Chaos Seed: Feng Shui Kairouki (1996)

Chaos Seed, for SNES

Rating: 7.5/10: Good

Worth trying out if you like both construction/management and action rpg

Chaos Seed is an unusual hybrid of genres that can be best summed up as a mix of Ys and Dungeon Keeper. The game is separated into a number of scenarios that are independent from each other, other than the story that connects them. Each scenario has you start off from scratch at level 1 and they usually have unique gimmicks and branching paths leading to multiple endings.

Core gameplay centers around building, navigating and defending your dungeon. The heart of the dungeon is the dragon furnace, where you deposit 1 of 2 resources to advance the scenario and get points (a resource not score) for building rooms. The game is experienced from a top down perspective above your character, much like Ys and the A Link to the Past. Press and hold on a wall to bring up the build interface to make a new room or corridor. Thankfully the game is paused during this because the controls for building are a little awkward. Medium sized rooms are the cheapest to make, while going under or above that size costs more. Larger rooms are able to harvest more resource nodes and all rooms need both yellow and green resources (red is just for the item room). Yellow (energy) is used to power rooms, build and is needed to put in the dragon furnace, while green (sentan) is used to upgrade rooms, hire and revive minions, and to buy traps and items. There is a complicated system of specialist resource rooms (your only reliable source for personal use) and transport minions to bring resources to other rooms that do not produce enough naturally. In order to get resources for your personal use you must press and hold on the center of a resource generator room and run around to pick up the loot that spawns around it before it despawns in like 3 seconds. This process is a tedious pain in the ass.

On top of all this is the feng shui system, which has a wheel of the 5 Chinese elements. Rooms get bonuses or penalties from other rooms that are directly linked by corridors; each element has 1 good relation and 1 bad, while all other relations give a small bonus. When making a new room the element symbol appears in the background without the color coding found everywhere else in the game. I found it very difficult to understand these symbols because they are based on Asian languages rather than universal symbols. The game is played in real time but has discrete turns that end after a timer counts down; only 1 early scenario has an actual turn limit though. When a turn ends you are taken to an overview screen and can see all details (except the location of enemy portals). This screen is the only place where you can upgrade (or downgrade) rooms, assign minions to groups, assign patrol routes for minions and place traps. When the next turn begins you pick up where you left off last turn.

Building new rooms comes with a little mini game kind of reminiscent of Harvest Moon as you smash rocks to clear the ground, while sometimes having to dodge cave ins and kill critters. The main threat comes from the town above as soldiers, monks, ninja, samurai and heroes attack the dungeon, believing you to be evil. Portals randomly spawn in any of your rooms (except stair rooms) and periodically pump out enemies until they are destroyed or the turn ends. These enemies will try to kill you (which is game over) and your minions, steal resources and destroy rooms. They are a huge pain in the ass to deal with, especially as your dungeon gets larger. It can be difficult to personally reach them before they cause a lot of damage and other methods of dealing with them are not really reliable. They can simply rush through attack rooms if nothing keeps them fighting there and it is hard to level up your minions. The closest thing to a training room is upgrading the summoning room to have new recruits at a higher level, but this requires a significant investment of resources. Personally power leveling them does not work well because if they survive the battle, which is not likely if they are under leveled, the xp they gain is based on your level compared to the enemies. Killed minions can be revived at a small sentan cost but repairing rooms is another pain in the ass. Only a few minion types can repair rooms and that room must be on their patrol route; they will not repair if they are in the protagonist's group! On top of this damaged rooms lose upgrades and tend to be looted. The basic ability that every room starts with can be lost, rendering the room useless until enough sentan is built up to build it back, and there is no way to remove rooms or corridors, or change rooms into different types. Despite the variety of rooms and upgrades, I found it better to keep the dungeon small and simple whenever possible; half the room types are not really needed and a smaller dungeon is easier to defend.

Combat is similar to other top down action RPGs, such as Ys. 1 button does your basic attack (which has very poor range), 1 fixes you in place, 1 does a short dash and 1 opens the menu to access spells, items, map etc. The tutorial at the beginning tells of other moves that can be performed by pressing combinations of buttons, though the only one I bothered to use was the medium attack, which has much better range, hits a small area and has invincibility frames. In fact I found combat to be mostly spamming that medium attack over and over. It does not help that there is no reference guide for how to perform the moves and I forgot how to do strong attacks. Combat ends up being a mess of characters being knocked around absurdly and losing the protagonist under the sheer amount of stuff on screen. Between the enemies, your minions (which is not just limited to the ones in your group), attack effects, dropped loot and spells going off, there were many times where it took me several seconds to find the protagonist, especially after being knocked around. There is also no color coding for teams; the protagonist is mostly blue and white with brown hair. Guess how many enemies use the same colors. Yeah, I don't fancy playing Where's Waldo in the middle of combat. Boss and mini boss fights are quite difficult and resemble bosses from Ys, with a set of specific moves used more or less randomly and requiring bullet hell style dodging.

