yung chaz ^^)
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15/30 Hanagumi Taisen Columns, the best of both worlds
I’ve already mentioned Sakura Taisen and the ST-V, two of the rare successes of the Saturn generation, in this series of posts; let’s talk about the game that brought them together.
Following the success of Sakura Taisen, Sega unsurprisingly rushed to produce a sequel, but that wouldn’t arrive on store shelves until April 1998. To fill the gap, Sega and Red launched a series of shorter-term projects. The first software released was Sakura Taisen Hanagumi Tsūshin, a fan disc that could best be described as a multimedia mook distributed on a Saturn CD-ROM and mainly promoting other goods and future events scheduled for 1997. Appropriately, this product was released for Valentine’s Day. Here’s an excellent overview of the whole experience.
That being said, the second proper Sakura Taisen game on the Saturn would be Hanagumi Taisen Columns, released in March 1997. As you could surmise from the title, it combines the Hanagumi gang (Sakura Taisen’s women’s squad) and Sega’s venerable ochige (blocks dropping and stacking game) Columns. This crossover was most likely inspired by the then recent success of Konami’s Tokimeki Memorial Taisen Puzzledama (1996), which already successfully crossed the worlds of gal games and puzzle games.
Hanagumi Taisen Columns could be called a masterpiece in clever contents recycling. It largely takes the code and routines from ST-V Columns '97, which happened to be developed around that time at AM#1 and released in arcades in January 1997, and adds a bunch of assets straight from Sakura Taisen, adding only a minimal but surgical number of original illustrations, sprites and voice clips.
Nevertheless, the game is much more than a simple Columns ’97 reskin: it adds a whole new system of special attacks inspired by Sakura Taisen’s dialogue choices, and the adventure mode is adapted to each character. To emphasize its fan game nature, Hanagumi Taisen Columns is also compatible with Sakura Taisen’s save files, through the magic of the Saturn’s internal memory (or a boring Memory Card), with small bonuses available in Hanagumi Taisen Columns depending on which character’s ending you unlocked in Sakura Taisen.
The only thing missing from the game is an online mode, via the XBAND adapter. It’s most surprising because this was becoming a rather common feature in Saturn games at the time, especially with competitive puzzle games of this kind, usually via a separate version exclusively focused on online mode, and sold for a cheaper price. We would have to wait for the sequel Hanagumi Taisen Columns 2 on Dreamcast to fight online.
A commercial and critical success on Saturn, Hanagumi Taisen Columns also had the distinction of being the first game originally released on Saturn to the enjoy an arcade career via the ST-V, in autumn 1997. Either through an amusing coincidence or a finely timed schedule, Hanagumi Taisen Columns arrived in the arcades around the same time as Columns Arcade Collection was released on the Saturn, complete with a port of the ST-V game Columns '97. Parallel fates, these two.
One last tidbit for the cunning linguists among you: the 対戦 taisen (meaning “competition” or something like “versus”) in the title Hanagumi Taisen is not the same 大戦 taisen (meaning “wars”, “great battle” etc.) in the title Sakura Taisen. Which makes sense if you know the game’s storyline summarized in the video below, which is a cool retrospective of the two Hanagumi Taisen Columns games.
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This thread made me give the game a proper play and I realized it feels like a SNES fighter that looks like a Saturn fighter. The aesthetics are strong and unique, but the gameplay is so primitive. It reminds me of the Ranma fighters for SNES with its lack of real combos and wonky move priorities. The zooming in and out basically wrecks spacing control. It’s a better looking Pretty Fighter X. As Chazumaru said, it would have done the job in 94, but the genre had evolved so fast that by 96 it was a relic. Still, I was glad to do one playthtough to see all the anime barbarian art work.
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16/30 Ōtomo’s game that almost happened
Fake Down is undoubtedly in the Top 5 of the Saturn’s most notorious cancelled games, but someone will probably learn this for the first time today: Ōtomo Katsuhiro (AKIRA, Memories, Steamboy etc.) worked on a Saturn game.
System Sacom is one of the first Japanese developers to have jumped on the CD-I-style multimedia boom. We owe them Mansion of Hidden Souls (1993), which can be considered The 7th Guest of the Mega CD. On the Saturn, the company continued on this trend with CG-based or FMV-based interactive movies such as Rampo, The Mansion of Hidden Souls (the confusingly homonymous sequel to the Mega CD game), R?MJ The Mystery Hospital and 
Gekka Mugentan Torico, a.k.a. 
Torico, a.k.a. 
Lunacy.
Then, like everybody else, System Sacom got gobsmacked by Capcom’s Biohazard (Resident Evil), and so the company set about releasing its own Alone in the Dark clone, Fake Down.
