Supertember: Week 4

Our last week of SNES spelunking is a truncated one, owing to some very in-character miscalculations on my part, but I still managed to squeeze in three more great (or at least distinctive) games that successfully brought my "Best Of" list total over 100... with perhaps a slightly dodgy 92-100 range. I'll be publishing said Top 100 "Ranking of SNES" as a bulletpoint list at the end—with a more elaborate site list with review notes following in due course—since that was kind of our whole stated goal here and everything. Turns out you don't really need a reason to check out a bunch of obscure but cool retro games but it's nice to have a structure to these things. Speaking of which, you should check out Week 1, Week 2, and Week 3 if you haven't already.

My SNES journey is far from over, of course: I'll have to eventually get around to several more of its amazing turn-based RPGs that I've somehow neglected so far, like the Lufias and Dragon Quests and the Produce trilogy (not to mention the last Goemon game), all the while keeping a watchful eye out for any new fan translations rolling in or, as has become the case in the past, Square Enix deciding to up-rez one of its many SuFami treasures. As it is, though, I feel like I've a pretty strong foundation upon which to build a list of recommendations for those curious about the sheer width and breadth of cool and distinctive games available on the platform. I just have to resist the temptation to replay many of my old favorites for RetroAchievements now that I've been bitten by the bug, especially as I've so many modern games in my backlog remonstrating with me to quit living in the past. (I left poor old Bloodborne Pinocchio somewhere in the city slums of his nightmare puppet apocalypse so rescuing him will be my first priority in October.)

For the final time, at least for this year, here's another fine batch of joyouSNESs:

Neugier: Umi to Kaze no Kodou (Wolf Team, 1993)

Here I am, continuing to dig up all the Ys clones (or proxYs as we in the pun biz call them) on SNES and SFC alike, and this one's an odd case for a number of reasons. A curious case, you might even say. Neugier (pronounced "noy-gear"; which indeed is the German word for "curiosity") was developed by Wolf Team on behalf of publishers and frequent partners Telenet Japan exclusively for the SFC, where it was due to be localized as "The Journey Home" until plans were suddenly axed. Wolf Team wasn't really known for RPGs at the time but soon would be just a couple years later after they made Tales of Phantasia and about 20 more Tales games to follow, give or take a few spin-offs: as both a Tales fan and Ys fan alike, the opportunity to see the creators of the former attempt to make something akin to the latter was beyond tantalizing. Instead, I'd say Neugier turned out to be a pretty muted pleasure even with some positives in its corner.

In Neugier, the protagonist is Duke: the disowned son of the ruling lord of the titular region, who has heard ugly rumors about his former home nation hiring pirates and sea witches to rob seabound travelers passing through its territory. Taking it upon himself to return from his self-imposed exile, Duke's voyage is suddenly ambushed by those very same nefarious forces and after a futile battle he wakes up on a beach outside Neugier Castle with a concerned woman tending to his wounds before suddenly running off. So begins a mystery into exactly what happened to Neugier, its lord, and the dark machinations operating above and below the surface. The game is a purely linear affair, with six "stages" each concluding with a boss fight and a tiny amount of exposition before the next one begins. Much of the level design involves dead-ends and maze-like structures though, and there's rewards aplenty for exploring off the critical path.

As a pure action RPG with more emphasis on the action, Neugier replicates the quick pace of the Ys series but streamlines a great deal: you only have one weapon the whole game, a curved sword, and instead level up your basic slash attack and a jumping slash attack by using them over and over. Since the latter is the only one that can reach flying enemies, it's best to prioritize it, though the grounded version tends to eliminate foes a lot faster. You have no magic, no defensive options, and there's a scattering of accessories that boost either attack or defense or both. You can find permanent health upgrades from defeating certain enemies or by opening specific crates and there's also instant-use curatives and a rare potion that acts like a fairy, healing you upon death. One notable mechanic is the "Throw-Chain": a grappling hook that functions more or less identically to the hookshot from A Link to the Past, where it can hook onto walls to pull yourself over as well as briefly stun and knock back enemies (besides bosses). The Throw-Chain is used for a very small number of the game's many platforming challenges: I'd say you probably spend as much time navigating floating platforms as you do tearing shit up.

Worth reiterating that your alacritous movement/combat speed coupled with how there's only six stages means that this game is very short. There's a post-game rating that judges your quality as a player based on the total amount of time taken to win, and I was able to procure the eighth highest rank by beating the game in 34 minutes (there's a RetroAchievements-related reason as to why I put myself through that time trial, you might be surprised to learn). A casual playthrough would probably be closer to two or three hours, and that's if you ran the course of each map checking every route for collectibles and upgrades. It is the sort of breezy action-RPG, like Ys, where taking your time to defeat enemies for the extra levels will make a world of difference against the next boss fight if you're having trouble, though none of them are all that difficult owing to how low their health bars tend to be. Even the final boss with his three phases is... well, I took the liberty of recording an attempt below:

I certainly didn't dislike Neugier: the traversal is solid enough and for as straightforward as the combat mechanics are it's so rapid that you end up slicing through most enemies in seconds (unless it's one of those annoying flying guys that keeps circling around you). The optional upgrades are just about worth it to scour each new map and kill everything at least once to see what they drop—the odd way the game does this is by having certain enemies always drop the same thing, though in the case of health upgrades only once, so I found it was worth keeping track of those that drop curatives in case I was running low on health and they were close by—and the Throw-Chain occasionally can make the platforming easier to deal with, or sometimes the inverse if a jump looks a bit too far and you forget you can hookshot across the rest of the way. The story's mostly nonsense with a few twists you can see coming a mile off, but it doesn't intrude on the action too often and feels pretty much on par with what Ys was offering in the same department (at least until Falcom shuffled around some of those Trails writers to spruce up the narratives for Ys Seven onward).

Honestly, with a rapid-fire blog feature like this, any game that can show me everything it has within the length of a movie is extremely helpful. I'm not sure the longevity is there, even with the ranking system and making various choices about whether or not to add to the timer to go after a safety-enhancing upgrade—the accessories all take about a 30 second detour to collect and are invariably worth it—but then I've never been a speedrunner type. A strangely light and cheap-looking game considering this was a studio poised to drop a huge, pioneering, and pretty elaborate 30-hour action-RPG just a short while later: if it didn't play completely differently, you could almost call this game a proto-Tales tech demo. I think the box art will probably stay the coolest thing about Neugier, but I'll admit to finding it a great deal of fun for as brief as it was.

Does it Make the List? Yes, but probably not too high up. (Well, not that I need to be vague since I'm posting the list at the end this time.)

Super Adventure Island II (Hudson Soft, 1994)

You could certainly look at Super Adventure Island II as a big departure for the series—I played the first one at the start of this feature with the aim to see its more, well, adventurous successor—though you could also argue that it tracks given the origin of the Adventure Island series as a whole. That is to say, Adventure Island initially began as a palette-swapped version of Westone's Wonder Boy, only with a famed Hudson employee in a grass skirt replacing the titular wondrous lad in order to avoid litigation with license-holders Sega (who weren't exactly pleased about sharing with Nintendo at the time). Just as Wonder Boy went from an arcade side-scrolling brawler with a hunger mechanic to keep players focused on moving forward into the more RPG-light aspirations of the Monster World games to eventually trying their hand with the non-linear exploraction format with Dragon's Trap, so too does Master Higgins put away his usual left-to-right beelining for a more backtracking-heavy format with Super Adventure Island II.

