Kanye West once said before he irretrievably went off the deep end, "I'mma wonder about swans", and so are we here on Anyway, Here's WonderSwan: a monthly root around in the dusty attic trunks that are the Bandai WonderSwan and WonderSwan Color libraries. As always, we're going to process five games from those catalogs—some of which are randomly chosen by an algorithm, while others are selected by yours truly through some creative rules-massaging—and give them a semi-serious attempt to vindicate their existence. The reality is that much of the WonderSwan library, which at the time had already figured out that the portable gaming audience heavily favors RPGs and strategy games, is trapped behind a monumental language barrier yet I'm still hoping to dig deep enough to find some gems worth the hassle or at the very least get a more comprehensive idea of what that system had to offer the world in the brief period of time it existed. Also, making fun of dumb low-effort anime tie-ins. I never claimed my intentions were pure.

There's no new "loopholes" to exploit for a bit more control over a feature I invented (trying not to think about the psychology behind that) but I can at least refresh you all on the ones we have already. The first is the Lucky 7s Clause, which means I get to choose whatever game shows up on any number entry that's a multiple of seven. Since we're dealing with entries 26-30 this time we have a Lucky 7 in its midst with #28. The next is the Prime Plus Plan: similar dominion over any entry that's also a prime number. There's one of those too here: entry #29. FInally, there's the Square Squared Settlement, in which any square numbered entry is a guaranteed Squaresoft game, though which one is still ultimately randomly selected from those remaining. We don't have a single Squaresoft game this time around but we'll certainly see more eventually.

That parenthetical "Part Six" in the title sure does suggest there were at least five previous parts to this series, right? Very shrewd of you all to recognize that. They're over here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five.

Anyway, here's WonderSwan:

#26: Shaman King: Mirai e no Ishi

"Shaman King: Will for the Future"

• Developer: Graphic Research
• Publisher: Bandai
• Release Date: 2002-08-29
• Inscrutability: Major
• Selection Process: Random
• Is This Anime?: Sure is.

Field Report: Shaman King, which follows the adventures of spiritual medium Yoh Asakura as he prepares to enter a tournament to become the titular wish-granting Shaman King, is a manga created by Hiroyuki Takei that ran from 1998 to 2004 in Shonen Jump. It was adapted as an anime in 2001 by studio Xebec, their biggest hit up to that point having probably been the goofy harem sci-fi Martian Successor Nadesico, which in turn found success overseas as part of 4Kids's Saturday morning line-up of anime exports. I wasn't following kids' anime at the time, since I'd ceased to be a kid at that point (sure am aging myself for no reason), but I recall seeing images of this show and how striking they were: the property takes on some hip-hop/graffiti influences and has this sharp, cool style to it that I'd later see in stuff like The World Ends With You or modern Sonic reboots or taken to its unfortunate extreme with that whole "Loonatics Unleashed" era of Looney Tunes. I'm not saying you can draw a straight line from Shaman King to Poochie the Rapping Dog (Poochie came first, after all) but it felt like the contemporary coolness of serial anime of the late '90s and early '00s is what prompted a lot of other animated properties to start heading in that direction (and the observant parodies that followed). Suffice it to say I know little about the show itself, and this Japanese-only WonderSwan RPG probably won't be the ideal place to start learning.

The plainly-named Graphic Research shows up six times in the WonderSwan library, invariably connected to anime properties like One Piece or Soul Hunter. They'd been active since the Famicom era with a heap of games for that system and multiple portable formats like the Game Boy yet very few of these would ever see localizations, either due to licensing or some intrinsic Japanese-ness that would make them hard sells overseas. A short list of localizations includes the Twin Cobra port for Genesis, the PlayStation kart racer Bomberman Fantasy Race, and a few Monster Rancher games for GBC.

Boy, that was a whole lot of yapping. I guess anime tie-ins have to spend a considerable amount of energy early on catching up new players on the setting and lore before they can get into the action. I walked around protagonist Yoh's hometown for a little while before getting beaten up by a Native American in a graveyard after he transformed into some kind of angel but didn't get to do much more than that. The combat turned out to be more turn-based than I anticipated—I guess I figured it'd be more like that Inuyasha action-RPG I played, since they had a similar look—and one that's built around an active-time battle gauge. Specifically, it had that Grandia approach where exploiting that short time between choosing attacks and actually attacking was paramount for interrupting opponents and maintaining control of the battle. It didn't mean much against that Native dude (whose name was Shiruba, or I guess Silver since it was katakana) since that was a fight I was scripted to lose for the sake of teaching this upstart how competitive the Shaman King contest will be, but I imagine other fights will depend on quickly firing out "distraction moves" to create some space on the time gauge to squeeze in the big hitters.

