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After playing Beltlogger 9 and Kileak 1 over the past couple years, it was only a matter of finding it until I finally played through this, their middle sibling x3. Kileak 1 is such an early PS1 game that it’s in many ways more of a tech demo, and Beltlogger 9 is a quite respectable game, so I was super curious about just where the game made right in between them would fall on that spectrum. It took me about 5 or so hours to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.

The story of Epidemic (or as it’s known over here, “Kileak, The Blood 2: Reason in Madness”), is a sequel to Kileak, The Blood which came out earlier that same year. Taking place some 30 years in the future from that, you play as Masao, the son of the protagonist of the previous game. A mysterious virus has wiped out nearly all of humanity, and those who remain live in an underground complex controlled by an authoritarian corporation. It’s up to you and the rest of the tiny resistance movement aided by your mech walkers, to put a stop to their regime and free humanity from this literal doomed future of darkness!

The story is definitely a midpoint between Kileak 1 and Beltlogger 9 in terms of both presentation as well as actual content. It’s very much an evolution of the first Kileak that adds both characters for the lead to interact with as well as somewhat more complex themes around what it means to be human (Are humans more than their genes? Are we just a collection of mechanical chemical processes, or is humanity something more than that? That sort of thing). It’s nothing that would’ve been terribly novel in sci-fi spaces even back in ’95, but it’s presented in an entertaining and engaging way. It replicates the feeling of playing through a kinda B-grade sci-fi movie of the time very well, and even if it isn’t quite as thought provoking as Beltlogger 9’s story, it’s still a good time to go through.

Appropriately, the gameplay is also very fitting for a midpoint between those two games. While we don’t have the three-dimensional verticality of Beltlogger 9’s space station exploration, we’re mercifully free from Kileak 1’s extremely simplistic corridor mazes. You play through a small handful of stages that actually feel like locations in a world rather than just a constructed maze to Pac-Man your way through. The narrative benefits a lot from this, sure, but it also just makes the game far more fun to play in the first place. Level design can admittedly be a bit rough, as remembering where to go among collecting all of the keys (or even just trying to find what the button you pushed even did) can be an annoyingly cumbersome process, but the game is overall short enough that I never found these to be massive problems.

Enemy design is still quite simplistic, and we honestly haven’t evolved that far from where Kileak 1 was. You’ve got drones big and small that buzz around and fire stuff at you, you’ve got cameras and turrets in the ceilings, you’ve got larger bots that’ll putter around and just try to bump you to death, and you’ve got super annoying (but thankfully infrequent) floor-hugging bad guys who just race into you to explode. In quite a change from either of the other two entries in this loose trilogy, enemies will actually respawn infinitely in many areas. Getting spotted too long by a camera will summon a bunch of baddies, sure, but there are many areas where just existing there will summon enemies out from holes in the wall endlessly. It’s not the worst thing in the world, and it certainly makes this somewhat horror-setting more tense, sure, but honestly the combat just isn’t fun enough to make something like this a feature I appreciated all that much. The game has bosses too, but they’re basically just giant versions of the big enemies that fire lots of missiles and take lots of damage. Nothing bad, sure, but nothing to write home about either.

The last and most interesting part of the mechanics are the guns themselves. In both Kileak 1 and Beltlogger 9, you find guns across levels which have various kinds of ammo, and you’ll use those to fight with. In Kileak 1, you even have a variety of energy weapons that drain your constantly draining shield health bar for a bit of risk/reward mechanics. This game has neither of those. While you *can* find some optional upgrades in some levels, these amount to some unimpressive activatable abilities (a shield that I never found terribly useful) and health bar expansions. Instead, you have the same weapons all the time and you just find more or different ammo for them.

You have a constantly (slowly) recharging energy beam that’s quite weak, an assault rifle that’s quite powerful but drains ammo fast, and a missile launcher that can fire various types of missiles for much greater damage. It ultimately didn’t matter a ton for me, but managing your ammo types is a pretty important part of the gameplay loop, especially early on, that adds to the whole survival horror feeling that they’re going for. It’s not the best thing ever, but it all amounts to a very welcome step forward from Kileak 1 and a much more playable experience, even if it’s certainly quite rough by even the later standards of the PS1.

