Lunar: The Silver Star (Sega CD, 1993) - The Impression

 The story is simple: Alex, a boy from a small town, yearning to follow in the footsteps of his idol Dyne, who once ascended to the title of Dragonmaster and saved the planet, goes on a casual adventure with his bud. In the process he stumbles upon his destiny: if he can prove himself worthy of taking up the mantle of manhood, the great dragon Quark will help him become the world’s next Dragonmaster. This triggers an epic quest: evil is unleashed upon the planet that only Alex can stop. Together, with a cast of adventures and his trusty companion Nall, they set off in search of the Dragon items so that they can seal this great evil and preserve peace.

Such is the story that drives Lunar: The Silver Star, a Sega CD JRPG developed by Game Arts and released for the ill-fated add on system to Japanese audiences in 1992. A year later in 1993, a fully localized version of the game would make its way to American shores by way of publisher/localizer Working Designs. This version, which I played to completion in February of 2021 feels like a unique time capsule in many ways: both its localization, its gameplay, and its structure feel as if they were designed in a vacuum free of any grandiose expectations. It might be the ultimate starter JRPG in terms of presentation and accessibility. The game’s structure is simple: wander from town to dungeon and back to town again across a decently sized map while fighting random battles and a series of boss fights to save the world. There are not any complex puzzles to solve, and the game’s difficulty curve is so tame that even my mother could likely reach the credits without too much frustration. Its combat, turn based like the best of them, is functional at best: it is one of the earliest games to implement a form of auto battle in your ability to have the AI make combat decisions for you: I suggest you use this and just cruise from locale to locale.The only real challenge I faced in my playthrough was the repetitive dungeon design in the 2nd half of the game, and the sometimes obnoxious encounter rate. Even that was not enough to get my heart rate up.

To aid in subduing the audience into hangout mode, the game’s score, composed by a team of three individuals to take advantage of the CD add on’s CDDA capabilities, has to be one of the most relaxing JRPG soundtracks I have ever heard. Gone are the harsh tones of the Genesis/Mega Drive’s FM synth capabilities. Instead, you get a series of overworld and dungeon themes that I can, at best, describe as melodic and chilled out. This is not a dig at their work: it takes incredible skill to compose a score that is both relaxed in its approach and also engaging; Lunar’s CD score is both and might be the game’s secret strength. I never tired of its tone over the course of my playthrough - that might be the highest compliment I can pay a JRPG’s score in a game with frequent random battles.

 The game’s most glaring fault, and perhaps its only real one, is that it was localized by a team of writers that I can only describe as, “a group of 20-somethings drinking Mountain Dew, constantly high fiving each other when reading off jokes, and never saying no to any idea, no matter how much it undermined the nature of game.” It felt less like a group of professionals localizing a highly successful Japanese title, and more like the kind of group that produced the J2E re-translation of Final Fantasy IV that I played last summer. At any time, I was waiting for a character to drop a gem of a line like their, “What? Has he been feeling up your butt, Rydia?” My groans were frequently audible.

At the end of the day, Lunar is a competent, accessible, and downright friendly JRPG. It does not push any of the existing boundaries that existed in 1992, and feels designed for a decidedly different audience than your standard early 90s JRPG. The team that made this at Game Arts wasn’t trying to be anything else or surpass anything else, and in doing so created a calm serenity of an experience.

Note: this impression was written in one shot without revision or editing. Deal with it.

Landstalker: The Treasures of King Nole (Sega Genesis, 1993) - The Impression

     It would be unfair to compare Climax Entertainment’s Landstalker: The Treasures of King Nole to other games. Therefore, to set the tone, I will try my best not to. Taken in isolation, Landstalker is an action adventure title for the Sega Genesis that puts you in the shoes of 88 year old treasure hunter Nigel, who after accepting the task of protecting a nymph named Friday from thieves, is whisked away to island where they together undertake the task of uncovering the location of King Nole’s legendary treasure. It's a refreshingly simple premise that allows the gameplay to take center stage as you traverse the landscapes of the island looking for dungeons to clear out in your search of vast riches. Along the way, you’ll butt heads with evil Duke Mercator, who, of course, has only one goal in life: beat you to the treasure. What this ultimately translates to is an excuse to crawl into further dungeons and break the backs of those designers who thought vague, precision heavy puzzles would be a good way to fill your afternoon. Plunder them dungeons, help some townspeople, and get the treasure. Simple, right?

