Farewell to the 16-bit generation from Neverland. Of course, with maximum fanfare, albeit without a chance to enter foreign markets due to such a late release, already in 1996.

Despite all the unsightliness and secondary nature of Lufia: The Fortress of Doom – the first swallow of the Neverland company – in the future the developers gave birth to a sequel that rightly took an honorable place in the pantheon of the greatest 16-bit role-playing games. And then they expanded the series to the size of an entire franchise, releasing several spin-offs, third-party projects “based on” and even one full-scale remake-reinterpretation of their most successful game. But when, after the closure of Neverland, the rights to the series passed to Square Enix, you can no longer expect good news either about the Lufia series or about everything that the company has still managed to do. The only lucky one is Rune Factory, which is still barely breathing under a new roof.

Arranging a soundtrack to set the mood

Enough with this topic, fortunately the game that we will talk about today is exactly that “side project”, which, moreover, never left Japan, which is why it quickly sunk into oblivion. A fan translation into English, which was born with great pain in 2012, helped her cross the ocean. According to the translator, he spent a good 12 years on the localization process for Energy Breaker, because in addition to simply translating the text, he also had to rewrite the game itself so that it could live with the new English-language worldview.

By the way, if the character designs seem familiar to you and resonate with something from childhood or early youth, then the creator of Trigun, Yasuhiro Naito, was responsible for them. How he was brought into some unknown Energy Breaker – history is silent, but for the recognizable and memorable characters created for the game, I definitely thank him very much.

The story begins with Myra, a girl with amnesia, who in her dreams is very persistently asked by someone to save the world from destruction. This “someone” turns out to be the blind fortune teller Selphia, who just by chance dropped into the city where the main character was staying. Hoping to get at least some information about her past, Myra goes to an appointment with a mysterious seer, but along with the first leads she will also receive a ton of adventures on her ass. As soon as the player is finally allowed to take control, it becomes clear that this is not a simple jRPG, but an isometric one, and even with complete freedom to explore locations a la Super Mario RPG!

And you will definitely have to explore a lot in the game, since the talkativeness, curiosity and cheerfulness of the main character and the graphomania of the scriptwriters know no bounds. Almost every protruding pixel in the game can be examined and listened to, often completely useless, but no less charming comments from Myra, and sometimes you can even find some hidden object, starting with shiny stones – local optional items for collecting – and ending with elements of uniform designed to make the upcoming battles a little easier. Neverland, even in the first part of Lufia, liked to equip the interiors of houses with various hidden objects, but in the case of Energy Breaker, their brakes seem to have completely failed, because you can probe all the suspicious corners. No, not hours, but long enough to completely forget about the plot.

Another interesting feature of the peaceful exploration of game locations is the local dialogue system. Yes, exactly the “system”, because the mechanics of interaction between characters for their miracle Neverland decided to make it at the level of computer RPGs, no less. So, the heroine can not only communicate with NPCs, but communicate with them normally, communicate with them flirtatiously/friendly, communicate with them aggressively, communicate with them on a certain topic and communicate with them about an item from the inventory. But the admiration for the apparent sophistication will quickly fade away, since the game itself barely remembers this system. In some ways, this is a good thing, since you won’t have to wade through thousands of possible combinations of dialogue options just to move a linear-as-rails scenario forward a little. Instead, the dialogue system is used mainly to add variety to the routine reading of text, as well as to get some goodies. So, to sum it up, curiosity is your best friend in Energy Breaker.

However, at first this very curiosity will https://nonukcasinosites.co.uk/no-verification-betting-sites/ constantly run up against an extremely limited inventory, which allows you to drag no more than eight objects. And considering that a complete set of equipment alone takes up four slots, or even all five, there is absolutely nowhere to store various magic scrolls, health and action point replenishers and other rubbish, and you will have to get rid of them in the nearest store. Fortunately, after sale, items do not disappear without a trace, and you can always buy them back from the dealer. And the inventory will also gradually expand as new characters with their own pockets join the team, as well as as additional containers are found in the dungeons.

