This is Console History, a special sub-series of my more general History Lessons series, covering console role-playing games, action role-playing games, Metroidvanias, and action-adventure games in nominally chronological order starting in the late 1980s. The chronology is garbled in the beginning as the scope of the series expanded, but it gets more organized later on. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

We’ve just completed a detour from the nominal timeline for this series. Having reached Phantasy Star II which released on March 21, 1989 in Japan, I went back to play several games I’d missed or passed over: Glory of Heracles: The Labors of the Divine Hero, Bionic Commando, Valkyrie no Densetsu, and (jumping backwards again) Golvellius: Valley of Doom. Now we’re all caught up, and proceed to April 1, 1989, when Data East released Makai Hakkenden Shada in Japan for the PC Engine. It was never localized in English, so I turned to a fan translation from cabbage, Shubibiman and onionzoo.

I’m glad I did the detour, because Data East also developed Glory of Heracles, making for a nice comparison. Unfortunately, Makai Hakkenden Shada doesn’t fare well in that comparison.

First, some background: Makai Hakkenden Shada is based on Nansou Satomi Hakkenden, the longest novel in the history of Japanese literature. Written by Bakin over a period of 28 years from 1814 to 1842, it contains a whopping 98 chapters spread over 106 booklets, and tells the story of the eight “Dog Warriors”, spirit children born from a curse that was partially mitigated by their mother’s devotion to the Buddhist sutras. The tale covers the lives of the eight warriors as they eventually meet and join forces against the enemies of the Satomi clan. Not much of this is referenced in the game, however. Players control Shin (who is perhaps supposed to be Shino from the novel, but may just be a new character) and encounter the other Dog Warriors during the game, which takes places after the events of the novel. The barebones premise is that someone is trying to resurrect Tamazusa, the one who originally put the curse upon the Dog Warriors’ mother. But here this is presented as a world-threatening event, whereas in the novel Tamazusa was simply someone who had a grievance against one specific family.

But I suspect Data East just wanted to use some characters that players would already know, so they wouldn’t have to come up with anything original. Makai Hakkenden Shada is a blatant rip-off of the first two Ys games, which also appeared on the PC Engine (and got a US release on the rebranded Turbografx-16). Those games are awesome, as I learned when I played them for this series, and not just because they used the CD-ROM add-on for the PC Engine and therefore had cool anime cutscenes and impressive studio-quality music. They took the classic action-role-playing game “bump combat” popularized by early Japanese home computer games such as Hydlide and Dragon Slayer, and melded it with an epic tale that incorporates a lot of elements from adventure games. The combat is fast and breezy, the locations are interesting and fun to explore, and there’s always cool stuff to find and rewarding puzzles to solve, as players interact with a memorable cast of recurring characters.

Makai Hakkenden Shada appears to be an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the Ys games, and unlike them, it did not require the expensive CD-ROM add-on to play, released instead on a standard HuCard cartridge. It makes a lot of sense to try to copy something popular while aiming for the market of players who only had the base PC Engine, and it reminds me somewhat of Data East’s earlier effort Glory of Heracles, which was also imitating another game (Dragon Quest). But Glory of Heracles brought some new ideas of its own: it doesn’t have separate overworld and town maps, instead integrating the towns seamlessly into the world (something that reminded me of Ys, actually), it emphasized switching weapons when fighting different types of enemies, and it had a lot of puzzles to solve by finding items and using them in the right places (actually, that’s also kind of like Ys…). Makai Hakkendedn Shada, by contrast, doesn’t have any new ideas. It’s just copying what Ys did, but worse, with a lot of annoying design choices.

To be fair, I’d been warned. A writer over at Hardcore Gaming 101 lambasted Makai Hakkenden Shada for being a poor Ys clone with no originality. But I’d read similar things about Glory of Heracles, and ended up enjoying that. Besides, it seemed the Hardcore Gaming 101 writer hadn’t gotten that far in the game (having now played through to the end, I don’t blame them). I’m also still intrigued by PC Engine games, since very few came to the US and even fewer players actually played them. And, I’d heard that Makai Hakkenden Shada is pretty short, so it didn’t sound like too much of an imposition regardless of its quality.

Only later, when I was already playing, did I come across ZombiePie’s account of playing it over at Giant Bomb, that goes into a lot more (highly critical) detail. ZombiePie went in expecting something terrible, citing Makai Hakkenden Shada as an example of “kusoge“, a Japanese term that literally translates to “shitty game”. And they go on to list many, many examples of bad design in the game (although some of those examples helped me figure out a few annoying puzzles, so that’s nice). If I’d read that piece before I started playing, I probably would have skipped over Makai Hakkenden Shada for this series. But I didn’t! Now that I’ve finished it, I didn’t dislike it quite as much as ZombiePie did. But I definitely don’t recommend it.

Like the Ys games, Makai Hakkenden Shada uses “bump combat”, where protagonist Shin must run into enemies to fight them. Both of the authors I mentioned above complained about its implementation of this, citing wonky hit detection that made it unclear how to damage enemies without Shin also taking damage. But this is one ting I disagree about. I found the combat in Ys I & II much harder to understand, as I was sometimes able to bash an enemy several times in a row without taking a scratch, and other times I took a beating. In Makai Hakkenden Shada, enemies are not knocked back when hit, which — combined with smaller characters that take up less space on the screen, and Shin’s slightly slower movement speed — made the mechanics much clearer. If an enemy is lined up with Shin and facing him when it touches him, it will do damage. Approach an enemy off-center, or hit it from the side or from behind, and Shin will deal damage without any retaliation. This immediately made sense, and was aided by the fact that Shin moves in discrete, half-tile increments (a bit like Super Hydlide, actually). So he’s either lined up with an enemy, or he’s off-center by exactly half a tile. Position Shin correctly, and he will emerge victorious.

That’s about the last thing I can praise about Makai Hakkenden Shada, however. Well, I suppose some of the music is decent, and even makes use of the PC Engine’s ability for custom waveforms in its programmable sound generator, meaning it can sound slightly better than competing consoles like the Famicom or Master System. But everything else about the game is pretty bad. For some reason, Shin’s half-tile-at-a-time movement also translates to the screen scrolling, making it feel jerky where in Ys it was impressively smooth. The explorable areas in Makai Hakkenden Shada are very similar to those in Ys I, from their theme (towns, fields, a cave, a tower) to their general positions in the world, yet each is smaller and less interesting to explore. There are spells like those in Ys II, but instead of transforming the experience, they’re largely forgettable and not very useful. It doesn’t even look as nice as the Ys games, with lower quality art that uses fewer colors, squandering the main advantage of the PC Engine hardware.

But the biggest issues are in the progression and quest/puzzle designs. In Ys I, gaining levels was much less important than finding better equipment, which was used to gate progress into new areas by suddenly increasing the player’s ability to battle foes. In Makai Hakkenden Shada, both levels and equipment are hugely important, and the progress gating for them is incredibly harsh. At the beginning of the game, Shin can only safely fight the first group of enemies he finds. Wander any farther, and he’ll meet opponents he can’t even damage yet. This forces grind in a blatantly transparent way. Gain a level, and suddenly his current foes can’t even damage Shin anymore and are therefore trivial. They also don’t award experience anymore, so he’s forced to move on and grind against the next batch of enemies. New weapons and armor also make a big difference, but cost a lot, again forcing Shin to grind for cash.

Other, semi-buggy annoyances crop up too, like finally convincing a character to stop blocking a doorway, only to find him there again if Shin decides to retreat back to town before triggering the next bit of the story. But the biggest frustration comes from poisonous enemies. These don’t need to damage Shin to inflict poison. Even if he gets the jump on them, dispatching them without taking a scratch, he will still get poisoned. Touching a poisonous enemy at all results in Shin getting poisoned, which prevents him from healing (normally he heals, agonizingly slowly, when standing still). The only way to remove this effect is to buy and use a medicinal herb, and Shin can only carry one of those at a time. Resting in town doesn’t remove the poison. Gaining a level doesn’t remove the poison, and in fact the poison will prevent Shin from getting the benefit of his new higher health total. Only the one, single-use herb will help, after which point Shin must return to town to buy another.

Until he can’t. About halfway through the game, Shin travels to a new area and is no longer able to return to the town herbalist. In fact, there are no more shops of any kind after this point, and enemies stop awarding money when defeated. And yet, there are still poisonous enemies to face, right up until the end of the game! This is such a bizarre design decision, especially because there is still a town to visit in the second half of the game, it just doesn’t have any shops in it. Why not put a herbalist there? Instead, players must have the foresight to stock up on medicine before proceeding into the second half of the game, and then they better hope they can reach the end while only having one chance — a single chance — to cure poison. Oh, and if you’re thinking that poisonous enemies might be the one time it makes sense to fight with magic: I tried that, and found them immune to it.

Other annoyances add up too. The later areas in the game have narrow corridors that make it harder to fight enemies without getting hit, and those enemies hit really hard, even if I stopped to grind for levels at every opportunity. There are certain doors and chests that only open with specific items, and it’s not always clear which ones. There are many items that I never determined a use for. One of the spells Shin can find is supposed to help him heal, but it doesn’t appear to do anything. Boss encounters, which are again clearly copying the encounter style from the Ys games, feel shoddily designed and take too many tries (although none are as difficult as the toughest bosses in Ys I & II). At least the final spell, which freezes enemies in place, is highly useful in the final area, and makes it a bit easier to dodge poisonous enemies. That final area, by the way, is clearly trying to copy the awesome Solomon Shrine from the finale of Ys II, but — as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, at this point — fails to capture any of things that made the Solomon Shrine fun to explore.

I got through Makai Hakkenden Shada by liberal use of save states, reloading whenever something went wrong, like getting poisoned. Or sometimes even just taking damage, because stopping to heal takes so long. Oh, and enemies have a tendency to spawn right on top of Shin if he ever stops moving (to heal) in the later areas. I will grudgingly admit that this type of “save scumming” is possible even if playing on original hardware: players can save or load (in a single save slot) at any time, and passwords are given when saving which allow resuming a game in a future session after turning off the console. So players could, laboriously, retry every section to avoid getting poisoned forever, max out Shin’s level, and defeat the final pair of bosses. I just don’t think they’d enjoy it very much.

At least Makai Hakkenden Shada is, in fact, very short, taking me only a handful of hours over a few days to finish. Grind and all. If it had been a longer game I may not have persevered. I don’t recommend it, unless — as ZombiePie argues — you want to experience an example of truly bad design to broaden your appreciation for game design as a discipline. If that’s you, then you’ll want to grab the fan translation, and then use the Retroarch frontend and Beetle PCE Fast (or Beetle PCE, but that’s only required for a handful of games that used the SuperGrafx) emulator core to play. As for me, I’m just glad this one is over so I can move on in the series.

EDIT: Originally I had a statement here about the next game I was going to play, but instead I decided to do a thorough reorganization of the early timeline for this series, to try to minimize detours from the nominal chronology. You can read all the details on that reorganization in the next post.

Next on Console History: The Great Console History Reorganization