Farland Story (1) and the history of TGL (PC-98 Paradise) compared to the SNES, PC-FX, PS1 versions!
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- Опубліковано 25 лип 2024
- In this episode of PC-98 Paradise I talk all about the very first game in TGL's "Farland" series: "Farland Story" from 1993. I also talk all about one of my old favorite Japanese PC game developers TGL.
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00:00 Intro: Who is TGL?
02:13 Packaging
02:47 Installation
04:24 Opening
05:04 The game!
10:48 The Plot
12:37 Music & Soundtrack
15:08 SPOILERS!
16:45 some downsides
18:11 Taiwan MS-DOS version
18:34 Super Famicom version
19:02 PC-FX version
20:03 PlayStation version
20:27 Windows version
21:06 What happened to TGL? - Ігри
Your work is so good to the point that I've never had a PC-98, never played any of these games, have no nostalgia whatsoever, but I still watch and enjoy all your videos. Keep up the good work!
Me too
Ditto
My thoughts exactly.
The love of the craft and history is infective.
This proves the bullshit excuse of nostalgia goggles is false. It,'s quality. Quality games and a quality youtube video.
I still haven't played a pc-98 game yet. but your channel always makes me crave to.
Same here. I just recently started to look into games from other systems from that era and this channel has by far been real good at enticing me to start up many games I had missed.
The art style of this game looks genuinely epic, its going on my list !
I would love to see you cover this entire series! As always, your vdeos are amazing! Thank you so much for making these!
I am really into the visual novel scene especially non-romance focused ones like Umineko so glad entergram released the ps4 version
I for one would absolutely watch a series of this if you ever decided to start commit to it
Oh I am committed, but it will definitely have to be slow process as I cover lots of other games/series in between. Thanks!
Hearing that a game this old had an autosave feature made my eyes bug out of my head.
I would be thrilled if you covered the other entries in this series! Also these graphics are wonderful!
I'm sure it's just a coincidence but just going by his portrait, the protagonist Arc looks a lot like the titular Arc from Arc the Lad, another SRPG series.
Farland Story was first!!! :)
@Basement Brothers Indeed he was, the combo of Armour, cape, sword and optionally headband was very common in the 80s and 90s and could be found pretty much anywhere you looked in Japanese RPGs of the time.
Yes I'm interested in seeing you cover any PC-98 content especially this series.
It's resemblance to Fire Emblem is kinda crazy.
Healers needing combat to level, max level of 20, promotion items that only work from lv10 onwards, both sides attack each other when they are capable, enemy and player phase music, getting approximately 1 new character each chapter...
It's certainly a welcome comparison though, and I'll be interested in seeing the differences as their styles diverge through their respective entries.
I previously played Rusty but now I'm playing Farland Story. This PC-98 Paradise playlist is indeed a paradise. Thank you! Just to reinforce, PC-98 games are extremely charming.
Pumping out 6 games in a series in two years is just, wow. At that point it's pretty much an episodic series.
it's low effort garbage that's why lol. even FE1 is more advanced that this.
Yes do the whole series. Love watching any RPGs from the PC 88,98 systems, as those are not easily played for English speaking folks.
What a charming little strategy game. I love the character designs. I love retro computer hardware, and I really appreciate your dedication to showing us insights on how these games might have been enjoyed in a period-appropriate manner.
Only three per year? That hustle!
It's crazy how the sprite works in a game from 30 years ago still hold up to these days; it even looks better than some of the new 2D games nowadays.
Your videos are utterly amazing. If you play each of the Farland games to the end and do a video on each one, I promise to watch every single one of those videos all the way to the end, like that video and leave a comment on each of those videos to boost them for the youtube algorithm.
Mr Jakes is my history teacher to a side of gaming I never even knew existed. Learning about all these classic PC-88 and PC-98 games is a treasure, like finding lost media.
Every time you upload is an absolute treat! Thank you for making these videos.
