My Quest To Defeat One Of The Granddaddies Of Kusoge: Makai Hakkenden Shada - A Terrible Ys Copycat

Some Background Information

Forgive me @mento, but I decided to cover a TurboGrafx-16 game on this site. Near the end of 2024, I mentioned during my write-up about an insane Garfield JRPG that I was on a podcast that discussed a variety of kusoge games. What I failed to mention during that blog post was the game I selected for the podcast: Makai Hakkenden Shada. My reasoning for picking that game was simple. With co-host Cassidy of The Bad Game Hall of Fame picking the Garfield JRPG, my friend ArbitraryWater picking An Elder Scrolls Legend: Battlespire, and the final guest picking Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order, I wanted to choose a game that fit the "kusoge" label from a purely orthodox perspective. Before we continue, let's start with the basics. What is "kusoge?" The term approximately translates from Japanese to "shitty game" and is used to describe games that are poorly designed to the point that they are outright unenjoyable to play. The minute you boot up a kusoge game, you should instantly know something is off. It might look like a video game and sound like a video game, but what you are experiencing feels like an artifact from an alien culture. For those of you frequenting this very site, these games are "Blight Club worthy," but maybe even a step above the staff's tolerance levels.

Does this look familiar to you? Do you think you can name the game this one copied? I'll give you a hint, it rhymes with yeast.

My task was simple: find an old-school kusoge JRPG that could take up at least twenty to thirty minutes on a podcast that followed a roundtable format. However, the field for quintessential kusoge JRPGs from the 8-bit and 16-bit eras is packed, so why did I pick a relatively obscure TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine title that never saw the light of day outside Japan? First, Makai Hakkenden Shada has a shockingly well-done English fan translation that dates all the way back to 2015. I've already played Hoshi wo Miru Hito, and while that game finally got a complete English fan patch a few years back, for whatever reason, I can never get that patch to work. Likewise, I haven't dabbled with the PC Engine as much as the rest of my fellow retro gaming enthusiasts. I have played Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, Valis III, and the PC Engine version of Ys I & II, but maybe the most off-the-beaten-path outing I've had with the platform is Tengai Makyō II or Air Zonk. The PC Engine, as I know it, is a black hole in my general gaming knowledge, and I truly believe you come to understand a console's strengths and weaknesses when you play the worst titles released on it.

Okay, so this game was on a platform I haven't checked out much, but why did I try to finish it? I do try my best to complete most of the games I write dedicated blogs about, but when it comes to the bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, I'm a strong supporter of Wolpaw's Law of Game Reviews. By the time I reached the game's mountain sequence, in which you need to trigger lights at the entrance of every cave opening before the path opens to the next town, I felt comfortable articulating how I felt about Makai Hakkenden Shada. No additional pontificating was needed to render a verdict about its wretched hitboxes or creatively bankrupt graphical stylings, which I will discuss shortly. When I toiled away for thirty to forty minutes on the game's penultimate boss battle because of how bullshitty it was, I could have stopped there and saved myself from another hour of mental anguish and turmoil. And yet, I kept going. Despite the game's many tricks to make my life miserable, I continued to make progress and started to find ways to avoid its worst traps. The incompetence of how the game was designed and how it bucked the standards for RPG design raptured me. I had to see it to the end, even if it killed me.

Bosses that can murder you in just a few attacks? Oh, kusoge, how I missed you not being a part of my life.

And as you can see, I was victorious over Makai Hakkenden Shada, though that did involve a lot, and I do mean a LOT of save scumming and plenty of save states. I don't recommend Makai Hakkenden Shada, but I suggest you check out at least one actual kusoge game and see if you can finish it. You honestly come to appreciate the games of the past when you play gnarlier titles from time to time. Makai Hakkenden Shada came out a whole year after Super Mario Bros. 3 and the same year as Ducktales and Mega Man 2. What were the people behind this game thinking when they shipped a game in 1989 that looked like THIS?!

