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Old/obscure/underrated JRPGs

infidel

StarInfidel
Developer
Joined
May 6, 2019
Messages
494
Strap Yourselves In
and just when you think the case is solved and the game is p. much over the murderer turns out to be a psychotic time traveler trying to change history.
I think that twists like this give their games that unique charm. It's like the last part of Yu-No, where you suddenly go into a fantasy world for 5 hours with not much reason to or the one I saw recently in Dead of The Brain, where it turns out that the zombie plague was started by...
THE TERMINATOR
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Morpheus Kitami

Liturgist
Joined
May 14, 2020
Messages
2,476
Out of curiosity, how many of these PC-98 games need DOS? The only two games I tried on the platform was some mahjong game and Shadowcaster, the later of which needed DOS and my understanding of Japanese was not enough to install that.
 

peacegamer

Novice
Joined
Sep 14, 2017
Messages
6
They mostly run on DOS.
With different settings.

With empathy for how pain of those gamers in 80's era.
 

SerratedBiz

Arcane
Joined
Mar 4, 2009
Messages
4,143
Out of curiosity, how many of these PC-98 games need DOS? The only two games I tried on the platform was some mahjong game and Shadowcaster, the later of which needed DOS and my understanding of Japanese was not enough to install that.

There's emulators out there, you don't really need to have DOS installed. I've used Anex86, Pc98E and some others in the past. Sometimes games run in one of them but not in others, it takes some experimenting to get it right.
 

abnaxus

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Dec 31, 2010
Messages
10,849
Location
Fiernes
Played Foxy by élf (1990).

This is a really old strategy game with a silly plot. A group called Red invaded a city and started kidnapping and brainwashing all cute gurls. You are team Blue and must save the city.

Gameplay though is not too bad, kinda like Dune 2 minus building your own base. There are a ton of different units (including tanks, missile launchers, aerial units) each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

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Played Foxy 2 by élf (1991).

Same game as above but with better graphics and an actual story. This game was probably developed together with ELLE as the female protagonist of the game looks exactly like Elle.

Now you need to finish missions within turn limit but you no longer need to eliminate every enemy to win, just capturing enemy base is enough.

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rohand

Cipher
Joined
Aug 20, 2014
Messages
592
Location
Planet Escape
Ok! That is an awesome application and i'll be using that a lot. AWESOME!!!
You know, there's a simpler way. PC-98 emulators support hooking text to outside (since text is usually displayed with a common routine), so for the most games you can just run a tool that will grab strings and use multiple online dictionaries to translate them (not working for some games but it's a rarity). It's p. playable. Sometimes a particular dictionary API breaks and needs to be updated.

Check out the tail end of this thread for the fresh versions (and some other similar tools):
http://www.hongfire.com/forum/forum...utorials/68499-translation-aggregator/page118

Oh yeah, and there were some additional helper files somewhere that make some commonly used words translate better, like names for example. There was that game I played where the protag was called TRUTH. But it became more useful Shin after using that.

https://ztranslate.net/ seems promising too.

Retroarch is going that way too
 

infidel

StarInfidel
Developer
Joined
May 6, 2019
Messages
494
Strap Yourselves In
https://ztranslate.net/ seems promising too.

Retroarch is going that way too

Automatic OCR would be p cool. They're also talking about helping the recognition with indexes, once it's easy to use, it would be the last barrier, since emulators produce a pixel perfect image ideal for OCRing but not every game can be text-hooked. When I play games on PC98 nowadays I tend to use Textractor (https://github.com/Artikash/Textractor/releases) + DeepL API + Translation Aggregator in another window just to get Google and romaji. Two catches - Textractor's author recently announced he's stopping the development due to lack of motivation and DeepL costs a small amount of money (less than 10 EUR/month in my case). Otherwise it's very playable.
 

abnaxus

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Dec 31, 2010
Messages
10,849
Location
Fiernes
Finished Dangel/Dengel

Very Rance-like protagonist (his yakuza speech patterns were annoying to read though), cool waifus, p. amazing enemy design, story full of twists and turns (you even lost the main character for 1/3 of the game), main character even sacrifices himself at the end for the sake of his waifus

final dungeon was also great with a p. cool maze

also nice detail, defeated enemies don't drop gold but fangs, pelts, ichor, etc. that need to be sold to shops to make gold

overall p. classic game, better than any Final Faggotry
Dangel was one of the first games I played on PC98 emulator (even before Kuro no ken). It was a p. fun classic jrpg with a great protagonist (an ancestor of Rance).