Wrong. Landstalker eskews common sense and adopts an isometric perspective to help it stick out from the rest of the early 90s crowd. This translates to two things: sometimes the movement cannot be described as anything but clunky as you wrestle with three dimensions with a two dimensional controller and that frequently you will think that you are about to make a carefully measured jump from one visual plane to the next and you will almost always be wrong. This is not an issue with the early dungeons and travel through the games world; the early dungeons of Landstalker are, while challenging and highly technical, intuitive in the way it teaches you to read the game’s multi-leveled maps. In my experience however, this does not seem to help with many of the game’s later dungeons, which I can only describe as mean spirited in design.

You see, if it was only the movement that crippled your progress I probably would have been able to deal with it. However, after the first handful of dungeons lured me in with intuitive design choices I just kept getting hit in the face over and over with a general lack of guidance. There were endless moments where I felt I closer resembled a fish flopping on the deck gasping for progress than a seasoned 88 year old treasure hunter. Because I wanted to maximize the limited freetime I have at my disposal I cracked open a guide and followed it closely through the game’s closing credits and let me tell you: I was definitely not smart enough to solve some of these puzzles. And I am okay with admitting that! More people should! 

There is one piece of Landstalker however, that I just felt that bond with immediately: it has really good combat. Though it boils down to moving ever so slightly away from your opponent and slashing viciously, I was immediately down for the count. There was seldom a moment where I hesitated to jump in and have at it due to the game’s lenient respawn mechanic: the game allows you to purchase items which instantly revive you when you are downed. It allows you to unleash the pent up rage that the previous room’s platforming developed all over each of the game’s enemies and boss battles, which are never prohibitively challenging. The only thing regarding combat that boggles my mind is the invisible numbers on the back end: somehow your HP is tied to the number of hits that enemies take in a way that just drives me nuts.

You know what REALLY bothered me about this game though? Duke Mercator, mocking you, offers you 20 gold for finding the treasure, and says you can afford a candy bar with that. You can’t even buy a candy bar in the game.

Note: this impression was written in one shot without revision or editing. Deal with it.

Xenogears - The Next Thirty Hours

 In my first write up on the initial 20 hours of Xenogears I mentioned that I was less interested with what I was actually doing as a party of characters than I was in what I thought was going to happen later on. I can safely say that, after punching out and rolling credits after 48 hours of gameplay that unfortunately this does not change. In many ways, the second 30-ish hours of the game take that feeling I had and magnify it two or three fold. As I look back on the events that occurred in the game, I do not find myself reflecting on the dungeons, quests, and both on foot and mech driven combat because for the most part none of them struck me as particularly interesting. Perhaps I am spoiled by the likes of having played Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals and navigating its wonderful Zelda-like dungeons filled with puzzles recently, but every dungeon felt like it was an exercise in trying to get me lost. Each of the games dungeons in the second 30 hours continued the trend of having bland, identical hallways that will lead you in these maddening circles until you find that one door you missed; it could take hours, or, if you had a map, minutes to navigate such treachery. And when I had to navigate these dungeons in the Gears suits? Good lord those controls brought me to my knees; I am thinking of you, Tower of Babel. 

Fortunately for me, the things happening to my characters continued to ramp up in complexity and intrigue. The story keeps piling meat and cheese on the dense sandwich of gourmet anime nonsense in front of you, and when you finally get to bite into it? Oh baby. The story delivered upon you in Xenogears, especially during the game’s second disc, is complex enough to make Sora and Riku put on a dress shirt and khakis so they can take notes. The twists and turns and mind boggling events just keep on coming through the game’s meaty conclusion, which is, for those who are inquiring, a battle in which you fight god for the fate of the planet. If it seems mundanely similar to many other JRPGs, I will tell you that at least Xenogears is upfront in its intentions from the very beginning. There are no surprises when the stakes reveal themselves: a mysterious figure names you the, “god-killer,” only a few hours into the first disc of the game. Even though some of the events were so extreme that I could not contain my laughter at their execution, there was not a single moment in which I was not interested to see where it was going. If only every JRPG could be this wild in its ambitions.

