Disk 4: The Mystic Dragoons (ミスティックドラグーン), Part 1

Name: The Mystic Dragoons (ミスティックドラグーン)
Type: Fantasy Turn-based RPG
Available Languages: Japanese

I went about picking this week’s game a little differently than I have my previous choices. All of the other games were obvious picks for me, games that I wanted to get to immediately. But what to do next? Such was my quandary as I stared at my game shelf, titles blurring as I pressured myself to just choose one already. So I ran my fingers over the jewel cases, glancing at titles, occasionally looking at a cover, until I reached a game called The Mystic Dragoons. Well, the title passed muster, so I checked the cover, and was rewarded with some of the nicest cover art I’d seen in quite a while. And so, this week’s game of choice was picked purely for the cover art and the prospect of the presence of dragons. Just for a heads up, I will often be using the anglicized names that are used in the art book when they are given for ease of understanding. Well then, ladies and gentleman, shall we begin?

The opening movie shows people using a time travelling dragon that utilizes water to head into the past to commit an assassination in order to change the future. Alright game, you have my attention. Apparently their scheme worked and the future has changed. Well then, I’m ready to seek justice, preferably with my very own dragon.


The time travelling dragon prepares for its unpleasant mission.

After the game finishes throwing a ton of plot at you, you get to control the main character, who at present is an unnamed little boy who hails from a line of great dragoons. Your grandfather leaves your care to the dragon Raira and proceeds to send you off into the unknown. Nothing like RPG parenting, is there? You end up in a village that appears to know a thing or two about dragons, and your character finally gets a name: Cliff. It appears that we’re going to be stuck in Collet for a while, our hero is only three, after all. And so time passes as Cliff is raised with the other children in the village. The player even gets to join the kids in a pointless and boring round of hide and seek.

After all that nonsense is over, you finally regain control of the character and gain access to the status menu. It’s about time we got to the gameplay. Raira is having a baby, so we’re off to the caves to name it, accompanied by Mila, a girl from Collet. Baby Alf joins the world just in time for the village to be attacked, so we have to make our escape, weak little level ones that we are. Thankfully, the monsters here drop a bunch of healing items, so grind, little weaklings, grind. Now, it’s time to find out why someone finds it necessary to destroy our peaceful little community of dragons. You meet Buran, the jerk who set his monster army upon you and your friends.

 

 

Cliff doesn’t handle seeing even more of his friends murdered in front of him well and attacks Buran, which goes about how you’d expect it to at this point in the game. After getting beaten within an inch of your life, you find out that these nasty fellows are members of the Gureizeru army. If the map in the booklet that came with the game is anything to go by, the Gureizeru Republic is a long way from Collet, which leads me to wonder what they want with us. Well, now that they’ve killed the dragons and murdered the adults, they set fire to the entire village, all while having a good laugh at our expense.

But then Pura-ma Federation’s Tactical Dragoons show up and send Buran and his friends packing. Apparently the Gureizeru Republic believes that dragons are going to destroy the world because a princess told them so in a prediction, hence what we’ve had happen today. Sounds logical to me. I’m ready to go join the dragoons, not so much for the purposes of revenge, unlike my characters, but because I get to ride a dragon. Hey, whatever works for you, right? But then as soon as they arrive, they ditch us, burning village and all. Great.

 

 

Soon after, we’re off to the Gureizeru Republic to see Elmys talking to Cronoss, the goddess of time. Apparently this is the girl who said that dragons were going to destroy the world, and she mentions that it has thrown the world into chaos and wonders if that is the god’s intention. Elmys is approached by her two sisters, who drag her off for a meeting with Buran. Elmys is about as thrilled about all this destruction in the name of the goddess of time based on her word as one might expect.

 

 

Finally we return to our heroes and their burned out husk of a hometown. Hopefully this means that I can actually play the game for a while now. Apparently we need to head northwest to a city called Dorasshu to upgrade our equipment. I’m all about that, so let’s move out. We finally reach the world map, so it’s time to start our grand adventure toward becoming dragoons and stopping the Gureizeru Republic. Why do I get the feeling that this is only the tip of the iceberg?

