In a few hundred years there will be multiple universities that will have existed for more than 1000 years continously, so this would be technically possible.
Just when you think "8 disks seems a lot" then you discover the original version of Beneath a Steel Sky for the Amiga came on 15 and that's not even the record. Phew.
I remember one of the versions of Adobe I had was like 25 disks. My dad would always uninstall it, and I would spend so long installing it again. Repeat for a couple of years until I got my own pc
Plus an extra one for your save games you had to provide yourself. Monkey Island 2 was also a chonker at 11 disks, but had far less swapping than BASS.
I played this one. I loved how absurd the plot was. I didn't know what I was getting into when I first started, but it certainly wasn't a violent coup from a school club where they used their own members as suicide bombers. That actually got a reaction from me.
Honestly love seeing videos about doujin games for the fact that the devs put so much passion into what they created and since games like these aren't very known outside of Japan it's a really fascinating look at the interests of their subculture at the time.
This channel has helped me discover so many older Japanese PC games. I don't have a PC-98 but I do read Chinese and a surprisingly large amount of these games have been ported to Windows in that language. Will definitely try it out when I get time.
That throne room at 12:55 is adorable, the repeated NPC sprites, the seat tiles that sprites hop off. They really tried to give the feeling of a big/busy world with their limited graphics.
Such a cool weird title that wasn't on my radar til now. One of the things I love most about PC-88/98 is how many odd yet wonderful titles there were, it's astonishing there isn't a huge amount of coverage overall aside from the more flashy titles. Yet another reason why this is such a special channel. Love seeing the portions which show the physical set up, from the box art/manual/inserts to actually running it on the original hardware. Brings it even closer to that great feel like being back around release and a buddy showing off the new game they got.
Glad that there still are physical copies of these old games. Seeing you load and click all the settings makes it feel like you are loading something amazing
The world may sound crazy but from this video seems like its basically a high fantasy setting with a japanese highchool theme. Everything starts making more sense when you swich terms like "club" and "club president" with stuff like "kingdom" and "kings" Even the whole thing with schoolgirls being used as sacrificial war paws makes more sense when you notice they are basically medieval soldiers being sent to war to die
the tonal dissonance is enhanced severely by the fact that the attack animation just shows a character running away if they die which gives me cognitive dissonance watching.
I absolutely love the music this game has. I mean even the install process has a really great soundtrack. The attack animations remind me of how fun it is when you start doing multiple hits per weapon in Final Fantasy 3 for the Famicom. It gets really silly seeing your guys run up and slap something 16 times with a couple swords.
In the distant future our world is ruled by a system structure of a high school student body hierarchy 😂 after watching through some Kamen Rider series I absolutely love these super serious stories with a way out there premise!
@@StoneCresent Though that comic started two years after her first platinum album, so that comic's use of the name could potentially be a reference to her.
@@StoneCresent Though I guess it could have been just him trying to think of another repeated name like JoJo. I'm actually almost completely ignorant of that series and need to dive in.
I noticed it said 天文部 on the battle screen and thought is that a high school girls' astronomy club going to war with other high school girls' clubs and then you explained that is precisely what is happening. Seems like a fun game with a very strange premise. I dig the Kansai dialect too.
I once had a dream to learn Japanese. But my mind isn't what it used to be and it feels like maybe I never will now. But these videos almost make me feel like I did! And I can enjoy all the obscure delights that come with it! Thanks 🙏
This game not only got a Korean port, but it also got another DOS port in Chinese, and it is same with the Korean port that only support CD music, however, they have changed the name to "Q女天使學院", which roughly translate as "Q girl angel school"... but interestingly, they keep the Japanese Metajo title in the opening animation
Awesome. I wasn't aware of the Chinese version. Just found a video of it, and it looks like a completely different port of the game made separately from the Korean version, and with better music. Do you know if the second game was also ported to DOS in China? I will mention it in the next video.
Played this multiple times, first time the Korean DOS version for IBM-compat PCs, and later PC-98. Absolutely bizarre and wonderful. It does have a few weird quirks that might put off some; but if you're playing, have everyone learn Swimming and other terrain-movement skills first. Makes your life much easier.
