Cosmic Fantasy: Bouken Shonen Yu (CF1)

[termis]

Finished it today.  It's been 10 years or so since I played CF2 in English, so I can't compare this to the sequel that well, but from what I recall, pretty big steps seem to have been made going from part 1 to 2.

The general game graphics blows chunks (I seriously thought that the game loaded crap sprites when it first started in the spaceship), but the cut-scenes are pretty nice. 

I think just about the only time they use red-book CD audio is during character speech, and intro/endings.  And the PSG music is pretty standard RPG stuff for its day.

I grumbled a bit about why games like Dragon Slayer would even need a SCD card with its crummy graphics, but after playing this game, I can clearly see how it helped DS.  CF1 runs on the old System 1.0/2.0 cards with minimal (64k?) RAM, and it accesses the CD for just about every damn thing you do  -- battles, entering shops, going into status screen, or even accessing your magic command in the overworld.  It's pretty tiring at times, but I got used to it after awhile.

Still, it was good fun.  I always prefer sci-fi themes over fantasy, and this one has a good mixture of both sci-fi and fantasy in there.  Story progresses little bits at a time, and like many J-RPGs, though you have one big goal (to defeat Morgan), you have to complete small tasks to carry on with the story.

The game doesn't keep track of your gameplay time, but considering this wasn't a long RPG, I'd guess it took less than 20 hours to complete the game. 

I found an English faq for the Sega CD version in gamefaqs.com which works okay most of the time, but there are some differences which can throw some people off.  This Japanese faq is much better done, and even non-Japanese readers can get help from it as it has detailed maps on the site.

Onto my next RPG...

[runinruder]

I enjoyed CF1.  It's incredibly straightforward, so I'd recommend it to folks who are interested in playing Japanese traditional-style PCE RPGs but haven't gotten their feet wet yet.  It's as linear and simple as they come.

CF2 is definitely much, much better, as are CF3 and CF4-2.  But 1 has its moments, both humorously raucous (the Saya in the lake scene) and quietly touching (the cinema where Saya and Yuu talk outside an inn late at night).   

[FM-77]

I played this a bit on Mega-CD. It was kind of fun. A cool game. Nasty-looking, but cool. Good music, if I remember correctly.

[Black Tiger]

I made it through CF1 on the Mega-CD version a good 2/3 - 3/4 with ease back when I had very little japanese RPG playing skill.

I don't know how different it is from the PCE version, but if they're not that different it shouldn't be too tough for the average player.