May no Monogatari Mou: Part Two (PlayStation & Super Famicom & Nintendo DS)

Welcome back to Part Two of this rapid-fire exploration of various fan translated games. I'd say check out Part One for further details on what we're doing here but that first sentence is basically the whole shebang: these are games that never left Japan but nonetheless found capable localizations from devoted enthusiasts and since I'm forever intrigued by what we missed out on I wanted to see what was denied to this hemisphere. (Also, you might want to check out Part One anyway because I'm starting with the second half of a two-part review. Blame my poor time management on that one.)

Sony PlayStation: King's Field (FromSoft, 1994)

Returning to the very origin of King's Field is like peeling off the layers of wallpaper from the home you just bought (pretend I'm not addressing an audience of millennials and younger here) and finding out both just how much and how little has actually changed over the decades. King's Field began as—I'm only assuming here; I'm sure there's all sorts of lore videos I could consult by From-heads that I might peruse later once I have more of these games under my belt—a Japanese take on an immersive first-person dungeon crawler picking up steam in the West, borrowing elements from the globally popular Dungeon Master (which more or less began the whole real-time crawler trend) and later panoramic adaptations of the formula like Ultima Underworld. In fact, UU was only released a couple of years before this first King's Field, so I wonder how much one inspired the other. All the same, there's elements of King's Field that would be later explored in From's later games, especially the Souls series, in how it drops you unceremoniously in a very hostile location that you to gingerly feel your way around, pick up lore snippets from items and NPCs that might give you some direction but more often simply adds context to your quest and to the nature of your foes in situ rather than through some massive text dump before the game begins, and grapple with some subtle (some might say obtuse) character development systems that won't necessarily turn you superhuman if you figure out how to min-max it but can certainly do the opposite if you aren't paying close attention. Well, not that you can really gimp yourself in a game where enemies constantly respawn.

All right, so the game does have an opening crawl. Doesn't explain too much though. The story is meant to be a mystery after all.

Did anyone say "invisible path over a giant bottomless pit surrounded by fireball traps"? No? Is this your first From game?

We explored most of those traits in the first half of this review, though, so let's move onto the game's overall arc now that I've finished it. With only five floors you'd be forgiven for thinking it's a pretty quick adventure: however, between the slow pace—both in the literal sense, since your guy moves like he's wearing 200lbs of armor which eventually does become the case, and via the fact that this is a game you want to take very cautiously—and the circuitous level design with its tacit encouragement to backtrack occasionally to earlier floors to see what doors and chests a newly discovered key might unlock. A neat feature I mentioned last time is the Mirror of Truth, capable of giving you information about monsters and NPCs that might offer hints but typically exist for flavor (the game is D&D coded in several ways with how it designs its puzzles and features; or perhaps I should say Sword World, as D&D didn't really catch on over there), and that's the kind of attention to world-building that's always given From a slight edge even if, at least back at this stage, the world is not quite so compelling to engender too much by way of the aforementioned deep dives on YouTube. What story the game has involves the son of a knight captain searching for a missing retinue of knights and the current King, all of whom disappeared underneath the royal crypts for as yet uncertain reasons: anything else you learn while you're down there. "Show, don't tell," is close to the expression I'm looking for here (it still tells a lot, after all) as to why the King's Field system of narrative design worked well enough to be carried through almost all of From's games to the present day as intrinsically as any number of Moonlight Greatswords.

The other half of King's Field appeal is in that gradual deciphering of how its world ticks and, vitally, how you can avoid getting murdered by it. There are no devastating traps per se, though the swinging pendulum maces can cause you some harm if you mess up the timing to get past them, but figuring out the right timing for fighting enemies, understanding the utility (and recovery) of magic in combat situations, understanding what you're best off spending your money on (tip: most gear can be found for free lying around the dungeon if you're thorough), and being painstaking with your cartography skills—a lesson a generation of Japanese RPG nerds would've no doubt internalized with the Wizardry series prior to this game and would be tested again with Etrian Odyssey in the years to follow. On first blush it's easy to assume King's Field is one of those antiquated games that you either need a phonebook-sized manual to parse or more patience than most tutorial-coddled gamers could muster in this day and age (I'm very much including myself here too; it's incredible how those survival skills go away with QoL-enriched modern gaming)—and the exceptionally crude 3D visuals would certainly corroborate that initial impression—but it's actually one of those intricate RPGs like Gothic that becomes much more rewarding once you're able to speak its language. As I was fighting its ridiculous final boss after struggling to survive hordes of demonic foes even while decked out in all the top-level equipment I could find I came to understand why this game saw three sequels, let alone everything else From created afterwards. It took a while for them to find their true voice with Demon's Souls and its lineage but it was always there, whispering from the depths of those dark corridors.