I found your channel recently and was starting to wonder if you ever had a vintage disk fail. Luckily we live in a golden age of retro gaming. Great work.
I feel like this game has to be somehow connected to nage libre on the super famicom. There's no way two independant group of people just thought of strategy rpg in a parallel fantasy world with an all female highschool student cast in war with each other where you only get to spend experience points in between stages. But then again it is japan so it might as well be.
Ooh. Interesting comparison. Looks like Nage Libre was released the same year as the doujin version of Metajo, so it's possible there was some "inspiration" going on there I suppose. :) Thanks for watching.
Don't worry, it came out on DVD here, with both Japanese subtitles and a Japanese dub track for every episode, packaged in cool cargo bay container jewel cases! I once owned the whole series on Japanese DVD, but gave them to a friend before moving house a decade and change ago. Really cool to see that Star Trek had SOME traction in Japan, though, even if it was (and sadly still is) pretty obscure here. And the Japanese dub is a trip -- Q has a Norio Wakamoto-esque villain voice, which is somehow both horrifically mismatched and also weirdly kind of perfect for him at the same time. ;)
@@Wyrdwad Thanks for the info. Despite American media having a widespread presence abroad, I'm always curious how notable certain things are. Especially when there's a language barrier as well. Stuff like the Daicon IV opening animation are such a treat to me because it shows the stuff that foreign fandoms considered likely to be recognized by their audience.
Id have thought that st:tng would be big in japan back in the day. Btw i wanted to say thanks for your work on popolocrois and samurai spirits rpg! Im loving playing these for the very first time, reminds me of the old days on rigg and gettin to play Ys IV! As a kid i would NEVER have thought older me would get to play these games. The futures awesome, we might not have hoverboards or power lacing shoes but it still kicks ass!
Oh and thanks for the awesome falcom age at xseed, you and a couple of your coworkers really made having a psp worth it, while my fam was enjoying fps in any color as long as its brown i was loving life with colorful games with sweet ost's.
@@joshfacio9379 Thanks so much for the kind words! I had nothing to do with Samurai Spirits RPG, though, I'm afraid. I think you're confusing me with Retro Translator Tom, who is a different Tom altogether. ;) I am the PopoloCrois guy, though, and the XSEED Falcom guy too, so hey, two out of three ain't bad! Heheh. And no, sadly, Star Trek has never been particularly popular in Japan. Even to this day, most Japanese people have never heard of it, despite the existence of major Hollywood movies not all that long ago! And despite every single Star Trek anything being readily available in Japanese somewhere or another. For some reason, it just never quite caught on here! Always found that odd, especially considering how massively huge Star Wars is here.
Haha, yeah. Don't I know it. My luck may also be not quite as good as I make it look but... luckily I do have a lot of old games that happen to still work fine.
Huh. Kinda reminds me of a friend's TTRPG game, to be honest. The worldbuilding is certainly ah, interesting. I like the fact that the player buys skill trees that develop themselves, using points gained from attacking. The ability to fast-forward mid-game is also really great. And of course, it's always great when a freeware game's retail version gets expanded. In this case, having a resolution to a cliffhanger be the rest of the game!
Would be interesting to see your friend's game. One small correction: doujin games are not freeware. The doujin circles charged money for them. I don't know how much this particular game was, but one of their other games was 1500 yen.
So I'm bad at SRPGs, but I still like to try them (like Farland). I don't like the npcs dont grow, and take away from the main chars. I really like the battle backgrounds and that theres a partial english patch. Thanks for shining light on this wild game. Such a great channel!
Great video! Would love to see you do a vid on the sequel! Just curious, but if you love this game so much, how come you haven't played much of the sequel? Is it not as good or something?
Good question. Well, I had never finished the original... so for me I always felt I had unfinished business to take care of before moving on to the sequel. So I guess the better question is why I never finished the original back when I first played it. And I guess the reasons were probably various. I was generally more busy those days during some of my first years working in Japan and had less time to play games. And also I was just discovering the PC-98 for the first time, and had to decide whether I wanted to spend time playing Metajo vs. other classics I had always wanted to play on the PC-98 like Legend of Heroes 3 and 4 and Brandish 1-3. Metajo for me at the time I found a little harder to follow, plot-wise, and I guess I wasn't very good at turn-based strategy at the time. (Now I find the game to actually be pretty easy on the beginner mode.) Anyway, gotta definitely play the sequel soon. Just booted it up the other day, and didn't remember the opening at all. It's possible I've never played it before.
