Gall Force: Eternal Story (Famicom Disk System) Review

Gall Force: Eternal Story (Famicom Disk System) Review

Date Released: 19 November 1986

Date Played: 31 May 2022

Gall Force: Eternal Story is actually the first commercial release by HAL Laboratory, who are better known for for the Kirby series. It's a vertical shmup based on the anime of the same name.  While very primitive and unbalanced, it has some unique ideas that set it apart from other games in the genre as well as some ideas lifted from other games that aren't quite as successful.  If you are a shmup fan and have a Famicom Disk System that you can actually get to work, chances are, this one is on your radar.

Gameplay:

The game is a basic vertical shmup.  At the beginning, you have only a single fire button and you'll soon become very aware of the game's outrageous difficulty.  Enemies fly in at lightning speed all with the intention of crashing directly into you.  Not only that, there are tons of enemies that fly in from behind you and cause you tons of damage that seems unavoidable.  There are powerups hidden around the stages in various blocks of both the visible and invisible varieties.  This is an idea lifted directly from Square's abysmal King's Knight and the game would have been much better without it. If you want to know the general distain that old school gamers have for this idea, read any King's Knight review (preferably mine) to see the myriad of ways that they are a bad design choice.  In essence, these blocks get in your way and always seem to prevent you from being able to shoot the swarms of enemies flying towards you. Imagine being at bat in a baseball game. The pitcher launches the ball towards home plate, but before you can hit it, you have to knock down a giant sandcastle that's right in your way. Think you have time to hit the sand castle, draw back, and then hit the ball?  You don't.  And you don't have time to blast through all of the obstacles in this game before you get smashed in the face by the bad guys.  It's no issue for them. They can fly and shoot right over all of the obstacles with no trouble at all. If you're lucky enough to find a powerup hidden inside, you'll be treated with a more powerful shot, speed up, shield, or even a 1UP.  These are highly needed and you'll spend most of your time frantically searching for them instead of focusing your attention on actually killing the bad guys.

You start off on Terra which is green and lush.  Once you make it to the end of the stage, you're greeted with the option of choosing the next stage from several choices. It's kind of like Mega Man, where you can pick the order of the stages.  Except in this game, all of the stages feel and look the same and most of the levels end up being pointless. In each of these different space levels, you'll blast your way through tons of enemies, space stations, turrets, and plenty more boxes before facing off against a boss.  These bosses are all very similar and are much easier than the stages themselves.  They mostly have the same sort of attack patterns and even with your basic shot, you should be able to dispatch them relatively easily.  Sadly, they take about 100 shots to kill... so they can take a lot longer than you'd expect.  Also, if you're unlucky enough to die on one of the bosses, it doesn't just kick you back to the beginning of the stage, it kicks you back two whole levels.  How annoying.

Once you take out one of the bosses, you will rescue one of the other characters from the all female cast of the movie. These extra crew members power up your ship.  This will then kick you back to Terra to play through another stage before selecting which crew member to save next. Each one of these characters has her portrait displayed at the bottom of the screen.  You can press select to highlight the portrait and the press the B button to activate her ability.  One becomes a mobile turret at the bottom of the screen, one gives a side shot (actually useful), one gives a spread shot (highly useful), one gives a backwards shot, and another gives an all around shot.  After you save the final crew member, you'll get to make your assault on the final boss of the game... assuming you're good enough at this game to actually get that far.  

The game is brutally difficult and extremely relentless. It feels like everything in the game homes in directly on you and you'll constantly be taking damage and praying for a reprieve.  Luckily, the game doesn't have 1 hit kills and instead opts to have parts of your ship get destroyed piece by piece (three total) and after you get down to just the fuselage, that'll put you into 1 hit death territory. On top of that, you also get extends at 30k, 100k, and then every 200k (I think).  So you'll be racking up quite a few extra lives as you play.  Obviously, these were added in to ameliorate the insane amounts of unavoidable damage that you'll be taking.  On top of that, your ship heals between every level... another blessing. It's a symptom of bad game design. They didn't know exactly how to design interesting and well thought out stages, so they just throw a bunch of junk at you that you have to tank your way through, then they throw some extra lives and healing at you to smooth out everything.

