GameFan Volume 4, Issue 5 - Lufia II [S1E6] - FunFactor

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, Ty, we're podcasts all about rating things. So how
would you feel if you scored a ninety nine out
of one hundred and ninety five and ninety eight and
still missed out on Game on the month? Ooh, I
feel like like whoever's rating me needs a new system, right,
like something like multiple Game of the months. Because this month,
in this issue, we are in for a battle royale

(00:22):
of some truly classic games. You've got fun Factor two
old gamers reviewing old video game magazine reviews. I'm Ty Schlter,
He's Aiden Moher, and we're two professional writers who grew
up loving the video games and video game magazines of
the nineteen eighties, nineteen nineties, and two thousands. Every episode

(00:45):
we take a critical look back on the games media that,
for better and for worse, inspired us to do what
we do. First, go to Funfactor pod dot com, follow
the show on your podcatcher of choice, leave us a
rating or review on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get
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(01:05):
consider becoming a member of fun Factor Ultra, our premium
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Then help us spread the word. Shout us out on
Blue Sky, funfactor pod dot com, or anywhere else at

(01:26):
fun Factor Pod. You know, ty As we've been recording
this show, flipping back through all of these old magazines,
I've been thinking a lot about how we consume games media,
and I think that's becoming extremely relevant given you know,
recent changes to the games media, you know, Landscape Online.
We're recording this just a couple of days after poly

(01:47):
Gone was sold to val Net, Giant Bomb sort of imploded,
and these were really high end, uh, you know, video
game sites driven by personalities that you know, have earned
reputations for being really smart, insightful driven writers, you know,
like looking for stories within games rather than just sort

(02:09):
of looking for those PR opportunities to juice things up.

Speaker 2 (02:13):
You know.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
Specifically, I've been thinking about the way we get information
about upcoming games. It's so locked down by PR nowadays,
Like even small indie games have PR companies driving communications. Yeah,
messaging is heavily dictated, which is such a far cry
from the mid nineties, when we were all desperate for
any little snippet of new information or screenshots from an

(02:35):
upcoming game, and we were digging through these magazines looking
for it. Today we're looking at an issue of Game
Fan magazine, and for my money, it's the magazine that
really put the fire under my feet by introducing me
to games I never would have heard of otherwise. Like
in this issue alone, we've got a two page review
of Snatcher on the PlayStation, a big review of a

(02:56):
Japanese exclusive pseudo sequel to Saygas Zeldeli Crusader of Centi
called Lincoln River Story, although they've translated it as Wrinkle
River Story, which I think is what happens when you
spend too much time in the lazy river of the pool,
and a preview of Wild Arms as well. There's a
sprawling review of a game called Welcome House near the

(03:18):
end of the magazine, which I'd never heard of, and
it didn't remember until we were revisiting this magazine for
this episode. It looks exactly like what you'd expect of
a PlayStation take on a loan in the dark, complete
with rudimentary three D graphics, and the worst character designs
this side of Nidhog two. It's such a deep cut
that it doesn't even appear to have a Wikipedia page,

(03:40):
But if you dig a little deeper, it turns out
it's actually one of the earliest games from Gust, who
are the creators of the extremely prolific Italie series, the
most recent of which Italie Yuma, came out in March
of this year, and there's like a million games in
that series. As you flip back all the way through

(04:02):
the magazine, there are even like little tiny screenshots for
squares late s Anys games Treasure of the Rudris and
Treasure Hunter G two games that still haven't ever seen
an English release. You might call them lost treasures.

Speaker 3 (04:15):
Heyo.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
And this is all like a long winded way of
saying the game Fan specifically reminded me of how magazines
allowed us to feel like we still experienced games we
weren't able to buy because we didn't have the money
or they weren't available here in North America, and it
felt like game Fan was covering games nobody else was
mentioning at the time. Did you ever play a game

(04:38):
like way later in life after admiring it, in a magazine.
Uh yeah, well, I've had some weird similar experiences. There's
a couple that I want to go back and get to.
And again, going back through this series has made me go, oh,
all this stuff is just out there right in a
way that it wasn't. Nobunaga's ambition was one the COI

(04:59):
Stratum game way back. It was available for nes and
I think it was released stateside, but I just physically
could not find a copy, And so every game meg
that I read talked about it. I'd see it in series,
I'd see two, I think three was for Super Nintendo,
and every game store that I went into where I lived,
they would just go, what, Like, what are you talking about?

(05:22):
You made that?

Speaker 4 (05:22):
Like they literally did not know that the game existed.
They acted like I was crazy. I would try and explain,
there's like factions and everything. You know, I would put
it on my like Christmas list, and this doesn't exist.
You're you're making this up right, So that that was
one that was high on my list. I didn't go
back and do that one. Some of the early emulators.

(05:43):
You know, I was already.

Speaker 1 (05:44):
In high school when like like Zisness came out, like Nesticle.
You know, there were some old ones that I could
go back, and I started to try and play some
of those that I saw in magazines and went, oh,
I wanted to play that, and the experience just was
not there, right, So I did not go back and
re experience that. But I've now I'm doing this podcast

(06:05):
with you Aiden, and my backlog is like full of
eighties and nineties stuff that I'm like, oh, I can
just play that. Yeah, And like the kind of technological
leaps we've had through stuff like FBGA and software emulators
allows us to have access to all of these games
that just were never available. And I've been doing that
for since about twenty seventeen. I got heavily back into

(06:27):
playing retro video games, and I've gone back to old favorites,
but I've also searched out, you know, a lot of
those games that I was curious about but could never
play back in the day. Like one of them was
Crusaders SENTI. Another big one for me was Terer Enigma,
which I like aggled over in magazines as a big
illusion to guy a fan, but of course it was
never officially released in North America. It didn't it didn't

(06:50):
come out here, but it did come out in English
in Europe, and so in about twenty seventeen, I was like,
I want to see if I still enjoy old pixel
ar RPGs, Like I do they still hold up? And
so I was like, let's do tear Enigma. I played it,
loved it, like absolutely worth the weight, and I was like, oh, yeah,
these games absolutely hold up. And that was like the

(07:13):
second game where I had this experience. The first one was, well,
it's the game we're covering later in this episode, and
I'm gonna slow roll this even though everybody's already seen
the episode title. But these two sort of like late
generation Supernintendo games or what convinced me that retrogaming still
had all the juice. It was in a situation where like,
oh they were good at the time, but they don't

(07:34):
hold up anymore. And that really put that fire under me,
Like I said to like, go back and explore all
of these holes in my experience, because we're able to.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
Do that now.

Speaker 4 (07:44):
Yeah, and something being part of the retrogaming community now
in a way, you know, you and I have talked
and I've gone back and dusted off all I built
an entertainment center for all my old console. I got
my games back out. You know, I've been doing the
retro gaming. But what's really been astonishing to me is
how deep and wide the retrogaming community is and has been.
And even though I've carried that spirit with me, you know,

(08:07):
I'm finding out every single day there's a whole new
world of retrogaming stuff that I just wasn't even aware of.
Getting out my Virtual Boy.

Speaker 1 (08:15):
To use basically as a bit or a prop for
this show has opened me up to this unbelievable world
of Virtual Boy home brews. I just found out there
is a street Fighter to port that uses the link
cable that was never The link cable was never officially
supported in the US, it didn't actually ever come out.
But if you've got two virtual Boys and a link cable,

(08:37):
you can play a homebrew port of Super street Fighter
two Turbo just called hyper Fighting. You know, it's unbelievable
to me how advanced and deep the scene is for
something that I just have just held close to me
personally and my experiences, and now I'm just thrilled to
be able to go through this with you and with
everybody listening.

Speaker 3 (08:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (08:57):
Absolutely, And like on the Virtual Boy angle. It has
one of the absolute like coolest FPGA like flash cart
yes out there, Like you know, I have one for
a Nintendo sixty four.

Speaker 2 (09:10):
I have a Super Nintendo one.

Speaker 1 (09:11):
Friend of the show, Eric Layman, was showing off his
FPGA cart for the Virtual Boy and it actually has
like an e ink display that shows the cover art
for the game that you're so that was virtual Yeah, yeah, yeah, virtual.

Speaker 3 (09:23):
Incredible stuff.

Speaker 1 (09:24):
And like to see the amount of like you know,
vision and engineering within this fan community that produces like
a fairly niche product, which is a Virtual Boy FPGA cart,
just shows how and why these games continue to be
so important. And you know why we're doing the show
that we're doing because I think it's important to continue
to recognize the impact that all of this has had.

(09:45):
All right, well, it is time to break open this
issue of Game Fan. Get past the really striking cover,
extremely nineties cover. If you're not already a member of
Fun Factor Ultra getting ad free episodes, hang tight through
the break. When we come back, we will flip through
this magazine and the review that aiden is slow rolling
for us right here on Fun Factor. Welcome back to

(10:26):
Fun Factor, where two old gamers review old video game
magazine reviews. Of course, we want you to review us.
Do we get a full five point zero in fun factor?
Leave us a review on Apple podcasts and we'll read
the best, funniest, kindest, and most entertaining ones on the air. Okay,
So today we're looking at volume four, issue five of
Game Fan Magazine. It's from May nineteen ninety six. It

(10:49):
has one hundred and fourteen pages, so I would put
that sort of like right in the kind of middle
ground of magazines from this era. But the one thing
that you'll notice as you flip through those one hundred
and fourteen pages is it's not nearly asad heavy as
something like EGM was at the time, and so like
volume of content, it was really like quite dense, which
is nice. There's twenty three games reviewed in this issue,

(11:10):
plus one re review of Night Warriors and one retro
review of Fantasy Star, which is kind of cool. Number
of systems reviewed for they review for the PlayStation Saturn
three D zero, s NES Genesis thirty two X, and remarkably,
as mentioned, the Master System. So that's what one, two, three, four, five,

(11:31):
six seven systems. Notably, though, looking through this issue, One
of the things that really like broke or like stood
out to me was Game Fan didn't break their magazine
down into like theme based sections like previews, reviews, feature
RPG's stuff like that. They broke it down by console,
so you end up with, you know, like after like

(11:53):
the kind of opening speel stuff, with some capsule reviews
and the editorial letter, you get PlayStation Nation, which is
a mix of previews and reviews for PlayStation games.

