Eldorado Gate Vol. 7, the final disc in Capcom's ambitious Dreamcast RPG saga, opens not with the usual fourth wall breaking intro from party leader/player host Bantross but a quick recap of the previous disc's finalé, Razin's tablet shattered into four pieces and scattered who knows where. With just two scenarios to go I was … Continue reading All good things…
There are just two scenarios contained within Eldorado Gate Vol.6's GD-ROM, and the first is short even by the series' already pleasantly zippy standards. The chapter title "Operation: Wipe out the Gabri tribe" wastes no time in establishing the threat to Eldorado Gates' cute and colourful mascot-type monster by those pesky holy knights first introduced a … Continue reading The beginning of the end
Eldorado Gate Vol. 5 opens with a scenario titled "Monster Hunter Sophie", accidentally naming Capcom's wyvern-bopping series over two years before its Japanese PlayStation 2 debut. Unlike the characters in that eventual multi-million selling showstopper, Sophie's monster hunting manifests as a capturing/summoning system that will no doubt bring Game Freak's Pokémon series to mind, but in practise … Continue reading The calm before the storm?
After Volume 3's unexpected but not unwelcome pair of stories Eldorado Gate's back with another three scenario disc, with three new characters for our ever-expanding team to go with it - Mimi, Mamma, and Gigi. Again the manual implores newcomers to treat the stories contained within as standalone adventures (and read the updated on-disc encyclopaedia when they've … Continue reading That awkward middle bit
Bantross promised us something different for this disc, and as soon as I picked up Eldorado Gate Vol.3's case it was obvious we really were going to get it. The cover shows Kanan front and centre - the girl whose life (as well as her sight, hearing, and voice) was ruined by another's desire to obtain the … Continue reading Old friends, new friends
Eldorado Gate's second volume is so keen on getting started Bantross, our suspiciously inscrutable combination of host, party leader, and know-it-all rolled into one, can't even make it through his introductory speech without getting interrupted; the game content to cut him short and throw a single line's worth of description for each of the first disc's three … Continue reading Free from filler, fetch quests, and flabby storytelling
Eldorado Gate, Capcom's Dreamcast exclusive RPG series, is in many ways a creation that should have never got off the drawing board. This was a brand new RPG saga with no famous name to fall back on, released on what was definitely the "wrong" format for the genre at the time (Final Fantasy IX, Vagrant Story, … Continue reading The beginning of an epic adventure
There's something about Langrisser Millennium, Masaya's 1999 entry in the long running SRPG series, that we need to make very clear very quickly: It's not like its older and infinitely better known tactical forebears by design, even going so far as to have the back of the box spell out this game's desire to be a new … Continue reading A fresh start in a new era… well, maybe
I'll be honest with you: I wasn't particularly looking forward to going through this one. Beyond having been Sakura'd as well as War'd up to my eyeballs by this point in my research the game seems to be a title that for English-speaking Dreamcast fans exists as a name and not much else on a … Continue reading Sakura Wars Corner: Ogami Ichirou Funtouki
A Dreamcast "Dramatic Community" release with "Online" in its title sounds about as useful in 2022 as a themed email program that will only show its personalised messages to recipients viewing them through their own copy of the same disc, but Sakura Wars Online (the version shown here is the "Teito Edition", and is fully … Continue reading Sakura Wars Corner: Sakura Wars Online
Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster 