Now, I played this many years ago, but never got around to beating it, since I sold my copy for like 10 times what I paid for it. I think the lasting appeal to this game has to do with the strange story and music. The gameplay is quite simple and basic -- a Dragon Quest clone with no depth. Extremely easy game at times, and then other times, random battles will just kill you with one hit. Strangely unbalanced. Seems like it could've spent some more time in the pressure cooker. Still, it's quite an interesting game, and the fact that it's been the # 1 most anticipated Virtual Console game for 4 years now -- and Nintendo STILL has no plans whatsoever to re-release it, put it up for download, or.. well.. ANYTHING with this title/series -- means that there's really only one way to play it for most people: emulation. And playing it on the Dreamcast -- with the VMU to save --
is a dream. Thank god for the simple graphics and slow gameplay... some games (Yoshi's Island) are just so damn insane (and that's a good thing, mind you, but...) that the Dreamcast -- a system that's 8 times more powerful than the SNES -- can't handle it! But it handles RPG's really well -- and strangely, it handles Genesis games, which are like 30x faster than most SNES games... I guess it just comes down to there not being a very dedicated snes emulator for the DC, really. The Genesis emulators over at dcisozone.com -- where you can download every Genesis game ever made, and they all play great! -- are way better than DreamSNES... still, Earthbound plays great, even though it only plays at about 95% of the speed. Some games, like Contra III are unplayable -- that's okay, since Contra Hard corps is way better and seems to play FASTER on the Dreamcast.
I beat this last night, btw:
Comix Zone. I mean, it's easy as hell, can easily be beaten in 20 minutes, but damn.. it's fun while it lasts. Surprised that no other games really adopted the "comic" style, aside from the stupid, boring XIII.
