Anyway, Here's WonderSwan (Part Nine)

It's WonderSwan time again and what a wonderful swathe of games I have for you this month. If I sound more chipper than usual about having to process yet another batch of unlocalized (and unlocalizable, in some cases) half-assed anime-licensed games for the Bandai WonderSwan and its chromatic cousin the WonderSwan Color it's because... I don't have to do that any more. I never did, technically, but now I've let myself off the hook in a rare case of giving my self-loathing a break and can now bask in the best the system has to offer, or at least five games that seemed cool enough to garner my curiosity.

You might recall from Parts One through Eight that, up until now, I've been laboring under the yoke of a coalition of random chooser associations with their unholy power of collective bargaining (I need to knock it off with the unnion-busting vibes around here, for real) but no longer! I have thrown off my shackles, run deep into the mountains, and now feast on the figurative poisonous berry bush that is my emancipation from months of anime-license-tainted drudgery. In less melodramatic terms, I'm not doing the random picker business any more and these five have all been personally selected both because I wanted to play them and also because there's only going to be one more entry after this and I'd rather have a clean break from Bandai's semi-transparent little box without the regret that I may have missed out on something amazing. Even if the WonderSwan does have 200 games total across both its variants I'm fairly sure I don't need to see more than a quarter of that amount so here we are with the penultimate batch, absent any Gundams or Inuyashas or Digimons (Digimen? Digimin?) or any other wildly successful anime of the early '00s: it's all killer, no filler episodes.

That said, I'm not going to claim that these will all be excellent games either, just that they caught my eye for one reason or another. In a way, if I suffer at all this month it'll be entirely self-inflicted and not a case where I can shift the blame onto some inculpable machine to make myself feel better. Oh hey, I think I just stumbled onto the reason why I was using random chooser apps in the first place. Better late than never figuring that out, I suppose. If you wanted to see the kinds of horrors I've been subjected to so far, be sure to check out the previous parts here:

Anyway, here's WonderSwan:

#41: Final Fantasy IV

• Developer: Sting
• Publisher: Squaresoft
• Release Date: 2002-03-29
• Inscrutability: Moderate (partial fan translation)
• Selection Process: Curated
• Is This Anime?: Nope!

Field Report: Square ended up porting over three of their Final Fantasy games to the WonderSwan, skipping III and going straight to IV for reasons that are probably obvious to anyone who played III. Final Fantasy IV was the first in the series to hit 16-bit systems and took advantage of that technological step up to create a more character-driven and twisty story upon which to hook their usual turn-based combat and dungeon exploration mechanics (something they'd do again to even greater effect with Final Fantasy VII and the opportunities provided by its generation of hardware). Also new to this particular game was the series's trademark "active-time battle system": an opt-out means of adding a level of tension as it gave enemies a chance to attack while you fiddled around with options, adding to the verisimilitude of a real battle as you're forced to think on your feet. The game's plot concerns the expansionist nation of Baron and its disturbance of the world's careful equilibrium of elements controlled by four crystals, at the heart of which lies the internal conflict within the Baron Empire's suddenly conscientious Dark Knight enforcer Cecil Harvey. Like if Darth Vader suddenly grew a conscience and defeated the Emperor, if you can imagine that.

This would be Sting Entertainment's second WS foray with Square following their port of Hanjuku Hero: Aa, Sekaiyo Hanjuku Nare...!, another SNES RPG with close links to Final Fantasy IV. I wonder if Hanjuku Hero might've been a dry run for this somewhat more important project: a chance to show off their chops before being allowed the flagship franchise to tinker around with. Sting Entertainment also produced a few other games for WonderSwan, including the previously-covered port of hoary dungeon-crawler Wizardry Scenario 1: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord as well as their own WS original RPG Riviera: The Promised Land (also released on GBA a little while later, and again much more recently on Steam). This would also be our sixth Squaresoft WonderSwan game (of ten) for those counting.

