2/24/2023 0 Comments Phantasmic pc casePower-ups now simply cannot be grabbed when Yuko’s life bar doesn’t afford it, instead of just killing her off for trying. Enemies still have her bounce back and forth in a continued, hopeless pummeling, but their spawning behavior is much less insane, too. Yuko can now change directions during a jump, and the platforming is not quite as relentless as a result. The FM-7 port on the other hand was tweaked quite a bit. There’s also a hidden bonus round that contains all weapons and heals Yuko at the end. Most vital is a healthy pocket of charged bars before entering stage 3, because that only has flying enemies, which invariably means that Yuko will end it with much less health than she started with. Really the only way to get through most of the bosses is to find a spot where mostly ground-based enemies attack and to grind up a few dozen health bars before jumping into the boss’ screen-filling streams of bullets and try to defeat them in a war of attrition. That’s right Wolf Team managed to introduce grinding to an action game. Yuko’s only saving grace is her ability to charge up her health bar a hundred times by picking up capsules left behind by defeated enemies. If she actually doesn’t have as much health as the item costs, she is scolded with the message “Ill gotten goods never prosper!”, and suddenly the flying enemies start an insane bombardment of bullets that kill her within seconds. The more powerful the weapon, the more it damages Yuko first. But nothing comes for free in Vecanti – each upgrade consumes several bars of health when picked up. Most attackers come from above, and thanks to the choppy gameplay, fighting off flying enemies reliably is simply not possible.Įvery once in a while, Yuko happens upon powerups that improve her armor or upgrade her sword with different types of projectiles, which is an absolute necessity, as trying to hit enemies with the basic sword strike only ever ends in tears. They attack relentlessly, and there’s not a second to relax. Most players’ first impulse would be to clear a screen of enemies before attempting any risky jumps, but that’s no use here: The monsters keep respawning endlessly, no matter whether Yuko is running around or standing still. And since the stages are mostly copy & paste, when Yuko falls down a screen in a climbing segment, she usually keeps falling for quite a long stretch. So far that’s period-appropriate, but on top of that there is no recovery time after a hit, so usually Yuko gets flailed around helplessly multiple times, before she can land on her feet again, more often than not even further back then where she started out. And that’s before she gets hit by an enemy in mid-air and is pushed back in the opposite direction. The problem is, her extended jump is so long it’s almost impossible to guess beforehand where she’ll land exactly. Yuko has a weird double-tiered jump, where she gets another boost in mid-air when the button is held down (and this being a computer game, the button for jump of course is “up”), yet they’re Castlevania style “stiff” jumps, where the direction and trajectory is strictly fixed. Still the game wouldn’t be quite as insufferable if the controls weren’t as inept as they are. The same portions are literally copied and pasted next to each other dozens of times, so without the helpful arrow Yuko would be hopelessly lost. But even just the direct path to the boss is ridiculously long, and there’s nothing interesting in between. There’s always an arrow on screen to point the player in the right direction, but following it too closely means missing out on most of the power-ups. Basically, it’s a side-scrolling action game like Ghosts’n Goblins or Castlevania, but much like many of the infamous Euro platformers later, it features vast multiscrolling mazes in place of the short, tightly designed stages of its Japanese contemporaries. The original Mugen Senshi Valis, released for a number of Japanese home computers, was created by the famed Wolf Team, and just like their other early game, Final Zone, it’s pretty bad. Valis itself was almost certainly inspired by the 1985 anime OVA Reda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko, which has an almost identical setup, right down to the heroine in the bikini armor.
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