Speaker 3 (12:03):
Just all bundled together.

Speaker 1 (12:04):
Like one page, you might have a preview, then you
have a review on the next page. Then you get
to Saturn Sector, which is the same thing for Saturn games.
Sixteen big games which are covered like you know, there's
a few good ones in this magazine, in this issue
which we're going to talk about today. Those are all
lumped together at the end without a cool name. As

(12:24):
was semi common at the time, sports games are sort
of segregated into the Game Fans Sports section after everything else,
so that people like me could just completely avoid it.
The three D O represented by a spot you like sports?
I like sports? Did you not like sports games as
a kid? I liked sort of like it just wasn't

(12:46):
something we played really me and my friends are like,
we would get into specific sports titles. We played Wayne
Gretzky Hockey on the Nintendo sixty four. My brother and
I play a ton of ice hockey on the ness.
But it was more like it was more just like
if there was some you know, generally arcadie video gamey

(13:08):
video game sports titles, Okay, we'd kind of get into
here and there, but for the most part, it was
not like a cultural like thing. Within my group of friends.
We liked RPGs was the big one, fighting games, and
then like FPS stuff like Nintendo sixty four multiplayer games,
stuff like that. But yeah, no, I didn't really play

(13:30):
a lot of sports games. Paid zero attention to me. Yeah,
well that was also my friend group except the sports
game maniac to where I had you know, Techno super
Bowl for NES. I had pen and paper and I
would basically manually franchise mode and go, okay, this was
nineteen ninety seven, this is nineteen ninety eight, this is
nineteen ninety nine, this is two thousand. I had my

(13:51):
like records for Baseball Stars, creative franchises and stuff.

Speaker 4 (13:54):
You know, I was playing you know, franchise mode in
my own head. On pen and paper, and then you know,
later I'd go to my friends houses and we would
simply not play sports games because they thought I was
a weird freak for enjoying the sports ball.

Speaker 1 (14:06):
Yeah, I mean, which is fair. We had a great
conversation on the on the fun Factory discord server where
two of our readers were talking about how they're like,
they're in a relationship. I don't know their relationship status,
but they know each other, the live together, yes, And

(14:28):
one of them got the other into baseball, like real
life baseball by kind of describing it as like a
turn based sports game, and they were like, well, I
like turn based video games. So that was how they
kind of introduced them to sports. So there is, you know,
there is that commonality. There is of course, that crossover
sports games was just something that was never really a
thing for me outside of random titles here and there.

(14:52):
But yeah, that had its own section that I never
looked at. And then there was a three d Oh
which was represented by a single title Dead thirteen, which
was like a you know, highly animated sort of I
guess point click adventure type game. It was actually like
pretty and nice looking like it looked like their cartoon.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
It was cool.

Speaker 1 (15:12):
Three d Ero did not get.

Speaker 2 (15:13):
Its own section. It was just lumped in with the
sixteen Pigs.

Speaker 1 (15:17):
Game Fan is very review and preview heavy, and that's
one of the things that really kind of stood out
to me is they're really interested in diving into and
providing lots of content on the games themselves. There's not
a lot of like industry chatter in it compared to
something like EGM or Game Players at the time. It
was very, very invested in, you know, just talking about games,

(15:40):
experiences of playing games. As with all these magazines, the
masthead for Game Fan in this issue has some notable names.
Kicking things off is publisher and editor in chief Dave Halverson,
who's sporting a wicked mullet in his profile photo and honestly,
like probably needs an entire special episode of Factor to

(16:00):
explain his whole story. But the impact he had positive
and negative on games media in the mid nineties was
you know, profound, and I think that's worth exploring, but
again not in this episode or an over run three out. Yeah,
and I mean the associate publisher on YouTube this is
this is incredible. Maybe we can dig out some old

(16:20):
photos of Dave Halverson and his mullet and his h
you know, his his mop because it was something else,
but uh, just underneath Dave was associate publisher Jay per Year,
and editorial staff included Kelly Rickards, Brian Lockhart, and Jason Weitzner.
In a hardcore gaming one on one history of game fan, Takui,

(16:42):
which is the pen name for Casey Lowe, who will
get to in a moment, said that even back then
they were inundated by letters from basement dwelling weirdos begging
for photos of Kelly Rickards because they all had crushes
on quote unquote her, but well, oh no. In an interview, Casey,

(17:05):
writing under the name Tikoui, said I would get at
least one Postmeister letter a month asking us to quote
unquote run a picture of her or talking about how
great it was. We had a girl writer, and what
is she like really, Lowe said, admittedly it's an unusual
name for a guy, but her character clearly depicted a

(17:27):
well muscled.

Speaker 4 (17:28):
Man incredible moment, So there was such a desperate desire
for this idea of this like unicorn girl woman writing
about games that Kelly Rickards adopted of as a strong
dedicated fan following of crushes who had no idea what

(17:50):
they were getting them.

Speaker 1 (17:50):
Some to.

Speaker 3 (17:53):
Casey low was part.

Speaker 1 (17:54):
Of an editorial and layout team alongside Dave Halverson and
Nick Berrys, who is better known as Nick Rocks. Lowe
was perhaps best known for working alongside Barry's and legendary
game localizer Jeremy Blaustein on many popular video games, including
sweek it In two, which you can learn much more
about in a book I'm writing about that series, which

(18:17):
is out in twenty twenty six from Boss Fight Books,
so keep an eye out for that. I go deep
into their work on that game. Nick Barry's, unfortunately, was
arrested in January twenty twenty four, and he was charged
with quote unquote felony solicitation of a child by computer
and first degree sexual exploitation of a minor, as well
as more than a dozen other fality charges. That's from

(18:39):
a Time Extension article about the situation. I don't want
to spend too much time on the details for obvious reasons,
but the details and circumstances of his arrest and the
charges against him and subsequent charges to other people connected
to him is awful. Yeah, it's tragic. My heart goes

(19:00):
out to the victims. It's really hard to look at
Nick Rox's contributions to game Fan positively at this point.
And it's it's hard because I know it's really hard
on the people who worked with Nick on game Fan,
and it's something I don't think we can and need
to dwell on too much right now, but it is

(19:21):
something as I looked back on this issue and I
was like, oh, I really want to do game Fan
and I started flipping through and I was like, oh, like,
how do I cover this? But of course, the work
that everybody around else, you know, everyone else at game
Fan was doing was doing fantastic work, and I wanted
to be able to highlight that. But it is something
that I think is important to bring up because Nick
Berry's had a strong impact on this magazine, was one

(19:44):
of sort of the more prominent and recognizable figures from
this era of game Fan. And you know, I hope that,
you know, whatever comes out of these charges and trials
that any victims can find, you know, the healing and
the help and the you know future that they deserve
for sure. Famously moving on, famously, game Fan actually started

(20:08):
life as a catalog for a local game store on
Venture Boulevard in Tarzana, California called Diehard, and so for
a long time the magazine itself was known as Diehard
game Fan before eventually just kind of moving over to
being known as game Fan specifically. It began life basically
as a semi professional fan scene, which gave game Fan

(20:29):
like it's really unique personality that I think comes through
so strongly as you do a flip through of this
magazine and really helped separate it from the rest of
the more rigid and traditional game magazines published by you know,
media companies, stuff like EGM and Game Players and Game
Pro and in many ways, I think, and this is
what sort of why the conversation about Nick de Barrus

(20:50):
is tough, but I think game Fan really helped catalyze
the concept of personality based games journalism. These so every
reviewer and like a previous writer, like staff writer, basically
had a fantastic, like unique portrait drawn of them in
sort of like a you know, a fun style. So, yeah,

(21:11):
we're gonna look at reviews from Oriyan today, and their
preview is like this sort of mad scientist with a
big brain TAKUI was sort of this mysterious martial artist.
Walko was this cool guy with a backwards hat, and
it really gave like that level of personality to them
that you know, a picture or photograph didn't always convey.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
That was fun.

Speaker 1 (21:31):
One of the people who worked at Game Fan, not
on this issue, but eventually and had a big impact
on the magazine as a friend of the show, Molly Patterson. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (21:41):
The reason she's a friend of this show is that
she was our second ever bonus episode interview guest. If
you want to learn all about producing Game Fan, insides
and outsides, ups and downs, all from Mollie who was there,
plus everything she was there for for EGM, just sign
up for the fun Factor of You crew at funpod
dot com. She has an interview in a time extension

(22:07):
piece it's like an oral history of Game Fan, where
she talks about her first days in the office.

Speaker 1 (22:10):
Can you read an excerpt from that? Ty, Yeah, my
first day in the offices, I was dumbfounded at how
garage the whole organization felt. There was no consistency to
the types of computers being used outside of mostly being
Max and many of them were more out of date
than i'd expected. The space was being rented in an
office building in Aguerra Hills, California. It was a total mess,

(22:31):
feeling more like a college fraternity than a professional company.
I really couldn't believe how that group of people could
make a full and proper magazine every month under the circumstances.
Once the shock wore off and I got into the
swing of things, there were definitely bad parts, but there
was far more good and I think that just speaks
so highly to what the industry was like at the time.

(22:52):
It was a lot of like really young people making
these magazines, trying to figure out how to, you know,
make a go of it, and these answers weren't really
solved in gaming, and you didn't you couldn't lean on
older journalists or media people because they didn't have experience
or understanding their video games, and so, you know, you know,
wild West is a cliche that's overused, but it really
was kind of a wild West, and it's it's pretty

(23:13):
fun to see how all those same questions posed to
various different game magazines were answered in different ways by
each magazine, which then gave them each their own personality.
And I think game fan like above them, beyond every
other game magazine had the most distinct personality, for better
or worse, I think over time. Yeah, and speaking of that, actually, Aiden,

(23:37):
while I was researching for another upcoming episode, I found
a letter to Next Generation asking them how they felt
about all that racist bullshit getting printed in game Fan. Huh,
and the editors responded, Oh, hey, we know the diehard
game fan guys. You know they're great, Like, we know
that's tough on them. I'm sure they'll figure out what happened.