The game would have been a post-apocalyptic Survival Horror in a setting conceived by Ōtomo, with a convoluted story about mutants sent to the Moon and a semi-mutant male protagonist tasked with killing another semi-mutant chick who had previously slain the previous generation of mutants. (Note the three letters DNA not so subtly highlighted in the game’s logo above.)
I don’t know if Virtua Fighter’s influence is at play here, but instead of tackling the mutant menace with a gun or a rocket launcher like any Raccon City citizen surely would, the protagonist would have fought barehanded and been able to switch between three fighting styles (power / speed / tricky).
The article below, which is the last we heard of the game (in August 1997), also shows what amounts to a RPG-like level and experience point system. But the article in question is better known for estimating the game’s progress at 50% of development, a lower percentage than all previous articles. Uh oh.
We don’t know when the Fake Down project actually died, but System Sacom was also hired by Sega around this time to develop Deep Fear, Sega’s in-house Biohazard clone, which eventually released in the summer of 1998. From “FD” to “DF”, perhaps the letters are a mere coincidence. In any case, Ōtomo - at the time busy with Rintaro’s Metropolis - is not credited on Deep Fear.
Sixteen years later, it’s not clear how much of the work initiated on Fake Down was used in Deep Fear, how much of Deep Fear’s production was also financing or helping Fake Down on the side, whether Deep Fear’s priority eventually caused Fake Down’s cancellation, or how much of Fake Down’s stuff was eventually recycled in Deep Fear. Here are the only known video excerpts from the game.
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Looking at the video today I can really tell how junky it looks. I suspect they really just didn’t have the goods here. I also totally forgot the otomo connection!!
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Well, in all fairness to System Sacom, this is all very early footage, and they did do a very good job with the support of Sega on Deep Fear, which is probably one of the soundest copycats of Biohazard (on a technical level) of that generation.
I am more worried by the focus on hand-to-hand combat which seemed like a really bad idea within those technical constraints and fixed camera angles. The game is often compared to Galerians on the PS1, with whom it shares several striking similarities (which apparently amount to nothing but developers of the same generation catching a similar vibe), but Galerians had the brillant idea to give its protagonist psychic powers that circumvented the reliance on close contact.
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Yeah, it’s the hand to hand, constantly semi-obscured combat that I’m referring to in the junky department. the CG is good, the vibe seems fine, but even the collision on the combat looks poor.
In other news… I forget whether it came from this thread but I am currently obsessed with the DEJIG (digital jigsaw) edition that has Christian Lassen paintings in it. If they get the music right this could be a real crowd pleaser in 2024.
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I played the Aqua World Dejig earlier this year, and the music was like a bizarre short loop droning forever while slowly adding more elements the more the puzzle progresses.
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wild and weird. the way they put this game (house of the dead for sega saturn) into the show (train to the end of the world) actually felt like an advertisement! But you can’t even buy this game anywhere, officially! they show the game’s full cover art!
Update: I was informed of another hotd film instance, in bio-zombie.
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oh my god, all of this sounds dope - i wanna say sometime around then, i finally came across localized copies of domu, so an otomo saturn horror game would’ve been so hype
as a zombie revenge fan: i absolutely get y’alls concerns for close range combat and the look of the hit detection in that early footage, but like…there’s a part of my brain that fixates on stuff like PT and acknowledges that the sum of some great parts usually isn’t going to live up to its imagined potential, but there’s always the outside hope that if the project fails, it does so in an interesting way that’s really weird & works for freaks like me who go digging in the crates via threads like this & articles by @Kimimi
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17/30 Polygon with the wind…
Here is another notorious cancelled game while the topic is on my mind: Cyber Sled, the only Namco game ever announced for the Sega Saturn. Following the legendary dispute between Nakamura (Namco’s founder and CEO) and Hatano (then Boss of Third Party at Nintendo), Namco had become very close to Sega during the Mega Drive era, nurishing the console with a number of arcade ports from 1990 onwards. These titles were sold in the US and Canada via a new local subsidiary, Namco Hometek.
So, following the release of Starblade on Mega CD in October 1994, one might have thought that Namco would be the ideal partner in crime for Sega on Saturn, the console promising arcade at home. As you all know, what happened instead is that Sony Computer Entertainment brilliantly identified the potential danger of Sega’s arcade ports and made Namco its preferred partner for the first two years of the PlayStation, in order to showcase the console’s 3D capabilities with products that could rival Sega’s exclusive games.
That’s why the readership of game magazines such as Next Generation or Mean Machines raised an inquisitive eyebrow when Cyber Sled was announced for the Saturn at E3 1995.
By that point, Cyber Sled had already been released on PlayStation (in Japan): it was Namco’s second PS1 game, in between Ridge Racer and the Tekken / Starblade Alpha duo. If, like myself, you enjoy collecting games for silly reasons, these four titles which were released before the new fiscal year (April 1, 1995) are the only Japanese PS1 games to have used the old Namcot label.
