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)

rodneylives

‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.

EDIT: Fixed one of the notes ab0ut herbs not giving you fullness, they do, it’s a little sneaky about it is all.

Due to other things going on I haven’t done a recap of the recent Nintendo Directs, but there was one thing mentioned that was extremely relevant to this blog: at long last, Square Enix has released a localization of the first Mystery Dungeon game into English. Here’s a trailer. (2 minutes)

I’ve represented this game before as Taloon’s Great Adventure, and it’s long had a fan translation. Now it has an official way to play it, though it seems like Spike Chunsoft had nothing to do with this recreation. The play seems mechanically very similar to the original, just with much sharper graphics. The characters and monsters are still represented using the original 2D pixel art, just presented in 3D dungeons.

There are a few modern Mystery Dungeon niceties, like a bar showing progress towards the next experience level and an on-screen display for fullness, but other than that, and the graphics, and the names localized according to current Dragon Quest sensibilities (lots of onomatopoeia and puns), it’s presented as it was originally released back on the Super Famicom, only now there’s an option for English. (Japanese is still offered as a language option.)

While a surprising amount of Torneko 1 persists even into the most recent Mystery Dungeon game, Shiren 6, there were some minor rule changes that will catch players who haven’t played the earliest game:

• Equipping arrows uses a turn, even though it’s mostly a user interface help, for there is no play difference between using L to fire one or going into the menu to launch it.
• In more recent Mystery Dungeon games it is impossible for traps or pregenerated sleeping monsters to block the ways into rooms, but I’ve seen it happen three times here.
• Torneko 1 is the only Mystery Dungeon game to use Rogue’s idea that, you’re going down into the dungeon to get an item, and once you get it you have to come back out again, through all the levels, the monsters getting easier as you go but no items generating on the way back up. All the later games just have you progress through the dungeon to the goal.
• On changes I approve of, monsters are more likely to choose directions other than straight ahead in dark intersections, and character healing is much more in line with Rogue than in recent Shirens: it starts slow and increases as you gain levels, instead of starting fast, but decreasing in effect relative to your maximum HP as that goes up.

I always say that the first Torneko Mystery Dungeon game is a lot like Rogue, and the first Shiren is quite a bit like Hack. Well, Torneko is more like Rogue than Shiren’s like Hack. Many monsters have direct analogues. Drackys are much like Rogue’s Bats, Muddy Hands are like Venus Fly Traps, Mimics are similar in both games (some versions of Rogue call them Xerocs), Funghouls are similar to Rattlesnakes and Walking Corpses degrade shields similarly to Aquators degrading armor. And of course Torneko’s Green Dragons are like Rogue’s ordinary Dragons.

Torneko 1 is most interesting to play if you’re entirely new to the Mystery Dungeon series. Lots of great monsters and items would come in later games, but they’re all absent here. There are no dungeon shops, no pots/jars at all, no monster promotions (though they can gain levels), and no allies, dungeon NPCs or bosses.

The intended progression of Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon is to complete a “Minor Mystery Dungeon,” which teaches the basics. It can be pretty difficult for newbies, even though it’s just 10 levels.

After that’s over, you’re expected to play the normal Mystery Dungeon many times, dying often, but the money you earn going to increasing the size of your shop and the town around it, which adds more amenities to them and more conversations with NPCs there, who go on about their whimsical JRPG lives, engaging in their own petty adventures and dropping more hints to playing the dungeon.

There’s many of these shop upgrades you can earn, but if you know what you’re doing, if you’re experienced at playing Roguelikes in general and Torneko in particular, you can complete the main Mystery Dungeon quest quickly, even on your first try. The ending was written expecting you to have fully developed your shop by this point, so if you win before that point, when Torneko returns to town it’ll be instantly advanced to nearly its ultimate state, and characters you’ve never met will congratulate you on finishing the quest as if they were your oldest friends. All this was true of the original game too, and it was just as jarring there.

As a typical with Mystery Dungeon games, the main quest is not the biggest challenge. There awaits a bigger task, with more kinds of items and full item identification and that disallows taking items in with you, called the Major Mystery Dungeon. And both the normal and Major dungeons have 99 levels, so if you choose you can explore down to the bottom of both of them.

I should warn you about a problem that has caused great frustration in my experiences with this remake. Mystery Dungeon games let you hold the R button to constrain movement to diagonals. This is necessary because it is really difficult to press two directions on the control pad at once in a single frame. This Torneko remake has this feature, but by default it takes a half-second to kick in. This version plays more slowly than most MD titles, with enforced pauses after actions to make sure the player sees that the monsters don’t act simultaneously with you, that they take their turns after yours. This will make experienced players, like me, try to rush through, and that will result in them making unintended moves when the R button doesn’t kick in instantly, as it does in every other Mystery Dungeon game. This has directly caused me to lose at least two runs, and I hate it.

On top of that, probably the worst thing about this game, is its price: $25 for a glowed-up Super Famicom game. You can get its great-great-great-plus-several-more-greats-grandchild Shiren the Wanderer: The Tower of Fortune and the Dice of Fate (Switch, Steam), for five dollars less, before any discounts, and at this moment on Steam it’s only four dollars! All the Shiren games are much deeper games, loaded with extra content and bonus dungeons. The recently-made Shiren 6 for $36/$40 (Steam currently half off, Switch) is a pretty good version.

I note that the credits to this game have a section for AI content. I don’t think that necessarily means it was used to make this game. On one hand, it would explain that concerning problem with the R button, and a couple of other UI problems. But on the other hand the credits are very long, and seem like they must list every employee at Square Enix. So I don’t know if they used it, but if they do then that’s despicable, and if they did it in order to avoid hiring Spike Chunsoft to port the game they made then that would be extra despicable, and then to charge so much for it on top of that. But I don’t know if is true at this point, so I won’t pass judgement… yet. It might explain the R button problem, and a couple of other weird sloppy bits I’ve noticed.

There is a charm to Torneko, and there are some changes in the later Chunsoft Mystery Dungeons that I don’t approve of, but it’s obvious that Square Enix made it mostly for the nostalgia money. It still makes for a good introduction, but you might want to wait until it goes on sale unless you’re desperate to have it.

But yeah, I was desperate.

What follows is my obsessive notes on this version, largely unedited, in case you’re desperate too.

Some differences from the original:

• The game plays more slowly, with an enforced pause between player and monster turns
• Torneko doesn’t automatically turn to face attackers when struck
• The ‘R’ button doesn’t immediately constrain diagonals, it takes about a half second for it to activate, longer if there’s a message box on the screen (changing the setting “Lock Movement to Diagonal” to Either in Game Settings corrects this, but is annoying in other ways)
• You can change game balance options to customize your runs, although it might make run ineligible for high scores and achievements
• Items don’t have descriptions in their item menu like basically every other Mystery Dungeon game, including, I notice, the original. Instead, to find out an items function (provided that it’s identified), you press ZL while selecting it.
• In addition to the classic B+A button combination to pass turns in place, ZR also does it
• The game lets you retry a dungeon immediately after failing it, with a Large Loaf in your inventory
• Land mines destroy nearby items, which I don’t think happened until later Shiren games
• The options for naming items include a “guess” option that lets you pick from items discovered in all past runs, although it doesn’t seem to actually name the item, it just checks it off of a list
• In the Play Records menu in the dungeon, there are a number of interesting lists, including all the items and monsters you’ve found among all your runs.

Things it’s useful to know:

• Equipping arrows uses a turn, which is not common in Mystery Dungeon games
• High score tables return, a fun but largely unnecessary feature
• Misses are much more common, from both you and monsters, than in recent Shiren games, don’t be surprised if you miss four times in a row once in a while
• Herbs don’t give you any fullness (EDIT: this was incorrect; they do give 5 fullness, but it’s added immediately, right when you use the item, not along with the other effects of the herb)
• Enemies gain experience and can gain levels, but don’t promote into new species as in Shiren
• Some general advice: Ledgerdemen (a.k.a. Magicians) can easily end your adventure at DL2.

Some other points of interest:

• This remake borrows the minus-charges convention from recent Sirens, for use of unidentified wands; if you use an unknown wand, it’ll say it’s “-1,” or minus-one, but this is just to remind you how often it’s been used
• It also displays Fullness on the display, and an experience progress bar
• The game makes you escape the dungeon after collecting a goal item; carrying the goal item turns off hunger, as it did in Rogue when you found the Amulet of Yendor (and were wearing no rings)
• No pots or dungeon shops in this game
• Food items eaten at full do not increase maximum fullness
• Traps can be generated in room doorways, unlike more recent MD games.

A list of enemy properties:

• SLIME: weak
• DRACKY: weak, may move randomly
• MAULUSC: weak
• GHOST: moves fast
• PLATYPUNK: average
• DROOLING GHOUL: divides sometimes when attacked
• FUNGHOUL: may caused poisoning
• BODKIN ARCHER: fires arrows
• LEGERDEMAN: can put you to sleep, always generates asleep, hard to awaken
• MUMMY BOY: strong
• BAG O’ LAUGHS: steals money, leaves money if defeated, may warp away when attacked
• IMP: Steals an item
• RESTLESS ARMOUR: high defense
• WALKING CORPSE: rusts shield
• LUMP SHAMAN: may teleport player away
• POWIE WOWIE: generates in groups of four, moves and attacks fast, whole group wakes up when one does
• LIVING STATUE: looks like dungeon feature statues, remains inert until you approach it, strong
• ROCKBOMB: stops moving and attacking when low on HP, may explode if then reduced in health without killing it (10 HP left), reducing a nearby player to 1 HP (explosion range 2 spaces in all directions)
• MUD MANNEQUIN: may perform a weird dance that drains a level
• MUDDY HAND: may grab Torneko and prevent escaping
• GOLEM: strong
• MIMIC: looks like an item until awakened
• GIGANTES: strong
• FLOAT-O-COPIER: weak, looks like another kind of enemy but doesn’t have its properties or strength
• POCUS POPPET: can reduce player maximum strength by 1, or maximum HP by 5
• SILVAPITHICUS: fast to move and act
• WINKY: can mess with player controls, can affect from anywhere in sight
• ARCHDEMON: strong
• SHADOW: invisible, may move randomly; if you try to move into a space but can’t for some reason, it’s because a Shadow is in the way
• GREEN DRAGON: strongest monster, may breathe fire, worth 3,000 XP

A few items:

• PEEP SCROLL: this game’s name for the famous Scroll of Identify
• SUSTAINING RING: Torneko doesn’t get hungry!
• MOD ROD: Transforms target into another monster
• PROFITIER RING: sells for a lot, that’s all, no other effect
• SANCTUARY SCROLL: prevents adjacent monsters from attacking in melee
• SNOOZE WAND: puts target to sleep
• EVAC SCROLL: escapes the dungeon
• CHEST OF CHEER: Your objective

Some items that appear, unidentified at first, in the Major Mystery Dungeon:

• SANDS OF TIME SCROLL: resets the dungeon level (including your stats, inventory and level) to the state it was in when you first entered it
• WANDERFUL SCROLL: asks you to pick an item like the Peep Scroll does, but charges a wand
• BREAD SCROLL: asks you to pick an item like the Peep and Wanderful Scrolls do, but turns the selected item into a Large Loaf
• COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO RING: doesn’t keep you awake as you may expect it to do, instead monsters wake up when you enter or leave a room.
• GOBSTOPPIBG SCROLL: player cannot use their mouth, meaning, no eating food or herbs or reading scrolls
• REVEALING RING: Shows invisible things
• SAFETY RING: Prevents being caught in traps

rodneylives

I made a list of everything on my Nintendo Switch account: <b><u><i>two hundred and seventy-one items</i></u></b></ironicfakehtmltag>. Some day I’ll give you the list, but not today. But I figured it’d be useful to people if I reported on some notable deals happening on the eShop from time to time. Nintendo doesn’t pay me to do this, and any links you use earn me nothing, it isn’t advertising. And only items that catch my eye, and survive the crushing wave of ennui these tasks produce, make it into this list.

Note 1: I round off most prices. I count every keypress dearly, and typing “.99” over and over again pours caustic soda on my remaining nerve endings.

Note 2: I use em-dashes in this. That is not proof I am some idiotic LLM, you adjective[entire] derisive noun[breadbin].

Note 3: A foundational requirement for being included in this list is it must be at least half off.

Note 4: No screenshots or covers this time. I’ve just been up all night tracking down Japanese words in the Super Famicom version of Shiren the Wanderer, my neurons are floating in a thick soup right now.

Ahem:

General

The Wonderful 101 Remastered ($18, 55% off) — One of the most beloved games for the Wii-U, and contains a superhero character called Wonder Toilet, I say approvingly.

Dokapon: Sword of Fury ($12.50, 50%) — new entry in the cult JRPG-styled board-and-party game series.