The fan translation that's out there right now is a utility-minded one that only covers the items and menus, so the main story and dialogue have been left in Japanese. Thankfully, for my sakes at least, there's no kanji—only hiragana and katakana—so I can make out every fifth word or so. I'd say I could read the names too, except I already recall what they all are; guess it helps to know who's talking though. As such, even though I'm always happy for a chance to play Final Fantasy IV to its conclusion again, the WonderSwan version isn't all that attractive a prospect without a complete translation. It's not so much that I forget specific story beats (I do) but more that there's usually directions buried in that dialogue that are very handy in the pre-quest log era of 1991. Otherwise, this is pretty much Final Fantasy IV as I remember it, with some amount of graphical boost to the characters outside of battle (in-battle they look fairly identical, since those sprites were always well-defined and the WS only has so much screen resolution to work with) as well as the monsters and backgrounds. It's been pretty easy too, so either I'm still in the gentle opening hours or it's possible that it's at least partly based on the later "EasyType" release for SFC (which was the basis for the American SNES localization, known there as Final Fantasy II, though I've read that version was made even easier). One thing I'm near-certain wasn't in the SNES original is a "memo" option: a means of creating a temporary save file that quits the current session, deleting the save once it's reloaded. This lets you make a quick emergency save anywhere you want if you suddenly need to put the WonderSwan away (or it's low on charge) and a traditional save point (like the world map) is currently unavailable.

In terms of progress, I got up to one of my favorite scenes—where the wizened sage Tellah, in his grief, starts absolutely beating the snot out of the ineffective bard Gilbert for allowing his beloved daughter Anna to sacrifice herself on his behalf, telling him in no unambiguous terms just how spoony he is before he leaves to find the perpetrator—and decided I was good. That amounts to one smallish dungeon in the Mist Cave and a larger one for the Waterway that separates the oasis town of Kaipo to the desert kingdom of Damcyan of which Gilbert is regent. Cecil's still a Dark Knight at this point in the story but after being tricked into incinerating Mist Village with a booby-trapped Bomb ring he's on a revenge mission against his former king with the orphaned summoner girl Rydia in tow. This part of the game has an annoying habit of giving you low-level characters to babysit (first Rydia, now Gilbert) so some amount of grinding is warranted before you get too far into the next dungeon with its boss fight waiting at the end. I might revisit this save at a later time since there's a full (and kinda compelling) RetroAchievement set for this port of the game—one that's considerably less intense than the RA set for Final Fantasy IV for SFC—but for now I think I've seen plenty. It's not like I'm hard up on methods to play some Final Fantasy IV one way or another.

Time Spent: Around two hours.

#42: Puzzle Bobble

• Developer: Yoshidayama
• Publisher: Sunsoft
• Release Date: 1999-07-01
• Inscrutability: Minor
• Selection Process: Curated
• Is This Anime?: Nuh-uh!

Field Report: Puzzle Bobble, known in the west as Bust-a-Move despite having no rhythmic component, is an accuracy-based puzzle game featuring the Bubble Bobble kids (now turned back to dinosaurs; I guess it's one of those relapsing curses) as they shoot down colored bubbles with a ballista-like device. The goal is to connect several bubbles of the same color, causing them to pop and remove any extra bubbles that were only suspended in place due to their support. Trick is, trying to aim for the bubbles higher up is that much harder to pull off and those bubbles are always descending so there's little time to fine-tune the shot. Puzzle Bobble saw several arcade incarnations that were ported to the systems of the day and as far as I can tell this port is based on the 1994 original.

Yoshidayama is a Kyoto-based contract developer that we encountered once before on this feature with the inscrutable therapeutic life-sim Metakomi Therapy: Nee Kiite!. Fortunately, they also worked on real WonderSwan games too, including Puzzle Bobble and the golf game Wonder Classic. Puzzle Bobble was originally a Taito game so where Sunsoft got the license to publish home versions of it is anyone's guess; they were also behind a WonderSwan Space Invaders port too so I guess the two companies must've had some kind of relationship. (Doing a bit of digging and it looks like Taito published a lot of Sunsoft's early arcade games internationally. I could see the two being in cahoots from that point forward.)