One other interesting mechanic of the game is that you can fire your basic shot just as quickly as you can tap the button.  This is a rarity from the time as games loved to limit how many bullets could be on the screen at any given point.  The downside to this is that the game has no turbo option (stupid hardwired famicom controllers) so you're going to be hammering the ever loving daylights out of the fire button.  After an hour, my thumb was so sore that I actually had to put an adhesive bandage on it for padding.  If you could hook up an NES advantage to the Famicom, it would greatly improve the gaming experience of this game. Too bad that isn't an option here.

Presentation: 

The game looks fine for a somewhat early Famicom Disk System game.  The sprites have some good detail and there's a much welcome lack of flicker and slowdown, something you'd expect from a game from this period with so many sprites on screen.  Terra is nice and colorful and reminds me a bit of Xevious in terms of its art design.  However, the space levels where you rescue the girls all take place over a boring starfield and look the same.  After a while, the repetitive nature of the levels sets in.  You fight on Terra, go to space, back to Terra, back to space, etc.. Repeat this 14 times... then you get to go to the ending of the game.  It's overly long and could have been cut down significantly.  You can tell they were trying to get as many characters from the anime into the video game as possible. 

The music is fairly catchy but also repetitive.  I'm not sure if it's the theme song from the movie or not, but it's only about a 30 second loop before repeating.  After a while, you'll zone it out and totally forget it's there. 

Conclusion:

Gall Force is kind of fun to play.  It's primitive, of course, but that doesn't make it a bad game.  The all female cast is a nice touch, but I wish each new crew member provided better powerups.  Only a couple are useful, and it makes your ship feel like it reaches its maximum potential in the first 3rd of the game.  The levels and music get repetitive... as does constantly mashing the fire button, but these are all relics of the time period.  Sadly, the unbalanced difficulty and intentionally frustrating enemy placement and bullet patterns sort of kill the experience.  Instead of learning the best way to kill everything, the game is more focused on trying to get lucky and take the least amount of damage possible to make it to the end of the level or until you earn (or find) another 1UP or get healed.  Also, spending all of your time destroying blocks while looking for powerups instead of blasting enemies. At 15 levels (and around 45 minutes) it's overly long for a shmup.  On top of that, there are no continues, so seeing it out to the end is only for the most hardcore. It's not called, "Nintendo Hard" for nothing.

If you're a fan of old school shmups or early games in general, give this one a try.  It's pretty unique and will keep you occupied for a while. However, it's not a game you're going to come back to very often.

Final Status: Played

Final Score: 6/10 (a little good)

Quarth (Famicom) Review

Quarth (Famicom) Review

Date Released: 13 April 1990

Date Played: 17 January 2022

Introduction:

Quarth is a quirky game developed by Konami.  It's a mixture of a 2D puzzle game like Tetris combined with a vertical scrolling shmup (or so Wikipedia would have you believe).  It was originally released in arcades back in 1989 and was known as Block Hole outside of Japan.  This version released for the Famicom is a good port and is a ton of fun to play. It's very tiring to play though and your fingers will be begging for mercy, so break out your NES Advantage Joystick and get your hands all limbered up, because you're going to need every bit of dexterity that you can muster.

Gameplay:

You play as one of two ships that are completely identical other their appearance.  One is a standard space ship that appears to be decked out for battle and is basically as generic as possible.  The other one is a cute lunar lander capsule that's being carried by cherubs and totally awesome and unique.  I love it and have no idea why anyone would ever choose the boring old space ship. On this same screen you can select which of the 10 levels you would like to start from (like Tetris).  Each of these have increased difficulty and if you start from the beginning, get ready for the long haul because it will take a while and the tendons in your hands will be screaming. Still, it's nice to be able to pick up where you left off without having to spend a bunch of time playing through the same easier stages over and over again.

