This review was originally published on the Console Purist Facebook group on June 15th, 2019. A tiny grammatical error has been corrected in this version.
It’s
Saturday; it’s PlayStation Basement. PlayStation Basement is a weekly review of
an odd or obscure game for the original PlayStation. Games are rated Good, Bad,
or Neutral. Let’s go!
Today is
Free RPG Day in North America, a day when tabletop RPG publishers hand out
books to get players to try out their games. Usually, these are not complete
games. Stores will also usually have some other goodies like dice or download
cards. I like going to Free RPG Day quite a bit. The store that I go to, Phantom
of the Attic, runs a tournament every year using the Dungeon Crawl Classics
system, and I’ve gotten three trophies from previous years, one each of bronze,
silver, and gold. I will probably not stay for the tournament this year, but
I’m sure it will be interesting. I hope that you can check out Free RPG Day
wherever you are.
Since it’s
Free RPG Day, I have an RPG to review today. This game is Battle Hunter, and it plays a lot like a board game or a very simple
tabletop RPG. Battle Hunter is set in
the future year of AR 0062, a time after the end of World War III. The war
destroyed much of human civilization, leaving countless artifacts and knowledge
buried underneath the rubble. Players create a hunter and take on jobs to
retrieve artifacts from the ruins of the past.
Battle Hunter is another budget game
from publisher A1 Games, a subsidiary of Agetec, a company that spun off from
ASCII Corporation. As mentioned before, these games were released late in the
PlayStation’s life cycle for very low amounts of money. Battle Hunter was released in North America in June of 2001, though
it came out in Japan in December 1999 as Battle
Sugoroku: Hunter, part of the SuperLite 1500 Series, a Japanese series of
budget games. Battle Hunter also
released in Europe on April 12th, 2001 as The Hunter.
Battle Hunter’s cover art differs
greatly between the regions. In North America, the game had the familiar A1Games stripe at the top, though, unlike the other games in the budget series,
it lacks a mention of the game’s genre. The cover shows the cast of playable
characters in front of a screen with an angry face. The Japanese cover art
follows its own SuperLite 1500 series of monotone covers and small images. The
art shows two characters back-to-back, weapons drawn, and the title. It could
be cool but not without color or a larger image. Europe got a really strange
image that makes the game look like a planetary romance pulp story set in a
Windows ’95 computer. There are four characters: a red-haired elf, a humanoid
cat, a dark-skinned man, and a big-headed dragon. Everyone has swords, and they
are standing on a green planet. It’s really a trip and doesn’t match the game
at all. The American art does it best.
Graphically,
Battle Hunter looks pretty much like
the American art. It’s all 2D and isometric. The colors are bright, animations
are simple but effective, and characters have some unique looks. There are huge
mohawked androids, swordsmen with long jackets, shotgun-wielding soldiers,
pony-tailed martial artists, and more. Each
sprite has a few different colors to choose from too. Monsters are the same way
but come in varieties of slimes and robots. The large character portraits
during story scenes look good too. Unfortunately, the backgrounds are a little
boring; each level looks the same throughout. There are not a lot of dungeon
types either. I wish that there could have been some different designs for
rooms at least. One thing that’s pretty cool is seeing all of the different
item designs in the game. Those look especially nice.
The sound in
Battle Hunter has a similar theme:
it’s good, but it is repetitive. The game has a few tracks for levels, a few
tracks for the different stores, and some for story sequences. The game goes
for a Sega Genesis-style metal soundtrack. I get these songs stuck in my head
sometimes. The sound effects are pretty good too, though, again, there is not a
lot of variety.
Gameplay in Battle Hunter consists of getting a
mission to retrieve an item, entering the dungeon, dodging traps, fighting monsters
and opposing players to retrieve the item, then leaving the dungeon. On a
player’s turn they can move, attack, or rest. Moving onto an item box adds the
mystery item to your character’s inventory. You can also find flags on the
floor that do a variety of things If you end your movement next to an opponent
or monster, you can attack them. Characters are rated in attack, defense, HP,
and movement. Other than HP, these stats are added to dice that are rolled for
each action. Player also receive cards that add to the die roll or do special
things. Cards can be used when moving or during combat for different but
related effects. Defensive cards let a character avoid traps or add to a
character’s physical defense against attacks. Movement cards help a character
escape battle, lower an opponent’s escape chance, or move further during their
movement. Some cards, like attack cards and trap cards, can only be used during
certain parts of a turn. Traps and critical hits give players status effects
such as leg damage (reduced movement speed), empty (discards all cards in the
character’s hand), and stun (prevents a character from acting).
At the
beginning of a player’s turn, they draw one card. You also draw some cards, and
heal some HP, when resting. If all of the cards are drawn from the deck of 80
cards during a game, a powerful monster named GON appears and hunts down the
player holding the target item if it has already been found. If GON defeats
that player, the game ends. If a player is defeated otherwise, they respawn at
another location on the map with their max HP reduced by ½. In addition to GON
ending the game, the game also ends if a player with the target item enters the
square marked as the exit.
Retrieving
the target item awards that player with money. Items found can be identified at
the broker and then sold or kept. Some items have special effects like
increasing attack, preventing low rolls, or allowing a player to move further
with leg damage. Some items unlock new backgrounds or music tracks. The game
tracks how many items have been identified and rewards a player that can find
and identify them all. You can also level up your character after a mission,
letting you increase a few stats. Level 15 is the maximum level, and you cannot
have perfect stats – choose wisely.
The game can
be played in a single-player story mode or as a multiplayer party game with up
to four players. My friends and I often played this as the latter. I actually
wasn’t sure that Battle Hunter had an
ending or anything until I was taking pictures for this review and thought the
mission seemed new. The translation is pretty bad with numerous grammatical and
spelling errors, so it can be hard to follow the storyline; it seems more like
a bad fan translation than anything official. The story is something about a
strange organization named “B PHS” who is trying to stop the player from
completing missions that they receive. I checked an FAQ after doing the mission
and found out that there was indeed an ending. It wasn’t too hard to get. The
game doesn’t change much at all throughout though, and that includes
multiplayer mode. Battle Hunter is a
one-trick pony, and it does that one trick of dungeon crawling fun very well.
Battle Hunter receives a Good.
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