Tag: Retro Gaming

#WeeklyGameMusic: Servants of the Mountain (Final Fantasy X HD Remaster)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

In a bit of a twist, we visit this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic to a rearrangement of a mainline Final Fantasy game that wasn’t originally composed by Nobuo Uematsu. Servants of the Mountain, originally composed by Masashi Hamauzu, is perhaps an underrated gem that doesn’t get called out very often. This remix also gets a helping hand from Junya Nakano to give Final Fantasy X HD Remaster the fresh coat of pain it needs for modern hardware.

Final Fantasy X story is…rather confusing. It begins with the sports star, Tidus, heading out to a thrilling match of Blitzball, only to be swept up by a gigantic monster named Sin (…subtle). From there, he gets thrown with a group of aquatic scavengers to pick out some machine parts, then gets swept up again to the calm Besaid island. Thoroughly disoriented, he gets laughed at by the locals when he claims he’s from Zanarkland, as according to them, that civilization has perished a long time ago and only exists in folklore. In the midst of all this craziness, he’s invited by Yuna, the local’s summoner, to join her pilgrimage. He agrees, given he really doesn’t have much better to do, and Besaid was giving him a depression pretty quickly, anyway.

Interestingly, Final Fantasy X uses a turn-based combat that doesn’t utilize time like past entries. Instead, the player decides what moves to make to all party members during one turn: in doing so, an indicator regularly updates who will make which attack first. Naturally, all moves, both by players and enemies, are executed accordingly. This allows the player to easily swap out their party members in the middle of any turn, given each character specializes in exploiting a specific enemy weakness. Otherwise, exploration is the usual Final Fantasy fare: find keys, open doors, activate switches, trade items, etc.

Final Fantasy X was originally released on the Playstation 2. It’s HD Remaster was bundled together with its sequel, and is available on Windows via Steam, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PlayStation 3 and 4.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Peper Steak (OFF)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

We’ve highlighted Mortis Ghost’s OFF in the #WeeklyGameMusic before…over five years ago. Since I consider that a long enough time to return back to the topic, let’s talk about the most memorable track in the game, Peper Steak by Alias Conrad Coldwood. It’s perhaps the most bizarre JRPG battle music I’ve heard to date.

OFF is a freeware RPG Maker game that takes the popular turn-based JRPG narrative and completely deconstructs it. The nefarious plot starts with you, the “puppeteer,” to take control of the Batter and “purify” the world. After all, if the game tells you specters are evil, then surely eradicating them is the right thing to do, right? So begins the Batter and your journey as you explore a universe composed of four basic elements: metal, meat, gas, and plastic. With it to (not) assist you are some of the most pathetic and scared NPCs to grace text on-screen, as you and the Batter takes down each guardian of this universe.

OFF uses a time-based battle system where the party attacks after their cooldown time is over, obviously taking inspirations from older Final Fantasy games. Since enemies can attack your party while you are making decisions, naturally, the game encourages you to make quick decisions. Otherwise, the usual RPG Maker fare applies: exploration is largely grid based in a stark, minimalist world. Objectives frequently involve the usual RPG tropes, including finding keys, trading items, entering codes, etc. Oddly enough, the game does feature an overworld…but mysteriously, is only one screen large. While purely there for aesthetics case, it does make the player start to question the intentions of Batter’s journey…

OFF is a free PC game that was originally written in French. A translated version is freely available at Starmen.net.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Little Jack (Skies of Arcadia)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

Power through this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic with a energy-boosting track from the SEGA Dreamcast classic, Skies of Arcadia, developed by Overworks! The wonderfully adventurous track, Little Jack, composed by Yutaka Minobe and Tatsuyuki Maeda, is one of the earliest tracks that plays in the game, especially when your party ventures off of your own floating home island, and into the skies on your own sky ship. A fantastic introduction to get you pumped in this retro, turn-based JRPG.

I’ve previously covered Skies of Arcadia in an older post (before the 2020 blog post series refresh), but to help everyone catch up: in this game world, you control the sky pirates, Vyse and Aika, to explore all the floating, airborne islands across the vast skies. That’s right, there’s no planetary ground in this fantastical universe! The plot kicks off with the duo rescuing Fina from the scrupulous Valuan army. Upon returning to their Robin Hood-like home base, Fina reveals that her mission is to collect the Moon Crystals, powerful magical crystals that comes from the six moons, before they fall into the wrong hands. Immediately sensing adventure, the three teenagers team up to recover these crystals.