Much like Magical Drop for WonderSwan and Side Pocket for WonderSwan, Puzzle Bobble for WonderSwan immediately runs into the issue of "how do we translate a game for which color was so integral into monochrome?" and, in pretty much the same way Magical Drop did it, they changed the colors to patterns. This works well in some contexts and less so in others: they have one type where there's a black circle inside a white circle that's like 70% black and another where it's 70% white and they're not always the easiest things to tell apart when the chips are down and you're getting desperate. A benefit to the reduced resolution though is that it's much easier to line up shots, since there's less distance the bubble has to travel before it hits something. Since this is traditional Puzzle Bobble rules, you're given a limited amount of time to make a move (or bust one, as the case may be) but the terrain starts dropping lower to the ground based on the number of moves taken not time taken, so you are given some amount of leeway (and incentive) to aim things up properly. This is also an earlier version of Puzzle Bobble where the whole ceiling slowly comes down rather than constantly adding new rows of bubbles, which also keeps things manageable.

Because this version of Puzzle Bobble is more accommodating than usual, I managed to rapidly clear the first fifty rounds in just over an hour. Once I hit "Round 51" I realized it was probably going for the full set of 100 stages much like Bubble Bobble itself and decided to cut my losses then and there rather than stick through it for the long haul. While Puzzle Bobble can be deeply satisfying if you manage to fling a bubble past all the barricades and take out a linchpin near the top to cause everything to collapse, it can be irksome in turn due to how your next bubble is dependent on luck: as long as there's at least another one like it on the field, no matter how buried, there's a chance it will spawn as your next bubble "bullet". Sometimes you could wipe the last one off the board only to have it be the next one in the chamber, which of course then leads to more now that there's at least one on the field again, and occurrences like these are as dissatisfying as the cascades are the opposite. As such, though I like Puzzle Bobble a lot, I find that an hour's playthrough is just about right for this series (which suits my purposes both here and in the franchise's recent appearance on 64 in 64). Glad to know the WS version isn't horribly compromised even with the limitations of the platform: turns out puzzle games just kinda work on portables, who'd have thought?

Time Spent: Just over an hour.

#43: Wild Card

• Developer: Squaresoft
• Publisher: Squaresoft
• Release Date: 2001-03-29
• Inscrutability: Hyper Mega
• Selection Process: Curated
• Is This Anime?: Naw!

Field Report: Wild Card is a deckbuilding RPG and the first game Squaresoft developed specifically for the WonderSwan Color. The game uses cards not just for its combat system but for much of its worldbuilding also, essentially crafting components of the narrative and setting in a randomized order similar to the player-directed world construction of Legend of Mana. A modified version of this card-based system would then later appear in the director's next project, Unlimited SaGa for PlayStation 2. Like Blue Wing Blitz, the game has yet to receive a fan translation possibly owing to how complex its rules are (or maybe how little most westerners care about the WonderSwan; it's not like I knew much about it before this year).

This would be the seventh of the ten games Squaresoft produced for WonderSwan that we've covered here so far, but only the fourth out of those they developed themselves as well as the third and last game that was unique to the WonderSwan. Wild Card's director was Akitoshi Kawazu, best known as the director of Final Fantasy II (the real one) and the creator of the SaGa spin-off franchise, with artwork from Akihiko Yoshida: an artist that joined the company via the Quest Corporation takeover along with designer Yasumi Matsuno and composers Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata (this group of four had already worked together on both Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story). Regular SaGa composer Kenji Ito did the music; it would be his last project for Square before resigning to go freelance. (Gotta say, not exactly filled with excitement for an untranslated Kawazu RPG based on procgen and deckbuilding but it's the last of these Square WSC originals and I at least wanted to see the Yoshida artwork.)

