Exploring The Saturn: Part 3

Sonic Team's first game on the Saturn, a sequel to a launch title, yet another arcade port, and Treasure making their grand debut. There's a 

NIGHTS Into Dreams: As I said in my first Exploring The Saturn post, I've played NIGHTS Into Dreams before, and yet I was perfectly content to go through it again because it's just that good. This is still my favorite Saturn game so far, and it'll probably stay that way even when I'm done with these playthroughs.

NIGHTS Into Dreams is a unique arcade game where you fly through a stage collecting these orbs to free a colored orb, which you have to bring back to the start after accumulating as many points as you can. Trust me, it sounds more exciting than this, I'm just not at all familiar with NIGHTS lore and don't really know the name of... anything you're doing. But that just makes the gameplay loop all the more original, and the fluid controls and sheer variety of ways you can get more points to end each stage with a higher rank makes for a very dynamic and replayable game. You can explore the stages for hidden areas, try to get the longest chain of orbs/stars to improve your score even more, or just plain ignore all of it to engage with the game's surprisingly complex pet simulator. Leave it to late 90s Sonic Team to be way too extra with their games, as usual. 

NIGHTS Into Dreams only has seven levels, but they're all super fun and memorable, constantly throwing new ideas, mechanics, and setpieces to keep things feeling fresh. Soft Museum is my personal favorite  The bosses are admittedly pretty jank, but none of them are really all that hard either if you know what you're doing. There's a few other extras like a VS Mode and some easy preset high scores to beat, but the majority of the replay value in NIGHTS really is just playing stages over and over again, improving your scores, engaging with the A-Life system, and ideally, getting all your ranks to A. It's just such an easy game to come back to, Sonic Team really are wizards at making games that encourage you to get better at.

But the true thing that makes NIGHTS Into Dreams so great has to be the overall aesthetic. Befitting the title, NIGHTS takes place in this surreal, colorful dream world, and it looks consistently stunning. Between my gushing for Kirby and Klonoa, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that I'm a sucker for dream worlds, and the unique art direction of NIGHTS forms a big part of its identity. It's also aged remarkably well, similarly to the Panzer Dragoon games but even moreso. And it shouldn't be much of a surprise here, but the music is great. It's so great. Tomoko Sasaki of Ristar fame and Naofumi Hataya from Sonic CD fame collaborated on the NIGHTS score and it's easily one of the most uplifting and magical video game soundtracks I've even heard, outside of the eclectic set of boss themes which range from rock to DnB to opera beats. It's fantastic.

So yeah, NIGHTS Into Dreams is a fantastic game. An addicting and one-of-a-kind arcade experience with an impeccable aesthetic and a lot of replay value. It's a truly magical game, not just the best non-Sonic game Sonic Team has made, but easily stands up with the best in that series as well. If there's any Saturn game you need to play, it's this one.

5/5 Stars

Panzer Dragoon II Zwei: Panzer Dragoon II Zwei is yet another Saturn sequel that fixes pretty much all of the original game's issues. I liked the first game well enough, but the core gameplay definitely could've used just a bit more polishing. Zwei is that polishing.

At face value, Panzer Dragoon II Zwei seems a lot like the first. You fly and shoot through seven stages, all while switching perspective to watch your back and sides from enemies. However, right from the get-go, you may notice that a big change has been made: You can actually move your dragon when you're not facing forward. This is a huge improvement that fixed my number one issue with the original game, and already makes Zwei's difficulty feel a lot more manageable. Zwei is still pretty tough, don't get me wrong, but it feels a lot more fair than its predecessor in a lot of ways, the improved controls being one of them. I also thought the difficulty curve felt a lot more natural, with the difficulty not immediatley spiking up the moment I got to the second stage. But them there's the multiple routes through most of each stage, not just a great way to add in replay value, but it also lets the player choose how difficult they want to make the game. Certain routes are harder than others, and taking the harder ones with reward you with more points to evolve your dragon.

So yeah, Panzer Dragoon II Zwei also really ups the replayability too. There's multiple routes in almost every level, dragon evolutions, as well as trying to kill 100% of the enemies in a given stage. But the most inventive addition is the Pandora's Box, which is essentially a cheat menu that slowly doles out more options as you play the game. Getting all the cheats in Pandora's Box will take quite a while, either 100%ing every stage or playing for 30 hours (unless you have Saga save data), but the sheer amount of customization, options, and hidden modes you get by the end of it is truly impressive. Sadly, Pandora's Box doesn't save your progress if you use any of the cheats, meaning you can't unlock the full thing while using any of the cheats you already got, which is a real shame. The visuals and art direction are as great as always, with the bosses being especially noteworthy for being far more varied than the ships and dragons we had in the first game. The addition of ground-based sequences also allowed for even more unique and memorable levels too. And the soundtrack is just as great, despite leaning more towards techno than the first game's orchestral score, it captures the same general vibe.