SteamWorld Heist II & Build Bundle ($18, 60% off) and SteamWorld Build & Dig Bundle ($14, 60% off)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants Unleashed ($16, 60% off)

Save Me Mr Tako: Definitive Edition ($3, 80% off): A rerelease of another Switch game that, I hear, was sabotaged by its original publisher. A challenging-yet-cartoony pixel art platformer with Game Boy graphics about an octopus hero, with a more involved story than you might expect. It’s three bucks, what have you got to lose?

Capcom

Resident Evil 4 ($10, 50% off) — The entry on the site spells “Resident Evil” all in lowercase for some stupid marketing reason. It’s widely acknowledge that this port of a Gamecube title is a high-point in the series, and contains zero percent zombies by weight. A lot of Resident Evil games seem to be on sale right now in fact, along with the Monster Hunter series, but I’ll leave those for you to seek out if you want them.

Street Fighter 6 (Switch 2 version, $20, 50% off) — After a dalliance with SoulCalibur back on the Dreamcast, and a ridiculous amount of time spent training amiibo fighters in Smash Ultimate, I’ve largely stayed away from fighting games. Still, it’s nice to see a classic series survive.

Devil May Cry, Devil May Cry 2, Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition (all individually $10, 50% off) — I never got into these, finding them a bit too preposterous, but I understand a lot of people like them, and hey, they’re here.

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy ($10, 66% off) & Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy ($25, 50% off) — Why is Apollo Justice more expensive than Nick’s games? I don’t know, but it’s a good reason to get it now before its price shoots back up.

Atari

AKKA ARRH ($6, 70% off): To think AKKA ARRH finally saw commercial release decades after the old Atari passed on producing its prototype, and this version was developed by Jeff Minter himself. But how do you pronounce it? Like a pirate? ARRRRRH.

In fact, a lot of Atari games are on discount right now, including multiple titles in its Recharged series of updated arcade remakes. A few others: Head Over Heels ($2, 80% off), Asteroids Recharged ($3, 80% off), Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration ($18, 55% off), Atari Flashback Classics ($12, 70% off), Atari Mania ($6.24, 75% off) and Centipede Recharged ($3, 70% off), among many others.

SquareEnix

A lot of SquareEnix games are on sale at the moment. Collection of Mana ($16, 60% off) — Three games, Final Fantasy Legend (Game Boy), the beloved Secret of Mana (SNES) and the heretofore unreleased-in-English Seiken Densetsu III, now christened Trials of Mana. Sadly Trials, unlike Secret, doesn’t support three human players, not even in its original version, but it does offer a lot of replay value with multiple scenarios to complete.

A while bunch of Final Fantasy games are currently on sale, too many to link them all. VII is $6.39 (60% off); IX is $8.39 (also 60% off). On the Enix side of the building, Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age ($20, 50% off) is interesting. There’s also four Kingdom Hearts games with typically silly names, like HD 1.5 + 2.5 ReMIX ($16, 60% off), but be careful, many of them are cloud versions that won’t work without an internet connection. There’s also Octopath Traveler and its sequel (both $24, 60% off) and Romancing SaGa 2 ($7.50, 70% off), among others.

rodneylives

What kind of focus image does a normal standard regular website get? Well how about a screenshot?

rodneylives

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Hiya hiya hiya Earth pleps, it’s your favorite alien gaming newscaster, here again with all the news that’s fit to blorp! Let’s get underway–

Ethan Gach at Kotaku notes that Nintendo had a video from DidYouKnowGaming about a failed pitch for a Zelda game that Retro Studios put together, but DYKG managed to get it reversed! Judging by the fact that like 90% of the posts on this blog seem to be about Nintendo one way or another you might think we’d be on their side in this, but nuh-uh! Nintendo abuses copyright law way too much, it’s good that this video was allowed to stand, yet it’s bad that ultimately Nintendo doesn’t suffer from these egregious actions. They can effectively throw out these legal threats with impunity, and their fans will just forgive them every time! I know that it certainly makes us feel a little bad about talking up their games so much!

So, more Nintendo stuff. At NintendoLife, Ollie Reynolds says that 2023 will be the year of 3DS GamePass. They even got an unshaven video maker on their staff to make the case for it. I mean, we’d like nothing better than to see that, but Nintendo themselves largely gave up on the 3DS and all its features years ago. It’s a nice thought though!

Also from Reynolds, good news: Pocket Card Jockey is getting a new edition! And they call it Game Freak’s secret best game! Yes, sweet vendication! And to think they gave its 3DS incarnation a “solid” 7 out of 10 at its release. But wait, there’s also bad news: it’s not coming to the Switch! It’s an exclusive release for Apple Arcade! Seems pretty boneheaded to me, but I don’t have an internal skeleton so what do I know?

