The SNES Classic Mk. II: Episode IV: Telling Tales

The SNES Classic had a sterling assortment of games from Nintendo's 16-bit star console, but it's hardly all that system has to offer a modern audience. In each installment of this fortnightly feature, I judge two games for their suitability for a Classic successor based on four criteria, with the ultimate goal of assembling another collection of 25 SNES games that not only shine as brightly as those in the first SNES Classic, but have equally stood the test of time. The rules, list of games considered so far, and links to previous episodes can all be found at The SNES Classic Mk II Intro and Contents.

Episode IV: Telling Tales

The Candidate: Naxat Soft's The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang

Everyone's aware of the boom of video game mascots of the early 90s, picking up from the success of Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog, but I think the general public consciousness of lesser mascots outside of the US - which saw the accursed likes of Bubsy the Bobcat, Awesome Possum or Gex (sorry to any Gex fans, I just needed a third) - isn't quite as pronounced. Largely because if a mascot didn't pick up any steam in its home territory, they didn't even try to launch it overseas. As was the case with Zoom's Dolucky the Cat, SunSoft's Hebereke the Penguin, or, in the case of this week's Candidate, Dorabocchan the Vampire. Prince Dorabocchan, which was wisely localized into something as suitably vampiric as "Spike McFang" (hey, I wonder if Joss Whedon got the idea from this game?), was an attempt at a cute mascot platformer hero from developers Naxat Soft: a developer known for, if anything, generic fishing and golf games for Super Famicom and also being one of the big supporters of the TurboGrafx and its CD sibling. Their brief forays into the platforming genre included Makai Prince Dorabocchan, a 1990 TurboGrafx-16 game that never left Japan, and its 1993 sequel Chou Makai Taisen: Dorabocchan ("Super Demon Wars: Dorabocchan") - better known to US audiences as The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang thanks to a localization by the continent-spanning publisher Bullet-Proof Software. (Naxat would later return to their comfort zone of golf with 1994's Super Naxat Open: Golf de Shoubu da! Dorabocchan, the last game to feature the character.)

Twisted Tales is an unusual game, hence its consideration for this project, in that it's a top-down action game with some very basic RPG mechanics. The hero, Spike, moves around in eight directions while hitting enemies with a cape spin move and a hat tossing move. The hat toss is a long-range attack that can hit several times, but requires that the player plant themselves and charge it up to use it, which makes less useful if you're too close to enemies. In addition, Spike can buy and use consumable cards with various effects: the most common type are the tomato cards - as Spike is the sort of cute sanitized vampire that eats tomatoes for sustenance, like Count Duckula - which can heal Spike's HP. Others might involve turning Spike into a flying hat, letting him escape dangerous situations, or summoning a crowd of bats to keep enemies distracted. You can also upgrade Spike's top hat for a substantial cost, which alters how the hat toss move operates: the most expensive, the lightning hat, has a deadly homing effect.

I learned early on that stacking up on as much healing as possible is paramount for survival, because this game is extremely difficult and very harsh with saving opportunities. This appears to be one of the few (perhaps unnecessary) gameplay tweaks in the localization, as the original Japanese version had Spike's health regenerate slowly over time. Grinding's also a thing, which I wasn't expecting from a cutesy top-down action game, as you are at a severe disadvantage if you attempt a boss while being one or two levels below them - it's why most NPCs tell you the XP level of the next boss, so you can grind away to match it before you meet them. Even regular enemies can ruin your day if they get too close and personal, and the game lacks any sort of damage immunity so you can get destroyed pretty quick if you share the same space as something damaging, like a spike trap, for too long. Traps are just as frequent as enemies, and I found myself having to repeat entire dungeons a few times because of nasty surprises.