The battle system in this game is your basic turn-based fare. When you are fighting on the ground, you are given the choice of five icons to use. You can attack, using your weapons or special techniques. There is a magic icon, an item icon, an icon that allows you to adjust your position in regards to the enemy’s location, and an icon that allows you to run. Later when you can ride dragons (Oh joy of joys!), you get a slightly different set of choices. Along with the attack, magic, and run icons, you also get two new ones. There is charge icon that you can use to hit enemies bodily with your dragon and a breath attack that you can use to have your dragon attack the enemies.

The character designs for this game are lovely, and are showcased to good effect in an accompanying art booklet. Kamimura Sachiko draws with a delicate, detailed hand that really brings each of the characters to life. Unfortunately the in game design is not nearly so beautiful. The scenes are rather empty and plain in comparison to the detailed sprites and pretty character designs. If they had put half as much effort into the backgrounds as they did into the rest of the game, perhaps this title would be much more well-known. I’m not one to judge on a game’s appearance alone, but it seems just a little lopsided to me. The first magic spell that I received in game, Kare Yuku Dendoron, is quite possibly the most hideous spell animation that I have ever seen. I would tell you what it reminds me of, but I’m trying to keep this blog completely clean, therefore, I’ll leave it for you to find out yourself. Let’s just say that the animators were unimaginative and that the spell is hideous and leave it at that.

 

 

Overall, despite some graphical flaws and an occasional lag in the narrative, I like this game. The story is classic fantasy, but with a slightly different approach. The sprites are detailed and expressive. And hey, did I mention that you get to fight while riding a dragon? Because if I didn’t, that would have been very remiss of me.

When I originally wrote this post, I intended to talk about this game for several weeks. After playing through most of this game, I have found that that is not feasible. I googled this game’s Japanese title at one point, and the very first option that popped up was Mystic Dragoons kusoge. For those of you who know what that means, no further explanation is needed as to why I’m ready to move on. For those who do not, look it up at your own risk, as the translation is rather vulgar. Suffice it to say that the Japanese by and large are not impressed by the quality of this game. I wouldn’t go so far as to relegate it to the territory that they have left it in, but I can see why casual RPG gamers could develop a loathing for this game. I myself have grown quite weary of it and I’ve played through most of it as of writing this, so for those of you who are thinking of importing it, you have been warned. In the long run, this game becomes an exercise in intense boredom. So it’s back to reviews we go!
 Edit June 5th, 2014:

Since writing the above, it has come to my attention that this post has become the most popular one on my blog. Being quite happy to give in to popular opinion when it comes to my readers, I have posted part two for your enjoyment.

If you feel like hearing more of my gaming prattle, feel free to follow me on Twitter. You can find me at @bejiita_buruma

The Same Old Grind

I sat up for quite a while the other night trying to figure out what to write as a blog post for this week. The more that I pondered on the subject, the more my mind seemed to want to wander. It is difficult to write an active blog on RPGs, given their long, involved narratives and work intensive battle systems, and I was wondering how I was ever going to keep up. Then it struck me. I don’t always need to talk about the games themselves. And my problem had just become my solution for this week. After all, wasn’t what was making my life so difficult the all-important grind? So why not write a piece about that, and why rational human beings subject themselves to such a thing in the first place. You would think that we would have better things to do with our time than to stare at a screen while pushing the same buttons over and over again, after all. What could possess us to do such a thing, in such numbers, and for so many years? While my story is rather silly, I’m certain it’s not unique, and that people can relate to it. And if you can’t, maybe it will give you a laugh and an insight into the mind of a very odd gamer.

