So people have wondered about the EGGConsole releases on the Switch, so I figured since I have played a lot of them, I would summarize them here.
General Info
These are all older Japanese PC games, for either the MSX or the PC-88 so far. The games themselves are unaltered, so if the original is Japanese language heavy, the EGGConsole version is as well. Thus there are a lot of the games that I am probably not gonna play. But! A lot of the either have like no text at all in them, or actually have English! Sorta. You’ll see.
For all of the games, the emulator UI and the How To Play are presented in English. There is a gallery of the original (usually all in Japanese) manual. It’s all a nice classy presentation. So expect some posts about these games incoming.
All of them are $6.49 each, so that’s not too bad.
So you know how SMB2J/Lost Levels just expects you to be really good at SMB1? Scenario II expects that for you in regards to Xanadu, but Xanadu is like infinirely more bullshit. It’s so good. An example: The game starts you with 1500 HP, but you can’t move even one square without losing 1000 HP right away. Then you have to try to not get murdered with only 500 HP. It’s beautiful bullshit. You probably don’t want to play it.
Also notable in that it is the first videogame that Yuzo Koshiro ever had music in. Apparently he liked Xanadu so much that he made his own music for it and sent Falcom a tape, and they just hired him to include those songs in Scenario II.
Tritorn is a sidescrolling RPG with ridiculous grinding, a power-up system based on silly bullshit hidden requirements, and not a single guide in English I could find for it (thanks Google translate). It’s a miserable shitshow. The music is a 10 second loop that might take 20 seconds to play because it has slowdown based on what is on screen. The sound effect for the sword leaves a weid ringing noise that will slowly drive you insane once you notice it. Jumping is so weird that you have to get used to running a bit before juping, or else you will only go straight up and down.
But look, sometimes I have depression, so I beat this thing. Also the last boss is so dumb that you can just stand behind him and murder him. It’s great.
Yo, it’s Hydlide! Bump combat, pretty prescriptive levelling order, repetitive soundtrack, but it all rules. No magic system in this one (that was added for the NES to get people who played the original version to buy it again, and it doesn’t matter that it is gone), but you can probably beat it in an afternoon, especially if you are willing to look up what to do. It’s pretty fun, honest.
The MSX version of Hydlide is also up there, but everything I read on it said it isn’t substantively different enough to bother with.
Hydlide 2 is on the shop as well, but it’s got a lot of Japanese text (there is a translated version, but EGG ain’t putting that on here).
This game is some real wizard shit, like quasi 3d running on the PC-88, and it actually manages to be fun too. God only knows what the weird low quality voice is saying during any of the between level scenes.
It’s a little euroshmup-y, in terms of you have a life meter and such, but that’s honestly OK, because it’s still really fun to just blast around in. And absolutely should not be running on the hardware it was running on.
A side-scrolling maze game where you play as a transformer and only get 1 life. It is brutal. The controls are really not great, and you should probably just play the PSP/PS3 remake Thexder Neo, which keeps the same level design and brutal difficulty, while also giving you a button other than the directionals for jumping and transforming. The original controls are probably a lot easire for my brain if I am using a keyboard, but on a pad, they make no sense at all.
You might know this game for being one of the hardest shooters on the Megadrive. Or you might find it because it was headed by the same dude who headed Hydlide 3 like I did. What is interesting is this is a very different game from the Megadrive version. The MSX2 version has 3 classes, and is still hard as hell.
The game is a weird combo of vertical scrolling shooter and low-key RPG. It kinda works, except that it doesn’t really, but that is OK.
This week’s release, from 1988. A Search Action game that feels a little more Simon’s Quest than Metroid, but pretty simple as far as I have gotten in it. It also feels kinda Ys III The Wanderers from Ys-y as well (which I will make another post about) I did get pretty lost, so I have started making a map for it, because of who I am as a person. It’s still pretty early in the map, but here it is:
The grid for each of the rooms is 8 by 20, so yeah, the map is weird.
This game is mostly known for being the first game that Yuzo Koshiro did music for as a freelancer, after his falling out with Falcom over getting credit for the Ys I and II soundtracks. And, because he has been the same dude all along (remember the most recent Gotta Protectors game has versions of the soundtrack based on a bunch of different 8 and 16 bit systems), this game actually has two soundtracks, one of which takes advantage of the PC-88’s optional Sound Board II. Thankfully the EGG version lets you use either, and I can confirm the Sound Board II version rules.
Funny sidenote: Koshiro still does most of his composing on a PC-88. The most recent Etrian Odyssey rereleases used the PC-88 for the actual music, which is kinda amazing and yeah the dude is a (positive) sicko.
So yeah, I will update this map as I keep going, but pretty cool game.
So Ys III, like the original one, rules. Suddenly the series went side-scrolling and let you swing a sword and despite the loss of Koshiro, the soundtrack is great. Except the SNES version. That version of the soundtrack is no good. But the PC-88 and Megadrive versions slap.
This one is just NOT in English at all really, but thanks to the shift in the game style, not really a big deal to just use Google Camera Translate on my phone for the occasional dialog. Even doing that, it only took me a weekend to plow through this game, but it is well worth it just to see where it came from. Bonus is that the scrolling in this version didn’t make me wanna barf, which I heard the PC Engine CD version absolutely did. Parallax can be a butthead like that.
It grew a lot! The trick was there being two knight doors, one way back near the start of the game. I would have had no clue on this, so I went digging on the internet and found that the same guy who wrote up the guide to Tritorn that I used made one for The Scheme, which was all in Japanese, but Google translate because this was the only guide I could find for it. And even he doesn’t have a map, but refers to a map in (I think) the original strategy guide? So I am still working on my map. You can see where I noted the presence of a Dragon (or DRAG) which turned out to be pretty useful.
I just got a thing to let me get past the infinity hall, so yeah.
The game is still a lot of fun, if full of a bunch of silly bullshit and backtracking. The soundtrack remains the highlight though, and the person on their page even jokes that more people bought the soundtrack than the game, which is totally believable.
Like listen to this shit.
So good.
Sidenote: I forgot the place Tritorn takes place is called Rwanda. Which is just odd.
Yeah it was confusing that there are 2 knight doors at the left end of 2 different hallways. I’m nowhere near ready to go through that endless hallway yet
