Together Retro April 2021 - Little Big Adventure

[PartridgeSenpai]

I played through Gargoyle's Quest today! It's got a very Zelda 2 vibe to it in how it's a sidescroller and an adventure game, and it's a pretty darn fun one of those~

AJ was very right when he told me about the inverse difficulty problems it has (much like the 3rd game in the series does), and hoooo boy does it ever, but it's still a fun time ^w^

[SpaceBooger]

I love the first Dragon Warrior/Quest, I've actually beaten it twice now- once on NES and once on the Super Famicom remake compilation of I and II. The first one has a great addictive simplicity and progression to it, but II is very unforgiving and makes you run around a lot, especially early on! There's more to II, but I actually prefer the simplicity of I.

I also like the simplicity. I set my own goals, like to get the Magic Armor and I grid because I want that item. I like the "I grind because I want" vs "I grind because I have to". The grinding in DW1 doesn't feel like other games since I usually am self-motivated and choose to grind vs feeling like the game is forcing me to grind. Now I do understand grinding is needed in this game, but I feel I was self-motivated vs game motivated.
Anyway, I'm loving this for quick plays... which usually turn into long plays.

[alienjesus]

I've heard the GBC version of the game rebalances some of the grinding to make it a little friendlier too. Dragon Quest on the NES is an absolute fucker requiring hours of grinding to take on the final boss.



I've started game number 5 for the month - Biomotor Unitron for the Neo Geo Pocket Colour. You get to choose a male or female character from one of 5 races which determines the starting element of your robot. There's humans for the fire element, foresters which are essentially elves for the wood element, mariners for water are essentially mer-people, and Birdians for wind element are basically angels. The final race is lizardment to represent earth element. Each element if effective against another - fire beats wood beats earth beats wind beats water beats fire, with 3 other elements existing too - Darkness which beats all the main 5 elements, Light which is neutral against the main 5 elements but effective vs Darkness, and Mirror which changes to match the opponents element every fight.

I went with a Forester girl as my character because I figured she was the cutest. Not the most thought-out decision but I had no idea of the advantages of one vs another. To be fair, it seems that you're good as long as you didn't choose Mariner - there are 4 dungeons in the game mostly themed around certain elements: Earth, Wood, Wind and Water. Unfortunately, with no fire dungeon, the water element loses out!

Your goal in the game is to improve your robot and enter it in the arena tournaments to rise to the title of 'Master of Masters'. Upgrading involved crawling the dungeons (which are semi-random - there's a limited pool of floor layouts but they are randomly selected each visit) to get money and materials to upgrade with. Some upgrades can be bought from the shop, but some require your engineer partner to attempt upgrades using the materials you've found. Dungeons get progressively harder each floor - despite me having a type advantage, floor 3 of the earth dungeon becomes a challenge and floor 4 is too much for me right now. Grinding trips for more money and more materials is the order of the day here for sure.

Luckily, the parts you can buy at the shop did the job for a lot of the early tournament ranks. I entered and won 3 times, raising my title to Rookie, then Viscount, and Marquis. Theres 4 more ranks to go - Duke, Lord, Master and finally Master of Masters. I believe progression will be a lot slower now though, as I have to start finding better parts in dungeons instead of just buying them.

Anyhow, the game is OK so far, but for all the comparisons I've hard to Pokémon it's really not that similar - and unfortunately, it's not really in the same league of quality either. It's charming and much better translated than anything else I've ever played on the system, but it still has that low budget NGPC feel to it. If you've ever played the console you probably have some idea what I mean by that.

[MrPopo]

I've heard the GBC version of the game rebalances some of the grinding to make it a little friendlier too. Dragon Quest on the NES is an absolute fucker requiring hours of grinding to take on the final boss.

Dragonlord can totally be beaten at level 7.

If you're massively manipulating the RNG so form one only casts Stopspell and form two stays asleep forever.