(24:00):
I'm paraphrasing here. I don't have the quote in front of.

Speaker 4 (24:02):
Me, but now I'm already I'm like on a mission
to go track down exactly what this was.

Speaker 1 (24:08):
What happened didn't have to look that hard.

Speaker 4 (24:13):
From the Wikipedia page of Game Fan magazine controversy section.
In the September nineteen ninety five issue of Game Fan,
an article was printed that contained several derogatory comments about
Japanese people.

Speaker 1 (24:23):
Game Fan's official explanation was that a.

Speaker 4 (24:25):
Rogue employee sabotaged the magazine in order to alienate its
Japanese audience. However, later reports indicated it was actually filler
text that someone had neglected to remove and the entire
incident was an internal joke that accidentally got printed. An
apology dated August twenty fourth, nineteen ninety five, was published
in Diehard Game Fans October nineteen ninety five issue, in

(24:46):
both English and Japanese. That's the kind of thing that
can happen when you have it's the wild West, and
you've got you know, nineteen twenty twenty three year old's
writing and editing each other with little to know of
corporate oversight, let alone editorial mentorship from people who've had,

(25:08):
you know, experience in an industry when this is games
media and there's almost no industry experience for anyone to
have had.

Speaker 3 (25:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:16):
Absolutely, and it's you know, for better or worse. You know,
it can create really high highs, and I think there
is a lot of that in Game Fan, Like, I
really do love it. Even as I was reading through
this issue, there were a few things about, like, you know,
just the way that they would phrase comments about like
Japanese creators or Japanese companies, and I you know, from
the perspective of twenty twenty five, I'm like, oh, that's

(25:38):
probably not really an okay way to frame that complaint
or that criticism of these companies, and so I'm curious
to see if you can dig out the source of
that that letter. Yeah, well, let's let's go ahead and
get into the rest of this magazine. There's a ton
of stuff to get to. Yeah, let's do it. Today.

(26:05):
We're looking at a Volume four, issue five from me,
nineteen ninety six, and I think it really exemplifies, like
how even deep into game fans run, it really retained
that authentic fanzine feel like, it felt like and looked
like something made by enthusiasts, just like at a far
far larger scale than other similar fanzines. On the cover,

(26:28):
as you sort of mentioned earlier, it's got a huge,
beautiful piece of key art from Legend of Oasis, which
is a Saturn sequel to Beyond Oasis. It's and I
can't and I'm gonna cut in real quick. I can't
emphasize enough. This looks like I've played this game. I've
never played this game. I've never even heard of this game,
but it's so of the era and of the moment
that it looks like every other Killer JARPG being made

(26:50):
at the time. Absolutely, and it's like it's a it's
a pretty good game beyond Oasis and Legend of Oasis.
Like one of the things that really sticks out about
Legend in particular is it really leans into that art
style and the sprites on screen are gigantic and it's
an overhead sort of Zelda style like adventure game, but
the sprites take up like a fifth of the screen

(27:11):
like they're humongous, and it kind of hurts the gameplay.
But that art style that you see on the cover here,
and it's got a really like kind of bright, vibrant
Disney esque take on like uh, you know, I don't
even know how you would describe that like Arabian Nights
in a tropical setting with genies and stuff, like yes,

(27:32):
you know, that art style comes through in the game
like brilliantly and it's really beautiful. And you know, there's screenshots,
lots of screenshots in this issue and it looks like
that and it's it's a good looking game, and it's
one of the ones that after I got a Saturn
for the first time a few years ago, I like
dove into because I was always so curious to see
how and if it could really hold up like to

(27:52):
that style of presentation bordering The piece of key art
is a yellow text on a bright blue back, which
is always a fantastic design choice. Detailing many of the
games in the issue previews, reviews, including Tar Rock, Dinosaur Hunter,
Dark Savior, Snatcher, and of course, because it wouldn't be

(28:13):
a mid nineties game magazine without it a big Final
Fantasy seventh feature. If you saw me react a little
while ago in like shame and discussed, it was because
I had flipped ahead a little bit and saw they
had labeled Barrett Bullet. Oh on, guys, Yeah, absolutely, but

(28:37):
it's also kind of showing. And I think we've seen
this in other magazine maybe PSM number one, maybe our
first issue where these were people like these magazines were
kind of having to do like a lot of their
own translation off preview material themselves, and so like Cloud,
they have Cloud and Earth, but yeah, Bullet for Barrett. Famously,

(29:01):
like within my friend group, there was once a preview
Final Fantasy seven. It wasn't this issue. Who I can't.
I couldn't tell you what magazine it was, but they
translated Cloud's name is Claude Claut, which is like a
real name. And so I had one friend who insisted
and would probably still insist that Claude was a better

(29:22):
name than Cloud, and like, you know, we'll go to
the Gray claiming that he should have been named Claude
all because of like a mistranslation Jim Claude. Yeah, if
I can get you a flip to page ten and eleven,
there's an ad there that immediately popped out at me
for a few obvious reasons. Number one, it's the game

(29:46):
fan mascot, which is like huge, hulking but also somehow
shapeless blue man with a CRT TV.

Speaker 2 (29:53):
For a head.

Speaker 1 (29:53):
Ah, and he's like surrounded by more CRT TV screens
with words like download as two words download user friendly
and hot info emblazoned on them in like the most
nineties way possible. It's an ad for game fan Online,
which is a game fans website in mid nineteen ninety six,

(30:16):
which I think is just really forward thinking and you know,
not something that you saw pushed by a lot of
other magazines at this point. They call it the quote
unquote deepest video game site on the world wide Web.
I was heavily ingrained in like message boards and other
online services at this time, but I'm not really sure

(30:38):
I was going to like traditional websites. I wasn't going
to GameFan dot com for like games coverage. But what
about you, like by mid nineteen ninety six, were you
on the internet in that way?

Speaker 4 (30:49):
I would have to go to my rich friend's house
who had all the cool stuff, because he, of course
also had multiple computers.

Speaker 1 (30:56):
And one of us.

Speaker 4 (30:58):
Actually convinced my rich friends parents to get a T
one line run to their house, not T one, T
three sorry T one was like a huge business class.
I mean T three was still a business class, but
he ended up getting convincing them that they would that
they needed this T three which was still like a wild.

Speaker 1 (31:17):
Amount of Internet. But we didn't get that.

Speaker 4 (31:19):
For until I think we were almost out of high school,
maybe already out of high school. So we were all
taking turns sharing a couple of phone lines and a
couple of computers trying to run this stuff. But I
was very active on the Next Generation forums. Actually Next
Generation's website was like the Web, like the magazine, very modern,
forward thinking, trying to be super cool. And I also

(31:41):
access it very heavily at my school's library, especially when
I wasn't supposed to be.

Speaker 1 (31:46):
It was definitely like not long after this that I
got online because I remember, you know, like reading about
Final Fantasy nine and Chronal Cross and stuff on you know,
the gu the gaming and for Intelligence Agency and stuff
and that. You know, that would have all been like
nineteen ninety nine, But I don't think in nineteen ninety six,
I was doing a lot of like land parties with
friends playing Warcraft and Doom and Quake and stuff. But

(32:09):
you know, I was on bulletin boards and message boards,
but not really looking at websites, which is funny because
I'm you know, I working web now right.

Speaker 4 (32:18):
There wasn't much. There wasn't much like we looked at
it a recent episode. You know, a lot of stuff
was still one person project of college kids that were
getting free hosting space.

Speaker 1 (32:29):
Hosting space was unbelievably tough to come by.

Speaker 4 (32:32):
A lot of game magazines that were putting content online,
we're putting it, you know secondarily and again next generation
like mostly existed as forums. I think they had you know,
styled the same way as the site, but it was
it was not a bonanza of content in any way,
shape or form.

Speaker 1 (32:48):
I was definitely like my first experiences would have been
like outside of like Final Fantasy message boards would have
been like Icy Brian's and so far as domain, I
was obviously like you know, I remember printing off a
Super or a Super Mario RPG walk through, or not
even a walk through, just a world map on my
dot matrix printer at the time, printed off like a

(33:10):
character recruitment guy versweek it in one, So that would
have been like ninety seven or so. So definitely this
was around the time that I started to get like
more heavily online in those ways.

Speaker 3 (33:21):
After this ad.

Speaker 1 (33:22):
We have a section called Viewpoint, which is the capsule
reviews for this issue, and so this is an EGM
style format off having multiple reviewers provide an opinion and
a score for a bunch of different titles across a
two page spread. They rank games out of one hundred,

(33:42):
like an overall score out of one hundred. They also
break it down into categories of graphics, control, play, mechanics, music,
and originality, so each game is marked out of one
hundred on the earth well marked out a ten on
those one hundred overall. I can't really tell if there's
like a weighted average that leads to the overall score

(34:05):
or if it's just like they don't explain the way
that other magazine is sort of explained like game Players
explained how each of their categories was weighted, and then
a final score was taken from that. We have about
eleven reviews or eleven games reviewed three reviewers each.

Speaker 4 (34:22):
I like the butterfly ballot style layout for maximum confusion. So,
for example, we have Rise to Resurrection, the sequel to
the horrible fighting game Rise to the Robots, if I
remember correctly, also very horrible, getting scores of forty thirty five,
fifty six, ninety nine, ninety five, ninety Wait what oh,
super Mario RPG on the right.

Speaker 1 (34:46):
Yeah, speaking of Super Mario RPG, it is a standout
this month, and it is the game that got eight
out of one and did not manage to snag Game
of the Month that went to Panzer Dragoons Why. For
the Saturn it got a ninety nine, a ninety eight,

(35:09):
and a ninety nine. It is a very good game.
Those are very good scores. I personally like Super Mario
RPG a bit more, but I'm not a big rail
shooter fan. But Panzer Dragoons Why, I think is a
very reasonable reasonable Game of the Month choice there and
Super Mario RPG, just in tough against another classic game.

(35:32):
And then there's another another standout Super Nintendo RPG, which
we were going to talk about later in this issue,
which got a ninety ninety and a ninety triple nineties,
but we'll get to that soon.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
Can you flip, like.