The only thing I knew about Farland Story before this video, is that it had a pretty decent animated opening scene. (Though, not quite the 15 minute craziness of Elm Knight!)
What are you ralking about? Of course we would absolutely LOVE to see you cover more games from this series! You channel is a treasure and, for me, each game you cover is like a little gem, an unknown part of history that I'm very eager to know more about. Thank you for doing all this work for us.
Definitely would love to see more videos for this series
This is so crazy to look back on... I actually played most all the Farland Story games in a somewhat unorthodox way. In highschool we were given little computers to complete assignments during class, but instead of doing math I'd visit a website that let you play the english version of these games in browser! I ended up completing all of them. The difficulty was nothing compared to fire emblem, but the chibis were 10x cuter. It was probably the first PC-98 game I ever played. Anyhow, thank you for bringing back such good memories. Your videos are always a blast to watch, I especially like seeing the convoluted installation process!
Nice video~👍
Thanks for making Farland Story(my request last time)
Lovely video mate! I definitely want to see more of the games in this series!!
Definitely interested in seeing you finish the series! Keep it going!! 😎
I love TBS games, so the translation of the first game is definitely going on my list. Thanks a lot!
Glad I could be of service! And happy to see my thumbnail didn't scare away people who like turn-based strategy.
Great video! Thanks for letting me listen, and watch.
Please do the whole series :D
I'm so glad i found this channel. I've known about Falcom's early games and TGL for a while now and it's nice to have detailed videos going over the games on PC-98
Great Stuff, as always!
I think I heard the name of this game ages ago, but I didn't knew anything about it, being all in japanese, I think I will play the game with the english patch now that I know about it, as always, excellent job with these videos.
Great video! I seen u mentioned langrisser which i really love too for the artstyle alone! I hope you will do videos about that series! Lol
I hope you continue this farland series. it looks interesting and I'm curious about how the story in the other games in the series are
Man your videos really encourage me to keep practicing japanese, is harder than I though but the amout of media that im missing looks really cool, thanks for your videos and for your hard work
Thanks for the effort putting this video together. It looks like an interesting series. It would be nice to try the SNES one.
This game introduced me to PC-98 and other game systems beyond Nintendo and Sega's in the pre 3D era when I was a kid searching for fan translations of games. I loved the game's artstyle but I couldn't get the PC-98 emulator set up properly back then. Great to see you cover this series and would love to see more!
I'd definitely love to see you cover the rest of this series! It seems like an easier carbon copy of Fire Emblem, so if you love this series then you'll probably love FE even more.
I also like the battle backgrounds. I'm not seeing any instances of an artist doing an image for half the given display resolution and then mirroring it to cover the whole screen, which is something you see a lot in games from this time.
Did they do that out of needing to meet a schedule or was it a way to save data ?
@@napoleonfeanor I don't know that you could preserve memory doing that. I'm guessing it was more often due to crunch, but it looks bad either way.
@@fmsyntheses if the hardware supported sprite flipping it whas a viable space saving solution.
One of the few retro reviewers I watch with no intentions of playing the games.
It's like watching a history documentary but not actually wanting to live in said time period.
I wouldn't mind going back to the 80's or 90's...
@@BasementBrothers i would love to see the start of mmos and how different the mindset of people who played them were.
grew up in a very strict christian household where games were the devil
I played this game on an emulator some years ago (English patch), i really enjoyed it.
I just discovered Your channel because of Twitter, really good content.
Until this video I totally forgot I even played the first game! I was already an SRPG fan by then so it was a no-brainer to check this out. I didn't think this series had this many games though, wow.
Thanks for your coverage of Farland Story! RetroArch has a screen translator option I just found out about so I'm trying Farland Story 2: Habou no Mai for the SNES and it got me introduced to the series!
Would love to see more videos on this series 😀
+1 here for you to cover the whole series and since you never got to play a few of their titles it would be nice to see a fresh new experience from you too.
Man you really make me want to import one of these things.
I'd love to see more about these games!
