Preface:
As you may know, it's quite common for games to be locked to one region.
Whether it be Japan (99% of the time when they're region-locked), North America (which also represent a good percentage here), or even Europe & Australia (quite rare, but I do think there was some good exclusives (no, throw your German/Finnish/French/Spanish/Italian DS number-game-based-on-a-TV-game away, I'm not speaking about those ones)), region-lock always have been an issue for us, gamers, and as we all know, companies care more about their money than their customers most of the time.
Which, while it may save us from some bad or weird games, might also prevent us from playing games that are actually cool. But, luckily enough, some constructors forgot (or didn't) set region-lock properly on some of their consoles. In my case here, I'll speak about the GameBoy Advance.
The console's BIOS being only 16Kbytes, and only containing LZ77 (That's a ZIP variant for those not aware) functions and maths functions (faster than your written-in-C implementation), it seems to have no region-lock or security programmed in, which mean that any "valid" GBA game from any region can be played on it.
Hence why this series. In it, I'll introduce you to some GBA games that were never released outside of Japan. Whether they're good, weird, bad, fun... you get the idea, I'll review them.
But! There is a condition though. You can put your hopes of seeing Mother 1+2 or Mother 3 or some English-translated JRPG to rest, because I'll only be reviewing obscure Japanese games; the ones you've never heard about. The ones that makes you say "What?" when you hear their names. The ones that have stupidly long names that would even make Windows go crazy about it. You get it, I'll review Obscure Japanese GBA Games.
Episode I: ガチャステ！ダイナデバイス２： ドラゴン / フェニックス(Gachasute! Dyna Device 2 - Dragon / Phoenix)
(Title screens of the Dragon and Phoenix versions)
So, as we all know, the Pokémon franchise has been successful, and mostly flawless for the most part (excluding the anime with Ash making decisions that any sane Pokémon player wouldn't do 95% of the time).
In a fact, so much that, while it had rival franchises (the most known being Digimon, which might ring a bell for some of you, since it had a better anime, at the cost of... lesser good games (the DS ones were decent though), and them never coming to Europe (Pokémon dominated the market there, so Bandai chose to forget Europe)), they didn't get the same success that Pokémon did. But, not getting the same success doesn't mean it was bad though.
And as a matter of fact, there was this really obscure series of games (well, which only have, sadly, "2" games (each coming in two versions)) called Gachasute: Dyna Device (Note that the game cards says Dyna in Katakana, but the below says Dino. I'll stick to Dyna because it makes more original).
So, what is the series about? Well, in the first one (Gachasute Dyna Device Red & Blue (Oh, really?)), you do play some kind of mix between a SimCity-esque game with Pokémon elements (collecting Dynas), and JRPG stuff (equipment for battles).
All of this, inside of a PDA simulator which allowed you to track down how much money you had left, had an agenda, a calculator, a PCM player (well, consider it more of a sound test), an address book, and it even had 3 mini-games and a calendar. Alas, the game now have a fatal design flaw: the internal date can't go past 2010/12/31. They didn't program the game to go past that date, which is quite a shame, but hey, that's off-topic.
So, with that said, let's review Gachasute 2, which takes a totally different direction than the first instalment in the series!
Let's Review the Story!
So, after the short anime opening of the game, you'll get prompted to choose between "New Game" and "Continue" (in Japanese (hiragana), of course!)).
And from there, you start in Dyna City, a city devoted to Dyna battles. Since you're a fan of Dyna Battles, you decide to become the very best, like no one ever was~♪ (sorry, wrong franchise)
So, you decide to become a Dyna Battler, and become a Dyna Master. And soon after your arrival in Dyna City, you'll meet Hiiragi Misari, which is a girl that will stay with you while you aspire to become the best Dyna Battler around. And in a fact, she'll help you, as it will be thanks to her that you'll get your first Gold Medal.
So, after getting that Gold Medal, she tells you more about Dyna City, and asks you to use that medal at the Gachasute Park, so you head there, and start praying to get a good Dyna... until you get the one on the packaging of the game (Serglene if you went with Dragon version, or Elphene if you have Phoenix version).
(Left: Serglene, mascot of the Dragon version, Right: Elphene, mascot of the Phoenix version)
As you get your first Dyna, you can officially start going on Dyna battles to take out opponents, gain medals, level up, and become a Dyna Master...
Let's Review the Gameplay!
So, in Gachasute 2, you use Dynas, that are dinosaur-looking robot toys (well, for only a few though...) to battle. But it doesn't stop just here. Before every battle, you can assign which Dyna to send to battle, and also adjust his equipment (Equip-able gear depends on your Battler level, which increases every time you win).
And then comes another strategical point: the battery. What's the point of using a robot to fight other robots if you can't power it up? Here, two choices are offered to the player: Auto or Manual. Auto will manage your Dynas' batteries depending on what's left in your Dyna Charger, while Manual allows you set a manual percentage.