For as much of an ordeal as the game can be, it's also effortlessly charming. It's one of the few SNES games I can recall that's actually funny, or at least attempts to be, with many amusing lines of dialogue and Looney Tunes-style physical humor. Spike's joined, intermittently, by two other Royal heirs: Camelia of Vampyra, an assertive vampire princess trained to be self-sufficient; and Rudy of Von Hesler, the spear-wielding scion of the big bad who swears his father isn't regularly this evil. They act as mostly useless support characters who occasionally run over and kick enemies in their proximity, but they show up a lot in cutscenes between areas to complain about Spike leaving them behind or being too wimpy to help: the game begins with Spike at a resort for fighter training, and refusing to come to Camelia's aid before the tutorial is complete because otherwise he'd "lose his deposit". Spike's parsimonious nature gets a brilliant callback at the end of the game too as everyone strikes a cool pose as the final boss explodes into money (like most regular enemies), only for Spike to suddenly break from the freeze-frame to go collect it and return. We're not quite talking Jazzpunk levels of incidental hilarity here, but it was a genuinely amusing game even with the occasionally sub-standard localization.

But enough talk, have at you, P.O.G.S.!

• Preservation: I gravitate towards distinctive games for this project because I feel they've aged the best on the whole, having not seen a thousand imitators (and sequels) improve on the core concept little by little, but sometimes a novel idea can age poorly also. In this case, while the idea of a top-down action game with RPG mechanics is a neat premise, all the grinding and lack of checkpoints made it more of a slog than I anticipated. You need a lot of patience and/or skill to succeed at this game - you could feasibly get by with one or the other, but both are recommended - and I'm not sure how well a modern audience would receive something that actually feels this antiquated. 2.
• Originality: That said, the top-down format with its enemies with health bars to whittle down and consumable items to rely on puts the game in rare company with the likes of River City Ransom and Secret of Mana. It's a bizarre combination of ideas that works better than anyone might reasonably expect, and that originality extends to the game's use of humor and cutesy gothic horror trappings. That most of the common enemies are variants of walking garlic cloves - a vampire's true nemesis - speaks volumes to how silly this game can be. 4.
• Gameplay: I sort of think this game would be a lot better without the RPG aspect, because being underleveled for a boss can really make it a struggle. It's like Ys, in that you want to brute force everything with pure skill alone, but the numbers game going on in the background - where you need a hundred hits of chip damage to win while they can flatten you in five - makes anything less than a fair fight untenable. That said, the jumping and spinning mayhem when a pack of enemies are close, and strategically retreating far enough that you can employ your powerful hat toss attack, as well as the variety of monster types and their attack patterns makes ensured that the battles never got too dull. When I wasn't being dominated by their higher levels, the boss fights were the right balance of challenging and fun too. 3.
• Style: This game's definitely got style. Visually, it's a treat, with big expressive sprites for its characters and vehicles along with some great vistas and well-framed cutscenes. The dialogue could've used some more polishing, but at least there aren't much in the way of typos and other errors. I like that there's trash-talking before every boss. 4.

Total: 13.

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The Nominee: Wolf Team/Namco's Tales of Phantasia

The SNES/Super Famicom was a hotbed for up and coming JRPG franchises, but one of its more low-key debuts was the remarkably advanced Tales of Phantasia from Wolf Team as late as December of 1995, after the launch of the Sony PlayStation (which was itself a major hub for JRPGs). It is assuredly for this reason that the Super Famicom version of Tales of Phantasia never left Japan, though we in the West were at least graced with the enhanced GBA port/remake.