I also have bad allergies, What really helps me is one of those Dyson air purifiers (I'm sure cheaper alternatives work also) and I have recently found an anti pollen mesh that you can use as window screens so you can keep your windows open while keeping bugs and pollen out.
Falcom and Hudson Soft games always deliver on the Soundtrack department. Colorful games too
I would love to see more of this series! :)
Enjoyed hearing about this series I knew very little about!
I have this game as a translated rom since sooo long ago.
I really have to play it.. It's so cute !
Whoa, thanks for showing the OS of the PC-98, i think i never saw it before !
I played this years ago (or the sequel) on my cousin's computer (probably the MS DOS version) then later got the remake/remaster on windows for myself, and I really enjoyed the character map sprites on that version. It's really nice to see some content about it.
Looking forward to what you have to say here more than usual. I've had my eye on this series since learning about it recently.
I do enjoy tactical RPGs, but I prefer them on the easy side. Disgaea, Shining Force. Not really into the hardcore ones like... Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre. Yes, my casual is showing if I consider those games too difficult. Is what it is.
You mention Langrisser... Oh man is that too much for me. I bought the recent PC remakes of the first two games. I was unable to clear the second map of the first game after trying several times. There's definitely some unexplained mechanics there I just don't understand, but as it was I found it to be by far the hardest tactical RPG I've ever tried to play.
Okay yeah, this looks right up my alley. Great summary and breakdown of it as well!
Would love to see your cover more classic TGL games
had this one sitting in the backlog and finally got around to it. seems like a neat series! maybe I need to revisit PC98 emulation I did play a little bit of the castlevania-like Rusty but that was mostly it. definitely a great video, though.
Didn't know you actually live in Japan.
I find this series about Japanese home computer games fascinating despite having never even heard of most
The CM-64 is just a CM-32L and CM-32P jammed into one case (Literally. That's why it's so heavy). The CM-32L is identical to a MT-32 (later revision model), but with extra built-in sound effects that almost no software uses.
Wow! Didn' t know that Entergram, the company who did the two Konosuba RPG, is actually TGL! This is a surprise!
Honestly, I didn't either until doing research for this video. I always thought they had switched to only adult games with the "Giga" label in the early 2000's and then just kinda died off.
Owh myyyy i played most all the Farland series up till Saga. Hoping one day we can get fan translated version of Farland Saga 1 and 2.
Glad at least one of these has a fan translation, I'll have to give this a shot. I'd be fascinated to hear about more of them, it's one of those series I've been peripherally aware of but know very little about because there just isn't a ton about them in English floating around.
The first six games in the series have fan translations. The only PC-98 title that doesn't is Farland Story: Juuou no Akashi. Unfortunately the translation were all released in 2003 and the person who did them all doesn't appear to be active in the translation scene since 2005, so someone new would have to want to tackle it. Farland Symphony was translated by Mirror Moon (who primarily do translations of Type Moon visual novels) and Farland Story FX was translated in 2021, so there's some hope, but not a ton.
Cool. I didn't know there was a translation of Farland Symphony! It's good, and doesn't require any knowledge of the previous games to play.
I've played a game called Farland Story on the Sega Saturn, but I don't think it is a port of this one or any of the other main game, but more a Gaiden...I think. Also played both Farland Saga also on the Saturn. I was really curious to see the origin of this series, but since it was so obscure, I never thought I would see an in-depth video like your. Thanks a lot!
The Saturn one is "Farland Story: Habou no Mai", which is a port of "Farland Story 2" for Super Famicom. It was never made for PC-98. I'll be talking about it briefly in the next video. Thanks for watching!
I wonder what Top50 did to have BTAxis' ire against him immortalized.
Years ago, I imported copies of Steam Hearts and Variable Geo for... reasons. It wasn't easy to play them on my then-modern American PC, but I put in the work. So I have played those, and I see what you're doing in mentioning them as briefly as you did here.
I wish the US got these gems. Would've loved this as a kid.
Speaking of TGL, with the recent passing of Takahiro Kimura it would be a good time to take a look at the Variable Geo games.
