Tag: rpg

A Ten Hour Documentary on Pool of Radiance

MrEdders123 on Youtube went way way beyond the call of duty and made a video on nearly every aspect of SSI’s classic RPG Pool of Radiance, the first official D&D product to attempt to adapt the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons tools to computer play with any degree of completeness and the first in the legendary “Gold Box” series. It’s nearly ten hours long.

It’s true that the length is kind of ludicrous, but in its description there is a helpful directory of chapters to get you to jump around it to the places most appealing to you. And what a monumental task they’ve accomplished! Included you’ll find a history of unofficial attempts to adapt D&D (many games cribbed from its rules in the early days), the licensed Intellivision D&D games, TSR’s own computer products, SSI’s becoming the official D&D company for computer games, the history of the Gold Box line, the play of the game itself, the ports of Pool of Radiance (including the Famicom release) and three fan remakes in different engines.

Playing Romancing SaGa 2

I have had a generally good time playing Romancing SaGa 2.

Until 2016, the 1993 JRPG had never been officially localized into English in any form, but then in 2024 Square-Enix made one of their upgraded remakes of it, giving it the whole modern-day spit-and-polish. As someone born in 1973, I refuse to use the term “glow up,” and am only camel-casing the title because it’s essential to the series identity. That’s the kind of thing that happens when someone with an English degree writes about video games.

If you’ve never played a SaGa game before, well, you might actually have, as the first three games in the series were renamed Final Fantasy Legend and released for the Gameboy. The words “Final Fantasy” at that time had a degree of name recognition in the US, paid for by Nintendo when they published the original Final Fantasy for NES. Nintendo wasn’t then, and has never been an altruistic company, as any publisher from the NES era would have told you, but it was good of them to sponsor this one, and the original Dragon Warrior, even if it was with future profits shining in their dollar-sign-studded eyes… and then both Square and Enix jumped ship to the Playstation because of Hiroshi Yamauchi’s refusal to use optical media for the N64. It wenteth around, and yea verily, around cometh it back.

The SaGa series has always labored in the shadow of its terminal cousin, despite it sharing some of the same talent in its origins. Generally SaGa games are much lighter on story, taking on a more simulationist approach. I’d say the games look generally more like a Western style RPG than Final Fantasy, so naturally the Romancing trilogy didn’t see US shores until they started rereleasing them. Instead we got Secret of Evermore. I tell you, there is no justice.

SaGa, famously, doesn’t use experience levels. Generally characters improve in statistics through use. In Romancing Saga 2, this takes the form of a system of weapon and magic skills, which each themselves have levels. When a character uses one in battle, it gets some points. The stronger the enemy, the more times it’s used, whether it defeats an enemy, even if it was a different character who used the skill, all of these things seem to factor in. Higher levels mean more damage, and also give the character a chance to learn better skills that use that weapon.

There is something you should know if you decide to play it, which is alluded to in the description on the eShop page but it’s possible not to realize it. At the start of the game you’re asked to pick one of two character models, one visibly male and one female. You don’t immediately play as either of them, however. You won’t see either of them until nearly the end of the game. Instead, you start out playing as Leon, the head of a small nation called Avalon, and his son and successor Gerard. The kingdom is beset by one of the Seven Heroes who are the major villains of the story, and both Leon and Gerard’s brother Whats-His-Name get killed. Gerard goes off and gets revenge on the scoundrel, and keeps going for a while, but eventually the game declares “XXX years pass,” where XXX is a number over 100.

Surprise! All of your characters are gone! Gerard too! The stories they had been a part of are just left hanging. I guess at some point Gerard got tired of avenging his family and saving the world, and decided to just do emperor stuff at home for the rest of his life.

I can’t emphasize how sudden and jarring this is. If you know it’s coming it’s not so bad, but up to this point it seems like the game had been gearing up for you to play Gerard for the full runtime, but no it really isn’t that kind of game. You’re given a choice of several successors, each one of them of the different characters you have available to you at that point in the game. You pick one, and the are given all of the skills that Gerard had. This happens many times during the game, each advancing the game clock a hundred years or so. If you pick a different class than the previous one, they gain its starting skills in addition to what they had before, so eventually your emperor becomes the most versatile member of your party.

