Status Chovus Apr 28, 2023
Beat. I had no idea what to expect going into this game and was very pleasantly surprised. It was like the forerunner to the great SNES action RPGs; Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia, and Terranigma. Again I found the default speed on my emulator too fast to the point where I more often ran into enemies than properly hit them. …
Beat. I had no idea what to expect going into this game and was very pleasantly surprised. It was like the forerunner to the great SNES action RPGs; Soul Blazer, Illusion of Gaia, and Terranigma. Again I found the default speed on my emulator too fast to the point where I more often ran into enemies than properly hit them. I wonder if my emulator runs faster than the original NES. I used 30 frames per second slow motion mode for most of the combat, and found it quite manageable. The game did suffer significant slowdown when there was a lot on the screen. I found regular sword attacks good enough for most enemies. If they had projectiles I flanked them with each hit. It was not until the human enemies with swords that I exclusively used ranged attacks, because their weapons were just as long as mine. I also found it useful to charge up ranged attacks against annoying flying enemies, and it was not very often that I bothered to go all the way to the mp costing magic attacks.
In the beginning I skipped buying the basic armor and shield, instead saving up for tier 2 stuff. Later on I bought platinum and ceramic armor, and the mirror and Sacred shields. Money was no trouble to get and I had over 10k at the end, with nothing to spend it on. I reached max level near the end of the game by grinding those robot enemies that could only be hurt by the starter sword. It was unnecessary because I ended up having to kill a lot of enemies without any more levels to gain. Too bad there were not more levels to go up to give the game more optional content. I felt that most of the game had a very good level of challenge, with good variety of enemies and danger. Despite using save states, I had to use the healing magic regularly. I loved the design of simply holding down the cast button to convert mp into hp until I stopped pressing. The bosses were fun and well designed, though the final 3 were too easy. They could have had way more health and more dangerous attacks. I messed up by going to the 2nd last boss before the 3rd last and spent 30 minutes trying to kill him. I thought there was no way he had that much hp. Turned out the 3rd last guy lead to an item that was needed to make the 2nd last guy vulnerable. Maybe the game should not have let me go so far wrong, but I could have teleported out of the unwinnable fight. The final 2 bosses could only be harmed at specific times and had intricate bullet hell style attacks to dodge, but they just died too quickly once I figured out what to do.
I was very impressed at how they crammed so much game into so few buttons. It felt ahead of its time and probably would have been better suited to the SNES controller. Start was to access a stats screen, which was not that useful. Select accessed the inventory and was incredibly important for switching weapons, spells and gear, and saving was accessed by pressing start here. It was a little annoying for enemies to be immune to 1, 2 or even 3 swords, forcing me to use the inventory mid combat, but it was good that every sword was needed for the entire game. The best accessory was the warrior ring for removing the charge up time on the weakest ranged attack, turning the game into more of a shooter. I used that for most of the end game and the 3rd last boss. The power ring made magic stronger, but I only used it for the 2nd last boss who was immune to all other damage. For the rest of the game (including the final boss) I used the iron necklace to reduce damage. Before I had that I used the shield ring, but armor seemed to be way more important than the shield. The spells were both useful and creative. I mostly used the heal and status cure. Barrier was good during boss fights because a couple seconds of properly timed barrier to avoid damage cost less mana and time than healing the damage. Fly was fun to bypass some annoying parts of the game, and shape change was really cool even though it had no combat application. So there was 1 button to attack and use item (meaning I had to make sure no usable item was equipped when I wanted to attack) and the other was for magic and the jump boots. While it did take a bit to get used to the double functions, it was very efficient use of the limited buttons.
The biggest flaw was the lack of in game maps. Some of the areas were quite large with a lot of similar looking screens, and there were Metroidvania elements of backtracking to previous areas to use a new item or spell to get past an obstacle. It made me resort to reading a walkthrough as I played (usually after completing an area), and especially using maps for the end game. It was unnecessary to have the magic orbs as a separate equipment slot that had to be changed when it could have automatically activated when switching swords. Other than that I did not like how the different swords, armor and shields all looked the same on the character. This was the type of game where those minor graphical changes would have added a lot to the game. Different colors for each sword, and more armor graphics with each better suit rather than the lame cloth he looks to wear for the whole game. This was an amazing game for the time and I would have loved more content and sequels that made more elaborate use of the item and magic mechanics.
9.0/10
