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chuckroKouryu Densetsu Villgust ("Armored Dragon Legend Villgust") is a SNES rpg that appears to have escaped from the NES era, and is another example of a game that I'm not terribly upset didn't get a professional localization.
Right off the bat, this game feels "slow". The battle animations are stilted, and damage is displayed in the dialogue box instead of pop-up numbers. The menu system is annoying, forcing you to equip items to tell how powerful they are and trade them among characters to guess who can equip them. The system feels like it was designed for an older generation of games, where the "slow and clunky" model was more acceptable. By the SNES era, the better designers usually realized that gamers wanted wading through menus to be sped up so they could spent more time playing the game. This game also lacks an "auto-battle" function, which would be very useful, given that you spend most battles having everyone attack.
The game starts off very "Dragon Warrior", with a very brief intro, then you have minimal equipment and access to the first town and are expected to grind for a while. The plot also tends very "old school", as it's mostly simple "signpost" conversations with townspeople, especially early on. I wonder how much of that is the game and how much is Magic-Destiny's translation job. (It feels simplistic, but that could also be the original Japanese, too.)There's little nuance, and very little to work from in terms of personalities or even most events. (Given that it's based on an anime, it may also be assuming you know the characters and don't need much presented to you here. It's a lousy assumtion, but it would be an explanation.) Most of the events involve thirty seconds of conversation indicating where to go next, and most quests are the standard "this town has a problem, complete this dungeon to solve it" variety. Oh, and you're a legendary hero. Shocking, I know.
There are tiny bits of characterization here and there (certainly not enough for the nine PCs and dozen named NPCs), but for the most part, the story just blows by. Gomez, who seems set up at first to be a major villian, makes a bunch of appearances, then is unceremoniously the boss of a random dungeon and you kill him. Your girlfriend is pretty much a macguffin the entire time, despite hope that she might do something at some point. And there's the standard Crystal Dragon Jesus references to western religion, most ham-handedly in the section where you meet Peter, Marie and John and get crucified. But nothing really noteworthy is made of any of it, it's just kinda there.
In an interesting twist, enemies give both less XP AND less gold if you're at a higher level. The number of encounters also declines as you get stronger than the enemies in an area. This is basically a serious anti-grinding feature, coupled with the fact that you'll need to grind in every new area. You can't get ahead of the curve, really, so you're stuck in exactly the level progression and game pace the designers wanted. (Though I'll admit, the low encounter rate in an area with weak enemies is pleasant; it reminds me of the frustration-preventing instant-win feature in Earthbound.) This also causes money to be seriously scarce, which means you can't buy all of the snazzy new weapons at any point--the enemies will stop giving you enough money before you can afford everything.
There's a bizarre amount of stat inflation, too, probably implemented to make the grinding/anti-grinding system work properly: Stats start in the double digits and eventually reach five digits. The first sword has 6 attack, the second 15, the third 30. The final sword has an attack power of 10,000! This is troublesome for magic, since each character can get a max of eight spells and lower-level spells scale very poorly. (And as is standard for the era, debuffs don't work on anything that it's worth casting them on.)
This makes for...interesting beef gate problems, as well. The system pretty much demands linearity, the plot asks for it, but when you're about a third of the way through the game you hit a "sandbox" area, where there seem to be a number of places you can go and no particular order to go in. Oh, there's an order, just don't expect the game to tell you anything about it. Hint: Don't go into the desert until you've done everything else, unless you love game overs.
Honestly, I'm reminded a bit of Lunar: Dragon Song, where they didn't have a lot of plot, tactics or personality, and tried to make up for it with a gimmicky system to encourage a lot of extra grinding. If you use a cheat code to gain a level after every battle, the game suddenly moves massively faster, because you fight three or four battles in each area and then random encounters stop, and it's not like the cutscenes are eating up a lot of your time. (The first two dungeons played normally take about two hours. The entire game played with cheats takes maybe seven hours, if you dally.)
The graphics are a little more colorful and detailed than most, especially the "3-D" sprite designs used for characters (which are cutsy and superdeformed, like Lufia but even more so). It's not bad for early in the SNES era. But I get the impression they had a sprite designer who cared about making pretty, detailed work, and then a layout/map designer who threw things together in the grand tradition of NES sprites. The dungeons are linear space-filling paths and very repetitive.
