Because it is a pre-Final Fantasy SquareSoft title, I had a feeling that this next game I played, Suishou no Dragon (or Crystal Dragon in the English fan translation) would be rough. Turns out I was right. It was developed by Square and published under their Disk Original Group (DOG) imprint for the Famicom Disk System on December 15, 1986. It was never released in English, of course, since there was never a non-Japanese equivalent of the Famicom Disk System at all, but I was able to play it in English courtesy of Mute’s translation patch. It is a science fiction-themed visual novel; visual novels being the genre that Square got its start with, with The Death Trap as their first game in late 1984.
The story of the game is very simple for a visual novel and I’m assuming there has to be some more context given in the manual (which I wasn’t able to find any scans of) since the game starts you off in the middle of the action and never really fully tells you what’s going on. The notes that came with the fan translation establish that you are searching for your two friends, whose interstellar shuttle has mysteriously disappeared. While searching for them, you are ambushed by a space dragon (which is where the game picks up) and rescued by a mysterious woman named Jean. You spend the game traveling between a few different planets searching for your friends. It’s an extremely short and bare-bones story, almost feeling like they established the framework for a story and never really filled it out with anything substantial. You can see everything the game has to offer in terms of its script inside of an hour. It’s honestly pretty bad.
More than any of the other games I’ve played so far, this one makes use of a point-and-click interface. All of the commands (look, talk, use, etc.) are executed based on the position of your cursor on the screen. The commands themselves are toggled by holding the B button and using the D-pad. It’s a bit clunky but not nearly as unintuitive as the controls for the move command. When you select move you can toggle between different destinations represented as arrows on the screen. You’re actually meant to press B to cycle through these, but when I first started the game and was trying to figure the controls out, I thought that maybe you need to hold B and use the D-pad (since the D-pad by itself does nothing). And this does actually visually cycle between the different destinations but does not actually select them, leading to a confusing moment where I thought both exits from one of the early areas led to the same place.
As I stated above, the game is very short and it seems like the strategy Square used to pad out the length is a couple of maze sections (one when navigating the depths of space and one when navigating Alias’s desert moon). But they aren’t real mazes like the ones in Portopia or Princess Tomato. It’s more like a series of screens that look exactly the same that give you three directions to go in. Since you can’t really tell where you are or where you’re supposed to be going, you just kind of have to bumble around until you find your destination. The closest thing it really has to tough puzzles is a sequence where if you do anything but use your gun on a character, they immediately kill you. But you can continue again from right outside the room where that takes place so it’s no big deal anyway.
The character designs of the game were actually done by none other than Sunrise (known for Gundam, Cowboy Bebop, etc.) and they look fine for the most part. The character portraits are the only thing in the game that look halfway decent. All of the background art, which is what you’re looking at for most of the game, looks very crude. The only character graphics which I don’t like at all are Jean’s, which have an atrocious white and bright teal color palette. The game has only minimal sound effects and only one song that plays during the title screen. The sole piece of music in the game is actually pretty good though, one of Nobuo Uematsu’s earliest music credits.
So, obviously I don’t care for this game very much. But it’s just because there’s nothing to it. It offers nothing substantial in terms of story, characters, gameplay, graphics, sound, or anything else. Hell, I barely have anything to say about it at all. But it’s short and it’s one of Square’s earliest games, so maybe it’s interesting as an oddity? I dunno, but next time I’ll be playing something with much more meat to it, mostly because it’s actually a compilation including six different games - Jake Hunter Detective Story: Memories of the Past. Until then, take it easy~