Aesthetically, this game is both very cool and VERY much a creation of when it came out (and, I’m sure I don’t need to say it again, a midpoint between those two games :b). Environments are still made of what’s effectively a big grid, but the texture work of them makes them far more distinct than the simple floor-by-floor design of Kileak 1. We also have some prerendered cutscenes of our human characters which are as neat as they are uncanny. I’m sure they would’ve been fairly impressive at the time, and the camerawork employed to obscure things like how rough they look when they move around rooms is quite cleverly done, but it’s unquestionably quite rough by today’s standards at any rate ^^;. The only real downgrade I’d say is the music. Kileak 1 has a really eclectic and weird soundtrack, and this is much more subdued and laid back for the most part. It fits the tone they’re going for just fine, I suppose, but it’s definitely nowhere near as memorable as the first game’s.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While Kileak 1 is a relic only really good for the very curious into early console FPS games, Kileak 2 is a much more solidly put together experience. It’ll still feel very aged and clunky to anyone more used to games that control with joysticks rather than with the D-pad and shoulder buttons, but it’s a well enough crafted experience both narratively and mechanically that I think it’s worth looking into if you’re in the mood for something a bit different~.

This is a game I’ve owned for so long that I actually imported it back in the States and took it with me when I moved out here to Japan (and even then it took me nearly 6 years to finally get around to playing it XD). I’m not a huge strategy RPG fan, but I *am* a big Parodius fan, so I had to grab this out of sheer principle more than anything. Back when I first looked into it, my Japanese ability was far too rough to actually attempt playing it, so I just shelved it for some time in the future. I’m not sure what it was, but when combing through my backlog around a week ago, something in me just finally hit me with a huge urge to play through this for real. It took me around 19.5 hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on easy mode on real hardware.

Paro Wars is a strategy RPG using characters and the universe(?) of Parodius, just as the Famicom’s Cosmic Wars is an srpg using characters and the universe of Gradius. You pick from one of eight factions of Parodius-flavored parodies of real-world countries, and you play through an 8-stage campaign of them fighting for supremacy in the latest Paro World War (all thanks to a mysterious and mischievous cat). It’s a narrative really just out here to be silly (even if some of the references to real-life events/people are surprisingly deep cuts at times), and it does a fine and entertaining job of giving us a premise for our big ridiculous SRPG game.

As someone only quite loosely familiar with SRPGs, the actual mechanics of this game are a very interesting mix of Advance Wars and Super Robot Wars (two series I’ve played tons of and am very familiar with, even if they both would’ve been in their relative infancy when this game was originally released). Mission objectives are always the same: Capture the enemy’s HQ or destroy their big robot (and the former is always far easier than the latter, lemee tell ya). Much like a SRW game, you have a collection of 30-odd pilots rather than generic units, and these pilots will level up and gain stats as they get kills on enemy units. You’ve got land, sea, and air units, and you’ve even got capture-able cities and buildings much like the Advance Wars series has. The biggest difference from either of those other series, however, is that Paro Wars’s biggest focus is on fighting your enemy economically just as much as you are militarily.

Unlike something like SRW where each pilot has more or less a single bespoke unit or, at most, can pilot a bunch of robots from their own series, any pilot can pilot any unit in Paro Wars. Unlike something like Advance Wars, where there are only a handful of units and never any overlap between different ones (there’s only one light tank, one helicopter, one transport ship, etc.), Paro Wars has at least two if not many more for basically every unit type. It’s ultimately all quite simple, but just getting to grips with the best practices of the game took more than a few restarts at the beginning to watch and learn how the AI played so I could even start trying to fight back ^^;

The game will thankfully deploy your units for you at the start of a mission, but you also have the opportunity to deploy them manually if you want. There’s nothing stopping you from deploying your entire army at once if you’ve got the actual machines to deploy them, and if all you want is ground cover, you can even assign one pilot per machine rather than the usual limits of 4 or 8. That’s to say that, unlike a game like Advance Wars where you’ll *see* 4 or 10 little units in the battle animations but they’re just representations of health, all 8 jets you see in a Paro Wars unit are actual units, and you’ll need to make more, one at a time, in the production menu if you want to launch more units. There’s no danger to your pilots though, however. If a unit gets wiped out, you can deploy them again in whatever machines you want next turn from your big robot (or any building within 10 squares of your HQ). Heck, if a unit hits level 20, you can even have them pilot a second unit simultaneously if you like! (just don’t ask me exactly how that works logically XD).