After the start, the game is truly non-linear. You can explore the world largely as you wish. In the original I understand it made things feel aimless, but this version offers to keep track of quests for you, and show markers on the screen so you’ll know where to go. After beating the first of the Seven Heroes who are the antagonists, you can attack the others in different orders. While I usually like the classic style of these games, Romancing SaGa 2 is so far-flung and varied that you’ll be playing for many many hours even with the game showing you destinations, and while the quest markers can be disabled I recommend leaving them on.

Timeskips happen whenever you pass a major quest milestone, but can also happen when you finish a number of subquests. Some subquests can only be done by specific kinds of emperors, like a male one (boo) or a Corsair, and you’ll be locked out of them until you have one that fits the bill.

One important thing about timeskips is eventually you’ll be looking forward to them, because of another of Romancing SaGa 2’s little features. Every character, including the emperors, has a limited number of life points, or LP. When a character runs out of HP, they lose one LP permanently. There are also some attacks, I hear, that affect LP directly. Some characters have buckets of LP (I’ve so far seen up to 26), but some being with as few as 6. When a character reaches 5 LP the number is displayed in red from then on. When a character runs out of LP they die permanently.

It’s not quite permadeath in the roguelike sense, you can always go back to a previous save if you wish, but it does mean you have to make a choice: abandon all the progress you’ve made since the last save (this version of RS2 autosaves on area changes), or keep going without that character. The game will generate a new character for you to fill in the role of the departed, who can then be added at a tavern. If your emperor character runs out of LP you have to pick a successor immediately. I don’t know if a timeskip also happens in that case, but it probably does. Whatever causes a timeskip, all of the next generation of characters will have a new supply of life points, and you’ll be grateful for it.

Losing even one LP hurts, because Romancing SaGa 2 is shockingly hard! I’ve been playing on the “Hard” difficulty, which is the difficulty of the original, and characters run out of HP all the time. Frequently a monster will decide on hate this day, and make a single attack that drops a character to very low HP, or even knock them out in one move. I don’t know if it’s that bad on lower settings, but I enjoy the challenge of scraping through every battle. If you too choose hate, and play on Classic, be prepared to use every advantage to its utmost.

I haven’t yet exhausted the things to tell you about Romancing SaGa, but I have run out of time to write things down about it. I’m sure I’ll be back to tell you more soon.

Plus:

  • Combat is genuinely fun and challenging. A game like this, I think, challenge is the point of it. There are three difficulty levels, “Casual” (you are supposed to sneer when you say it), “Normal” and “Hard,” a.k.a. Classic. Normal is intended for experienced RPG players… but Classic is harder than that, and is the difficulty of the original Super Famicom game. It is truly difficult, and it’s the one I’m playing on. I hear two more, even harder, difficulties are unlocked after completing it, for players who enjoy bashing their heads into solid brick walls.

Minus:

  • I can’t emphasize enough how the game sets you up to think it’s one kind of game, then without warning throws those characters and their story away. Do not get attached to Gerard, he’s a nice boy but he won’t be with us long.
  • The succession system, which periodically replaces your entire party with descendants of similar skill, sometimes causes subquests to break. Sometimes you can restart them, but I’m not sure if you always can.
  • As you advance the story and fight monsters, the “enemy strength” rises too, which makes all the monsters stronger. As a result, a time-honored tenet of battle RPG systems, that your characters get stronger, is overturned. The world increases in power as your characters do. Due to this, it seems if you build your characters so they’re generalists you’re shooting yourself in the foot, as it means they won’t have a way to keep up with the rising enemy difficulty. It’s better to raise them each to specialize in something and stick with it, and switch your party composition to meet different challenges. I consider this to be a grievous design sin in an RPG (I was not a fan of Final Fantasy VIII) and it’s the worst thing about Romancing SaGa 2, but there’s a lot else here to recommend.

Weird:

  • All of the Seven Heroes have goofy French names.

Romancing SaGa 2 ($50 on Nintendo eShop)

More From The Bard’s Tale Diaries

The C64 Appreciation Society continues their playthrough of the first Bard’s Tale. (23 minutes) If you want to start from the beginning, they’re collected in this playlist. (7 items)

I’ve already introduced The Bard’s Tale in prior posts, so in brief: The original Bard’s Tale trilogy were all Wizardry-style dungeon exploration RPGs in the classic style, called by some “blobbers.” Indeed they did a lot to define that style. A few things that Wizardry did weren’t adopted by later blobbers, especially its particular form of permadeath, its simulation of “Out” parties and retrieving lost characters from the dungeon, and its willingness to obliterate your entire group instantly and permanently if you teleported into solid stone.