The last thing I want to touch upon is the hard switch in structure that hits you like a brick when you swap to disc 2: it is honestly the best decision the developers could have made. In some ways, it feels like the only way to execute the insanity of the plot that they wanted to deliver. The switch from a big, open world traditional JRPG to one that tells its story primarily through slides of dialogue and cutscenes feels like the power play of the century, even if it was a result of poor project management and general inexperience, as admitted by the game’s director, Tetsuya Takahashi. The scale and complexity of the events of disc 2 are essential to building into the game’s reasonable conclusion but upon reflection, I do not think any of the events described in the game’s many, many cutscene-ish sequences would have been all that fun to play. Disc 2 is full of events in which the party wanders around looking for various objects, stopping at points to do rather important, yet tedious activities, and various things that probably would have taken several hours of your time in the least interesting way possible. Instead of a cool average completion time of 50 hours or so that ends in a mostly satisfying way, you’d be staring down the barrel of a 100 hour disaster that would send you spiraling out of control into like…..wood working or some other hobby. Just trust me on this: playing the events of disc 2 would have been….rough. Anywho, Xenogears is pretty interesting. That’s about it.

Note: this impression was written in one shot without revision or editing. Deal with it.

Wario Land 4 (Game Boy Advance, 2001) - The Impression

 A bad platformer turns you off with cheap deaths, unresponsive controls, and poor level design. Your time is wasted on relentless obstacles, minimal progress, and general aimlessness. Fortunately for all of us, Wario Land 4 features none of those things. Instead, it takes the idea of the collectathon that was so prevalent in the 3D platformers of the 1990s and retools and weaponizes it in 2D using the full capabilities of the Game Boy Advance platform. It drops many of the conventions of the 2D platformers that preceded it such as lives, linear level design, punishing precision platforming, instead focusing on exploration, puzzle solving, and building tension. That last point - the building of tension might just be what makes Wario Land 4 such a rewarding experience.

The premise of the game is simple: Wario enters a golden pyramid, tempted by the idea of uncovering a whole bunch of loot, and is presented with a series of 18 levels to rip to shreds in the pursuit of a higher tax bracket come the new year. The main levels of the game, 16 in all, are sorted into 4 groups by color. Each one of those levels is a large 2D maze that you must scour in order to find 4 quarters of a gemstone of sorts, a key to the next level, and if you are feeling ambitious, a bonus CD that contains an isolated copy of each of the level’s tracks that are playable in a separate mode. Each of the 4 groups are similarly themed, and a boss awaits you after you find each of the 4 quarters in each of the four levels. A simple enough premise, right?

Each of the game’s 18 levels are laid out in ways that encourage experimentation with your base set of moves such as a power dash, charge, and ground pound, as well as a set of different gimmicks that allow you to break down barriers or access different parts of the level. The essential items are cleverly hidden in ways that, on normal difficulty, reward players for their willingness to explore the depths of each level. On hard mode, the difficulty that I played to completion, some of these objects are hidden in such obscurities that one must push the game’s controls to their absolute limit in order to walk away with even the bare minimum items required to progress. It is however, not a precision platformer; Wario Land 4’s levels are designed to be accessible by the masses, and provide ample room for you to try again, resulting in eventual satisfaction by all levels of players. The gimmicks, such as turning into a shooting ball of flames, or becoming a raging snowball, are never used in ways that become stale. 

