Something about the shot of you calmly pouring whisky into a glass until it overflowed made me laugh out loud. I love the ridiculous cutaway gags you do in these videos, and how it's just often enough to keep things unpredictable without overdoing it.
FYI, I played Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes 2 through Retroarch, using it's realtime auto translation (machine translation). I mention this, because we could always use that to play the 7th game, which doesn't have a fan-translation. Better than nothing, and it worked great.
Interesting. I've never played Habo no Mai, but since it was originally a sequel to "Farland Story" on the SFC it makes sense that Ark would appear. Thanks.
@@BasementBrothers If you are interested, you can watch my entire playthrough of this and Four Seals on Billibilli by seaching 古大陆物语 四封印 and 古大陆物语 破亡之舞.
I put some disk reading sounds from the 3.5 inch floppy drive in the Burai II video, but it didn't come out very well. The drive just doesn't make very much noise.
Thanks for the clarification about the Saturn game. Now I know :). Great episode, I've discovered your channel not long ago, but I've started watching all your past ones, and it's great dive into a gaming sphere I didnt knew much about!
Fairly common games like this one are not too hard to find complete on Yahoo auctions for a few thousand yen each, in my experience. Most owners tend to keep all or most of the stuff in them. The Farland games are often missing the music CDs though it seems.
A long time ago, back in the middle ages, distilled liquors such as brandy and grain alcohol were referred to as "water of life" (aqua vitae in Latin). I can't help but wonder if that's somehow related to whisky's ability to revive party members in this game.
I liked that the last boss was made much more difficult than he ought to be. I had to get the entire team involved to whittle his HP down, which generally feels more epic than two or three characters going through the motions.
Underrated Tatsuya Watarai soundtrack. The art style is a cool twist on the original art style as well! Based on Firecracker Music Collection, it's possible that either CHEMOOL did the OPNA version of the soundtrack, or touched it up.
I've loved seeing these Farland Story videos. I'm a SRPG junkie but I had no idea about these games. These first two really reminds me of the Famicom Fire Emblem but with prettier music and graphics. Guess I need to set some time aside to get started on this series now.
Love this channel! U make me want to learn Japanese faster and discover all these amazing games! The artstyles alone make me wish more games today could use that 90s late 80s anime look!
I love the segments of these videos where you show the install. It’s nostalgic to me. Have you consider a video just overviewing the OS on the PC-88/98 I’m not familiar with the hardware and love your videos.
I do have the one video on my PC-8801MC. I've been thinking about making more of an overview video about Japanese classic PCs someday or something like that. One thing I should probably emphasize more is that I would not recommend buying a PC-98 unless you really like tinkering with old machines, fixing, and troubleshooting. Thanks for watching.
Yey, i'm glad that you are reviewing further games of this series. This games looks really nice, even if graphics and battle animations are rather simple in comparison to tRPGs i know, but in here they compensate this with hillarious comedic expression.
been busy so haven't had a chance to see these episodes so kinda playing catch-up. noted on the 'Arc' thing I was kinda wondering cus the design did seem a little similar, but suppose it was just coincidence. wondering why the translator had to go full on working designs with the difficulty adjust though? seems like a cool series may have to sit down and see if I can get these running on retroarch. (I think the last pc98 game I played was rusty, which was interesting as a castlevania-like) PS. and yeah the cutaway bits are hilarious. whisky for your fallen comrades, haha!
Another excellent video! I hope you will cover the Farland Saga games at some point. I've played both of the ports on the Sega Saturn and absolutely loved them, especially the 2nd. So I'm very curious to learn more about the PC 98 originals!
Farland Saga was originally for Windows. But yeah, I also have the Saturn ports. It would be cool to cover those someday, but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. If I remember correctly, the Saturn ports aren't too different from the originals.
It would have been nice to have mentioned you were made aware of the difficulty changes (from the third game onwards) in the English patch through a viewer.
