Doing the PSX/PC98 version of
The Legend of Heroes IV: A Tear of Vermilion just as a small curio, doing sidequests in Phildin. It feels like a prototypical Trails in the Sky with its sidequests and guild, but also a much more basic version of the previous three Legend of Heroes games with a much simplified story and field map that simply overly reuses chunks to make it up (the path to Ourt is like a path that uses five original chunks stretched out to last like 12) which, I guess saves space, but makes everything very easy to get lost in, the effect is way too similar to the Lost Woods and Lost Hills of Zelda 1. Thankfully the PSX version makes the paths between cities a single flowing map, which lessens the disorienting effect.
In the PC98 version, the flow also takes a hit as Disk 6 includes the battles and Disk 2 includes the towns, so you're always changing floppies. The game forgoes traditional levels in favor of proficiency levels a la SaGa which means quite a bit of grinding, the fact Mednafen has a fast forward button while Neko Project 21W does not is why I went with the PSX version rather than going with the CD version and installing to a hard drive on PC98. np2fmgen does seem to have fast forward but it also seems to be older, so.
However, battles are much slower due to it abandoning real time battles for a more turn based tactics style of gameplay, another similarity to TitS. Maps are also poorly designed, filled with so many rocks and trees and pits that it's hard to move around in, tiles being much smaller (roughly 32x16? not sure of the ratio) doesn't help either, being hard to position yourself. Pisca is also a problem as you gain like. One (1) per defeated enemy if you finish a battle and don't run away (which they helpfully added a manner to escape to the next map block. it's very slow) which is. Oof. Your main source of Rose is gonna be sidequests, can't tell if this is an actual problem yet or just a weird design choice that doesn't affect the gameplay as much like SaGa, recruiting party members does seem to require Rose though, at the very least, Muse and Martie do.
Tadashi Hayakawa's (who upon reading his japanese wikipedia page, did yugioh duel monsters and 5d's??? lol) story also takes a hit, I've only managed to make it up to the part where Avin saves Dinerken from Rutice and Buster before dying without saving, but there is much less dialogue and story here. It also feels less organic, for example instead of Shannon being met through going through a dungeon and saving her from Octum's Apostles (who by the way are literally called heretics by the heroes in the PC98 version, that is on the nose as fuck), you just find her laid on the ground being attacked by monsters halfway to Tibri. Characters also feel more plain due to the openness of the story, Mile has very little dialogue and just happens to be a pupil of Lemuras? This is never really given much detail, he's mostly just there. The prologue is also much shorter. Due to the way the game is stored in each floppy, I'm assuming they simply got too ambitious and ran out of space like the first Star Ocean. This does make Hisayoshi Takeiri and Satoko Ono's Windows writing's reliance on White Witch callbacks feel lazier, but I still prefer their rendition over this, despite my feelings on making the main enemies followers of a "god of darkness" instead of going for a yin-yang sort of approach to light and darkness, where neither one is inherently evil or good, but that's just my JRPG veteran bias.
Music is also much worse, with FM instrumentation feeling much emptier than previous Falcom games, especially White Witch, which is absurd because, according to the Falcom Composer Breakdown spreadsheet (do read
the history section for tea on how scummy Falcom's upper management is, especially Masayuki Kato. kato commit die binch),
the composer list seems to be roughly the same with the addition of Satoshi Arai (not many confirmations on who made what though), a bizarre anomaly considering how great White Witch's soundtrack is, even just before that there was Revival Xanadu, Brandish III... What happened here? SC-55 MIDI is much better, and is what Sound Team jdk wanted to focus most on, but the FM soundtrack. Just what happened to it?
Saving is also a problem, I honestly didn't find any way to save in the PC98 version other than tents? Reading JP Wikipedia, it seems inns also allow saving and there's a quicksave placed when you exit the game that gets deleted upon loading, which is so backwards. The PSX version allows saving at any time, which is much better. The PSX version has much uglier graphics, taking the pixel art of the PC98 version and smoothening out into weird vaseline, Windows 9x game versions of it, which I don't mind for the tileset, but the character graphics, it feels awkward. I much prefer the grainier, pixelly look, despite that they'd probably be blended in with CRT monitors.
Also, load times are terrible, lasting like roughly 5 seconds to load battles and cities. Thankfully the game plays as best as it can, which is more than I can say for other long loading games like Sonic 06 and MMX7.
The PC98 game was released in 1996 which is absurd considering Windows 95 was already out by then and I'm pretty sure the PC98 was winding down with nothing but doujin releases from here on, I believe? Need to research. Either way, this is entirely due to Kato literally telling Yoshio Kiya that making games for Windows would doom Falcom which is absurd and proof that Kato was still living in the 80s. Kiya would leave shortly after or during Legend of Xanadu 1, roughly 1994, heading to Nihon Application, currently Creansmaerd, to make the Gekirin/Die Gekirin quadrilogy and Last Imperial Prince (Gekirin's Windows versions are available on Internet Archive, no links, Die Gekirin is also on iOS I think?, and Last Imperial Prince is available on PC-FX, not sure of what emulator is best for it but I heard it's pretty decent I think?).
I feel like a mix of console and PC releases instead of focusing exclusively on PC with the occasional 3rd party port to console would help secure Falcom's livelihood in the pre-PSP era, sadly Kato is a fucking hack who doesn't know how to run a company properly, focusing on paranoia to downplay the contributions of each dev to each production and disallowing them from speaking of their work publicly, making them seem like a homogeneous corporation where no one stands out and preventing them from furthering their career.
The PSX version was released in 1998, which is adequate. While FF7 would have been released at the time, it's not exactly that bad a port outside of the load times and lo-fi presentation, I'd give it a 2/5 at worst. It's very much a budget title, but the PSX ports seem to have had a moderate reception going by the amount of people who look back on PSX White Witch fondly. LoH I & II had much worse reception due to being just straight ports of the PC98 versions with Redbook audio which is just jarring as fuck.
As for
the PSP version I'm at Guia (I've been to a town with the same name IRL, fun fact), just met Rael and Elenoa (pretty sure I've seen an old shitposter in old Sonic forums with the name rael (a bunch of numbers) and also a crossdressing (drag queen?) rabbit furry from decades back with the name raelbunny or something, nsfw warning). As for the
PC version, I'm still only at Borun, heading to Torkas Cave.
The segment with Archem and the Meefas was really cute and spoke to me a bit, as an animal and insect lover (I feel bad crushing roaches and accidentally stepping on snails and ants haha!), a very relevant commentary considering the amount of waste people do to nature even these days, from Bolsonaro ravaging the Amazon and driving natives out of their homes for agriculture (iirc) and cryptocurrencies contributing to pollution (and GPU shortages!) all to try and line the pockets of idiots who want to seem hip and with it, like idiot Twitter artists and celebrities hopping on NFTs or just silver spoon privileged Silicon Valley dudebros. Truly we live in a hellscape of which there is no reprieve.