Bizarrely, capturing more factories, ports, and airports just gives you more manufacturing capacity. It doesn’t let you actually spawn units from those locations (which was very weird coming from Advance Wars). What these act as are not just more money per turn, but they also raise your “science score”, which lets you build more units per turn (as each one has a science capacity limit as well as a cost in money). These buildings can also serve as resupply points if you’re playing on a setting that uses fuel and ammo. A very cool feature of Paro Wars is the remarkably customizable difficulty, which not only gives you the choice between easy and hard modes, but also lets you toggle whether that campaign will have ammo/fuel (or if units just have infinite of both), fog of war, and even zones of control. The game even has items that units can pick up and then use before they move/attack on their turn. Items range from kinda useless to hilariously broken, though the game very annoyingly lacks an inter-mission phase to sort around items and such, meaning you’ve gotta do it manually during the mission, which feels very needless for such an important aspect of the game.

It's a lot to get used to, but it’s ultimately all surprisingly simple once you get down to it, and that’s largely down to two factors: The AI, and the game’s balance. The game is balanced quite roughly. My guess is that this is affected more if you’re playing on a setting with fog of war and/or fuel & ammo (as I played with those as well as zones of control off), but I found planes to be extremely overpowered, and land & sea units were barely worth looking at once I had a sizeable enough air force and production capacity. What’s more is that you actually take everything with you (from your money to your units) between missions, so if you spend the last few turns of a previous mission just using your high production capacity to crank out a ton of big scary units, they’ll be fresh and ready for you to use as soon as you start the next map.

Perhaps this is something fixed if you’re playing against harder AI, but at least on easy, the AI aren’t terribly difficult or smart. To a point, I want to give the game the benefit of the doubt and guess that harder difficulties make them create larger armies that fight more aggressively, but the biggest thing that I have a hard time believing that harder difficulties would alter much are their strange priorities. They seem to fight only one set of AI that assumes they’re playing with fog of war and fuel/ammo limits all the time. They’d take conspicuously long amounts of time to react to my approaching forces (or those of approaching enemy AI forces) as if they couldn’t see them, and they’d also target my resupply-capable trucks extremely heavily despite them having no use in the game mode we were playing. They target units that can capture buildings quite heavily too (which makes sense, especially with how broken the capture helicopters are), but it’s still something that makes them too easy to manipulate and abuse.

Aesthetically, the game is really exactly what you’d want, if you’re the kind of person who really wanted an SRPG version of Parodius, anyhow XD. There are all sorts of bizarre units (flying butts, flying women's chests, flying random objects, tanks with legs, boats that are made of food, and loads of other stuff), and it’s all animated beautifully in the battle animations. Character voices and depictions in cutscenes and such are also really well done, and they really show off just how powerful the PS1’s 2D capabilities were. There are so many little details that really make the "Parodius meets real-world parody countries" bit sing as well. I was giggling so much reading all the silly parody troop names for each new army I encountered, and it's all the funnier when the character they belong to is some photo-realistic looking dog or a giant bullet wearing makeup X3. The only really small complaint I have is the music, which, while good, is a bit too samey, as you’re hearing your own faction’s music SO often that you don’t get much of a chance to hear any other tracks (even if the AI take FOREVER to take their turns because they think quite slowly for each unit).

Verdict: Recommended. While it's far from the most finely tuned SRPG in the world, I think Paro Wars excels very well at being a competent, fun game that delivers on its super silly premise in spades. If you're like me and a fan of both Parodius and simple SRPGs, then this is a no-brainier to try out, but if you're just an SRPG fan looking for something a bit silly and different on the PS1, then this can be a great time there too! Paro Wars may be relatively simple under the hood, but the sheer ability you have to customize the difficulty and technicality of the experience to your skill level is something I cannot praise enough, and it makes this super weird game stand out on its own merits and not simply the facts of how bizarre it is that it exists in the first place x3