Yeah, this one's completely impenetrable without a localization. All I did was randomly generate my protagonist, what looked to be a potion-user named Maria, from some multiple choice test (very Elder Scrolls) and then get dropped outside a city where I could explore for a bit, find some shops that sold gear I had no money to buy, and enter some taverns that—for whatever reason—prompted some kind of battle system when I got close. There looked to be other adventurers to hire but maybe the idea was that I had to impress them in a duel first before they were convinced to join me. Either that, or Maria is the type to go around picking fights constantly. Since I didn't know what I was doing in any part of the game I found what looked to be the "run away" card and used that for every situation, and more or less just milled around for a bit until the mandated ten minutes was over.

The game does look pretty nice with that artwork though, and if I didn't think I was on a road to nowhere with Kawazu calling the shots I might've been drawn in by how player-deterministic this adventure was becoming. I couldn't even leave the starting town to see if there were procgen dungeons or some sort of equally-procgen story intrigue to embroil myself in, or if the goal instead was to find as many of these worldbuilding cards as possible for the album found on the starting screen's main menu. Presumably there's some sort of demon lord or crystal or something to pursue in the long-term but I'll be darned if I could make heads or tails of anything that was going on. In short, it seemed "aggressively Kawazu". I still have strongly negative vivid flashbacks to trying to figure out Unlimited SaGa over the course of ten hours or so and if that game is as closely linked to Wild Card as it would seem then I'm satisfied enough with what little I've seen so far. This kind of game is like the Lament Configuration: even if it's inscrutable enough to be intriguing, your curiosity likely won't lead anywhere good.

Time Spent: 10 minutes.

#44: Raku Jongg

"Fallen Sparrow"

• Developer: Enterbrain
• Publisher: Bandai
• Release Date: 2001-05-31
• Inscrutability: Minor (Major if you don't know mahjong)
• Selection Process: Mostly Curated
• Is This Anime?: Nein!

Field Report: Raku Jongg is a mahjong-themed block-stacking game that was originally released on Windows PCs by ASCII Corporation and Enterbrain (and I believe originally developed by one person before they picked up the license). It was later ported to PlayStation and, seeing as portables are a good fit for this genre, the WonderSwan Color. Its name comes from the jong in mahjong (meaning sparrow) and raku/ochi, to mean fallen or dropped. The goal of the game is to drop mahjong tiles into a playing field and match three connecting mahjong tiles which are then added to the player's "deck", as if they were assembling a winning mahjong hand. Legal sets of three, or "melds", include both three of a kind (pon) and straights of three in a row (chi) with ideally one set of dragons or a valuable wind (such as the current player's wind, assigned at the start of each round) to ensure their hand is worth something. Expert players can aim for more elaborate combinations, like having multiple chi that when combined produce a long straight from 1-9 or having multiple versions of the same chi/pon in all three suits. The player's score is then determined by their hand's value, with failure states for putting together a useless hand or letting the tiles stack up too high in the playing field. Some hands are also forbidden: "seven pairs" or "thirteen orphans", for instance, wouldn't work given how the game operates in triplets.

Enterbrain is probably best known as the custodian of various "Tsukuru", or "Maker", game-creator series with the most famous of which being RPG Maker. While primarily a publisher of magazines themed around video games, they've had their share of producing "disk mags" in the past and were responsible for the development of smaller original games to present on them along with the usual demos and apps. Without knowing for sure, I'm guessing that's what happened here: Raku Jongg was one of these shareware freebies that became an endearing enough hit, what with it combining two popular pastimes (competitive block-stacking puzzle games and mahjong), that Enterbrain saw fit to produce retail versions. While I'm not doing the random chooser thing any more there were a batch of WS puzzle games I was curious about, and since I couldn't narrow down their number easily I instead threw them all into a raffle and took a few winners to pad out these last two entries. Raku Jangg is definitely a little more intimidating than most of the block-stacking types available on WS but since I know the rules to mahjong I'm sure I can muddle through this. Famous last words.

