Racketboy Summer Games Challenge 2024

[pierrot]

Albert Odyssey Gaiden

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu~CK!!!

The devs actually, legitimately, didn't play test this game! orz
Apparently the four bosses in the towers are pretty legendary (read: "Infamous") for having broken HP. The one in the southern tower, that I actually managed to beat after close to an hour, has the highest HP of any boss in the game, but is also the easiest of the four tower bosses. He has 25,000 HP, when the previous boss before these towers has 4500 HP--. The bosses in the east and west towers may only have 22,000 and 20,000 HP, respectively, but they're no easier. The east tower boss is actually potentially the most difficult in the game.

It seems the official guide book for the game in Japan said about the east tower boss, 'If he gets into the party-wide attack loop, you're just fucked.' There's literally no recourse for dealing with these bosses other than to just grind levels until your arms fall off.

It's amazing. This game continues to be even worse than I could have imagined. I have to believe Working Designs must have actually rebalanced the game significantly when localizing, and probably made the script at least more interesting from the Japanese, because I don't think I've ever seen anyone talk the shit about Albert Odyssey that it rightly deserves.

----------------

Dragon Quest IX

I've had a lot of success here. I found a tool online that actually provides the layouts and blue chest locations/ranks for treasure map dungeons, which means I can check to see if they're actually worth going into before spending 20-40 minutes going through it manually. It has supercharged my dungeon delving efforts. I also checked a lot of the maps I already had, and indeed, there weren't any rank 10 chests in any of them. I went back at the lv 96 map I had, and got a really good string of maps with three rank 10 chests each. Got the legendary axe out of the first or second one I opened, which is really nice. I would have kind of preferred the sword or claws, but it still works for my main character.

One of the maps also had the rare boss in it, which drops the Dragon Lord legacy boss map at a 5% drop rate. So I'm just going at him until he gives me the map, and hoping to get Metal Slime Boots out of a rank 9 chest along the way. Once those are in my possession, I have all the legacy boss maps that aren't dropped from other legacy bosses. I'm trying to get all the legacy boss maps before really anything else, because I'm already at about 92 maps in my inventory, and there's a limit of 99 that can be carried. Supposedly the game asks you if you want to drop a map to make room for a new one once at the limit, but if you say "no" for one that comes from a quest, you permanently lose that map from the save.

Otherwise, I'm at 92% of the bestiary (I'm gonna go for 100% on this), and I have all but 10 of the non-weapon quests completed. My main goals feel more imminent now.

[pierrot]

I beat Albert Odyssey Gaiden. It was-- painful.

I'll start with the good points, because there aren't a whole lot:

- It's functionally a game. (For the most part, it's generally playable.)
- Despite a pretty muted color palette, the graphics don't suck outside of some boss' really derpy battle sprites.
- The music is mostly pretty good. Not exceptionally fantastic, but overall reasonably better than average.
- The sound overall isn't terrible, but a lot of the sound effects are pretty meh, and the (limited) voice acting is fairly third rate (aside from the intro movie narrator, who's more like second rate.)
- It has a story. (I didn't say it was good.)
- Big-ups for having a gay party member who isn't terribly offensive. (Pretty big deal for 1996.)
- There's a little intro scene when storming a vampire's castle in the first story that is basically just the Castlevania intro. (That was a cool touch.)
- There are a couple mildly interesting story elements around the main character and Guy (the descendant of the hero Albert).

I really should have known that I was in for a rough ride when I started the game and found out that for town and dungeon exploration, they miscalculated the velocity for diagonal movement, so it's faster to move in a zig-zag orthogonaly along cardinal directions. (It's potentially close to the same amount of time, but it feels significantly quicker, anyway.) The main flow of the game is in two story parts; The first story, taking place over the first half of the game, is kind of rushed, simple, and only mildly interesting, but the story in the back half is a fucking train-wreck. The writing is absolutely god awful, but for the first story, it's at least forgivable.

The story would just be whatever, if it weren't paired with one of the worst combat systems I've ever suffered through. It's a really simple combat system, so at a glance it's hard to imagine how it could go wrong. For starters, you automatically lose 10-12 seconds for every combat instance due to load times. Every time. There's also a few seconds of delay when enemies take their turns, and the overall pace of combat is just terrible, with slow attacks and long, unimpressive animations. The encounter rate is also so bad that you can often only walk a couple steps before another encounter. Aside from that, the main things are that stat scaling is atrocious, and the balance is often even worse. The stat scaling is a problem throughout the game, but it's manageable in the first half of the game. Basically, you have to outpace the level of the enemies in order to not have attacks constantly blocked and not take unreasonable amounts of damage. (There are buffs and debuffs, but most of them hardly make a difference, and buffs wear off randomly, often after a single turn, or after another character's action. There's no indication for if debuffs are still up, either.) In the early part of the game, you can be going from one town to the next and go through three or more different transitions of enemy strengths. A single level or two can be the difference between mowing through enemies, or getting your face eaten by them. By the late game, most trash mobs are just kind of annoying, while bosses shred and cleave like crazy.

The death knell for this game is the four tower bosses at the end, that I mentioned before. Just from the regular, absurd, flow of trash mobs throughout the game, I had my party up to level 39 when I got to the towers. That was good enough to struggle buss my way through the first tower boss for 40 minutes, and come out with a win. The other ones have attacks that make it pretty much impossible to beat them at that level, though. After watching a little of a Japanese 'explanation' playthrough around that part, I leveled up to the point that the mage character gets the Stardust spell (level 48), and that was enough to get through the rest of the game. However, not before spending close to two hours in the final dungeon, and breaking down and just watching the shortest route to the end. The design of the final dungeon is absolutely obscene. Not even the most broken of masochists could enjoy that shit.