Naturally, this isn't something I'm going to get far in without understanding the language. Turn-based RPGs tend to require more ratiocination and anticipating enemy attacks and I can't really do that without being able to read anything. I liked the game's look for the most part but if I'm going to be able to engage with any these anime tie-ins it'd have to be an action game where reading isn't as much a factor as opposed to something like this which was 90% text boxes. Alas, I think the latter will be true for most of them on WonderSwan: the portable format lending itself better to RPGs and strategy games as previously stated.

Time Spent: Ten minutes.

#27: Kurupara!

• Developer: Tom Create
• Publisher: Tom Create
• Release Date: 2001-06-14
• Inscrutability: Minor
• Selection Process: Random
• Is This Anime?: Maybe a spin-off.

Field Report: Kurupara! is a panel-flipping puzzle game (I suspect the name means "spinning panel", from the onomatopoeia "guru guru" meaning to spin around: a term I learned from Kuru Kuru Kururin and Gurumin) that has you setting up the board by placing similar tiles together by sliding them around and then knocking them all out in as few moves as possible, dominos-style. The way it works is that three or more tiles lined up next to each other will blink out of existence giving you more room to work but conversely you get the best result by moving everything into place first for a big chain reaction. You're free to spin tiles around to see what's on the other side as often as you need to: any tile with multiple sides will automatically spin around after it's been used to complete a line of identical symbols, ideally already in a place where the symbol on the other side is also matched with a row of same. So as an example you might have a tile that has a flower on one side and a frog on the other: if you line up the other frog tiles in a vertical line and the other flowers in a horizontal line then slot this multi-tile between them, the two lines will poof away one after the other. As with a lot of these visual-based puzzle games it's far more intuitive in practice. The game has a straightforward cutesy look with either a sunny female assistant or a silly pompadour-sporting sleazy uncle type popping up in various places for encouragement.

The Tokyo-based Tom Create is attached to seven WonderSwan games and in all cases besides this one had their games published by Bandai. They frequently worked with Bandai prior to the WonderSwan also, making them one of several third-party studios presumably scouted ahead of time by Bandai when they got to work on building a robust library for the system. They're another company where few of their games ever released overseas as most of their output was licensed fare: a handful that made it out include SD Gundam Force for GBA and Bleach: The 3rd Phantom for DS. They're still around too: they just put out some manic-looking shovelware for Switch called Throw it! Animal Park and an upcoming sequel Throw it! Dinosaur Panic that resemble one of those coin-shifter arcade machines but with living creatures.

So... this game is kinda irritating. Specifically in the way super tough puzzle games can be if you're too impatient or incautious. I'd probably liken the gameplay to Puzznic: getting the symbols into the right place to set up the chain without messing up one of the steps takes up most of the mental strain and is fraught with difficulty due to the degree of organizational acumen required to shuffle everything around without messing up. Fortunately, while there is still that slight Sokoban influence, at least you don't have to worry about gravity in Kurupara! like you would in Puzznic. The real challenge comes in carefully flipping everything to get a head count of what you're dealing with: since you're trying to avoid any remainders (you effectively cut your score in half if you leave any, since you lose the time bonus as well as take a malus for each remaining tile) you might start by counting how many of every symbol there are. However, if there's two adjacent symbols matching nearby then the chances of you flipping over a third and causing them to vanish is pretty high, and you run into this cascading issue of "well, I'll just flip one of these pairs of tiles first so I don't accidentally get a three" and instead get a three somewhere else by accident. It's like a minefield. As long as there's at least three of that tile remaining you're in the clear but it's so easy to screw yourself over during that examination phase. The other half of the problem is that the game is scoring you on an aggregate result: that means if you slip up any one puzzle in a batch of four or five you possibly missed being able to reach the best cumulative target goal, and if that should happen on the fourth puzzle in the series it's a heartbreaker. You also can't retry any single puzzle and choosing to give up means you automatically score a 0 which might as well be an instant loss on any high score attempt so it's not just about not screwing up but being super consistent about not screwing up over multiple puzzles.

However, in addition to the composite scoring mode you can try your hand on some solo puzzles. I think this is meant to be more like a practice mode but it's the second listed in the main menu so I didn't catch on until after I'd already tried the main "gauntlet" mode. I think this could be the kind of puzzle game that you could really get attached to (in that portable-friendly intermittent playthrough sense) once you'd become a little smarter at it, learning to avoid the various pitfalls that new players like myself inevitably trigger, but for something presented as this flighty and cartoonish game for kids it definitely has no chill.

Time Spent: 25 minutes.