The Curious Case Of Makai Hakkenden Shada And Why It Is Kusoge

When it comes to kusoge JRPGs, Hoshi wo Miru Hito stands tall. And while it is a legendary shit game, it also is never afforded any context on why it is as bad as it is. When developer Another and publisher HOT-B started work on Hoshi wo Miru Hito in 1987, they didn't have much referential material to work with, and their previous work, Psychic City, is one of the earliest examples of a science-fiction cyberpunk RPG. By the time they started developing the game, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, or even Ys hadn't codified the template for the JRPG genre. In fact, when Another started working on Psychic City, which Hoshi wo Miru Hito sought to "remake," they had to turn to The Black Onyx, Ultima III, or Wizardry III. Again, it's not a great game, but Hoshi wo Miru Hito was making a blueprint for a game that didn't exist; on the other hand, Makai Hakkenden Shada has no excuses. I feel safe saying that because the latter is a shot-for-shot trace job of Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished. That's not hyperbole. The game's opening cinematic and starting town are precisely the same as Ys I's. The game even uses the bump combat system, wherein combat is in real time, and you damage foes by running into them, hoping you have the appropriate level and attack rating to deal damage. The first and foremost thing that makes Makai Hakkenden Shada kusoge is that it is a straight-up plagiarism of a better game. Yet, because it came from a team that wasn't familiar with RPG game design and mechanics, it screwed the formula up.

Yeah, this game is pretty shameless in borrowing from Ys

I am not the first person to point this out. HardcoreGaming101 raised the "plagiarism" specter against this game as far back as 2015, ten years before the publication of this blog. That's to say, this accusation isn't breaking news. Furthermore, the lack of inaction from Nihon Falcom isn't surprising given that they were in the midst of almost all of its veteran staff leaving the company (tthanks to @bowl-of-lentils for reminding me of that with their video), with the figureheads behind the first batch of Ys games forming their own company, citing a toxic work environment at Nihon Falcom. Lagoon on the SNES was another bottom-of-the-barrel Ys clone that benefited from Falcom being at its weakest and most vulnerable state, but at least Lagoon is funny to look at and has a mostly banging soundtrack. The bones are rotten with Makai Hakkenden Shada, even though its developers copied someone else's homework. Here is one of the most egregious examples I can think of off the top of my head. The entrance of the game's first true "dungeon," which is styled as a samurai's castle, is guarded by a ninja who only gets out of the way if you relinquish a katana, which costs 800 in-game gold. At this point, most enemies only drop between two to five pieces of gold, so you're looking at killing at least fifty to sixty enemies to eliminate a roadblock that immediately nabs your best offensive weapon. However, because the scripting for the game is borked, if you leave the dungeon before you re-encounter that same ninja further in the castle, they re-appear at the entrance, asking for the same sword you just gave him. The developer forgot to de-dupe required NPC encounters. Seriously. Luckily, the sword does respawn at the merchant in the nearby town next to the castle, but you're back to the grind of reacquiring the finances to get the sword all over again if you make this mistake.

This sequence is complete bullshit.

The game starts without any opening narration or introduction and instead with your character in the middle of a small village with two explorable buildings. One is a merchant that provides access to the starting equipment, and the other is the home of the initial quest giver who lays out the story and gives you 300 gold to buy stuff. The game doesn't say shit, and to add insult to injury, it plops you right in front of the entrance to the starting plains area, where you are directed to complete your first grind session. Worse, your starting income is enough to buy the starting weapon OR the most basic set of armor; you can't buy both, which means you either make a glass cannon that can beat enemies quickly but dies in two hits or you make a tank where everything takes five hits to kill. And whatever build you decide on, progressing to a more balanced build takes about ten to fifteen minutes, barring the probable "Game Over" screen or two. It's the first environment, and getting your first level up is already an absolute ordeal. The game shows its hand and instantly relays how critically it lacks "game juice." And getting that first level up is an atrocious chore. Given that we are working with a modified version of the bump combat system, you can only fight the very first enemy type in the first environment. However, unlike Ys I, you need to kill twenty to twenty-five of them to net your first level. The expected immediacy of moving your character from level one to two is something the designers of Makai Hakkenden Shada ignored outright for no reason. It's not as if its version of the bump combat system is complex, so forcing you into a grind session that lasts double that of the game it copied is outright bizarre. And hilariously, it commits the same cardinal sin as Ys I's version of the bump combat system. Most of the time, you're either murdering everything in your way without breaking a sweat or you're in constant fear of dying. There's no middle ground.