Gameplay is unique and I don't know of any games quite like this.  It does share some similarities with other games in terms of concepts and execution, but it's really its own thing and I'm surprised it isn't more well known.  Your ship sits at the bottom of the screen and can move left or right as the screen slowly scrolls upwards.  Instead of enemies to shoot, you will encounter various quadrilateral (squares and rectangles for those of us who haven't had geometry in a couple of decades) shapes with missing pieces.  Your ship shoots blocks instead of bullets and your goal is to fill in the missing pieces of the rectangles.  When a rectangle is made whole, it will vanish and award you with points. This is obviously very similar to Tetris as you have to train yourself to recognize patterns and prioritize which blocks to clear first. The trick is to find groups of rectangles placed together and chain them into one huge block for a bonus score and to clear the screen faster. One technique that you'll need to employ if you want to succeed is to realize that the screen stops scrolling as the blocks are cleared.  So, if you clear a large block for a big score bonus, you'll have several seconds of the screen scrolling being frozen.  This is your opportunity to try to clear the remaining blocks on the screen.  Keeping these clears chained together is essential to have time to deal with everything and if you're not able to clear the blocks fast enough, and they reach the line right above your ship, you crash and lose a life.  Once you're out of lives, it's game over.  There are several powerups to assist you. They have abilities that range from stopping the scrolling, giving score multipliers, or even destroying all blocks on screen. It's a fantastic system and is a perfect example of easy to learn and difficult to master.  You'll know everything you need to after only a couple of minute and is a perfect example of pick up and play arcade fun.

As mentioned above, there are 10 levels broken into 10 sections each and clearing each one will advance you to the next.  Difficulty ramps up very quickly and by stage 3, things will start to get pretty tense and hectic for the average gamer.  When using a joystick, you'll find yourself quickly tapping the fire button in rhythmic patterns as you tap the joystick to move quickly around the screen.  The way you control the joystick feels a lot like the Magical Drop series of games and if you were to watch someone's hands without knowing what game they're playing, you would have a tough time differentiating between the two.  I'm not sure how anyone can make much progress on this game using a standard controller because you'd have blisters on your fingers in no time.  You have to input a ton of commands at lightning speed even on some of the lower levels and it's very impressive to watch someone truly skilled have a go at this game.  Typing this review right now, my wrists are still tight and sore from my previous play session.

There are some 2-player cooperative and competitive options if you can get a friend to play with you.  They're a lot of fun and can get pretty intense during a heated play session.

Presentation:

Quarth looks pretty decent for a puzzle game from the 8-bit era.  You don't want things to look too busy because you need to read the patterns on the screen at lightning speed, but everything is colorful and vibrant. The backgrounds, borders, and blocks all have pallet swaps between stages and while overall aesthetics are sparse it really helps in the graphics department.   The music that accompanies the game is decent enough and has that trademark Konami feel, but it certainly isn't one of their best and even after hours of playing this game with the same couple of tracks repeated over and over, I can't even recall what they sound like or if there's a catchy melody. It's almost as if it went in one ear and right out the other.  Not a good sign for a game with such addictive gameplay. Still, as basic as the presentation is, it doesn't do anything to hinder the amount of fun you'll be having.

Conclusion:

This is a great little game that I'm surprised not more people know about.  It never left Japan on the Famicom and the only Western release (outside of the arcade) that I know of is on the original Game Boy.  I'm sure plenty people played it there as Konami was probably trying to cash in on the puzzle game craze that was brought on by Tetris being the pack-in game for the Game Boy, but I've never heard anyone mention it. It's a shame that it wasn't brought to the NES because I think it would have been a fairly popular game.  It's a ton of fun even if the music is a little lackluster and playing for more than a few minutes is super hard on your hands .  Other than that, my only complaint about the game is that I don't really see the shmup comparison.  If the screen just fell downwards like in Tetris rather than your ship flying upwards, no one would ever remotely consider comparing it to a shmup. Still, I see what Konami was aiming for and I commend them on an original concept even if it was a little harebrained.

If you're a fan of puzzle games or tense and twitch based arcade gaming, you have to give Quarth a try.  It's an underrated gem for sure.

Final Status: Played (I could clear up to stage 6)

Final Score: 8/10 (Pretty Great)