While we’re on the subject of folk with heads of bone, Chris Moyse at Destructoid tells us that, in one of the most ridiculous decisions within memory, Square-Enix is doubling down on blockchain support in their games.

We love it when we can link to an article outside our usual stable, so here’s an article originally published in Japanese on Rockman Unity, translated into English and presented on Rockman Corner, an interview with the director of Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection about its upcoming release. Those games don’t get nearly the love they’re due, and it’s nice to see them given another chance to shine. Particularly, we’re told that the link cable battle play of the original games has been replaced with online matchmaking!

And to continue the upbeat tone at the end of our post this week, an article on Vice from Emanuel Maiberg about the formation of the biggest union in the US games industry!

rodneylives

Live A Live is currently the toast of the Switch, with over 500,000 in sales since it was released. Not bad at all for a remake of a Super Famicom game from Square’s classic era that had never made it out of Japan until now.

AustinSV on Youtube presents a video that goes into some detail about what was changed between the versions. If you’ve played the original (I’ve played a fair bit of it through the popular fan translation from Aeon Genesis), you’ll know a few things were definitely tweaked. I remember the Prehistory, by far the funniest chapter, being rather more risque in its humor, although the fart jokes and poop flinging were left mostly intact. Some of the changes are really interesting; they translated the whole Middle Ages chapter in iambic pentameter!

Which Version of Live A Live Should You Play? The Original + Switch Remake Reviewed & Compared (Youtube, 16 minutes)

rodneylives

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

It’s a rare day that we get to link to the Washington Post, in this case a piece by Michael Cavna on the death of Yu-Gu-Oh! creator, mangaka Kazuki Takahashi. Hey there Michael! Bet you never thought your work would be linked by a single-celled pixel-art organism! Can you ask them to do something about their ludicrous paywall drebnar? Yu-Gi-Oh! is only tangentially part of our purview here but there have been enough video games from that series that we can probably make room for it under Retro, plus it’s published by Konami. One of my favorite facts is that the card game includes several cards that officially refer to the Gradius series, including cards of the Vic Viper and Big Core.

Elliot Williams at Hackaday challenges us: You think you know how Mario Kart works? I think so? You supply electric potential through a wire to a console loaded with some game software, which sends signals to a video screen, and you use a wired controller to interact with it. Yes, I win! His article just links to a video (see above) about how the AI drivers work. This subject has been thought of so much that there’s a patent on such drivers granted to Lyle Rains for his work back in the early days of Atari, in 1979! That it took 20 years for that to expire is a blight on the history of game programming, drebnar!

PC Gamer’s Rich Stanton tells us that Yuji Naka is still angry at Square Enix for removing him from the Balan Wonderworld project. He accurately notes that the degree of acrimony from Naka about this is unprecedented-Naka is pissed and doesn’t care who knows it. The article suggests listening to both sides here. Here at Set Side B we admit, we tend to take the word of developers over those of gigantic corporations, especially when the developer is someone of Yuji Freaking Naka’s standing! We may be wrong, and if the word comes out that we are we’ll cheerfully admit to it, but it is easy for me to believe, in Naka’s words, that Square Enix “doesn’t care about games.”

Zack Zaiezen at Kotaku writes that Take Two is going after another Grand Theft Auto modder. Boo! Hiss! News like that fills up my angry sac!

It’s a good day for linking to non-gaming sites! At CNBC, Ryan Brownie warns of a coming contraction of the games industry, partly due to it coming down off the boost caused by the pandemic, and also from bottlenecks produced by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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EXPLANATION THE FIRST: LONG MODE

Barry Kramer, A Good Enough Summary of Kingdom Hearts, up to 3 (33 minutes):

Then, his A Good Enough Summary of Kingdom Hearts 3 (12 minutes):

EXPLANATION THE SECOND: SHORT AND SNARKY

JelloApocalypse’s So This Is Basically Kingdom Hearts (5 minutes):

EXPLANATION THE THIRD: VIDEOGAMEDUNKEY

vgd “explained” it in four minutes:

As a followup, his “explanation” of Metal Gear Solid (about 7 minutes):

EXPLANATION THE FOURTH: REALLY REALLY LONG

Dialing down the snark, NovaZone did a more reverent explainer in about three-and-a-half hours:

