Dual Orb 2
Nov. 17th, 2010 01:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroAmong the 90s SNES games I've been clearing off my backlog is Dual Orb 2, a jrpg made by I'Max and fan-translated by Nightcrawler / Translation Corp.
This is not a game for the jrpg beginner, that's for sure. This is a grind-heavy, hard game. Two of your characters start with training equipment, which means they can't even deal damage to the common enemies outside the first town (only your third character can) until you money-gring enough to buy them real weapons and armor. This costs about 2,000 GP, where the average battle is giving you 20-25. If you decide not to grind when you have the chance and instead rely on the third character, he leaves as soon as you reach the first dungeon, where you can't leave to buy better equipment. If you save there without having prepared, odds are good you'll end up needing to restart from the beginning.
The graphics are an interesting mix from the mid-SNES era. The character sprites and town designs remind me a lot of Lufia, but the battle graphics are higher-quality(attempted "realism" similar to The 7th Saga) and the opening sequence has a mode-7 cutscene that may use the same engine as Final Fantasy 6. (Some of the sprites are actually from FF6--the castle banner in the beginning of this game is the Empire's banner hanging in Vector in FF6.)
Actually, the Final Fantasy inspiration is evident in many parts of the game. You've got your jrpg standards--remnants of an ancient high-technology civilization, one of the heroes has amnesia, evil empire out to conquer the world, destroyed hometowns galore, all that. The keep-moving-forward plot bears a decent resemblance to any Final Fantasy game--though I think of FF4 in particular, especially when you consider the constant rearrangement of the party. And I wonder if the mobile town and bird-like airship/spaceship went on to inspire FF8. (There doesn't seem to be enough history of the game available in English to tell what Square had to say about this, if developers moved from one company to the other, etc.)
The dungeons are fairly straightforward, with little in the way of mazes or even dead ends, and a high encounter rate. Early on, the random encounters aren't particularly difficult; it's just the boss battles that kill you. By the time you reach the Flame Cave, your resources are seriously taxed by fighting random battles, because there's a dearth of better armor. When you finally get a significant armor upgrade in Gasso, the difficulty of random encounters drops again. Credit to them for clever enemies, though: In a set of ruins of an ancient (technologically-advanced) civilization, you fight jeeps and laptop computers.
Gaining levels doesn't seem to affect much--it increases your HP and MP (by regular amounts) and seems to affect your speed slightly, but the amount of damage you give and recieve seems almost entirely determined by your weapon. And upgrading weapons is insanely expensive. The amount of damage you take seems to only be affected by your armor, and as I noted, you can go several dungeons without even the slightest improvement in armor. An enemy that did 300 damage to you at level 5 will still do 300 damage to you at level 25. This also means that you'll be healing after every battle, even if you cheat up stronger weapons.
The number inflation is odd, as well. From the very beginning, pretty much all numbers get measured in thousands--your HP, enemy HP, MP, everything. Except for 1-point scratch damage, you're never doing less than a couple hundred damage per strike (at least, if you hope to win eventually). Why not just lop a zero off the end of every number and make the game have to handle fewer digits?
An odd little fakeout/annoyance comes about halfway through, when the game gives you a new underleveled, underequipped character. There's about 15 minutes of plot and the game's only sliding-block puzzle before the next dungeon--no battles--at which point that character is removed and you're given a new, appropriately-leveled and equipped one. Who stays with you for one unwinnable boss battle, then leaves again. There's a similar bit at the end when a character returns for the penultimate dungeon. He's a solid 30 levels behind the rest of the party and never gets a better weapon. And he's in your party for that dungeon and one of the hardest bosses.
By the end of the game, the difficulty level breaks the game system. Even with much better equipment than I was supposed to have and periodic levelling, bosses were killing me repeatedly before I squeaked by them. Even the best strategies required the RNG to be kind to you--one boss has minions that you can paralyze, but you'll never be fast enough to cast Paralysis before they get a full round of attacks in, which could easily kill the character who has that spell. Sindra, a late-game boss, drove me to such frustration I entered a set of max attack/max defense cheat codes and equipped the magic immunity armor. He was still really hard to beat, especially since my attacks maxed out around 3,500 damage, and he would dodge most of them (and counterattack) and periodically heal himself for 9,999. The boss after him, Odorath, just casts the hit-all Paralysis spell on your party repeatedly, and there doesn't seem to be a way to protect against it.
The final boss, on the other hand, has multiple forms, including one that's unbeatable and requires you to lose. In any other game I'd say that's fine, but in this one, where bosses have been devilishly difficult leading up to that point, it feels like a dick move by the programmers. I wonder how many people wasted their resources on the unbeatable form and just hit reset before seeing the scene that dying gets you?
Virtually all of my complaints, you'll note, are with the game itself. I thought the translation work was excellent. (As is often the case. Fan-translations are typically labors of love, and the folks doing them for jrpgs are usually people willing to put in the time to get them right.) There's an entire sequence that involves pirates trying to get ahold of beer--which makes you wonder if there's a translation error when it starts, but makes perfect sense by the end. I shudder at what would have happened had a mid-90s professional localization team gotten their hands on that, as at least some part of it would have ended up making no sense whatsoever. Probably all of it.
Most of the fan-translated jrpgs left me with a faint feeling of disappointment, that the game wasn't officially localized back in the day and that most people won't get to play it. I don't really have that feeling here--the game is too hard in broken ways, and the plot is too much of a re-tread of the rest of the 16-bit jrpg era without adding anything new.