Was not aware of his name before now. Sad to hear that he has passed so recently. Looks like it was barely a week ago. Thanks for alerting me to that fact. :(
He also worked on Code Geass and Dirty Pair Flash, among other things.
P.S. Yes more videos on the rest of the series. I'm IN..!
Really enjoyed this one dude. I actually have the fx one myself. I got really psyched to play pcfx and haven't had a chance in years(still never learned Japanese) . I dont like strategy games, but I remember getting shining force cd and finding I liked it (usual sega experience), so when I saw farland and learned it was simpler than most, I was stoked. Especially for games I dont beat! Really love the funny animations! I hope you play and cover more of this series (and pcfx, 88,98)!
Fun channel
Get Boundary Gate for the PCFX, super dope RPG and you can beat it without knowing any japanese. Way, WAY better than the PSX version.
@@KingofCrusher got that one! Good to know!
Wish I could afford MMZ next
@@ggbetz Oh man, is that the RPG based on a fighting game? I vaguely remember it being so rare like Zenki FX which I never had enough money to buy. I only ever had PCFX games in the $10-$60 range, haha.
Yeah, same universe as kendo rage on snes. No shops, weapons just update at preset times. I missed out on it like 2yrs ago for 100, when it was going for 5x as much. Foolish me
Smart range. That'd've gotten you a lot of story driven games back in the day.
I'm not getting notifications when you upload. I just happen to see your last upload. smh Great game!
Make videos of all the Farland Story games? Heck yeah.
You can never talk too much bout Nihon Falcom.
Just made my sunday night. Got my scotch ready! Love your videos.
A fitting beverage considering the subject material. That's a taste that can wake the dead!
Giga... rip baldr another long running series.. farland story is one i still need to try
I enjoy all your videos, so I don't have strong feelings on covering the whole Farland series or not. I do think documenting the whole series like this would be a good reference work. But it would mean fewer videos on other games. But it seems like you'd enjoy playing through the series, and that counts for something too!
Maybe aim to complete the series, but not necessarily in sequential videos?
Well, regardless, I look forward to future videos. This is the only channel I've found in English or Japanese that covers PC-88/98 games with such quality videos.
This is the most realistic comment. You're right. I really want to play all of these and make videos about them, but it would use up my time that I could be using to play and make videos about other games.
I probably will be gradually working through the series though.
As someone who's really enjoyed some of Giga's games but hadn't heard of TGL until now, it was a nice surprise at the end of the video
(Giga's "adult" games are not just porn, for anyone who is watching this; One of their best visual novel/top down shooter/brawler hybrid mecha games, Baldr Sky, is on Steam now in English)
Shame the Giga brand died though
Guess that sort of game doesn't have much of a market today with gacha games and vtubers and such taking over their once main audience in Japan
Ohh I remember farland symphony with the fan translation..never finished that game maybe I should give it a go again
That few seconds of Briganty immediately caught my attention. I really hope you cover that soon!
It's not on my shortlist at the moment, but would really like to someday. It would be the first adult game I've ever covered, so I would be very upfront about the fact it's an adult game, and of course not show any of the adult scenes in the video.
@@BasementBrothers I didn't realise it was an adult game. I just saw a few seconds of platformer and thought it looked cool. Sorry.
Yeah. You'd never know it from the gameplay. In a way it's kind of a shame that such a good platformer was an age restricted game.
You should get yourself Anex86 and the Briganty rom. Even without an English patch, it's a remarkably fun (and appropriately ero) game. Great music, cute girls, cool hero, etc. I've played through half a dozen times or so.
And I second a video on Briganty, only so I can have the full story properly explained to me ;D
This game really looks fun!
I always found langrisser to be pretty difficult when I played Warsong on the genesis I was so freaking confused granted I was pretty young when I played that. When I picked up the remakes though I still found myself struggling for sure. I really want to try these Farland games though I adore the art style!