Speaker 1 (35:47):
Just to the next page or two pages down, there's
this beautiful, stunning preview of Dinosaur Hunter for them like
ten day sixty four, I need you tie, I need
you to paint a word picture here and just explained
how you know, remarkable and transcendent and beautiful.

Speaker 2 (36:06):
This preview looks.

Speaker 1 (36:07):
Yeah, okay. So right about this time, there's a department
store called Mervin's and there was this T shirt that
they had with some logo I don't remember what the
brand was, very short lived brand just had kind of
like a futuristic names, like a two word name, and
then it had a little skull on fire between it
and that was like embroidered on. And then there were

(36:29):
three the same shirt and three different colors, really comfortable
T shirt and it was like a gray blue, a
gray green brown, and like a gray green gray. And
one time, my mom in a fit of anger at
the pile of laundry that I had in my room
described them as mung colored shirts, and that is what

(36:50):
is happening on this page. The entire page is just
slathered in mung It is almost impossible to distinguish between.
And brilliantly, they went ahead and used like a PIXELI
gray green background for it, so just in case you
had any hope of getting some saturated colors or distinct
visual clarity or non foggy objects that is.

Speaker 4 (37:14):
Wiped out by the background being just as mung colored
as the rest of it.

Speaker 1 (37:18):
Incredible. And then, like my two favorite things aside from
everything you just described, is in the top left, above
the logo for the game, there's a Nintendo sixty four
and a cartridge and it kind of looked like the
cartridge is sort of hovering above it, but they've used
this like photoshoppy blur effect to make it look like
the cartridge is like slamming down from above into it,

(37:39):
and like it just looks so good and you can
tell it's one of those things. And it was probably
like two am when they're like knocking this together, and somebody.

Speaker 3 (37:46):
Was like, oh, yeah, look at this.

Speaker 2 (37:47):
This looks sick.

Speaker 1 (37:48):
It looks like the cartridge is just like slamming into
the console, even though like the angle is totally off,
like the cart would not slide into the car. Yeah, yeah,
it's great. It's like a saw.

Speaker 4 (37:58):
And then further down they're trying to descend into an
isometric like three quarter view of the Oh my god,
exactly exactly, and the cartridge is like slightly too small.
Incredible for the uh the cartridge slot as well, and
the Nintendo sixty four is turned on so good. This
is a very image heavy preview. It's a single page

(38:20):
and there's like, oh yeah, like what eighteen thirty six
screenshots and it's cool, like this is stuff the game
fan probably was capturing themselves somehow, Like, you know, they're
not good screenshots, right. These are not like what we're
used to in twenty twenty five for preview screen shots,
which are like perfectly framed, beautiful, you know, pieces of art.

(38:43):
These are like screenshots in the game that somebody took
from some tech demo somewhere, and you know, I can
appreciate it from that angle because there was probably a
lot of work that went into this.

Speaker 1 (38:54):
There was, in fact, a ton of work that went
into this again. Please listen to the Molly Patterson Bonus episode.
Subscribe to the Fun Factor Ultra Review crew. Listen, give
us money, enjoy more incredible content. Please thank you. Okay,
back to the show. And there's a lot of like
showing off a blot of the enemy variety. It's you know,

(39:14):
like it's showing off these environments, but they're very samey,
Like you know, three of the screenshots, four, five, six,
at seven of the screen shots are the same enemy
just from like slight. It literally looks like it was
took like it in like a burst, Like cool, take
a picture, Take a picture, take a picture. Take it great. Yeah,
run all of them, run all of them. Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely,

(39:35):
And it says like and I mean like this is
something else too. It says all these all these characters
are only between thirty and forty percent complete. These characters
animate unbelievably smoothly, so like this is a really early build.
We don't get to see this god from video games anymore.
So you know, on first glance, this whole preview looks
a little little stodgy, a little little bland, But when

(39:58):
you recognize it, you're actually getting this these sort of
assets that would never make it to the light of day.
Now it's pretty neat. I also though, in some of
the copy near the bottom of the page, it says,
quote unquote, as promised, the n sixty four produces pixel
free environments, And I just like absolutely love the way

(40:20):
that they're bragging about the Nintendo sixty four offering quote
unquote pixel free environments, as though like all the pixel
art games in this issue haven't aged like far far
better than like we're talking like some beautiful pixel art
games which are very pixely but still look amazing, and
Turock does not. And it's just funny how hard we

(40:43):
were pushing into three D tech that like really wasn't
mature enough at a time to really pull off, you know,
like our impressive visuals outside of being like, oh wow,
I've never seen this before, but the idea that this was,
like that getting rid of pixels with some sort of
a win instead of some sort of compromise is pretty funny. Okay,

(41:04):
before we get to the good stuff, we're gonna flip.
We've been at the beginning of the magazine. We're gonna
flip all the way to the back of the magazine.

Speaker 3 (41:11):
Because to me.

Speaker 1 (41:12):
This is like the real meat and bones a game Fan,
and I you know, I kind of alluded to it earlier,
but this is the ad section where it was loaded,
not with like you know, traditional ads bought by publishers
of specific video games, but like these are ads from
game shops around the United States, loaded including Diehard because

(41:37):
of course Game Fan started life as a catalog for
a game store. But they're loaded with like ready to
order imports. So you have games like Albert Odyssey on
the Sega Saturn for ninety dollars, a cool one hundred
dollars for a Japanese copy of Bahama Lagoon on the
Super Nintendo, and then one hundred and ten dollars for

(41:59):
King of Fighters ninety five, which is just like, you know,
there's so much conversation right now about like you know,
game prices going to eighty dollars US and stuff, and
you know, if you were in the import scene back then,
one hundred and ten bucks King of Fighters ninety five,
ninety bucks.

Speaker 4 (42:17):
Uh for we will not be under sold. Clods are welcome, man.
I just want you to think about, just imagine it is.
This is the main nineteen ninety six issue and you're like, oh, yeah,
I'm gonna call this eight one eight number. Your dialing
you're paying long distance. By the way, kids, you had

(42:39):
your landline and you're gonna get charged. This is gonna
show up on your mom and dad's long distance bill
as like a four dollars phone call. It's not a
toll free number. The eight one eight number you're gonna
call Diehard Gamers Club. You're gonna go, I want to
play King of Fighters ninety five. I'm gonna pay your
one hundred and nine ninety nine plus tax, presumably US shipping,

(43:01):
and yeah, send that cod which means cash on delivery,
which means in some number of weeks someone will show
up on your doorstep and they're going to be like, okay, great,
please hand me like one hundred and twenty two dollars
in cash, and then if you do, you.

Speaker 1 (43:18):
Get your gay. To be fair, chain of things happening
here is unbelievable. To be fair, they do promise overnight delivery,
which is wild and must have called fortune, so you
do know it should theoretically show up.

Speaker 3 (43:31):
The next day.

Speaker 1 (43:32):
I don't know how that's possible, but it's there. It's
the promise, but speaking of that, you know, long distance
phone number. There's also the aforementioned quote unquote Secret Treasure
of Ludra, which nowadays is more commonly translated as Treasure
of the Rue Dress, which is on the Super nes
It's like a light gen Squaresoft RPG, and it's awesome.

(43:56):
It's there alongside Treasure Hunter g. They wouldn't even less
the price in this ad, so you had to call
that number again long distance. You're paying money for it.
Your parents are gonna get mad just to find out
how ludicrously expensive these Supernintendo carts were. Like if they're
listening one to ten for King of Fighters, you gotta

(44:17):
be looking at one twenty oh yeah, like bottom we
also here we also hear Aiden Special collectible offer imported
resin kits from Japan, limited quantities, call for prices. This
Felicia from Darkstalkers, I do.

Speaker 4 (44:34):
Not even want to know how much it would have
cost you then, let alone what that figurine must be
worth now on the secondary market. If you have a
nineteen ninety five Felicia from Darkstalkers, I mean, you know,
go in there at there's Cami I Honda. You know this,
this whole group and something that was only available in

(44:55):
Japan probably had to be smuggled out of the country overnight,
you know, overseas shipping two Diehard Gamers Club And then
you know there's probably five of these things on the
continent and you're gonna call them ask for their price.

Speaker 2 (45:11):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (45:12):
Yeah, those are beautiful though, man, like you said, the
resale on them is probably kind of crazy. The other
crazy thing here is you can get a Saturn for
two sixty nine ninety nine white Japanese Saturn. All import
RPGs include free translation aiden. I'm sure this is equally
high quality. It's set right above there, available now from Japan. Yeah,

(45:34):
he's just amazing. Who's doing this translation dot matrix printed
out sheets? Uh? There is, however, quite a killer deal
monthly import Saturn blowouts only fourteen ninety nine for Street
Fighter to the movie. The game a classic stone cold
classic right there. So you know, I talked earlier about

(45:57):
how like these magazines really let us feel like we
experienced or knew about or were in on games, like
even if we didn't get to order them or play them.

Speaker 2 (46:08):
And these.

Speaker 1 (46:11):
Like these previews and these like ads at the back
are a huge part of that. For me, like I
looked at these screenshots for like so long and just
dreamed about having these games. Oh. One of the funny
things though, is like I think that, like, yeah, I
look at this ad and this is from Diehard, so
the magazine that like published game or the store that
published game Fan, But they have an ad down near

(46:32):
the bottom for Thor on the Saturn, but that is
Legend of Oasis. So it's just it's weird how they
have a whole preview of the game but then have
it translated as a different translation and title in the
ad at the end. And the same thing like they
have a picture of a Nintendo sixty four. It straight
up says Nintendo sixty four on the console, but the

(46:57):
ad says pre order your Ultra today. So it's just
it's interesting to see how like, you know, these ads
were probably being put together by you know, somebody else
that wasn't maybe deeply involved in the magazine itself. Wow.

Speaker 3 (47:10):
Yeah, anyway, cool stuff.

