to get away with. But in the end, the good and bad of Secret of Evermore can't be divided into concepts from the East and West. Some of the things they pulled from Secret of Mana were probably best left in the dustbin. Some of their own ideas were utterly fantastic. Other differences weren't so favorable. There's a lot to consider with this strange little chimera of a game.

The basic set-up sees your main character, an average American boy, accidentally activating an old experiment in an abandoned lab, taking him to another world. He's joined on his journey by his faithful dog, who takes a different form depending on which part of the world the hero is in. You control the boy, while the dog is handled by an AI that is fortunate to only have to imitate a dog's basic behaviors. The world of Evermore is broken up into four very different areas. You'll start in a prehistoric zone filled with cavemen and dinosaurs, but you'll eventually travel to an Age of Antiquity-style world, a more familiar Gothic fantasy area, and a sci-fi inspired area filled with robots and lasers. There's an actual story reason for the world being made up of such mish-mash. Each zone represents the fantasy utopia of one of the four people originally caught in the experiment that occurred 30 years before.

Secret of Evermore's story revels in B-grade schlock with such intensity that it hangs a lampshade on it at regular intervals, with the main character constantly referring to situations from fictional B-movies. I guess Family Guy wasn't first to the punch with overdoing that particular device after all. The thing is, while the game is clearly trying hard to appeal to an American audience, it doesn't feel particularly inauthentic about it. Unlike previous overtures to the Western market, Square allowed a Western team to take creative point on this game, so instead of getting a distorted picture of Americana that was filtered through a foreign point of view, we get a distorted picture of Americana right from the source. While the B-movie references in the game have never done much for me, an awful lot of the game's other attempts at humor land really well. There's a particularly good bit of fourth-wall breaking in Gothica where a ranting character not only calls out to the player but dares them to strike him down if he's lying. You can, if you want to. It's of little importance to the story, and you might not even see it if you aren't looking for it, but it's little moments like that which give the game its personality.

Establishing that personality is vital because from a purely mechanical standpoint, Secret of Evermore is closer to Secret of Mana than even the other Mana games are. It carries its virtues, such as having a wide variety of weapons and magic to choose from and make use of. It also carries its flaws, like the sticky collision issues and the poor combat flow that comes from the stamina gauge. If there was something you didn't like in Secret of Mana, chances are good you'll have a similar problem here. It's that close. Even the enemy behaviors don't wander far from the sorts of things you would have seen in the game it pays homage to. Evermore only makes a couple of departures from Mana in its nuts and bolts, and only one of those departures is truly significant.

There are no magic points in Secret of Evermore. There are plenty of magic spells, or at least abilities that function like them, but rather than drawing on a reservoir of energy, you produce them through alchemy. It's not a complicated system, though. You just need to have a particular amount of two different items each time you want to use a spell. Basic materials can be found laying around the world and can usually be easily bought in shops. Some of the spells are used to solve puzzles, and for those, one or both ingredients will be handed out like keys would in other games. It's clever and certainly novel, but it can get somewhat annoying over the course of the game. You'll end up having to run all over the place to get the ingredients you need for frequent-use spells, so you'll end up using most of them quite sparingly. Just like in Secret of Mana, however, your spells level up through use. You avoid using them to save alchemy ingredients for when you really need them, but when you really need them, they're too weak to be of proper use. All you can really do is find a shop that sells what you need and hang around outside of it, grinding castings until you run out of ingredients and then going back in for more.

Perhaps the most notable difference that the new team brought to the table is in the map designs. Evermore's maps are large, full of routes that branch and close in on each other, and in dungeons, often make use of trial and error puzzles that force the player to backtrack a lot. Just about every part of Secret of Evermore overstays its welcome, in my opinion, save perhaps the final area. That section of the game feels like the team was rushed to button things up, and it comes off as a somewhat hollow experience as a result. I don't remember being quite so annoyed by how long some of the dungeon maps are when I was younger, but in replaying it for this article, I often had to walk away part-way through each one and do something else to recharge before coming back to finish. The bosses also have a tendency to drag on far longer than they remain interesting. You'll likely figure out the tricks and patterns to each of them within a minute or so, then spend the next ten minutes whittling down their health points in a dull dance of death.

