Having so much fun with Legend of Xanadu 1 at the moment. Love how fresh and original the gameplay feels with its original leveling up and and straightforward item system. The characters and story also really come alive, and love the sideview platform levels that end each level, really makes you look forward toward them. Have heard the criticism of the excessive fetch questing but really don't mind this as the game really pushes you to keep exploring. Can't believe how this game is being looked over nowadays!
The main reason would be that there's no translation and only an English guide for the first couple of chapters, and the game is near-impossible to play unless you know Japanese because of the fetch-quests tied to the clock (how you have to be at specific places at specific times).
If someone does a translation patch or guide for the rest of the game, I think that it'd get more attention than it currently does... but as it has been so far, only people with a LOT of patience or knowledge of Japanese can get far in it. What little of it I can play certainly seems great, but most of it is inaccessible...
"The first half of a two-parts PC Engine game, it was released in 1994 after two years of delay. In an unusual fashion for the time, part of its promotion was conducted through a radio program called "Amusement Party First Avenue", with hosts Aya Hisakawa and Hiroko Kasahara, which aired on TBS radio. But the program ended before the game was released. To make matters worse, its sequel "Monster Maker - The Ark of Gods" ended up not being released at all, leaving all the mysteries and plots unsolved. In his aforementioned (2003) interview with "Used Games" magazine, (Tabeta) claimed: "the game's contents ended up eightfold what we had originally planned", "the graphics, sound and script of the sequel were almost done, but since they had been built for the PC Engine, we would have had to redo everything from scratch in order to release it on a different platform, which is why we couldn't".
At the time of development, he said in a PC Engine magazine something to the effect of: "if the game suffers any more delays, I'm going to shave my head", but to no avail. A photo of him wearing sunglasses and smiling with his hair buzzed down later appeared in the same magazine."
It's really unfortunate that the game didn't finish... sounds like it'd have been pretty big! And while a mostly finished script and art isn't exactly a finished game for sure, it's too bad that none of it has ever leaked; it'd be interesting to see.
As for the 'we'd have to redo everything' comment, though, that's not really true... I mean, there are some Turbo CD games which had straight ports to the Saturn, with nothing changed other than minor visual upgrades. See AnEarth Fantasy Stories and Gulliver Boy, for two good TCD RPG examples of that. Too bad they didn't do that at least. Ah well.
The device you can slap on the back of the PC Engine is called "AV Booster", I think.
But I'd imagine anybody buying a white PCE would also get at least an IFU-30, which has composite out too anyways.
Yeah, who cares about the AV Booster if you have a CD drive? The IFU has AV outputs, just like the US Turbo CD base unit does.
That's too bad, I really like the art in the series. I really wish some of the board/card games had been localized (that's where I first heard of Monster Maker, actually).
Ah. I first heard of the Turbo CD game, then heard of the franchise after looking into the game. I have one other Monster Maker game now, III for the SNES; it's okay, but going by that game, Sofel's games aren't as good as NEC's... another reason I wish NEC had made more than one. Ah well.
Oh yes, I could tell right away I wasn't going to base anything on their opinions right out, but the fact that they actually play and review and journal so many games as opposed to providing one screenshot from the start of the game is immensely helpful in guiding me in mapping out my future purchases. My only real gripe is that most of their writeups have massive endgame and ending screenshots in plain sight.
Well, they do review many games that most of the people reading the site will probably never finish, so it's nice to have that stuff online somewhere, probably...
Yeah, I'm bummed by both personally (and the eventual closure of Compile, they could have been great in a digital download world, since they were already kind of doing those types of games with their Disc Station stuff). Anyway, the PC-Engine version has become quite elusive I see, I am afraid to see what it sells for now, but if it's not TOO bad I will do what I can to get it, I just wish I had done so years ago.. although I see Popful Mail selling for less than what I got it for back then and that was a "holy grail" find for me, even though I don't think it's actually "rare."
MMI for TCD was December '96, no way would there have been another game in the series on that platform. The game was actually the only game released that year that supports (much less requires) the Arcade Card, oddly enough... all the others are from '94 and '95. But despite that, yeah, its price isn't that high. I presume that it's because it's an RPG in Japanese -- lower prices for that. Fewer people are interested in games that they can't play! It's pretty easy to understand why import shmups are expensive while RPGs aren't.
As for Compile, who knows, maybe digital-download stuff would have been good for them... but they couldn't make it to then. Ah well. What I really wish, though, is that Compile had kept making shmups.. their shmups were some of the best, but then they almost completely stopped making them after 1993 in favor of just Puyo and Madou Monogatari stuff. Too bad.
The one actually called Madou Monogatari. It's a SNES-era Final Fantasy style RPG instead of a dungeon crawler and it's pretty straightforward. If you're at all interested in the series, track it down and give it a run, it's simple but fun, and the characters and world are just awesome.
I have Waku Puyo as well, if I recall it was a rather uneventful roguelike, but still amusing for a Madou/Puyo fanatic.
Ah. I haven't played Waku Puyo much, but that cloth poster/map thing it comes with is nice... not sure if I'll put it up or not (it's a big diamond shape...), but it's cool.
As for the other games in the series, reviews like HG101's are somewhat iffy -- they emphasize how simplistic the games mostly are, for sure. I haven't played them too much myself, though... I like the Puyo Puyo games, but 8/16-bit-style RPGs? Much more mixed feelings about that stuff.
(around €30)