The Bard’s Tale, on the other hand, looks exactly what the standard picture of a classic blobber looks like today. So long as you have the cash to revive a character there is no real penalty for dying, there is no absolutely solid stone to teleport into, and there’s no concept of “Out” parties, for if your party wipes their corpses get mysteriously teleported back to the Adventurer’s Guild, where if there’s enough gold in their cold pockets you, I guess in the capacity of being a caring guardian spirit, can tell the priests to bring them back to life.

But while not as eager to annihilate members of your group, neither is The Bard’s Tale an easy game. Compensating for the lack of permadeath, dungeons tend to be much more diabolical in design, with magical darkness, teleporters, spinners and antimagic zones in evidence. Dungeon levels are bigger than Wizardry’s, there are more of them, and most significantly to a new player, “Town,” here named Skara Brae, isn’t a simple menu of options but an entire level of its own to explore! And at the start of the game, you don’t know where anything except the Adventurer’s Guild is! You have to do significant mapping before you can buy equipment, recharge your spell points, or even raise your experience level.

In this 7th installment of the video series, the player finds and begins to explore the third of the game’s dungeons, finds some interesting items, suffers from disk corruption and loses some progress, earns it back, and fights a jabberwock.

Richard Garriott Getting Ultima’s Copyrights Back

It’s been going around the gaming bigsites (PC Gamer, Time Extension, Kotaku, Eurogamer and others) that due to a quirk of US copyright law Richard Garriott, who begin the Ultima series in June 1981, may finally be getting back the rights to his now-ancient series from the corporate behemoth, Electronic Arts, that has long owned them.

The details of the story are that this only involves the copyrights, not the trademarks. But trademarks are different from copyrights, they must be continuously defended and expire if not utilized. Every so often Electronic Arts attempts to do something new with the Ultima name, but none of them usually turn out that successful. The sole remaining example of classic Ultima is the venerable MMORPG Ultima Online, older than World of Warcraft, even older than Everquest. It’s possible that EA could use its unbelievable continued existence as a pretext to keep hold of the Ultima trademark, but UO is incredibly ancient itself nowadays and doesn’t have the large userbase it once did.

I have no love for the monstrosity Electronic Arts has become, the memory of their enlightened early years under Trip Hawkins fading after decades of stagnating sports lines chained to big leagues licenses, and piles of brown and gray military shooters. They sit on countless classic computing properties, doing nothing with them while people who fondly remember them age and die off. Yet I choose to believe this isn’t out of spite, more that they can’t be assed to do anything with properties that aren’t gigantic sellers.

Ultima is one of the few cases where a piece of their gigantic lucite block of IP shows a crack that could be broken away. Richard Garriott has maintained his wealth from the time of Ultima’s success, and may have the resources to fund a revival. Whether it would be successful… I can’t say. Garriott has tried making multiple games since leaving behind Ultima with varying degrees of quality. His Tabula Rasa from NCSoft, from nearly 20 years ago, didn’t do well; I’m not apt to hold that against Garriott though, considering how badly they treated City of Heroes.

Every so often Richard Garriott comes up with some new concept, but truthfully it’s been a while since he’s made waves. I personally sat at a talk he gave at DragonCon a few years ago where confidently held forth on the direction that he saw gaming going, but then failed to go. I’ve tried Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues recently, he was involved with it but has long since left it. I bounced off. I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but Garriott’s most recent project involved NFTs, which seems like a huge danger sign.

My personal opinion is that Richard Garriott should immediately approach Digital Eclipse, developers of the terrific remake of Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, and together start making something along those lines. Richard, if you’re somehow reading this, please consider it! They do great work. Maybe something involving Ultima III, IV or VII? Any of those would be amazing and could open up this long-neglected series for a new generation of players.

Anyone else out there have personal experience with how amazing this game was?