A screenshot showing me trying to take advantage of the bump combat system on some feral chickens. Take note of the fact the game starts you with only 10 HP.

For an example of the game's lack of "juice," the first boss battle comes to mind. The boss is a giant werewolf that leaps around from left to right and vice versa, dealing massive damage when you don't attack him from an incredibly unforgiving angle. The game doesn't tell you any of this, and the hitbox is completely screwed up. However, the enemy programming in Makai Hakkenden Shada is the walking embodiment of "Amateur Hour," as I was able to find the exact line where the game's first boss would never cross to the pixel and immediately figured out what the level's unintentional safe zones were. From there, all I needed to do to beat the boss was walk from left to right and right to left, and they were dead within ninety seconds. That's not even the first example of the game not feeling "right" with a critical set piece. There's a moment in a forest leading up to this dungeon wherein the game presents you with a placard that says a riddle that amounts to "turn around from here to find the true path." If you move forward to the rightmost exit on the screen, you end up exactly where you were upon entering; the screen is an infinite loop until you find the solution to the riddle. Exiting from where you came drops you back at the previous interstitial sequence with endless waves of enemies attacking you that likely stopped giving you EXP an hour ago, a point I'll review later. The solution is to approach the placard with the riddle, turn right, and bump into a tree, which looks no different from the normal border texture for the environment, and this reveals itself to be a secret passage. You read that one right! This game has invisible walls, which I admit were a common annoyance, especially in JRPGs of this era, but this one seems especially heinous given that it is the start of the game. After murdering chickens and rabid dogs, the game drops an obtuse riddle on you, which, upon looking at some scant documentation about the game, ended up being a brick wall for most not playing it with a guide.

The Mid-Game Kusoge Brick Wall

There is a story in this game that haphazardly introduces itself from time to time.

After playing my share of kusoge, I have come to this realization. While most of them feel like Sisyphean torture wherein the odds are demonstrably stacked against your favor, the vast majority have final acts or concluding boss battles that are cakewalks. The reason for this recurring flaw is simple: most kusoge lacks balance or a carefully crafted end game. Games within this crease often give you tools to populate your toolbox without properly considering or testing how they impact their respective power curve. A prime example is Hoshi wo Miru Hito, wherein, because of how slow the game is about populating your party and how level-ups work, it is incredibly punishing when you first start. However, it is laughably impossible to get a "Game Over" after the halfway point because the programmers failed to give enough AOE spells and moves to your enemies, and your HP growth was mapped on an exponential chart. However, like most kusoge, there's this awkward middle point where you haven't quite turned the corner on the game, and it is still throwing new enemy types or scenarios that can clean your clock. The latter of those design flaws plague Makai Hakkenden Shada, but it's almost worse here than in Hoshi wo Miru Hito. That's right. There's something about this game that is significantly worse than Hoshi wo Miru Hito.

The inventory system with the game's core three stats (i.e., your level, attack, and defense) which determine how the bump combat works. Also take note of the one herb I have.