#28: Wizardry Scenario 1: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

• Developer: Sting Entertainment
• Publisher: Bandai
• Release Date: 2001-03-01
• Inscrutability: None (Fan Translated)
• Selection Process: Chosen (Lucky 7s)
• Is This Anime?: Not originally but there is anime based on this game.

Field Report: Popularly considered one of the earliest successful commercial RPGs and one of the most influential games of all time, Wizardry Scenario 1: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is the first game in the Wizardry franchise created by Andrew C. Greenberg and Robert Woodhead of Sir-Tech and was originally released on the Apple II in 1981. The game's meager story, not really conveyed in-game, is that the titular mad overlord Trebor had his enchanted amulet stolen by a wizard named Werdna (read the names backwards) who then goes on to create a multi-floored dungeon full of monsters to keep everyone busy while he works on uncovering its secrets. The player's party is sent by Trebor to recover the amulet. A typical party consists of six characters who start with basic classes like fighter, mage, and thief and can eventually switch over to advanced classes like bishops (mage + cleric), lords (fighter + cleric), samurai (fighter + mage), and ninja (fighter + thief) once they have the right stats and, in some cases, a special item found late in the game. Their race also determines their aptitude for classes: humans, for instance, are suited for any job besides clerics due to their low piety, while dwarves have more strength and endurance and work best as front-line melee types such as fighters and lords. As popular in Japan as it was in the States, the Wizardry brand has been kept alive by Japanese homages and spiritual sequels after the main series petered out after Wizardry 8, its 3D debut and a pretty fun and accessible RPG given the vintage. To give you some idea of the timeline, Wizardry 8 came out two years before this WonderSwan Color remake of the very first game; as far as I know the WSC game was the most recent version of Wizardry I prior to the Digital Eclipse revamp that came out last year.

This would be our second Sting game. Sting brings over their flair for visuals, making this game's D&D-inspired graphics look detailed and striking despite the small resolution and including many new images for special events and encounters, while paying due deference to a game that more or less inspired the entire JRPG format. Sting produced a total of five WonderSwan games: two on behalf of Squaresoft, one of which was another remake of a major franchise's origin point (Final Fantasy) that we encountered back in Part Four, and three for Bandai. All five are RPGs. I'm not sure how they procured the rights to make a Wizardry for WonderSwan but theirs was hardly the first Wizardry port made by a Japanese studio: the NES, Super Famicom, TurboGrafx-CD, FM-7, PC88, PC98, Sharp X1, MSX2, and Game Boy Color all saw versions too.

Man, speaking of games with no chill. Had to rely quite a bit on my residual memory on how Wizardry works but for new players the most important thing is to grind, grind, grind early on or else you'll get wiped by a sufficiently tough monster group pretty quickly. Lot of cheap runs into the dungeon, fighting one or two easy groups, then bailing for the stairs for any healing. I've gone with a traditional party here—two fighters, two bishops, a pure mage, and a thief for trapped chests—which I've found sturdy enough barring the mage's paltry 2HP at level 1. The hybrid bishop class does need a bit of a run up to be effective due to being an all-rounder, but they can at least fight as well as clerics for now (though they don't quite have the armor). Other tricks I've resorted to include creating "burner clerics" for heals rather than rely on the inn, which ages you like crazy, and replacing any of the dead with their identical twins rather than pay to resurrect them at the church because it'll take like 50 fights at this level to recoup the losses. As is the case in any D&D-like game just those first few experience levels alone are pivotal for making extremely vulnerable characters less so, usually doubling their meager starting HP. Wizardry is fairly abstract in its dungeon-crawling as most of its floors are completely devoid of treasure barring a few plot-critical items and encounters: if you're trying to raise cash you just have to run around until you bump into enemies, then hope they leave a chest behind that either has no traps or those you're able to disarm. I'd earned just enough gold to consider buying some +1 magical gear but the hefty investment gave me pause.

Anyway, I took a quick glance around on the second floor of the dungeon after fully mapping out the first whereupon our already short dwarf was dramatically made even shorter and I decided to call it quits. I think if I ever do take the plunge on a full Wizardry playthrough it'll almost certainly be with that Digital Eclipse remake; I've not heard what kind of quality of life improvements it has but this game could surely use them. But hey, this thing's over 40 years old and too venerated to see any major changes so you have to expect a few antiquated quirks. Antiquirkated. I suppose I should just be grateful the WonderSwan version has its own auto-map feature: an absolute luxury for RPGs made in the 1980s.

Time Spent: Around 2 hours.