Project EGG added Farland Story 1 to their catalog just a week after this video came out! Maybe not super useful for non-Japanese speakers but still kind of neat. Wonder how much of the series they'll end up getting.
When the Legend of Heroes videos were over, I was bummed. Now I see how many videos are in this series, and I can be happy again lol love all your videos. You've made me want an old Japanese PC, but they're a bit pricey. Any suggestions on where to start?
Well, usually the easiest places to find systems are on Japanese auction sites: yahoo auctions and mercari. There are proxy services which will help you to bid and get items shipped outside Japan, but they are pricey. Many of the better deals are on untested or broken systems if you are handy at fixing old PCs. Even if you buy one listed as 100% working though, I would not recommend buying one unless you enjoy troubleshooting and fiddling with old PCs. I usually don't show it in my videos, but I often spend a lot of time trying to get some of these old games working, and for me that's part of the fun.
@@BasementBrothers I know I just wanted make seem dirty. Ya know we all had at least a few friends that would have said that back in the day. Your show is fantastic by the way. I've watched all the episodes several times.
He doesn't just share the same name from Arc the Lad; he also looks like him. Is there something in Japanese, that makes a character's name influence the way they look? I also noticed this with "Una" in the Falcom Gagharv trilogy, and Juna in Trails of Cold Steel 3/4. With that one, it's the same company, of course.
Well, have you ever met someone IRL who just "looks like" a Daniel... or a Chris? It's also possible that the creator of Arc the Lad played Farland Story and was consciously or subconsciously influenced by it I suppose.
Exactly. "アーク" is really just a typical sounding fantasy katakana name in Japanese. It's really no wonder there are multiple RPG characters with that name.
I watch your videos alot since i found you.the older rpg"s are ny first gaming love,wich is why i missed alot great action games that i search out now.the reason i say these things is because you guys CAN'T stop.please incorporate a different rpg"s if at all possible.i know you have an agenda but if you ever break from that please cover. Tecmos secret of the stars.But i love what you guys are doing,i tip my hat.many thanks.i hope this is start of wonderful relationship. Truly, Your greatful fan Mike
So question..... how do the SFC etc ports handle the side stories? I mean in this original version those were options, right? Or do the combo remakes force you to just play through them all once you reach the FS2 portion? Or are they reorganized so that they occur in their logical story position?
I'm not sure about the SFC version, but in the PC-FX and Windows versions they just removed the side stories. Also, they moved the final stage of the first game to be the final stage of the entire two games instead. They even deleted one of the priest characters from the first game and combined her into the healer character "Alicia", so yeah, you can see there were a ton of changes.
Excellent video as always! If possible when you show a game report if someone already translated the game to English. It's kinda boring use Google Translator all the time.
Good question. I explain this a lot more in my Legend of Heroes IV video, but on PC-98 Drive A is whatever drive you boot from. So if I boot from my hard drive it becomes A, and my second hard drive I also have connected is B. Floppy drives then become the next available letters. If I boot from floppy it's the opposite. Floppy drive 1 is A, 2 is B, hard drives are C and D. It's different from Western IBM compatible PC's.
@@BasementBrothers It was Microsoft that made the PC-88/98 operating systems though, wasn't it? Strange they overlooked a convention they were so attached to that today the primary hd on a Windows machine is still automatically "C" literal decades after anyone was likely to have a floppy disk drive to inherit an A or B.
PC-98 does use Microsoft's DOS, but DOS only comes into play after boot device is selected. The system BIOS handles drive order prior to that. Then even after booting to DOS, there are a lot of small differences to be found between PC-98 DOS and the original MS-DOS used in the West.
Did you try using the original .unt files instead of the ones included with the patch? I talk about this in depth in the next video, but that's how you can get it (mostly) back to the original difficulty while still in English.
I have mixed feelings. Sometimes rebalancing or QoL improvements done for translated releases (official or not) are big improvements. But I think the original version should also be available if at all possible.
