the-doomed-posts-of-muteKi

I'm the hedgehog masque replica guy

嘘だらけ塗ったチョースト


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gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

Coming off the back of Dragon Slayer IV, one might expect the fifth Dragon Slayer game to continue travelling down the more arcade-style route, but Sorcerian's nothing of the sort: it's another side-view action-RPG, now based around a four-character party that trail after one another like Gradius options, but combat isn't especially snappy nor sophisticated, and is so incidental to the experience that you might find yourself deliberately avoiding most of it before long. No, the draw of this game is the character creation aspect, which sees you creating new party members by assigning race/class and gender and, through completing quests and acquiring items and gold in the various dungeons, devising various ways to strengthen your party members, enchant their gear or craft potions that'll let them access the game's million billion different magicks, adopt new non-combat occupations that affect their growth/gold gain over time and so on. The dungeons do feature basic puzzles that might require you to know where to put an item or to bring characters of a specific class, but they're mostly just series of elaborate fetch quests; the real hook is returning to town after a quest and figuring out new ways to develop all the little dudes you've been trekking with for so long (or, once you find out that they'll eventually die of old age, trying to get the most out of them while you can). The clear idea was to create some facsimile of putting together a party in a TRPG and projecting your own feelings onto characters that you've grown and cultivated over various adventures, and the sheer variety and needless complexity of the addressable parameters on your characters does go a ways towards covering for the fact that you're not really doing much otherwise.

By design, Sorcerian is not a narrative-driven game: it's split into 15 discrete scenarios, and was developed with the specific intent of being a modular platform that could be expanded with additional scenarios. Sure enough, it got a whole bunch of 'em: Falcom made two expansion packs themselves, and several others were developed by other companies and distributed via the Takeru disk-writing vending machine service, including some with scenarios sourced from magazine submissions. Falcom also put out a "Utility Disk" that added new stores, character/item naming and other functionality, along with some bonus content like a quiz game. (EGG's only offering up the base game in this package, but I presume it's only a matter of time before they start selling the Falcom scenarios, at least.)

Sorcerian's various micom ports were all reasonably similar, save for some substituted/missing tunes and some deliberate alterations of quest flags between ports to keep players from solving all the quests the same way; Sierra also produced an IBM version back in the day, and I wanna say it's still the only officially-localized version of the lot. Aside from Sega's Mega Drive conversion (made by the Phantasy Star II team and boasting all-original scenarios and music) and Victor's PC Engine CD port (a mix of Falcom and new scenarios, with occasional voice acting but tons of bugs), there was an outsourced and ill-advised Dreamcast remake with 3D graphics, as well as a pair of Windows remakes, Sorcerian Forever and Sorcerian Original, that offer new and classic scenarios with modern visuals, but none of them attempt to modernise or expand upon the core action in the manner of their other remakes, so I tend to see them as inessential.

One other version worth mentioning is G-MODE's galakei conversion, which is noteworthy for being the only version since the micom era to offer the Falcom expansion scenarios; that version's also available on Switch via G-MODE Archives, with the expansions included for free.


dog
@dog

GSK mentions the English Sierra version of this, which I'll bring up to say: it's a fun port because of how Sierra handled the music. They had one of their in-house composers (Robert Atesalp - Leisure Suit Larry 3, Castle of Dr. Brain) do MT-32 MIDI conversions of the original music, and it's fascinating hearing Falcom-style music filtered through the Sierra house style. Some fun examples.

PC-88:

MT-32:

PC-88:

MT-32:

You might wonder "why bother", but Sierra made a big deal out of their advanced music stuff. It's like advertising fancy graphics effects today: not many players have the hardware to do it, but you want to show off for the people who can. Plus, Sierra would actually sell you an MT-32 in their software catalogues. They needed to make sure their games had great music so they weren't disappointing the people who'd paid them money for the fancy hardware.


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