Murder on the Eurasia Express（ユーラシアエクスプレス殺人事件）

You may have noticed there are a lot of these interactive movie games on this blog lately. As usual, I need to make room to further drown myself in the delirious pleasure of shameless consumerism (aka hoarding). Err, excuse me, I mean, "engage in my personally enriching hobby of video game collecting".

What's the point of buying more games when you have a giant pile?
When are you going to have time to actually play all those games?
Don't you think there's better things to spend your money on?  ▼

Murder on the Eurasia Express beats the record for being the shortest of the bunch so far, clocking in at only about 2 to 3 hours. Unlike the anime games I've been playing recently, this is FMV with OMG, real people!!

Wow, the hair rendering looks so realistic!

Even though there were a lot of cheesy FMV games with the advent of the CD-ROM, I still enjoyed them back in the day. Just being able to hear "real" music instead of sound chips and midi was mind blowing at the time. One game I particularly enjoyed as a kid was Burn Cycle (rating board, what's that?). They should make a sequel with the new body, what with all these pronoun switching these days (if you played, you know what I mean).

This game was unfortunately not as good as Burn Cycle unless you dig the "train full of high school Japanese girls" setting. Unfortunately, I didn't recognize most of the cast but I think they're pretty famous? I did recognize Fukuda Kyoko and oh boy that was a quick flashback to the past. Since this game came out in 1998 and she was born in 1982, she actually should have been going to high school at the time, if my gamer math is correct. Then again, why the hell would you want to go to school when you can act in a mediocre 6,800 yen PS1 FMV murder mystery game?

Oh crap, my book report is due tomorrow!

Yeah, 6,800 yen for a 3 hour game. Ouch. Of course it's way cheaper now but can you imagine if someone were to try to sell a shitty 2-3 hour game for $60 today??

Rating Pending? I'll rate it right now: diarrhea

They would rave about how amazing the shit game is of course! Because everything is backwards now! Fortunately, this game is at least entertaining... somewhat. You can only go to a few carriages and the lounge and you're just basically going from room to room asking questions. There's a time limit too, which is annoying.

Arbitrary time limits that make you restart the game? We love those!!

For some weird reason, you can look at every person's chest and knees and no worries, you can stare at the crotch of the guys too if that's your thing. And no, there is absolutely no point of looking down in terms of beating the game.

Teacher's knees here because looking at high school girls' knees is sick.

Turns out that I've been mentally scarred by all the moe social media outrage vis-à-vis chichi bukuro blood drives, wrinkled/clear skirt, etc. that I forget what regular Japanese girls look like. Oh yeah, I totally forgot that most Japanese girls are flat as a board!

Turns out clothing is pretty effective at covering body parts... IRL

Score: 2 There's an important clue on one of the girl's chest! If you inspect each one carefully, you'll discover that you're a pervert! out of 5 (2.5 hours to beat)

Anyways, you go from room to room, asking questions and uncovering more questions to ask. Swap the disc, repeat, and finally at the end of disc 4, you have to actually do some thinking to present the correct evidence to identify the killer.

It's just like Murder on the Orient Express but with Japanese girls and the mystery not even remotely as interesting and there you have Murder on the Eurasia Express in a nutshell. However, I still gave it a score of 2 as barely worth checking out because I felt the human drama was interesting enough to warrant a couple hours of your time.

One of the girls gives you (the camera) a kiss at the end and your secretary is different depending on how fast you beat the game, etc but no way I'm going to replay just to see those minor differences.

At least the manual is really nice. Took a quick pic before purging.

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely

Wingman 2: Kitakura no Fukkatsu（ウイングマン ２ -キータクラーの復活-）

About a year and a half after the release of Wingman, comes the sequel from Enix: Wingman 2 and Kitakura comes back in this one. Now, I only read the first few chapters of Wingman to get a sense of the overall setting so I had no idea that Kitakura had gone anywhere. I'm not sure of the story timeline but I guess Kitakura was presumed dead and it seems kind of silly to announce his revival right in the fucking subtitle but there ya go. (Spoiler alert?)