While the pacing is atrocious, it's worth playing the game just to experience some of its more unique moments. I absolutely love the bazaar in the Age of Antiquity area. It's a marketplace with nearly 30 different shops, and if you want all of the cool things you can get here, you're going to need to do some serious bartering. The game's composer, a young Jeremy Soule, did a lot of great work in this game, aiming for ambiance over more melodic fare. The marketplace especially stands out because there's no music at all, just the noisy murmurs of the throngs of shoppers. The map does have a lot of NPCs compared to many RPG maps of the time, but Soule's choice of accompaniment makes it feel even busier. It was the most welcome bit of backtracking in the game. Sadly, to get there, you'll have to walk through a desert for what feels like forever. Only once, mind you, but it's still awful. Afterwards, a cheeky skeleton boatman will row you across the sand for a reasonable fare, giving you a guided tour the whole way. Now that is worth doing.

Amusingly enough, the biggest thing in Secret of Evermore that doesn't stick around longer than it should is the game itself. In fact, it ends up being rather short, with the average playthrough taking just over half the amount of time a run through Secret of Mana takes. This might explain why the dungeons are stretched out as long as they are, as this was an era where an RPG's value to players was frequently measured in how many hours it took to beat. With more even pacing, Evermore probably would have burned through its content in under 10 hours, which would have been the kiss of death for an RPG in 1995. It's just unfortunate because it feels like it's just starting to get cooking when it all comes to a rather abrupt end. I could easily imagine the concept being greatly expanded if the team had had more resources and time to put into it.

They wouldn't get that chance, sadly. The game had a lot of negative vibes working against it, and it launched in a very busy season. Even with decent reviews, Secret of Evermore wasn't able to get a lot of positive attention. Only with the passage of time has Evermore's unfair stigma been shaken off enough for the game to earn some real appreciation. In a rather cute twist, this game has achieved minor cult status among hardcore Japanese gamers as a rare case of a Square game highly relevant to many players' interests that did not get a Japanese release. A fan translation exists, of course, but Secret of Evermore holds almost the same status with Japanese 16-bit RPG fans as Seiken Densetsu 3 does for Western 16-bit RPG fans. I find that kind of funny given how Evermore was received in its home market.

Between the fading of misplaced anger and Square's poor handling of the Mana series over the last couple of decades, I feel like time has been particularly kind to Secret of Evermore. It certainly has its weak points, but far fewer than you would expect given the relative inexperience of the team behind it. Sticking closely to the steps of Secret of Mana gives it a solid foundation from which it could strike out in unexpected ways. Not all of that worked, but enough of it did that Evermore was able to make a distinct personality for itself, one that only feels more special as the years march on. I have no earthly idea why Square Enix has buried this game as hard as they have, but I sincerely hope that they give the game some fair recognition at some point. It would be a great candidate for a handheld release of some sort.

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Next: Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest

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postgamecontent · 8 years ago

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Square/Enix Misfits: Brain Lord

Original Release Date: January 27, 1994 (JPN)

Original Hardware: Nintendo Super Famicom

Although they checked out a bit early in the generation, Enix America was fairly busy during the the Super NES years. Over a span of five years, they published 10 different games on the system. Strangely enough, not one of them was a Dragon Quest game. Their most frequent partner in those years was Quintet, whose full line-up we've already examined. But they had another developer that they worked with on more than one occasion during those years. Produce Co., Ltd was a mid-sized company formed by a bunch of former IREM employees in 1990. It would close its doors by the year 2000, but in the brief span of time it was around, Produce was mostly known for its work on the Super Bomberman games for Hudson, and a group of RPGs known collectively as the Mystic Ark series for Enix. Due to Enix no longer having an American branch during the mid-90s, only two of the four games in the Mystic Ark series would see release outside of Japan.

The first is a game that is more famous than it deserves to be. I'm not sure why 7th Saga became so well-known, but I suspect it was due to the decent coverage it got in Nintendo Power and other magazines of the time. Many of its problems came from some poorly thought-out localization changes, but even in its original form, it wasn't going to win any prizes. At the very least, however, it is somewhat known, which is more than I can say for the second Produce game to make it over to North America. Brain Lord technically takes place in the same universe as 7th Saga, but it's an action-RPG as opposed to that game's more straight take on the RPG genre. In another fit of poor planning, the game was released in North America on the same day as Robotrek in October of 1994. That also put it in the vicinity of Illusion of Gaia and Final Fantasy 6. It was an unusual glut for RPG fans, and it was inevitable that there would be some casualties. Brain Lord was one of them.