Yet, for as clearly as this game is chasing after Wonder Boy's crown as an innovator in the tropical platformer space, and to an extent Nintendo's own Super Metroid with its now-familiar exploraction structure, it's actually beholden to a surprising dark horse candidate for homages: Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. SAI2 not only has an overworld where you move between the game's "stages", all islands named for Japanese onomatopeia (I recognized "fuwa-fuwa" immediately due a certain pair of virtual hellhounds), but you'll get into random encounters where you must quickly exit the area from the left or right. Of course, unlike Zelda 2 where these ambushes created opportunities for XP grinding, without any RPG mechanics these surprise random encounters don't really offer much at all besides being an ever-present minor annoyance. Even so, it's the only other game I've seen do something like this beyond your usual turn-based RPGs with overworld encounters and the specificity of how they're designed leaves no ambiguity as to their inspirational origin. The dungeons/islands themselves are designed similarly to Zelda 2's as well, with circuitous designs and traps that frequently drop you several floors or require spells to navigate. Master Higgins can now equip armor and weapons like Wonder Boy or Link, and can even acquire progress-enabling up-jab and down-stab moves from weird old guys in the middle of nowhere.

SAI2 is full of surprises, between hidden nodes on the overworld to a hint system that works by sleeping at the only safe haven on the map, the castle at Waku-Waku Island, to the fact that there's a casino where you can spend hours playing three mini-games to earn enough cash for the best equipment in the game—and you can get there pretty early too: at the fourth island (out of six)—but I think the most surprising is that the story involves an NTR angle, which isn't something I think I've seen before in a PG-rated action game. Master Higgins and his frequent squeeze Tina have finally tied the knot and are sailing away on a rickety raft to their honeymoon, when a storm sends them floating in opposite directions both with amnesia. Tina's found by the local King and soon finds herself betrothed as his Queen-to-be while Higgins searches around the islands for traces of his past self—it's only when Higgins has a chance encounter with the King after Tina's already been abducted again that the two star-crossed lovers are once again united by the thread of fate. It's romantic and all but you can't help but wonder what sort of preceding relationship Tina and the King had before nuptials were being discussed. Or maybe I just spend too much time on the seedier sides of the internet, who knows.

As for the game, it's pretty standard exploraction business with some slightly trolly level design, owing to those traps I mentioned that frequently has you scaling up and down dungeons. One mechanic is how each dungeon has an icon associated with it—a star, a sun, a moon, a droplet, and a lightning bolt—and a lever that turns all blocks with that icon either on or off. In most cases you want the blocks on because they often serve as platforms, however there are certain occasions where the blocks might be actively blocking a chest or secret area and you have to make a mental note to go back to the relevant island and turn those blocks off again. The fifth dungeon has an area where all five blocks need to be turned on at once, creating a whole lot of backtracking to do if I wanted the contents of the chest at the end of all those platforms (spoilers: it had the second best shield in the game, so kinda?). The casino is diabolical: if you were hoping to buy the items in there directly you arrive halfway through the game likely carrying around a couple thousand coins, mostly from enemies that occasionally drop gold coins worth five each and maybe a few chests that contain anywhere between 500-5,000 gold. To buy the Light Sword from the casino, the best weapon, takes 50,000 gold. Either you play the most rewarding mini-game (as seen in the screenshot above) over and over or you can decide to finish the game with the second best set, found across various dungeons for free albeit requiring some late-game abilities to reach.

Other than that you've got some bright and colorful graphics with sprites that tend towards the larger side, making areas feel a bit cluttered at times, and some tropical music with plenty of soccer whistles that is pretty much typical for the series's aesthetic. There's a really cool spell system that gets unlocked about midway through the game with the discovery of a magic wand: you can start finding MP upgrades shortly thereafter and each one also unlocks a new spell that takes that much power to cast. So for instance, at one MP you have a spell that warps you back to the dungeon entrance and at two MP you can cast a recovery spell that heals a (shockingly) low amount of HP. The game has plenty of hints for how to make progress, boss weaknesses to exploit, and powerful equipment found with the right upgrades so even if there's some obtuse puzzles you can't really fault the game for being too withholding about information. Many bosses can be spam-attacked to death pretty quickly though a few have smaller windows of opportunity to attack and are more of a waiting game. I've included a fight against the final boss, easily the hardest by several magnitudes, below for some context (as well as plenty of awkward post-game flirting between the Master and Tina):

