#64: Thunder Spirits

Thunder... Thunder... THUNDER SPIRITS!

I had never heard of this game so I didn't know what genre to expect, until I saw the title screen. This is going to be a side scrolling shooter. Or maybe a top scrolling shooter. Seika is the company that has brought us Drakkhen and Lagoon which were definitely on the sketchy side of the RPG genre... How would Thunder Spirits compare to other shooters?

PEW PEW!

The first thing I try in a new game is to hit all the buttons on the face of the controller. Three of them did nothing (no bombs?) and one of them shot my guns. Very slowly if I held it down, or I could really mash the button to get a semi reasonable stream of bullets. Maybe it's just me getting old, but I don't like having to constantly jam the button that much to accomplish something. Give me autofire! Or a limited number of bullets so mashing is detrimental. Don't make the only way to reasonably play your game be to mash one and only one button!

TROGDOR!

I got some powerups along the way. Some of them seemed to do something, others did not. Then I noticed there were more icons at the bottom of the screen. Could I hit select to change them? Nope. But it turned out L and R both cycled through the options at the bottom. R would change my currently equipped weapon. L would change my current ship speed. Changing speed sounds good, because it means I could go slow through an intricate maze of bullets and fast to avoid sharply turning enemies but because you could only toggle in one direction and there were 4 speeds it didn't seem plausible to change on the fly. So I just set it to as fast as possible and hoped I wouldn't careen into things. I did. Changing weapons was interesting in that the powerups would only buff some weapons and death would only level down the currently equipped powerup.

The game had limited lives, and limited continues, but if you continued you got to keep going right from where you died. So it was more like slightly less limited lives. I still managed to lose them all without beating the first level. I may have made it to the dragon boss but he had a fire breath attack that seemed to be unavoidable. Once I ran out of continues I had no desire to restart from the beginning. Especially with my right arm going numb from all the button mashing.

Rating: D-

#28: Lagoon

Nice waterfall I guess?

I recognized the name Lagoon but I couldn't really remember why. I was thinking it was an action-adventure game where you saved townspeople by opening chests but that would be game 72 on the list, Soul Blazer. I'm sure I rented Lagoon as a kid but I guess it really didn't stick with me. It turns out Lagoon actually is an action-adventure game, but not a memorable one. The game started with me forced to wander around town trying to find a plot hook. The town was full of buildings with doors. Some doors I could open. Others I couldn't. There was no way to tell which was which which was pretty frustrating. Ultimately by visiting, in order, mayor's house, church, cave entrance, church, mayor's house, church, weapon shop I was finally able to get started.

Huzzah!

I opened this treasure chest and it locked up the game and played a huge, unskippable fanfare. Doo da dooooooo! You found 10 gold. The mayor gave me 300 gold to start my adventure which was enough money to buy every single thing in the store. 10 gold is not interesting. It certainly didn't deserve a fanfare.

ARGH! GO UP! AND AROUND!

I eventually made it to the end of the stupid cave and found the dude I was sent in to rescue. He was injured and took a healing potion I found in a chest to similar huge fanfare. I gather he wasn't going to move until I gave him one, so it's a good thing I found that chest first... Otherwise I would have had to backtrack the stupid cave, then come back here. Once the guy started moving it turned into an escort quest. I had to go back through the whole cave with this idiot following me. Idiot-boy moved very slowly (I guess for flavour because he was injured?) and would try to take the shortest path to me. Even if that path included a little impassable crack. Then he'd just stand there looking stupid until I walked back up to him and showed him the right way to go.

WHY WON'T YOU DIE?!?

I got frustrated with the escort quest so I tried to get my friend killed. Nope. The enemies would just walk right through him without doing any damage to him at all. He would appear to be invincible. Why did he need my help if he can't take any damage? Just walk home on your own, loser. So I took off to the exit without him... But then it wouldn't let me go into doors unless he was beside me, so even if I cleared a straight line path to the door I then had to wait for him to catch up before proceeding.

Slow escort quest coupled with wonky controls coupled with a pretty bad combat system meant I just walked away from the game rather than finish the escort quest. I don't remember getting this bitter at the game as a kid so it's quite possible that World of Warcraft managed to jade my perception of escort quests. 

The combat system was annoying in that my sword was only a couple pixels long and I'd only hit the enemy if I managed to line it up mid-swing with an enemy. My health bar regenerated and theirs didn't so I ended up just charging into every enemy and mashed the attack button until they died. I'd be full by the time I got to the next enemy so I didn't care how much damage I took. This is bad game design, I think. I want combat to be interesting and then to have consequences for failure. Oh well.

Also frustrating... I was going up levels but I only found out by checking the status screen. No dings. No messages. Nothing. Opening a chest with 10 gold in it was worth a fanfare and a pause. Leveling up? Nothing at all. That's the wrong way to design a game. People like to level up. Tell them when they did!

That said, if I didn't have a lot of action-adventure experience this probably wouldn't have been so bad. And it was the first such game on the system. Well, it came out in the same month as Super Castlevania IV... Lagoon should probably be happy it's earlier in the alphabet since I suspect it would get a worse rating in the other order...

Rating: C

#7: Drakkhen

Drakkhen was the first RPG put out in North America for the SNES and it has some very interesting design decisions. You have a party of 4 characters and you only control one of them in combat. The other three wander around the screen and try to swing at the enemy. I made a wizard but he didn't seem to have any useful spells and mostly just tried to beat down with his staff.

Bung's clothes broke... Nice undies!

You start off by randomly generating four characters. You have to make a fighter, a scout, a priest, and a wizard. You get three rolls for your stats. I think I saw only a single 18 but I had one person roll four 17s. Of course, I had no idea what the stats did or which stats a given class really wanted but I made my best of it.

Physique = Fortitude = Vitality = Constitution?

The basic storyline is there were dragons and they were awesome. They disappeared for some reason and left behind a half-dragon race called the Drakkhen which have been suppressing humanity. There are 8 Drakkhen royalty (a male and a female of each element) and you need to wander around the world dealing with those 8 Drakkhen in an attempt to save humanity.

The fate of humanity is in Bung's capable hands!

The overworld map is an interesting pseudo-3D system. You have a map with compass that shows you where all the castles and stuff are. I remember the game having an interesting enough story and 12 year old me was more than capable of figuring out where to go next. I remember it being hard but fair...

RIP

Having now played a wide variety of RPGs I can say Drakkhen has some very serious flaws. Not being able to control your party is frustrating. The sound effects are actually terrible. Experience doesn't seem to be split between members of your party so the guy I was controlling (and was therefore getting in range to attack fastest) kept getting all the kills. He hit level 3 and everyone else was still level 1. Gear breaks after taking a few hits and naked people seemed to be guaranteed to die in one hit.

I played a bit, saved, and thought I'd go back to it another day. I have since decided I really have no desire to keep playing. I did rent it several times as a kid and distinctly remember beating it at some point so it's not unplayable trash or anything like that. It's just got a lot of warts that I don't want to deal with for the hours it would take to really make progress.

Rating: C