Final Fantasy Adventure

Platform: Game Boy
Developer: Square
Released: 1991
Genre: Action RPG

The Story
Life is rough for a gladiator. Wake up, slay monsters for the enjoyment and appeasement of the masses, eat, sleep, then do it all over again. Except today is different for one of these benighted souls. His friend dies in his arms, but not before imparting the secret to escaping the castle. Resolved to get the hell out of dodge, the now ex-gladiator manages to break out. Only moments after tasting his first breath of freedom, however, he overhears Dark Lord plotting to take the power of the mana tree and using it to rule the world, then gets pushed down a waterfall for his troubles.

Once he comes to, having survived the fall, our intrepid hero stumbles across a young girl who may just be the key to stopping the evil Dark Lord from accomplishing his sinister goal.

The Game
I remember when I was a kid, I played Final Fantasy Adventure a couple of times. I also remember giving up immediately both times because I couldn't figure out how to kill the first monster. But we'll get to that later. The point is, FFA was one of the earliest instances in which I learned that a game released here in the states had been given a different name than it had elsewhere in the world. In this specific case, FFA was known as Mystic Quest in Europe and originally Seiken Densetsu in Japan. I was later more shocked to learn that it was actually the first game in what eventually became known as the Mana series in the English-speaking world and not actually a Final Fantasy game at all. Now, imagine my further surprise to find during my research for this review that there was even more to the story than that.

As it turns out, FFA actually is a Final Fantasy game. Or at least it was intended to be. The full original name of the game was Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden, meaning it was a side-story to the FF series. This puts it in the realm of games like Final Fantasy Tactics, Dissidia Final Fantasy, and Kingdom Hearts, all of which use some of the setting elements while altering core game mechanics. Where all of the main FF games are still RPGs through and through, the gaiden games shift their focus to stuff like action, adventure, and strategy. In any case, it wasn't until later that Seiken Densetsu became a different series all its own.

The Characters
The hero of the story is an ex-gladiator turned defender of mana and the world. His name is . . . whatever you decide to name him, in the English version. In the original Japanese, he's named Sumo. Y'know, like the big guys who push each other for sport. Unlike other games in and similar to this genre, our hero isn't a silent protagonist, though just barely. He's not much of a talker, but then neither is anyone else in FFA. All that can really be said about his characterization is that he's a pretty decent fellah and he's willing to go through a whole lotta crap in order to save the world.

Early on he meets a young lady - named Fuji like the mountain in the original Japanese or whatever you decide to name her in the English version - who seems to be the key to protecting mana from those who would misuse it. She owns a pendant which also figures into the whole scheme, and both she and it spend most of the game as the macguffin you have to chase around the map since they both are continually getting kidnapped and/or stolen.

Dark Lord is the resident bad guy, presumably because his parents named him "Dark Lord". He's got a second-in-command named Julius who's a magician type and pretty mean and nasty.

And then there's some NPCs now and again. Most of them are your standard walky-around-and-spout-random-information types. A handful push the game along in some fashion or another, such as the Gemma knight (an order dedicated to protecting mana) who charges you with guarding Jo and the pendant. And some actively join you in your quest. All of them, however, are pretty much small change. Generally unimportant to the actual quest, only briefly a part of the narrative overall, and not much worth mentioning. No, seriously. I'm not just saying this to keep from having to type any more in this section. If the game has simply had signposts in the place of most of the folks, no one would have been able to tell the difference.

The Writing
Just as the characterization described above suggests, the writing is so bare bones as to almost be marrow alone. Hell, it's downright abominable in some spots. Dude plays some music, something happens as a result, and the entire explanation is: "Mystic tune?" "Yeah."

It would be easy to blame the localization of the game, and it would probably be a fair cop. It's true that a lot of games at the time had their stories dumbed down by the English translators, and this one almost certainly wasn't an exception. However, that doesn't explain away how skeletal the whole story overall is. It's not just the dialogue. Much of the action is just filler, fluff, stalling for time. A lot of the things you're called upon to do don't actually have anything to do with saving the mana tree or stopping Dark Lord. They're just random obstacles that suddenly pop up to keep you separated from the macguffin of the moment, be it the girl, the pendant, or both.

