"Gaia no Monshou" - Turbografx-16/PC Engine

AKA - "ガイアの紋章"

Well, it's finally happened. We've reached a game that doesn't even have an English Wikipedia page. All the information that's on our Wikipedia is that the game was distributed by a company called "NCS," who ALSO doesn't have a Wikipedia page.

According to a walkthrough over on StrategyWiki, however, the game was originally released for the PC-88. It's a prequel to the "Langrisser" series, which is something I've never touched with a ten-foot pole because strategy RPGs scare the living daylights out of me when they're not developed by Nippon Ichi (who do a good enough job simplifying the formula and peppering them with cute art that a moron like me can enjoy them). Also, apparently NCS stands for "Nippon Computer Systems," also according to the aforementioned StrategyWiki post.

So, what incredible insider knowledge does the Japanese Wikipedia hold? Well, clicking on the game title in the list links to the page for "Langrisser," which doesn't even have a section talking about this game.

I'm getting the feeling this game is not well liked. But let's form our own, fresh opinion.

The title screen is cool. This seems like a good sign.

----- Playthrough -----

Gaia no Monshou is a strategy RPG with all the strategy RPG trappings you probably expect if you've played anything like it.

You'll be using a variety of units which have different stats and movement distances to fight individual RPG battles on a map, with the intention of winning some greater war (the whole map). There's no bases to capture or anything, you simply have to annihilate the enemy team.

One unique feature in the game is that magic, instead of being attached to units, is a choice you can make at the beginning of each battle which affects your whole team during that battle-- these include things like upping your chance for evasion, or upping range by a square.

This game also features some truly wacky units:

Is that a knight riding a dolphin!?

... legitimately one of the coolest things I've ever seen in an RPG.

Anyway, when you boot up the game you'll be greeted by three options.

The first one is Scenario, which gives you the option to go through the game as a series of pre-made scenarios, with your armies already decided for you. This I guess is the option you would want to pick if you want to play the game more like a series of board-game setups, if, like me, you're terrified of making your own decisions. You can also choose to either play the light or dark armies, if you want to go to bat for the bad guy (I think his name is transliterated as "Bosel") instead.

They all come with a page of explanatory text, if you're a huge nerd and want to read instead of playing video games.

Something interesting about this is that you can actually make it so that you simply watch the CPU fight on both sides, or you can play two player.

This mode also includes some silly campaigns, like the 30th one: "1988 Nippon," which features a small army of player-controlled modern military units fighting against a dragon.

Considering this game came out in 1988, I can only assume this is a contemporary account of daily Japanese life.

Second up is Construction, which as it sounds like, allows you to build a scenario with whatever units you like.

Third on the menu is Campaign. This mode is more like what I expected from this game on a baseline. In this mode, you're playing through the same maps and against the same enemies as in scenario mode, but now you're forced to play the light army, and you also are forced to make decisions about what kind of characters you want on your team.

The catch to campaign mode is that you have a select amount of points that you're allowed to use on troops, and there are several factors that go into how many points you get during the next round. You're penalized for losing troops during the previous fight. You're also penalized if you allow enemies to run away at the end of fights.

Wait! Come back! Zombies aren't supposed to run!

After I completed the first mission once and realized that I only had 6 points (enough to buy 6 basic troops or 3 slightly better troops) I realized that clearly there was a technique. I'll save you the details, but I tried quite a few configurations to take down those blasted 20 zombies in the 8 turns the game seems to want you to do it in.

Eventually, I realized that only the standard troops could counter attack, and since I only had 8 turns to kill 20 zombies, I needed to kill at least around 3 a turn. The answer was obvious to me. Allow my troops to be surrounded and make them fight for their lives by counter-attacking 4-5 times every turn.

I like to call this strategy: abandoning strategy and using brute force instead.

Eventually after these 4-5 tries I was able to get to scenario two with 23 points! Proud of myself, I went and looked up a Japanese walkthrough to see how many points THEY got. Apparently they got 26, so I had to try one more time with their strategy, which was just using six of the flying falcon knights (for their mobility) and not letting any die, while killing every zombie before it got off the field.

Now this finally feels like I'm using some kind of strategy.

Because hitting in this game is a total crapshoot, I had to reset the game several times to get a good run and finally finish with all my falcon knights. Excited, figuring I'd finally capped this level, I ended it to see I only earned 24 points. I'm not sure what I did wrong or how I could increase it (less turns/less overall damage?)... but anyway, I decided it was finally time to move on and play some more of this game so I could write this post (I almost forgot why I was playing...).

I kept going, but the entire time I was playing I was aware that I wasn't making enough points to really beat the game. My army would lose 1 or 2 units every round, and in the next round I wouldn't be able to afford enough to compare with the enemy, and I'd lose 1 or 2 more units. I knew I probably wouldn't beat the entire game anyway for this review, so I didn't want to go back and grind levels to come out with a better score.