I'm so glad to see this channel growing, because it really deserves it. Keep it up, man.
Same, real glad I found it a few months ago. Really cool to learn about all these games that never came to the US.
Something about the shot of you calmly pouring whisky into a glass until it overflowed made me laugh out loud. I love the ridiculous cutaway gags you do in these videos, and how it's just often enough to keep things unpredictable without overdoing it.
FYI, I played Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes 2 through Retroarch, using it's realtime auto translation (machine translation). I mention this, because we could always use that to play the 7th game, which doesn't have a fan-translation. Better than nothing, and it worked great.
im glad you mentioned this because i had no hecking idea that retroarch had a translator. thats very good to know!!
Woah, that's AWESOME. Does that feature exist for every system in Retroarch?
@@Vulpas Yeah, it's a Retroarch feature. It's not tied to any of the cores.
Wtf... A real time translation program? That sounds awesome!! Which one did you use? Do you remember?
@@MiBrCo4177 Retroarch has support for it built in. Vgtranslate.
Ark appeared in Habo no Mai. His son actually joined the party. Later his son's class was changed to Dragon Rider.
Interesting. I've never played Habo no Mai, but since it was originally a sequel to "Farland Story" on the SFC it makes sense that Ark would appear. Thanks.
@@BasementBrothers If you are interested, you can watch my entire playthrough of this and Four Seals on Billibilli by seaching 古大陆物语 四封印 and 古大陆物语 破亡之舞.
This series gives me that feel good early to mid 90s JRPG vibe I adore.
Always a pleasure to watch. Looking forward to the third.
I'm so glad you're doing what you're doing, Japanese PC games need more love.
But where were my chunky disk reading noises!?
I put some disk reading sounds from the 3.5 inch floppy drive in the Burai II video, but it didn't come out very well. The drive just doesn't make very much noise.
Thanks for the clarification about the Saturn game. Now I know :). Great episode, I've discovered your channel not long ago, but I've started watching all your past ones, and it's great dive into a gaming sphere I didnt knew much about!
As always nice video.
The insides of how each game of the series evolves with the use of the Hardware is what really keeps me coming back for more.
2:05 so sad. Kyoto Animation was victim of a horrible arson.. Rest in peace to all the victim.
The Japanese PC games from this era always seem to come packed with tons of goodies. A fold out poster? Can you imagine that today?
Probably only in special edition releases nowadays I could imagine it. :) Thanks for watching.
@@BasementBrothers how easy is it to collect these older PC games complete? Just curious.
Fairly common games like this one are not too hard to find complete on Yahoo auctions for a few thousand yen each, in my experience. Most owners tend to keep all or most of the stuff in them. The Farland games are often missing the music CDs though it seems.
A long time ago, back in the middle ages, distilled liquors such as brandy and grain alcohol were referred to as "water of life" (aqua vitae in Latin). I can't help but wonder if that's somehow related to whisky's ability to revive party members in this game.
Ah finally more of my nostalgia supplement, installing the game has always been as much of a part of playing as actually playing it
I'm really looking forward to learning about the whole series. Love this channel.
I liked that the last boss was made much more difficult than he ought to be. I had to get the entire team involved to whittle his HP down, which generally feels more epic than two or three characters going through the motions.
I guess I had some of my characters leveled up a little too high! He went down pretty easily with the charge attacks.
@4:01 Haha, what was that pause? Caught me off-guard
Underrated Tatsuya Watarai soundtrack. The art style is a cool twist on the original art style as well! Based on Firecracker Music Collection, it's possible that either CHEMOOL did the OPNA version of the soundtrack, or touched it up.
I've loved seeing these Farland Story videos. I'm a SRPG junkie but I had no idea about these games. These first two really reminds me of the Famicom Fire Emblem but with prettier music and graphics. Guess I need to set some time aside to get started on this series now.
One of my favorite channels ever, hell yeah.