Hey buddy. Missed ya. Not only is this the best sword in pure stats terms, but you can fling around nukes with it due to a special property.

Just because King's Field takes after western RPGs doesn't mean it can't have a ridiculous JRPG evil tentacle tree as a final boss.

Super Famicom/SNES: Xak: The Art of Visual Stage (Microcabin, 1993)

Xak: The Art of Visual Stage is... well, all right, let's look at that subtitle first. That is its actual name: this wasn't some bizarre mistranslation, at least not on any localizer's part. What I can tell you is that this isn't a game about kabuki or bunraku or live theater of any sort, at least as far as I can tell. This is instead Microcabin's attempt to horn in on a rising brand of game popularized by their fellow PC developer contemporaries: the top-down action-RPG. Obviously, at least to me, Falcom's Ys is the most obvious inspiration here—the ever growing health gauge across the bottom of the screen, the mechanic where you regenerate HP while standing still, the incremental equipment upgrades and the gold farming often required to obtain them—but then this was something of a mild fad during the mid-'80s which also included the likes of Falcom's earlier Dragon Slayer/Xanadu, Namco's Tower of Druaga, T&E Soft's Hydlide, and Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda. It was very much the hot thing and I can't really fault a smaller studio like Microcabin (whose ludography is almost entirely old Japanese PC games I've never heard of) for wanting to get in on that action. That said, Microcabin didn't necessarily have much to do with this port, given they hadn't really broken into console game development quite yet: instead, the three names associated with the game are Tokai Engineering (a contractor with a very small number of Famicom credits by this game's release), Sunsoft (who published the port), and—perhaps entirely coincidentally—a company, formed by a former Microcabin dev, called Falcon. That's Falcon with an N not an M (though in Japanese there's no real linguistic difference when the letter's on its own like that; it's why you see as many "sempais" as "senpais"). At any rate, we have here another case like (fittingly enough) Ys IV: Mask of the Sun where the original devs were not console savvy enough to feel confident in porting it themselves and instead kicked it over to a so-so contractor who was presumably pretty cheap to hire.

Nah, see, Adol has red hair and blue highlights on his armor. This is completely different.

Why is this here? Why did I screencap it? Why am I choosing to share it with the internet? It's the mystery of the Visual Stage at work.

As to what this game's about, well, it's a fairly standard fantasy chosen one story. The protagonist Latok, son of Dork (for real), is told by a visiting pixie that he is the distant descendant of a god who manifested in the distant past to defeat an evil being called Badou, sealed its soul and body away in two different places, then got busy with a human woman because what else are you going to do with your time at that point? Defeating the soon-to-revive Badou might be beyond Latok's dumb little sword so instead he's encouraged to locate the three gems of Xak: both the name of the world and the name of some Force-like energy that exists all around it. With the gems he'll be powered up enough to win the day, so off he goes with very little idea as to where these gems are hidden but, conveniently, all happen to be mostly along the path to the shrine where Badou's body is kept. As with any early Ys type game, it's not simply a matter of marching to each dungeon in turn: you've gotta spend some time on the overworld grinding first or those dungeon monsters will eat you alive. Areas are typically gated by monster strength, requiring you to both level up (which provides a modest stat bump) and farm gold for better equipment (which have much larger stat bumps). Beyond that you might have a few fetch quests to perform, a few bosses to slay once you're strong enough that they don't all insta-kill you, and a whole lot of running back and forth except for the times where you're standing perfectly still to let your health regenerate back to full (and thank the twin goddesses for emulators and their fast-forward hotkeys).

Despite the many similarities to Ys, Xak does have a few idiosyncrasies of its own. The level requirement for weapons, armor, and shields is an anti-farming trick that arguably doesn't solve a problem that perhaps wasn't even a problem in the first place: you do earn less XP from easier monsters as you level up but typically any gold farming you're doing to buy the next tier of equipment (perhaps because the current boss is one-shotting you; a very common predicament both here and in older Ys) will typically also include the XP you need to meet the level requirement. The game's magic scroll system offers a QoL boon by way of their teleport scrolls: an instant means of travelling back to safe areas like towns, which might be preferable if the particular grinding spot happens to be halfway through the current dungeon. Another perhaps unnecessary choice is having the option to enchant your gear: certain enemies, usually spectral in nature but there's no real rhyme or reason, are immune to physical damage until you enchant the sword and likewise they'll do more damage to you by way of elemental attacks if you don't enchant your shield and armor first. You can try walking around these enemies if you're not up for the extra expense but it's often not worth the headaches. Other QoL touches include the ability to save anywhere—this feature even persists in the SNES port, where such a lenient save system is far less common—and plentiful healing items that you can purchase (up to ten each of three increasingly effective grades of consumable). Honestly, those two would make the game a cakewalk were it not for the fact that it does nothing to mitigate the sheer amount of grinding involved to not get quickly murdered by the tougher mobs and bosses.

