Go-jin Senki (鋼仁戦記), launched 8/6/1998, developed by Santa Leisure, printed by Tonkin Home
After struggling by way of Mild Fantasy I and II, I used to be not completely satisfied to see Tonkin Home’s title pop up with this recreation. Whereas this recreation is nowhere close to as dangerous as these, it’s nonetheless not a very good recreation and I didn’t end it ultimately. Nonetheless, there’s a translation patch so you’re free to attempt it for your self.
The setting is Kunagami, a world that’s mainly medieval Japan however with mechs known as Goujin which can be managed by human spirits. The story begins with the king of Himuka, Raioura, attacking the Kuchina tribe’s village and slaughtering many of the inhabitants. Considered one of them, Isamaru, is taken to a jail however is freed by Lakan, considered one of Raioura’s underlings who has defected to cease Raioura from his plan to take over the world. The story finally ends up involving not solely Raioura, however evil demons and one other member of the Kuchina tribe.
The story is instructed by way of a mix of VN-style narration and regular speech textual content bins. The story is the very best a part of the sport — whereas it’s not a masterpiece of RPG narrative, it’s attention-grabbing sufficient that I had some curiosity in how the plot would end up ultimately.
The sport circulate is a sequence of fastened battles with no alternate paths. You’ll be able to retreat from most battles (maintaining your XP and cash), and you are able to do follow battles on any battlefield you’ve cleared to date, if it’s good to grind. The occasion restrict is six, and also you get much more characters than that. At first I used to be attempting to make use of all of them however ultimately I simply centered on a small occasion.
The graphics within the battle are bizarre — they’re polygon 3D figures on a traditional 2D map. It doesn’t look that good and it slows every thing down rather a lot.
Every character has a sure variety of AP. Talents take AP — in principle the assaults that take extra AP are extra highly effective, however the system appeared poorly carried out as a result of you’ll be able to have a 16 AP assault that solely does 10% extra injury than a 4 AP assault (typically there are additional results additionally, however the results aren’t all the time good, like knocking a personality again).
Characters recuperate AP between turns, however not very a lot — 1 at first, however as you degree you’ll be able to recuperate a bit extra.
An enormous downside with the system is an lack of ability to take again your motion after you do it. Generally, the UI is plagued with points — as an example, you usually can’t verify what skills do, and you’ll’t see characters’ statuses within the display screen the place you’re selecting who to ship to battle.
Characters are available three varieties. “Generals” have two equip slots, one for a weapon and one for a magatama that provides a magic assault (or heal). Then there are fighters and spellcasters, that simply have one slot. Generally I discovered that the fighters have been almost nugatory; I used all my generals after which spellcasters (one assault, one heal), after which stuffed the sixth slot with a fighter.
That leaves the Go-jin. You begin with one, and get two extra as you progress. Numerous effort was put into this a part of the system — every mech has 5 gear slots, and you should purchase and equip quite a lot of weapons. Characters have particular expertise that allow them get additional results out of the weapons (akin to with the ability to assault everybody adjoining, or firing a number of photographs). Nonetheless, there are two elements of the system that utterly hamstring the gojin and make them basically unusable in lots of levels.
The primary difficulty is that folks in Gojin don’t acquire expertise. As a substitute, any expertise gained by the gojin is distributed equally to different characters. This implies it’s important to continually be switching round your characters (and the weapons).
However the a lot larger downside is the “berserk” difficulty. Every map has a sure “energy density” that provides every flip to your gojin’s counter. When that counter reaches 100, the gojin goes berserk and might not be managed. I noticed the enemies use issues that (barely) lowered their gojin’s counter however I by no means noticed this. The principle difficulty right here is that so lots of the battles are very lengthy, with tons of reinforcements, that any gojin you ship out are assured to go berserk. I simply stopped utilizing them due to this, and I seen that somebody who did an entire playthrough on youtube did the identical factor.
One other massive difficulty with the sport is you could’t save throughout battle, and it’s fairly straightforward for the enemies to overwhelm you (they take quite a lot of hits to carry down and no one can tank). I used save states, however even then I discovered the sport tedious.
Finally I bought to a degree about 70% of the way in which by way of the sport the place I used to be saddled with an NPC working on bugged AI (she would solely transfer subsequent to the enemies and never take any actions), which took up a slot and left me with solely 5 guys. I hit one more stage with waves upon waves of reinforcements, and I lastly determined that I used to be not focused on struggling by way of the sluggish battles and flawed system to see how issues turned out. I most likely ought to have given up rather a lot earlier however I attempted to stay it out.
Subsequent up is recreation #100! It’s Wachenroder, the second-to-last Saturn recreation for me to play.
