![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroA villianous demon named Balam is trying to use human technology to destroy The Magical Land of Wozz, so Wozz's Elder Sullivan summons a hero from the human world to rescue them. What he gets are three kids, but there's no way to send them home, so they're pretty much forced to be heroes regardless. These three heroes-to-be are the American archer Shot, the Chinese psionicist Chun and the Japanese inventor Leona.
Of the three characters: Shot is a typical fighter, with high HP, defense and physical attacks. Chun is a dedicated mage, who starts off with several attack spells and generally has enough MP to use them in every battle (and a seperate set of psi abilities, which change effects depending on his level and aren't affected if he's silenced), and eventually gets most of the healing spells, too. Leona is a utility character, whose special ability is to combine items to create new ones, but in practice isn't terribly useful in combat--she doesn't get any special bonuses for using items or ability to create them in battle, so she's mostly a weaker version of Shot. (Which is extra-absurd when you consider that she's got a bazooka and Shot uses a bow!)
The fourth party spot is filled by another eight characters, who are sometimes required and sometimes can be rotated in. Each additional character has a role, though most of them are half-decent fighters with either attack spells or support spells. Madisto and Vargas stand out as the best, as Madisto has every healing spell, and Vargas is a very strong attacker and also knows a collection of good buff spells (which Chun never learns and items don't seem to replicate).
None of the characters is a silent protagonist. Shot is brash and kind of an asshole. Chun is a coward and tends to act childish, and his story arc is mostly about overcoming that. Leona feels she needs to prove herself, and occasionally makes stupid decisions because of that. Their personalities are even shown in the way they move on the world map--rather than always following your leader in a line, they'll fall behind, "tailgate" you, or wander off to look at things and then catch up. Depending on which character you choose as the "main" one, the story changes in a bunch of places as the group seperates. (Which can mean the difference between doing a solo dungeon and a dungeon missing one party member, in some cases.) In theory you'd need to play the game three times to see every event, though in practice it's mostly a matter of which character gets the most on-screen development.
The battle system uses a three-quarter view similar to the first two Breath of Fire games, and it's obvious that different artists designed the battle and map views--the battle views are much prettier. The map screen is pretty much classic early-SNES graphics.
The battles themselves are relatively straightforward, as there isn't a lot of strategy unless your fourth character has buffs or debuffs. Have Chun cast the appropriate elemental spell and everyone else attack, repeat until all enemies are dead. The game's tournament area (thankfully optional) is basically a never-ending series of battles called Slaughterhall. Every time you beat 25 battles in a row, you win one of the game's best accessories. The problem being that this process is exceptionally tedious. And it's not even that much of an endurance match: You can carry up to 999 of every item, and consumables are generally very cheap compared to the money you get from enemies. So as long as you plan ahead, you can have effectively unlimited MP and healing potions.
There are vehicles you can have Leona build in a workshop, including varieties of tanks, boats and eventually planes. None of them disable random encounters, but they all have their own weapons systems and there are special "parts" healing items that repair them. While this seems like a cute idea, in practice it just adds additional random battles that are nothing but time-wasters--every enemy you meet in the boat or plane with die in 1-2 hits of the vehicle's one special weapon. There's no challenge and no strategy.
Dungeons are mostly straightforward. There are a handful of puzzles and some slightly maze-like areas, but nothing particularly innovative.
The game doesn't take itself very seriously, and the translation runs with that. Wozz is the land where all of the magical creatures of legend live, who sealed themselves away from Earth when humans began using technology. The very first quest is to get water called "Evian" from a magic healing spring. Then you go to a town made of cheese and populated with mad scientist lisping mouse-men. One of the continents includes towns populated with ghosts, zombies and skeletons (all friendly); another has the land of the flying goldfish. One of the random islands includes a translator cameo, but it doesn't seem particularly out of place, given the lighthearted feel of the game. (The translator references Dual Orb 2, which he also translated.)
In the land of "not all translations are equal", I'm not sure what they were doing with a bunch of the monster names. Birdmen called "Bifeel", for instance. What is that? Also, the god of Wozz is named Seus. I somehow feel this was supposed to be "Zeus", not "Suess", but hey, I could be wrong.