One of the earliest instances of this is when the hero and heroine spend the night in a tower during their travels and, oops, the girl gets kidnapped by a vampire. Not a vampire sent by Dark Lord or Julius to stop the forces of good from succeeding. Not a vampire interested in harnessing mana for himself. Nope, just a vampire out for some nubile girly flesh. Guess you better go take care of that before you get on to doing whatever else it was you were supposed to be doing. No no, it's cool, saving the world can wait.

I don't mind jumping through hoops to get to the end of the line. I don't even mind when a few of those hoops are sidelines to the main quest. All these hoops are, after all, a necessary part to the RPG process. But when only one out of every five or six missions has anything even remotely to do with beating the big bad guy, I gotta start getting the feeling that the writers didn't really know what to do with their own premise.

The Gameplay
For an easy comparison, FFA basically plays like the old top-down Legend of Zelda games. You view the action from above, moving the hero around on a square-ish battlefield and taking suckahs out left and right and up and down. A charge up meter sits at the bottom of the screen, charging up whenever you're not actively trying to slay things. When it reaches its peak, you can execute a special move with whatever weapon you have equipped, that move usually having to do with throwing the weapon across the screen.

Speaking of weapons, I do rather like the weapon system in place here. You get several different kinds of weapons to choose from, including but not limited to battle axes, whips, and spears. Many of them are not only useful in breaking down baddies into finely sliced, stabbed, or lashed open sections, they also have other abilities helpful in your quest, such as crossing gaps and cutting down trees that stand in the way. It adds a fair amount of depth into what might have otherwise been a simple little hack 'n' slash.

Sadly, the weapons have their downside as well, that being that it's difficult to be sure you've hit your enemy with most of them. If the baddie doesn't have a knockback animation - which is often - you have to depend on a "whack" sound that's sometimes difficult to make out over the "weapon swing" sound and the background music. It can lead to situations where you're wailing away at some evil fungus or goblin or hedgehog but you don't notice for a few seconds that you're not actually hitting the bastard and they end up turning right around and clobbering you right in the face quite handily.

I mentioned before that NPCs are pretty much useless in the game, but truthfully it's worse than that. Their crimes range from petty criminal negligence to outright belligerent harassment.

Let me go on record as saying that I hate hate HATE that whole "walk into someone to talk to them" thing that was so prevalent in Square's early RPGs. It's annoying as hell when you're trying to get by someone, there's only about an inch of space to get by (if that), and they have a twenty minute conversation loaded, cocked, and ready to fire each and every time you try to step around 'em. On the bright side, you can kill them dead.

Or, uh, so I heard.

AI controlled characters sometimes join you, but they're hardly any help at all as their entire schtick is to walk around aimlessly and shoot/magic/stab/nothing randomly all around them with absolutely no regard as to where the bad guys actually are. There are certain things you can get them to do if you use the "ASK" option, like heal you or whatever, but that's really where their helpfulness begins and ends.

But the thing that ended up annoying me the most was the fact that there were locked doors in dungeons for which you needed keys. Not so much that these things existed, as they're a perfectly good staple of video games overall. It was that I had to buy the keys at stores outside the dungeons, straining the seams on my tiny and usually already full-to-bursting inventory bag. It was either that or simply hoping that they would randomly drop from an enemy, which they only very rarely did.

This still wouldn't have been so bad if the locked doors were only to special areas with extra stuff. But as the game progresses more and more of these doors are part of the actual gauntlet that you need to run to get to the end. Furthermore, if you traveled enough rooms away, the doors you had already unlocked before will magically reappear, locked once again and requiring another key from your inventory to pass through! All put together, this smacks of simple douchebaggery on the part of the programmers, and it's the reason I finally gave up on beating the game about halfway through.