Now, for battles. It's not your average JRPG-on-GBA turn-based-battle-system. Here, it's a dynamic battle system where you control your Dyna. Battles are always 1-on-1, until one of the Dynas drop, after which it's up to the Dyna following it to take on the opponent who defeated the previous one. So, you'll have to defeat 3 Dynas in a row most of the time to win.
And it's where equipped gear matters: You have ranged weapons which fires small orbs or lasers, and close range weapon which pummels, throw water in a zone or cut your opponent. Since you move around on a 3x3 board, and so does your opponent, it's up to you to adapt and move around to dodge and counter-attack. Your reflexes will be required at all times, as battles become tougher and tougher.
But fear not; if you're not that screen-full-of-bullets Japanese shmup player, you can take out your opponent easily thanks to "bursts". Occasionally, you'll see an orb with L or R pop near your Dyna. That means his L-Weapon or R-Weapon burst is ready. To charge it, press L or R, then A or B to unleash a devastating attack on your foe!
Alas, it has to be fair, so your opponent may also choose to try to dish out bursts on your Dynas. Again, no worries, the battle system is well-conceived, and there is a small window of opportunity during which you can move before the attack is fired. Using that opportunity, you can have quite fun battles!
Here's what a battle looks like (screenshot taken from the Dragon version). My opponent was about to use a burst against me.
Now, that's the fun battle part everyone loves. But then, there's the technical part. As I said, you have a battery in your Dyna charger. When you charge Dynas, this battery goes down. And unless you go to the Dinomo Mall between battles, you can't charge it. Which means that you have to pay caution to it at all times, and adapt your charge depending on what's left. This is a big factor, especially in the in-game tournaments where you face opponents with no break.
Plus, I said bursts, but bursts do use some items you gain via the Mall, or by levelling up. During the fight, you can see how much of your "Bursts Ammunition" are left just under the "Press L/R" panel, so, while the battle system may look simplistic, that's still one extra info you have to consider while battling.
Now, for the Dyna-gathering part. When you win, you earn Bits (currency of the game) and Medals. Bits are used in the Mall to buy Medals, Dynas & Gear you already acquired, and Burst Ammunitions, but also at the Gachasute Park to try to obtain new Gear, while Medals are here for the sake of the Dynas.
And that's where the game falls short quickly: There only are 15 Dynas to get. 3 of each 5 elements. Which is, even for a 2003 game, insanely small! Even Dyna Device 1 had way more Dynas. So it means that once you've gotten them all, there's no point in using the Dyna Gachasute machine: you can already buy extra ones at the Mall.
Let's Review the Graphics & Music:
As I said, Dyna Device 2 is different in the sense where they went for an all-anime style. The characters look like anime characters, you have anime "scenes" (static images, video on the GBA is difficult), and even when you get Serglene/Elphene, you get a small anime scene showing the Dyna, which is pretty cool.
The music, while not outstanding, is still pretty good, and doesn't fall into the "PCM on 4 channels that cut off when a sound effect is played" category. Indeed, with all those bashing/firing sound effects, the game's soundtrack still plays fine, and the audio's quality won't drop even if there are a lot of "pew" or "bash" sounds. Which is already great, considering so many GBA games had this tendency to use all music channels and then, have the quality of the music drop as soon as a sound effect had to be played.
But, with that comes a drawback: the NPCs's faces. Misari's face looks normal, and so does your face (aside from the "mouth always open" problem), but your opponents will suffer from the occasional "derp" face or deformed anime face syndrome... which doesn't exactly looks good.
So, you have characters that have normal anime faces, and then, there are the ones that must have been badly drawn, which is a bit sad.
Conclusion:
If we put some lack of Dynas and weird-looking characters aside, Gachasute Dyna Device 2 is actually a pretty solid game! It has multiplayer (good luck finding anybody with another copy though), fun battling system that anybody can pick up, even with bad reflexes, and even a good-looking anime style and a quite good soundtrack that manages not to fall prey to the GBA's 4-PCM channel limitations.
So, while this concurrent to Pokémon was totally overshadowed by way more popular games during its time, it's still worth it, and even if you don't know Japanese, I encourage you to use Google Translate on it, because honestly, even if you don't understand what the characters say, the game is actually worth your money if you find a cheap copy (hint: eBay is your friend. You could get a copy for roughly 7€ with shipping!)
Final Score: 9.0/10 - Pretty good game, should have deserved an occidental release.
PS: Note that screenshots were realized using an emulator, since taking screenshots on a real GBA would be quite difficult. But to prove that I own the game, here's a photo of a cartridge with my name next to it:
Proof
Also, feel free to leave some feedback!