#29: Makaimura for WonderSwan

"Ghosts 'n Goblins for WonderSwan"

• Developer: Team OX
• Publisher: Bandai
• Release Date: 1999-07-22
• Inscrutability: Minor (stab the demons, got it)
• Selection Process: Chosen (Prime Plus)
• Is This Anime?: This game wasn't inspired by anime but rather good old-fashioned misanthropy.

Field Report: Ghosts 'n Goblins is I suppose in a way a dry run for Resident Evil if instead of ammo shortages and dogs flying through windows you just got hammered by enemies from every direction while you awkwardly jumped around with no air control. What I'm saying is that's there both a thematic link between the two and a shared sense of verisimilitude in which you keenly feel the hostility of a world full of scary monsters through the game mechanics as much as you do the visuals and atmosphere. What I'm actually saying is that Ghosts 'n Goblins might be Capcom's second least player-friendly game after their obscure PS1 kusoge Kawaii Karakara-tan the Memory Card Wiper. Still, for as much antipathy as I might feel towards this series, I've been gravitating towards WS platformers and action games that I know I'll be fine with regardless of any language barrier. I've played enough titles in the G'nG family to know what I'm doing here, even if I make no promises that I'll survive more than five minutes. In retrospect I'm not entirely sure why I chose to play a hard-as-nails RPG and a hard-as-nails platformer, both quite notorious for being so, back-to-back like this. Maybe I subconsciously felt like I got off too easy last month with the relatively accommodating Rockman & Forte: Mirai kara no Chousensha.

Team OX is an odd one: GDRI suggests it was one of those contractor companies that specialized in executing specific roles within a game's development cycle, being hired to fill any gaps where the core development teams either lacked the expertise or manpower. In most cases they lent their support to the graphics side of things but for Makaimura for WonderSwan specifically it seems they also did the brunt of the programming work too. Their other WS credits include five of the system's six Super Robot Taisen Compact games, where they contributed to the detailed cut-in shots for the expansive rosters of famous guest mecha.

Well, if there is one thing more torturous than Ghosts 'n Goblins it's a bad port of Ghosts 'n Goblins. Making the screen estate smaller while keeping the sprites the same size does not, this won't surprise you to hear, make this game any easier. Nor does giving everything a hitbox approximately twice the size of what's actually visible. Probably all that spooky spectral energy that surrounds them like an aura, right? There are various weapon types you can acquire, much like in Contra or the sub-weapons of Castlevania, yet the drop rate heavily favors trash like the axe (slow, weird trajectory), the torch (tiny range, flames barely do any damage), or the sword (not ranged, so it won't even reach a lot of enemies) rather than the two actually good weapons, which I only saw once or twice each: the knives and crossbow, which are both fast and have excellent coverage. There's also a fireball but it's so rare I didn't see it once. I think I'd also forgotten that Ghosts 'n Goblins didn't have the double jump yet, or maybe they just took it out here, because the platforming was much harder than I anticipated and that's not even including the constantly respawning flying enemies like the imps and specters. But hey, you didn't need me to tell you that this game was kind of a nightmare. Well established by now.

Let's talk some other differences in this port. The most beneficial was infinite continues and they were even kind enough to remember half-stage checkpoints and whatever weapon you had equipped, so unless you were some 1CC masochist death doesn't hold much meaning. Of course, keeping your weapon isn't that much of a boon as in most cases the default lance is probably better than whatever garbage the game saddled you with most recently by dropping item spawners directly in your path but it was handy for those few, precious moments when I had something decent to swing around. The game also added libraries: a bestiary, an item list, and stats tracking across multiple runs, though it's not like it really needed those rundowns given how elementary this game is. Maybe it wanted to feel like an IGAvania, since Symphony of the Night was still fairly fresh in the memory in 1999. I guess it's helpful if you wanted to know the name of some obnoxious ghoul that killed you over and over so you could tell your therapist who specifically was to blame for your most recent emotional breakdown. That'll impress them, I'm sure. I managed to get as far as Stage 4-B before my patience finally ran out: there's a demonic horse boss that throws its rotating ring of flames at you and it's nigh(neigh?)-impossible to avoid without perfect timing because of the aforementioned hitbox issue, and just getting to that guy was an aggravating ordeal by itself. At least it's reassuring to know that some things never change.

Time Spent: 80 minutes of hell.

#30: Sangokushi II

"Romance of the Three Kingdoms II"

• Developer: Koei
• Publisher: Koei
• Release Date: 2000-04-06
• Inscrutability: Super Mega
• Selection Process: Random
• Is This Anime?: Nah, man, this is as real as it gets.