Now all I do is play PC88 games while listening to Plastic Love (tnx YT) 

So, according to random Japanese blogger, the first Wingman sold pretty well (at least for those times) though nowhere near the level of Xanadu, which I don't get cause fuck that game. Anyways, it sold well enough I guess for Enix to go for round 2 and it's what you would expect pretty much any sequel to be: the same shit as the last game but more of it and better. Also, now complete with the obligatory Enix fan service (only one as usual for um... "marketing").

Queue the obligatory Enix fan service click bait

In the gameplay department, they made the user interface a little bit easier to use by allowing you to point at shit to either go somewhere or look at something. Dayum, what is this? Apple II?

Whoa, a cursor? WTF is this newb shit?

You still have to type a bunch of random shit you would probably never guess without a guide but thank god I discovered this little tool that let me bypass the old-school kana input. Unfortunately, there were some bugs using the tool with small kana such as when trying to type "buy juice" so I did have to pull up a pic of the PC88 keyboard at times, but overall WAY easier this time around.

Well well well, looks like we got ourselves a Casanova here.

I'm going to confess to totally cheating again this time around. While the cursor does make things a bit easier than the first game, there's a bunch of random guesswork like having to say "cute" to get an item (again). They have some traps too such as making you go out of your way to pick up some medicine that is never used. When Miku is unconscious, forget about the medicine, you're supposed to type "do kiss" for some reason. Maybe it's a reference to the manga, I dunno but fuck it, guide time. The guide also helped when the game failed to progress as there's a bug that may require you to save and reload (emu save state doesn't count duh).

Kissing without consent is rape! #metoo

Once you cheat, it's a pretty short game as usual but there's a lot more PC88 art to enjoy in this sequel. Although I have to say that even though there is more art, not all of the art looks well... proportional. I'm no artist so I'm not gonna gripe about it but could it be that the Zarth artist was feeling a little time crunch? Who knows? Maybe somebody can kickstart a book about it.

Is this camera angle necessary? I demand a high-tech cape!

One thing to note is that the ending of this game matches the ending of the manga so you might want to avoid if you plan on reading the manga (yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of you out there). Given that it seems the story is pretty much concluded in the manga and this game, I'm curious to see where they take things in the next game: Wingman Special.

Score: 2 disappointed "tweet #metoo" command didn't work out of 5

Overall, a pretty solid ADV sequel at least for those times but there's a lot more competition in 1986 than there was in 1984. The little mini game was a nice distraction though and pretty decent for what it's worth.

This mini game is better than in the previous game but no Contini Punch

The music was also pretty darn good at least in terms of PC88 levels. I should know cause all I listen to nowadays is PC88 music and city pop cause that's what Youtube tells me to listen to.

Coming up next: Plastic Love daft punk nightcore remix 2

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely

J•E•S•U•S

JESUS was on my list of games to check out as a GOTY contender for 1987. Like probably countless other suckers back in the day, I was much impressed by the amazing PC88 (MSX2, etc.) art. I bet in my fantasy life growing up as a Japanese gamer, I would have picked this up in a flash just based on the back cover art alone. You see, back in the old days, the cover was all we had to go on to decide what to buy (or in my case rent). Thank goodness we have the likes of Shitaku and IGN today to save us from such folly. (Must... contain... the laughter...!!)

SOLD!

While the kids were busy playing DQII (barf) on the kiddie FC from Enix, the adults were probably plunking down wads of cash to buy their other lineup. And Enix quickly delivers within the first hour or so of gameplay with some nice fan service that of course makes up the bulk of Google image search for this game today. While I didn't play the later FC port, I have to wonder if it has the same content.

There, happy? Now, this is just like every other blog post on this game...