Once you've attacked one of these squids 80 times, you'll realize why I didn't want to repeat any levels.

Eventually this culminated in a grand finale at level 7 where I beefed up my army with some of the stronger knights with higher HP and made a final push at the enemy. Unfortunately I came under-equipped for their ranged catapults and was taken down without really doing that much damage.

It was a nice thought, anyway.

That's when I learned something kind of interesting about this game-- dying doesn't necessarily mean you lose as long as you still have points in reserve. At first I thought this meant I'd be able to send a second force to mop up the enemies I missed, but unfortunately, every single enemy respawned and I only had one point. So I sent one singular basic soldier out to try his best.

I mean theoretically he could-- and he's dead.

That was pretty much where I closed the book on Gaia no Monshou for my personal journey. I considered playing more levels on scenario mode to avoid going back, but I felt I'd pretty much gotten the gist at that point and knew everything I needed to know.

----- Review -----

How long did I play?
~3 hours.

How much did I beat?
6/25 levels.

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Intuitive Design: 

How easy is it to intuitively understand the game?

I don't think there's anything I was terribly confused by. Then again, I've played plenty of RPGs. Still, most stats are pretty clearly labeled and intuition tells you what they do. When selecting a character to attack with, you'll be shown by highlight which enemies are in range. When selecting magic you're given info on what it does.

Gameplay / Difficulty: 

How rewarding does playing the game feel?

This game's big problem is a huge reliance on luck, which seems pretty common for RPGs and strategy-like games of the '80s anyway, so it's not a lone offender in that regard. Thankfully both the enemy and you get the benefit of the RNG, but as with any RNG based game, it often feels terribly unfair in the enemy's favor, over time (I don't know why that is... psychology?).

I often was reminded of games of Risk I've played in the past where one man has successfully defended a spot against 20-30 of my army. This frequently happened in this game, where one particularly weak soldier seemed to take dozens of hits against all odds. It can get very frustrating and makes you wish the devs had taken out or at least limited the RNG to only deciding a damage modifier instead of making it all or nothing.

Legend has it they're still there, hitting that valkyrie, to this day.

Another frustrating mechanic is the spinner that decides who goes first in each round. Always at the worst possible time, the CPU will manage to get two turns in a row. This makes it very frustrating for instance when trying to chase them down at the end of the level, when they get two turns simultaneously and vanish off the map before you even get to move.

Aside from that, most of the levels I played seemed like reasonable challenges to me, if I had reset more frequently to have more guys as I went forwards. You really have to watch your guys' health though, because the CPU will intentionally target one unit at a time trying to kill them, and if you let it happen too much it'll snow ball out of control like it did for me.

Depth: 

How deep/long is the game?

Honestly, 25 levels is kind of a lot, especially given they all take around 30 minutes or so to play. For a strategy game though, the lack of strategy is pretty disappointing after you've been playing for awhile. 

Ultimately, because of how the game works and the limited abilities of your units, there's really only so much strategy to be had. The only tactic I could really come up with was to try to put my highest health guys at the front, ranged attackers in the back, and rotate fresh ones as people took damage. Once you've done that across four or five levels, you start to kinda wish you could move it along a little faster.

Yeah yeah, fire, I get it. Just hurry up.

And there is a fast-forward option if you press select, so maybe they foresaw people getting bored watching the animations. There's even an auto button if you just want to watch the game play itself, and to be honest I feel like it could probably do as good of a job as I could, if not better.

Sound / Graphics: 

How's the sound? How are the graphics?

The sounds in the game are perfectly serviceable, though they are very bleep bloopy compared to what you might expect. You won't hear any realistic or otherwise sword swings in this game, you'll just hear a weird bassy boop when most enemies attack. A strange choice for the game, but perhaps just a choice out of convenience on the part of the developers.

The music in the game falls in a similar category-- it's fine and interesting enough, but it's really not going to blow you away at any time, and it can certainly get repetitive with the battles going on for as long as they do. 

I think my favorite is probably the victory theme, but maybe my emotions were clouded by knowing I actually won the battle, finally, while listening to it.

Personal Chord: 

Does the game have that undefinable "something" for me?

Despite all my complaining, it almost does, actually. I like these simple little strategy games, I just wish there was more to it and more guarantee that you'd win if you employed a good strategy. As it is, you can really only increase your chances but might still get wiped based on luck alone, which is frustrating, though some may argue is more realistic I guess.

Should You Play: 

Is there a reason to even bother with this one?

This is a pretty hard one to recommend, even though I think I kinda like it. There is actually an English translation of this game if you want to give it a shot. I have to say though, strategy gamers are probably going to be disappointed, and RPG gamers are going to be even more disappointed considering there's really nothing more than a generic story and basically no sense of progression other than having more or less points to spend on units.

I would say, if it looks interesting to you, or you want to play it as a lead up to Langrisser, which some people like and you might want to play, then you just knock yourself right out.

Otherwise... I'm gonna have to recommend you go ahead and skip this one I think.

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