Saint Seiya - Ougon Densetsu Kanketsu Hen (Famicom, 1988, TOSE/Bandai)

An interesting hybrid of an action game and a turn based RPG, and also adapting that part of Saint Seiya which I actualy first saw when I was a kid. How can this possibly turn to crap now ?

What ? Bandai ?

Yeah, figures.

But let's start at the begining: the game is based on a Shonen Jump Manga and Toei anime called "Saint Seiya" or "Knights of the Zodiac". It involved a bunch of guys in mystical armour fighting other guys in mystical armour trying to do generaly nasty things to Athena and the world. The first story arc was by far the simplest and was already structured like a video game, with a series of "levels" accesed after defeating the "bosses" of lower situated "levels" to do battle with stronger "bosses", all to save a damsel at the last one. The series even provides a handfull of different protagonists to chose from for the sake of replay value and variety.

A succesfull attack in motion

So how can this possibly suck ? Well the problem lies in the format. Instead of a sidescroller, which you would expect this to be after starting the first level and entering the action section, you get a hybrid action game/and a hybrid action/turn bassed RPG fight mode. The regular action sections are dirt simple, even if there's times when you simply can't avoid hits. While traveling through this area you may notice the "sevensense" bar at the bottom: this fills up slowly for every regular enemy you kill and by larger chunks for the bosses. However the game doesn't like to see you making things too easy for yourself, so just as you've found a nice grind spot and started accumulating some sense points the game literaly drops a meteor on your head. And I don't mean the regular meteors that show up in every stage, I mean the game literaly takes a meteor and fires it at you in the shortest possible trajectory. The bar can be used to replenish the "cosmo" and "life" bars that get depleated with every hit, once you start the boss battle.

The actions sections are still, however, more or less dirt simple. Go forward, shoot the three enemy sprites availible, try to avoid meteors, fail at it, jump over gaps, get shot by archers and then go up to a temple entrance. The only variety is found in special "dimensions" some of the bosses teleport you to.

The Level Map

At the end of an action section you come across a boss. And here's where the "fun" begins. You have several options, from attacking, talking, observing your status and talking/summoning one of the other characters. Depending on the character you can have more then one attack to use. Using the attack effectively seems to be somewhat based on pressing the apropriate directional buttons at the time you cast it, but it's realy hard to tell for sure. After an attack your enemy might say something and....he does an attack that always hurts you. You want to know why ?

Well it turns out you're supposed to physicaly dodge the attack by pressing the correct directional button just before the attack begins. If you manage to dodge sucessfully but in the wrong direction your character will stay out of reach for a while....and will then return to the centre of the screen when 2/3rds of the attack are over, yet takes the exact same dammage if he hadn't done anything.

The action section. Pretty much all of them.

And worst of all, the dodging is like a quick time event. An incredibly quick quick time event with no button indicating when you're actualy supposed to dodge. You're just supposed to know you can dodge just slightly before the bad guy's text stops scrolling....if you didn't press it before. If you did your character does nothing even if you press it at the correct moment later. This means that dodging attacks effectively is related to predetermining when the enemy will stop talking (and they sometimes simply attack you without speaking) and then doing it slightly beforehand.

Worse, the RPG element seems to mostly take the worst elements from the genre and glueing them ontop of each other like some bizarre modern art piece. Basicly the game devotes itself to slavishly adapt the plot of the original series, to the point where it becomes detrimental for a sidescroling fighting RPG hybrid with a free range of selectable characters. That means that if someone lost in a fight in the series, you have to first go into the fight as them, lose and best case scenario have to fight with a new character that pops up out of nowhere, or worse you have to replay the level as a different character, once having to do so four consecutive times. Other times the game will randomly not make it possible to hurt the enemy (although they still can, and will, hurt you) until you talk to the opponent....twice. There's a gimmick like this for virtualy all of the later half of the game.

Having a good ol' chat with the boss.

