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sarahssowertty
@sarahssowertty

This week's Arcade Archives release is... Exvania (Namco, 1992)

PSN
EU
US

Switch
EU
US

This is the game's first home port since its release. Only the Japaneese ROM is included (a World version has been dumped for MAME, however). On the original game, character select is locked to which set of controls you're using, but you can set which player you want in single-player mode via the Preference Options here.

Princess Elektra has been kidnapped by the wicked witch Erinyes! Four brave knights decide to mount a rescue mission... But, well, only one of them can defeat the witch, right? So, they decide to engage in gentlemanly combat to figure out who should fight Erinyes. Across the land, they fight amongst themselves for ownership of seven castles, and the knight with the most castles has the honour of fighting the witch. Their form of combat? Single-screen arenas filled with chests and sometimes monsters, using their chains to break the chests open for power-ups and magical orbs that explode in cross-shaped flames to take their rivals out, last one standing wins!

... If that concept sounds a little familiar, then yes, this is a Bomberman variant with a slight fantasy motif, but it's got a few wrinkles to make it unique. For a start, the orbs you drop can't destroy chests, so you have to use your extendable chain to whack and open them, but that's not the only thing the chain can do. You can hit your opponents with it to very briefly disorient them, but you can also hit placed orbs to change its colour, increasing the length of its flames. Hit it too many times and it explodes prematurely at max power which sounds like it'd kill you... But you can use your chain behind walls to hit it! This adds an extra layer of strategy to proceedings and makes it stand out from Bomberman, so if you've got a few friends locally who want something slightly different, this is a worthy variant on the bomb-blasting classic.

The one downside is that 'locally' bit, as this game supports up to four players but, of course, Arcade Archives releases have no online multiplayer. You can kludge it with Share Play on PS4 / PS5 but only one player can join you and the other two slots are filled by CPU players who do their best but aren't the same as a human opponent. As a result, I'd definitely recommend this to people who can easily arrange local games over those who need to rely on the internet, my apologies.


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