I’ve heard that Garriott is going to be at DragonCon again this year. I plan on reporting on it on-site. Despite what you might think from what I wrote two paragraphs above I’m still rooting for him. Ultima is the most shamefully neglected classic RPG franchise out there right now, and I’m excited to think that it might make a comeback, no matter how unlikely that might seem right now. I didn’t think Wizardry could make a comeback either! Let’s all clutch our ankhs tightly and hope.

The First Console RPG

Proclaiming something for sure in the realm of vidyagaems is just asking to be challenged and possibly humbled. Yet it seems likely that the first true video RPG, as pointed out by -Eclipse14- in this video (10½ minutes), is the Atari 2600/Supercharger game Dragonstomper.

I have played Dragonstomper, in fact I wrote about it in an ebook on 2600 games here, and it’s quite an interesting game. Defining an RPG these days is rife with complication, but then it a bit more obvious: statistics, character building, equipment, exploration and turn-based combat. Dragonstomper has all of these things and more.

The Supercharger was a peripheral that allowed games to be loaded off of cassette tape. The unit itself housed an amount of RAM that held the games that the system would run. The Atari 2600 didn’t have write lines leading out to the cartridge, so the Supercharger had to load the code itself, which looked like normal inflexible ROM to the Atari. But the Supercharger could handle multiload games, making it much easier to make large games for the console. Dragonstomper was stored on the tape in three segments, corresponding to three stages of the quest.

The first section, and the most open-ended, involved exploring the kingdom, fighting monsters, finding items and trying to build your character’s power. A complication to this is that five magic items, a Charm, a Cross, a Potion, a Ring, a Staff, have randomized functions that change every time you begin a game. (There is no saving; the Atari has no way of writing to the tape.)

To get to stage two, you must get past the guard to town, either by showing him an ID, by bribing him, or by defeating him in combat. (They have more health than the dragon!) Town is kind of a break area where you shop for items to help you in the final part of the quest: the tunnel to and fight against a dragon waiting for you in its cave.

There’s all kinds of interesting things you can do, that helps give the game a lot of replayability. For example, you can hire fighters in town to accompany you against the dragon. There are traps around but also items that can reveal their locations to you. You can fight the dragon in melee, or by firing a longbow at it, or you can even avoid fighting it all together by figuring out how to get the gem its guarding without fighting it. There is a GameFAQs guide to it (contributed as late as 2023) that gives a good rundown of how to play and win.

Indie Dev Interview with Jake Houston

For this episode of the perceptive podcast, I spoke with Jake Houston who is a solo developer working on his rhythmic RPG Game Over. We spoke about working on the game, RPG design and more.

The Basement Brothers look at Popful Mail for the PC-88

Falcom’s Popful Mail is one of those games that takes after classic anime. It’s almost the perfect anime-styled light RPG, with appealing and fun characters on a quest that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It got a good number of ports, and they all have something a bit different about them. In the US we only got the Sega CD version, ported by the prolific-but-controversial Working Designs, but in Japan there was a PC-88 original, and ports to the PC-98, PC Engine CD and Super Famicom. Hardcore Gaming wrote them up here.

I could go on about its very light RPG elements (there’s no experience system at all), its comedic story, its characters and music, and I will someday. But until then, please be content with what the Basement Brothers had to say about the original PC-88 version of Popful Mail, which is the version for the weakest machine, but still fun. (39 minutes)

Falcom had developed a reputation for making hardcore, unique and system-heavy RPGs like Dragon Slayer and Xanadu, so Popful Mail was a departure. It was designed to be an early multimedia game, with animations and even voice acting in some versions. This version, however, was distributed on floppy disk, and for a underpowered system, so it couldn’t rely on audio-visual splendor. It still did pretty well for itself, as the Brothers demonstrate.

It’s always saddened me that Popful Mail was a one-off. It’s a property that seems ripe for sequels and animation, but to my knowledge it never happened. Maybe Falcom will ease their stream of Ys sequels someday and look at updating more of the other games in their history, and maybe then they’ll return to Mail and her cartoony comrades. Here’s hoping.

Eamon

(Edit: changed stylization of the name of the system so it’s not all-caps.)

I was sure I had posted about this before, I mean I had to have. It’s such a cool bit of gaming history, never less than a bit obscure, but still, incredibly, has multiple websites devoted to it today. While waiting to binge on Kirby Air Riders, I figured I’d work off some of my indie KARma (heh) with this post about something that could not possibly be more different.