However, when you don't know what to do and don't follow the invisible road map, you can find yourself in a rather tight spot. Like the last boss. You succesfully deplete all of his life and cosmo and he still stands there, attacking you. You're actualy meant to lose so another character can get brought back and learn a random move to finish him off. However you probably won't know this at the time and worst, at this point the guy only does 3 points of dammage per round. Out of about 799 Life points you can have if you don't screw up. So this will take awhile. And you'll probably swear quite alot.

In the end, Saint Seiya - Ougon Densetsu Kanketsu Hen is a rather unplayable mess that tries so hard to faithfully adapt the source material that it becomes a large stumbling block.

Fire Bam (Famicom Disk System, 1988, Hal Laboratory)

Now this is an odd one. An action RPG released on the old disk system that not too many people have heard of. Some people get turned away by it's garish colours and it's somewhat cryptic nature, but there is definitely a solid product here, and one holding much more substance then one would believe.

The final Boss knows how to colour coordinate.

The game stars Bam who has to regain the Magic Sword, defeat the clan of the "evil Domes" and "open up" the world. This later term has to do with an interesting twist in the game mechanic. You have one area that serves as a hub (forest) and you're home town where you can go save your game and regain energy, by visiting.....

They seem to turn human later on. Don't
ask me how they stay floating in the air for so long.

These things. When you start there doesn't appear to be anything else besides your house in this area. You then leave for the woods, which is also sort of a hub, but with enemies. These range from weird pink bouncing things to humanoid giraffs with giant scissors.


Going around here you discover two things. 1. killing enemies makes them drop fire, which is added to your counter and is actualy used as currency (one best not try to think about that too much) and 2. your starting sword is well and truly useless. It has a reach of exactly 0.3 inches and is just as usefull. The sword is your main means of attack (you do get one later with actual range) because although you do acquire ranged weapons later on, these tend to become useless on some enemies later on.

Your main method of transportation: a living elevator.
One wonders how the big red guy got in here when this
is the only way in.

Going around you find various shop doors where giant....things sell you various items for very high prices, and then another type of door.

Which has no deeper meaning at all.

                                                                        Entering this will either lead to an action sequence or dungeon. The action sequences are rather a pain in the behind (especialy if you don't have the better sword yet) due to how the enemies come at you from above, and how colecting extra health or invincibility is made difficult by both how fast it moves, it dissapearing quickly and the fact that should it land behind you you can never get at it before it dissapears. Then at the end you fight a boss, and there are actualy 7 boss types, although they all do get repeated at least once. And after these boss fights a cinematic occurs. Sort of hard to comprehend when you're going into it blind, but it actualy means the world is expanding - literaly, new areas get uncovered not only in the woods but in your town as well, resulting in the appearance of shops where you can buy some much needed gear.

A giraffe with scissors.
Just.....a giraffe with scissors.

After going through a series of these sequences, you'll be left with the task of clearing out dungeons. They are entered through the exact same doors, but these are, obviously, a lot less straight forward. There are dozens of blind paths, elevators going in multiple directions, keys you need to pick up and every place looks pretty much the same. Defeating the boss will result in the same expansion of the game world, with one exception. Once you actualy have to face the final boss, however you need to get yourself killed here because you don't have the magic sword yet (annoyingly this still takes away a life, even if unavoidable).

Getting thrown about in the Action Sequence

Also speaking of the bosses, one of the action sequence bosses gets an....upgrade here.

Does one even have to say anything to this ?

Clearing all the dungeons makes the red lizard thing be replaced by a woman who gives you the Magic sword with which you finaly put that satanic gremlin in his place.

Fire Bam is an interesting game, but the dungeons are mazes that can get ridiculously extensive and annoying to complete without a walkthrough. Interestingly enough this was one of the many games released by Hal Laboratory, makers of Kirby. The game's director and character designer, amongst other things, was Pikio Midorikawa, who'se only other credit was Eggerland: Meikyū no Fukkatsu.