(Side note: No, you never fight Seus. The final boss is a twist, if a troperiffic one, but it's not God.)
Early RPGs taught the player to take a very conservative approach to MP. It could only be restored by staying at the inn, or occasionally by a very rare and expensive item, so it had to last you the entire dungeon. Consequently, you tried not to use magic unless you absolutely had to. (The fact that buffs and debuffs were generally useless in early rpgs didn't help either.) Nowadays, there are lots of games where magic is unlimited, or regenerates quickly enough that it might as well be, or where you get enough MP-restoring items (and they're cheap enough) to keep you going. This game seems to be from the transition period, where having a character whose physical attacks were all but useless because he was expected to cast a spell every turn (even in random battles) was new and interesting--because he had enough MP and magic-restoring items were cheap enough that he could feasibly do that. (Though that's only for attack magic: Healing magic gets very expensive very quickly relative to the amount of HP it restores. You're better off healing with your giant item stash if you don't have the dedicated healer as your 4th character.)
There are also multiple levels of each spell--the elemental spells periodically level up into the next version, which costs more MP but does more damage. This doesn't seem to be related to how often you use them. Fortunately, when the healing spells level up, you get to keep the weaker, cheaper version too.
Beyond that, though, this is pretty much a bog-standard SNES jrpg. I might even go so far as to call it a Breath of Fire clone, as it has a similar look and feel and many of the complaints carry over. But the biggest one is that everything moves a little too slowly, there's too high an encounter rate and there's a little too much grinding required early on. (The game is plenty generous with money, though, which alleviates a lot of the difficulty once you get to the second continent: You can carry 999 of the really cheap MP-restoring item, which also doubles as infinite healing out of battle, so you can restore to full after every battle if you need to and you're patient.) I ended up using the fast-forward feature in SNES9X to alleviates some of these issues, though it screwed up the game clock and I had to approximate my final play time.
Overall: A lackluster, run-of-the-mill SNES jrpg whose slightly different battle style (encouragement to use a lot of black magic) wasn't flanked by enough other variety, strategy or innovation. And it moves too slowly. It wasn't bad by any means, and it kept me amused enough that I was perfectly happy to see it to completion, but I can't see going back to replay it and I'd recommend a fair number of other SNES-era games ahead of it.
Of the three characters: Shot is a typical fighter, with high HP, defense and physical attacks. Chun is a dedicated mage, who starts off with several attack spells and generally has enough MP to use them in every battle (and a seperate set of psi abilities, which change effects depending on his level and aren't affected if he's silenced), and eventually gets most of the healing spells, too. Leona is a utility character, whose special ability is to combine items to create new ones, but in practice isn't terribly useful in combat--she doesn't get any special bonuses for using items or ability to create them in battle, so she's mostly a weaker version of Shot. (Which is extra-absurd when you consider that she's got a bazooka and Shot uses a bow!)
The fourth party spot is filled by another eight characters, who are sometimes required and sometimes can be rotated in. Each additional character has a role, though most of them are half-decent fighters with either attack spells or support spells. Madisto and Vargas stand out as the best, as Madisto has every healing spell, and Vargas is a very strong attacker and also knows a collection of good buff spells (which Chun never learns and items don't seem to replicate).
None of the characters is a silent protagonist. Shot is brash and kind of an asshole. Chun is a coward and tends to act childish, and his story arc is mostly about overcoming that. Leona feels she needs to prove herself, and occasionally makes stupid decisions because of that. Their personalities are even shown in the way they move on the world map--rather than always following your leader in a line, they'll fall behind, "tailgate" you, or wander off to look at things and then catch up. Depending on which character you choose as the "main" one, the story changes in a bunch of places as the group seperates. (Which can mean the difference between doing a solo dungeon and a dungeon missing one party member, in some cases.) In theory you'd need to play the game three times to see every event, though in practice it's mostly a matter of which character gets the most on-screen development.
The battle system uses a three-quarter view similar to the first two Breath of Fire games, and it's obvious that different artists designed the battle and map views--the battle views are much prettier. The map screen is pretty much classic early-SNES graphics.