However, this is not your typical PC88 hentai game. It's Enix after all and that's about the only real fan service you'll see for the rest of the game. Oh well, at least I was soon impressed by a very familiar type of puzzle to those who have played 999 or some other similar game. So far, this game was looking to be a very strong contender for GOTY.

I'm not a PC88 expert (yet) but this is the first puzzle I've seen so far on it

Unfortunately, this just sets some inflated hype as if you might be playing some super early predecessor to a ADV/Puzzle hybrid game like 999. Alas, this is the first and only puzzle (detecting a pattern here...) and the rest of the game is a very standard affair for ADV PC88 games of this era. Yes, I'm talking about randomly trying out menu option after menu option. On top of that, to make it extra annoying, you have to walk around the halls, which while cool looking, just makes things more cumbersome.

Walk? Do I look like some hipster health nut?

Fortunately, it's not a command line interface, so no painful kana typing and you can control everything conveniently from the numeric keypad. So it's a fairly easy game to play but I wouldn't go as far as to say it was fun.

Given that the gameplay is nothing special, you would hope the plot would make up for it. But no, to sum up the story, it's like an anime version of Alien but WAY more boring. If anything, this game highlights how amazing the movie was all the way back in 1979.

It's 2018, you don't actually have to play yourself!

Score: 2 hallelujahs out of 5

JESUS is a good looking game, there's no doubt about that. And unlike the first Wingman, it even has some real nice music including some DQ jam. But behind the pretty facade, there is almost nothing interesting about this game and so it barely qualifies as a 2 just on its nice visuals. Hopefully, the sequel or some of Enix's later titles fare better. I'm particularly looking forward to ANGELUS cause that bath scene. I'm still a sucker, after all.


Some extra screen shots for the devout Christians?

I'm sure the title would have gone over well here.

Shameless product placement? More likely blatant trademark abuse

This is the other art. Now you don't need to play the game. You're welcome.

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely

Dragon Quest III（ドラゴンクエストIII そして伝説へ…）

My first reaction when I started up Dragon Quest III was OH MY GOD, it's SOOOO much better than DQ2!!!! Once again, it paid off to start the series chronologically because the graphical leap over DQ2 was huge. I mean, yeah, I'm comparing two Super Famicon remakes but it's obvious they put way more effort into the remake of the 3rd compared to the 1&2 "bargain" bundle.

Finally feels like I'm playing a SUUPA Famicon game.

Not just the graphics, the entire game feels like a breath of fresh air and restored my faith in the series after the awful previous entry. You walk way faster and the battles are fast and smooth. The killer feature is auto dismiss on the battle dialogues. Instead of having to press a button after EVERY SINGLE action, it'll just fly by based on your dialogue speed setting. Compared to DQ2 where a single turn could require up to 20 button presses, you'll only have 8 if you have four party members (attack+select enemy x4). In addition, the battle music is not absolute crap so I'm glad to be able to play this game with the sound ON this time.

Finally, battle music that's not vomit-inducing
The game starts out with an intro of your dad with some pretty awesome cut scenes and then some deity gives you a personality test and proceeds to give you some profound life tips based on your personality. I was told some deep advice that amazingly completely matched my current situation and basically saved me from a self-destructive path of sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll. The sex especially was tough cause you know chicks be all up in my biznass 24/7 G.

I'm now convinced that this game has deeply influenced Japanese society for us old fogeys... somebody should research that. Joking aside, it was definitely fresh and exciting to start off playing a short scenario that tests your personality. I got the one about the king but failed at getting the sexy personality. Though near the end, somehow my strongest equipment ended up being bikinis and garter belts so I ended up with a whole party of sexies anyhow. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


To be featured on next BBC documentary: "Shaping the weeb generation"
Speaking of sex, another nice customization is the option to pick the gender of you and your party members. Even though you look pretty much identical in my opinion, the other character classes have more variety. A nice touch is every time somebody mentions you as Ortega's son, they have to correct themselves. I'm sure it's still an sexist and misogynist game per SJW's standards but at least now I can finally create my standard waifu party.

