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
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