OK, this was a bit more elaborate than I thought from watching a short demo before starting. It's both a mahjong and a block-stacker in the sense that you're fighting your opponent on two fronts. Assembling a strong mahjong hand is essentially a means of cornering your opponent but really it's the block-stacking half where the pressure is felt keenest. In order to keep your field manageable it's ideal to be removing trash tiles constantly: if you can connect three of the same suit that aren't identical or run together in a chi, then they simply vanish but in many cases that's exactly what you want to keep the field clear for valuable pieces. Dragons and Winds have some odd rule about them where they'll occasionally act as wild cards: they're rarer to drop but of course you ideally want a meld of them to make your hand a valid winning one (unless you're aiming for something more specific, like "all simples"). You'll also have non-mahjong tiles come down occasionally: arrows wipe out anything in the direction they point at, while hammers destroy the bottom tile of any column they land on. Good for removing buried junk but easy to let something valuable get caught in the crossfire. After you have four melds the game has these elaborate animations for the final pair needed to complete the hand—they remind me of the animations you get on pachi-slot machines when it tries to increase the drama of whether you hit the jackpot or just missed out—and if you get it, you get your score added to your current total. If you fail, one of your melds is destroyed and you're dropped back into the block-stacking mode. Your points are a combination of the mahjong hand scoring and the usual match-3 bonuses from eliminating blocks in combinations or in lines higher than three.

I couldn't follow the story much at all but the game part was pretty compelling once I'd figured it out, though obviously highly contingent on luck (much like mahjong itself, I suppose). If you have a pair of dragons you might be waiting forever for its third brother to arrive—Double Dragon fans are still waiting for Tommy Lee to show up—but that's just the luck of the draw. Chis feel like they're a little harder to get going and run into the same issue of needing a single tile type to arrive and finish the set (say, if you have the two and three of bamboo already lined up, you still need to wait for a one or four of bamboo depending on the set-up) so you'd might as well stick with pons since they're involved in more of the high-scoring hands. After earning both a haneman (seven han) and a baiman (nine han), both of which I'd be very happy to receive if I was playing regular mahjong in a Like a Dragon game, I opted to retire on top.

Time Spent: About 30 minutes.

#45: Mr. Driller

• Developer: Namco
• Publisher: Namco
• Release Date: 2001-04-15
• Inscrutability: Near Zero
• Selection Process: Curated
• Is This Anime?: Negatory!

Field Report: Mr. Driller is a fast-moving drilling puzzle game inspired by (and originally meant to be a sequel to) Namco's venerable Dig Dug series, dropping Susumu Hori (the son of Dig Dug protagonist Taizo Hori) (yes, that's a boy) into a vertical shaft and having them quickly dig down for oxygen tanks while avoiding any falling debris created by drilling through load-bearing blocks or else having them combine into groups of four or more and disappearing on their own. The game scores the player on how far down they can make it before being smushed, and it's often in the player's best interest to keep moving so the falling junk never catches up with them. The bright color palette and heart-pumping pace quickly made it a fan favorite, albeit one that was hard to survive for long. It was first released in arcades in 1999 and ported to PlayStation, Dreamcast, PC, Game Boy Color, and the WonderSwan Color in short order.

Namco's well represented on the WonderSwan as one of its big-name third-party supporters, though its total of six WS games is a little shy of the ten offered by Square or the eight from Sammy. We've covered one other game from them so far, the Klonoa side-game Kaze no Klonoa: Moonlight Museum, but we might see a few more before we're done with this feature. Mr. Driller appears to be the only one they published themselves; they were happy enough to let the console manufacturers Bandai put out the rest. I've never super enjoyed Mr. Driller because it's really hard to get a good session going given how easy it is to die, but I'm sure if I was better at it I'd appreciate its nuances a whole lot more. It's definitely more intense than most games of its type, the cutesy pastel vibes belying a ruthless core. Still, no need to worry about requiring a fan translation in order to play it.