Love this channel! U make me want to learn Japanese faster and discover all these amazing games! The artstyles alone make me wish more games today could use that 90s late 80s anime look!
Looking forward to the next video in the series
Lovely video as always, the Midi version of this games soundtrack really slapped! Thanks again for another great continuation of the PC-98 Paradise!
Really enjoyed this video!
Sweet love a new video, i enjoy all your stuff but the rpgs are my faves
I love the segments of these videos where you show the install. It’s nostalgic to me. Have you consider a video just overviewing the OS on the PC-88/98 I’m not familiar with the hardware and love your videos.
I do have the one video on my PC-8801MC. I've been thinking about making more of an overview video about Japanese classic PCs someday or something like that.
One thing I should probably emphasize more is that I would not recommend buying a PC-98 unless you really like tinkering with old machines, fixing, and troubleshooting. Thanks for watching.
Nice alternative to der langrisser
I have the PC-FX remake of the first two games, but admittedly haven't tried playing it much. Definitely my type of game though, another great video!
Yey, i'm glad that you are reviewing further games of this series. This games looks really nice, even if graphics and battle animations are rather simple in comparison to tRPGs i know, but in here they compensate this with hillarious comedic expression.
Another hit episode! :)
man Zavel is one of the jankiest looking final bosses Ive seen.
I think the recap levels in 2 were the first I experienced I had of Farland Story.
been busy so haven't had a chance to see these episodes so kinda playing catch-up. noted on the 'Arc' thing I was kinda wondering cus the design did seem a little similar, but suppose it was just coincidence. wondering why the translator had to go full on working designs with the difficulty adjust though? seems like a cool series may have to sit down and see if I can get these running on retroarch. (I think the last pc98 game I played was rusty, which was interesting as a castlevania-like)
PS. and yeah the cutaway bits are hilarious. whisky for your fallen comrades, haha!
These videos continue to be great.
Now that I know whiskey revives the dead, I think I'll go conduct an interview with Osamu Tezuka.
Woo More Farland Story
Those boxes are incredible. Are those hard plastic?
Sure.
My brother in Fire Emblem, thats a tactical game.
Another excellent video! I hope you will cover the Farland Saga games at some point. I've played both of the ports on the Sega Saturn and absolutely loved them, especially the 2nd. So I'm very curious to learn more about the PC 98 originals!
Farland Saga was originally for Windows. But yeah, I also have the Saturn ports. It would be cool to cover those someday, but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. If I remember correctly, the Saturn ports aren't too different from the originals.
@Basement Brothers
Ah okay my mistake. I just assumed they also originated from the PC98! 😅
Toward the beginning of this video I show a chart I made showing the original platform for each of the games. Check it out.
It would have been nice to have mentioned you were made aware of the difficulty changes (from the third game onwards) in the English patch through a viewer.
Awww yeah! Gonna be good!
Project EGG added Farland Story 1 to their catalog just a week after this video came out! Maybe not super useful for non-Japanese speakers but still kind of neat. Wonder how much of the series they'll end up getting.
They had better do ALL of them!
When the Legend of Heroes videos were over, I was bummed. Now I see how many videos are in this series, and I can be happy again lol love all your videos. You've made me want an old Japanese PC, but they're a bit pricey. Any suggestions on where to start?
Well, usually the easiest places to find systems are on Japanese auction sites: yahoo auctions and mercari. There are proxy services which will help you to bid and get items shipped outside Japan, but they are pricey. Many of the better deals are on untested or broken systems if you are handy at fixing old PCs. Even if you buy one listed as 100% working though, I would not recommend buying one unless you enjoy troubleshooting and fiddling with old PCs. I usually don't show it in my videos, but I often spend a lot of time trying to get some of these old games working, and for me that's part of the fun.
Great Stuff!
I played the snes version
I like how that end boss is riding the woman like a horse lol.
I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be one being with two heads, but whatever floats your boat!
Thanks for watching.