Field Report: Sangokushi II, or Romance of the Three Kingdoms II, is (duh) the second game in Koei's strategy series based on the historical novel of the same name. The actual war took almost a century to resolve before China was finally united into one sovereign state but these games tend to cover the early years when the imbroglio was at its most tumultuous, following the three separate nations of Wei, Shu, and Wu and their respective ruling dynasties. Most Sangokushi games following the first simply added new features or expanded to include more battlefields, more scenarios, and more time periods: this game added a reputation system that meant you had to attend to the needs and desires of your advisors and vassals as well as the option to include your own player-created generals that would go out and clash with the canonical ones. Not that forcing Cao Cao to occasionally contend with the upstart Lord Poopypants did anything to diminish the gallantry of the Three Kingdoms conflict.

Since Koei developed and published the game themselves I'd imagine it's pretty close to its other versions, the first of which was released on NEC's PC88/PC98 series of systems around eleven years prior. It's also the second time Sangokushi II was released on a portable system, after the Game Boy Color in 1999, but I figure it'll fare better with the WonderSwan's higher resolution over the GBC's chromatic color palette given the abundance of details and menus these games tend to traffic in. It was the third and last game Koei put out on WonderSwan, following a port of the first Sangokushi and the compulsory Nobunaga's Ambition appearance. (Nobunaga no Yabou was the game that put them on the map, so Koei certainly Oda debt of gratitude to that guy.)

Rounding out the "not for babies" themed selection this month, Sangokushi II and its contemporaries always struck me as the most intimidatingly dense things, even though a game series that started in the mid-80s can't have had an overwhelming number of features and systems to memorize. I'm sure if I ever sat down and genuinely tried to figure out one of these Koei strategy games, probably sticking to the 8-bit or 16-bit ones for the sake of simplicity, I'd find that they're a lot more approachable than they first looked. After all, they're hugely successful if they've been able to keep Koei afloat for decades (though I guess it's mostly musou and anime tie-ins doing that these days) and that has to speak to some level of accessibility. Even if that was the case, though, I'm not going to get anywhere with everything stuck in Japanese so my time with this game was always destined to be brief.

After flailing around in the menus for a while I opted to try a game with no human opponents to see how the gameplay cycle looked, but you only ever get bits and pieces of what the CPU is up to as an outsider and that apparently doesn't include managing any battles. I suppose if the game was going to play out every CPU-on-CPU battle in that tactical warfare mode we'd be here waiting quite a while for our next turn, were we not too chickenshit to avoid participating. Instead, it seemed to be mostly diplomatic missions and tax rate adjustments. Riveting stuff, but not something that could hold my attention for longer than the requisite 10 minutes. Darn it all, Lu Bu, you defeated me again.

Time Spent: 10 minutes.

Current Ranking

(* = Don't need fluent Japanese to enjoy this and/or it has a fan translation.)

1. O-Chan no Oekaki Logic (Ep 4)*
2. Rockman & Forte: Mirai kara no Chousensha (Ep 5)*
3. Kaze no Klonoa: Moonlight Museum (Ep 3)*
4. Final Fantasy (Ep 4)*
5. Rainbow Islands: Putty's Party (Ep 4)*
6. Flash Koibito-Kun (Ep 1)*
7. Magical Drop for WonderSwan (Ep 1)*
8. Wizardry Scenario 1: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (Ep 6)*
9. Slither Link (Ep 5)*
10. Gunpey (Ep 2)*
11. Judgement Silversword -Rebirth Edition- (Ep 1)*
12. Makaimura for WonderSwan (Ep 6)*
13. Side Pocket for WonderSwan (Ep 5)*
14. Final Lap Special (Ep 2)*
15. Densha de Go! (Ep 2)
16. Gomoku Narabe & Reversi Touryuumon (Ep 3)*
17. Kurupara! (Ep 6)*
18. Guilty Gear Petit (Ep 3)*
19. Hanjuku Hero: Aa, Sekaiyo Hanjukunare...! (Ep 5)
20. Blue Wing Blitz (Ep 3)
21. Beatmania for WonderSwan (Ep 4)*
22. Super Robot Taisen Compact for WonderSwan Color (Ep 3)
23. Inuyasha: Fuuun Emaki (Ep 1)
24. Chou Denki Card Battle: Youfu Makai (Ep 5)
25. Shaman King: Mirai e no Ishi (Ep 6)
26. Shin Nihon Pro Wrestling: Toukon Retsuden (Ep 4)
27. Meitantei Conan: Nishi No Meitantei Saidai No Kiki!? (Ep 2)
28. Sangokushi II (Ep 6)
29. Metakomi Therapy: Nee Kiite! (Ep 2)
30. SD Gundam Eiyuuden: Musha Densetsu (Ep 1)