It will probably come as a surprise to many of my readers to learn that I came to the RPG circuit rather late in my gaming life. I was a teenager when I played my first RPG, having been weaned on the Atari 2600 and raised on platformers. I attacked RPGs much like I did any other game, a kid throwing herself full throttle into the mix as though I could beat it through sheer force of will. I had no idea what I was doing. It took a classic game, Final Fantasy VII in fact, to teach me some home truths about RPGs. Final Fantasy VII is not a difficult RPG in any sense, but I was a newbie and so I was taught a lesson in humility in a rather painful way. No, not by Sephiroth, Jenova, or any other major plotline boss, but by a minor boss monster called Materia Keeper.

Materia Keeper arrives in all its dubious glory.

The first time I met it, it handed my hindquarters to me so skillfully that I didn’t quite grasp what had happened. Then it did it a second time. And then a third. I limped away from Materia Keeper in a rage filled haze. My mother walked into my gaming room to find my teenage self punching a throw pillow and snarling unrepeatable things under my breath. It wouldn’t be the first or the last time that she questioned my sanity. A crossroads was reached that day. I could turn away from RPGs forever, or I could embrace the anger that filled me, turn it into something productive, and throw myself into what RPG fans know as the grind.

Given the nature of this blog, my choice is obvious. By the time I returned to Materia Keeper, I felt much older and wiser, although scant time had passed. I had toiled in an obsessive manner that only RPG players can understand, killing the same monsters over and over again and watching as my stats oh so slowly rose to a more acceptable level. But it wasn’t enough. I wanted revenge. There is something to be said about the fact that over fifteen years later, I still have a ritual to defeat a monster that I know to be an afterthought at best. It exists purely as a test of your level of skill and perhaps to teach you the spell Trine. I take the latter part to heart. I wanted to kill this boss in the most humiliating way possible, and I wanted an audience while I did it. So with both of my incredibly confused parents watching, I fought Materia Keeper, stole Trine from it, and proceeded to kill it with its own spell. It was a glorious moment of achievement and a validation of all my hard work. It is still the only acceptable way for me to kill that boss today, even though I look at it with pitying amusement now instead of virulent loathing.

But my reason for telling this story, besides being yet more documented proof of my insanity, is simple. I remember that day as being the day something clicked in me as a gamer, and I began to learn how to play RPGs properly. What motivates everyone is different, of course, but there has to be a reason that a normally rational human being will sit around staring at a screen doing the same thing over and over for hours on end just to up a few numbers in their status menu. My reason is that every now and then, there is an enemy that truly vexes me. Perhaps they just rubbed me the wrong way, kicking me when I was down. Perhaps they hurt children. Perhaps they let my character live, just to watch him suffer. Whatever the reason, every now and then there is one enemy, often not even the final boss, that I want to make pay. I am a rational adult, I know that these characters are fictional, that they don’t know what I’m doing, but I think that I speak for most gamers when I say that that is not the point. I suppose when it comes down to it, gaming is all about validation, whether it is private or public. For me, it’s all about that elusive boss. I will level grind for however long is necessary to make sure he or she not only loses, but is thoroughly schooled for the suffering they have caused. It’s not so different from the MMO player who is continually looking for that elusive drop, or the trophy collector who has to collect ‘just one more’ so that his collection is better than his friend’s.

Whatever your reasoning is, bragging rights, validation, or just good old fashioned boredom, the grind is an intrinsic part of what makes every successful RPG gamer tick. I still haven’t quite figured out what the allure is, even after having sat at my computer and pondered over this very subject for several hours. There are some mysteries that are better left unsolved, and perhaps this is one of them. In the end, I suppose understanding the nature of the grind comes down to knowing the human mind itself and what drives each of us as a person. I know I haven’t granted us any solid understanding of the subject at hand, but I’ve managed to give my brain a workout, and perhaps made you think of what drives you as a gamer. Hopefully that will be enough to keep your thoughts churning for a little while.