The story was not at all what I expected. Rather than a story about traveling the world and building different caves, it goes into parallel universes and time travel. Trying too hard to be like Chrono Trigger? It makes the game come off as cheaply made because you visit the same few areas and meet the same several characters over and over. The overall plot is also confusing and a paradox, but the dialogue is good. Other than building your dungeon you are also able to explore dungeons below your own; some are just bonus areas while others are plot important. Sometimes you get to go into town and there are a couple entire scenarios that play like visual novels without building and combat. The biggest flaw of the game though is just how long it takes and the lack of balance caused by this. You can only transfer 1000 energy to the dragon furnace each turn; that means the last level takes at least 65 turns to complete. The beginning of each scenario is interesting as you design and build your dungeon, but after that you just hunker down and do the same things over and over then wait for the turn timer to count down. This caused the game to drag on for far too long and made me not want to replay any scenarios for other endings. If only there was a way to increase the energy limit to expedite the process, maybe then there would be a point to building a large dungeon with all kinds of rooms. Honestly, I would rather just play Dungeon Keeper or Ys again, despite how good this game actually is.

Pro

• Good dialogue, characters, setting etc
• Save file shows % completion and number of completions for each scenario (but not how many different endings each has and which ones you did)
• Interesting blend of gameplay from different genres
• Post game content, including visual novel chapters and a challenge dungeon mode

Con

• Lack of variation in settings and characters, due to parallel universe thing
• Front loaded tutorial and no reference for controls; some combat moves require multiple button presses
• Steep learning curve for entire game and all its systems
• Combat is a mess, with too much on screen and too much knockback
• Basic attack sucks due to terrible range; most enemies can outrange you in melee
• Magic is unbalanced with many spells being complete garbage and a select couple being overpowered
• Enemies can attack from almost anywhere, making defense a mess; attack rooms, traps and groups of minions are thus less useful than they could be. More and larger rooms are more difficult to defend
• Strict limit on how fast you can win, which makes the game drag on for too long and limits the benefit of having a larger dungeon using all the room types
• Building rooms is awkward because you first pick the size and then the position
• Harvesting resources and setting up transport chains is tedious
• Equipping is hidden under the team menu instead of item menu
• 1st boss cannot be defeated on 1st time doing that scenario
• Dash and interact use the same button, which leads to a lot of accidental dashing when you want to talk or loot
• Treasure chests dropped by enemies vanish if you leave the room or corridor
• Combat takes place in only 1 room or corridor. Fighting in a tiny narrow corridor makes the combat even worse and it is possible to completely miss enemies if you both cross a room-corridor threshold at the same time
• UI obstructs play area
• Minions are difficult to level up unless they are around your level and in your group
• The knight enemy is OP compared to others while others are oddly weak. A level 16 or so knight is more dangerous than a level 30 samurai or ninja
• Some scenarios have obscure requirements for winning and unlocking the next that you pretty much have to fail and replay. Some scenarios can be temporarily disabled
• Detection room does not seem to actually do what it says, or the range is so low that it is pointless
• Repairing damaged rooms is more awkward than it needs to be since you cannot use the hero’s group for it

Beat the game with about 45% completion. I beat most scenarios once and only 2 a 2nd time. I screwed up 1 of the early scenarios and did not get the ending you need to unlock the next set. I repeated the 1st scenario to get an alternate ending and then did the other properly. I started using a walkthrough to make sure I did not screw up again because this game is too tedious to repeat levels.

It took until the final building scenario to become fully proficient with the game. My strategy was to build a huge production room on several energy nodes and a huge refinery on a mix of energy and sentan nodes. Let the refinery work and upgrade it to level 2 as long as it has enough energy, which is why the refinery needs a few energy nodes. I did not want to fool around with transporting energy between rooms with minions. Then I built 3 summoning rooms to unlock 4 groups, a dig room to get some loot and another smaller refinery and production rooms. Use that refinery to get my own sentan while a group of 4 dragons move sentan to the primary summoning and production rooms. Upgrade that summon room to get some decent minions. With the hero I used a bird and horse. I made another group with a cat and 2 snakes and set them to patrol between the main production and refinery; they ended up being decently powerful and could often defeat enemies without my help. They even beat 1 mini boss for me. Last team was a single bird set to patrol everything for repairs. I did not find much use for detection, transfer, storage and attack rooms and found the game more bearable with a small dungeon that was easier to defend. I actually maxed out the main production room to the point where both it and I reached max capacity. The most important thing was that room was never destroyed because I camped there and every group had that room on their patrol route. I focused on destroying portals and personality defeating most enemies. I pretty much ignored feng shui though I was aware how it worked. I did build a few extra corridors linking rooms to improve the feng shui, but the strategic aspects of funneling where enemies can go was more important to me.

I did not use this optimal strategy on earlier levels because I had not learned it. Thus some of the scenarios were a huge pain in the ass. I did properly beat the level where you have to beat the boss using traps, attack rooms and minions only. I wasted my time building a huge linear dungeon with lots of attack rooms and strategically placed teleport rooms so I did not have to walk the whole thing. The bosses skipped 90% of it and I barely scraped by with a single mid level attack room, traps and 2 groups of minions. I never tried out the top tier minions, most spells and most room upgrades.

I mostly spammed the medium attack in battle, favored attack boosting equipment and abused the pulse bullet spell, which the walkthrough said was OP. I never bothered with more complicated moves. Good game overall despite having problems with tediousness and balance.