The game's arbitrary shoot 'em up section.

Me during the game's arbitrary shoot 'em up section.

Then there's the design choices which just feel like classic old-school "fuck you"s to the player. Such as a trap in one dungeon that drops you into a room with no doors: unless you have a teleport scroll on-hand you're basically screwed. There's a cave network where many tunnels are blocked by boulders that you can remove with a (relatively expensive for that part of the game) disintegration scroll, and since you won't know how many of these big rocks you have to melt you end up spending a lot of time going through the dungeon with however many scrolls you can afford, eventually hitting a literal wall once they run out, and then heading back out of the dungeon to buy even more scrolls. Finally, there's a shoot 'em up sequence similar to Namco's Dragon Spirit that pops up out of nowhere and features the most annoying boss in the game: a flame salamander that frequently flies off screen only to pop back in directly behind you and fireball your ass before you can move out of its way. Between these less player-friendly quirks and the ever-present grinding/farming cycle it's not a game I'd argue has aged particularly well, nor did it really take the opportunity to file down the Ys franchise's rougher edges, but as SNES-era action-RPGs go it's... probably somewhere in the middle?

Actually, let's do the science on that real quick. Here's all the action-RPGs I've played so far on SNES (excepting A Link to the Past and Illusion of Gaia, since they're more action-adventure) in ranking order, including Xak:

1. Terranigma

2. Secret of Mana

3. Tales of Phantasia

4. Secret of Evermore

5. Ys III: Wanderers from Ys

6. Soul Blazer

7. The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang

8. Alcahest

9. Shadowrun

10. Ys V: Ushinawareta Suna no Miyako Kefin/Lost Kefin, Kingdom of Sand

11. Kuusou Kagaku Sekai Gulliver Boy

12. Ys IV: Mask of the Sun

13. Xak: The Art of Visual Stage

14. Neugier: Umi to Kaze no Kodou

So, uh, maybe not the mid-tier after all. But hey, there's a lot of less-good action-RPGs for this system I've yet to check out (Lagoon, anyone?) so it may still yet bounce back once I have the full picture. At any rate, Xak: The Art of Visual Stage is a proxYs with perhaps a subtle degree of deviation from its more famous inspiration once you did a little deeper into what it's doing, even if the bigger, more apparent stuff—the visuals, the story, the perspective, the combat (which is fortunately not the bump system at least, but also still partly that somehow?), and the general progression loop—is otherwise eerily similar. I have, for some godforsaken reason, decided to make it my mission to play as many of these proxYs games as I can find to see if anything can measure up to the Crimson King Adol himself and for that reason at least I'm glad to have checked this off the list. On a final sad note though, Xak did take after the first Ys in one other important way: the initial game is meant to be the first half of a longer story that the sequel concludes. Xak II, however, was never released on the SNES: it certainly exists elsewhere, as do further sequels, but only on a limited number of platforms. Unless I bust out a PC98 emulator I don't suppose I'll be bumping (as it were) into this series again. I say that, but somehow the third game made it to PC Engine CD-ROM, a platform I've already championed once before in this feature, along with the side game Fray in Magical Adventure CD: Xak Gaiden that stars a side-character you rescue early on in Xak 1. That Fray game was also ported to Game Gear which just received (as of this month) a fan translation patch, so never say never I suppose.

I swear I will reach inside the screen and slap you if you leave behind an obviously vital key because I haven't found the door it belongs to yet. This game just loves stretching out its runtime.

Nintendo DS: Irozuki Tingle no Koi no Balloon Trip / Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love (Vanpool, 2009)

Oh jeez, here we go. Back in the DS days I rented a game called Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland: a game tangentially connected to the Legend of Zelda franchise (one of my all-time favorites) through its comic relief character Tingle, a middle-aged man pretending to be a fairy for reasons not even the three goddesses could ascertain without vomiting into their own mouths a little. He was introduced in Majora's Mask as an eccentric map vendor notable for being suspended in the air by a balloon wherever he could be found: you needed to find a ranged weapon like the slingshot to pop his balloon before you could talk to him. Since then he's become this beloved ancillary character despite appearing like a cruel joke at the expense of the unpopular, lonely 30-something fanbase who spend their time online raging against a series of games intended for children (a la The Simpsons's Comic Book Guy). Or at least that's one interpretation (maybe a somewhat telling one). Either way, his popularity eventually led him to adopt the lead role of two DS adventure games every bit as strange as he is: the first of those was released in Europe, hence why I was able to play it when it was new, but the sequel had eluded my notice until just recently.