Like the bump-system Ys games, you reach Makai Hakkenden Shada's level cap, a solid dungeon or two, before reaching the game's final environment. However, with the Ys games, you improve your character's stats by procuring equipment and abilities, and therein lies the biggest mistake the makers of Makai Hakkenden Shada made when trying to copy Nihon Falcom's homework. After you exit the second town and are plopped on the other side of a mountain, there are no merchants to restore your healing items, no inns to rest in for cheap HP restores, and there are no weapons to gain other than the ones you collect through the progression of the story or opening treasure chests in dungeons. That's predictably a problem during the middle of Makai Hakkenden Shada because you eventually find yourself in a cave populated almost entirely by undead and poisonous enemy types. If you get inflicted by an enemy that bestows the "Poison" status effect, and you remember to pick up an herb at the health store, you can rid your character of that status exactly once. Leveling up does not remove the status, and after you use that herb, you are shit out of luck if the status is inflicted on you a second time. From the second dungeon forward, you have to beat the entire game with just one use of a single-use healing item. That's all you have for about ten hours. Eventually, some spells can help you mitigate this issue, one being an unlimited frost attack that does zero damage but freezes everything around you, which makes running around enemies like bats and zombies a picnic. However, the game's issues with its wonky hitboxes and soul-crushing amount of grinding remain. Even worse, after you level up, all enemies below your level net you zero EXP. While they no longer deal damage and you can eliminate them in a single attack, doing so doesn't get you anything, and that means every time you are grinding, it's always against enemies that can murder you.

I am now poisoned and essentially screwed for the rest of the game. It's only the third level, by the way!

There are so many issues with the game after you get past the starting town, beyond the fact that you don't have any easy healing, beyond having your character remain stationary for your character's HP to restore by 1 HP per second. To access the third town, you need to solve a switch puzzle by entering and exiting every cave entrance at a mountain leading up to the city to light up torches. You need to enter this town about three to four times, and each time, you need to redo this puzzle because the accompanying poison-based dungeon is not immediately next to the village and, instead, three screens removed from it. If that's not a sign of game design incompetence, I don't know what is. Likewise, everyone in this town is mute, but the game doesn't tell you that, which makes your first impressions of it weird. Oh, and even after you break this curse, there are no merchants, nor is there an inn to rest at; the town only exists for you to scavenge a single unmarked lake tile to get some fireflies. You don't know why you came here in the first place and only go there because the poison dungeon is pitch black when you first try going into it, a problem those previous fireflies address, and the path leading to the town is all else that remains. There's a path from it to the next boss, but curiously, if you go to the boss arena, nothing happens. All you see is a facetious shrine maiden asking you to leave and an NPC in what you assume is a prison. To trigger the boss, you must equip a magical mirror you got a whole level ago and enter this room. The shrine maiden will be revealed to be a horrible monster. Knowing how to see their proper form, like the rest of the game, isn't signposted at all, and there's another bit in the poison dungeon where a door will not appear unless you use a different item, and a chest will not open unless you use an entirely different one-off trinket in your inventory.

I tried resting next to this rock to heal my character and after two minutes a bunch of gargoyles spawned on top of me and I died. FUN!

Those chests are also bizarre. Some will only become interactable and share their content after you've met some threshold with the game's story. Yet, they still exist there for you to search. For example, there's a chest next to the entrance leading to the evil shrine maiden, but when you interact with it before you beat them, it has nothing. However, after you do, it has a pipe. You can miss an optional spell in the town next to the cursed samurai castle that theoretically speeds up your default healing rate, which is only one point of HP per second by default. You can only get that spell during the narrow window after you beat the first boss but before you talk to some NPCs to cross over to the other side of a mountain. You can never return to that or the first town; thus, if you forgot to pick anything up during the game's first act, you're shit out of luck. Oh, and I mentioned that your character only heals themself at a rate of 1 HP per second; as you might expect, that's a real problem by the time you reach the end game. For example, let's say your character has a maximum of 500 HP, took 499 points of damage, and is at 1 HP. You need to find them a safe spot to sit still for eight and a half minutes before they get back to their total, and that's downright impossible because someone who made this game decided that the game needs to respawn enemies on you if you remain motionless in a combat zone for more than two to three minutes. Only a proper nightmare person would have zero healing merchants or inns for more than half of their game while also programming the game to spawn enemies if you try to use your only viable healing option for more than two minutes.