On one hand, it's not a big loss. Brain Lord isn't a great game by any stretch of the imagination. The only thing it truly exceeds at is in walking the line of mediocrity without fail. But it's also not a bad game. I could imagine this game finding more success at another time and place in the Super NES's life. The action is competent if not particularly thrilling. The story is so bland they might as well have not even bothered. The dungeon designs and puzzles are where it's at in Brain Lord, though, and they're quite enjoyable. The game leans a bit heavily on block-pushing puzzles, but they're at least well-designed ones with several gimmicks to consider. I lost count at some point, but I think there are five decent-sized dungeons to explore, each with multiple floors. You're not always meant to finish these dungeons in a single attempt, so warp statues are placed at regular intervals. You can use those to quickly travel back and forth from town. Since all you stand to lose by dying is some money, it's wise to head back now and then to unload what you've collected and stock up on supplies.

Each dungeon culminates in a boss battle that gives you the plot coupon you need to find the next one. There are only two towns in the game, so you're meant to be spending most of your time tackling the dungeon areas. I had to laugh at the name of the second town in the game. I'm not sure why the localizers thought having it named Toronto was a good idea, but it greatly added to my amusement. I am Shaun the brave warrior, hailing from the mystical fantasy realm of Toronto! Anyway, towns aren't good for much more than picking up quests or replenishing your basic supplies. You'll occasionally be buying some gear there, but most of the good stuff is in the dungeons. The real money sink in towns, particularly in the beginning of the game, is Jade.

Jades are special items that allow you to summon a Fairy. These Fairies each have a special ability they can use, ranging from direct attacks to healing spells and more. You can have two Fairies equipped at any given time, with much of the game's combat strategy revolving around using the best combinations for the situation. The Fairies will level up while they're out courtesy of certain enemy drops. Higher levels produce stronger effects. Your character, on the other hand, cannot level up. The closest thing you'll find are permanent stat-boosting items. Most of your power upgrades will come from finding new gear or magic spells. So while your character can attack directly with his weapons, he's not always that good at taking down the bad guys that pack the dungeons. Ignore the Fairies at your own peril.

I kind of enjoy the Fairy system, but as you can imagine it's hideously unbalanced. Once you farm up enough gold for the direct attacker and healer, you probably won't need much else. The fact that they only level up while they're equipped makes it a bad idea to change which ones you're using too frequently. I appreciate the sentiment, at least. In a slightly different way, I felt similarly about the magic and weapons in the game. There's a surprising variety of both here, but once you find ones that work for you, there isn't much point in experimenting. This kind of wasted potential is a hallmark of Produce's games in general, in my opinion.

One thing I like a lot is how the game handles your traveling companions. Although you only control a single character, your hero is meant to be part of a group that is trying to scrounge a living from questing. As you progress through each dungeon, you'll bump into your companions in various places. They'll give information and hints, nudge the story forward, flesh out their back-stories, and even help you solve the odd puzzle. I don't remember a lot of games of this era doing that sort of thing. It makes it feel like you're actually working with others who have their own interests and agendas in mind.

In addition to testing your puzzle-solving and monster-smashing skills, the game also has a fair number of platforming challenges. Not Brain Lord's strong point, I assure you. I've certainly run into worse, but the main character in this game is not a terribly agile guy. The only thing that makes it bearable is that your guy's jump distance is predictable. Since everything is constructed with tiles, it's easy enough to gauge each jump. You'll need good timing, though, since you'll often be jumping from or to a moving platform, often with other gimmicks in play such as a disappearing floor. Is this really testing my brain? Well, probably as much as that silly DS game, anyway.

While most of the people who worked on Brain Lord were the usual Produce crew, they managed to pull in a fairly famous talent to do the character designs. Sachiko Kamimura is generally best-known for her role as the character designer and supervising animator of the anime adaptation of the classic City Hunter. She worked on a number of products at Sunrise Inc and Toei Animation. Her video game work is limited to Brain Lord and the SEGA CD game based on The Heroic Legend of Arslan. I wish I could say that her obvious talent shined through in Brain Lord's characters, but they're not especially noteworthy by the standards of the time, and they look pretty poor in-game due to the angle of the overhead perspective. Nicely animated, at least, so good job on that.

I guess I'm not making Brain Lord sound all that exciting. Truth be told, it's not a very exciting game. But there's an odd rhythm to it that makes it easy to sink time into, particularly if you're not allergic to block puzzles. Outside of the Zelda series, most action-RPGs that bother to feature puzzles don't usually put a lot of effort into them. Even in the case of Zelda, its reliance on acquiring and using new tools means that you rarely need to think deeply about how to move forward. I won't say that Brain Lord is like taking the SATs or anything, but it does feel like somebody added swords and platforming to a Sokoban-style puzzle game, and I think for some people, that's a nice combination.