Disgusted by sexist pink female armor, I went with a party of all bunnies and died instantly.

However, it was only later that I found out that there is NO pafu pafu with my all waifu party. Personally, as a gender-fluid sometimes lesbian female, this is EXTREMELY OFFENSIVE toward the LGBTKFCABCDEF community and we should all boycott Nintendo NOW.

ANYWAYS, getting into the gameplay, I can quickly summarize all the changes as "everything broken in DQ2 was fixed". They added the bag that allows you to carry EVERYTHING at all times and a line of text that explains what each spell does. FINALLY! No more having to google what Behoimi and Hyadaruko fucking does. However, being a classic DQ title, the random encounters are still very much a multitask repeatedly press 'A' affair or in my case 'L' for one-handed multitasking, though thankfully not as often as DQ2. I only wish holding down 'A' went faster than mashing it. Unfortunately, it's way faster to just mash. However, to its credit, this is the first DQ game where I had to use buffs and debuffs for boss battles namely Rukani, Sukuruto, Piorimu, and Baikiruto. Yeah, I have no fucking clue what those do either, which is why the in-game descriptions are so nice. It was kinda lame that Orochi has some sort of invisible health regeneration every turn but at least it made me use more than just attack and heal.

Holy shit! Explanations? Who'da thunk it?!

So yeah, on paper, this is the best DQ and probably one of the best RPGs on the FC (based on what I've seen). The SFC version definitely has some great graphics including some awesome spell effects. Yet somehow, I just enjoyed the short and simpler days of the first DQ more. There's a TON of content here and some nice surprises near the end but man, it just got kinda boring after a while. Yeah, you could conceivably play around with more jobs but you'd have to start at level 1 again. Or you could mess about with the board games and arena or hunt all those pesky metals down (meh). For me, besides the bosses, the gameplay and world setting was just too I dunno "Dragon Quest" to keep me interested. The personality stuff was cool but as far as I could tell, it has NO effect on the story or gameplay.

Score: 3 overrated JRPG reddit rant post time! out of 5 (also -10 points for no female on female pafu pafu)

Most of the game is just the standard DQ walking around + random encounter + attack + heal affair. So while technically there is nothing wrong with the game, I thought it was just OK. Also, the short, simple dialogues kind of made the story not as impressionable as it could've been. I mean, I guess it's cool for the kids since they can't read so good. I guess I should've played this like 10 years ago... ok ok 20 years ago.. ok I'm OLD, stop pushing it! There is an optional dungeon you can play after the game but I didn't bother. The sparse dialogue just didn't make the effort worth it for me.

I dunno, maybe I'm just not a big DQ kinda guy. I will however devour a Butterscotch dipped cone ANY day but wrong DQ.

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely

Wingman（ウイングマン）

Oh man, the things I do in the name of Jhipsterdom. While Wingman was on my list of Enix games to check out for 1984, I've been loathe to go through it even with a guide because it required kana input. You have no idea what a pain it is to type はめる ぶれすれっと in kana mode.

Unfortunately, I later found out that it's impossible to type ろ without a 106-key keyboard. Now, I do have an old Japanese laptop laying around the house but was too lazy to get it out so I figured out how to use the onscreen keyboard to type with keys I didn't have. Unfortunately, this changed some other things such as requiring shift+7 to type a single quote. You have no idea what a pain that is for typing in English.

UGH. Seriously, the shit I do for Jhipster-dom

So you can see why I skipped Zarth but Wingman is like a series on the PC88 with Wingman 2 and Wingman Special. Also, this game has far more illustrations than Zarth and seems much more fleshed out. According to some random Japanese website, apparently they enlisted the help of the guy who did that one good pixel art in Zarth for this game as well. He's definitely got some MS Paint skills fo' sure.

