gosokkyu

エンド

  • 戦う人間発電所

owatte shimatta


When Hydlide 3 dropped, I described it as "Hydlide II, but they actually tried this time", and I wasn't just being glib: series creator Tokihiro Naito was quite frank about Hydlide II being a game they were pressured to make and one they ultimately didn't like very much, and they vowed that there'd never be a Hydlide III (which they walked back by titling the sequel "Hydlide 3", naturally). That's not to say they didn't add anything meaningful over the original game—they added an equipment/shop system akin to a traditional RPG; there's a magic system in addition to bump combat; there's a good/evil alignment system; the map's way bigger and has towns with NPCs and so on—and it's sufficiently prettier and more technically adept than the prior game, but all of those improvements were completely undercut by a severe lack of balance and an abundance of inscrutable "puzzles" that nobody without a guide could realistically be expected to solve.

There were a few different micom conversions alongside the PC88 original (most notably the X1 version, which has in-game BGM, but they're basically all quite similar) but there was no Windows version, no console port nor any remixed version way down the line... it's a game that could be made a lot better via some very simple changes, but I suppose nobody cared enough either way to even try.

Someone asked me why EGG skipped over II and I speculated that the extremely Indiana Jones-ish intro tune might've posed a problem, but really, I think people just don't like it all that much. OG Hydlide's simplicity and compactness offsets the occasional bullshit, and Hydlide III comes so close to being good that it's easy to cut it some slack, at least for a little while, but Hydlide II is nothin' but work.


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in reply to @gosokkyu's post:

I would assume that 2's coming after 3 because of popularity.

I've been buying every EGG console release (beat Ys 1/2 and Hydlide) and own a few games on Project EGG. I think there's great value in keeping these games coming, even the not so amazing ones.