This was a real find for me as someone who loves this subgenre and is always excited to discover really early versions of it before much had been codified between Super Metroid (which released about six months prior) and the IGAvanias that arrived a while later. It's a bit rough in spots, definitely more than a little antagonistic with some design choices, and I really would've preferred if it had unlocked the fast travel features sooner—there's a 4MP warp spell that's like the exit spell but lets you specify an area within a dungeon that you can warp to from the overworld, which is a great time-saver—but it's otherwise a very serviceable early exploraction game that existed before auto-maps became standard, though having the game broken up into relatively small stages does alleviate the amount of backtracking and getting lost involved. It was absolutely worth playing through the first game to see just how different this one was: it's a shame they never tried to do this again, with the most recent Adventure Island reboots reverting back to the linear platformer format. Well, maybe Konami (the current license holders, after Hudson folded) can get working on a reboot just as soon as they get done with that Ganbare Goemon Collection I've decided I sorely need enough to will into existence.

Does It Make the List? Sure does. Top half at least.

Pieces (Prism Kikaku, 1994)

I've heard this game referred to as the "Tetris Battle Gaiden of jigsaw puzzles" and knew I had to pencil in a look before this feature was over. Jigsaw puzzles are, like LEGO sets and nonograms, one of many ways I like to relax ideally through a video game medium where I don't have to worry about mistakes or clearing up and storing large piles of pieces afterwards, whether they're plastic or cardboard. However, Pieces is not necessarily in the market of helping you wind down after a stressful day: it has the aforementioned Tetris Battle Gaiden aspect where you compete against a series of increasingly tougher CPU opponents or a friend in putting together three jigsaw puzzles as quickly as possible. I figured Prism Kikaku would be too obscure a developer for the English-speaking internet to know too much about—their only other credits on GameFAQs includes a port of fantasy Capcom brawler The King of Dragons and the RPG Dual Orb II, both also for SNES—but apparently "Prism Kikaku" was the original name of Nippon Ichi Software, a company I'm conversely quite familiar with. If it's true they're one and the same, then this is the first game the eventual Disgaea devs and overseas Ys publishers ever released. From small acorns, etc..

The Tetris Battle Gaiden comparison is felt most keenly from how you're able to accrue "item power" by banking excess time from a bonus timer that starts as soon as you place a piece; you can then spend them on any one of a series of icons that appear on the far side of whichever half of the screen you're taking up. These might include ways to screw over your opponent, like causing their cursor to freeze up or reversing their controls or even just wiping their own slate of items clean before they can use any, or it might help you finish your puzzles faster such as an automatic mode where pieces are put in place as soon as you click them, or a helper that works as quickly as you to make progress twice as fast, or a scanner that plays a little "hot-or-cold" game with the piece you've selected to help narrow down where it goes. Your opponents can use all these abilities too, of course, so this feature is not something you can neglect out of some stubborn sense of fair play and still expect to beat the harder CPUs. Jigsaw puzzles certainly aren't everyone's cup of tea, less so when there's a stressful timed competitive element added to it, but I'd like to see the GB crew add this to the rotation of some "Mini-Game Olympics" multi-game event that I'm sure Dan Ryckert has thought about hosting a few times in the past. If that dude likes anything outside of wrestling and games, it's absurd game show structures that allow for plenty of screwing over your friends and coworkers. Check it out in action here, as I take on a fake Gundam:

