Beyond the Beyond (PS1, Played on RG350)
Jun. 20th, 2023 09:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroFinn is a young swordsman just starting out, but when his home country is invaded, he finds himself on a quest to defeat the “Vicious Ones” from the Underworld who have broken the truce dividing the world.
This was made by Camelot after the did the first two Shining Force games but before they did the Golden Sun series, and it shows—it has a bunch of aspects that feel like either series, including stats and class upgrades that feel like Shining Force, and dungeon designs that are clearly primitive Golden Sun ideas. It doesn’t feel like a PS1 game—it feels like a SNES game with a couple of 3D bits thrown into the battle system because they could (and that was likely because it was one of the first PS1 jrpgs released). The fact that characters emote entirely by wiggling their sprites slightly larger and smaller is odd. It feels like they figured out how to change the size of sprites really early and then used that to save money on animating anything else.
The difficulty is kinda wonky at best and pretty nasty at worst; you get a lot of stretches without inns or chances to save (which is less of an issue on an emulator, but even so) but then fight the same enemies for several dungeons in a row. Enemies with hit-all spells can really mess up your party, but you don’t have the MP to return the favor because random battles are so damn frequent. The low “number inflation” means that even in the endgame a strong hit will only do 50 points of damage…but a midgame boss (when your best strikes do 20) could easily be a sack of 900 HP. And you’re stuck with cursed Samson for the first third of the game, who does reduced damage and misses half of his turns. (In case it wasn’t obvious, I used cheat codes. Lots of cheat codes—I actually experimented quite a big. Being able to turn off random battles alone was probably the reason I finished the game.)
Oh, and I almost forgot: There’s a completely undocumented “timed hits” feature to battles that can greatly affect how survivable they are. I never actually figured out how it worked!
The battles often feel like an old-school Dragon Quest game, with characters defaulting to auto-battle (and automatically using up all of their MP too fast if you don’t stop them) and luck determining if monsters use the attack that will devastate you or the one you can ignore. The Dragon Quest influences are even stronger on the story progression--the plot opens up into a non-linear exploration segment where you can vaguely figure out what to do by talking to every townsperson and also guessing; then when you get a ship it does it a second time. It can be really hard to guess where you're supposed to go next, whether in a dungeon or for the plot; and the very high encounter rate discourages wandering. It's the sort of game that pretty much demands a walkthrough, because it’s actually very linear but doesn’t give you any useful indications of that.
The worst thing about that really high encounter rate, though, is that the dungeon puzzles are actually pretty decent. There’s a new mechanic to pretty much each one, and some of them are really clever…except that it’s nearly impossible to keep track of how to solve them because the damn random encounters happen every four steps. (They clearly learned—in Golden Sun, random encounter rates drop in areas with puzzles. Golden Sun also gives you a big assortment of renewable magic, generally makes battles easier and advancement faster, and gives the characters a few more ways to emote.)
And the plot, hoo boy. It’s generally the standard “defeat the demons and save the kingdom” sort of story also cribbed from Dragon Quest. Around the halfway point, you successfully save your home country from occupation and bring the fight to the invaders (which is good!), and that's when you learn that your father isn't really your father; you're a prophesied hero and a long-lost prince. Oh, and the villains know this and have had three or four good opportunities to kill you by that point, but keep throwing minibosses at you and wandering off instead. (It's like they don't actually want to win!) A big deal is made about a number of character deaths, but no one you spend more than two minutes with actually stays dead. And your characters don’t really do or say anything in the last third of the game; they just follow your silent hero around until the ending sequence.
Oh, and after you class change your dragon buddy grows up and becomes your airship…but the place you have to return to immediately afterwards has nowhere for him to land, so you still have to get back on the boat to get there.
Overall: I’m happy I played this for its piece of video game history, but it’s not a good game. The developers took all the wrong lessons from NES Dragon Quest games and produced something that actively makes itself unfun. Fortunately, they learned their lessons by the time they made Golden Sun.
This was made by Camelot after the did the first two Shining Force games but before they did the Golden Sun series, and it shows—it has a bunch of aspects that feel like either series, including stats and class upgrades that feel like Shining Force, and dungeon designs that are clearly primitive Golden Sun ideas. It doesn’t feel like a PS1 game—it feels like a SNES game with a couple of 3D bits thrown into the battle system because they could (and that was likely because it was one of the first PS1 jrpgs released). The fact that characters emote entirely by wiggling their sprites slightly larger and smaller is odd. It feels like they figured out how to change the size of sprites really early and then used that to save money on animating anything else.
The difficulty is kinda wonky at best and pretty nasty at worst; you get a lot of stretches without inns or chances to save (which is less of an issue on an emulator, but even so) but then fight the same enemies for several dungeons in a row. Enemies with hit-all spells can really mess up your party, but you don’t have the MP to return the favor because random battles are so damn frequent. The low “number inflation” means that even in the endgame a strong hit will only do 50 points of damage…but a midgame boss (when your best strikes do 20) could easily be a sack of 900 HP. And you’re stuck with cursed Samson for the first third of the game, who does reduced damage and misses half of his turns. (In case it wasn’t obvious, I used cheat codes. Lots of cheat codes—I actually experimented quite a big. Being able to turn off random battles alone was probably the reason I finished the game.)
Oh, and I almost forgot: There’s a completely undocumented “timed hits” feature to battles that can greatly affect how survivable they are. I never actually figured out how it worked!
The battles often feel like an old-school Dragon Quest game, with characters defaulting to auto-battle (and automatically using up all of their MP too fast if you don’t stop them) and luck determining if monsters use the attack that will devastate you or the one you can ignore. The Dragon Quest influences are even stronger on the story progression--the plot opens up into a non-linear exploration segment where you can vaguely figure out what to do by talking to every townsperson and also guessing; then when you get a ship it does it a second time. It can be really hard to guess where you're supposed to go next, whether in a dungeon or for the plot; and the very high encounter rate discourages wandering. It's the sort of game that pretty much demands a walkthrough, because it’s actually very linear but doesn’t give you any useful indications of that.
The worst thing about that really high encounter rate, though, is that the dungeon puzzles are actually pretty decent. There’s a new mechanic to pretty much each one, and some of them are really clever…except that it’s nearly impossible to keep track of how to solve them because the damn random encounters happen every four steps. (They clearly learned—in Golden Sun, random encounter rates drop in areas with puzzles. Golden Sun also gives you a big assortment of renewable magic, generally makes battles easier and advancement faster, and gives the characters a few more ways to emote.)
And the plot, hoo boy. It’s generally the standard “defeat the demons and save the kingdom” sort of story also cribbed from Dragon Quest. Around the halfway point, you successfully save your home country from occupation and bring the fight to the invaders (which is good!), and that's when you learn that your father isn't really your father; you're a prophesied hero and a long-lost prince. Oh, and the villains know this and have had three or four good opportunities to kill you by that point, but keep throwing minibosses at you and wandering off instead. (It's like they don't actually want to win!) A big deal is made about a number of character deaths, but no one you spend more than two minutes with actually stays dead. And your characters don’t really do or say anything in the last third of the game; they just follow your silent hero around until the ending sequence.
Oh, and after you class change your dragon buddy grows up and becomes your airship…but the place you have to return to immediately afterwards has nowhere for him to land, so you still have to get back on the boat to get there.
Overall: I’m happy I played this for its piece of video game history, but it’s not a good game. The developers took all the wrong lessons from NES Dragon Quest games and produced something that actively makes itself unfun. Fortunately, they learned their lessons by the time they made Golden Sun.
