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Post subject: Re: The SNES translation list
PostPosted: Sun May 13, 2018 8:22 am 
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Location: Ireland/Spain, sometimes Eastern Europe
kurisu wrote:
There are other sites like 2ch archives, https://www26.atwiki.jp/gcmatome/, and other individual sites (all in Japanese of course).

But it's hard to get a whole lot of information on 25 year old games -- sometimes you can find the Famitsu review scores here and there.

Also there can be nostalgia confusion -- I've been very open that I'm judging these games from 2018, not when they were originally released. I can't say what I would have thought of a game like Dual Orb if I had played it in 1993 when it first came out. I certainly had a lot more motivation to play bad games since I could only get a few games a year.


Yeah, that's also a huge difference. In Europe, we had multicarts - tons of them, in fact, for most retro systems - so you could have like 100 FC games or something like that on one cart (albeit usually with glitches/crashes etc.) and that would last you for a long, long time. SNES wasn't nearly as popular as Genesis as well, let alone the computer systems (at least here in Ireland, same with the UK of course), and games on that system tended to be much shorter on average, with way fewer RPGs (in the case of consoles at least - RPGs/adventure games were super popular on the PCs), so that's why C-64 and Amigas are so popular for example - it's purely due to nostalgia.

I'm also curious about these Shinseiki Odysseia games, hopefully they prove worth the effort. There's seemingly not much on them, even in the Japanese internet they seem kinda obscure...


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Post subject: Re: The SNES translation list
PostPosted: Sun May 13, 2018 1:05 pm 
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There's one other site where a guy has reviewed (almost) every SFC RPG. I don't like the design of his page, but it's comprehensive.
http://www5f.biglobe.ne.jp/~hankotu/game.htm

He puts both Odysselias in the "bakage" (silly game) category although he gave the story a high rating.

His choice for the 9 worst SFC games: Maka Maka, Villgust, Light Fantasy, Cyber Knight, Song Master, Burai, Bazoe! Magic Land, Gaia Saver, and La Wares.

His best 4 games: FF6, Mother 2, Dragon Quest V, Torneko's Dungeon.

For each game he starts with a rating breakdown where he assigns star ratings to each category. The categories are:
物語 (story)
容量 (amount of content)
内容 (contents -- not quite sure what this is)
操作 (controls)
絵柄 (graphics)
音楽 (music)
調整 (adjustment -- not sure what this is, maybe control over your character development/growth?)
特殊 (individuality)
総合 (overall ranking)
キャラ・(characters)
難易度・(difficulty)


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Post subject: Re: The SNES translation list
PostPosted: Sun May 13, 2018 2:15 pm 
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Interesting that he considers Taloon's Great Adventure (as D-D here translated the title) one of the absolute best RPGs for the system, from what I can see. I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure if I'd consider it as good as FF 6 or DQ 5. Also, gotta love the "9 kusoge gods" section, hah. La Wares is, like he mentions, extremely short - you can really clear it in a couple of hours, and it is rather rudimentary at that. I liked the mecha theme though, not too many games have that. Thanks for the link, that's really quite interesting!

And from what I see, a "silly game" can be really bad too (Dual Orb 1...), so Shinseiki can go both ways, but at least the story is apparently good, like you're saying.


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Post subject: Re: The SNES translation list
PostPosted: Sun May 13, 2018 3:23 pm 
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I prefer what some people derisively call "generic" RPGs, and I'm not big on unique, add-on, or innovative features. I also don't need a lot of splashy, complicated graphics and cut-scenes or an explosive, dramatic, "catchy" musical score with excerpts and riffs that get stuck in my head for years.

To me, the story is everything.

How well someone tells that story makes or breaks a game-playing experience for me. Over the years, I have set aside dozens of games due to amateurish writing, suffering from chronic "kid-speak" that is chocked full of "cools" and "awesomes", not to mention passive voice phraseology every other string with no action verbs, combined with copious usages of nouns such as "stuff" to depict objects instead of naming them precisely.

As for these folks at websites who set themselves up to presume to rate RPGs (movies, books, whatever) in any language, I recall the wag I first heard mention something to the effect of, "Opinions are like [that part of our anatomy we sit on]. Everyone has one!"


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Post subject: Re: The SNES translation list
PostPosted: Mon May 14, 2018 3:50 pm 
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Bongo` wrote:
Looking forward to your review of SO1, kurisu! You'll be bound to shed some light on the mystique surrounding this series.

