Wibarm (MS DOS, 1989, Arsys Software)

Wibarm is a computer game from the late 80's which origiated on Japanese home computers like the Sharp X1 and the FM 7. It took three years for it to be ported to DOS, the result of which is a game that looks vastly different, however the English version retains the Anime style cutscenes (what few there are) and doesn't thankfully replace them with something more "appealing" towards western tastes like what happened with box art in the 80's. Final Zone II on the Turbo Grafx 16 CD is a perfect example of how western game publishers assumed their customers were mentally retarded monkeys who would be perfectly willing to buy a game with a cover so awful it could be considered an act of war.

Even the cover seems to actually look somewhat like your in game character, though the colors are a bit off.

Wibarm is a Mecha RPG, where you fly around in your Robot suit, and look for enemy encounters. On the overworld this is a singular enemy that is revealed to be multiple enemies when it comes in contact with your sprite and inside buildings it's a magic eye picture that blocks your way. Your robot can change forms, from a standard humanoid form to a plane and then to a ground vehicle type thing, which doesn't really seem to have much use beyond getting through gaps you can't walk or fly through.

You get an overworld to explore, where you fight enemy encounters and look for entrances to buildings. These are where most of the game takes place, as you walk around in a quasi first person view showing your robot from the back. It is inside buildings where you fight most monsters, find energy replenishment and repair item. This is important because your energy goes down every time you attack as well as each time you get hit and you have a seperate dammage meter. If you run out of energy you can still walk around and try to get back to a level base to refuel. But if your dammage meter fills up you die. Worse, if you pass a certain threshold of dammage, your map stops working so you need to use repair systems to make sure that doesn't happen. You also need to find items to improve your weapons and shields.

The weapons consist of a beam which targets a specific monster, a rifle which you have to attempt to aim and a wave attack which attacks everything at once. Now the problem is that you have a limited amount of energy, and you are pretty much constantly picking up upgrades to increase the amount you have, however enemies will simply not take any dammage from any of your weapons until you hit a certain threshold of "ability" points, which you get a certain amount of after most fights.

The biggest issue with the game is that you can't really tell when you will be able to hurt them, as there are no levels or leveling up. You will have to spend time going back and forth from one building to another, popping outside to try and fight stuff in the overworld every now and then, looking for which enemies you can actually dammage, and you'll have to keep at it long enough so that you will become able to kill the enemies you couldn't even scratch before. This gets a bit problematic when levels began to rely increasingly on having hidden walls around. They aren't marked out in any way, and even when you find them, they still show up as just regular walls on the map so you have to remember where they are.

And then you get to the Maze level on the third stage.

Imagine getting through this without a map

It wouldn't even be so bad if the buildings didn't infinitely loop vertically and horizontally, so you can't really map out where you've been. And then it includes maps for other buildings on the same level inside areas of the maze. You can't get to these areas from the maze and they have no relation to stuff going on inside it, however they make it virtually impossible to tell where you've been, as there are no real landmarks inside buildings to help you tell where you are.

There are only four overworlds, however it will take you quite a while to beat. In order to be able to hurt the final enemy blocking the computer you need to get to you need to have almost 27 000 ability points, and most enemies give 100 and less. And unless you defeat pretty much all the enemies in all the overworlds and in all the buildings, you won't have enough. It's a competently made game but the fact that you sometimes just have to hope to run across an invisible wall or ram into every wall in the level sometimes makes progress a thing of luck or extreme tedium.