For the first half, I found the game to be a bit quaint and largely inoffensive, but the second half makes it abhorrent and offensive to me. Anyway, unless Working Designs reworked this into a different (better) game in localization, I would firmly recommend avoiding Albert Odyssey on the Saturn. Save your money for Rayearth.

[MrPopo]

According to a review I dug up:

Decreasing battle loading times and reducing the random encounter by 25-35% while adjusting the experience gains to compensate, as well as increasing the exp gains from late game bosses, are the major changes they tout, along with minor quality of life additions like faster walking speed and improved menu navigation.

[PartridgeSenpai]

Oooo, very interesting on Albert Odyssey! That's one I managed to track down for my Saturn over here, but one that my Saturn died before I could get a chance to play it. Sounds like I dodged a bullet XD

[Note]

Appreciate the review, pierrot. This is one I've been curious about, but I'll probably put it on the back burner. Also, interesting to see what Working Designs adjusted during localization from popo's post.

If anyone's played the US version, was your experience similar? Wonder how different the US version actually ended up, especially in regards to the difficulty balance.

[pierrot]

According to a review I dug up:

Decreasing battle loading times and reducing the random encounter by 25-35% while adjusting the experience gains to compensate, as well as increasing the exp gains from late game bosses, are the major changes they tout, along with minor quality of life additions like faster walking speed and improved menu navigation.

Oh, thanks for this! That actually sounds like it could be a pretty significant improvement, even if it's mostly band-aids. Although, it might not address the grinding required to deal with the bosses at the end of the game, unless the south tower boss gives enough exp for three or four levels, or something. (They mainly just needed to have their HP reduced by at least 30%.) A little surprising, though, since I thought Working Designs usually changed stuff to make games harder. Does put the reception section of the wikipedia entry into better context, though, where the quoted reviews mostly talked about it as just an unremarkable JRPG that could 'tide people over until Rayearth and Lunar' (ouch, that second one probably stings).

What could they have possibly done to the menu, though--? I feel like I need to look up a playthrough of the Working Designs release now to see what's "improved" about that.

[MrPopo]

From what I've seen, WD tended to not be big fans of too much combat. So reducing encounter rates and increasing experience is in line. But then jacking up stats also is to "compensate" for the reduced encounters; make each one memorable or something.

[alienjesus]

It's been quite a while since I updated here, but I've been moving house and it's been keeping me pretty busy.

Unfortunately, that means I have made zero progress on my summer game list this year for pretty much all of July. I finally picked up Dragon Quest V again yesterday though, and saved the town of Coburg in collaboration with my buddy Harry. I also gained the ability to recruit monsters for my party, so my current team is the Hero, a Brownie, a Cross Eye and a Slime Knight.

Due to it being August, I've decided to trim my list of Summer Games to be a bit more realistic, down from 10 to 6. This is my newly reduced target list:

1. Faxanadu (NES)
2. Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii)
3. Dragon Quest V (DS)
4. Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance (Switch)
5. Spyro the Dragon (PS1)
6. Little Big Planet (PS3)

I've cut Radiant Silvergun, Star Control 2, Phantasy Star Online and Mario Golf off of the list. Some of them were difficult choices to cut but I mostly chose them based on how long I thought they would take, and the fact that my game room still isn't quite ready yet so my console options are limited.

[pierrot]

I started playing Wild Arms the other day. I've played a handful of hours, up to the initial, seminal event in the story. I don't really dislike anything about the game, but I'm also not all that interested in it at the same time. It's a pretty easy game to play, so if I put forth the effort to start it up, it doesn't seem too hard to keep it going for a while, but feeling compelled to get that initial impetus seems a bit more difficult. The Ephinea anniversary event is due to start any time now, so I may not be prioritizing Wild Arms a whole lot, going forward.


I'm in an awkward position with Dragon Quest IX. I got Metal Slime Boots out of a Rank 9 chest, and was able to get the last of the legacy boss maps that come from quests, but I got a little tired of not getting the Dragon Lord map off of the rare boss in the treasure map dungeons. (After the axe, the Rank 10 chests have only given me the Gringham Whip, also--which is a great weapon, but not really what I want.) So, I went at the legacy bosses, leveling Baramos and Mudoh up to Lv 16 to get the Dolmagess map. I mowed through the level 1 versions of all the other legacy bosses, as well. After getting the Dragon Lord map, I would only need the other two legacy bosses off of that one to finish all of them. Then I just need a max enemy rank ice and water treasure map dungeon to finish the bestiary (and finish off the last 7 quests), but the rare boss doesn't drop maps, and I didn't really want to collect any more regular maps until getting all of the legacy boss maps. This grinding for the Dragon Lord map has basically set my motivation to an all time low.

[Note]

I was able to finish Link's Awakening DX tonight. I collected all the seashells needed for the upgraded sword, collected all the heart pieces, finished the trade sequence for the boomerang, and finished the color dungeon for the upgraded tunic. I was hoping to 100% complete the game, but I managed to miss the three photos you have to take while you're with Marin. That's a bit of a pain, but overall I had a really fun time with the game and I'm glad I finally played through it.

I think I'll go with Ico (PS2) for my next game. I'll be going on vacation on August 12th, so I don't want to start anything too long. I read Ico is pretty short, so maybe I can finish it in the upcoming days before my trip.