0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - Black Matrix OO

     

Black/Matrix OO is an anime style tactical fantasy role playing game, and a remake of the 2002 Game Boy Advance release Black/Matrix Zero. The game was developed by Flight Plan, and published by NEC Interchannel. The game releases exclusively in Japan on the 13^th of May 2004 for the Playstation. A North American release of the game was rumoured, however it never came to pass, some rumours suggest it was canned due to the games religious themes.

Notable people who worked on the game, Toshio Tabeta had a long career in the industry, dating back to 1983, when he worked on Pac-Man on the programming side of things. He has mostly worked as a Producer during his career, working on games like Down Load, Darius Alpha and Darius+, Strider, The Dragon Knight series as well as the Black/Matrix series. In 2006 Tabeta founded the publisher Prototype, he has also worked for computer magazine Monthly MyCom.

Masami Watanabe who worked as a Producer on the game, has had a long history with the Black/Matrix series. Another series he has worked on over the years is the Strategy RPG series Summon Night, as well as working on Dragon Ball Z Legendary Super Warriors in 2002, and Eternal Poison in 2008. Asuka Suzuki, Hirokazu Kawase, Shinya Ishihara, Hironori Takano also all featured heavily in the development of the Summon Knight series during their careers.

 

Black/Matrix OO is a port of the Game Boy Advance game Black Matrix Zero, the game was reworked and the main story expanded for this re release, the game also received additional endings for the games story as well as a new game + mode, and several new mini games.

The main story of Black Matrix Zero/OO is set in the same fictional world as the original Black Matrix., but Is set hundreds of years prior to the events of that game. The world is inhabited by three divisions of humankind that share the world, the white winged people, called the angels, the black winged people known as the devils and the wingless people.

 

Those who have wings have great power and pay little mind to the wingless ones, the angles rule the world in the shadows via the religious organization called the Prodevon Church, which maintain control and the ignorance of the wingless people.

The main protagonist of the Black Matrix series is a wingless boy named Cain, he is a persistent character in the series who opposes the Angels in order to rescue his friend Matia. In the original version of Black Matrix Zero gets his wings you could choose  between black (demonic) or white (angel) wings, the re release only allows you to choose the angel wings.

 

This section will not be very comprehensive, it has proved difficult to find a good solid source of information on the game, only the general basic information being available. The game is a turn based strategy role playing game, when you have entered combat the player navigates their party across an isometric battle screen, similar to Final Fantasy Tactics, unlike Tactics the screen can not be rotated, but positions enemies and the general layout of the battle area result in this not being an issue.

When combat starts you can choose any of you available characters to move, when you decide on which character you want to move, the tiled combat area will highlight the area you can move your character to in a blue colour.

 

When you move over one of your characters their status screen will be shown on screen, this small status screen has your characters portrait, along with their current level, Hp, Pp, attack stat and magic stat. When characters attack each other damage that has been inflicted is shown as a number appearing above the character, special abilities consume the Pp stat.

 

Movement is vital in this game, like many tactical RPG’s especially when facing large numbers of enemies, if you are too slow to spread your forces away from your starting position you run the risk of being boxed in by the enemies. Certain allies have access to magic attacks some of which can affect multiple enemies (See gameplay video).

Basic controls for the game, general movement is done with the D-Pad, selecting actions is done with the circle button, while cancelling an action is done with the X button. To access the action menu the L1 shoulder button is used, to view your characters status page the square button is used, the menu can be accessed with the triangle button and finally the select button ends your turn.

This being a Japanese only release and a very late release in the original PlayStation’s lifecycle we don’t find any critic reviews available for the game. As a result we must head over to GameFAQs for their user ratings, here we find the game sitting at an impressive average user rating of 4.13/5, from a total of 12 user ratings.

Taking a closer look at the user reviews we find Black/Matrix OO didn’t rate lower than a 3/5 from it’s user ratings, and only one user rated it at this score. Another single user rated the game at a 3.5/5, we find that four users rated the game at a 4/5 while the largest majority, a total of six users rated the game at an impressive 4.5/5.

Moving on to the games difficulty level, we find just 9 users have rated this game, and we find a large percentage of the users found the game to have just the right difficulty level. Two users found the game to be on the tough side, while the remaining user rated the game as having an easy difficulty level. Averaging out the game rates as having just the right difficulty level.

Lastly we have the games lifespan, this category only has seven user ratings, with all four spending a good amount of time with the game. The minimum amount of time from one user was 20 hours, another two users spend 40 hours playing the game.

The largest chunk of users spent an impressive 60 hours with the game while the remaining user spend a massive 80 hours playing Black/Matrix OO. Averaging out the games lifespan comes in at around the 52 hour mark.

This is the part of 0 to Z where is visit four 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, Ebay has now been dropped unless the game is unavailable at other retailers.

 

So lets get down to business with Gamedude, who unsurprisingly don’t stock this Japanese only release, the same goes for Retrogames.co.uk. So we will quickly move on to eStarland.com where we don’t find the Playstation version available, or even listed. We do find some other entries in the Black Matrix series, these are for the Dreamcast, Sega Saturn and Playstation 2.

 

We move on to Amazon.com in the hopes of finding some copies of the game, we don’t find the standard release of the game listed on the site, the limited edition release is however listed. Prices for this edition start at $26.02 for a good condition copy of the game, for just one cent more you can get a very good condition copy of the game, two copies are priced at this point and comes with free shipping.

A large number of used copies peak at around the $39 mark, with a few copies a few dollars more than this, one used copy as usual is priced beyond this point, with that copy coming in at over the $55 mark. It is new copies of the game that are far more abundant.

New copy prices start at $53.74, this copy like many of the new copies on offer come with free shipping, there is also a large number of new copies closely priced to this one with around just $3 covering them. Prices for new copies steadily rise up to the $70 mark, with a few copies priced beyond this point the new game prices for Black/Matrix OO limited edition coming in at $110.49.

Written by

P J Gibbon