But not everything in the game is just exploring the sights and chatting with people. The local combat system is perhaps the most interesting part of Energy Breaker. Despite the fact that it is designed in a classic form for tactical jRPGs: an isometric view, movement across a checkered battlefield, a variety of attacks that differ not only in the damage dealt, but also in the affected area, it’s hard to put Energy Breaker on a par with such titans as Tactics Ogre, Final Fantasy Tactics and others like them.

The reason for this is the overwhelming simplicity of everything related to the combat system, be it extremely linear equipment, a set of techniques and the use of the latter on dangerous enemies. All clashes with enemies are numbered in advance by the game itself, so there are no inherently random battles in it, but you can run into a battle with the same number several times if you hang around for a long time in an already explored location.

The battles themselves take place on the “wall to wall” principle, and the main requirement for victory in the vast majority of cases is the need to kill all enemy units. And it is at this moment that you will encounter a kind of peculiarity of the Energy Breaker gameplay, expressed in its desire to limit and limit everything that is possible. For each battle you are given a strictly defined number of moves, and if you cannot meet the limit, regardless of the plot significance of a particular battle, that’s it, the game is over.

What’s funny is that the game itself doesn’t explain in any way why you need to rush so much – you have to, and that’s it! As for the moves of individual characters, things are more usual with them: each of them is given a certain number of action points (~11 units, depending on the hero), which the player is free to dispose of. Although, the combat still doesn’t provide many options for the development of events: either move the character in space, which consistently eats up 5 action points regardless of the distance traveled and the thorny path, or use an item from your pocket, or hit the enemy, which consumes a different number of points depending on the chosen attack.

And the heroes have a lot of techniques in their arsenal. There are purely melee attacks, there are techniques for hitting targets at a distance, there are pushing attacks, there are attacks that hit in an area, there are techniques that hit everyone in the line of action, there are techniques that affect the characteristics. I would like to dwell on the latter in more detail. Due to the fact that health and damage indicators are limited to double digits, the slightest changes in character parameters can lead to serious changes in the situation on the battlefield.

Among such techniques, what stands out is perhaps the most unbalanced spell “Poison”, which drops all the characteristics of one target and literally turns it into a defenseless kitten. And no, there is no way to cure a hero, only if you spend a lot of action points and pump up his parameters back. That is why learning this technique is a vital condition for completing the game without tears of blood, and any encounters with enemies who can poison turn out to be a real nightmare.

It is also impossible not to note another interesting feature of the game’s combat system – the dependence of the damage dealt on which direction the target is facing relative to the attacker. If in the same Final Fanasy Tactics the accuracy of the attack depended on this, then in Energy Breaker, due to the lack of the phenomenon of accuracy itself, things are somewhat different. So, if you hit the enemy in the forehead while standing close to him, then a painful counterattack will come in response. If you attack head-on with a ranged or pushing attack – in other words, anything that does not bring you dangerously close – there will be no response from the target. Likewise, if you hit an enemy in the side while standing close to him. The most interesting situation is obtained if you jump behind the back; in this case, not only will no counterattack follow, but the damage done will also increase significantly. As I understand it, this is due to the fact that when hit in the back, the victim’s “Dexterity” parameter is no longer taken into account, but I couldn’t find any specifics on the Internet.