Farland Story's soundtrack usually shines on the SC-55 or SC-88. Especially since CHEMOOL eventually stopped working on the FM soundtracks since FS3 I think (the songs no longer have the polish they used to have). I think he might have done a bit of FS5 based off of Firecracker Music Collection containing the intro theme.
The FM music rocks in the 5th game! Don't know about 3, 4, 6, and 7 yet though. Never even heard the soundtracks. Oh well. Soon...
@@BasementBrothers FS3: All the tracks by Tatsuya Watarai are great in the SC-55 and CD versions. His FM tracks aren't that great, but I wouldn't be shocked if the FM version was done by Naoya Simokawa, who wasn't very good at this point. There's some really cool tracks from here (mainly more atmospheric tracks, though the boss theme is really nice), but Tatsuya Watarai made the most iconic tracks including the opening theme.
@@BasementBrothers FS4: Some really great composers join in at this time, especially Masataka Kitaura, Atsuyoshi Isemura (who composed for Kirby and the Amazing Mirror), and Rikei Hirashima for the CD version. Unfortunately, it was still sort of a dark age for Farland Story, since Masataka Kitaura was making really rough compositions compared to how great he would become, and Simokawa's songs also brought down the soundtrack (boss theme by him slaps in the SC-55 version, but is rough with OPNA). Also I should note that Simokawa could still make good compositions, and he's gotten really good over time.
@@BasementBrothers FS6: Great soundtrack by Atsuyoshi Isemura. The OPNA version has its flaws but still has soul behind it. The SC-55/SC-88 and CD versions are absolutely amazing, and they show off how talented he was at composing. None of the tracks in that game miss, though sometimes the usage was a bit annoying when they made smaller songs play over large maps.
@@BasementBrothers FS7: Pure Kitaura genius. The OPNA version has some flaws, but you can genuinely tell that Kitaura was trying his best. The SC-55/SC-88 version is really really good. Both versions show off the best kinds of music Kitaura excelled at: moody songs that set a scene. Something you'll notice by these track titles is how they match up with the sound design in the corresponding song. For example, "Strangled Cry" has the lead sounding like it is being strangled (I know this is sometimes used as in insult, but this is definitely 100% intentional, or how "Angry Cat in the Closed Radio" has that title as the exposition behind the CD track.
Recently I got into Japanese PCs and have setup many of the ones that interest me using Retroarch, PC-98, MSX, X68000 and the Marty.
I knew about the Farland games mostly from the Saturn and PS1, so I was surprised to see their origins on the NEC computers. The emulation is quite good and there are many options for videos and you can map those games to any gamepad, keyboard or mouse. It's great since these machines are not the easiest thing to get into.
It's surprising that the genre isn't that popular, it never crossed my mind as the Shining Force, Fire Emblem, Daisenryaku and Advance Wars are so popular.
My preferred series are the Shining Force titles, specially the trilogy for the Saturn and the Daisenryaku titles on the same console, but there are hundreds of great RPGs in this genre.
Riglord Saga 1 and 2 for the Saturn are great as well.
I never knew that TGL is the same entity as Giga
Man, the similarities between Arc here and Arc from Arc The Lad are pretty spot on. Jrpg protags are usually pretty similar in this era but are at least visually distinctive enough. But this is near spot on lol
Create an uproar, man. Plagiarism!
Thanks for watching.
This looks fun
The issue with the English patch if that the translator messed with the difficulty to make the game harder. So it's a different experience from the original Japanese version. Great video, I love these PC-98 informative videos, keep it up! Cheers!
Interesting! But that sounds a bit dubious to me. The translator doesn't mention that in his translation notes. He makes it sound like he barely managed to figure out how to replace the text at all let alone change the difficulty. And he actually says:
"The game isn't very hard. If you want to have a fun time playing, then don't do your best too much in the first missions, because otherwise you'll be left with an uninteresting mid-game. Try fighting with inferior equipment until you can't get through anymore."
But as you can see in the video, I only really have played through the unpatched Japanese version - I only started up the patched version for a sec to capture footage for the video - so I have no idea how difficult the game is with the patch. Thanks for watching!