That's right, I'm doing a full review on a game I didn't finish. I usually don't like doing that, but I think I still managed to play enough to get a good feel of what FFA's about. The problem is that I got into a section of Dark Lord's castle that was about six or seven rooms from one end to the other, and both of those ends had locked doors on them. And I had run out of keys. And after nearly two hours of grinding through monsters I still hadn't found a key drop. I probably could have kept grinding for several more hours until a key finally fell out of one of the treasure chests, but all the other little annoyances in the game had already discouraged me and this was just the last straw.

The Challenge
Your allies are randomly attacking morons and the enemies are absolutely no different. With very few exceptions (those generally being the ones firing magic attacks), every single baddie just walks slowly around the screen, attacking the air around them in the hopes that they eventually hit something. More often than not, the threat they pose is one of being unpredictable as well as just sheer numbers crowding in your way.

I know it's just a Game Boy game, but surely something a little bit better than this was possible. At least getting either the baddies or the goodies to actively turn toward whatever side of the screen the opposition is on, even if they don't line themselves up exactly.

In any case, this makes the game frustratingly uneven in the challenge arena with everything being up to simply how the random number gods decide to fall that particular battle.

The Sights
If there's one spot I can say FFA does bring the goods, it's in the looks department. The backgrounds are pretty good, and the sprites are pretty much spectacular. While not tremendously expressive, they are very detailed and well designed. I am approve.

The Sounds
As mentioned in the gameplay section, the "hit" sound effect can often be difficult to detect. One of the reasons for this is that the background music is often loud and almost uniformly terrible. There's the occasional gem that slipped through somehow, but for the most part the music is clanging, piercing, grating, or otherwise just plain horrible. I tried not to pay attention to it as much as possible, and even tried to shut it off so I could listen to some of my own music, but unfortunately I still needed some of the sound cues to play the game properly.

Bleh.

The Bottom Line
I have to say that I wasn't sure I could make it through this review without inevitably drawing comparisons to the sequel Secret of Mana. Thankfully I think I managed quite well and such comparisons can wait until I do the SoM review.

Now, I know that much of what I've said here has been pretty negative, but I do have to say that for the most part all of my complaints are rather small ones. The annoyances were petty more often than not, and on their own I could have easily ignored them and gotten on with the game. It's just that there were so many of them all ganging up on me at once that my patience finally began to wear thin.

I could see, however, why so many folks like FFA, why it has a good-sized fan-base. It's just that I personally couldn't look past the flaws to truly enjoy the gem that I could sense hidden underneath. If you like action, RPGs, or action RPGs, I would definitely recommend you at least give this game a whirl. Who knows? You might be able to enjoy it where I didn't!

Shadowrun (Genesis)

Platform:  Sega Genesis
Developer:  BlueSky Software
Released:  1994
Genre:  Action RPG

The Game
Joshua is not a happy man.  His brother Michael was killed in a failed shadowrun, and he intends to find out who did it and why.  To these ends, he spend the last of his money to buy a ticket to Seattle to visit Michael's last known place of residence, a coffin motel in the Redmond Barrens.  From there, Joshua becomes a shadowrunner himself, traveling back and forth across the Seattle Metroplex and beyond in his tireless quest to avenge Michael's death.

The Genesis version of Shadowrun was released a year after its SNES cousin by a different developer and with a completely different storyline and gameplay.

The Characters
You play as Joshua, a somewhat hot-headed young lad who starts out looking for revenge and ends up on a quest to save the world.  The way he does this is partially determined by the player's choice of archetype at the beginning of the game . . . specifically, he can be a decker (hacker who projects his very consciousness into a virtual construct of the computer system), a street samurai (big, tough fighter skilled in the use of guns, armor, and punching things very hard), or a gator shaman (magician who follows the precepts of his spirit animal, allowing its magical energy to flow through him).

You face a number of different adversaries, but the main ones are Renraku, one of the biggest megacorporations around, and Thon, a free spirit bent on world domination.  These two forces have joined together in a mutual bid for power that naturally degenerates into each side trying to use and then lose the other.  Many of the other baddies you end up facing are working for either one or both of these nasty villains.