Great content! Because of your videos I started looking for PC-88 games on the Switch and they have quite a few of them. No PC-98 games though, but hopefully Nintendo will be able to add some eventually.
Glad to see I'm not the only one who loves this game! Super fun gameplay and the combat animations are gorgeous. As for disk 8 not working, the passing of time is kind to nothing and no one. Old hardware and software breaking down has been the reason for some questionable purchases of mine, like my recent purchase of a Wonderswan which I had wanted for years. There's no good reasoning, not many games I'm interested in, but the console is so unique and I wanted to play it before it's too late. All those devices are now on borrowed time, and unfortunately, so is your PC-98. All the better then that you take your time to show off these games and the original hardware while it's still possible.
Also humorously that Lenovo mouse is at least 10 years old, since it has their older logo which they changed in 2015 but also it's the older style shell of their cheapo bundled in optical mice which they changed to a more rounded shape a couple years before that. But I guess it's more about use than age. I know for some old mice for the Amiga for example you can get replacement insides to convert them to optical mice, but iirc you don't really care about that since you like to be able to use the same peripherals with all your old computers for space saving reasons.
I would say it's more helpful to mention any English patches _before_ you get into the spoilers. That's usually the key detail of whether I'll play through it or not, or would even be able to understand the story if I did. If a patch isn't out yet, even for a game I want to play, I'll probably have forgotten a lot of the story details by the time one does come out, if ever. Even so, I appreciate you labeling the spoilers. I know too many other channels that get into deep spoilers with no warning to the point that their videos are basically unwatchable to learn about something new.
Very cool video. I have always admired these old types of PC games. Something about their simplicity and genuine craftsmanship is just simply endearing.
I never heard of this game before, but it looks awesome!! This is one of the many reasons I love this channel so much, it helps me discover new fantastic IPs to explore!
What a batshit insane plot this one has. Re: your question, I like that you have a warning sign for spoilers but no, I'd never even dream of playing this one. While it's a bit too "out there" for me, I applaud how original it seems to be and I lament the fact that in the current industry this kind of experimental game is nowhere to be seen. Sure, there are tons of indie games but most of those are nothing like this game.
Trust me, it isn't nearly as intimidating as you think. Most PC-98 games can be easily emulated using pre-installed hard drive images like the one I showed for Metajo, so you don't need to do the installation yourself. The game will just boot right up when you load the hard drive image. The reason I show the installation process is just to demonstrate what it would have been like for someone purchasing the game back in the '90s.
@@BasementBrothers I think I forgot to make a reply to this comment, or youtube ate it ?_? Either way, I mean yeah I do know of the pre-installed Harddrives and such but I would like to understand how to do it myself in case I stumble across - something that's very likely - games that aren't installed. Not to mention general navigation for potential issues that may arise. There's been moments I've been stumped by an issue that my friend whose knowledged in Japanese was able to tell me " _It wants a different disc in_ ". One example I could say right away and also ask you right away, is that I've been unable to get any 'proper' music out of Sorcerian for PC-98 only getting bleeps and boops of PC Speaker wonders ( _Ski or Die is my favorite example of the wonders of PC Speaker Music. It ain't music unless it makes your ear bleed from a guitar riff right_ ), yet the PC-88 version of Sorcerian is exactly as one would with the wonderful music. It's led me to believe that PC-98 doesn't have the same capabilties but that sounds absurd to me, ergo I must be doing something wrong. Maybe the need to install it, or maybe I have a bad version. It's stuff like that that would make it more useful to be more comfortable and knowledged about the PC-98 systems & harddrive ^^
Yeah, I've seen games like that too. I couldn't figure out how to get the FM sound working in Xanadu Scenario II for PC-98 on an emulator either. A lot of early Falcom PC-98 games have that issue. I don't know how to get it working on an emulator I'm afraid... but on my real PC-98 the FM sound works fine. Sorcerian will sound almost exactly the same on either PC-88 or 98 when the FM sound is working.
another interesting one for PC-98! had to laugh at the translated dialogue, from what katakana I could read I think the translation checks out, haha. also some amazing music, for sure. love that FM synth!