The Bonkers End Game

Don't mind me, I'm just spewing the same fire ball spell fifty goddamn times.

I should mention that Makai Hakkenden Shada is based on a book, Nansou Satomi Hakkenden. Other characters from the source material haphazardly appear occasionally to provide the protagonist with new jewels that power an amulet, which is the key to defeating a looming evil wizard that was previously defeated centuries ago. Predictably, you and your companions are the descendants of the original heroes who beat this monolithic malignant force. While I assume the fan translation does its best to give you an idea of what's happening, there's no polishing a turd, and I can only imagine the game's manual provided you with a better idea of what was happening in the game. As someone who didn't bother to look up the manual, I can tell you that most of the characters are introduced at the beginning and end of the game. There's a weird middle act where you seem stuck with the same equipment, spells, and companions, with no end in sight, and yet, suddenly, you get the last two to three companions during the game's final thirty minutes. It's an incredibly awkward feeling, to say the least. For hours, it's just you controlling Shin, struggling with the same enemies with no light at the end of the tunnel because the game ceases to bestow gold as there are no merchants from which to buy items anymore. You are at the complete behest of leveling your character up and hoping the stat boosts are enough to give you some buffer to get past its worst enemies. And yet, getting the last two level-ups and final companions all happen on the last dungeon and level. The game's pacing is an absolute fever dream.

In most JRPGs, especially ones made in the late 80s and early 90s, the genre primarily operated under the shadow of Dragon Quest. The leading "hook" wasn't about whether you would finish the game but when. Even if a new environment starts tricky, there comes a point when your level-ups and new equipment help you turn the proverbial corner. That somewhat happens in Makai Hakkenden Shada, but not how you might expect it, and again, the game's flawed design reeks from top to bottom. First, you reach the game's level cap, not at its final dungeon but around when you beat the third to last boss. For the entire last level and final two bosses, all of your combat experiences have no rewards. It's just you repeatedly slogging away at the same enemies and hoping you get lucky with enemy spawns and their hitboxes. And with your stats and equipment plateauing mid-game, everything takes way longer to complete than it should. The third to last boss is a giant toad, which you must beat by jumping into its mouth and using a fire spell to damage its heart. The issue is that the damage cap on that fire spell tapped out ages ago, but a late-game stat sheet determined the HP for this boss. The result, which I found downright hilarious, is that you must fire off that basic-ass fireball spell fifty times. The designers knew that bosses in a video game need to have their stats grow as you near the end of the game, but they didn't boost your stats. There's no magic stat in the game, so all of your spells are set in terms of what they can do and for how much the minute you pick them up.

Me mid-jitterbug with this boss battle.

But those spells do end up being what frees you from your torment in Makai Hakkenden Shada. As I mentioned, one spell passive buffs your healing speed, and another passively buffs your attack damage. The final one, which involves your character shooting ice particles around them in a pattern, is busted. The spell has no MP cost. Therefore, you can spam it non-stop without any penalty. While it doesn't deal any damage, the spell completely freezes enemies that it touches, which allows you to speed past everything in the final dungeon without worry. Unfortunately, the spell doesn't work on bosses, but it will enable you to completely ignore all interstitial combat gauntlets between you and the end of the game. Hence, when you enter the final dungeon, which you can only access by finding a random ladder to cross a pit of lava, which took me forever to figure out, two bosses are all that remain between you and rolling the game's credits. Apropos of many games of this era, the final boss is far from being the hardest in the game and is comparatively a breeze. Avoid its projectiles and get up in a corner on the final battle arena screen, and you're set.