I discovered not long ago that there was a sequel “Danger Angel” released in 2003.

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Aside from voice over, occasional video sequences and shinier CGs it is basically exactly the same game as the first (but overall much less raunchy).

At the end of Dangel 1 Anduke saves the world from and ascends to heaven but shortly thereafter is banished from heaven and encased in stone for a hundred years because he fukked around too much.

After a hundred years the daughter of Zeus who is basically a Sill clone (incidentally, Dragon Knight protagonist is the son of Zeus, Wapanese really love to use him as a god) descends to earth because he needs to save the world again.

It comes down on finding four women with special powers who become party member. Only Anduke can unlock their power by fukking them and making them cum. Their powers are unique and used both in combat, dungeons and plot events.

The plot is actually p. clever. Anduke has a half-brother this time around (he’s half demon while Anduke is half angel). There’s a love triangle thingie going on with Sill but only Anduke gets to pop her cherry (he cucks Anduke at another time though).

You meet some party members from the first game (or their descendants) which is p. neat.

The ending is great; just when you expect a boring end where everyone returns to their old life, Anduke literally heads into spaaaaaaace with his harem of waifus (who don’t mind he fukks even more gurls). :lol: :salute:

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And on another note also played

Kuro no Dansho: the literary fragment by Abogado (1995)

It’s a detective adventure with horror elements. There’s a string of murders that happen in the main characters’ own apartment building and it’s p. easy to figure out the culprit. But then everything turns out to be related to the main character’s dark past and the story takes a Lovecraftian turn.

The story finishes in Maine (the US state).

The game has some memorable scenes and tunes.

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abnaxus

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Dec 31, 2010
Messages
10,849
Location
Fiernes
Played Jesus: Kyofu no bio monster by Enix (1987)

Older Enix games like Hokuto no ken and Savior have hiragana/katakana only text.

It is basically a mix of Invasion of Body Snatchers and Alien.

At the end you beat the monster with the power of friendship music (like in Loom)

This game has a sequel unlike Angelus

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Played Jesus 2 (1991)

It’s a direct sequel, taking place 4 years after the first. This time it’s more like that Heinlein book.

The monster merges with master computer at the end and you need to insert the game discs in a certain order according to colour (disk 1 is green, etc.).

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abnaxus

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Dec 31, 2010
Messages
10,849
Location
Fiernes
Played Arcus by Wolf Team for PC88 (1988).

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Wolf Team has an interesting history.

This Telenet Japan subsidiary was founded in 1987, and initially headed by Masahiro Akishino. It went independent for 2 years, then got folded back in. It is known for its work with Japanese PCs, the Sega Mega Drive (Genesis), and the Super Famicom (SNES). They developed Zan, Arcus, and Hiōden games.

In 1993, it was restructured, as part of a Telenet Japan initiative to reduce costs. Some staff resisted the change, including Wolf Team head, Masahiro Akishino, producer Masaaki Uno (went to Camelot Software), Sega Genesis programmers Toshio Toyota and Yukihiko Tani (aka bugtaro) (both co-founded Gau Entertainment ).

Wolf Team producer Joe Asanuma took the helm at this time. Due to the poor sales of their games, they needed to seek an outside financier to publish and market their next game, based on the novel Tale Phantasia, written by Yoshiharu Gotanda. After seeing bids from some companies, such as Enix and Namco, they signed on with the agreement made by Namco. Namco made many marketing changes to the game, which struck a protest from Yoshiharu Gotanda, and Masaki Norimoto. Many people on the team supported them, and these protests saw Joe Asanuma get ousted for his lack of ability to solve these protests, so they brought in Eiji Kikuchi to direct the game. This brought up the idea for the protesters to start up their own company.