On learning of the existence of this post, my friend Julian Hill over at Boxed Pixels pointed me toward his own level grinding experiences in the cult classic Shadow Run. It’s worth checking out for the perspective of another gamer on this topic and hey, it’s a post about Shadow Run. I shouldn’t have to tell you to read it.

Next week will be the beginning of a rather experimental journey for this blog, as we take a look at another Japan only RPG release in an entirely new style. Hope to see you then!

If you feel like hearing more of my gaming prattle, feel free to follow me on Twitter. You can find me at @bejiita_buruma

Disk 3: Alundra (アランドラ)

Name: Alundra (アランドラ)
Type: Action RPG
Available Languages: Japanese, English

After the strangeness of our last venture, I thought that it might be nice to move back into slightly more familiar territory for a little while. We’re going to take a quick venture into one of my favorite action RPGs this time around, a marvelous game called Alundra. Whether you’re a fan of the Landstalker series or someone who loves the Legend of Zelda games, this is a game that should be played by everyone who loves action RPGs. Dark, difficult, and moving, Alundra is a game that is a pleasure to write about.

This is another game that I have played both in English and in Japanese. As always, I will recommend that you play the game in the original language if you can get it, but this one more so than usual. The company that released Alundra in the United States was often responsible for subpar translations, and this shows particularly glaringly in Alundra. In a game that is supposed to be dark and sometimes disturbing, a bad translation can be extremely jarring. So we will ignore that version entirely.

You begin the game as Alundra, the titular character and classic silent protagonist of the game. He is on a ship, being led toward his destination by a series of dreams that are calling him toward a village in trouble. You can tell this by a cut-scene of the village itself, which looks peaceful enough, but the music belies that. Creepy in the extreme, and accompanied by a disembodied scream, the dream leaves you in no doubt that something is seriously wrong there. You are soon after confronted by Meruzasu, your foe, who has no interest in seeing you meddle in his business. You awaken to the ship that you’re on being caught up in a terrible storm. It crashes, and you are thrown into the ocean. You are rescued by a man, and awaken in the village of Inoa, your original destination. The man is Anzesu, and he will be a big help to you throughout the game.

Alundra’s arrival unfortunately coincides with problems in the village. Disturbing dreams are provoking the villagers and, unlike regular nightmares, these dreams can and do kill. As the game progresses, and more and more people fall, villagers who once welcomed our hero begin to look at him with suspicion. Some support him, others point to him as being an agent of evil. Of course this isn’t enough trouble for Alundra. Another person from Erena, the clan of people who can enter dreams, arrives and begins belittling Alundra’s abilities to the locals. Then there’s the clan of murderous apes that live in the forest to the northwest that want nothing more than to wipe out the village of Inoa entirely. And they aren’t they only group of vicious creatures that want to cause trouble for the humans, either. Poor Alundra has more on his plate than your average hero.

Alundra is typical of its genre in that it offers plenty of hack and slash action and dangerous dungeons to explore. You can collect life vessels and magic seeds to improve your health and magical stats. There are many types of weapons available to you: swords, a huge ball on a chain that can break blocks and cause massive damage, bow and arrows, and several different types of magical staffs. There are multiple types of spells available for you to use as well, in four different elements: earth, water, fire, and wind, with two for each type.

This game opens up to the player rather quickly after Alundra is allowed to leave Inoa. While you may always have some destination or other in mind, you can wander all over the map, as long as you have the items available to proceed forward. Death is quite literally around every corner in this game, but exploration is the key to success in Alundra. Much like the Legend of Zelda series, much of Alundra’s stat boosting is done through items found during exploration. While some might want to try a low health run through this game, I am not one of those brave souls. I know my gaming limitations. So as you progress through the game, it would behoove you to take a look around, carefully, each time you get a new item. You never know what interesting and useful things that you might stumble across. It bears repeating that in this game, every little bit helps.