The Saturn version, initially scheduled for autumn and then the end of 1995, was delayed several times before being tacitly cancelled around summer 1996.
The key detail about this announcement is that it never officially happened as far as Japan is concerned. The only local trace of its announcement is this tiny insert in Sega Saturn Magazine, explaining that this port was an initiative of Namco Hometek, Namco’s North American consumer branch, and that the game did not seem to be scheduled for a Japanese release. Case in point, the game never appeared in any of Sega’s (or game magazines) release listings in Japan.
Through the years, there have been many rumors and conspiracy theories about this port. What we do know is that development for the game did take place at Namco Hometek, and that Sega of America was still counting on the game’s release in 1996. SegaRetro has a handy entry compiling the (meagre) information known in the West about the game’s development at Namco Hometek.
Sega fans have been speculating for years that Namco pulled a cheap trick on Sega, or that SCE demanded the game’s cancellation by virtue of a global exclusivity agreement with Namco. Frankly, with the more objective hindsight of 2024, I think it is a much simpler case of Namco Hometek cancelling a game whose commercial potential no longer justified its development budget in the eyes of its publisher.
We know that Namco Hometek was pretty independent of its parent company in Japan. For instance, they were responsible for Ridge Racer 64 and Ridge Racer DS in collaboration with Nintendo Software Technology; these two titles were never released in Japan. The Cyber Sled port was apparently intended for Windows95 and Saturn; sounds like typical North American publisher ideas from the year 1995.
Now, it is an understatement that Cyber Sled didn’t draw a major crowd on PlayStation, so much so that the sequel Cyber Commando was never released on Sony’s console. Without a direct access to the Japanese market, Cyber Sled had little chance of breaking through on Saturn.
That being said! The absence of a Saturn port, released circa 1996, is particularly unfortunate because the Cyber Sled arcade panel…
… Was a match made in heaven for the Twin Stick released with the port of Virtual-On, Sega’s own arcade response to Cyber Sled.
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18/30 The Top 100 best Saturn games, according to Saturn Fan’s readership
I’ve mentioned Sega Saturn Magazine a few times already. It was the reference and quasi-official magazine for the machine in Japan. Nowadays, the magazine might be most remembered for a gimmick called the 読者レース dokusharēsu (something like “The Readers’ Grand Race”); an ongoing poll allowing the readership to send the magazine a graded ranking of their 10 favorite and most disliked Saturn games after each issue.
Notoriously, the erotic adventure game EVE Burst Error came out on top (with a staggering average score of 9.5014 out of 10.0000) when the competition closed in March 2000, out of a total of 1156 eligible games, while the magazine had already digivolved into Dreamcast Magazine for about a year and a half. Honestly, although the game always received good press and a warm welcome from Saturn gamers in its time, this final ranking says more about the Dreamcast and magazine’s audience at the time, than it does about the Saturn.
However! Sega Saturn Magazine didn’t hold a monopoly on the hearts of Japanese Saturn fans, and indeed, its main competitor was a magazine appropriately called Saturn Fan. Truth be told, until around 1997, the Parisian that I was could only find and would only know about Saturn Fan, which would sometimes appear in the magazine racks of bookstores for Japanese expatriates.
Saturn Fan had its own readers’ ranking, which was less well known and/or less promoted in the magazine than SSM’s version. Fortunately, the great SSSG Youtube channel recently posted a handy recap of that readership’s Top 100 games, which I’ll share with you here.
Before I do that, a few preparations are necessary. First, I need to help the less Kanji-friendly among you decipher the chart:
The 総合 score in red, in the middle, is the overall score out of a maximum of 30 points. The six criteria around it, each rated on a 0-5 points scale are, from the top and clockwise, ① キャラ the characters, ② 音楽 the music, ③ 買得度 the perceived value (or, roughly speaking, the amount of content), ④ 操作性 the quality of the controls , ⑤ 熟中度 something like the game’s capacity to absorb/ engross the player and ⑥ 独創性 its originality. You’ll notice at the end of the video that, through this cumulative scoring system, there is a tiny margin between the hundredth (23.45 points) and first (27.46 points) title in the ranking.
The system and rules employed by SaturnFan were very different from that employed by SSM. Readers only had one chance to give their opinion on each game, in each issue following that of the review for game in question. This explains some seemingly strange rankings (Virtua Fighter above Virtua Fighter Remix, for example) and, generally speaking, a game released at the end of the console’s life was theoretically penalized by being compared with more titles than a title released in the first two years. Not to mention the unfortunate few games released after November 1998, i.e. after the column had already closed, as Saturn Fan gave way to Dreamcast Fan.