Alright fuck it, let's do this

This game is based on the manga of the same name and takes place a few volumes into the story. Now, I wasn't about to go fly to Japan to buy up the manga to get caught up on the backstory but I did brush myself up on the main plot and characters via you know online resources.

Shockingly, the anime was NOT available on Netflix
As a command line based ADV game, you're basically expected to just type shit until something works. Now, there's a helpful list of commands/locations at the bottom of the screen you can choose using the function keys but you still need to type shit that's not on the list.

Function keys? It's been a while my good friends.

For example, you're supposed to type "talk" and "cute" to get an item from the teacher. I'm not sure how you're supposed to figure out to say "cute" when the entire Japanese language is at your disposal. Even the early Sierra On-line games were not that brutal. Now, part of the fun in these games is trying to type shit like "fuck you" to see if the game has a clever response but given the fact that it takes me like 2 minutes to type a single word, fuck it guide time.

You're supposed to talk about じゅもん. How did I know? I cheated, sorry (NOT!)

What's kinda cool about this game is you can transform by typing "chaing" which is a combination of the words "change" and "wing" (amazing that didn't catch on). When you transform into Wingman, you can battle the villain in the area at the bottom of the screen. You have two attacks via the F1 and F2 keys: "Contini Punch" and "Wingle Crash". The wingle crash always resulted in me losing health as well so I stuck with punching but I guess it doesn't really matter whether you win or lose. The screen is upside down because it's a separate dimension for battling or whatever (just read the manga).

Score: 2 wingle contini chaings out of 5

I would say this is a pretty high quality adventure game for its time at least visually and a much better offering from Enix compared to Zarth. It helps that there's a whole manga/anime to fill in the settings since there's very little dialogue in the game itself. In fact, you kinda HAVE to read up on the story (unless you're cheating like me) to know your vehicle is called "winner" to chase after the villian (I thought it was "weiner" this whole time).

You're riding weiner... err winner here (not shown)

As you can tell, for its time, this is probably the most visually stunning game I've seen so far. It's just a darn shame I have to suffer through kana input for it. But I'm kinda starting to get the hang of it so I guess I can put that skill to use for the next text based retro PC game. Ugh, but then again, probably NOT.

Ugh, do I HAVE to save Miku-chan? How much more typing is involved??

Dang, look at those shadows, is that DirectX 12??

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely

Karuizawa Yukai Annai（軽井沢誘拐案内）

Though light on narrative, the ending of Hokkaidou rensa satsujin blah blah definitely left an impression on me and will probably go down as the best adventure game of 1984. Though it did not make GOTY simply due to the genre defining technical achievement of King's Quest, so far, it was definitely the game I enjoyed most from that year.

So of course, I had to check out the 3rd entry in Horii Yuji's Mysteries trilogy: Karuizawa Yukai Annai. At least this time, the title is far easier to memorize and it is a very curious title: Karuizawa kidnap guide. Never have I seen the word "kidnap" paired with "guide" before. I hope it doesn't trigger some FBI search alert... oops, I guess writing about the FBI doesn't help me here. Anyways, since there is no PC98 Master race remake, I will delve into the original PC88 version. Oh wait, there's a phone app remake? Let's see...

OMG, I just literally barfed RIGHT in my mouth just now

Wow, Square, you've somehow managed to make a game from 1985 look WORSE on a phone with probably about 1000x better hardware. That's... quite an achievement. BRAVO! Ok anyways, let's get on to the OG PC88 Master race.

So this is a heart breaking mystery murder adventure like the last game right??

In the last game, you played as a detective investigating a series of murders by ordering around your slightly perverted detective underling. Right off the bat, I have a feeling Kuruizawa Yukai Annai is going for a slightly different tone.

Man, I can't wait to solve a thrilling mystery!

But I can't quite put my finger on just what feels different about this game.

So is this a game where I need an emergency ESC in case my mom walks in?