As always, Mr. Driller is an easy game to like if a hard game to love. The wholesome vibes of its little driller guy and the deep pit of colorful blocks makes for a visual confectionary, as does its chipper quirky OST. The rules are quickly seized upon by any new players but it's the speed at which they descend that distinguishes experts from novices. You don't need to figure out a way to collect every oxygen tank, for example, if you're clearing the current 100m portion of the level in seconds; chances are, if you go fast enough and let everything chain-react itself into oblivion above you the only things that will remain are the tanks, dropping down to greet you as freebies instead of something to pause and consider a route to reach. Of course, that only works early on where things can often just work out in your favor: later on, the tanks are zealously guarded by those brown chocolate-shaped bricks that, while you can drill through them in an emergency, take as much air from you as the tanks provide. There's always the matter that you can fall afoul of poor luck and just have some block fall on your head with nothing to intercept it: again, rare early on, more common as you descend as the layouts become less fair to you.

I could definitely see an alternative universe version of myself getting hopelessly addicted to beating my best depth result as I continue to assail The Infinity Pit but it feels all too easy (and often remarkably quick) that you go from having two or three lives to fall back on to no safety net at all, at which point the tension rises and naturally it only takes one more mistake to see you kicked back to the title screen again. Like Puzzle Bobble, it's a puzzle game that works best in shorter sessions with gaps in-between so you can forget the frustration you felt by making that one dumb error that cost you everything and go back to loving its cutesy vibes and arcade "live, die, start over" sensibility.

Time Spent: 20 minutes-ish.

Current Ranking

(* = Don't need fluent Japanese to enjoy this and/or it has a fan translation.)

1. O-Chan no Oekaki Logic (Ep 4)*
2. Rockman & Forte: Mirai kara no Chousensha (Ep 5)*
3. Kaze no Klonoa: Moonlight Museum (Ep 3)*
4. Puzzle Bobble (Ep 9)*
5. Final Fantasy IV (Ep 9)
6. Final Fantasy (Ep 4)*
7. Rainbow Islands: Putty's Party (Ep 4)*
8. Raku Jongg (Ep 9)*
9. Flash Koibito-Kun (Ep 1)*
10. Magical Drop for WonderSwan (Ep 1)*
11. Mr. Driller (Ep 9)*
12. Hataraku Chocobo (Ep 7)*
13. Wizardry Scenario 1: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (Ep 6)*
14. Slither Link (Ep 5)*
15. Gunpey (Ep 2)*
16. Judgement Silversword -Rebirth Edition- (Ep 1)*
17. Neon Genesis Evangelion: Shito Ikusei (Ep 8)*
18. Makaimura for WonderSwan (Ep 6)*
19. Golden Axe (Ep 7)*
20. Side Pocket for WonderSwan (Ep 5)*
21. Battle Spirit: Digimon Frontier (Ep 8)*
22. Final Lap Special (Ep 2)*
23. Densha de Go! (Ep 2)
24. Gomoku Narabe & Reversi Touryuumon (Ep 3)*
25. Rockman EXE N1 Battle (Ep 8)
26. Kurupara! (Ep 6)*
27. Guilty Gear Petit (Ep 3)*
28. Hanjuku Hero: Aa, Sekaiyo Hanjukunare...! (Ep 5)
29. Blue Wing Blitz (Ep 3)
30. Makai Toushi SaGa (Ep 8)*
31. Wild Card (Ep 9)
32. Beatmania for WonderSwan (Ep 4)*
33. SD Gundam: Gashapon Senki -Episode One- (Ep 7)
34. Super Robot Taisen Compact for WonderSwan Color (Ep 3)
35. Inuyasha: Fuuun Emaki (Ep 1)
36. Chou Denki Card Battle: Youfu Makai (Ep 5)
37. Meitantei Conan: Nishi No Meitantei Saidai No Kiki!? (Ep 2)
38. Shaman King: Mirai e no Ishi (Ep 6)
39. Shin Nihon Pro Wrestling: Toukon Retsuden (Ep 4)
40. Inuyasha: Kagome no Sengoku Nikki (Ep 7)
41. Sangokushi II (Ep 6)
42. Kyousouba Ikusei Simulation: Keiba (Ep 7)
43. Metakomi Therapy: Nee Kiite! (Ep 2)
44. SD Gundam Eiyuuden: Musha Densetsu (Ep 1)
45. SD Gundam Eiyuuden: Kishi Densetsu (Ep 8)