Fortunately for Joshua, he's also got a lot of folks on his side, though not all of them work for free.  He meets up with a number of Mr. Johnsons, people who specialize in working as middlemen for corporations and other organizations and do the actual hiring of shadowrunners for their various illegal and quasi-legal activities, who give him jobs and information.  He cultivates a list of contacts who are willing to provide him with info, gear, and various services for the right price.  And there are several fellow shadowrunners hanging about and are willing to team up with Joshua as long as he keeps them paid and alive.

He also eventually meets and teams up with Harlequin and Frosty, two legendary figures in the Shadowrun setting.  So that's pretty neat!

Like its SNES predecessor, the Genesis SR has a lot of characterization floating around.  Virtually every NPC you meet has their own unique personality and mode of speech, with only a few glitches here and there . . . every single hotel owner, for example, bitches about all their towels being stolen, even in the classiest joints.  Though there may just be an epidemic of towel thieves in Seattle, meaning it might have been done that way on purpose!

The Writing
The game's story is even deeper than the characterization, branching in several interesting directions with nicely cinematic reveals of important plot elements.  It really feels like Joshua is moving through a long and complex Shadowrun campaign, and it's great to see how they pull various disparate elements together to make a cohesive whole.

The dialogue between Joshua and the NPCs is extremely well written, and in several parts it and/or the narrative sections are interspersed with what amounts to action scenes, putting you in a short firefight before returning to the discussion at hand.  And while it partakes of the Shadowrun slang from time to time, it doesn't try to beat the player over the head with it and uses it in contexts where it's easy to understand if you're not already familiar with it.

The Gameplay
If nothing else, the gameplay alone in this game makes it worth playing.  It's an overhead game with a sandbox setup, allowing you to go anywhere in the game right off the bat as long as you're willing to pay cab fare and - in one case - for a passport.

Combat is as easy as cycling through targets and shooting/punching/magicking them until they stop moving, but the mechanics behind it are very deep.  You have a sizable list of attributes which can be advanced through gaining and applying karma, there is a wide selection of different types of guns and spells, you can buy various cyberware upgrades to enhance your stats and abilities, and you have two different life meters, one for physical damage and another for stun damage.

Your attributes also include a number of non-combat stats, including but not limited to Negotiation (influences buying and selling as well as the pay for shadowrunning jobs and for hiring other runners), Electronics (allowing you to pick maglocks and hack security systems), and Reputation (allowing you access to certain buildings, reducing the costs of entering certain clubs, and getting the attention of certain high-class contacts), adding even further depth to other areas of gameplay.

When speaking with NPCs, Joshua can pick from up to three different dialogue options (one each for the A, B, and C buttons on the Genesis controller), making chats with other people a decently interactive experience.

The menu screen overall is incredibly in-depth, storing tons of information about your character and the mission he's on.

Running the Matrix - the cyberspace construct of the city's computer grid - can get a bit repetitive at times, but there's so many options of what you can do that the player can mix things up a little if they start getting bored of the same old "continuous Deception/Attack" routine.

While there are many other games that were made since that have this kind of depth or more, this was one of the few console games of the time that went to such lengths to give the player such an immersive experience, and in my opinion all that hard work was worth it.

The Challenge
The game remains fairly challenging throughout - unless you go on a shadowrun binge and simply upgrade everything to insane levels - but is especially so at the very beginning, mostly because your stats start off so low as to be almost non-existent.  Joshua is a very weak character to start off with, and it takes a great deal of time grinding shadowruns before things start equalizing.

This is one of my few gripes with the game.  There is a nice variety of runs you can go on, but by the time you get to where you really need tons of cash and karma to get where you need to be to advance the storyline, your options have been whittled down to only two real choices:  Matrix runs or breaking into corporate buildings to retrieve a package/person.  The challenge at this point is to merely keep up the grind without getting burnt out.  I realize, however, that the limitations of the Genesis were probably what kept the developers from introducing even more variety in the run types . . . but it can still wear the player down after a while.