Most crucially, this process also penalized games that had a slow start but gradually gained in popularity through word of mouth. Nevertheless, I find this Top 100 a little more representative of the average opinion of Japanese gamers than SSM’s sometimes far-fetched ranking. I have also transcribed the list below the video, in case there’s a title that catches your eye but you can’t read the title. Here’s the video:
100 X-Men: Children of the Atom (Capcom)
098 Thunderforce V (Technosoft)
098 Can Can Bunny Premiere 2 (KID)
097 Yūkyū Gensōkyoku 2nd Album (Mediaworks)
095 Sakura Taisen Teigeki Graph (Sega)
095 Shining Force III Scenario 2 (Sega)
094 Kidōsenkan Nadesico: The Blank of 3 Years (Sega)
093 Digital Pinball ~Last Gladiators~ Ver.9.7 (KAZe)
091 Linda³ Kanzenban (ASCII)
091 Princess Maker 2 (Micro Cabin)
090 Twinkle Star Sprites (ADK)
089 Bulk Slash (Hudson)
088 Puyo Puyo Tsū (Compile)
087 Sonic Jam (Sega)
086 Tactics Ogre (Riverhill Soft)
085 F-1 Live Information (Sega)
084 Phantasy Star Collection (Sega)
082 Grandia ~Digital Museum~ (Sega)
082 Yūkyū Gensōkyoku (Mediaworks)
081 SuchiePai Adventure Doki Doki Nightmare (Jaleco)
080 Gun Griffon (Game Arts)
078 Tokimeki Memorial Drama Series Vol.3 Tabidachi no Uta (Konami)
078 Ojōsama Tokkyū (Mediaworks)
076 Azel –Panzer Dragoon RPG– (Sega)
076 Street Fighter ZERO (Capcom)
075 Söldnerschild (Sega)
074 Guardian Heroes (Sega)
073 Black Matrix (NEC Interchannel)
071 D no Shokutaku (Acclaim Japan)
071 Virtua Cop 2
070 Bio Hazard
068 Marvel Super Heroes Vs. Street Fighter (Capcom)
068 Victory Goal ’96 (Sega)
067 Langrisser IV (Masaya)
066 Dōkoku Soshite… (Data East)
065 Lunar –Silver Star Story– (Kadokawa)
064 Tokimeki Memorial Drama Series Vol.1 Nijiiro no Seishun (Konami)
063 Darius Gaiden (Taito)
062 Akumajō Dracula X ~Gekka no Yasōkyoku ~ (Konami)
060 Dōkyūsei 2 (NEC Interchannel)
060 Culdcept (Ōmiya Soft)
059 RealSound ~Kaze no Regret~ (Warp)
058 Vampire Savior (Capcom)
057 Idol Janshi SuchiePai II (Jaleco)
056 Fighting Vipers (Sega)
055 Layer Section (Taito)
054 Hanagumi Taisen Columns (Sega)
053 Tokimeki Memorial Drama Series Vol.2 Iridori no Love Song (Konami)
050 Dōkyūsei if… (NEC Interchannel)
050 Langrisser V (Masaya)
050 World Advanced Daisenryaku (Sega)
049 Idol Janshi SuchiePai MechaGenteiban (Jaleco)
048 The King of Fighters ’95 (SNK)
047 Advanced World War: Sennen Teikoku no Kōbō (Sega)
046 Policenauts (Konami)
045 Lunar 2: Eternal Blue (Kadokawa)
044 Shinseiki Evangelion 2nd Impression (Sega)
043 Panzer Dragoon (Sega)
042 Himitsu Sentai Metamor V (Mainichi Communications)
041 DESIRE (Imadio)
038 Shinseiki Evangelion Digital Card Library (Sega)
038 Virtua Fighter Remix (Sega)
038 Dragon Force (Sega)
037 Dennō Senki Virtual On (Sega)
035 Nonomura Byōin no Hitobito (Elf)
035 Kidō Senshi Gundam: Giren no Yabō (Bandai)
034 Street Fighter ZERO2 (Capcom)
032 Marie no Atelier Ver.1.3 (Imadio)
032 Cross Tantei Monogatari (Workjam)
031 Shin Megami Tensei Devil Summoner (Atlus)
030 X-Men Vs. Street Fighter (Capcom)
029 Pia Carrot he Yōkoso!! 2 (NEC Interchannel)
028 Fighters Megamix (Sega)
027 Vampire Hunter (Capcom)
026 Tengai Makyō Daiyon no Mokushiroku (Hudson)
025 Mahōkishi Layers (Sega)
024 J.League Pro Soccer Team wo Tsukurō! 2 (Sega)
023 Senkutsu Katsuryū Taisen Chaos Seed (Neverland)
022 Shining Force III Scenario 3 (Sega)
021 Radiant Silvergun (Treasure)
020 Enemy Zero (Warp)
019 Devil Summoner Soul Hackers (Atlus)
018 EVE Burst Error (C’s Ware)
017 Dead or Alive (Tecmo)
016 Silhouette Mirage (Treasure)
015 NiGHTS into dreams… (Sega)
014 Panzer Dragoon II Zwei (Sega)
013 Super Robot Taisen F-Final (Banpresto)
011 Sega Rally Championship (Sega)
011 Grandia (Game Arts)
009 Virtua Cop (Sega)
009 Kakyūsei (Elf)
008 Super Robot Taisen F (Banpresto)
007 Daytona USA (Sega)
006 Tokimeki Memorial ~Forever with you~ (Sega)
005 Ko no Yono Hate de Koi wo Utau Shōjo YU-NO (Elf)
004 Virtua Fighter (Sega)
003 Sakura Taisen (Sega)
002 Sakura Taisen 2 (Sega)
001 Virtua Fighter 2 (Sega)