This time around, you play as a regular Joe Blow vacationing with your girlfriend at a cabin in you guessed it: Karuizawa (OMG PLOT TWIST!). After you get frisky with your GF (that's always a good way to start a game), she worries that her younger sister Nagisa hasn't returned from an errand to buy some soy sauce. The police doesn't seem interested and thinks she just went off wandering somewhere and will be back soon. So you and your GF decide to take matters into your own hands and set off to find her.

I'm still trying to figure out what feels different about this game...

The controls are very smooth in this game. You can do everything from the 8-directional keypad and Yuji added a map this time. This works better with the narrative that you're roaming around town, looking for Nagisa-chan.

Was gonna put screenshot of map but still trying to pin down what's different

Thanks to the lack of infinite possibilities of a text input adventure game, I think this game is very doable without a guide. I still used a guide though cause fuck it, I don't have time to wander around aimlessly, looking for Nagisa-chan. However, the big exception are the parts where you have to find shit on the screen. It's like there's exactly one TINY spot which has the item and it's totally invisible. Even knowing the invisible item was there, it took me forever to actually find it. So in short, this game is pretty much impossible without a guide in the later chapters.

The search icon is a heart? Hmm... is the game trying to tell me something?

Finally, we get to the last chapter and funny ol' Yuji decides to put a barebones, crappy RPG in the mix. The only moves that are effective is for Kumiko to blow a kiss, Asami to show her "panti" and you do all the fighting. You have to defeat the guys in the right order and even then, you may need to save and retry if you're not lucky. Needless to say, I wasn't super impressed.

Panti RPG is a good idea but lacking a bit in execution

Score: 2 just make it a freakin' eroge Yuji and stop teasing already out of 5.

As the final 3rd entry in the Yuji's mystery series, I guess I can look at this as his final goodbye to ero as he cleans himself up to make a little known series of games called Dragon Quest. I can see why the previous entry is way more popular as it has a far superior story and human drama. Still, this one was a playful and somewhat funny title and while not the best story, it has some of the best art for it's time and deserves at least a play through.

Fuck it, GOTY. Why the hell not?

Dude, what are you doing with Kumiko?! Nagisa is OBVIOUSLY the way to go!

Bye pervert Yuji, we'll miss you.

This picture included with game is the clue to the final puzzle before the RPG bit

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely

Dragon Quest II（ドラゴンクエストII 悪霊の神々）

My first thought when I started Dragon Quest 2 immediately after DQ1 was that I didn't like it. I don't want to sound like an old fogey that hates change but man, I really don't like the changes they made from DQ1.

Yes, this is totally going to be recurring theme here.

I don't want to say something as cliched and hackneyed as "with great power comes great responsibility" but dammit, you can't just tack more shit onto a finely tuned game and expect it to come out decent.

Sure, if you start a series with only one party member, the next natural progression is to add some more party members. I didn't even notice but DQ1 only had exactly one enemy each battle. Oh boy have I noticed it now!! Consider the average length of a one-on-one battle in DQ1. Yes, the whole thing is kinda slow but given that the only turn is either you or the enemy, everything ends pretty quickly. Now take that same slow battle and triple the size of the party (hence button presses) and increase the enemy count up to 7 enemies.
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
You still here? Cause I think I just went into a temporary coma. Maybe the slowness wouldn't even be that bad because of course I'm multitasking this game if not for that AWFUL battle music. OH MY GOD. I thought something was up with the emulator on my PSP but NO, it's totally craptastically accurate.

Seriously, not only did I multitask this game hardcore, I did it with the sound OFF. Even though there's actually some halfway decent songs in the game, I don't even care because this is the song you will hear for like 80% of the time. I dunno, maybe it's just me? SquareEnix must have thought this diarrhea is hot shit (LOL get it??) because they included it in Theatrhythm Dragon Quest out of the total TWO DQ2 songs in the game.