This is not a game for the jrpg beginner, that's for sure. This is a grind-heavy, hard game. Two of your characters start with training equipment, which means they can't even deal damage to the common enemies outside the first town (only your third character can) until you money-gring enough to buy them real weapons and armor. This costs about 2,000 GP, where the average battle is giving you 20-25. If you decide not to grind when you have the chance and instead rely on the third character, he leaves as soon as you reach the first dungeon, where you can't leave to buy better equipment. If you save there without having prepared, odds are good you'll end up needing to restart from the beginning.
The graphics are an interesting mix from the mid-SNES era. The character sprites and town designs remind me a lot of Lufia, but the battle graphics are higher-quality(attempted "realism" similar to The 7th Saga) and the opening sequence has a mode-7 cutscene that may use the same engine as Final Fantasy 6. (Some of the sprites are actually from FF6--the castle banner in the beginning of this game is the Empire's banner hanging in Vector in FF6.)
Actually, the Final Fantasy inspiration is evident in many parts of the game. You've got your jrpg standards--remnants of an ancient high-technology civilization, one of the heroes has amnesia, evil empire out to conquer the world, destroyed hometowns galore, all that. The keep-moving-forward plot bears a decent resemblance to any Final Fantasy game--though I think of FF4 in particular, especially when you consider the constant rearrangement of the party. And I wonder if the mobile town and bird-like airship/spaceship went on to inspire FF8. (There doesn't seem to be enough history of the game available in English to tell what Square had to say about this, if developers moved from one company to the other, etc.)
The dungeons are fairly straightforward, with little in the way of mazes or even dead ends, and a high encounter rate. Early on, the random encounters aren't particularly difficult; it's just the boss battles that kill you. By the time you reach the Flame Cave, your resources are seriously taxed by fighting random battles, because there's a dearth of better armor. When you finally get a significant armor upgrade in Gasso, the difficulty of random encounters drops again. Credit to them for clever enemies, though: In a set of ruins of an ancient (technologically-advanced) civilization, you fight jeeps and laptop computers.
Gaining levels doesn't seem to affect much--it increases your HP and MP (by regular amounts) and seems to affect your speed slightly, but the amount of damage you give and recieve seems almost entirely determined by your weapon. And upgrading weapons is insanely expensive. The amount of damage you take seems to only be affected by your armor, and as I noted, you can go several dungeons without even the slightest improvement in armor. An enemy that did 300 damage to you at level 5 will still do 300 damage to you at level 25. This also means that you'll be healing after every battle, even if you cheat up stronger weapons.
The number inflation is odd, as well. From the very beginning, pretty much all numbers get measured in thousands--your HP, enemy HP, MP, everything. Except for 1-point scratch damage, you're never doing less than a couple hundred damage per strike (at least, if you hope to win eventually). Why not just lop a zero off the end of every number and make the game have to handle fewer digits?
An odd little fakeout/annoyance comes about halfway through, when the game gives you a new underleveled, underequipped character. There's about 15 minutes of plot and the game's only sliding-block puzzle before the next dungeon--no battles--at which point that character is removed and you're given a new, appropriately-leveled and equipped one. Who stays with you for one unwinnable boss battle, then leaves again. There's a similar bit at the end when a character returns for the penultimate dungeon. He's a solid 30 levels behind the rest of the party and never gets a better weapon. And he's in your party for that dungeon and one of the hardest bosses.
By the end of the game, the difficulty level breaks the game system. Even with much better equipment than I was supposed to have and periodic levelling, bosses were killing me repeatedly before I squeaked by them. Even the best strategies required the RNG to be kind to you--one boss has minions that you can paralyze, but you'll never be fast enough to cast Paralysis before they get a full round of attacks in, which could easily kill the character who has that spell. Sindra, a late-game boss, drove me to such frustration I entered a set of max attack/max defense cheat codes and equipped the magic immunity armor. He was still really hard to beat, especially since my attacks maxed out around 3,500 damage, and he would dodge most of them (and counterattack) and periodically heal himself for 9,999. The boss after him, Odorath, just casts the hit-all Paralysis spell on your party repeatedly, and there doesn't seem to be a way to protect against it.
The final boss, on the other hand, has multiple forms, including one that's unbeatable and requires you to lose. In any other game I'd say that's fine, but in this one, where bosses have been devilishly difficult leading up to that point, it feels like a dick move by the programmers. I wonder how many people wasted their resources on the unbeatable form and just hit reset before seeing the scene that dying gets you?
Virtually all of my complaints, you'll note, are with the game itself. I thought the translation work was excellent. (As is often the case. Fan-translations are typically labors of love, and the folks doing them for jrpgs are usually people willing to put in the time to get them right.) There's an entire sequence that involves pirates trying to get ahold of beer--which makes you wonder if there's a translation error when it starts, but makes perfect sense by the end. I shudder at what would have happened had a mid-90s professional localization team gotten their hands on that, as at least some part of it would have ended up making no sense whatsoever. Probably all of it.
Most of the fan-translated jrpgs left me with a faint feeling of disappointment, that the game wasn't officially localized back in the day and that most people won't get to play it. I don't really have that feeling here--the game is too hard in broken ways, and the plot is too much of a re-tread of the rest of the 16-bit jrpg era without adding anything new.