Keep up the good work! These are the kind of games I would love to play, but I know I would never have the time or will to do what it takes to play them.
Amazing video of a game I did not expect you to cover. Anyways, the install thing is a thing for a lot of late PC98 games (1994 to 1998) and because of this I can't play games like this and Grounseed
Though I appreciate all the videos you make, I'd be interested in telling us how you ended up living in Japan, and how did you learn the language. That'd be pretty cool to see too actually. 😎
Played the game(the Trad. Chinese localized version on MS-DOS, named "Q女天使學園") 20+ years ago, never beat it because too hard for me(also, not fan of this style of battle screen representation :\). But this game did gave me heavy impressions because of the story and artwork design.
Yeah I saw that. Mobygames is an awesome database of video game information, but unfortunately oftentimes it just matches up people who happen to have the same name. I've found numerous errors on Mobygames. :(
Listening PCM samples on SSG doesn't surprise me at all, YM2203 and YM2608 (Mono and Stereo soundboard Yamaha FM Chips) have an internal YM2149F for SSG, this is the chip Wich most MSX Computers used (it's a clone of a General Instrument called AY-Something wich it's the MSX Standard PSG), in MSX there is several examples of PCM over PSG, maybe the most famous one is the Aleste 2 voices, and you can see this even in european MSX1 tapes like "oh shit!", this can be done by an undocumented way of using channel's parameters. Greetings from Spain
sometime in the middle of the video i paused it and went online looking for soundtrack rips to download, each and every one of them was recorded with a low pass filter in hoot every. damn. time.
If i had a nickel for every Japanese RPG that started with a quote from a fictional scholar, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot of money, but it's still odd that it happened twice.
Hey Basement Brothers, gotta ask, do you know if a fan remake for say an RPG Maker engine was ever done, in japanese or not, so that it would be easier to consume this game for modern PCs for example? Because I think this game deserves that, it has an RPG Maker smell to it and overall I'd really recommend the game to people and play it myself where it would be of great help if that news exists for it!
Gotta give my honest opinion here but... Yuck! The PC-98 version is the best and only version anyone needs. Games are better in their original form as intended by the original creators. Just use a PC-98 emulator.
@@BasementBrothers the issue would be the lack of a full english localization in any shape or form. Hence me wondering who owns the rights to it, or if any kinda remake etc was done in the last 20 or so years you'd be aware off.
No remakes besides the ones I showed in the video, and also a second DOS port made in China that another commenter pointed out. I think if someone wanted to localize and preserve this game for use on modern hardware the best move would be some sort of emulated version of the original PC-98 game, not a full remake. The partial English translation already available for the PC-98 game proves that the text can be cracked, so now the only obstacle to a full translation is finding someone with the localization skills willing to do the work. (Not me though!) Or I guess some company willing to fund a professional release and translation. Not sure who owns the rights though. There is still a company with the same name as the company who owned Anjin (Nihon Advance Technology Kabushikigaisha), but I'm not sure it's actually the same company. (It's a pretty generic technology company name.)
the tonal dissonance is enhanced severely by the fact that the attack animation just shows a character running away if they die which gives me cognitive dissonance watching.
When the clubs are outright killing each other for the last scraps of school budget, you know things have gotten real bad... though I'm curious now. Does the plot have like, arcs or goals for their characters, or is it mostly just silly stuff revolving around the outlandish premise? You say the game takes itself seriously, but I didn't really get much from the plot outside "schoolgirls killing each other for the sake of their club".
Hmm. There are a few character arcs, but not many. One of the characters, Noriko, will betray Mayumi at the end of the game if you've made enough decisions to upset her over the course of the game. There are also Risarisa and Kotoeri who hate each other but come to get along by the end. Still others don't really have much going on though like Marie or Takumi. Most of the plot is inter-club politics where they talk like they are warring countries or something. But that being said, the dialog isn't dry either. It's full of humor. It's a really difficult game to describe.
