La Wares (SNES, Played on PocketSNES on RG350)
The ancients left behind eight giant Wares robots, each strong enough to conquer the world. A chosen one emerges in this generation who can claim one of these robots, but a sinister conspiracy seeks to put their own chosen one into his place.
This was billed to me as being really terrible, and I can't resist a challenge. It does definitely have some poor design choices: It has an hour of start-to-slime time and significantly more before you can buy any equipment. In-person battles and leveling are fast (though they don’t give gold), but pretty boring with little strategy (there are only a few spells, and you can’t use items in combat).
I give them credit for making dungeons that aren't just straight lines; there are at least loops and branches to find treasure in. But the treasure is either gold or healing consumables, which aren’t particularly useful because, again, you can’t use them in battle at all. The in-person battles are generally easy-especially if you buy equipment--and you fully heal from level-ups. The world map is auto-traveled in your mech, with random battles that can only be fought with “Fight, Kick and Defend” as your options, and an unclear health system involving vials. This is the only way to grind money, mind you; and it doesn’t appear that the mech levels up. (There’s no equipment for mechs, and there doesn’t seem to be a good way to compare the equipment for your characters besides price.)
The fact that you have to fight boss battles as the mech, which are battles of attrition driven by the RNG (because you miss a lot) is probably the worst of that, though. (For all I complained about the RNG-dependent nature of Earthbound’s boss battles, it has nothing on this.) You miss even more often against bosses, and while gaining levels for your main character might make the mech stronger, it’s very unclear and that means a lot of slow grinding against really easy on-foot enemies to hope that the RNG is kind to you when you hit a brick wall boss.
This was apparently based on the tabletop rpg Wares Blade; and several sites also mention an anime, but I can’t actually find details of that. If they were trying to port the tabletop system to a video game, they clearly failed miserably. The plot isn’t too bad, if a bit standard, and the characters aren’t terrible. But the progression through most towns is meaningless-they’re just pit stops to rest or repair the mech, they don’t even have sidequests or plot clues-and is clearly meant to pad out the game.
Overall: I played for three hours and got to what looks like about halfway through, according to a walkthrough, but then I got tired of grinding and praying to the RNG to try to get past a mech-battle boss. This game is, indeed, pretty awful.
This was billed to me as being really terrible, and I can't resist a challenge. It does definitely have some poor design choices: It has an hour of start-to-slime time and significantly more before you can buy any equipment. In-person battles and leveling are fast (though they don’t give gold), but pretty boring with little strategy (there are only a few spells, and you can’t use items in combat).
I give them credit for making dungeons that aren't just straight lines; there are at least loops and branches to find treasure in. But the treasure is either gold or healing consumables, which aren’t particularly useful because, again, you can’t use them in battle at all. The in-person battles are generally easy-especially if you buy equipment--and you fully heal from level-ups. The world map is auto-traveled in your mech, with random battles that can only be fought with “Fight, Kick and Defend” as your options, and an unclear health system involving vials. This is the only way to grind money, mind you; and it doesn’t appear that the mech levels up. (There’s no equipment for mechs, and there doesn’t seem to be a good way to compare the equipment for your characters besides price.)
The fact that you have to fight boss battles as the mech, which are battles of attrition driven by the RNG (because you miss a lot) is probably the worst of that, though. (For all I complained about the RNG-dependent nature of Earthbound’s boss battles, it has nothing on this.) You miss even more often against bosses, and while gaining levels for your main character might make the mech stronger, it’s very unclear and that means a lot of slow grinding against really easy on-foot enemies to hope that the RNG is kind to you when you hit a brick wall boss.
This was apparently based on the tabletop rpg Wares Blade; and several sites also mention an anime, but I can’t actually find details of that. If they were trying to port the tabletop system to a video game, they clearly failed miserably. The plot isn’t too bad, if a bit standard, and the characters aren’t terrible. But the progression through most towns is meaningless-they’re just pit stops to rest or repair the mech, they don’t even have sidequests or plot clues-and is clearly meant to pad out the game.
Overall: I played for three hours and got to what looks like about halfway through, according to a walkthrough, but then I got tired of grinding and praying to the RNG to try to get past a mech-battle boss. This game is, indeed, pretty awful.