Title screen image from Renga in Blue.

I’m talking about Eamon, an Apple II text adventure/RPG system with ports to other platforms (there was a not much used C64 version, and a PC/MS-DOS version with a bit more uptake), but was biggest on Apple II.

Eamon itself isn’t a single game, but is more like a family of games, each created to a certain specification. The closest thing that Eamon has to being at its center is the Master Disk, which is a character creation tool and a starter adventure. The idea is, you create and customize a character using the Master Disk, which saves your character and allows you to take them into other adventures, written by others.

If you remember me talking about Dungeon (from Loadstar issue #74 and others), it’s the same kind of idea, but from far earlier, and a lot more freeform. Dungeon had creation tools and a game engine. Eamon adventures were BASIC programs written from scratch, that modified the character file. Your in-game surrogate was really at the mercy of whatever horrors the adventure writers had in mind. If you feel a mild chill of existential horror at the idea, that’s because you live after decades of internet culture has trained you to recoil in fear that a software author could do just anything. It requires a degree of trust on the part of the user. Of course, Eamon adventures varied in quality and fairness. You have to expect that even your best characters could get pasted by a level 1,000 Tarrasque right as an adventure begins. Of course, smart people made backups of their character disk; in a chaotic realm like this, it’s a lot less cheating than basic prudence.

I promised links to websites. Here they are.

There’s Eamon Remastered, which is a web-based recreation with many recreations of classic games. With it, you can create a character which is saved to the website, then put it through the options on the Master Disk, and then can send them through the adventures, without having to get an emulator working or anything. If you just want to try it, that’s probably the best.

EAMON Remastered, in the Beginner’s Cave

There’s a full Eamon Wiki, the Eamon Adventures’ Guild Online, the Adventurer’s Guide to Eamon, and the blog Renga in Blue’s description. Given that it’s an obscure text adventure system written in BASIC and created in 1979, it’s frankly astounding that there’s so much information on it on the Living Web.

I’m surprised that Eamon isn’t more widely remembered now, as there were hundreds of adventures (at least 280) made for it. The Digital Antiquarian wrote about the history and play of Eamon: Part One, Part Two, a liveblogged exploration, A Journey Into the Wonderful World of Eamon, and some expressed frustration on coming up with a definite history of Eamon.

Gaming Jay plays Eamon (33 minutes):

So, how do you play this?

First off, you should probably try the Eamon Remastered web-base recreation, which has a fair number of adventures to play. Here is its manual.

After you create your character (if you’re playing the Apple II original, make sure to follow directions in town, as the game is positively gleeful about killing newly-made characters), you’ll want to buy a weapon and some armor. Advancement in Eamon is not of the level-based D&D style, instead characters advance by doing. When you attack with a weapon, you might improve in your ability to use it. When you’re struck by an attack, you might improve in your use of armor. It lacks the “dopamine hit” (I hate that term) of gaining a level, but I think this is quite a more realisticm, and dare I say, better, method of character advancement. It’s more like the Runequest/Call of Cthulhu/Basic Role-Playing system, where most of a character’s ability is encoded within a number of individual skills. Though it’s a lot more gradual, it also means that characters are a lot more individual.

When you play it, you’ll find that it works basically like Infocom adventures did. Since each Eamon game is a program to itself, things could work very differently between them, but I think most of them tried to adhere to some shared conventions.

The “Beginners Cave” adventure is the intended first experience with EAMON. It provides you with some basic treasure, opponents and advancement. It is quite possible for a new character to die there, so treat this adventure with care. I found that there’s some quirks. “take [item]” tends not to work; “get [item],” however, does. “attack [monster]” can be used to attack in melee. There is a button, by the input box, that you can click for a list of available commands.

I don’t know if this is true of every adventure, but to get away from a battle you’re currently in, it won’t do to move out of it, if you don’t want to fight you should use the “flee” command, although monsters can follow you anyway if they choose. Flee sends you to the previous room you were in. If the monster that was menacing you chooses to follow, then I don’t know what else to do than just keep attacking and hope for the best.

I don’t have a lot of experience with Eamon myself, so I must leave you to your own devices for furthering your adventuring career. Good luck!