@@BasementBrothers I know I just wanted make seem dirty. Ya know we all had at least a few friends that would have said that back in the day.
Your show is fantastic by the way. I've watched all the episodes several times.
these look like fun games i tried the pc-fx but didnt play it long as i cant read japanesse maybe i should go back to it.
These games seem sort of "cozy", if that makes sense.
He doesn't just share the same name from Arc the Lad; he also looks like him. Is there something in Japanese, that makes a character's name influence the way they look? I also noticed this with "Una" in the Falcom Gagharv trilogy, and Juna in Trails of Cold Steel 3/4. With that one, it's the same company, of course.
Well, have you ever met someone IRL who just "looks like" a Daniel... or a Chris?
It's also possible that the creator of Arc the Lad played Farland Story and was consciously or subconsciously influenced by it I suppose.
@@BasementBrothers Arc is also the name of Terranigma's protagonist...
Exactly. "アーク" is really just a typical sounding fantasy katakana name in Japanese. It's really no wonder there are multiple RPG characters with that name.
I watch your videos alot since i found you.the older rpg"s are ny first gaming love,wich is why i missed alot great action games that i search out now.the reason i say these things is because you guys CAN'T stop.please incorporate a different rpg"s if at all possible.i know you have an agenda but if you ever break from that please cover. Tecmos secret of the stars.But i love what you guys are doing,i tip my hat.many thanks.i hope this is start of wonderful relationship. Truly,
Your greatful fan Mike
Whiskey based medical care! How did Japan manage to out 'merica America?
Japan is quite famous for their whisky nowadays too!
So question..... how do the SFC etc ports handle the side stories? I mean in this original version those were options, right? Or do the combo remakes force you to just play through them all once you reach the FS2 portion? Or are they reorganized so that they occur in their logical story position?
I'm not sure about the SFC version, but in the PC-FX and Windows versions they just removed the side stories. Also, they moved the final stage of the first game to be the final stage of the entire two games instead. They even deleted one of the priest characters from the first game and combined her into the healer character "Alicia", so yeah, you can see there were a ton of changes.
Seems like quite an enjoyable series. Too bad that it never saw western release, or at least some english patches
There are English patches.
Excellent video as always! If possible when you show a game report if someone already translated the game to English. It's kinda boring use Google Translator all the time.
I always do! The thing is, very very very very very very very few PC-98 or PC-88 games have English patches. These are some of the only ones!
"I'll select the source floppy drive which is drive C and the destination hard drive is drive A..."
What madness is this?!
Good question. I explain this a lot more in my Legend of Heroes IV video, but on PC-98 Drive A is whatever drive you boot from. So if I boot from my hard drive it becomes A, and my second hard drive I also have connected is B. Floppy drives then become the next available letters. If I boot from floppy it's the opposite. Floppy drive 1 is A, 2 is B, hard drives are C and D. It's different from Western IBM compatible PC's.
@@BasementBrothers It was Microsoft that made the PC-88/98 operating systems though, wasn't it? Strange they overlooked a convention they were so attached to that today the primary hd on a Windows machine is still automatically "C" literal decades after anyone was likely to have a floppy disk drive to inherit an A or B.
PC-98 does use Microsoft's DOS, but DOS only comes into play after boot device is selected. The system BIOS handles drive order prior to that. Then even after booting to DOS, there are a lot of small differences to be found between PC-98 DOS and the original MS-DOS used in the West.
10:40 you doing alright bro?
I will be... after another whisky.
Peak
I hate when people messes with the difficulty.... because it's too easy.... Make the patch optional!
Agreed. I had to check out partway through 3 because he made it virtually unplayable.
Did you try using the original .unt files instead of the ones included with the patch? I talk about this in depth in the next video, but that's how you can get it (mostly) back to the original difficulty while still in English.
I have mixed feelings. Sometimes rebalancing or QoL improvements done for translated releases (official or not) are big improvements. But I think the original version should also be available if at all possible.