As you may know, it's quite common for games to be locked to one region.
Whether it be Japan (99% of the time when they're region-locked), North America (which also represent a good percentage here), or even Europe & Australia (quite rare, but I do think there was some good exclusives (no, throw your German/Finnish/French/Spanish/Italian DS number-game-based-on-a-TV-game away, I'm not speaking about those ones)), region-lock always have been an issue for us, gamers, and as we all know, companies care more about their money than their customers most of the time.
Which, while it may save us from some bad or weird games, might also prevent us from playing games that are actually cool. But, luckily enough, some constructors forgot (or didn't) set region-lock properly on some of their consoles. In my case here, I'll speak about the GameBoy Advance.
The console's BIOS being only 16Kbytes, and only containing LZ77 (That's a ZIP variant for those not aware) functions and maths functions (faster than your written-in-C implementation), it seems to have no region-lock or security programmed in, which mean that any "valid" GBA game from any region can be played on it.
Hence why this series. In it, I'll introduce you to some GBA games that were never released outside of Japan. Whether they're good, weird, bad, fun... you get the idea, I'll review them.
But! There is a condition though. You can put your hopes of seeing Mother 1+2 or Mother 3 or some English-translated JRPG to rest, because I'll only be reviewing obscure Japanese games; the ones you've never heard about. The ones that makes you say "What?" when you hear their names. The ones that have stupidly long names that would even make Windows go crazy about it. You get it, I'll review Obscure Japanese GBA Games.
Episode I: ガチャステ！ダイナデバイス２： ドラゴン / フェニックス(Gachasute! Dyna Device 2 - Dragon / Phoenix)
(Title screens of the Dragon and Phoenix versions)
So, as we all know, the Pokémon franchise has been successful, and mostly flawless for the most part (excluding the anime with Ash making decisions that any sane Pokémon player wouldn't do 95% of the time).
In a fact, so much that, while it had rival franchises (the most known being Digimon, which might ring a bell for some of you, since it had a better anime, at the cost of... lesser good games (the DS ones were decent though), and them never coming to Europe (Pokémon dominated the market there, so Bandai chose to forget Europe)), they didn't get the same success that Pokémon did. But, not getting the same success doesn't mean it was bad though.
And as a matter of fact, there was this really obscure series of games (well, which only have, sadly, "2" games (each coming in two versions)) called Gachasute: Dyna Device (Note that the game cards says Dyna in Katakana, but the below says Dino. I'll stick to Dyna because it makes more original).
So, what is the series about? Well, in the first one (Gachasute Dyna Device Red & Blue (Oh, really?)), you do play some kind of mix between a SimCity-esque game with Pokémon elements (collecting Dynas), and JRPG stuff (equipment for battles).
All of this, inside of a PDA simulator which allowed you to track down how much money you had left, had an agenda, a calculator, a PCM player (well, consider it more of a sound test), an address book, and it even had 3 mini-games and a calendar. Alas, the game now have a fatal design flaw: the internal date can't go past 2010/12/31. They didn't program the game to go past that date, which is quite a shame, but hey, that's off-topic.
So, with that said, let's review Gachasute 2, which takes a totally different direction than the first instalment in the series!
Let's Review the Story!
So, after the short anime opening of the game, you'll get prompted to choose between "New Game" and "Continue" (in Japanese (hiragana), of course!)).
And from there, you start in Dyna City, a city devoted to Dyna battles. Since you're a fan of Dyna Battles, you decide to become the very best, like no one ever was~♪ (sorry, wrong franchise)
So, you decide to become a Dyna Battler, and become a Dyna Master. And soon after your arrival in Dyna City, you'll meet Hiiragi Misari, which is a girl that will stay with you while you aspire to become the best Dyna Battler around. And in a fact, she'll help you, as it will be thanks to her that you'll get your first Gold Medal.
So, after getting that Gold Medal, she tells you more about Dyna City, and asks you to use that medal at the Gachasute Park, so you head there, and start praying to get a good Dyna... until you get the one on the packaging of the game (Serglene if you went with Dragon version, or Elphene if you have Phoenix version).
(Left: Serglene, mascot of the Dragon version, Right: Elphene, mascot of the Phoenix version)
As you get your first Dyna, you can officially start going on Dyna battles to take out opponents, gain medals, level up, and become a Dyna Master...
Let's Review the Gameplay!
So, in Gachasute 2, you use Dynas, that are dinosaur-looking robot toys (well, for only a few though...) to battle. But it doesn't stop just here. Before every battle, you can assign which Dyna to send to battle, and also adjust his equipment (Equip-able gear depends on your Battler level, which increases every time you win).
And then comes another strategical point: the battery. What's the point of using a robot to fight other robots if you can't power it up? Here, two choices are offered to the player: Auto or Manual. Auto will manage your Dynas' batteries depending on what's left in your Dyna Charger, while Manual allows you set a manual percentage.