Baldur’s Gate 3 Final Patch Animation

Larian Studios has announced the last Baldur’s Gate 3 content patch, and they commissioned a cartoon, from Spud Gun Studios, to commemorate it. It’s more mass-market than most of the things we present here, but eh, it’s the final patch. 4½ minutes:

The same people did some other animations over the past months as well, so we might as well make this a roundup post. They’re all official content.

Mod Support (3 minutes):

The game’s leaving Early Access (3½ minutes):

Christmas (3½ minutes):

And The Greatest Foe (a particular frog in the swamp, 2 minutes)—but Youtube’s awful policies think it’s made for kids, despite the frog getting murdered bloodily at the end, so they made it unembedable. YOUTUBE HAS DONE A STUPID THING, LET THIS ALLCAPS MESSAGE STAND IN TESTAMENT TO THIS RIDICULOUS FACT.

Gamefinds: Dungeon of Hank

It won’t take you more than a few minutes to play Marlowe Dobbe‘s Dungeon of Hank, a short and free homebrew Game Boy game made with GB Studio, and it’s not challenging. But it does have a lot of cute cat pictures, and is funny, and that’s enough. It’d probably be enough even without the funny. Cat’s cute, just sayin’. The cat’s name, you should know, is Hank Stuart Bastard. It doesn’t sound like one that T.S. Elliot would bestow, but then, what the heck is a Rumpleteaser anyway?

Who indeed!

Dungeon of Hank (itch.io, free)

Sundry Sunday: Proving Grounds of the Bard Fox

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Taking a short break form gushing over Atari Games’ Rampart to bring you this fun, short animation, by Only Jerry, set to the battle theme of the Japan-only PC Engine version of Wizardry. It’s only a minute or so, so please enjoy!

Hidden Dialogue in Earthbound

It might not seem like it, but in the 8- and 16-bit era, text in a game was rather expensive.

The expressive power of an English sentence is great, but in a way, that of an equal number of bytes of assembly is greater, due to it living and working in the machine, and not just in the head of the player. A page of text is about 700 words; at an average of five characters each, uncompressed that’s 3,500 bytes, or 3.5 kilobytes. By contrast,the whole OS of the Commodore 64, Kernel and BASIC ROMs combined, is 8K.

Most JRPGs are thought to have lots of text, but really they have less than you might think. Square used a few tricks to make a little text seem like more than it really was: like the use of larger fonts, and using graphics to put on little skits to illustrate scenes instead of just displaying them as plain old words. And of course there’s compression. A good compression scheme, while troublesome for fan translators, can still cut down the size of text by half.

But Earthbound is a unique game in many ways, and one of them is the amount of text it has. Creator Shigesato Itoi is a copywriter and essayist, and he wrote a ton of words for Mother 2, Earthbound’s Japanese version. Translator Marcus Lindblom gave it a localization that many regard as one of the greatest of all, that manages to get across much of the wit and charm of the original.

It was a huge task. The text dump on GameFAQs, compiled by someone going by the name “BlueberryButtface,” is 391 kilobytes; the size of the game’s ROM is a bit over 3 megabytes. A direct comparison isn’t really helpful because the dump on the page is uncompressed, but it’s still useful to get a sense of scale.

A lot of this text, as it turns out, is hidden. Not in the sense of being locked off from the player, unused in the game. The text is findable in the game, but much of it is obscure, available only at a specific part of the game, or easy to miss. And, this being Earthbound, much of the text is pretty funny!

On Youtube (again), Cybershell has put together a 28-minute video that uncovers much of this hard-to find text. I already knew about much of it, because I’m weird like that, but it’s nice to have someone present a guide to what’s there and how to find it. A lot of it is the text of the Hint Guy, who, as in the style of Nintendo’s games at the time, will give you a pointer to whatever you have to do next in the story if you pay him a fee. All the hotels in the game have newspaper text appropriate to the point of the story you’re in, even the one way back in Onett, the starting town. Items have interesting descriptions if you think to ask for them. And of course, after you win the game, you can go back in and talk to the NPCs on the way back home, and frog help me, Shigesato Itoi wrote, and Marcus Lindblom translated, congratulatory text for nearly everyone in the game. And there’s more, even than that.

Here’s the video. It’s a fun use of half an hour, if you have any interest in Earthbound.

Rare and Obscure Dialogue in Earthbound (Youtube, 28 minutes)