While Skies of Arcadia shares a lot in common with any retro turn-based JRPG — maze-like exploration, HP bar for health, MP for magic — one of it’s more unique features in its normal battle system is the Skill stat. Unlike all the other meters, Skill is shared between all party members in the field, and is the primary resource consumed for dishing out the most powerful attacks. Recovering skill can be done by sacrificing a character’s turn with Focus, and/or simply letting the party’s turn end. A large majority of the player’s decision-making will focus on how to best allocate Skill points during battle to balance hitting hard, and defending.

Skies of Arcadia was originally released for the Dreamcast. It was later ported to the Gamecube as Skies of Arcadia: Legends.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Discothéque Rouge, After Hours (Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

Need a little more chiptune in your life? The absolutely talented Chipzel has you covered with this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic. Her remix of Discothéque Rouge, After Hours, from Pocketwatch Games’s multiplayer heist game, Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine is some of the tastiest gems out their to savior. Enjoy it…while it lasts…

They can’t keep us locked in! Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine begins with a group of criminals breaking out of prison, and sneaking out. The triumph is short-lived, however, when the company realizes they’re penniless and wanted. After much deliberation, the party comes to a decision: escape to Monaco, by every means possible. Thus begins their long journey of gathering more criminal connections to assist their freedom.

Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine is an award-winning cooperative heist game. You and three other skilled thieves infiltrate heavily guarded buildings to — what else? — steal everything valuable. The innovation kicks in when every player realizes they’ll need to share information between each other as they deal with each character’s limited vision and hyper-specialized abilities. It’s pretty normal for something to go wrong during the heist: alarms triggering, guards taking notice, etc. After all, much of the fun is trying to figure out how to deal with the escalating situation amongst your group of friends.

Monaco: What’s Yours Is Mine is released on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Switch. It’s also available on Steam.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Heavenly Star (Lumines II)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

The next #WeeklyGameMusic is a popular track that has appeared in quite a lot of games, ranging from No More Heroes to Child of Eden. As far as this writer can tell, though, it originated from Q? Entertainment’s block-based puzzle game, Lumines II. Sung by Genki Rockets, it tells a story of “an artificial space girl” and her rather optimistic understanding of what Earth (which, in lore, she has yet to visit) is like.

Lumines II is the second game in the Lumines series: a color-block-based puzzle game where one drops blocks to create a 2×2 same-colored square to score points. The innovation comes from how the game calculates combos: the 2×2 same-colored squares doesn’t get eliminated until after the Time Line — a vertical line which swipes from the left of the screen to the right in regular intervals — passes over it. In other words, clever players can rapidly drop a ton of blocks to create more 2×2 squares before the Time Line makes a full pass over their formation, thus aggregating to a larger score.

While the basic premise of Lumines is simple, the game excels on presentation, and in particular, it’s dynamic music generation. Much like Tetris Effect, each and every action the player takes creates a sound effect and instrumental that affects both the background music and visuals. As a consequence, playing Lumines often feels like sketching music on the fly, just as much as thinking through the puzzle that you’ve created for yourself.

Lumines II was originally released on the Playstation Portable. While this sequel is no longer in print, its predecessor, Lumines Remastered is available for PC on Steam and Microsoft Store.

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#WeeklyGameMusic: Honkey Tonkey Fantasy (半熟英雄対3D)

Posted on by Taro Omiya

Ever wondered what would happen if you threw the infamous Final Fantasy music composers, Nobuo Uematsu, to write music for a comedic, nonsensical real-time strategy game? Wonder no more, fellow readers who ask such bizarrely specific questions: this week’s #WeeklyGameMusic has your answer! Here’s Honkey Tonkey Fantasy, from the Japan-only game, 半熟英雄対3D (Hanjuku Hero VS 3D, roughly translates to half-boiled hero), created by none other than Square Enix.

Prince Almamoon’s kingdom is under attack by extra-dimensional beings from the 3D world! They…they’re even voice acted!! With this newfound threat, the “great” prince orders his silent, text-only 2D army to fight back.

The battle system in Hanjuku Hero is broadly divided into two modes: real-time strategy phase, and the Pikmin-like battle phase. The former involves ordering groups of armies to move towards a way-point. When either two groups of opposing armies collide on the map, or your army runs into a fort, the battle phase begins, where both armies are thrown into an isolated stage to fight. The player moves the general, and with it, the armies that follow said general, charging into the opposing forces. To turn the tides in their favor, at any point, the player may use a limited number of “trump cards,” who’s effect can vary from spreading out the opposing army, to reviving fallen soldiers.

半熟英雄対3D was released in Japan on the Playstation 2. Outside of potentially South Korea, it has not been published elsewhere, or ported to any other console.

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