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so much heat on this list! gotta ask though, any thoughts on why azel/panzer saga seemed to resonate so much less in japan than it did (or more accurately, now does) stateside? many of the RPGs above it are no slouches themselves, but the proper/recticle shooter panzers rate so high above it that i gotta ask
also, obligatory
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My guess would be, as chaz mentioned, because it came out late in the Saturn’s life. At leaat in part. Fewer reviews period??
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@Irishninja Well, in the case of Azel, I think it is first and foremost a victim of all the circumstances I mentioned above.
① The game releasing pretty late in the Saturn’s life, which meant both less interest overall and tougher competition against the rest of the console’s catalogue.
② The game famously sold extremely poorly upon release, and gained popularity belatedly. But the early adopters may have had gripes with the game, such as being too short and simple for the average RPG fan, or a bit too different from the usual Panzer Dragoon for Zwei fans.
③ Nevertheless, it did get into the Top 100, with a total score of 23.89/30.00, around the same as beloved titles such as Gun Griffon, Guardian Heroes and Bio Hazard. So, it was definitely not snubbed in the grand scheme of things. (Where the heck is Bomberman!?) With the way the score is calculated…
You can tell the game was most penalized by the 買得度 value criteria, probably due to the game’s relatively short length, and its lack of 独創性 originality…. ? OK, not sure I get that one. My bad, I was somehow looking at the wrong game, the other criteria that users penalized were the 操作性 controls. I can get that, as they are pretty unorthodox for a role-playing game.
For reference, Azel finished 17th of the SSM readers race (with 9.4304pts) in 2000, ahead of the other two Panzer Dragoon games. This seems to confirm the game’s reputation had grown over time among hardcore Sega fans. (I could check the evolution of its ranking and score in the Readers Race between 1998 ans 2000, if you really want to dig through this issue).
I do agree with your assessment that Azel is now more beloved in the West than in Japan. I am not sure Azel would appear in a selection of 30 games for the Sega Saturn Mini based on Sega of Japan’s and/or Japanese users’ preferences alone.
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First, have to say thanks to @chazumaru for all the excellent and rad posts! I’m finally starting to understand the Sega Saturn, and it’s rising up my personal console rankings list the more I learn and play around with its games.
I started messing around with High Velocity Mountain Racing Challenge after watching the latest Pandamonium video and seeing how cool it looked. I also just finished watching Initial D for the first time last year, so that added to my interest and enjoyment of virtual mountain racing.
The first thing that caught my attention are the sweet visuals. I really love the distant skyline, the sense of elevation and roller coaster-type feel to the racing, the little gas stations, pedestrians, and other accents along the roads are all real cool as well. And luckily the controls, drift and car handling are very functional. Surprisingly so. I figured I’d play this just to look at it and enjoy the soundtrack, but it turned out to be a pretty fun racer, albeit somewhat still extra-punishing for the slightest miscues, in the way old games were.
I’d say the funniest and most “old game” thing about this game is that there are two accelerate buttons, one if you want to accelerate with manual controls and the other if you want to accelerate with auto controls. And if you want to handbrake instead of regular brake, you have to hit the brake button + accelerate button, instead of mapping the handbrake to a different button altogether, despite the Saturn controller having plenty of buttons for all this.
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19/30 【Play F to pay respects】get in the Saturn, Shinji !
Not giving up on the « two posts a day » pace yet, here’s a double entry on the great game that dared release in two parts, when this kind of move was still largely uncommon.