Using items from the inventory, by the way, is far from the most useless thing, as it might seem at first, given the small capacity of the hero’s pockets, and I’m not just talking about treating beaten party members and feeding them doping. Almost every technique in the game is duplicated in the form of a magic scroll, the use of which, like any other item from your pocket, costs only one action point, which will allow you to spend your time per move more economically. Actually, this is precisely the reason for such a limited inventory – it would be enough to just fill your pockets with 99 scrolls of poisoning and not bother, but you have to constantly choose what is most needed. I’m not talking about the most valuable replenishers of action points, which need to be saved for bosses and only bosses.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the combat system is that characters literally begin to wither from the damage they receive. In the game, this is expressed by the fact that the less health a fighter has left, the fewer action points he is given on the next turn. And such mechanics apply not only to your team, but to everyone in general, which adds a certain element of spice to the tactics. Sometimes a situation may arise where finishing off a fairly battered enemy throughout the entire battle will bring less benefit than a simple blow to a healthy enemy. And when you consider how useful stat-impacting moves are in this game, one or two hits from a buffed hero can be enough to cause several bad guys to lose their self-propelled properties on the first turn. Actually, it is for this reason that the developers introduced a limit on the number of moves – this way they do not allow you to sit in a block, download parameters and wait for the opponents to crawl to you. Moreover, the enemies are not stupid either, and they will often respond in kind to your inaction.

Unfortunately, the game’s biggest flaw was the script. And the problem is this. If you try to look at it piece by piece, focusing on the stories of individual heroes in the team – and each playable character has a written storyline, which is very cool – then you can only find fault with the somewhat peculiar texts of the dialogues between them, and even then you cannot exclude the possibility of a not entirely competent fan translation from Japanese, but if you look at the events of the game as a whole, then only one word comes to mind – porridge. Amnesia, robots, mad scientists, ruins of civilizations, time travel, shrinking to the size of a beetle and traveling through internal organs, a cycle of rebirth, and all this is complemented by local lore, which can only be called confusing.

Sometimes there was a feeling that two people were working on the game script: one of them carefully worked out the storylines of the main characters, and the second was a follower of the cult of Masato Kato, who, in the manner characteristic of Masato Kato, was carried into some kind of jungle, the thread of the narrative of which could not be easier to lose. And it would be nice if all the problems ended there, but the writers crammed more into the game than, apparently, they themselves could comprehend, because the game at some moments raises more uncomfortable questions than it should. This especially applies to the local time machine and the degree of illogicality that it brings to the script.

This very notorious connection to the Lufia series also finishes it off. Apart from some similar elements, there is no obvious connection at all. The only thing the developers were strong enough to do was show the main character of Lufia & the Fortress of Doom for 10 seconds in the final cutscene. I guess this is how the authors wanted to show that the games take place in the same universe or something like that, but this approach is still quite lazy.

What else did I want to say about the game?. Oh yeah, the soundtrack! The composer of the Lufia series, Yasunori Shiono, decided to take a backseat this time, limiting himself to only three tracks, while the main work on writing music for the game was done by another Neverland in-house sound designer, Yukio Nakajima, and it cannot be said that changes in the composition had a negative impact on the quality of the final material. As befits any self-respecting Japanese role-playing game soundtrack, Energy Breaker’s music is written on a grand scale and includes compositions from a wide variety of genres and styles.

Of course, there are different examples throughout the album (for example, the theme of the forest locations sounds so mournful and monotonous that already in the second minute you want to turn it off and put it in the background of Secret of the Forest from Chrono Trigger), however, the overall quality of the game soundtrack is significantly above average. The local few fighting themes sound especially good. Unfortunately, due to the developers’ decision to use regular location music for ordinary battles, there are not as many of them as we would like, but even that little bit is enough to get a dose of listening pleasure.

Interestingly, the game credits list a third composer who composed only two tracks: a waltz theme for one of the main characters and a background melody for one of the later game locations. Apparently, Energy Breaker is the author’s only work in the gaming industry, because. To. it is not possible to find any information about this mysterious person (what is there, even if the correct reading of his/her name is the question: either his/her name is Yusei Yamamoto, or Sachiyo Yamamoto). And this is a shame, because the two tracks that came from his/her pen are simply excellent!

That’s all that can be said about the game. Despite the fact that it gives the impression of a slightly chaotic project, the script of which cannot decide until the very end whether it tells an interesting or funny story, Energy Breaker definitely deserves much more attention thanks to its combat system and, of course, beautiful music. Not a masterpiece, but the game comes dangerously close to this title.