[SpaceBooger]

Dragon Warrior Question:
I am at level 15 and was grinding for the Magic Armor and Flame Sword - the Silver Shield is next on my list...
I just stumbled across Loto Armor... now I'm annoyed that I was grinding to get that armor. I currently have 3k gold and will sell the Magic Armor.
I have been stalled out on the story to grind, the last part of the story that I have done was get the Silver Harp and then the Loto Armor. Should I continue the story or should I grind for the Silver Shield first?

[alienjesus]

EDIT: Scrub that, the Silver shield is the best one right? Might as well spend the time to get it , the extra levels will help with the Dragonlord's castle

[MrPopo]

Yeah, Silver Shield is the best shield and worth grinding for. You're going to grind for it one way or another, so if you're still in grinding mode might as well do so now. You've got a good handle on what you can and cannot manage monster-wise. If you start doing other stuff you run the risk of dying and losing half your gold, which is an utter bitch with how expensive the Silver Shield is.

[alienjesus]

Played some more Biomotor Unitron tonight. I started up by crafting and buying some new parts, creating a lovely monstrosity - a robot with beetle wings and a hook hand with a hermit crab where it's legs should be. This helped me make some decent progress into the next dungeon but I started hitting a wall. I figured this would be enough to beat the next level of the arena, and it was (giving me a new 'duke' rank) but unfortunately the boss of the next arena level after that proved too much. Seeing as I was also unable to progress further into the dungeon I was exploring too, I figured my equipment was at fault.

The game lets you swap out the following robot parts: Cores, which give you what is essentially MP, and all your attacks run off of this. Legs boost responsiveness (read: accuracy) and hp with some favouring one stat over the other, whilst backpacks have the same trade-off between mobility (read: speed) and hp. You can equip 2 accessories which have effects like changing elemental weaknesses or giving small stats boosts too.

All of these parts I had the best available though, so it was clear I needed to focus on arms. You can equip 2 arms, a left and a right, and these not only determine which attacks you can use in combat (one attack per arm) but also the element of the attack and your attack power. Some arms are weaker but often these give stat bonuses to defence and hp so there's a balance to having a good offense and defence.

I did some experimenting and eventually worked my way up to having an X-Gun arm, which gave a massive fire element offense, and a mail arm, a big water element fist which gave poor offense but enormous defensive bonuses. This boosted both stats by a lot and I made a much deeper run into the dungeon, where I found some 'gnome' metal, a rare type of material you cant buy. Upgrading my mail arm with this turned it into the Plate arm, giving a ridiculous defense boost. I also gained enough levels to be taught a new attack spell by an old man at a fountain, which was based on my robots core element of wood. This means I now have a fire, water and wood attack option meaning I have super offensive options vs wood, fire and earth enemies, which is very nice. It also gives me good neutral coverage too.

I took my new gun and arm and magic into the arena and managed to clear the next 3 levels no problem with them, such was the power boost. I passed through lord status and am now a High Master, the second highest rank. This allowed me to hit max level with my main character too, a stat which is seperate from the robot's stats but which allowed me to learn a second spell, which boosts all stats for a while. I also got a 'Salamander' metal which I combined with my X-Gun to turn it into a rail gun and almost doubled it's power again. Feeling pretty lethal now!

Good thing too, because story stuff happened and the champ was usurped by a random challenger piloting a fearsome dark type Unitron, who I'll now have to beat if I want to achieve my ultimate title of Master of Masters. That's for tomorrow though!

[PartridgeSenpai]

Anyhow, the game is OK so far, but for all the comparisons I've hard to Pokémon it's really not that similar - and unfortunately, it's not really in the same league of quality either. It's charming and much better translated than anything else I've ever played on the system, but it still has that low budget NGPC feel to it. If you've ever played the console you probably have some idea what I mean by that.

That was really the impression I got when I tried it out last year as well. I wanna give another try to it someday, but it realllly failed to grab me in any way with just how sorta "whatever" it was (at least at the start).

[alienjesus]

So yesterday I played through the rest of Biomotor Unitron. Spoilers ahead!

I picked up just before taking on the scary new Unitron at the arena, but I was short on funds to get a few of the new pieces - so I decided to take my great new gun to one of the dungeons and earn some money. I'd been mostly focused on the earth dungeon up to this point as I was using wood weaponry, but my gun was fire type so I went to the forest this time assuming that would be easiest.