After Tales of Phantasia was released, most of the development staff left Wolf Team. Most of this development staff went to participate in the founding of Tri-Ace. Only Motoi Sakuraba, Shinji Tamura and Eiji Kikuchi remained with Wolf Team after this breakup. Wolf Team kept developing the Tales games for Namco, and did some sports games on the side for Telenet Japan.

In 2003, the remains of Wolf Team were dissolved, and the remaining staff were transferred into a new subsidiary known as Namco Tales Studio, and develops the series for its financier and publisher, Namco.

Arcus is an old first person dungeon crawler. There’s a yuge 100x100 grid desert and ice area where you need find chit, but at least in PC88 version the locations are not randomized which would truly be hell.

Like Slayers, your characters’ stats and equipment don’t change throughout the game. You also don’t gain gold from fighting monsters so it’s pointless to fight at all. Enemies only serve as an irritant when mapping a dungeon. In Slayers at least it was fun to roflstomp the enemies in various ways, here it’s more of a run-from-combat simulator.

It is a low magic setting, the entire game comes down to finding artifacts so you can cast magic.

Regardless of the lack of leveling at the end awaits a black dragon with instagib flame breath if you’re unlucky. You need to use the acquired magic to beat the dragon but it still mostly comes down to dumb luck.

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Played Arcus II by Wolf Team (1989).

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This is the game with the hilarious intro.

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It takes place ten years after the first with Pikto the half-elf as protagonist, who was only a boy in the first game. You meet the other characters from the first game.

It is no longer a first person dungeon crawler. You can now see the enemies roaming on the map, but still no leveling and no reason to fight much at all. In combat you can target body parts as most enemies have a weak point. But this time you can only have two party members.

At the end awaits another dumb luck boss. He has to be beaten by casting a spell that is literally called “Fin”. It takes some turns to be able to cast the spell as combat always starts with low willpower and it can only be raised by having your party members use the encourage command on main character – but if the boss takes them out…

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Played Arcus 3 by Wolf Team (1991).

It takes place two years after Arcus 2.

Finally there’s leveling! And you revisit some dungeons of the first game.

The Elven bowgurl from second game is now slutty blue-haired waifu, but no clue what happened to the Dorf and thief gurl.

I ran into a game breaking bug at the end of a dungeon: an event didn’t trigger. I read later that you aren’t allowed to leave this dungeon after entering or the bug triggers.

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Serves me right for playing something with phagot elf protagonist.

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Arcus I.II.III for Mega CD (1993) remake features the three Arcus games in one (with the second one a first person dungeon crawler as well) and has leveling up from the very beginning but the dungeons are extremely simplified and the combat is slow and boring compared to the originals. Not really worth playing even for the cinematics.

This is a p. weird series as a whole. There’s also an action popamole featuring the four adult characters of the first game in a completely unrelated story.
 
Last edited:

Sarathiour

Cipher
Joined
Jun 7, 2020
Messages
3,262
Just discovered this thread. Impressive job.

Would it be possible to machine translate some of those, or am i doomed to learn how to read moonrunes in order to have a grasp about what's happening ?
 

Endemic

Arcane
Joined
Jul 16, 2012
Messages
4,321
Would it be possible to machine translate some of those, or am i doomed to learn how to read moonrunes in order to have a grasp about what's happening ?

Text capture tools/software will give you a workable translation. I can't remember the specific ones for PC98 emulation off-hand.
 

InD_ImaginE

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Aug 23, 2015
Messages
5,366
Pathfinder: Wrath
Just discovered this thread. Impressive job.

Would it be possible to machine translate some of those, or am i doomed to learn how to read moonrunes in order to have a grasp about what's happening ?

So long you can run the emulator windowed using Capture2Text + DeepL desktop app will let you like understand 70% of the stuff on screen so long they are not some complicated sentences or related to poem and such.
 

abnaxus

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Dec 31, 2010
Messages
10,849
Location
Fiernes
I played the PC Engine version of Alshark (1994).

The PC Engine version of Emerald Dragon added some new stuff but this is a 1-1 remake.

It’s been a while since I played PC version but leveling seemed to be much faster also much easier to get money and scrap (scrap is needed to have Scrap Joe create weapon, armor, engines, etc.)

Party AI is probably much better than PC version too.

I think it's the best version.

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