Yet another example of more isn't always better is the world map, which must be about 4X+ times larger than DQ1. You can even travel to the original town from DQ1 and though most of places in DQ1 are gone and it's scaled down, you can still get a sense of how small the original map was as it's just a small part of the world in DQ2.

Everything is all hunky-dory until you get the boat, then it becomes an open world of getting lost and trying to find shit on random floor tiles based on cryptic clues from random strangers. This game is worse than even Mother in terms of aimlessly wandering around with no clue of where to go or what to do. Now, you can find a very basic world map that barely does the job but I didn't know that until after navigating vast expanses of ocean to find tiny islands in the middle of nowhere.

Even the awesomeness of the PSP wasn't enough to make this game palatable

For kids bored out of their minds with the ONE game their parents got, I get how wandering endlessly around a vast expanse of nothing but ocean would be a good way to waste time (FUN!!). But as an old fogey with 8 more DQ games on deck, the last thing I want to do is wander for hours looking for a TINY TINY island town in the middle of nowhere to find the goddamn gold key. (Yeah yeah, I talked to the random guy that said the gold key was to the south and his vague "directions" were TOTALLY over-simplified.) So once again, time to load up gamefaq and a world map on the good ol' internets.

Once you load up a walkthrough, you'll need to find item after item scattered around on the world map and also completely invisible. At least DQ1 told you how many steps an invisible item was but DQ2 has you scouring around the floor like some kind of crazy lunatic assuming you even found the clue (aka gamefaq).

Despite the dead simple story, the first game had a kind of charm as it made fun of the standard RPG tropes complete with the ohime-sama dakko. However, it feels like DQ2 actually takes itself seriously and thinks it's all that because it's selling like hotcakes. The endless fetch quest after fetch quest obviously designed to be as obscure as possible combined with the endless stream of painfully slow, random encounters flavored with the wonderful burps of the battle "music"(?) really made me glad to finally put this game down for good. I feel sorry for the poor kids in that last cave with the pitfalls, endless loops, and resetting paths back in the day without a gamefaq and the miracle of saves states.


Yeah, ok, they made some cheap and easy improvements sure. Like how you don't have to keep buying keys as using it once won't break it (that totally made no sense btw). And sure, you can save and whatnot in other towns besides the very first castle but it really doesn't make up for all the crap they added that makes the game slow as molasses. And no, throwing in a halfhearted, token pafu-pafu ain't gonna cut it either.

Score: 1 random stranger told me to crawl around the floor aimlessly searching for some "dew yarn" and now I'm in an insane asylum points out of 5.

PS. Buying the DQ collection on the Wii was NOT cheap and while DQ1 was good, I'm hoping DQ3 at least makes up for the scalper price.

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely

Dragon Quest（ドラゴンクエスト）

Starting all these classic RPG series from the first entry, I was beginning to wonder if they seemed bleh merely because I'm not hip and old-school enough to appreciate it. Perhaps I would have really enjoyed them if I had played them as a kid? But playing Dragon Quest made me feel a bit better because I've actually been having a lot of fun with it. Sure, I'm playing the Super Famicon version with vastly improved graphics and sound but then again, I played FF1 on the PSP and Mother on the GBA and those versions came out many years later than this version of DQ. You can see the differences in the various versions at hardcoregaming.

SFC? Pfft! I don't even care about the graphics.
In fact, I'm so hip, I refuse to play anything unless it's ported to a TI-81

Anyway, I don't know if the SFC version was re-balanced or what but boy is it the good ol' classic RPG fun I was hoping for. On paper, this game should be just as mediocre as the others. It has a fairly high encounter rate and battles consist of repeatedly pressing Attack as usual.

The menu system is the usual DQ clunky mess, but like Mother on GBA, the SFC version has the 便利 (convenient) L button that pretty much does exactly what you want whether it's opening doors or talking to people. Of course, FF fans will then ask, why even have the menu at all and I totally agree. At least it's also nice for one-handed playing and yes, this is yet another multitask game.