And it was a lot easier - my gun made mincemeat of everything in the first 5 floors, one shot killing enemies before they could act. A few enemies in floor 6 could take 2 hits and floor 7 enemies sometimes even more - but my very high armour score meant even with my low 150 hp (compared to them often having 500+) I outlasted most things. I actually managed to get to the final boss of the dungeon, Ent, and beat him too, awarding me with a new item. This also allowed me enough money to buy what I was after, and I went to the arena.

Fighting through the first 5 opponents (who were all the bosses of previous arena tiers), I took on the new mech. He was actually pretty tough and hit hard, but I defeated him - only to learn it was being piloted by the flower girl from town who was being mind controlled by an evil alien monstrosity living under the arena - time to go down there and finish it off.

I went into the new dungeon, and my power level was still high enough that no enemies were really a threat, even if the water element ones took longer to kill due to my fire element. There was some good equipment there too, which I picked up as I went. Each floor was guarded by a boss who were like easier versions of the dungeon guardians (like Ent who I fought before) but none of these were too tough, besides the water boss taking a long time to whittle down with my fire type weapon.

Eventually I got down to the bottom floor, stocked up on some amazing equipment and material that was down there, and took on the boss... Who totally wiped the floor with me, taking me out in 2 hits. Ouch. To rub salt into the wound, unlike every other fight in the game where you just lose money and respawn in town if you lose, this gives you a bad ending and a game over - meaning all that progress was lost!

I did the dungeon again, looted the bottom floor and left without beating the boss. I made use of the material I found to forge the best weapon in the game - the demon sword, a dark elemental sword that is super effective against everything except light & dark element unitrons, which at 400 hundred power was over 50% stronger than the gun I had before which is the second or third strongest weapon. With this and other equipment found in the last dungeon I set out... and cleared all 3 of the remaining dungeons I hadn't done. The Water dungeon was first and other than some annoying layouts fell quickly. Wind was next and the more open and less maze-like design of this one meant I took it down in less than 15 minutes. Earth was last and despite it being all mazes, I pushed through and took down Behemoth to clear all dungeons. It was very easy with my new equipment.

I finally went through the final dungeon one more time to take on the boss. This time I took a full stock of healing items, my new sword, an accessory to change my element to light to resist the bosses attacks some more (I believe they were dark type so did a lot of damage to my wood-element robot) and all sorts of other power ups.

The boss still hit hard, but I was liberal with healing items and worked down the bosses enormous hp a bit at a time. I often had to recharge my energy points to attack or heal off damage (the boss was faster than me and could do 180 damage per attack easily enough, so I tried to heal whenever I thought I would fall below 250hp this turn) - and to rub salt in the wound the boss would also use healing moves to restore 100hp of it's 1500+. My attacks only did about 105 so it was frustrating to see the boss use this during my healing turns. Eventually though, I did whittle the boss down and finally saved the day. I followed up the ending by taking on the game's final challenge - a boss rush of all 4 dungeon bosses, the ultimate mech from the arena and the final boss in a row, and with that completed Biomotor Unitron.


Biomotor Unitron is an OK game, and I enjoyed it well enough, but it's far from a must play. It's a nice option on the NGPC for an RPG, especially as the system isn't realy known for them - but it's not a patch on the best the GBC has to offer, or even the Game Gear if you play the Japanese library. I'm glad I played it though.


Thats 5 games down for me this month so far (Stranded Kids, Great Greed, Crystal Warriors, Madou Monogatari I and Biomotor Unitron). I believe I have time for one more game this month, so I'm gonna go for it. My options are as follows, and I'm leaning toward one of the Game Gear games currently:

Defenders of Oasis (GG)
Shining Force: Final Conflict (GG)
Dragon Warrior Monsters (GBC)
Mario Golf (GBC)
Mario Tennis (GBC)
Pokemon Card GB 2 (GBC)
SNK vs Capcom: Cardfighters Clash (NGPC)
Cool Cool Jam (NGPC)