EDIT - Upon further research, it looks like he only changed the difficulty from the 3rd game on, so the first and second one should be untouched AFAIK. Thanks!
@@BasementBrothers Whoops! I double checked and the translator only started messing with the difficulty from the third game onwards. Apparently they couldn't find a way to do it in the first two games. Sorry for the mix-up! It's been a long time since I've tried out these games, so I got confused about it.
Finally someone talks about only in japan games i notice a lot of retro gamers leave these ones behind which is shame. by the way do you know any List or website that has a complet list of pc fx98 and other pc platforms (or a least most of them i know its impossible to have all of them)?i arleady have complete lists for consoles but i need ones for PC
I played through most of Farland Story 5 only to find out that the translation patch causes the game to crash when fighting the final boss. It crashes on original hardware, don't know about emulators.
Cool! That's the other one I've played all the way through.
So, did you try finishing him off without the patch? I suppose then you won't get to see the ending in English...
As long as you reload saves it should eventually let you through, at least on emulator.
@@BasementBrothers No, I basically gave up. My kanji reading level is a bit low so I wouldn't understand most of the ending.
Basement Brothers, you're going to have to do a video on *Sakusaku Daigoutou Returns* someday.
Yeah, it's an ero game, but it's so ridiculous in all the right ways. The world has to know about it!
I must say that after this video i'll probably add another bunch of games to my never ending list of japanese games to catchup (Why there is so many interesting games and so little time to play them?). I love this 90s anime artworks from cover and manual, and comic chibi graphics in game are also good. And because i'm trying to play whole Fire Emblem series in this year i saw many similarities to early FE games, for example with how promoting of characters works. I'll gladly watch videos about rest of Farland Story games.
Yup I remember variable Geo.
I think I'll tale a look at the PC-FX version. With the story told mostly through FMV even with Japanese being the spoken language it shouldn't be too hard to follow.
It's mostly just voice unfortunately. The FMV scenes are a bit few and far between.
Farland Story is a great game!
"Falcom, which I talk too much about".
No. You talk just the right amount about Falcom.
Very well done! Do a video about Daisenryaku or Power DoLLS. Nobody talks about... :/
Do you like Daisenrayku?
@@BasementBrothers Since the day I learn that it was the source of inspiration for Panzer General, Famicom Wars and of course, Power DoLLS.
Hey, I'm with you buddy. I ostensibly like strategy/tactics game, and I'm not exactly a dummy (I was JV captain of my high school's chess team and only stayed off the main team due to not applying myself, lol), but I just CANNOT finish these things. Especially newer ones with grindy leveling up mechanics or skill trees (or whatever the heck you classify the systems in Othercide as). There are so many reasons to bounce off of these things, whether there's difficulty spikes or it just gets boring or they don't allow you to save whenever you want even though missions take a long time - I don't wanna be plopped down in front of this single mission for an hour and a half or whatever. The only game in recent memory that I've actually beaten was Empire of Angels IV, another very cutesy entry in the genre (from the Chinese devs at Sofstar instead of a Japanese dev, but still SD anime style stuff).
So yeah, *you are not alone!* I am certainly not going to tell you to _Git Gud;_ what an awful way that would be to pay you back for telling _us_ about this charming game! I actually thought I heard of this before, but I realize now that I got it confused with Melfand Story on the Super Famicom by STING. Oops. So yeah, thanks for putting this on my radar!
Makes it sound like baby's first Fire Emblem
Yeah. Pretty much.
I barely knew this series even existed; as a Fire Emblem fan though, it looks fascinating! I would love to see more coverage of the Farland games :3 Thank you for making this video!
1:15 - The guy on the left is about a 93% match to Ryu's artwork from Street Fighter Alpha 3!
Holy molly, if TGL had the resources of today and use to create Farland games of the 90's in this era, I am sure they would beat Fire Emblem, or simply be rivals of each other. Awesome.