The Graphics
Overall the graphics were very well designed.  The opening screen itself with the Shadowrun logo looks absolutely beautiful, and all of the different areas of the city look like they should.  There's a lot of great detail all over the place - from litter and debris lining the streets in the barrens to the futuristic looking high-tech gadgetry on the desks in the office buildings - but some of it is marred by a strange sort of pixellation effect.  Some of the streets and sidewalks, for instance, look like they're only about half there, as there's a grid of black spots laying across them.  I think it may have been an attempt to give them a more textured look, but I'd say it failed if that's the case.

Another small but sometimes annoying problem is a slight warping of the image from time to time.  Most noticeable in office buildings and out in the woods, a horizontal section of the screen will sometimes become raggedy.  It doesn't obscure the image any, but it is a bit distracting at times.  I've played this game both as a cartridge and as a ROM and this ghost warping occurs in both, so it's definitely a problem with the programming of the game itself, though I can't personally imagine the exact mechanics behind it.

A lot of the NPCs that wander around outside are clones of each other with no real individualization, and there's only about five different types at most.  Meh.

These are all just minor issues, however.  The game as a whole looks great.  Especially cyberspace . . . even though they use a very basic topography (in the pencil and paper RPG, the virtual construct of a computer system can look like virtually anything the programmers want it to look like), it's very pretty and utilizes a pretty snazzy mock 3D setup.

The Music
Shadowrun is one of the few games I'd consider buying the soundtrack from.  Where it's SNES predecessor was kind of "rock noir", the Genesis version is much more techno with an occasional hint of grunge underlying it.  Each specific musical snatchet is completely appropriate for the area it plays in as well, adding to the atmosphere without taking it over.

Only problem is that when you load your game while you're already playing, the music glitches and starts playing the Redmond Barrens theme no matter where you had saved last.  Fortunately it fixes itself once you leave the area.

The Bottom Line
I absolutely adore this game.  Though it has its moments where it's a bit of a grind, the excellent gameplay keeps even doing the same thing over and over again interesting.  I love that it's very tightly based on the Second Edition Shadowrun rules, making it feel even more like Shadowrun than just the setting alone could do.  Great story, great graphics, great music . . . overall, this is just a great game and I highly recommend it.

Shadowrun (SNES)

Platform:  Super Nintendo
Developer:  Beam Software
Released:  1993
Genre:  Action RPG

The Game
Jake Armitage is having a bad day.  But most days in which you die and wake up in the morgue aren't going to be your best, and that's just the situation in which Jake has found himself.  Unable to remember exactly what happened to him, he has to follow a thin trail of clues in order to figure it all out.  As he makes his way around the Seattle Metroplex in the year 2050 he has to dodge all of the people trying to kill him a second time, find help wherever he can get it, learn the path of a shamanic magician, and take down a couple of megacorporations to bring a conclusion to his adventure.  Just another day in the life of a shadowrunner.

Shadowrun is based on the popular pencil and paper RPG system of the same name.  Set in the only somewhat distant future, corporations more or less rule the parts of the world that the remnants of the sovereign nations no longer hold (and some of those chunks as well) and magic has returned to the world.  Shadowrunners are mercenaries willing to do virtually any job for the right price, finding profit by slipping through the cracks of civilization and doing the jobs the corporations aren't willing or able to dirty their own hands with directly.

The Characters
You can hire on other shadowrunners throughout the course of the game, but the only main protagonist is Jake himself, and he only speaks a few times, making any determinations concerning his character fairly difficult.  At the very least he seems prepared to finish the job he's been given and do the right thing when it comes down to it.

The bad guys - primarily taking the form of Drake, a dragon in charge of his own little corporate empire - are usually distant and cranky, but they're undeniably evil because . . . well, I guess they just are, dammit.  It's really a black and grey morality at work here.  The best baddie is undeniably the Jester Spirit, however, with his sadistically amusing dialogue and interesting character arc.