Unfortunately, like most of Enix's American-released games, Brain Lord has never made another appearance. It's not on any of the Virtual Consoles, and there certainly haven't been any new ports of the game. It's very likely that the rights to the game are stuck in limbo with Produce out of the picture. It's equally likely that Square Enix just doesn't care about it, though. It's not like anyone is banging down their door for the game, I'm sure. Still, it's too bad the game isn't more accessible for those looking to plumb the Super NES's RPG library. Consoles are more than just their most popular games, but that seems to be all that gets preserved. Brain Lord might be a little too average for its own good, but I could see some people still enjoying it today if it were available.

Previous: Robotrek

Next: Secret of Evermore

#squareenixmisfits #brain lord #enix #rpg #snes #superfamicom #retro #gaming

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postgamecontent · 8 years ago

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Square/Enix Misfits: Robotrek

Original Release Date: July 8, 1994 (JPN)

Original Hardware: Nintendo Super Famicom

I suppose you can consider this game the bridge between last month's feature on Quintet and this month's feature on Square/Enix Misfits. Robotrek was the final game localized by Enix's first American branch, Enix America Corporation, before it closed its doors. It wasn't its final game release, mind you. That honor goes to the dreadful American exclusive King Arthur & the Knights of Justice. But this was the last game that Enix brought over from Japan until they restarted English localization work partway through the PlayStation 1 era with 1998's Star Ocean: The Second Story. This was also the last Quintet game released in English by Enix. Robotrek performed quite poorly at retail in both Japan and North America, selling just 65,000 copies worldwide.

Did Robotrek deserve that? Well, I think it did. I'm not sure if it's the worst thing Quintet made, but it's close. There are a few really good ideas in this game, but none of them pay off the way they ought to. The storyline has little of the punch of better Quintet games, and it commits the rather egregious sin of having a dull combat system in an RPG with far too many battles. The game was meant to be humorous, but the translation quality is incredibly poor, so almost none of that comes through in the English version. It's the kind of game that sounds really cool when you hear it described, but ultimately turns out to be disappointing.

My first experience playing Robotrek was when the game first released in North America in October of 1994. If I remember this correctly, Final Fantasy 6 was due out in a couple of weeks, and I was looking for something to scratch the JRPG itch while I was waiting. Not having much money to spend, I decided to head down to the local rental store and see what they had. They were surprisingly good at stocking niche games, thinking back. I had seen a little coverage of Robotrek in magazines, and nothing else was really catching my eye, so I rented it for the weekend. I think I made it a few hours into the game before I gave up on it. The music was giving me a terrible headache, I had a lot of trouble making sense of the game's mechanics, and the whole thing seemed really childish, a major concern for any self-respecting teenager. I think I stopped playing Robotrek and decided to replay the first part of Final Fantasy 4 over that weekend instead.

Until now, I hadn't returned to the game. I had always wondered if I had given the game short shrift, the way I had to Earthbound in its time. Well, I'm glad to have settled that matter. Just about every issue I had with the game at the time was correctly spotted, and in playing through the full game, I found a few more to add to the list. Robotrek isn't awful or anything, but it's not very fun to see through to the end, either. What it does have in spades are good ideas. While your main character is a plucky little human boy, he never actively participates in battle. Instead, you design and build robots that do all the dirty work. You distribute their stats, choose their equipment, program their special abilities, and even choose what color their outer shell is painted. Granted, it's not much different mechanically from RPGs where you generate your own party members, but you have to give it points for presenting it in an interesting way.

Another gimmick is your character's ability to invent things by combining two different items. In practice, this is much more limited than it initially seems. Most of the time, you'll be using this feature to make plot-essential items. It's also used to make new gear, but only according to some very strict formulas. You'll need access to an R&D Machine to invent objects. You can find them in most towns and safe locations, and you'll also get temporary access when you level up. Sadly, this means that if you run into an obstacle that requires a plot-advancing item and you're not close to a level-up, you'll have to trudge out of whatever remote location you're in and go find the nearest R&D Machine. The machines are also used for building, customizing, and healing your robots.

