u/BogaMafija

Hi, what I'm doing is playing games of various consoles that are strictly exclusive to the consoles themselves (or at least were exclusive before being rereleased later).

Now the TurboGrafx 16 has some fun exclusives, although I already know that the console's Japan variant has an enormous library of games - it ain't fair to rate a console by global releases only when 70% (more?) of its games are Japanese exclusive.

I've tried some of them that I could find (Alice in Wonderdream and Son Son II for example, Rondo of Blood as well although that has modern rereleases so it wasn't hard to play it), but locating them, checking if they're translated and managing to nail the ones that are widely praised is quite the task.

That and I know a lot of these aren't translated (yet, I hope).

So any recommendations? Just pure TG16/PCE-only games - no arcade ports, no multiple system releases like games on the PC88/98 for example etc.

Hi, I'm a PC gamer mainly and I like going through random console retro games from time to time. This one's sort of unique since it's a strategy game built for consoles so I was interested to see how such a PC-centric genre translates to console.

First off people call this game an RPG/TRPG - I guess some people follow the logic that if you have characters with stats and can equip them (with a single item in this case) that makes a game an RPG, but by that logic games like Dawn of War, Warcraft 3, Total War Three Kingdoms, Total War Warhammer 1-3, Crusader Kings 2 & 3 are all RPGs which is quite a silly claim to make, so I'll call it what it is, a strategy game - sort of a mixing between grand strategy games and RTS games.

What I liked:

1. Music - nothing deep to add here, it has wonderful and varied music that fits both gameplay and cutscenes, I was very pleased with it, it works for this type of eastern/more anime depiction of a western-inspired medieval fantasy world.
2. Visuals - a very pleasant art style with gorgeous pixel art and charming animations alongside some clever use of 3D effects for backgrounds during battles.
3. Character interactions - there's a lot of dynamic dialogue and story dialogue which is mostly well written and fun to read. Non-plot relevant generals have more generic lines of dialogue that after like 8 hours in a campaign starts to repeat itself but you can't blame the game for that.
4. Dynamic events to break up the monotony of the campaign map - new dialogue that directs the story, new armies spawning to attack with plot relevancy towards specific characters and such tidbits. Nothing too huge nor frequent, but fun enough when it happens.

What I was neutral about:

1. The story - it's as generic as can be - oooh the big bad is resurrecting, quick champion of light you must gather the 8 chosen ones and end his blah blah blah.
2. The world map - it's kind of boring ngl, sure terrain differences impact stats in combat slightly, but in general the map is just one big continent of castles/territories, nothing close to something like Total War campaign maps with wildy varied battlefields, different ways of traversing the map and tactical impact of terrain.
3. The "award" system - win battles, get medals to award to generals, the more medals a general has the more troops he can field. It's just too simple and after you get 40+ generals it kind of starts to even be annoying trying to find which specific general you wanted to give a medal (I'll get to UI problems soon).
4. Item system - let's be real equipping a single item to a character that gives them 90 -> 94 attack is just whatever, who cares.
5. The "fortify" and "search" systems - when a turn on the campaign map passes you go to your court, where you can (among other things) choose certain characters to either fortify castles (which gives a boring small +% bonus to troops defending the castle) or search castles (for the boring items mentioned previously). After some time I just stopped doing this since having 20+ castles and going through these one by one is mind-numbingly boring.
6. The "have an audience" and loyalty system - generals can randomly desert your army because they are unhappy, which you can know is coming if you painstakingly go 1 by 1 through each of your generals by having an audience with them and talk with them, which (again) lasts too long and is mind-numbingly boring when having 30+ generals. It's a stupid and random system and the whole "loyalty" thing isn't fleshed out enough to warrant this even existing - there's nothing similar, deep nor interesting here when compared to, for example, Crusader Kings' character trait and reputation systems. Oh and deserted generals can later be encountered when searching castles and everyone acts as if they never met each other... Like seriously who thought this "system" was cooked enough to be thrown into the game lol.

What I didn't like:

Look this whole section here is just the consequence of me having too high of a standard for strategy games - they're a PC genre for a reason and it's no surprise that the whole gameplay/battle system on a console strategy game isn't gonna live up to something like Total War.

1. Battles - they're too simple and basically 99% of the time decided before the battle begins because of how rigid and restrictive "building" an army is - each general can have a single unit type, and each unit type is good against certain other units and weak against others. There you go, look at what the enemy has, send generals which have counter-units and win. The actual battle tries to incorporate some kind of engaging gameplay through being able to "order" units around the battlefield, but 99% of the time selecting the normal offensive strategy and pressing "advance" was enough for me to win. General abilities can sometimes change the outcome of the battle, but that still wasn't enough to make battles interesting - in my 300+ battles I maybe lost like 4 of them because an enemy general timed their ability well. There's no flanking, unit stances, different army compositions, unique unit buffs and abilities, nothing.
2. AI - seriously the AI just builds up dogshit armies (usually fielding 3 generals per army instead of maxing it out on 5) and suicides into your castles (which give number bonuses to your units in battle) for the whole duration of the game, basically giving you their generals once you capture them and leveling your heroes up, making the game even easier as time goes on. It's impossible to lose once you start turtling and just waiting for the enemy to gift you everything they have basically. There's no sieging like in Total War, castles hold two times the units that a regular army can field and there's 0 counter-mechanics to turtling and fortifying a castle if you want to do it. The AI sucks ass plain and simple.
3. UI - god the UI, even with a KB&M this shit would be annoying, on a controller this is a downright slog - so much button pressing through generic dialogue, so much menus inside of menus that have slow animations, it's impossible to find where your generals are when you are awarding them new units without going out into a whole different UI built for something else, it's impossible to know what armies on the map have at a glance (you have to inspect each army by selecting them and going through another menu), when starting a battle you need to skip through like 5 dialogue boxes and and then 3 confirmations before you finally start loading after selecting a general... It all just wastes so much time in the late-game when you have 50+ generals doing battle all the time...
4. No diplomacy, empire building, character building - the gameplay loop boils down to battle, battle and more battle - you can't build up your castles in interesting ways, you can't modify your units to make them act differently in combat, you can't engage in diplomacy, there's no economy in the game (everything will replenish with time spent in castles by characters), there's no character skill trees, there's no way to specialize characters even more into certain playstyles, there's no agents on the map to do covert operations, there's no resources on the map to conquer and try to control... There's only scripted story events that try to mimic diplomacy (for example the elves allying with Wein so you get all their armies and castles randomly to control until the end of the campaign).

TLDR - for my tastes this was an overly simple strategy game that starts losing its momentum and variety before even the half-way point of a single campaign.

All strategy games have a problem where towards the end of the game you stop getting new units, mechanics and systems and you're too strong for anyone to give you a challenge, but in this game I felt like I saw everything it offers after 2 hours of gameplay already - my 2nd and my 10th hour were the exact same gameplay loop - "take counter units -> watch battle with little to no input needed from my side -> repeat".

It's whatever, a real "5/10" game if I've ever seen one - looks nice, sounds nice and is fun for a couple of hours, but after those hours it just becomes a "brain off" monotonous experience of clicking through dialogue boxes and mechanically sending generals to battle without much thought required.