While characterization in this game isn't exactly deep, it's still there.  Virtually every NPC and PC you meet has their own distinct voice, all speaking with different accents, turns of phrase, and attitude.  Some of them - like Norbert, my favorite little maniac dwarf shadowrunner - are actually pretty damn entertaining at times.

The Writing
The story is a mildly complex plot that holds up pretty well, even if specific motivations are rarely called into question.  There are a few good revelations and a couple of decent twists . . . nothing great, but enough to keep a player interested and entertained.  In the end and despite a few oddities here and there, it definitely gives the feel of a typical Shadowrun adventure.

The dialogue is where the writing really shines, however.  As mentioned before, each character has their own particular way of talking, meaning you won't get bored chatting up four or five people with identical speech patterns.  The writing also has a good bit of clever wit about it . . . one of the runners you can hire on is a shaman named Dances With Clams, and he makes ocean references from time to time.

One thumb up.

The Gameplay
The game works on a point and click interface that would have been more at home on a PC than on the SNES.  Examining, manipulating, and picking up things isn't really so bad, but having to hit a button, move the cursor over, and then start spamming the button some more whenever one wants to initiate combat is a little bothersome, especially since no one else - including any runners you may have hired - aren't bound by any such restriction.  You also can't move Jake around while any of the cursors (manipulate, attack, magic) are active, meaning that while your enemies are free to go wherever they want while they're filling Jake with lead, Jake has to stand rooted to one spot while he returns fire.

Also unfortunate is the dialogue window.  While talking to people, you receive certain words and phrases that you can repeat to them for more information or tell to other people to get more info or advance the story in some way.  The unfortunate part is that after a while you collect an exorbitant number of keywords, and unless you already know exactly which ones will and won't get a response, you have to go down through the entire list, one word at a time, until you find just the right one or two that will make things proceed.  And if you forget or miss that one little word somehow, you might go nuts trying to figure out what you did wrong and end up starting the whole process all over again.  I remember that the first time I played this game, I was stuck in the first section for what seemed like hours all because I somehow missed saying "Lone Star" to this one guy tucked off the back office of a building.

Still, it's not too horrible.  The system is, overall, workable.  The karma system is okay.  Basic, not too deep, but it does its job.

The Challenge
I've played and beaten this game several times before, but even knowing exactly where I needed to go and exactly what I needed to do when I got there, it was still fairly challenging for me.  I'd like to take this as a hallmark of a well-balanced game, that it can be challenging (if not as challenging) for veteran players and newbie players alike.  It helps keep one from getting bored with it too easily.

The Graphics
For the most part, the graphics are beautiful, showing off worn-down slums and shiny, glittering office buildings alike with wonderful style.  The overall map of the game is pretty small compared to most SNES games, but it makes up for it by making each section of that map unique, a collection of greatly varied environments from a car-lined junkyard to a Gothic cemetery to high-rise offices to underground computer labs, with almost no cloning of rooms whatsoever.

Where the graphics fail is regarding small clickable objects, a common problem with a lot of early point and click adventure games.  One of the first items you're supposed to pick up is a scalpel from the morgue Jake wakes up in.  Unfortunately, the scalpel is only about three pixels long, so it takes a little trial and error to even discover that it's something you're supposed to take unless you already know what you're looking for.

The Music
I love the music in this game.  It's got a kind of "rock noir" sound to it a lot of the time, and I found myself quite often singing along with the catchy background tunes.

The Bottom Line
I'm an avid fan of the Shadowrun setting, having been playing and GMing it off and on since high school.  I can't say I'm horribly impressed with this particular outing . . . I'm not particularly fluent in the first edition version that this game is apparently based on, but I'm still fairly certain that a lot was cut out or changed in the transition.  Prickly little things like a very shallow stats system and having a character use magic and cyberware without any sort of detriment.

Still, I don't hate it, either.  It plays pretty well and is a decent diversion for a slow afternoon.  Let's just call it middle of the road and leave it at that.