Speaker 1 (47:11):
I you know, like there are so many games now
that I've sought out, like you know, fan translations for
like Treasure of the Rue Dress, Treasure Hunter g because
I saw them in the back of these magazines and
like in particular, like I talked about Terranigma earlier in
this episode, there is one specific screenshot from the back
of a game fan magazine that like haunted me for

(47:33):
my whole life until I could finally play that game.
And then I got to that part in ter Enigma
a couple hours and I was like, oh, this is it. This, like,
this is the scene from that game that I wanted
to play all those years ago, and that's that was
a cool feeling. Before we move on, this one last
screenshot I want to point out on this ad. It

(47:54):
is for the Nintendo sixty four. You see a screenshot
of Super Mario sixty four below it. Right above that
is a screenshot of Wavery sixty four before it was
a jet ski game, which I think is pretty cool. Whoa, whoa.

Speaker 2 (48:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:08):
So it's like, you know, you look like you're racing
in these kind of funky hoverboat things, and that is
Wavery sixty four before they turned it into a jet
ski game, which is pretty super cool.

Speaker 3 (48:19):
Yeah, good stuff.

Speaker 1 (48:22):
Okay, these were like far obviously far out of my
price range. Like I, like I said, I all guilties.
I had never bought any especially after doing, you know,
shipping duties, currency exchange to Canada.

Speaker 3 (48:33):
It would like I can't even.

Speaker 2 (48:34):
Imagine how much they would have cost.

Speaker 1 (48:36):
I eventually started importing games here and there. I imported
like Children of Mana and Phoenix right game and stuff,
but that wasn't until like the Nintendo DS era, did
you ever import anything? No, me and my friends were
less ethical. So our main way of getting games that
we wanted to play but couldn't was through shady online websites.

Speaker 4 (49:04):
Also we had now these of course we're us release,
but we also loved renting games and then copying them.
Yeah yeah, so that was mostly we were getting. We
were getting our fair share of games that way, but
I definitely desperately wanted to import a lot of these
games that just weren't available.

Speaker 1 (49:23):
Here absolutely or like and then every once in a
while I might go into a game store and see
one of them and they'd be one hundred and sixty
dollars or whatever behind glass.

Speaker 3 (49:32):
Yeah yeah exactly.

Speaker 1 (49:34):
But but yeah, so I mean, like, to me, game
fan really was about like this deep fan culture within gaming,
and that's what kind of came together to create game Fan,
and I really appreciate it for that, and it's you know,
I'm really excited to continue to explore how it was
engaging with games culture and games media and the games
industry compared to the more traditional like games media company

(49:57):
funded magazines as well.

Speaker 4 (50:01):
And we are going to engage with games media very
specifically this games media and the media this game's media was.

Speaker 1 (50:08):
Engaging with the game. Aidan is teased this whole.

Speaker 4 (50:11):
Time Lufia two, which you already knew because it is
in the episode titled right.

Speaker 1 (50:17):
Here when we get back on fun Factor, Welcome back
to fun Factor for two old gamers review old video
game magazine reviews.

Speaker 4 (50:37):
That is what we are going to do right now.
It is time for us to review the review.

Speaker 1 (50:48):
As I mentioned earlier, one of the interesting things about
game Fan is their review format, and it's a unique
against other magazines at the time because it kind of
combines the two prominent styles.

Speaker 3 (51:00):
As I said, it has.

Speaker 1 (51:02):
Capsule style reviews near the beginning, touching on about a
dozen different reviews, and those come with a one hundred
point scale review like score and category scores, but then
also scattershot throughout the whole magazine are expanded editorial style reviews.
So if the capsule reviews are like EGM, the longer

(51:24):
reviews are like game players, and these ones are like
just throughout the magazine. They might be beside a preview
like I mentioned earlier, but notably they don't have a
score attached. And so I like to really look at
this as a clever balance between sort of the consumer
oriented approach of reviews, like the capsule reviews.

Speaker 2 (51:46):
And like.

Speaker 1 (51:49):
More like comprehensive criticism that wants to look at the
game and what it does and what's interesting about it,
what doesn't work, without being concerned about whether or not
a reader is going to buy it or not.

Speaker 3 (52:02):
What do you think of this?

Speaker 4 (52:03):
Yeah, no, like fascinating, that's fascinating, and especially as you say,
from a game magazine that is born out of a
game shop right where like and they still have ads
for their own game shop in the magazine, that consumerism
is like tied so hard and they have you know,
the capsule reviews earlier with the multipanel scores go out
of one hundred, you know, and then as you say,

(52:25):
it's this big, big splashy two page layout, tons of screenshots,
and then you know, really good long editorial review and
no score and that's you know, it's ahead of its time.
That's what we love nowadays, and a lot of our
favorite sites they don't put in a score because they
don't want to participate in the Metacritic game. They don't

(52:48):
want to tie it to consumerism, and that's fascinating to
have that side by side with you know, even like
the most direct pandering to sales type reviews.

Speaker 1 (52:59):
Yeah, like literally at the back they have for scale, yeah,
from their shop a bunch of the games that they
reviewed in this issue, right, Like, so it is in
their best interest to try to get you know, go
to the back and payne.

Speaker 4 (53:11):
If there was an Amazon affiliate link, it would be
at the bottom of this review.

Speaker 1 (53:16):
Yeah, exactly, exactly. But I think the fact that you know, like,
like you say, the fact that they have both of those,
despite the consumer oriented nature of their business, shows just
that enthusiasm to want to write deeply about games. You know,
we'll get into the capsule reviews, We're going to get
into the full review as well, and we'll look and
see how well they both sort of serve that purpose.

(53:38):
But I also want to talk about the game we're
looking at today, which is one of my favorite RPGs
on the Super Nes, which is like, you know, high
praise because the super Nes has some of the best
RPGs of all time. Like you said, Lufia two, Rise
of the Sinistrels is what we're looking at today, and
it's a game that I played the original Lufia back

(53:58):
in the day, or mostly play it at my friend's house.
Well he played through it and dip my toes into
Lufia two a little bit here and there, but I
didn't really discover it and come to appreciate it for
what it is until several years ago, when it was
the first game I completed after getting back into like
quote unquote retrogaming via emulators. I wanted to see, like

(54:21):
I said, if pixel Art, you know, sixteen bit RPGs
still held up, and so I picked one of the best,
which with Lufia two. And of course, as I said,
it's gone on to become one of my most favorite
RPGs of all time. And I think the reviews we
go through today are going to touch on a few
of the reasons why.

Speaker 2 (54:37):
It managed to do that.

Speaker 1 (54:38):
So let's take a look at the reviews, because in
game fan there's multiple reviews of this we're gonna look
at and start with the caps or reviews, which are
at the front of the magazine, and we've got, you know,
opinions from Orion Waka and Takuhi. One of the things,
you know, that I thought was cute was that Lufia

(54:59):
two is infamous for it's poor localization. So it's a
fabulous game, but it got a you know, very bad
localization in English. We were lucky to get it in English.
It's playable, it's fine, but you can tell that you're
not getting the best experience from it. And so when
I saw Takoui on the review, which is a pen
name for Casey Low, I kind of had a chuckle

(55:20):
because Casey, as part of the sween and two localization team,
is responsible for another one of these absolutely classic Japanese
RPGs that has always been held back by its very
poor localization. And not to show my book too much,
but you know I do. I have written a book
about sweeen and sweake in two, and I have a
big long chapter about like what went wrong with that localization,

(55:44):
and I speak with Casey, and I speak with Jeremy
Blustein about why such a talented group of translators, you know,
put out a product that is known to be one
of these sort of most compromised localizations out there, and
so like, you know, it's just kind of funny to
make that connection for me in this review, you know,

(56:08):
in this capsule review, because Casey would go on to
you know, sweet In two came out only a few
years after this. It was three years later, so it
wouldn't be long past this issue that Casey started working.

Speaker 2 (56:18):
On game localization.

Speaker 1 (56:20):
But in any case, Ti, yes, can you kick things
off by reading Orion's review of Lufia two.

Speaker 4 (56:26):
Look a good RPG in English? I know, I know,
kind of shocking, but it's true. Once you get over
the fact that there's English in the textboxes, you'll notice
Lufia two has a very strong storyline. Even better for
the folks who played the original Lufia, clean and colorful graphics,
cool puzzles, and a great soundtrack. This is easily the
most enjoyable RPG I've played on myce nest in.

Speaker 1 (56:47):
A long while. Now let's just start getting some of
those great thirty two bit titles over here. And Oriyan
gave it a ninety overall.

Speaker 4 (56:54):
Oh yes, yes, I forgot to play. Yeah, ninety overall,
and then we have GCPM and.

Speaker 1 (57:01):
Oh for a graphics other things. Yeah go ahead.

Speaker 3 (57:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:09):
So Oriyan like obviously has no idea. This is May
nineteen ninety six, but they are gonna get their wish
like tenfold within the next year as Farm Fantasy seven
hits the PlayStation and then the entire genre explodes. I
do think it's interesting to see, like in this publication
in a magazine again that is published by a store

(57:31):
that wants to sell these import games, like a real
emphasis on like, hey, like, there are tons of good
RPGs out there, We're just not getting them, which was true.
There were so many that were being left behind in
this weird transitional period between the sixteen bit and the
thirty two bit era, and I'm just really glad that
Lufia two got that chance. Next up, we have Twoui's
review and they say, after all these years of begging

(57:54):
and pleating in vain for companies like Square and Enix
to meet their RPG responsibilities, Jalko just comes up and says,
here's Lufia two comes out tomorrow.

Speaker 3 (58:04):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (58:05):
While Lufia two wouldn't have been my number one choice
for an American conversion. This is an excellent game. The
battles get a bit tedious, but the storyline, music, and
puzzle dungeons are all really cool. Lufia two makes me
really happy to Kui gave it a ninety overall and
I think it really again illustrates how desperate console fans

(58:26):
were for RPGs at the time. Ye you know myself
chief among them. Half this review is just being like, hey,
holy smokes, like somebody put out an RPG, which is
kind of crazy. It doesn't even talk about the quality
of the game, which I.

Speaker 2 (58:39):
Thought was interesting.