The penultimate boss is the most challenging encounter in the game and might be the worst thing I have experienced this year. It's far from the most complex boss battle, but it was one of the most maliciously designed video game encounters I have contended with in a long while. It's one of those bosses that teleports into a spot, and you have a limited window to damage them before they disappear and teleport to a new location. The complication is that shortly after they phase into a new position, a fire centipede forms and moves around them in a circle. Even if you are in the only viable position when you attempt to get at them to deal damage, remaining there is tricky, and touching any part of that enflamed bug conga line deals instant death. Again, this game uses a version of Ys I's bump combat system, and with spells inert against all bosses other than the giant toad, you can only rely on direct attacks that involve you bumping into your enemy's character model. I've harped about the hitboxes in the game feeling terrible, but this encounter is one of those things you must see to believe. The hitbox on the centipede isn't uniform, bulging slightly in the middle and tapering off on its ends. It's less a line of death and more an awkward trapezoid, which makes positioning your character in the right spot fleeting, with you always needing to jitter your character to and fro while dealing attacks. Worse, the boss's locations are randomized enough that it's difficult to gauge the spawn points, and they can phase precisely on top of you, which is an instant "Game Over."

In true kusoge form, the final boss is a pushover.

This boss alone took me almost an hour to beat, and the worst part is that you get the gimmick and strategy rather quickly and can identify the game design foibles blocking your progress, but there are no outs. There's no grinding to take advantage of to boost your stats because you've already hit the level cap; there are no merchants from which to buy items, either. There are no secret side quests to gain overpowered weapons; you can do nothing to improve this ordeal; you are stuck. And when this and the final boss are done, Makai Hakkenden Shada employs my favorite kusoge trope: there's an ending narration crawl by a character you've just met during the final act, and then it smash cuts to credits. There's no pomp or circumstance; the developers didn't know how to end their game and, instead, just jumped to the credits. Almost every single notable kusoge game does this. Hoshi wo Miru Hito does it, and so does the Dreamcast's Death Crimson. Every time I see a developer throw in the towel at the end of their game and give up, practically admitting they know they made a dud, I can't help but punch the sky. It's magical.

What Did I Learn?

This person, whom you just met and says a grand total of seven sentences, says the final words in this game.

If there's something I have taken away from Blight Club as a recurring feature, it is this. There's something about finishing what feels like an impossibly difficult and lousy videogame. You learn to appreciate the medium and the difficulty of programming and designing even the most fundamental aspects of any game genre. Even the buggiest public betas or Early Access releases on Epic or Steam go through a lot of hoops to get to the point they end up reaching. It's a craft, and playing games like this helps you appreciate even the most workmanlike affairs. In talking with Cassidy of The Bad Game Hall of Fame, they relay a story that I think about from time to time regarding terrible video games. Like Blight Club, they played Ride to Hell: Retribution, but when they got to the game's fully clothed sex scene, they noticed that the game's code was breaking and showing up around the head of the game's protagonist and the female character drying humping them in the cowgirl position. The game stripped itself bare and showed Cassidy how the sausage is made, and only truly "special" games do that. You must find moments like those to see how far left or right on the spectrum of quality that games can get. I mean this: play bad games for more than just a few minutes. See how easy it is for even the basics to get screwed up. When you tap out after a few hours, you only get the tip of the shit game iceberg.

There's another part to this experience or ordeal I came away from with a positive outlook. There's something cool and satisfying about knowing you're part of a select few people on this Earth who have beaten a specific game. Less than 1% of the people on this planet have beaten Makai Hakkenden Shada, which is likely more like 0.005%. Nonetheless, I'm one of them. If I pressed every single one of you right now about this topic, I bet you could think of at least one game where you might be one of a few thousand people who have completed it. That's cool, and I don't think you're on an ego trip feeling proud of that fact. There are millions of games out there ready to be played, many of which have virtually no documentation and have been around for some time on the internet. However, there's one bit of advice I have to offer before you get your hands dirty. There are bad games, there are good games, there are weird games, and there are mediocre games. Only the last of those represents a crease of gaming that is truly unrewarding to meditate about for more than a handful of minutes.