Alundra is known particularly for its wickedly difficult puzzles. Those who make it to the final dungeon will know what I mean when I say that there is a jumping puzzle there that made me want to throw my controller. I really do believe that Alundra could have benefited from the use of the analog stick, but unfortunately it was released a short time before upgraded controllers were introduced to the PlayStation. As such, you’ll be gritting your teeth and mashing the directional pad with reckless abandon throughout most of the game.

 
I find Alundra’s in game appearance and character designs to be charming, and sometimes downright cheerful looking, which in a way seems to be an almost mocking contrast to the despair that pervades the plot of the game. The music is at one moment upbeat, and at the next moment you will be rattled by a complete change of theme, always accompanied by a disturbing disembodied scream. It is an unnerving plot device that is masterfully done, and even though I have beaten this game multiple times, it never fails to make my skin crawl.

Even if you are normally not drawn toward action RPGs, I can’t recommend Alundra enough. The plot is one of the most dark and fascinating that I have ever had the pleasure of running across. It is most certainly not for children, as it pulls no punches, but it is worth a play through by an adult who likes a good story. I admit that I was rather upset by Alundra’s plight the first time that I played through this game. Characters that you have grown fond of will suddenly end up turning their backs on you, or worse, viciously murdered. No matter how hard you work, it never seems to be good enough for some of the villagers. It says a lot about a game that a player can get indignant on a character’s behalf, particularly one who never has a word to say for himself. Maybe I take my games way too seriously. Or maybe, Alundra is just that good.

If you feel like hearing more of my gaming prattle, feel free to follow me on Twitter. You can find me at @bejiita_buruma

To Command and Conquer

I was given the idea, not so long ago, that it might be a good idea for me to put together a little Japanese gamer primer for the beginning importer who wants help finding their way through the menus of a text heavy game. After all, as the title of this post implies, to command successfully is to conquer in an RPG. So with that thought in mind, I went through the booklets for several prominent RPGs, compiling some common words that it might be useful for the player to know. Here are a few barebones terms, in some cases shown in both kanji and hiragana or katakana.

戦う / たたかう Attack

魔法 / まほう Magic

アイテム Item

防御 / ぼうぎょ Defend

召喚 / しょうかん Summon

特技 / とくぎ Special Skill

武器 / ぶき Weapon

防具 / ぼうぐ Armor

アクセサリ Accessory

I hope that this little list is of words is useful to whoever comes across it. I’ll be adding words to it as I think of them, so expect the occasional edit to be done to this post whenever a new word comes to mind. I’m sure that there are plenty of words that are important that I’ve forgotten to put on this list. If you have any suggestions, feel free to let me know.

Disk 2: Pal Shinken Densetsu (PAL 神犬伝説)

Name: Pal Shinken Densetsu (PAL 神犬伝説)
Type: Turn-based RPG
Available Languages: Japanese

Today’s post is all about relishing the obscure. Being that this is a blog about Japanese games, I felt that it was time to take a short trip out into leftfield and talk about a little known game. I wanted to choose a Japan only release that was a PlayStation exclusive. There are quite a few options to choose from, of course, but none that I could think of fit my criteria as well as Pal Shinken Densetsu. If you have heard of this game before, I congratulate you on knowing your RPGs. If you haven’t, then you’re in for a treat, as this game is nothing if not strange and entertaining. The title, roughly translated, means Pal God Dog Legend, and if you think that that makes no sense, it’s only because you’re not familiar with the story.

Pal Shinken Densetsu begins as a tale about a dog and his owner. Kaoru, a teenage girl with a destiny that she is unaware of, is being sought out by a man named Nostradamus. Totally unaware of this, she lives her daily life in her hometown of Kamishima. She finds an abandoned dog one day and takes him in, naming him Pal.