Honestly, there isn't much good to say about this game; it's one of the worst fan-translated games I've played. Maybe the anime was better?
Right off the bat, this game feels "slow". The battle animations are stilted, and damage is displayed in the dialogue box instead of pop-up numbers. The menu system is annoying, forcing you to equip items to tell how powerful they are and trade them among characters to guess who can equip them. The system feels like it was designed for an older generation of games, where the "slow and clunky" model was more acceptable. By the SNES era, the better designers usually realized that gamers wanted wading through menus to be sped up so they could spent more time playing the game. This game also lacks an "auto-battle" function, which would be very useful, given that you spend most battles having everyone attack.
The game starts off very "Dragon Warrior", with a very brief intro, then you have minimal equipment and access to the first town and are expected to grind for a while. The plot also tends very "old school", as it's mostly simple "signpost" conversations with townspeople, especially early on. I wonder how much of that is the game and how much is Magic-Destiny's translation job. (It feels simplistic, but that could also be the original Japanese, too.)There's little nuance, and very little to work from in terms of personalities or even most events. (Given that it's based on an anime, it may also be assuming you know the characters and don't need much presented to you here. It's a lousy assumtion, but it would be an explanation.) Most of the events involve thirty seconds of conversation indicating where to go next, and most quests are the standard "this town has a problem, complete this dungeon to solve it" variety. Oh, and you're a legendary hero. Shocking, I know.
There are tiny bits of characterization here and there (certainly not enough for the nine PCs and dozen named NPCs), but for the most part, the story just blows by. Gomez, who seems set up at first to be a major villian, makes a bunch of appearances, then is unceremoniously the boss of a random dungeon and you kill him. Your girlfriend is pretty much a macguffin the entire time, despite hope that she might do something at some point. And there's the standard Crystal Dragon Jesus references to western religion, most ham-handedly in the section where you meet Peter, Marie and John and get crucified. But nothing really noteworthy is made of any of it, it's just kinda there.
In an interesting twist, enemies give both less XP AND less gold if you're at a higher level. The number of encounters also declines as you get stronger than the enemies in an area. This is basically a serious anti-grinding feature, coupled with the fact that you'll need to grind in every new area. You can't get ahead of the curve, really, so you're stuck in exactly the level progression and game pace the designers wanted. (Though I'll admit, the low encounter rate in an area with weak enemies is pleasant; it reminds me of the frustration-preventing instant-win feature in Earthbound.) This also causes money to be seriously scarce, which means you can't buy all of the snazzy new weapons at any point--the enemies will stop giving you enough money before you can afford everything.
There's a bizarre amount of stat inflation, too, probably implemented to make the grinding/anti-grinding system work properly: Stats start in the double digits and eventually reach five digits. The first sword has 6 attack, the second 15, the third 30. The final sword has an attack power of 10,000! This is troublesome for magic, since each character can get a max of eight spells and lower-level spells scale very poorly. (And as is standard for the era, debuffs don't work on anything that it's worth casting them on.)
This makes for...interesting beef gate problems, as well. The system pretty much demands linearity, the plot asks for it, but when you're about a third of the way through the game you hit a "sandbox" area, where there seem to be a number of places you can go and no particular order to go in. Oh, there's an order, just don't expect the game to tell you anything about it. Hint: Don't go into the desert until you've done everything else, unless you love game overs.
Honestly, I'm reminded a bit of Lunar: Dragon Song, where they didn't have a lot of plot, tactics or personality, and tried to make up for it with a gimmicky system to encourage a lot of extra grinding. If you use a cheat code to gain a level after every battle, the game suddenly moves massively faster, because you fight three or four battles in each area and then random encounters stop, and it's not like the cutscenes are eating up a lot of your time. (The first two dungeons played normally take about two hours. The entire game played with cheats takes maybe seven hours, if you dally.)
The graphics are a little more colorful and detailed than most, especially the "3-D" sprite designs used for characters (which are cutsy and superdeformed, like Lufia but even more so). It's not bad for early in the SNES era. But I get the impression they had a sprite designer who cared about making pretty, detailed work, and then a layout/map designer who threw things together in the grand tradition of NES sprites. The dungeons are linear space-filling paths and very repetitive.
Honestly, there isn't much good to say about this game; it's one of the worst fan-translated games I've played. Maybe the anime was better?
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