Super Robot Taisen F, or Super Robot Wars F, is arguably the best Saturn game of 1997, one of the console’s best games, one of the best tactical games ever released and one of the best robot games in video game history. It was one of the few commercial successes of the Saturn post-1996, one of the console’s most popular titles in Japanese popularity polls, one of the few Saturn games that many Japanese people (and developers in particular) still talk about fondly today, and one of the Saturn games that has aged best technically and aesthetically, thanks to its modest but effective 2D, its very short loading times, its expressive sprites and its charming chiptune covers of great Japanimation classics.
Well, we’re all pretty lucky because this game almost never happened.
By 1996, Banpresto had made its choice. Its new flagship series, Super Robot Taisen, was to move from the Super Famicom to the PlayStation. As a reminder, the basic concept of Super Robot Taisen is to bring together all the super robot franchises in a gigantic tactical crossover, with an original scenario that still made constant references in its battle maps and dialogues to the memorable scenes from each series, and allowed fans to discover fun interactions between characters and robots from different series.
Have you ever dreamt - like Anno Hideaki himself - of seeing (well, reading) the famous Gundam scene with Bright Noah slapping Amuro’s face, except with Evangelion’s Shinji instead of Amuro? In Super Robot Taisen F, it happens!
Following Dai-4-Ji Super Robot Taisen (1995), which more or less concluded the entire saga of Super Famicom episodes, Banpresto had decided to move away from SD sprites in battles on the new generation of consoles. The public was ready for a new saga featuring life-size robots, or so Banpresto believed. This game was to be Shin Super Robot Taisen.
To speed up the console transition, Banpresto first released a quick port of the latest game, Dai-4-Ji Super Robot Taisen S (1996), correcting a few bugs and adding voices to certain attacks. Then, Shin Super Robot Taisen was released for Christmas 1996. And it kinda flopped, partly because it lacked the new monster hit of the moment, Shinseiki Evangelion.
In 1996, Bandai had made its choice. Faced with plummeting toy sales and the monumental failure of the Pippin, the toy manufacturer was going to merge with Sega, a company that seemed to have a better grasp of the US market, a better grasp of video games (these rascals had even beaten Nintendo and Sony in Japan in 1995!), and an impressive network of game centers.
Even crazier: while Bandai had suffered a resounding flop with the figurines for this new, weird Evangelion series, which failed to attract the usual fans of garage kits, Sega had conversely hit the ball out of the park with the first Shinseiki Evangelion game on Saturn, which sold out immediately (precisely because retailers, scared by Bandai’s failure, didn’t believe in ordering the game).
Sega had already invested in a cartoon production committee several times before, but Evangelion was their most resounding coup. It was the right IP, exploding at the right time (just after Virtua Fighter 2’s Christmas), coming to the Saturn with the right product: an interactive episode of the anime taking advantage of the console’s multimedia capabilities to tell an original and exclusive story from the hottest series on television. It was kinda the Bandersnatch of its time.
Needless to say, Sega was indeed quite the catch for a merger… Until the Tamagotchi saved Bandai and they realized they could do without the losers who’d just been stomped on by Sony and FF7 at the turn of the new year. Oh well.
Still, there was a brief moment when it was Sega who had the rights to the most popular robot series of the day, rather than Bandai or even its usual rivals, Takara and Tomy. If you’d like to know more about the seven (!) Saturn games directly related to the Evangelion phenomenon, I refer you to this good retrospective of the various video game adaptations of Evangelion.
It was against this backdrop that Bandai subsidiary Banpresto knocked on Sega’s door to suggest a new port of Dai-4-Ji Super Robot Taisen, but with Shinji and his girlfriends as special guests.
And in the face of the shared enthusiasm of Sega, too happy to get their own SRT, Terada Takanobu (the mastermind behind the SRT series), too happy to have Eva in his game, and even that dork Anno Hideaki, such a fan of SRT that he twisted Gainax’s arm to accept the deal, this third version of SRT4 ended up being a game way bigger and different from SRT4. It was pretty much a remake, erasing and canonically replacing the events of SRT4 as it became Super Robot Taisen F. (F for Final, supposedly.)
Since Gainax was in on the deal, Banpresto took the opportunity to add Gunbuster to the robot roster, as well as the new Gundam series of the moment, Gundam Wing. But the game’s star series is, of course, Evangelion. Even the purple F in the logo reminds of the pseudo-organic design of the EVA Unit-01.
One of the charm points of Super Robot Taisen is the versatility of its scenario and variety of battle maps, depending on whether you choose to go the Real Robot route (the nimble little mechs of the 80s and 90s, like Gundam) or the Super Robot route (the big boyz dating back from the 70s style of mechs, like GoLion a.k.a. Voltron, which I am sorry to say is only playable in Super Robot Taisen W for the DS).
The Evangelion content is therefore essentially accessible on the Real Robot side, with the Gundam goonies acting as foils. In this first disc, the integration of Evangelion seems a little superficial, and Eva’s three robots are (in my opinion) more of a nuisance to play than anything else; especially as, true to the series, they can become berserk and ruin your game. Worse still, the Angels from Eva are among the game’s most annoying enemies.
