Over My Dead Body (Ore no Shikabane wo Koete Yuke)

[KTallguy]

Hi guys,

While in the midst of getting ready to play a Eurasian immigrant in GTA4 and gearing up my SOP system for the MGO beta, I happened upon this interesting RPG/life sim, released only in Japan in 1999.

I was browsing Japanese PSN and looking at all the PS1 titles, and the cover just jumped out at me:


(Ore no Shikabane wo Koete Yuke)

Then I looked up some videos on youtube/nicovideo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1GPaW7cyoM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCNkNjjWiU0
http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm1567731

So I bought it for 600 yen and threw it on my PSP.

The premise is that your heroes are legendary warriors that fought against a horrible demon ravaging old Japan. Unfortunately they fell at the hand of the demon, and you, their only child, are cursed for life: you age 50x faster than normal, leaving you with a 2 year lifespan, and you are impotent.



The gods looking down upon this situation take pity on you, and offer their help. They give you permission to copulate with gods and create children that way (although your children will ultimately suffer the same curse). As your family line ages from generation to generation, your family members grow in strength, and you earn prestige allowing you to mate with higher level gods, and produce stronger offspring.



After getting your equipment all prepped for the journey, you choose from several dungeons with a party of up to 5 members and battle with various creatures in turn based style. The enemies are on screen, and if you bump them in the back, you can get the first attack (a vital skill). There are several forms of group attacks, magic and skills, and there are also four different jobs, each with their own unique take on battle. Both the enemy and your own party have a leader, and defeating the leader automatically kills the rest of the team, so often times trying to poke at the leader is the main strategy. If family members are killed, in most cases, they are gone forever, and you get a little obituary similar to Furai no Shiren. The ultimate goal of the game is to destroy the demon and eliminate the curse from your bloodline. In a nutshell, this game is like a horseracing sim combined with a roguelike RPG.



I've barely scratched the surface of this game, but there's sp much content it's amazing. The dungeons are very simple and level design is plain, but the enemy artwork is pretty good, although sometimes the combat backgrounds lack detail. Magic and special effects look great, and the music is surprisingly catchy.



Anyone else heard of this game, or played it?

[Persona-sama]

Huh, that sounds really interesting. How could a game like that fall under the radar, I wonder. Alfa Systems, aren't they a shooter company?

You should take some videos and upload it to Youtube for posterity!
_________________

[hugman]

A friend of mine played this years ago and was completely enchanted by it. It's really quite strange that there are so few generational games out there.

[Persona-sama]

Yeah, the only ones that come to mind are Phantasy Star 3, Dragon Quest V, and that one PS2 RPG where you play an immortal raising generations of armies to defeat some timeless evil or something.

Maybe it's hard to keep interest in characters when a game is too generational? Like, in this game it sounds more like your children are Pokemon than story driven people. But then, games like Shiren and other roguelikes are more about the adventure than the character.

What other generational games come to your minds?
_________________

[TOLLMASTER]

SaGa Frontier II had a generational system, as did at least one other SaGa game on the Super Famicom, but I think there it was more of a plot thing than something you had actual control over, other than the fact that your skills carried on in some way which I can't remember. It also reminds me somewhat of a game whose name I can't quite remember at the moment, but involved three different timelines (or something) you play consecutively where you have the same characters, but the time limit and number of animals you have to capture for your Ark and save from the apocalypse changes.

Anyway, this is a really great find, it's the kind of system you'd expect to see more often but for some reason don't. Thanks for sharing!

[Posicov]

I got the Playstation The Best version of this a while ago and I loved it. There is a whole lot of grinding involved--in addition to leveling up your characters, you have to donate money to the ruined Heian capital to upgrade shop selection, learn new spells by getting them from monsters, get valuable curios you can give as gifts to disgruntled family members to keep them from leaving your clan, and so on. It reminded me a lot of a Nippon Ichi game, but it doesn't require quite the same level of time investment.

There are some Japanese articles by the game's main designer, Masuda Jouji, and some of the game testers here, if anybody's interested. He mentions that one of the experiences he wanted to create for the player was raising up an unruly or troublesome child, (that's Masuda's son on the game cover, incidentally) and you really get a lot of that in the early game, when you don't understand the game's crazy genetics system and end up having to make do with a lot of incapable descendants.

(also, first post)

[TOLLMASTER]

[Posicov]

Thanks for the fix, and for pointing out Linda Cube. I'd never heard of it, but evidently (as in, according to Wikipedia) it was a result of Masuda working on a really by-the-numbers Tengai Makyou RPG for three years and getting completely fed up.

Also on the subject of Masuda and odd RPGs, digging around revealed that he recently designed one for cell phones called Hero Must Die. It opens with the hero killing the big boss demon at the cost of his own life, but getting blessed with five more days to live. Supposedly the ending changes depending on how you live those days out, but unfortunately it seems like this is mostly determined by which fetishized lady character you decide to chase after.

[Persona-sama]

[ferricide]

[TOLLMASTER]

[exodus]

[ferricide]

[Posicov]

On the above recommendation I got a copy of Lindacube Again and it's great. It is in fact about gathering animals for an ark (by beating them up in turn-based battles, naturally) and there are three different scenarios (although they're evidently just alternate realities or something). But the real money is just how open-ended it is.

Matsuda says his original concept was to have no story at all, just a world to explore with optional side events, but he was pressured into making two introductory scenarios to help players understand how the game works. Scenarios A and B sort of work as training wheels: they limit you to two out of the game's three areas, give you a much easier goal for animal collecting, and provide (utterly bonkers) plots that lead you from spot to spot in a good order for leveling up. Scenario C just cuts you loose from the get-go.

Like Ore no Shikabane etc., there is a whole lot to do, but unlike Oreshika almost none of that stuff really fits together in obvious ways. Although a lot of townspeople give you hints on how the game's systems work, there's a lot that just has to be found out through experimentation. Fortunately, you aren't shoehorned into situations you have to have figured some obscure thing out to beat a boss or whatever.

The character design is by Cannabis (of Akira and Nadia and lots of other late 80's anime fame) and the stills and animation that use his designs look great, but the production values are otherwise ho-hum. It's still one of the most interesting RPGs I've seen, though.