Speaker 1 (58:40):
That's a good point, can you if you read Let's
go to the final caps review. This is from Waka,
who continued the trend another ninety so three nineties across
the board. Yeah yeah, Julko's very wise to bring out
this title. This game's been rated as one of Japan's
favorite RPGs for over a year. The music, puzzles, which
are most intriguing, storyline, and anything else you can think

(59:01):
of are all new and improved. L two is put
together very well. With games like this Super Mario RPG
and more coming, ninety six is shaping up to be
yet another promising year for sixteen bit role playing fans.
It's very interesting justification on this, Like in terms of
the actual text, some of the formatting here is just

(59:24):
very strange. It's like they had a fixed number of
words that could go in the box, you know, and
then they're just like sizing and upset and downsizing to
fill the whole box. It's very funny.

Speaker 3 (59:35):
It's so good.

Speaker 1 (59:35):
And I also like how, like you know, in Walker's
review they refer to it as l two like an acronym,
but then as Lufia two, and other reviews like there's
no consistency across the naming conventions, which is which is
always funny, and I think does maybe speak a little
bit more to the you know, semi pro background of
the magazine.

Speaker 4 (59:56):
I also thought it was really weird is waka do
you know? Do you know if this is like a
persona type thing? Is that almost had the sort of
stilted in translation. You know, Jaliko is very wise to
bring out this title. This Gave has been with an
exclamation point. This Gave has been rated as one of
Japan's favorite RPGs for over a year. Exclamation point. It

(01:00:17):
almost sounds like a I don't know if it's English
as a second language or like, I don't know if
they're doing a bit, you know, but just like honestly
pretty like stilted, awkward phrasing for an English language magazine.

Speaker 1 (01:00:30):
I think it's just the quality of the writing of
the magazine. Yeah. Just his name was Mike Wakamatsu, So
that's all I really know about about Mike. But but
I do think that like caps or reviews, especially of
this time, like did get into some I don't think

(01:00:50):
that like short form concise criticism was necessarily a strength
of a lot of the young writers who were working
at this time, as much as it would kind of
come to become something that the strength of the industry.

Speaker 4 (01:01:01):
But I did think it was, Yeah, and I have
to in defense of myself also keep in mind all
of these, if you're not looking at the visual version,
all of these are like wild ass cartoon characters, Like
they look like they are in set dialogue in a
video game, with weird stereotypes and exaggerated proportions and everything.
So it's like it's I don't know if these are
characters doing a bit or just how these people are writing.

Speaker 1 (01:01:23):
Well, And like in other magazines. We got stuff like
Sushi X, which was a bit and you know, we
did absolutely have people write yeah in character rather than like,
you know, as themselves. And it can be hard to tell,
especially looking back, whether or not that that was what
was happening here, But I think it was just somebody.

Speaker 2 (01:01:38):
Who was really excited about RPGs.

Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
It's funny to me though, that, like Waka's opinion about
RPGs at the time was totally different.

Speaker 2 (01:01:48):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:01:49):
Well, O'Ryan and Takoui were both talking about how like, oh,
my gosh, an RPG on the Super Nintendo walk is like, oh,
it's been a really good year for Superintenda sixteen bit
role playing game fans, which is basically counter to what
the other two are saying. We're get another promising year
and another promising year. Yeah, So, I don't know, interesting

(01:02:11):
perspective was so different, right, Like he might have just
found maybe he really liked Secret of Evermore or something,
and so that just like you know, kind of set
a tone for that year more than the others or
something like that. But we're going to flip forward to
page sixty two, which is where we have a really
beefy two page spread for a full review of Luvia

(01:02:31):
two by Orian So. Orian did both a capsule review
and then a full on editorial style review, which I
think is interesting, Like I like that they kind of
give their writers both opportunities to write in both spaces,
and it's interesting to see how some of the concise
ideas in the capsule review are expanded upon in the

(01:02:52):
full review. Here we have again a two page spread.
It's like loaded with screen. They look really good too,
Like it's really like crisp and clear and colorful. The
layout's nice and simple. Yeah, they're all bordered by what
you know, my almost looks like a text border in
a sixteen bit RPG, you know, and some of them

(01:03:14):
were at a slant. But you know, it just looks
really good. It's an aesthetically pleasing set of pages. The
background is all overlaid with some transparency over top of
a background from the intro to Lufia two. It's got
that vibe that all these mid nineties video game magazines have,
but without feeling like it's like losing readability. The text

(01:03:39):
is a little small, like, you know, it squeezes a
lot of characters into a fairly small area of space.
So you know, it might be a little hard to read,
but otherwise, like I feel like it looks pretty good. No,
it looks great. I totally agree.

Speaker 4 (01:03:53):
And it is funny that they actually have this very
RPG like border that you called out, like a fan
text box in an RPG, but Lufia two does not
have that. It's just blue with the white rounded box
backgrounds of Final Fantasy style. But they clearly put a
ton into making this review look good and it shows.

Speaker 1 (01:04:13):
Yeah, absolutely it shows. And then I mean the next
page or previous one page. You have Super Mario RPG
a review as well, and it has something similar. It
has all the screenshots, but they're bordered by like the
Mario pipes. It also looks really good, So they were
doing you know, like sim bespoke artwork for the reviews,
which I think really makes it, like helps it stand

(01:04:34):
out and gives flavor to each each game. Oriyon's review is,
like I said, it's pretty dense and media. It's it
touches on a lot of the various different parts of
the game that work, but it's specifically focused on sort
of how it does everything better than it's prequel Lufia one.
The review kicks off with a story summary placing Lufia

(01:04:56):
two one hundred years before the first game, so it's
a prequel that deals with a lot of events that
shape the plot of the first game, and also, like
I said, contextualizes how Lufia two took a fairly standard,
like bog standard mediocre Superintendo RPG and just made every
single facet better and turned something that was sort of

(01:05:19):
middling into like genuinely one of the best games on
the console with Lufia too. Once you get past those
first couple of paragraphs, you get into the meat of
the review, and this is where Orion's praise starts to
kick in for the game's look and feel in particular.
And so I'm going to read a quote here from
Orion where he says the graphics they're well amazing. Everything's

(01:05:43):
gone through a complete overhaul. From the characters we're a
bit less squashed and a lot cleaner. To the overworld
map itself. The improvements made in towns and castles are
almost indescribable. Not only do the houses finally have a
roof for some reason, these were left off in the
first Lufia, but everything was packed with color and detail,
even the fight scenes, which in the original were these

(01:06:06):
painfully cheap looking battles where your enemies just appeared above
you have been changed into great looking isometric view battlegrounds. So, ty,
before I start like gushing over Lufia two and the
way that Oriyan does in this review, do you have
any experience playing the game or with the game?

Speaker 4 (01:06:24):
Actually, yeah, actually I don't, and it's definitely one that
I've thought about going back and playing through. I remember
that ads for it coming out and thinking it looked
pretty good, but again kind of I had just gotten
hooked on Chronic Trigger and Final Fantasy six, and by
nineteen ninety six I had a PlayStation and so I

(01:06:47):
was like, going, Okay, this doesn't look good enough to
go make a point of going and spending you know,
sixty bucks or whatever on it at the time. And
then I also had a weird even though Final Fantasy,
the Final Fantasy games were not like this, enough sequels
were coming out that I was like, oh, well, if
it's a story based game, I'm gonna want to play
the first one. Even though that you do not need

(01:07:09):
to play Lufia one to play Lufia two. I don't
think so you know, weird decisions you make as a
fourteen fifteen year old, and.

Speaker 1 (01:07:17):
I mean we were always making those decisions, right, Like
a huge part of like growing up as an adolescent
during this Golden Age was like our experiences, our path
through like video games or RPGs was shaped by the
decisions we made, right. I didn't play Lufia two at
the same time for many of the same reasons, Like
I was into Super, into Chrono Trigger and the PlayStation
was coming and stuff, and it just kind of slipped

(01:07:38):
me by, despite you know, enjoying the first one. Well enough.
One of my favorite games in like a really weird
way is there's a Lufia to remake on the Nintendo DS,
and it like it takes Lufia two but then turns
it into like a third person action RPG, so like

(01:07:59):
it doesn't have ran battles, it's not turn based battles,
but it also like modernizes everything. So like Maxim, who
is you know, the main character is wearing like a
cool leather jacket, and there's like a lot of science
elements in the game. It's like it's it's really strange.
It's like a re envisioning of Lufia two. It's very,

(01:08:19):
very different. It follows the broad sweeps of the story
in the same way, but it's like, it's just such
a weird thing to go in and play this game,
be like, yeah, this this is Lufia too. I it's
just not at all like Lufia Too. But it's also
I really liked it. You know, I got about halfway through.
It didn't finish it, but I really appreciated that experience

(01:08:42):
of finding something that's so vastly different from its source
but still felt like interesting and like true to itself
in its own way. So I you know, if anyone
likes Lufia Too, find that Nintendo DS remake and give
it a shot. It's it's really interesting anyway, tangent Aside
about remakes, can you read this next little bit of

(01:09:05):
the review, because I think it hits on the heart
of what makes Luvia two so special in sort of
the pantheon of Japanese RPGs in that sixteen bit era.

Speaker 4 (01:09:14):
But the best change by far lies in the caves
and dungeons. Though not much different from the original Lufia
in appearance, they've been totally redesigned to add an entirely
new element to the game. Enemies still attack randomly on
the overworld map, but now battles in caves and other
ground locations are almost like Chrono Trigger. The creatures are visible,
but if they touch you as standard fight begins. This

(01:09:34):
has done so random attacks wouldn't be a problem. As
you fool around with the new Zelda type attributes found here,
there are blocks to move, switches to throw, cracked walls
to blow open, as well as money puzzles to solve.
This is quickly becoming my favorite part of Lufia two.
Some of these puzzles are extremely well designed and a
blast to figure out.