It's also kind of crazy that the ONLY place you can save is at the very first castle but the maps and dungeons were manageable and small enough to make exploration fun even with the random encounters unlike some other games (*cough* Mother *cough*). You also learn a spell that will instantly teleport you back to the castle just when you get tired of trudging back there. Perfect! And unlike that sorry excuse of a teleport in Mother, it works instantly without having to find a mile of clear runway (which BTW was practically impossible to do so fuck that lame PSI ability).

Even if the battle system is primitive, the level progression and the economy are so well balanced, I always felt like I wanted to play just a bit more as a bit more grinding would net me enough experience and gold to gain the appropriate levels and equipment to progress with the game. Playing DQ1 after Mother really made me appreciate the motivation factor of a good economy that wasn't broken (ie NOT instantly buy all the best equipment and accrue tens of thousands of useless dollars for the rest of the game).

It's a game I wanted to play because I wanted to beat it, not because I wanted to be done with it, if that makes sense. And just when I got tired of fighting slimes, it seemed like the game read my mind and the hero learns a spell to avoid random encounter from weak enemies at level 15. Perfect!!

While the story is also as primitive as they come, it has those nice Aikra Toriyama moments that I really enjoyed. Yeah, most of you kids know about Dragon Ball, but my first encounter with Toriyama was Dr. Slump and man, that comic is so pervy and full of toilet humor, no wonder all the prepubescent boys loved it. Anyways, personally, when I think Toriyama, this is what I see in my mind:

This fan translator sure has a sense of humor. That or he loves pu...

So it brings a smile to my face when you (literally) carry Princess Lola to the inn and the next morning, the innkeeper says, "you guys sure seemed to have fun last night".

Not sure what's so embarrassing about a fun night of scrabble and pillow fights.
Wait, what were YOU thinking?

Because that wasn't enough fan service, in the SFC version, a girl in the first town will follow you to the inn as well basically getting you laid within the first ten minutes of gameplay. These retro games don't have the resource to waste time teasing LOL. As a nice bonus, the game doesn't stop you from taking BOTH girls to the inn at the same time. Obviously, I'm not the first to discover this as a let's play on youtube went straight for the threesome. Haters don't hate, it's just the perks of being the hot, sexy, irresistible hero

Every boy in Japan probably did this in the 90s. I know I did right away.

Anyways, as a Jhipster, of course I have to point out that all of this was censored for Dragon Warrior because THINK OF THE POOR CHILDREN!! In fact, pafu pafu I guess was censored all the way up to DQ7? I am really curious to know if it was finally included in the Android and iOS releases of DQ1. Is the world finally ready to handle the sheer delights of the *censored* pafu pafu  (only 20 gold!) action in 2014? Unfortunately, I have an extremely rare condition that makes me barf at the very thought of playing an RPG with no physical buttons so only time will tell, I suppose.

Was DQ finally released uncensored for the phone 28 years later?
Or did the social justice warriors win again?

Score: 2.5 yes I'm retro hip too! wannabe out of 5

In the end, DQ1 is a very, very simple and short RPG. It has barely any story, only one party member, no airship, and the tiny world map is centered around the first castle, also the only place you can save in the entire dang game.

However, the game's perfect balance just makes it FUN, which despite everything is the most important part of a game. Despite other games that seem to know just how to be the most frustrating (*cough* Mother *cough*), DQ1 introduces the right spell at the right time to make the whole experience a smooth and enjoyable ride. I can definitely see why those Japanese kids went so crazy over this when it came out. The music in the SFC version is also pretty good. A real orchestra would have been even better but still very relaxing. Maybe in the next remake?

Scale
0 - Awful
1 - Bad and not worth your time
2 - Has some flaws but still enjoyable
3 - An average enjoyable experience
4 - A great game
5 - Masterpiece of a caliber only found very rarely