The battles themselves are relatively straightforward, as there isn't a lot of strategy unless your fourth character has buffs or debuffs. Have Chun cast the appropriate elemental spell and everyone else attack, repeat until all enemies are dead. The game's tournament area (thankfully optional) is basically a never-ending series of battles called Slaughterhall. Every time you beat 25 battles in a row, you win one of the game's best accessories. The problem being that this process is exceptionally tedious. And it's not even that much of an endurance match: You can carry up to 999 of every item, and consumables are generally very cheap compared to the money you get from enemies. So as long as you plan ahead, you can have effectively unlimited MP and healing potions.
There are vehicles you can have Leona build in a workshop, including varieties of tanks, boats and eventually planes. None of them disable random encounters, but they all have their own weapons systems and there are special "parts" healing items that repair them. While this seems like a cute idea, in practice it just adds additional random battles that are nothing but time-wasters--every enemy you meet in the boat or plane with die in 1-2 hits of the vehicle's one special weapon. There's no challenge and no strategy.
Dungeons are mostly straightforward. There are a handful of puzzles and some slightly maze-like areas, but nothing particularly innovative.
The game doesn't take itself very seriously, and the translation runs with that. Wozz is the land where all of the magical creatures of legend live, who sealed themselves away from Earth when humans began using technology. The very first quest is to get water called "Evian" from a magic healing spring. Then you go to a town made of cheese and populated with mad scientist lisping mouse-men. One of the continents includes towns populated with ghosts, zombies and skeletons (all friendly); another has the land of the flying goldfish. One of the random islands includes a translator cameo, but it doesn't seem particularly out of place, given the lighthearted feel of the game. (The translator references Dual Orb 2, which he also translated.)
In the land of "not all translations are equal", I'm not sure what they were doing with a bunch of the monster names. Birdmen called "Bifeel", for instance. What is that? Also, the god of Wozz is named Seus. I somehow feel this was supposed to be "Zeus", not "Suess", but hey, I could be wrong.
(Side note: No, you never fight Seus. The final boss is a twist, if a troperiffic one, but it's not God.)
Early RPGs taught the player to take a very conservative approach to MP. It could only be restored by staying at the inn, or occasionally by a very rare and expensive item, so it had to last you the entire dungeon. Consequently, you tried not to use magic unless you absolutely had to. (The fact that buffs and debuffs were generally useless in early rpgs didn't help either.) Nowadays, there are lots of games where magic is unlimited, or regenerates quickly enough that it might as well be, or where you get enough MP-restoring items (and they're cheap enough) to keep you going. This game seems to be from the transition period, where having a character whose physical attacks were all but useless because he was expected to cast a spell every turn (even in random battles) was new and interesting--because he had enough MP and magic-restoring items were cheap enough that he could feasibly do that. (Though that's only for attack magic: Healing magic gets very expensive very quickly relative to the amount of HP it restores. You're better off healing with your giant item stash if you don't have the dedicated healer as your 4th character.)
There are also multiple levels of each spell--the elemental spells periodically level up into the next version, which costs more MP but does more damage. This doesn't seem to be related to how often you use them. Fortunately, when the healing spells level up, you get to keep the weaker, cheaper version too.
Beyond that, though, this is pretty much a bog-standard SNES jrpg. I might even go so far as to call it a Breath of Fire clone, as it has a similar look and feel and many of the complaints carry over. But the biggest one is that everything moves a little too slowly, there's too high an encounter rate and there's a little too much grinding required early on. (The game is plenty generous with money, though, which alleviates a lot of the difficulty once you get to the second continent: You can carry 999 of the really cheap MP-restoring item, which also doubles as infinite healing out of battle, so you can restore to full after every battle if you need to and you're patient.) I ended up using the fast-forward feature in SNES9X to alleviates some of these issues, though it screwed up the game clock and I had to approximate my final play time.
Overall: A lackluster, run-of-the-mill SNES jrpg whose slightly different battle style (encouragement to use a lot of black magic) wasn't flanked by enough other variety, strategy or innovation. And it moves too slowly. It wasn't bad by any means, and it kept me amused enough that I was perfectly happy to see it to completion, but I can't see going back to replay it and I'd recommend a fair number of other SNES-era games ahead of it.