Speaker 2 (01:09:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:09:52):
So like, Lufia two has a lot of really interesting
elements to it that blends genre and like also kind
of set the stage for stuff to come. For one thing,
like the battles the enemies are appear on screen in dungeons,
but it's not like Chrono Trigger where you fight on
the actual like dungeon like a layout you still go

(01:10:13):
into like a random battle screen, but it kind of
takes on almost a roguelike element because it has grid
based movement, so every map is a grid. Enemies don't
move unless you move, and so every time you make
a move, they make a move like roguelikes work out.
So there are instances in the dungeon where you might
need to stop and think something through and try to

(01:10:34):
figure out how you can maybe manipulate the space, how
the enemies are moving through the space. Maybe your low
on resources or hit points, and you want to try
to get through a room without getting into battle. How
can you stop that from happening? That I think is
just kind of really makes for a really interesting and
unique pace to plane Lofia two it's really a game

(01:10:56):
that encourages you because it's then also full of puzzles
to stop and look at what's happening on screen, not
just ripped through dungeons as fast as you can, and
that just plays like unlike any other RPG at the time,
I think, and as they touch upon there is sort
of these Zelda style tools in the game that allow
you to interact with the environment that are so heavily

(01:11:17):
baked into like the puzzle element of Lufia dungeon design,
and there's so many puzzles that really like I think,
if you didn't have Lufia two, you wouldn't have gone
on and had wild arms, which takes on the same idea,
and any of these sort of like heavily puzzle based
RPGs that we've seen since nineteen ninety six all kind
of come back to Lufia two and being able to

(01:11:41):
like go into it again like a game we're moving
through the environment and solving environmental puzzles is like such
a huge part of the experience. Was so different than
what like Square Enix or I guess Square Soft at
the time was doing with Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy.
And that's why I want everyone to go.

Speaker 2 (01:11:57):
Back and play Lufia too.

Speaker 1 (01:11:58):
It just feels like a very confident, well executed idea
of a different way you can do an RPG. And
then on top of all of that, they have like
a full one hundred level like actual Roguelike mini game
where you can do like a one hundred floor like
you know Roguelike where you start over from screach you
have to build up as you go on. It's like,
it's amazing. It's like if it was released as a

(01:12:20):
standalone game, it would be worth playing and putting tons
of time into the fact that it's sort of like
a semi hidden dungeon in Lufia two is remarkable. Yeah
that sounds that sounds outstanding. That's really really cool. Yeah,
it's it's worth going back to. Like I said, it
reinvigorated my idea of like how fun retro games could
be and how they can stand up and feel unique

(01:12:42):
even playing them, you know. Twenty five almost thirty years later,
Orian wraps up his review with a lot of praise.
The whole review is is very like you know, positive
and as obviously a big fan of the game, and
highlights in my opinion, a lot of the things that

(01:13:03):
the game does well and still continues to do well.
It looks really beautiful. The Pixlar graphics are incredible. They
look it looks so good on my crttvs upstairs. The battles,
the environments, everything about it just looks really nice. And
those puzzle elements are so strong, Ryan says to wrap
up the review. Lufia two did tremendously well in Japan,

(01:13:24):
holding a place in the top five of the Super
Famicom Readers All Time Favorite game list for over a
year and then and thankfully it finally made it to
our shores. See some Japanese companies care. Now, if we
could only get tails of Fantasia, Genza sweek It in

(01:13:44):
Romancey Saga three. Ah, then I'd truly be a happy man.
And of course we would end up getting all three
of those games on Western shores. Some of them would
take a lot longer than others, but Tales of Fantasia
hit North America on the Game Boy Advance several years
later against this Sweekend obviously came out nineteen ninety seven,
a year after this review was made. And Romancing Saga three,

(01:14:06):
I think, saw its first official English release on like
the PlayStation four, like within the last like five years
or so, as Square has been inexplicably re releasing all
the Saga games, so you know, like eventually we got there.
And I think Final Fantasy seven, as we've talked about
a lot, really changed the arithmetic for a lot of

(01:14:26):
these games.

Speaker 4 (01:14:27):
Yeah, And it's funny, Aden, while you've you know, been talking,
I've kind of gone back and gone like what was
I doing? You know, I said had a PlayStation at
the time, But like I'm trying to throw myself back
and going like, you know, why am I missing a
game like this just because it didn't look like you know,
Chrono Trigger as you know, it couldn't go one to
one with Chrono trigger.

Speaker 1 (01:14:48):
For graphics, right, Like, it's still it's still very very cool,
and we're wasting time on all those sports games. I
hate to break it.

Speaker 4 (01:14:56):
Yes, yeah, well sports gas, you know, because I'm look
at it's all right cool, there's you know, there's wipe Out,
there's Warhawk, there's you know, all these all these games.
But even then, you know, I was desperately waiting for
really an inch that wouldn't get scratched until Final Fantasy seven,
where I was going, show me thirty two bit RPGs,

(01:15:17):
like take this forward from here, right, like like if
you can do cron on Trigger, if you can do
Final Fantasy six, show me what's next, right, And so
I was hanging on any PlayStation rpg and just you know,
Beyond the Beyond, yeah, which were the most frustrating experiences
of all time as a gamer. You know, we I'm

(01:15:38):
sure I'll get into that at some point. I'm looking
at you know, Jade Cocoon. There's like a bunch of
these games that were like you know, C minus two
D plus RPGs getting localized, and like that's what I'm
on going, like.

Speaker 1 (01:15:52):
Please, please, please, please, please.

Speaker 4 (01:15:54):
And then I'm not looking at Lufia two. I'm like, ah,
that's yeah, sixteen bit whatever, be that good?

Speaker 1 (01:16:00):
Well, And it's it's that trap of that transitional era,
right like where you're wanting something that justifies your purchase
of the PlayStation like stuff like that. But this was
also like a transitional time for us as millennials, right,
like we were growing up and like I was into
video games, but by nineteen ninety six, I was also
getting heavily into Magic the Gathering. We were starting to

(01:16:21):
get into Warhammer. I was getting into beer and vodka
and just parties, right Like. There was a lot more
going on in my life around this time, and so
I was still playing RPGs, but maybe I was a
little more limited, and just Super Mario RPG coming out
at the same time was enough to feel that part
of my life and I wasn't burning through it and
then also looking for the next thing and the next

(01:16:42):
thing and the next thing. And I wonder if that's
part of the reason why some of these games fell
through the cracks for kind of people our age.

Speaker 4 (01:16:49):
Yeah, And I would love to go back and hit
myself in the head because there's a there's one. I'm
trying to remember what it was. Uh, it was like
it was, it worked. It was like a guitar RPG.
There was like a like a loot mechanic where like
they did. There was no Guitar Hero controller guitar, but.

Speaker 1 (01:17:08):
I was like, huh not guitar Goo man.

Speaker 2 (01:17:11):
That was a PS two game.

Speaker 4 (01:17:13):
Huh no, no no, But it was literally like an RPG.
But then you had play along moments like you whipped
out your guitar sword, and then there.

Speaker 1 (01:17:22):
Was like, uh like you know, just like Guitar Hero,
you're supposed to be hitting buttons at certain times, and
you know, I was like, oh my gosh, this is amazing.
I love this concept. And it was just absolute dog
shit in every way. It's massive loading time, you know,

(01:17:44):
anime style graphics that were terrible, like polygons. I've been
looking through trying to find It's like I was so
desperate for like what is the next cool thing on
PlayStation that I was just swinging and missing on all
these not even looking at all these great sixteenth bit RPGs.
Sorry if my your clack and I'm trying to figure
out what game you're talking about that this does not
rig any bells for me, So that like, that's that

(01:18:05):
was a deep cut pandemonium. No, uh, it's it's not.

Speaker 4 (01:18:11):
It's not Grandia, but it has a similar it might
end in a in that way.

Speaker 1 (01:18:16):
Huh.

Speaker 4 (01:18:18):
It did end with an a. It was called Ephemeral
Fantasia and it was hot dog shit. It was for
the PS two, which is why neither Aiden nor I
could remember it or look it up quickly on air.
It did use the guitar Freaks controller if you happened
to have one. And once again I want to emphasize
it sucked ass.

Speaker 1 (01:18:40):
But let's carry on. Let's bring it home. Yeah wait, no,
not bring it home. Sorry, that is an awful conservative
slogan from the recent election. Let's review the review. Hi,
let's look at this.

Speaker 3 (01:18:53):
What did you think?

Speaker 1 (01:18:54):
Yeah, get it right from the perspective. You know, you
don't know Lufia too well. But what did you take
away as a non fan from today's reviews?

Speaker 4 (01:19:04):
Yeah, well, it certainly made the case for this is
a game worth playing.

Speaker 1 (01:19:09):
Right. I want to hear more about the story because
I think that was you know, for me a huge
driver of loving RPGs, right, was this is a game
that has an actual story, It has narrative, it has characters,
it has a setting, it has a world, and it's
putting me into that world. And I'm playing that role,
whether it's a silent protagonist or I'm just controlling, you know,

(01:19:32):
the main character of an actual, vibrant cast of characters.
So I didn't get much of a sense of the story. Yeah,
and they did praise.

Speaker 4 (01:19:45):
The story, I think, in at least one of the
capsule reviews, but it's it's that that's the only piece
that's missing. You know, they do a great job talking
about the graphics, and you know, they talk a lot
about how much it's improved from Lufia one. And just
as we've been talking, I went back and looked at
Lufia one, like, show me these you know, hilariously cheap
looking battles sequences, and yeah, absolutely, the battles in Lufia one,

(01:20:05):
they just have sprites of characters, these sprites of enemies
just overlaid on top of graphics of rooms. But not
even in a perspective where it looks like the character is.

Speaker 1 (01:20:16):
In the room. It's just on top of the room.
It's like it's a throwback to some of the old
like Dragon Warrior, Dragon Quest games.

Speaker 3 (01:20:23):
Yeah, that battle system.

Speaker 1 (01:20:24):
But by the time of you know, Final Fantasy four
or you know, Lufia one came out pretty early on
the Super Nintendo and so it's still like felt like
an nes game almost, whereas Lufia two was like deeply,
deeply into the sixteen bit kind of ethos.

Speaker 2 (01:20:40):
At that point.