Overall, Panzer Dragoon II Zwei does exactly what a good sequel should. It improves most of the first game's flaws, keeps everything it did right, and adds a whole load of extra content and replay value to boot. I'm still not very good at it, but at least I feel like I can blame myself and not the game this time.

5/5 Stars

Sega Rally Championship: Yeah... I wasn't as big a fan of this one as I was Daytona. I'd say on a technical level, Sega Rally Championship is a big step up over its spiritual port predecessor. It runs smoother and looks far better too, but it just lacks the charm of Daytona for me.

Sega Rally Championship is a rally game more than a standard racing game, so there's a much bigger emphasis on navigating through tight turns on an open road. For me, I kinda prefer the way Daytona did things, with its more naturalistic tracks feeling more fun to drive around in compared to Rally's linear paths. I also preferred how unforgiving Daytona was in comparison, since the risk of crashing or swerving off road felt a lot higher, encouraging you to truly master the controls. But most of all, I just think the presentation is a big downgrade. Obviously, the music is a big step-down, with some good rock tunes that just don't stack up to Daytona's fast-paced and upbeat pop, but it's even just the little things. Daytona's tracks were filled to the brim with easter eggs, its menus popped with color, and there are so many charming vocal quirks like "Rolling start" or a narrator announcing the letters you pick for the name entry. Sega Rally Championship does get a point for "Game over, yeah!", but that's pretty much it.

Still, don't get me wrong, this is a perfectly solid, even great, racing game. The controls are smooth and fluid, and the difficulty curve between the tracks is still great. Once again, there's a lot of content here, even including multiplayer and a proper time trial that didn't need to be activated via a cheat code. The main mode is a Championship mode where you start in 15th place and have to try to be in 1st after three tracks, so whichever position you finish a track in gets carried over to the next one. I do really like the sense of progression there, compared to Daytona where you just pick a track and play it over and over again. And of course, I have to praise how much better the visuals are. The draw distance is way better, the framerate is so much smoother, and as a whole, the graphics just look cleaner and crisper. I may prefer Daytona as a game, but Sega Rally got the far better porting job here.

Overall, Sega Rally Championship is a solid racing game, I definitely don't dislike it, but the track design and charm just don't live up to Daytona USA for me, even if it's a far better port on a technical level. I'm still going back to Daytona for rounds, but I don't see myself doing that with this.

3.5/5 Stars

Guardian Heroes: Treasure is one of my favorite game developers solely for how out-of-the-box their games are. Crazy boss fights, nonstop action, weird genre blends, when they were making games there's no way of knowing what they'd do next. I may not like all of their games, but I sure as hell respect them.

Guardian Heroes is no different. This game tries to blend together fighting games, beat-em-ups, and RPGs. You fight waves of enemies like in a beat-em-up, but you use fighting game controls and are on a 2D plane, and you get EXP that you can use to boost your stats. It's a unique blend that can work really well at times, and the sense of satisfaction from leveling up is great. However, I'm still not entirely sold on the blend of genres Guardian Heroes is proposing, mostly because this game gets insanely hard. Fighting games are usually balanced towards one-on-one duels, and the complex moveset allows for what are essentially tactical fast-paced games of chess. However, when you're being swarmed by enemies like in a beat-em-up, it can feel way too overwhelming and almost unfair at points. The later levels especially feel like you're being swarmed nonstop. There are ways to mitigate this, however. The Easy Mode gives you 99 continues so lives are mostly not an issue, and there's an entire built-in fighting game mode if you'd rather play some one-on-one duels instead, but I kinda wish the levels were just more tailored around this new gameplay style.

But what really kept me playing Guardian Heroes is actually its presentation. Guardian Heroes' story is surprisingly well-executed. It's not super ground-breaking or anything, it really is just a chaotic MacGuffin chase, but between the likable characters, the genuinely fantastic scene direction, and the overall frantic pace, this is a fun-as-hell story that kept me hooked just to see what was going to happen next. Which is especially unpredictable since Guardian Heroes has a lot of alternate routes, that vastly vary in terms of absurdity and morality. This is a beefy game, between all the routes, leveling up each character, and the aforementioned built-in fighting game with its 30+ character roster. If you click with Guardian Heroes' gameplay, it will keep you occupied for a long time. And as I was hinting at a bit earlier, the game looks pretty great too. There's a unique blend of spritework and 3D graphics that, once again, holds up surprisingly well, allowing for both dynamic camera movements and super expressive characters.

Overall, Guardian Heroes is pretty neat. It may not really be my cup of tea, but it's an incredibly unique genre-blend with a great aesthetic and a surprisingly engaging story. Once again, it's Treasure doing what Treasure does best, being weird, unpredictable, and entirely their own.

3.5/5 Stars

This is probably my favorite batch yet. Both Nights Into Dreams and Panzer Dragoon II are two of my favorite games on the Saturn so far, and Guardian Heroes and Sega Rally Championship were good too. Let's hope the pace keeps up with DecAthlete, Keio Flying Squadron 2, Virtua Fighters Kids, and Christmas Nights.