The highlight of the game arrives in each level where you find a room where it's just Wario and the purple plunger. You must smash the plunger, leading to the reveal of a second game buried within the first one, set to a timer. Activating this timer adds a tasteful amount of tension to the otherwise casual experience of digging through its levels and forces you to race back to the very beginning of each level in order to keep the items you have found within. Hitting the plunger also changes the design of the level: previously accessible areas are sealed off, and other areas are opened up for the first time. It forces you to think on your feet as you adjust to the alternate version of the level, which often contains required collectibles in later levels. The game’s music, which is typically very excellent, turns into this sour, tense rhythmic noise that just propels you to get out as fast as possible.

The only part of the game that I did not actively look forward to was the boss fights. Playing on hard, I found them to be the only element of the game that I found mundane. Beating them did not feel like a triumph, but merely like being forced to overcome an obstacle setup between the fun parts of the game. Being that there are only a handful of them, I did not think it sullied my opinion of the game too much. Wario Land 4 basically rules.

Note: this impression was written in one shot without revision or editing. Deal with it.

Xenogears: The Twenty Hour Impression

    Xenogears rolls into town like a new kid who just moved from the big city into your small suburban neighborhood. It wears an intense leather jacket, has all of the cool toys that your parents couldn’t or wouldn’t purchase you, and drops mysterious one liners that make you go, “woah man, that’s heavy.” It oozes cool in ways you already knew the JRPG could, but with just enough edge to make you want to lean in and listen whenever it wants to say something. Its opening hours are filled to the brim with drama, tragedy, anime cutscenes, sci-fi concepts, and a 2 pronged battle system that allows you to do martial arts and martial arts in a giant robot suit. It hits hard and it hits fast. It introduces interesting characters with mysterious backstories, lets you spend enough time with them for you to almost care about them, and then ramps the momentum up to keep your eyes away from any of the flaws that might be simmering just under the surface.

    But like so many of the cool kids of our lives, once you spend enough time to get to know that kid, the cool factor melts away to reveal exactly what that kid brings to the table. And once things begin to slow down and you begin to spend some more time with Xenogears’ characters and environments, it becomes clear that maybe this kid doesn’t quite have what it takes to back up some of the cool things he read in all those books it assumes you probably haven’t read. If the first five hours of the game are a rush of cool kid adrenaline, the next fifteen hours ebb and flow with the kind of stammering that is produced when you ask that kid what it actually meant. In its first five hours Xenogears presents us with a moderately novel concept for a role playing game in 1998: a protagonist that doesn’t really know what he believes in, and doesn’t want to just fight whatever is in front of him. He lashes out at his peers, who are in turn believably complex in expressing their motivations, wants, and needs, and they lash out at him in return. It speaks to a level of depth that I would argue most games wouldn’t attempt to achieve for at least another ten or so years in terms of the emotional crisis that lingers at the core of many of its characters.

    Unfortunately, rather than fully explore these feelings and ideas, the story structure just continues to toss layers of obscurity on top of the interesting ideas at its core. It adds extra factions, brooding mysteries, melodramatic conflicts, and contrived plot devices that are perhaps more interesting to us as players than it is to the characters whose role we are playing. At the twenty hour mark, I’m not thinking about the characters I am currently playing and what they’re actually doing, but rather the questions that Xenogears forces me to keep asking. Mostly, this is because what they’re actually doing isn’t all that interesting; much of the game’s actual content is running around mildly confusing town maps talking to characters and being directed to do things just because. Many of the game’s dungeons, as well as its combat encounters just seem to be designed in order to take up time between moments where the game feels comfortable drip feeding me more information about the incredibly complex world the game takes place in.

    That’s not to say that I’m not enjoying Xenogears though; it just talks big game and then seems to not have the actual depth to support such bigness. The combat, while fun to watch play out, is usually solved by pressing the same combos over and over again with little variety, and the game is full of fun visual touches that generally make exploring its environments unique, if not entirely interesting. Its first twenty hours ring a bit hollow, but I am 100% willing to give it another twenty if it can answer some of my big questions in a satisfying way. Here’s to the next twenty…...

Note: this impression was written in one shot without revision or editing. I do, after all, have another twenty hours of Xenogears to play.