EXPLANATION THE FIFTH: BRYAN DAVID GILBERT

Part of the Escapist’s Unraveled series, Bryan not only promises to explain Kingdom Hearts, but all narrative, even including those that don’t contain Donald Duck, at least if you consider “all stories” as being the standard hero’s journey thing we’ve seen over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again by now. (15 minutes)

AND, MISCELLANEOUS

Honest Game Trailers (4 minutes):

And Loading Ready Run (7 minutes):

SORA, DONALD, AND GOOFY (2 1/2 minutes):

And that is just about enough of that. So, so long, from me, Mickey Mouse, and They Might Be Giants (1 minute).

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Bryan of Nintendo Everything brings us the words of the Mother 3 producer who thinks they know why it’s not been released in English: it has to do with the difficulty in bringing the special qualities of Shigesato Itoi’s prose to a language other than Japanese.

Gabe Gurwin of Gamespot thinks he knows why the Castlevania game reboot failed: the first one fit into the prior story but “frustrated” fans a bit, but the second one sucked. Eh.

Tom Nardi of hackaday brings us the experiences and pictures of Vintage Computer Festival East 2022.

One entire internet has been posting about Ocarina of Time remade in Unreal Engine with a 60fps frame rate. I am told that I should at least acknowledge this. I do so with Marc Deschamps’s mention on comicbook.com. It mentions the fact that Sora from Kingdom Hearts is playable.

Slightly more heartening is a report from Joseph Luster, writing for Crunchyroll, that two tactics games set in the R-Type universe are being remade.

Isaiah Colbert on Kotaku brings us news of Twitch’s plans for improving profits from streaming. Hint: they involve reducing the cut that streamers receive and even more ads! All problems solved! The streamers themselves don’t appear to be thrilled.

Tyler Fischer for comicbook tells us Square Enix plans of reviving the Fear Effect series.

And Lowell Bell on NintendoLife uses speculation about bringing them to Switch as their excuse to mention ten Western RPGs: Ultima (why only the original?), Diablo (it’s already got Diablos 2 and 3), Fallout (Wasteland 2 is there), Might & Magic VI (bring us Xeen!), Deus Ex, Morrowind, Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, Neverwinter Nights 2, Dragon Age: Origins and Witcher II.

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“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

Gavin Lane of Nintendo Life: Playnote gets a Flipnote Studio-style art app.

Jay Peters of The Verge, also on Playnote. Its makers wonder if its seasonal distribution model will be appreciated by purchasers of its becranked yellow joybox.

Ollie Reynolds of Nintendo Life: UbiSoft to shut down server support for a number of older titles.

Florence Ion (cool name!) of Gizmodo: Google Play is getting data safety settings.

Ollie Reynolds of Nintendo Life, again: Lego to release a huge new Super Mario set.

Thomas Whitehead of Nintendo Life (lot of items from them today): Game Freak to offer employees option of four-day workweek. Awesome!

Wes Finlon of PC Gamer: Moneyfarm Square-Enix unveils a new $11,600 statue of Terra from Final Fantasy VI riding Magitech armor that caused series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi to basically go WTF. Remember, back when he designed the first game in the series, Square was facing issues whether their little game development operation could survive.

“Master Blaster,” if that is their name, at Sora News 24, on Sega trying to bring eSports into Japanese high schools with a Puyo Puyo Boot Camp. “Listen up maggots, you’re going to spend the next hour setting up combos and fighting Draco Centauros until you get it right and I don’t want no backtalk or I’ll bust you down to facing Nohoho again!”

Rhys Wood of TechRadar: An Elden Ring demake for Game Boy is in the works.

Luke Plunkett of Kotaku: Super Mario movie delayed, Miyamoto promises it’ll be worth the wait. Aww, it’s just like that apocryphal quote often attributed to him. This reporter is overjoyed, the last one ended on that cliffhanger, Daisy was back from Dinohattan and needed Mario and Luigi’s help again, no doubt because of some scheme hatched by Koopa. I wonder how they’ll manage to bring Dennis Hopper back from the dead to reprise his role?

Alana Hauges, also from Nintendo Life: Sega plans to delist classic games from some platforms (but not Switch) in anticipation of the release of Sonic Origins.

And Ryan Dinsdale of IGN tells us Sony is creating a game preservation team, of which this reporter can only say, IT’S ABOUT FREAKING TIME.

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