0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - Alice in Cyberland

      

Alice in Cyberland ( ありす イン サイバーランド) is a 3^rd person Sci-fi anime style adventure game developed and published by Glams, Inc. The game was released exclusively in Japan on the 20^th of December 1996, the game was exclusively on the Playstation 1

Alice in Cyberland is a traditional Japanese style adventure game divided up into a total of 5 chapters, each chapter begins with Alice and her friends in Tokyo, the player is free to move about the city and talk to people, finding out information of events that are happing, eventually she will need to dive into Cyberland, which is also represented by a city.

When in Cyberland you will again be free to move around, doing so you will be able to investigate various systems in Cyberland, and looking and collecting information as you do so. Eventually you will come across enemies in the form of guard programs which must be fought, the battle system is fairly simplistic with the player having the option to either attack, defend, or change character, once the guard program is defeated the story continues.

The main part of the game is played through a dialogue screen where the player chooses from the available conversation options, like most interactive games the player usually has between two and four dialogue options to choose from. The correct answer will continue the dialogue and interaction, while the wrong answer won’t necessarily kill you it will lead you wayward and down a route of chance against your opponents.

In Tokyo in the 21^st century the Internet has grown to be an enormously important part of life, and a digital world called Cyberland has come into existence. The digital world is made up of 8 levels, with more important and confidential information granted a higher level, with the highest levels only accessible for those in the highest levels of government (or until someone leaves a laptop open on a train).

You play as a young junior high school student called Alice Minazuki voice by Yoko Asada, she is the daughter of one of the developers of Cyberland, her father gave her a special tool called Dive System, which allows Alice to access the deepest and darkest parts of Cyberland.

Along with her friends Reina Ohtori and Juri Yagami voice by Kae Araki and Yūko Miyamura they form the Alice-3 a team tasked with maintaining peace and order in Cyberland.

This is a very early Playstation 1 title and a Japanese only release as well, as a result critic review for this game a non existent, so we head off to GameFAQs for their user data. A total of 15 users have rated this game, with the games rating averaging out at a 3.57/5.

A big spread of users rating for this game with a majority rating the game as a very good 4/5, a few users were even more generous with their score giving the game a 4.5/5. A couple of users gave the game a 3/5 and a 3.5/5, there were a couple of lows scores which did bring the average rating down. With one user scoring the game a 2/5, while the other user scored the game a dismal 1/5.

On to the games difficulty where a total of 14 users rated this category, with over half rating the game as having just the right difficulty level, a decent chunk of users found the game easy, while a small fraction found the game on the tough side.

For the games lifespan we have a decent number of users rating this section with 12 in total, and with a wide range of playtimes as well the majority spending between 12 and 20 hours with the game. A small number spent up to 60 hours with game while a few had wrapped things up in around 8 hours, with an average lifespan for the game standing at 18 hours.

This is the part of 0 to Z where is visit five online retailers and see what the availability of the title is, and what price you would be looking at if you wanted to pick this title up, the sites that I will be using for this are Amazon.com,  eStarland.com, retrogames.co.uk and Gamedude.com I know the last one is very location specific, but from a podcast I listen to I’ve heard they have a huge stock of older games, I will also be including Ebay.com as well

So lets get down to business with Gamedude, along with Retrogames.co.uk and eStarland.com don’t stock this title no surprise really with this being a early Playstation 1 release and a Japanese only title. We now head over to Amazon.com, where the Japanese Import of the game is abundantly available, with a very good used copy of the game available from $8.97 and comes with free shipping. This converts to £6.99 in the UK, in the Euro zone countries it will cost you €7.63, while in Mexico it will set you back 158.65 Mexican Peso.

New copies of the game a quite reasonably priced with the cheapest new copy on the market for $14.56, this like many of the new copies on sale comes with free shipping. Please be aware however this game only released in Japan so you will need a Japanese Playstation 1 console to play the game.

Again Ebay.com is more expensive than Amazon, a used good quality copy of the game which comes with free international shipping as well, however it is priced at $18.70 and is over $9 more than a very good copy of the game from Amazon. While some copies are priced up cheaper once you add in the shipping costs the price quite often rockets over the $20 mark for a used copy.

Written by

P J Gibbon