A mini-game where you have to quickly tighten screws is a fair introduction to the touchscreen chaos this game intends to inflict.

And good day to you too, pig. (This is the save pig, by the by. He certainly saved my bacon more than once.)

Truth be told, I found Rosy Rupeeland deeply irritating due to a mechanic where you had to haggle for almost everything: if you low-balled the other party you'd probably end up with nothing, so it all came down to pure guesswork and all the rupee-farming needed to pay for your mistakes (mistakes you had no idea were coming, to be clear). Fortunately, the sequel Irozuki Tingle no Koi no Balloon Trip dispatches with that mechanic entirely and is closer to a pure point-and-click adventure game, albeit with a few mini-games to break up all the poking around. Balloon Trip sees Tingle—you can name him when you start the game, but everyone calls him Tingle regardless—whisked away to a world akin to Oz to retrace Dorothy's steps to the Emerald City. Rather than seeking a way home to Kansas, though, Tingle is searching for a girlfriend: several heroines make his acquaintance along his journey and getting on their good sides via the usual systems of correct dialogue choices and gifting found in most dating sims are the key to progress more often than not, whether or not you're actually all that invested in getting Tingle's dingle wet (and I can vociferously insist that I am not). Elsewise you're picking up the usual customers in any Wizard of Oz ersatz: a scarecrow light on brains but flexible when it comes to crawling through small gaps due to his straw body, a tin-man with very little empathy for Tingle (the case with most NPCs you meet also) but the brains to out-think most opposition, and a lion that can perform great feats of strength if you can convince him to stop quivering in fear. These companions join your team one after the other and exist as options you can use when interacting with hotspots in the environment, much like your inventory.

Beyond that, the game is actually really charming, which I never thought I'd say about a Tingle-centric game. The art has an incredible style to it (it's in the same vein as Rosy Rupeeland) and the humor is top-notch, making Tingle the butt of the joke more often than not while not necessarily being too unkind to him either. I've yet to encounter any of the heroines but I imagine the game milks that premise for all it's worth, with the player having to fight an uphill battle given just how unpalatable Tingle is in a romantic context (as well as most others), and the handful of puzzles I've encountered so far have been relatively simple but presented in such a way to reach the same levels of inventiveness that the core Zelda series regularly exhibits. What's more is that Balloon Trip is almost entirely stylus-driven, which makes it easy to play emulated with a mouse on hand. A cursory glance of its RA set told me two things: the first is that it was earmarked as one of the site's regular "achievement of the week" features, hence why there's a huge drop off in players after the achievement in question (less to do with the game's quality, probably more to do with the average player's tolerance for excessive amounts of Tingle), and the second is that the various "page" chapters of the game have secondary goals you might only be able to solve by coming back later with more tools at your disposal. Between the style, the humor, and the puzzle variety it's one of the better adventure games on the platform (I'm not yet ready to put it on the same tier as an Ace Attorney or Hotel Dusk, mind) and it sickens me to my very core that I'm enjoying a game starring Tingle, Hyrule's answer to the Reddit community, this much.

A mysterious clock from the very first "page" of the game. No clue how to wind it up but maybe I'll think of something after coming back to it later.

There's details I always want to read about in an adventure game where inventory puzzles are paramount. There's also details I don't want to read about as well, you know?

(P.S. I'll have a more thorough post-mortem for this game in the upcoming Mento's Month, most likely. Between the more time-intensive Indie Game of the Week and the usual array of chores, I didn't finish as many of these things as I'd hoped in the time alloted.)

And that's going to do it for another May's worth of fan transMaytions (dang it, came up with the right name just as the feature ended). Just so I can say that this two-parter possessed some modicum of purpose, let's have some scores for all five games highlighted:

• Linkle Liver Story: 3/5. Imaginative if obtuse Zeldersatz with some cool ideas and so-so execution.

• Galaxy Fräulein Yuna: 3/5. A fascinating if slight demonstration of what could be possible with CD-ROM tech.

• King's Field: 4/5. Moody, old-school dungeon crawling and a sure sign of what was to come from From.

• Xak: The Art of Visual Stage: 3/5. A proxYs with a few quirks, perhaps let down by the port job.

• Irozuki Tingle no Koi no Balloon Trip: 4/5. To my eternal chagrin, the creepy Tingle dating adventure game is easily the best thing here.