I can absolutely see why neither of the Odysselyas were fully translated, and it's NOT because of the content. The text storage and compression alone are some of the strangest I have seen yet...Has anyone successfully dumped the scripts for these games?[/quote]
It was one of the first RPGs I wanted to work on.
I got as far as decompression (could recreate the data to match a savestate), but when it comes to deciphering the script code, hadn't done it.

I recall still hitting upon scripting issues with Legend of Heroes and Kabuki Rocks. The latter definitely embedded the text within scripting engine code.

kurisu, I'm surprised Dual Orb 1 is a "terrible" game. I played maybe 60%, when considering whether to do anything with Nightcrawler on the game, or so before just getting bored.
As in, it was a rather bland and uninteresting game. (at least from the gameplay, I can speak nothing about the story.)
I think that would only qualify as a "bad" game, or is there something worse?


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Post subject: Re: The SNES translation list
PostPosted: Mon May 14, 2018 10:21 pm 
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KingMike wrote:

kurisu, I'm surprised Dual Orb 1 is a "terrible" game. I played maybe 60%, when considering whether to do anything with Nightcrawler on the game, or so before just getting bored.
As in, it was a rather bland and uninteresting game. (at least from the gameplay, I can speak nothing about the story.)
I think that would only qualify as a "bad" game, or is there something worse?


I thought it went well beyond bland and uninteresting. Up to the point where you enter the underworld I would agree, but the flaws in the game balance and tediousness get much worse after that. The dividing line between "bad" and "terrible" is a matter of personal opinion, I guess. But compared to Villgust, a game I would describe as the quintessential "bland and uninteresting" game, Dual Orb has more random encounters that are more difficult and provide less XP and money, more annoying dungeons that are needlessly long and confusing, the randomness of the "main character dies = game over" system, and such.

The story actually has some potentially interesting points in it, although ultimately it's not that great.


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Post subject: Re: The SNES translation list
PostPosted: Wed May 16, 2018 1:30 pm 
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This is why I avoid numerical ratings or anything else that suggests an objective standard -- everyone has their own ideas of what makes a game good. Story is not that important to me, for instance. And sometimes my opinion of a game might be swayed by things that aren't the game's fault.

But I guess I do count it against a game if it's tedious to the point where you need to hack the save file. When I played Dragon Quest V, I felt no need to even use the emulator speedup. Breath of Fire I used the higan speedup which is only about 1.5x or 2x. But now on Dazarb, the game I'm playing now, I moved over to snes9x so I could get the 18x or so speedup on battles -- I do think this counts against Danzarb's quality. I have a rule that for the first week I play any game, I do not use any emulator features, so I give each game a fair chance.


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Post subject: Re: The SNES translation list
PostPosted: Wed May 16, 2018 9:19 pm 
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To me, engaging is just if I wanted to play the game more. That's my most useful barometer of the quality of the game from my subjective standpoint.

For Dragon Quest V, I looked forward to playing the game. I wanted to keep playing it to see how the story developed, and to explore the interesting dungeons. So this is a good game.

With Danzarb, the game I'm playing now, I feel motivated to play the game primarily for the completion purposes, but I don't feel bored when I play the game or wish I were doing something else. So this is an average game.

With Dual Orb, I wanted to get it over as quickly as possible so I could move on to another game. When I was in the first week where I couldn't use the emulator tricks, it was a struggle to force myself to play the game. So this is a bad game (terrible in this case).

As I said, I do not pretend that my "ratings" are anything other than my subjective experience playing the game.


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Post subject: Re: The SNES translation list
PostPosted: Sat May 19, 2018 5:31 pm 
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Danzarb had a really engaging story for its time, in my opinion. I found it to be a simple but very enjoyable play when I first played it with some nice twists and turns as you progressed. I did not always like how the game basically made you pick a specific party out of the many characters you had, but it was a small gripe.

On the other hand, the second time I played and beat it, it was not as good, IMO. But not many games are still great on a 2nd playthrough. Secret of mana/SM3, Chrono trigger, soulblazer, breath of fire 3 and a few others are.

I do not expect Dual Orb to be any good. I could barely stand DO2. The music was, sorry to say, actually awful in parts, high encounter rate and just an average game. I actually wish DO had been translated first, as I would have played the 2nd to see the improvements.


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Post subject: Re: The SNES translation list
PostPosted: Sat May 19, 2018 8:19 pm 
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I just finished Danzarb; I pretty much agree -- the story is entertaining for 1993 and has some interesting (if somewhat ridiculous) twists.

My biggest complaint is how opaque the system is. You can't figure out what any character's attack or defense is, and they have a stat "DP" that isn't explained in the instruction booklet or in any koryaku site I could find. Characters have a weapon they're good with but it's hard to figure out which one it is. And so on.


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