But Super Robot Taisen F was so ambitious that Banpresto ended up splitting the game and its hundred or so battle maps into two parts. ln that second part, we would discover that the game had even more branching paths, including a nifty payoff for Eva fans “staying truthful to the lore”, via a hidden path and (bad?) ending if you managed to have Shinji go berserk at least five times before scenario map 61. Omedetō!
Here is a complete Speedrun-style playthrough of Super Robot Taisen F:
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20/30 【Play F-Final to pay respects】in space, no one can hear you scream “IDEON GUN!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Released in September 1997, Super Robot Taisen F had been a huge critical and commercial success for Banpresto, to the point of burying the plans for the other new series, Shin Super Robot Taisen, and securing that the SD look of the robots used in the series’ battle scenes would remain right up to the current PS4 / Steam / Switch generation of games (at the very least). Super Robot Taisen F would later see an equally popular PlayStation port, before the next series, Super Robot Taisen Alpha, kinda merged Super Robot Taisen F with the aborted ideas of Shin Super Robot Taisen.
On a more personal note, Super Robot Taisen F was also my first direct contact with the series. The French games magazine Joypad, which had a considerable impact on making import games and obscure consoles like the PC Engine more familiar to French players, had extolled SRT’s virtues many times since at least Dai-3-Ji on Super Famicom, but their lead import RPG reviewer (and robot anime superfan) Greg had been downright dithyrambic about SRT F-Final, in a short review published belatedly in the January 1998 issue.
Having then just finished Shining Force III Scenario 1, I was up for another tactical game, and this review convinced me to take the plunge. I was already familiar with Evangelion, a few Gundam series and a handful of other robot series released on VHS or discussed in the same magazine, but the reason I jumped into SRT F is because it was sold to me as a great SRPG game on its on rights. I saw it as a peer of Langrisser, Front Mission and Tactics Ogre, regardless of its animated licenses. Unlike most Japanese players, it was my newfounded dedication to Super Robot Taisen that made me discover and fall in love with a whole bunch of robot anime series.
So, in my personal case, Super Robot Taisen F isn’t “the Super Robot Taisen game with Evangelion”; it’s the Super Robot Taisen game with that other newcomer, just below, there.
It’s the Super Robot Taisen game with IDEON!!!
Oooh, Ideon… The anime Space Runaway Ideon, broadcast on Japanese television between 1980 and 1981, was Tomino’s first post-Gundam series.
The series draws heavily on Gundam for its themes, its pessimistic vision of mankind, its pacifist message and, to match all the above, an eloquent propensity to kill any character at any time.
However, Ideon has the knack of committing all these war crimes with an eponymous robot that is much bigger and beefier than the puny Gundam, no doubt to rekindle with the more traditional and safer Super Robot formula (remember that the first Gundam series wasn’t an immediate success, either in terms of ratings or toy sales).
As a result, the mecha Ideon in the original TV show is incredibly, absurdly, almost comically powerful. And since Super Robot Taisen is a meticulous series, its Ideon is just as powerful (so much so that it will reappear in very few episodes of the series, so systematically does it screw up the balancing of its games).
I’ll be honest: in the first half of the game, this balancing issue hadn’t jump out at me yet. Ideon was a bulky, goofy-looking robot which didn’t hold a candle to its younger, cooler looking peers.
But as explained above, Terada had been too ambitious with this remake to keep to his deadlines and conclude the story on a single CD-ROM. That’s why Banpresto split Super Robot Taisen F into two games and finally released the second part, Super Robot Taisen F-kanketsuhen, a.k.a. Super Robot Wars F-Final, in April 1998.
(Yes, the first F already meant Final… Let any Photoshop user or programmer who has never saved a file under the name FINAL_v5 cast the first stone.)
F-Final allowed you to resume the save interrupted at the end of the first F, thanks to the Saturn’s internal backup memory, or start F-Final from scratch with a new team and bonuses galore provided to beef up your fresh squad.
The game offers an impressive number of alternative routes and variations, including the secret Evangelion ending mentioned one post above, and allows you to unlock higher maximum stats for your squads. This endgame is where Ideon shines, as it single-handedly rakes the battle maps.
What makes Ideon so strong is that it has access to so-called Map attacks, which are relatively rare (at least in F-Final) because they allow you to attack several enemies at once, without retaliation, instead of choosing a specific enemy and engaging in the usual 1v1 battle scenes. To compensate, these grouped attacks are usually less powerful than proper duels, but Ideon’s attacks hit everyone on the entire map and are also the strongest attacks in the game! They one shot almost everyone. Here’s the notoriously stupid Ideon Gun, which is probably the strongest attack in the history of the Super Robot Taisen series.