Beyond that mode you also have the "All Play" mode which is a much more traditional puzzle-solving experience, since the developers weren't so out of touch to assume a whole bunch of quiet puzzle nerds wouldn't be drawn to a new jigsaw puzzle game they could chill out with. This mode offers various difficulty levels as well: the higher ones not only reduce the overall time limit but add fake pieces to the rotation (you typically have five "slots" where pieces sit after being randomly drawn from the larger pool of those yet to be placed) that you have to remove or ignore before accidentally trying to fit them into the image. If there's a downside to this half of the game it's in how all the puzzles are pretty small 6x6 to 6x10 affairs (or 36 to 60 pieces to save you some easy math), though with the time limit and fake pieces in play it can be more than a little challenging; especially with those where half the image is some identical looking background. But, hey, I have a fondness for the jigsaw puzzle format if not quite to the same extent as picross and this is really the only game I know of from this specific subgenre to be released on SNES, and coupled with the novelty of its competitive mode I found myself appreciating the rarity and ambition of this one quite a bit. I'm now working on its RA set—some real toughies in this group, like finishing all three of your puzzles before your CPU opponent has done two that you can only earn with the harder competitors—as I see out the end of September.

Does It Make the List? Well, the list is right down here, so let's find out.

The (Not Completely, Absolutely Official Just Yet But Pretty Close) Top 100 SNES Games List

(Italics = added since starting this feature)

1. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
2. Super Mario World
3. Chrono Trigger
4. Final Fantasy VI
5. Super Metroid
6. Terranigma
7. EarthBound
8. Super Mario World II: Yoshi's Island
9. Secret of Mana
10. Kirby Super Star / Kirby's Fun Pak
11. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
12. Final Fantasy IV
13. Ganbare Goemon 3: Shishi Juurokube no Karakuri Manjigatame
14. Ganbare Goemon 2: Kiteretsu Shogun McGuinness
15. The Legend of the Mystical Ninja
16. Demon's Crest
17. Illusion of Gaia / Illusion of Time
18. Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima
19. Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest
20. ActRaiser
21. Super Mario Kart
22. Kirby's Dream Course
23. Tales of Phantasia
24. Final Fantasy V
25. Ys III: Wanderers from Ys
26. Super Mario All-Stars
27. Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble
28. Donkey Kong Country
29. Secret of Evermore
30. Mega Man X
31. Live a Live
32. Mario no Super Picross
33. Picross NP
34. Super Adventure Island II
35. Kirby's Dream Land 3
36. The Firemen
37. Skyblazer
38. Equinox
39. Final Fantasy Mystic Quest
40. Soul Blazer
41. Ys V: Ushinawareta Suna no Miyako Kefin
42. Umihara Kawase
43. Tetris Battle Gaiden
44. Star Fox
45. Ys IV: Mask of the Sun
46. Shadowrun
47. Treasure of the Rudras
48. Pop'n TwinBee: Rainbow Bell Adventures
49. Super Castlevania IV
50. E.V.O.: Search for Eden
51. The Lost Vikings
52. Goof Troop
53. King Arthur's World
54. DoReMi Fantasy: Milon no DokiDoki Adventure
55. Hameln no Violin Hiki
56. Ihatovo Monogatari
57. Mega-Lo-Mania
58. SimCity
59. Plok
60. Pilotwings
61. F-Zero
62. Super Bomberman 2
63. Operation Logic Bomb
64. Alcahest
65. Holy Umbrella: Dondera no Mubo!!
66. The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang
67. Pieces
68. AD&D: Eye of the Beholder
69. Mega Man 7
70. Slayers
71. Kuusou Kagaku Sekai Gulliver Boy
72. Populous
73. Monstania
74. Robotrek
75. Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose
76. Neugier: Umi to Kaze no Kodou
77. Battletoads in Battlemaniacs
78. Flashback
79. Majyuuou
80. Parodius
81. Gunple: Gunman's Proof
82. Pocky & Rocky
83. Eien no Filena
84. Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts
85. River City Girls Zero
86. Sutte Hakkun
87. Sanrio World Smash Ball!
88. Lemmings
89. Super Gussun Oyoyo 2
90. Zombies Ate My Neighbors
91. Axelay
92. Oekaki Logic 2
93. Oekaki Logic
94. Jelly Boy
95. Super Buster Bros. / Super Pang
96. A.S.P. Air Strike Patrol / Desert Fighter
97. Super Smash TV
98. Battle Clash
99. Doom
100. Mario Paint