0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - Blue Breaker Egao No Yakushoku

        

Blue Breaker Egao No Yakushoku is a turn based 2D side scrolling role playing game, developed by HuneX and published by Human Entertainment for the PC-FX, Sega Saturn and Playstation. The game released exclusively in Japan on all of the previously mentioned systems.

The game released first on the 27^th of September for the PC-FX, this release of the game was published by NEC Home Electronics. The Sega Saturn release of the game came in late November of 1997, with a Playstation release the following month. The game also received a release as a part of the Major Wave series of budget titles in 2000.

 

Notable voice talent that worked on this game, Hikari Tachibana who voiced Asha in the game went on to work on the Power Stone games, as well as lending her voice to two Legend of Zelda games, in 2002’s Wind Waker and 2007’s Phantom Hourglass, most recently she worked on Hyrule Warriors Legends.

Wakana Yamazaki has had a long career in the video games industry, lending her voice talents to many games over the years since her first credit back in 1992. One of her most prolific roles is that of Ayane in the Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive games. more recently she has been working on the Samurai Warriors series voicing the characters of Okuni and Nene.

Kumiko Watanabe has also had a long career in the video game industry, providing her vocal talents since 1993, in 2000 she voice Ursula in Breath of Five IV, she also worked on the 2002 release Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter. More recently she worked on Dynasty Warriors Gundam 3 and Gundam Reborn voicing the character of Katejina Loos, she is also credited for Breath of the Wild in 2017.

 

Jūrōta Kosugi has a long and extensive list of games he has worked on, these include the Power Stone games from 1999 and 2000, the Samurai Warriors series, Jak and Daxter The Lost Frontier, Assassins Creed II, the Naruto Shippuden series and most recently Fire Emblem Heroes in 2017.

Other notable mentions include Jōji Nakata who voiced Sorean in 2010’s Xenoblade Chronicles, Aigol in SoulCalibur V, Bravely Default, Resident Evil Revelations 2, as well as Persona 5 and Nier Automata. Another notable voice actor is Hidenari Ugaki who voices Goro Majima in the Yakuza series.

Blue Breaker Egao no Yakusoku is an RPG but not your traditional RPG, Blue Breaker while having many RPG elements, also crosses into other genres. With your usual and traditional RPG elements such as town and dungeon exploration and party based combat, but with an addition of a love adventure as well

The love elements to the game are affected by your behaviour towards the girls in your party, with your behaviour influencing the games story, the main story of the game is a branching one, with events in the game world appearing depending on the progress you have made with your female companions.

 

Typical RPG elements will help to influence your relationship with the girls, for example if you get into too many fights the girls will become tired, if you issue too many orders to one or more of the girls while in combat they will become displeased. Another element that can affect your companions are internal conflicts within the party.

The game has a days of the week/protector mechanic, for this for six of the seven days of the week a protector god watches over that particular day, each of these protectors has a specific element that they are attributed to, on the particular day the magical element associated with it will be more powerful.

The seventh day of the week has no protector, on this day you will not be able to use your magical abilities or special techniques, also the points in which you raise your Experience level cannot be found on this day. The protector elements are Light, Fire, Water, Wind, Earth and Darkness.

 

When beginning the game you will be faced with the decision of choosing a protector, this decision will determine your status attributes and what magic you begin the game with, this will also determine which day of the week you will be strongest on.

 For example if you choose the protector Noorisu who is the protector of light, you will be most powerful on a Monday and strongest against Darkness, while choosing Ouga the protector of Wind, you will be strongest on a Thursday and strong against the Earth element, the wind Protector will also give you a stat boost to you speed stat.

Controls for the game are very basic with the D-Pad used for movement, as well as movement between actions and answers. To select the desired action or answer the action button is used this is the Circle button, you can also pause the game by pressing the Start button.

The game world is almost all fully accessible from the beginning of the game, the player navigates Kain from place to place around the world, connecting the various places you can visit are flat fields, this is where combat takes place, with enemies popping up randomly in front of him, Kain and whichever companions are currently with you will battle the enemies.

The games main protaganist is Kain, a young warrior who is sent on a mission by his father to stop a nefarious Dark Lord that is threatening peace across the land. As a right of passage to become a warrior Kain will not only have to stop the Dark Lord but also his warrior initiation can only happen when he find true love and marries her.

With this game being a Japanese only release there are no critic reviews for the game available, so we will be heading to GameFAQs for their user ratings. We find the game currently sitting at an average user rating of 3.58/5 from a total of 13 user ratings.

Taking a closer look at the games users ratings we find the game rated pretty highly with users, with all bar one of the users rating the game at a 3/5 or higher. The single user who did not rate the game in this range gave it a pretty poor rating or a 0.5/5.

Of the higher rated user ratings we find one user gave the game a 3/5, we find a decent chunk of users rating the game at a 3.5/5, while we see a majority of users rating the game at a 4/5, the final user rated the game at an impressive 5/5.

Next we move on to the game difficulty where we again find 13 users rating this category, we see that a large majority of these users found the game to have just the right difficulty level. We find three user found the game to be on the tough side, while the last remaining user found the game to be unforgiving, averaging out this comes to a just right to tough difficulty level.

Lastly we have the game lifespan, here we find a total of 9 users rating this category, we find that all 9 users spent a good amount of time playing the game, with the minimum about of time spent with the game coming in at 20 hours.

We find that three users spend around 40 hours with the game, and another two users spent and impressive 60 hours playing Blue Breaker Egao No Yakushoku. The final batch of three users spent a whopping 80 hours playing the game, averaging out this comes to around a 59 hour lifespan.

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, where unsurprisingly this Japanese only release is not available or even listed. The same goes for Retrogames.co.uk, so we will quickly move on to eStarland.com where we find the Playstation version of the game is not available or listed.

They do have the Japanese Sega Saturn version of the game, with two copies currently on offer. The first of these copies is a complete used copy of the game which can be picked up for $8.50. The second copy that is on offer is a new copy of the game, this new copy can be picked up for $17.95.

 

Next we have Amazon.com where we don’t find the game listed, we do find the Major Wave Series release of the game listed but this game is currently listed as being unavailable. I also checked the co.uk version of Amazon as well without any luck.

 

As a last hope we head over to Ebay.com where we do find a single copy of the game listed, this copy which comes in good condition and is priced at $6.50 with a standard shipping fee of $6.50 bringing the total to $13. if you are wanting expedited shipping the cost of this will be $18 bringing the total to $24.50

Written by

P J Gibbon