To, huh, balance things out a little, at least theoretically, Banpresto relies on a gameplay gimmick called the Id Gauge. Just as EVA-Units have to manage their AT Field and could become Berserk, Ideon can reach a point of no return. As Ideon is attacked and takes hits, it fills up this Id Gauge represented by a symbol that appears progressively on a special icon in the character’s sheet, as you pass Id Gauge levels (level 3 = three strokes on the symbol etc.). Each time you go up a level, you unlock a new, more powerful attack, such as the Ideon Sword or the Ideon Gun, but if you reach level 7, Ideon destroys the Galaxy (and it’s Game Over).
The gauge rises in level faster when you have less HP, and falls again under certain conditions, such as defeating enemies or retreating next to a base; handling Ideon quickly becomes a question of juggling between the usefulness of unlocking its strongest attacks and the danger of screwing everything up with a thermonuclear gigafart.
The thing is, even with this theoretical balancing safeguard, Ideon kicks ass on the last dozen of maps, especially when you catch the map’s biorhythm and aggro foes at the right pace to unlock the best attacks without getting overwhelmed. And since Super Robot Taisen F is a fairly difficult game overall, Ideon becomes your and Humanity’s best friend. Well! I am sure that’s exactly the moral that Tomino wanted you to understand at the end of the Space Runaway Ideon story! If you discover the original anime series in 2024, as I did thanks to Super Robot Taisen F, you won’t be disappointed…
To wrap things up properly, here is also a complete Speedrun-style playthrough of Super Robot Taisen F-Final (going for the Evangelion ending, as its the fastest one you can unlock):
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These posts are great and deserve their own website. I also love hearing about anything Namco.
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21/30 Panzer Dragoon (the full digital animation)
Panzer Dragoon is undeniably one of the Saturn’s iconic franchises. The first episode, released in March 1995 in Japan, was the console’s first original killer app, the first Saturn game to show something original (rather than an arcade port like Virtua Fighter or PC port like Myst) and completely unimaginable on previous generations.
Started in early 1994 by defectors from the arcade division and a few fresh faces from Sega CS1, Panzer Dragoon was among the twelve games shown and announced at the Tokyo Omocha Show in June 1994, during the console’s first official presentation.
(I’ll skip right to the part in question, but I recommend you watch the whole video if you have time this weekend, it’s a great time capsule of 1994 Japan.)
Panzer Dragoon ended up being the sixteenth game in the release history of the Saturn in Japan, and that version made such an impression that Sega of America made Panzer Dragoon the console’s third pillar of the console’s infamous “shotgun release” in the USA in May 1995, treated on the same level as Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA.
Digital Foundry has already released a pretty good video on the technical smackdown this game was at the time. Just to complement the video, I will add that its sequel Panzer Dragoon Zwei, released a year later in March 1996, fulfilled the first game’s promise with a slightly more robust gaming experience, which has aged better as a result.
But that’s not why you’re here today; you’ve seen what I opened the post with. Following the game’s success, and no doubt motivated by their recent savvy bets in the world of animation (Blue Seed → RayEarth → Evangelion), Sega commissioned Production I.G., our pals from Ghost in the Shell a few posts back, to make a 25-minute Original Video Animation for Panzer Dragoon.
I’ll spoil the bad news immediately: there is no Video CD or Photo CD of this OVA. It was only released on VHS and Laser Disc, in October 1996. Boo!
The OVA is by the numbers; a safe but boring adaptation, solidly produced by a team of veterans who had worked on the Blue Seed series, the Patlabor 2 film and, of course, the Ghost in the Shell movie, which had mobilized the whole Production I.G. team. The thing was released in the US two years later. It went relatively unnoticed.
Nevertheless, Panzer Dragoon’s OVA does justice to it’s originator’s status as a technological and artistic pioneer, as it does have a historic distinction: it’s the very first FULL DIGITAL ANIME in the history of Japanese animation, or if you prefer, the first commercial Japanese cartoon produced entirely with digital tools.
There’s an excellent retrospective, unfortunately all in Japanese, of the evolution of digital tools at Production I.G. available via this long article by Kifune Tokumitsu, one of the pioneers of digital japanimation.
In which I learned, for example, that it was the positive experience on Panzer Dragoon that enabled Production I.G. to produce the famous intro to the PlayStation game Ghost in the Shell. Rats, Sega’s got the short end of the stick yet again…
Anyway, I’ve set the scene, but you’d probably like to see the OVA in question. A few years ago, in the midst of the COVID19 stay-at-home fun times, a tiny circle of film and animation fans named Vulgar Daikaiju remastered the VHS in 1080p and dumped it on the Internet Archive; here’s a copy on Youtube.
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