Speaker 1 (01:20:41):
This and a touch on the story. Honestly, the story
in Lufia two is not very good. Like if you're
looking at Final Fantasy six or Chrono Trigger Fantasy Star four,
Lufia two is very much in that traditional structure of
like town dungeon, town dungeon, town dungeon. Right, you get
to a town, there's a conflict, you go to the
dungeon who resolve the conflict. You move on to the
next town into you make your way around the world,
and then you fight the Sinistrels. There are some character moments,

(01:21:04):
there's some interesting relationship dynamics within the party between Maxim
and some of the other characters and stuff. Early on
in the game, he you know, he has this like
romance with Tia, who's from his hometown, and she sort
of like leaves eventually and he finds somebody else that
is like, so there's like some complexity there, but it's

(01:21:27):
honestly not. You know, when you look at something like
Final Fantasy six from around the same time, even a
couple of years earlier, you saw a lot of like
breaking down of that traditional like town dungeon structure and
having more set piece design, having more sort of like
momentum based storytelling, And none of that is in Lufia too,
And I think it does enough to propel you forward.

(01:21:47):
But it's absolutely the type of game where the plot
is sort of a contrivance for exploring the world and
these puzzle based dungeons and stuff. So I'm not surprised
it doesn't get full rate in the reviews because I
honestly think if you dug into it too much, even
in nineteen ninety six, you'd be like, oh, yeah, it's
fairly simple. The translation is not very good, but it

(01:22:10):
does the job.

Speaker 4 (01:22:14):
So yeah, overall, and I want to give it scoring
credit for not having a score, for having like a
pure editorial review, especially since this reviewer also gave us
a score earlier in the magazine. That's unique and cool
and I think way ahead of its time.

Speaker 1 (01:22:31):
Yeah, absolutely and like, you know, that's basically where like
I'm coming down to as well as I love the
idea of the capsule reviews that are a little more
buyer's guidy, and then like this bigger deep dive into
what really makes the game look good and isn't trying
to convince you. It's like it's glowing, but it's not
trying to convince you why this is the one that
needs your money this month. It wants to take a

(01:22:53):
look at contextually, how does it fit in with the
first game, How does it fit in with other games
of the time, Where is it drawing you know, makes
comparisons to where you know, its soundtrack is touching on
what Final Fantasy is doing at the time, or it
looks to Chrono Trigger. How is it you know, taking
ideas from Chrono Trigger with on world enemy sprites. So
it's trying to contextualize a bit more than what you're

(01:23:15):
seeing from other Buyer's Guide style, consumer style reviews and
other magazines. Coupled with the you know, the caps le reviews,
which were really good, what would you give it out of,
you know, on a rating scale? What are we what
are we looking at for this one?

Speaker 4 (01:23:32):
Ooh, okay, Yeah, I am gonna give game fans review
of Lufia two seven and a half out of ten
Giant Catfish.

Speaker 1 (01:23:46):
Seven and a half out of ten Giant Catfish. I
think that's good. I would give it slightly higher. I
would give it, uh, you know, Orion's long review along
with the caps reviews. I'd give it an eight out
of ten. I think it's actually like, you know, a
giant catfish out of ten, because I think it's a
I think it's a pretty good review. I think it
really understands what the game is and succeeds as and

(01:24:09):
you know, it sells it in many different ways throughout
the caps of reviews and the long review. I am
docking in a mark though, and I'm doing the thing
I hate where I'm ending on a negative for something
I generally really like. But I'm going to dock at
a point. So I probably would have given it Anne
because I think it's a really solid collection of reviews.
Docking at a point because so many of them spent

(01:24:30):
so much of their review just talking about how we
never get RPGs instead of talking about.

Speaker 3 (01:24:36):
Like, hey, we got this rpg. We're lucky.

Speaker 1 (01:24:39):
Here's why it's so good, you know, or here's why
you need to play it, you know, or why it's special.
And so the fact that like so many of the
reviews ended up spending half their word count on like,
oh my gosh, it's an RBG.

Speaker 2 (01:24:52):
Can you believe it?

Speaker 1 (01:24:53):
It's in English isn't very helpful in terms of you know,
that consumer style or if you whereas like the same
number of words are spent in Orion's long form review
as you know, the capsule reviews were spending on that
exact same topic. So not going to mark off that
eight giant catfishes, catfishes, catfish, eight giant cat fish out

(01:25:18):
of ten.

Speaker 4 (01:25:19):
For me, it's a good one, all right, And you know,
I think that's a good good place to settle it,
because you know, for me, I was like, as soon
as you said to the capsule reviews, I was like, oh,
I almost want to give credit for the capsule reviews too.
But you know, you're right, they do spend a lot
of time just talking about this isn't RPG.

Speaker 1 (01:25:34):
Oh my god, this is an RPG. Red alert, Play
it no matter how good it is or isn't. And
as much as that does capture the mood of a
lot of RPG fans at the time. It's still not
you know, all that valid artistically creatively as critique. Yeah yeah,
I agree, they think, you know, like it, it's of
its time, But I think it does a job pretty

(01:25:56):
darn well honestly.

Speaker 3 (01:25:58):
All right.

Speaker 1 (01:25:59):
That is our review of game fans review of Lufia
two Rise the Sinistrels. Did we get it right? Leave
our review a review at Apple Podcasts, post it as
a comment on YouTube. We will read the best ones
on air, and hey, go ahead and pass this show
around to all your friends like it's third grade and
we're on the playground. Shout us out on Blue Sky, YouTube, TikTok,
wherever at fun Factor Pod. But unlike these old magazines,

(01:26:23):
you won't have to wait a whole month for your
next installment. We're dropping new episodes every two weeks. So
go to funfactor pod dot com to follow our show
on your podcatcher of choice, and please consider becoming a
member of fun Factor Ultra, our premium tiers that unlock
add free episodes, bonus episodes, and the members only channels
of our discord. It's nah, I'm just gonna scratch that.

(01:26:44):
I promise you you cannot miss it. If you sign up,
you and we will have a maximum score.

Speaker 5 (01:26:51):
In fun Factory, I'm working on a magic card deck.

Speaker 3 (01:27:10):
Oh nice cards here.

Speaker 1 (01:27:16):
Gotta trim it down by like three cards though, or
no six cards at one O six It's tough.

Speaker 4 (01:27:25):
Ooh, what's a commander.

Speaker 3 (01:27:30):
Esh Key dragon claw.

Speaker 2 (01:27:32):
I'll see if I can hold her up.

Speaker 1 (01:27:34):
She basically wants to cast like a creature and non
creature spell each turn. So I have like, I don't
know if you can see that, but I pulled it
up on basically wants to cast like a creature and
non creature spell each turn. So then I have a
bunch of like adventure cards that can be a creature

(01:27:54):
or a non creature, and then like a bunch of
really cheap like can trippy spells like gassing basically like
one man a zero mana cards that I can cast
before I cast a creature. And I don't know how
it wins, but we'll see. Oh yeah, that's like all
my decks.

Speaker 4 (01:28:15):
Yeah exactly, like this really cool theme and it's and
it's all synergy, yeah exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:28:20):
It's definitely definitely a synergy value deck. Yeah exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:28:24):
I mean Ashke can like get really big, really fast,
and I could win through commander damage, Like she has
trample ord one and vigilance and then gets two plus
one plus one counters on her every time I cast
like a creature and an on creature spell in that
d So like theoretically she could get huge and commander
damage people out, but keeping her alive is tricky.

Speaker 2 (01:28:46):
So we'll see.

Speaker 1 (01:28:48):
It's mostly just like a silly you know. Sometimes I
like to just build like weird decks that'll let me
use like a bunch of cards in my bulk bin
that I like would never touch otherwise.

Speaker 4 (01:28:59):
Yeah, I've I've been building uh Ohbecca, Oh yeah, Obecca deck.
And I realized partly because my two main decks are
Demere Fairy Deck. You know, it's a pre con that
I upgraded the million one and then also this rac
Dose Clerics like Black Clerics and Phoenixes deck. That was

(01:29:22):
like because I like Phoenixes, you know, and so I've
bought so many cards for both of them, and you know,
swapped in and out and cut cards.

Speaker 1 (01:29:29):
I'm like, wait a minute, Obecca.

Speaker 4 (01:29:32):
Is blue black red, so I've got a ton of
blue black red and various combinations, so like cool, I'll
just you know, so I threw a bunch of it,
and now I'm like buying actual like on theme or
like mechanically relevant cards, you know, making it more and
more actually functional. But it was surprisingly okay with just

(01:29:53):
the stuff I had laying around. Yeah, it's fun, Like
I mean, that's what's great about Commander. It's like you
can kind of whip something together. Like even for this deck,
I only had to buy like a fairly small number
of cards from the shop because it was like I
just dug through my bin for a whole bunch of
random commons and uncommons and worked really well. Cool, cool,

(01:30:15):
All right, well let's get get back at it because
we got to pluff through a whole other episode.

Speaker 3 (01:30:19):
Yeah, yes we do. Let's do it, you two, Okay.

Speaker 4 (01:30:23):
I was like, I just realized you slow rolled this
and I actually didn't scroll out to see what the
gay was. Do you want me to not mention it?
Do you want me to keep it a surprise?

Speaker 3 (01:30:31):
Oh no, I think you can mention it now.

Speaker 2 (01:30:34):
That's all good.

Speaker 1 (01:30:35):
I don't know why I slow roll it when it's
like literally the episode title.

Speaker 2 (01:30:38):
I just think it's kind of funny, I do.

Speaker 1 (01:30:42):
Yeah, And like back when I was initially like thinking
we could have it be like a surprise to each other,
you know, I still thought that would work. So yeah, yeah,
people seem to care more about what game we're reviewing
than I kind of expected. I think surprised. I think
I'm so surprised how much that is. Yeah, so, which

(01:31:02):
almost made me pick Super Mario IPG for this episode,
but I wanted to do Lufia instead. I talked earlier
about how like these magazines really let us feel like
we experienced or knew about or were in on games,
like even if we didn't get to order them or
play them. And these like these previews and these like

(01:31:25):
ads at the back are a huge part of that
for me, Like I looked at these screenshots for like
so long and just dreamed about having these games

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GameFan Volume 4, Issue 5 - Lufia II [S1E6]

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}GameFan Volume 4, Issue 5 - Lufia II [S1E6]