The 7th Saga

The 7th Saga

1993

Produce/Enix

Genre: RPG

I have a funny story. When I was a kid, maybe a year or 2 after the SNES was first release, my dad had a friend at work who was a huge Nintendo fan and had almost every game available. Sometimes my dad would bring home games that his coworker had lent him for me to play for a while, one of them was a RPG, I can't really remember much about this RPG, but I loved playing it and I feel like I would know it if I saw it, so I was excited by The 7th Saga because it very well might have been my long lost SNES RPG. Although, having played it for a bit, I definitely don't think this game is it.

The game begins with out choosing a character and going out into this town. The king comes to talk to you and says he needs your help finding some magic runes or something. I don't know, I could never really get into fantasy RPG plots, they're always the same basic thing: Hero needs to find magic widget, hero meets part, hero does Lord of the Rings'esque walking around, hero fights big boss, the end.

This is the overworld screen. Probably the coolest feature of this game is that rather than having random battles in the overworld screen like RPGs usually do, In this game you have that nice radar to your upper right which shows the position of battles relative to your character. you generally still can't avoid them though as the enemies move much faster than your character and seem to swarm towards him. A nice visual touch is that when a battle begins, there is a cool mode 7 animation of the move from overhead to 3rd person perspective with the overworld map, so that wherever you are on the overworld map will appear as the background in battles as seen below.

The battles are standard RPG turn based battles, nothing really to write about them.

One of the most defining characteristics of this game is it's difficulty. I'm not a huge RPG guy but I've certainly played plenty of them and usually can get by just fine in them, but in this game I honestly had difficulty right off the bat as even two to three battles with early enemies will completely drain your health. The 7th Saga's Wikipedia article states that difficulty only increases later in the game (Including one frustrating part of the game where it can easily be rendered unplayable due to it's impossible difficulty). I know it's tough to give a fair critique of this sort of game having played it for only a short period of time, but hey, the purpose of this whole blog is just to give a short review, if you want in depth stuff you can get it at IGN or something.

The game's audio is definitely a high point for me. The song that plays in the first town is especially catchy. Overall I found the difficulty level to be too high too early on to really get pulled into this otherwise relatively innovative RPG

4/10

3 Ninjas Kick Back

Because we're going through these games in alphabetical order, first up is 3 Ninjas Kick Back. Because this is the first game being reviewed, I'll layout a format to use now. First I'll give a short history of the game (probably culled from wikipedia) next, a short history of my first exposure to the game, a review complete with photos, and a 1 to 10 'SNES Controller' ranking. So let's get on with it.

3 Ninjas Kick Back

1994

Malibu Interactive/Sony Imagesoft

Genre: Action

This game is based on the sequel to the original 3 Ninjas film. The plot is about 3 young ninja brothers who are trying to retrieve a mystical ninja dagger from Japan.

I have never played this one before today, although I do remember being a fan of the 3 Ninjas series of movies when they first came out. Just reading the plot of this game now seems pretty incredibly clichéd and lame now that I'm not a child in the mid 90s though.

The game starts with this kindly Mr Miyagi-esque character (I can't seem to remember his name and it isn't stated in-game) telling us about a mystical dagger that was given to ninja warriors of great honor. he then proceeded to refer to me as "grasshopper" and made me wash is car, worst game ever...

So actually he talks for a couple of screens like the one above, and then the game begins.

Next we get to choose our player. TUM-TUM is the only character that I remember from the movies, he was a pseudo-fat kid who would constantly eat, thus his lightly insulting nickname. ROCKY and COLT I don't remember whatsoever, but I'm pretty sure they have the same stock 90s personalities as the main character kid, and the kid that was really really good and into hockey in Mighty Ducks. It seems that although the game gives a difficulty choice in the options screen. Choosing your character is another chance to choose a difficulty with ROCKY being easiest, then COLT, then TUM-TUM (very similar to choosing your character in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game for NES, you could call ROCKY Don, Colt Leo, and TUM-TUM Raph) After choosing your character an audio clip plays saying: "Let's Murderlize 'Em!!!" this gets VERY old VERY quickly. Plus the audio clip is the same regardless of which character you choose, you'd think the developers could have included a unique audio clip for each character.

This is what gameplay looks like. Graphics are OKAY, not great, not horrible but what's up with that HUD across the top of the screen? there are entirely too many icons up there and it's not really easy to notice the information while playing. I have absolutely no clue what the '8' in the lower right is supposed to mean, it would appear and disappear seemingly at random while playing. See that "vine" coming down from the tree branch? My main complaint about this game is the unwieldy method of having to grab these vines, you'd expect that either jumping into any point on the vine, or jumping towards the vine and pressing the action button as you pass it would cause you to grab it, not so. The only way to grab the vine is to make sure that your character jumps so that his hands pass directly over the very bottom of the vine. Jumping in this game has fairly clean physics, but precision jumping sections are pretty rare and far between. Overall, difficulty is relatively high for what was a children's game based on a children's movie. You will see plenty of this screen:

The game's audio can only be described as repetitive and slightly annoying. Overall this game feels pretty bland. It has that "just another platform game based on a popular movie" feel to it. While this game looked decent graphically and had a decent physics engine, there was nothing that really pulled me into it, making gameplay feel somewhat like a chore.

3/10

Hello and Welcome

There were 720 games released for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Read one man's quest to play and critique each one.