Phantasia is, of course, the first game in Bandai Namco's juggernaut Tales franchise, and the first to establish most of the trademarks of the series: active real-time combat - dubbed the LMB system, or Linear Motion Battle - that relies on fighter game concepts like spacing, footsies, combos, juggles, denial, and adds a layer of strategy in how you must work as a team, keeping enemies away from your casters (if you're melee) and relying on evasion to carve out a space to unleash hell (if you're a caster); a colorful cast of characters that the game is attentive about developing in various one-on-one cutscenes during quieter moments in the story; the frequently revisited idea in the Tales oeuvre of two parallel worlds (in this case, the same world a century apart) threatened by a single mastermind; and a collection of healing items, weapons, enemies and other recurring elements that the game uses as a form of connective bridge across its various independent sequels, similar to Final Fantasy. Phantasia didn't quite establish every notable Tales feature - the comedic skits for example, in which party members communicate as talking portraits, either delivering jokes, exposition, backstory, or a reminder for where the player needs to go next, would arrive with the second Tales game, Tales of Destiny for PlayStation - but it was a solid start to what would become one of the most prolific JRPG franchises that's still active today.

Phantasia sees a relatively generic group in the earnest warrior Cless/Cress (though his real name's probably supposed to be "Chris"), dedicated and empathetic healer Mint, the vengeance-filled archer Chester, the ridiculed scholar who believes in summoned beings and is later vindicated Claus/Klarth, and the helpful if klutzy witch-in-training Arche. This team dynamic not only provides a lot of amusing friction - the serious Chester and free-spirited Arche frequently butt heads - but provides numerous choices for set-ups in combat. Chester's a powerful DPS, but can't withstand enemy melee as a ranger and lacks any special attacks; Arche is a magic-user who can fly around the battlefield on her broom, meaning that she's both hard to hit and hard to protect from flying enemies and archers; Claus needs a lot of room for his strong summon spells, but they hit like a train; and so on. Keeping the tank and the healer around is almost mandatory, but there's a lot of variation even with this group of five - though it takes a while until you have all five accessible at the same time (the sixth character, the acrobatic and taciturn ninja girl Suzu Fujibayashi, wasn't made available as a playable character until the remakes).

• Preservation: Phantasia creates an awkward situation in that, while a lot can be said for how well the original has preserved given that we've had twenty years of sequels building on the same basic blueprint, Phantasia itself has seen a number of superior remakes and ports. The aforementioned GBA version is best known overseas, but the PlayStation remake - which came after Destiny - retroactively added a lot of series-wide features like skits to the game to make it feel more like a traditional Tales entry. All the same, if we're simply judging it by its Super Famicom incarnation, its innovations, the LMB system, focus on characters, and high-quality presentation ranks it as one of the system's best and most timeless. 4.
• Originality: Fantasy RPGs are a dime a dozen on the SNES/SFC, but action-RPGs are far less common. So to is the idea of incorporating fighter/brawler mechanics into a combat engine to ensure the player is tested on their skill as well as their strategic wherewithal. Wolf Team and Namco would later build a JRPG institution on the originality of this game, iterating and evolving its combat engine and other features, and that would've been a lot harder to pull off if Phantasia was an everyday, boilerplate affair. 4.
• Gameplay: Can't overstate just how compelling that LMB system is, especially when you have multiple characters for support and a number of different techniques to bust out. You can even acquire an artifact in-game that completely changes how special attacks are performed: usually, you select two short-range and two long-range skills, which you activate with either B or B and Up on the D-pad (your distance from the enemy determines whether it's the long-range or short-range version that activates), but this artifact maps all of Cless's attacks to fighter game inputs, letting you have full access to his entire repertoire at the cost of having to reliably throw out half-circle motions and the like. A JRPG's gameplay lives and dies on its combat engine, and Phantasia has one of the best for the system. 4.
• Style: Phantasia goes for a slightly more realistic style, especially when compared to its more overtly cartoony sequels. This gives the game a slightly drab and unexciting look, but it's also impressive to look at, with a lot of high-quality sprites, backgrounds and visual filters like cloud shadows passing overhead. The game also goes all-out on spell effects and a classic Mode 7 world map, and the larger character sprites for combat look great - later remakes adjusted the proportions to give everyone giant heads, presumably because that made it easier to animate their faces with expressions, but I find I prefer the originals. 4.

Total: 16.

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