Things don’t go very well for our canine friend, however, as Kaoru’s foster mother won’t allow her to keep him due to having a dislike of dogs. So Kaoru puts him on a leash and goes looking for help. Her boyfriend, Yukito, won’t take Pal in either, because he is too preoccupied with his studies. So she sadly takes him with her to school, not knowing who to turn to for help. Pal’s best friend, the stray cat Pally, releases him from where he’s been tied to a tree and they go searching for Kaoru. While looking around for her, you will be picked on by some punks, and finally by a girl who apparently thinks it’s fine to bring nunchaku with her to school. It turns out that she’s Kaoru’s best friend, and after realizing who you are, she helps you find her.

It is soon after that things become bizarre. After singing a strange song, Kaoru is kidnapped by a flying ship that is rather reminiscent of a harpy. Needless to say, you attack it, it makes mincemeat out of you, and then kidnaps your owner, leaving you and Pally injured on the school roof. It seems that you are a dog who has unwittingly been caught up in a rather large mess. But as you and Pally love Kaoru so very much, Zeus decides to help you. My eyebrows felt like they had raised to my hairline by this point, but I decided to just roll with it and took him up on his offer. Pal and Pally end up in the land of the gods, where the seven gods of good fortune put you through trials to become heroes.

Both of you pass with flying colors, which means that you’re ready to go kick Nostradamus and his little committee around like soccer balls, right? Not so fast! Zeus will allow only one of you to become a hero, so you have to duke it out. Given that the title of this game is Pal Shinken Densetsu, the puppy must defeat the alley cat. After you win, you promise Pally to save Kaoru and move onward. You are then treated to what has to be the most bizarre transformation sequence that I have ever seen, as Pal is changed into a human, although his dog ears still remain. You now have the appearance of a human and the power of a god. Sweet. You are also joined by Yama No Kami (god of the mountain), a rather obese female deity, and Binbougami (god of poverty), her perverted husband. How your circumstances have changed, Pal, although I’m not sure if they’re for the better. And so you return to Kamishima very different from how you left it, and your search for Kaoru begins in earnest.

The choices that you have in and out of battle are somewhat varied, although it is still a pretty simple system by RPG standards. As a puppy, you have options as to what you can do via menu. Pal can bark to talk to other animals or get the attention of humans. In battle it has the potential of frightening enemies into immobility. He can snap his teeth to confront enemies and attack them in battle. He can check for scents in areas to look for information. He can also wag his tail, which in battle can reduce an enemy’s health. As a human, out of battle you can talk to people and your party members, use techniques and items, and search for information. In battle, you can attack, defend, use techniques and items, or run. It’s your classic turn-based RPG fare. You can use your techniques in and out of battle and level up the elements as the game progresses. Each element adds a different group of spells to your arsenal, which makes the game’s battle mechanics slightly more complicated and interesting. It is fun to experiment with them to see what is most effective in different situations. Yukito, Kaoru’s boyfriend and your fourth party member, can’t use techniques because he is human, so as his special skill he cooks. That’s right, he cooks. His recipes can do all sorts of different things to help you as you fight your way toward the end. It’s a nice little addition to what is otherwise a pretty traditional battle system.

Beyond the strangeness of this game’s plot, another thing struck me rather forcefully. This game’s dialog is interesting in that it is written in furigana. Most games of this generation are a mix of that and kanji, but this game is an exception. Therefore I can recommend this as being much more accessible to beginning learners of Japanese than many other games. Oddly enough, the in battle choices and the choices to agree or disagree during conversations are all in kanji. I can only assume that this was done for stylistic reasons, as it’s rare to see the kanji for agreement and disagreement choices used in games.

We have only scratched the surface of this odd little game, given that discussing the whole story would be more like a dissertation and less like a peek into the world of games that few outside of Japan ever get to see. If you’re looking for something that’s a little bit different from the norm or that is a good game to play as your first foray into Japanese language RPGs, then give Pal Shinken Densetsu a spin. Its character designs are interesting, the battle system is accessible to most players, and I defy anyone to say that the story isn’t entertaining. You certainly won’t find this little jaunt predictable.

 

If you feel like hearing more of my gaming prattle, feel free to follow me on Twitter. You can find me at @bejiita_buruma