Building a robot costs a lot of money, but the game naturally gives you enough to cover the first one easily enough. When you finally scrounge together enough cash for the second one, the game's first big disappointment hits. While you can own up to three robots at once, you can only deploy a single unit in combat at a time. You can swap them out as needed, and if your current robot gets junked, you can send in some relief, but the realization that you're going to spend the entire game being ridiculously outnumbered in a fairly boring turn-based battle system is a painful one.

Inventions are often used as items on maps to solve various puzzles. For example, you might want to lure a guard away from a door, so you equip and use the air horn to distract him. The solutions aren't always obvious, but I kind of like that they were trying to make the dungeon navigation interesting in and of itself. This game also took the rather bold step of having visible enemies on the map. You could fairly easily avoid many of the battles in the game as long as you were careful. Of course, that leaves you even more vulnerable to bosses than you already are. Robotrek has serious issues with difficulty balancing, and some of the bosses are absurd if you haven't found a way to break the game by the time you reach them.

Let's talk a little more about the battle system, though, because I feel it's the root of many of the game's bigger problems. On its face, it seems somewhat similar to that of the ATB Final Fantasy games. A gauge fills up, and once it's full, you can take an action. Curiously, you can make that gauge fill up faster by jamming on the B-Button. Enemies will also attack at set intervals. Similar to the Lunar games from Game Arts, you'll actually need to close the distance to the enemies in Robotrek if you want to use melee attacks. Otherwise, you can pick off enemies from a distance using your guns or bombs. Each action consumes a different amount of your gauge, so using powerful attacks like bombs or combos means that you'll have to wait longer for your next turn. There will often be prizes and traps on the field, as well. It's obvious enough what their primary purposes are, but they also act as obstacles on the field, blocking the line of sight you need in order to shoot enemies.

Again, not bad on paper. It feels a bit slow in the beginning, but it's kind of fun, too. Playing the game for a while soon reveals particular issues, though. First, while your gear does change and improve throughout the game, you'll never get any special attacks beyond the ones you start with. Your stats go up, the numbers get bigger, but it doesn't feel like you're really progressing much as a result. It also doesn't take long for the gun to become useless against the more dangerous enemies, requiring you to get in close to chop at them with your melee weapon. Since you have to move your robot's clunky behind all the way across the screen to do that, it makes battles drag out longer than they really ought to be. It's especially aggravating when the enemies let fly with status ailments that reduce your movement capabilities. The battle music is also incredibly annoying. It's dissonant in places, and it feels like you're hearing the same intro running on a loop no matter how long the battle goes on.

Between all the backtracking you have to do for the sake of inventions and the slog of the combat, there's not a lot of reason to keep going in Robotrek. The story does end up being more interesting than it first appears to be, but it's not enough. The early hours of the game are particularly bad, as the story gets mired in generic cartoon nonsense before it finally starts to pick up a little steam with some fun time travel shenanigans. I get the impression that with a really good localization, Robotrek might have been worth suffering through. Unfortunately, the localization we got has enough trouble keeping its grammar straight, let alone trying to create a localization with the kind of humor the game needed. Given that the game was originally designed for a very young audience in Japan, the weak story isn't that surprising, I suppose.

I've seen a couple of sources list Robotrek as a predecessor to Pokemon, some even going so far as to say it inspired it. I very much doubt that is the case. Pokemon was already well into development by the time Robotrek came out, and as I mentioned earlier, Robotrek was not particularly successful. That the main character throws a ball containing a proxy fighter instead of participating in battles himself would seem like an obvious connection, but it's not as though Robotrek was the first piece of media to imagine kids battling with the toys from the balls dispensed by gachapon machines. The overall tone seems to also fit but again, this is most likely a case of both games looking to the same sources for inspiration, in this case children's animated shows such as Yatterman or Doraemon. There's not much else to connect the two games, and Pokemon is certainly the better game in nearly every respect.

If I were to pick a Quintet game for Square Enix to suddenly yank of the archives and put back into the spotlight, Robotrek would probably be next to last on the list, but it is a shame that the game isn't more readily available. While it fails to capitalize on its promising concept, who knows what the game could inspire if it were out there for more people to play? Instead, it ends up being a muted, sour note for Quintet's 16-bit work to ride out on in North America, and little more than that. Teenaged Shaun might have been wrong far more often than he was right, but I'll give him his due credit here: he didn't waste as much time on this clunker as older, allegedly wiser Shaun did.

Previous: Introduction

Next: Brain Lord

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#quintet #squareenixmisfits #enix #robotrek #gaming #retro #rpg

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