Now, for battles. It's not your average JRPG-on-GBA turn-based-battle-system. Here, it's a dynamic battle system where you control your Dyna. Battles are always 1-on-1, until one of the Dynas drop, after which it's up to the Dyna following it to take on the opponent who defeated the previous one. So, you'll have to defeat 3 Dynas in a row most of the time to win.
And it's where equipped gear matters: You have ranged weapons which fires small orbs or lasers, and close range weapon which pummels, throw water in a zone or cut your opponent. Since you move around on a 3x3 board, and so does your opponent, it's up to you to adapt and move around to dodge and counter-attack. Your reflexes will be required at all times, as battles become tougher and tougher.
But fear not; if you're not that screen-full-of-bullets Japanese shmup player, you can take out your opponent easily thanks to "bursts". Occasionally, you'll see an orb with L or R pop near your Dyna. That means his L-Weapon or R-Weapon burst is ready. To charge it, press L or R, then A or B to unleash a devastating attack on your foe!
Alas, it has to be fair, so your opponent may also choose to try to dish out bursts on your Dynas. Again, no worries, the battle system is well-conceived, and there is a small window of opportunity during which you can move before the attack is fired. Using that opportunity, you can have quite fun battles!
Here's what a battle looks like (screenshot taken from the Dragon version). My opponent was about to use a burst against me.
Now, that's the fun battle part everyone loves. But then, there's the technical part. As I said, you have a battery in your Dyna charger. When you charge Dynas, this battery goes down. And unless you go to the Dinomo Mall between battles, you can't charge it. Which means that you have to pay caution to it at all times, and adapt your charge depending on what's left. This is a big factor, especially in the in-game tournaments where you face opponents with no break.
Plus, I said bursts, but bursts do use some items you gain via the Mall, or by levelling up. During the fight, you can see how much of your "Bursts Ammunition" are left just under the "Press L/R" panel, so, while the battle system may look simplistic, that's still one extra info you have to consider while battling.
Now, for the Dyna-gathering part. When you win, you earn Bits (currency of the game) and Medals. Bits are used in the Mall to buy Medals, Dynas & Gear you already acquired, and Burst Ammunitions, but also at the Gachasute Park to try to obtain new Gear, while Medals are here for the sake of the Dynas.
And that's where the game falls short quickly: There only are 15 Dynas to get. 3 of each 5 elements. Which is, even for a 2003 game, insanely small! Even Dyna Device 1 had way more Dynas. So it means that once you've gotten them all, there's no point in using the Dyna Gachasute machine: you can already buy extra ones at the Mall.
Let's Review the Graphics & Music:
As I said, Dyna Device 2 is different in the sense where they went for an all-anime style. The characters look like anime characters, you have anime "scenes" (static images, video on the GBA is difficult), and even when you get Serglene/Elphene, you get a small anime scene showing the Dyna, which is pretty cool.
The music, while not outstanding, is still pretty good, and doesn't fall into the "PCM on 4 channels that cut off when a sound effect is played" category. Indeed, with all those bashing/firing sound effects, the game's soundtrack still plays fine, and the audio's quality won't drop even if there are a lot of "pew" or "bash" sounds. Which is already great, considering so many GBA games had this tendency to use all music channels and then, have the quality of the music drop as soon as a sound effect had to be played.
But, with that comes a drawback: the NPCs's faces. Misari's face looks normal, and so does your face (aside from the "mouth always open" problem), but your opponents will suffer from the occasional "derp" face or deformed anime face syndrome... which doesn't exactly looks good.
So, you have characters that have normal anime faces, and then, there are the ones that must have been badly drawn, which is a bit sad.
Conclusion:
If we put some lack of Dynas and weird-looking characters aside, Gachasute Dyna Device 2 is actually a pretty solid game! It has multiplayer (good luck finding anybody with another copy though), fun battling system that anybody can pick up, even with bad reflexes, and even a good-looking anime style and a quite good soundtrack that manages not to fall prey to the GBA's 4-PCM channel limitations.
So, while this concurrent to Pokémon was totally overshadowed by way more popular games during its time, it's still worth it, and even if you don't know Japanese, I encourage you to use Google Translate on it, because honestly, even if you don't understand what the characters say, the game is actually worth your money if you find a cheap copy (hint: eBay is your friend. You could get a copy for roughly 7€ with shipping!)
Final Score: 9.0/10 - Pretty good game, should have deserved an occidental release.
PS: Note that screenshots were realized using an emulator, since taking screenshots on a real GBA would be quite difficult. But to prove that I own the game, here's a photo of a cartridge with my name next to it:
Proof
Also, feel free to leave some feedback!
Though I'm not sure it'd fit the "GBA" category...