looked up a dude playing through it on youtube, oh god i forgot how big he is on the screen he's literally twice the size i remembered...and unless this guy is sequence breaking, like the first twenty minutes of the game are apparently walking through a forest where there's literally three different tree bitmaps and the trees can damage you if you run into them
the dude has one walking animation which is the same loop for his legs only, his upper body doesn't move unless you run
that said the LoD system is actually kinda impressive for the open world areas all things considered especially since this was made in 1994-1995, it's only when polygon buildings or something that's not a faked 3D sprite come on screen that it tanks the framerate massively and stuff starts popping in all over...a lot of the fog actually seems to be more for spooky effect than hiding stuff
when he goes in the first dungeon/mansion the camera is right in the dude's back and he covers 90% of the screen and he couldn't move forward until he slowly shifted the dude around 90 degrees and discovered there was a big ass statue right inside the door he couldn't walk through...really there seems to be a massive inconsistency in what can be walked through or interacted with or not, chairs, NOPE, big ass table, YEP...he winds up in a room where there's a shit load of the stuff you can't walk through all over the place that reminds me of the whole inconsistency in the randomness i mentioned, later he enters a room where there's literally nothing but an healing herb lying on the ground in it
but to heal you can "nap" which involves the guy just standing in place with his arms folded
the framerate indoors is at least half to a third what it is outside i assume because of the polygon walls, even though your view distance is never more than 20 feet, at least i assume that's the case since this came out well before even Sega figured out how to draw polygons properly on the Saturn...and i'm betting this runs entirely on just one of the CPUs...the boss fight against the Vampire is running at like a really choppy 10 fps because of all the polygons (literally tens to maybe a hundred of them, mostly to build the walls plus the steps up to the Vampire's bitmap Throne) even though there's nothing else in the room and just the one enemy sprite, while outside they can draw like thirty trees and five enemies and the far away background and it seems closer to 20 to even 30 fps at times...the second dungeon he plays through has a view distance that cuts off after maaaybe ten feet for darkness but it's destroying the framerate because of all the not visible walls to make up the maze...to where like the fog i think this might not actually be to improve performance but to make the dungeon scarier
armor, shields and such actually displays overtop the dude's sprite but when you come back from the menus it has a pause for a couple seconds to reload them back in over the character (yessss)
narrator guy says everything you drop stays where you drop it, which is, like wow actually...he also finds an item called LAMP OF DARKNESS which the explanation says nothing about, so he just uses it because why not, and it essentially turns the gamma down to about 10% so you can't see anything
amazing random item to put in a game
he tries to fight a will-o-wisp in the dungeon but after readjusting his position four times he can't line up the animation of his attack with the distance to the enemy
only 13 people made this game based on mobygames (really about four dudes did all the true work..and they outsourced for the hero's sprite footage!) and all their experience prior was making Golf games for the 3DO which seems like the ideal team to make a massive 3D RPG for the Saturn's launch and after this they made a Saturn Golf game before scattering to the winds
it's probably this random youtube guys laid back voice and the fact that he's trying to make the game seem interesting (like it does actually do a decent job of selling the mystery of the world even if that might be a byproduct of there being no information outside the text on items, signs, etc. like a proto-Metroid Prime way to telling the story) while making fun of it but it's sorta drawing me into this, i obviously wasn't mature enough in 1995 to embrace the jank like i am now and this is some serious delicious jank i'm seeing
i wonder how this runs on the emulators, there is no way it's one of the Saturn games i kept (he says while ignoring that he just got
Rise of the Tomb Raider from Humble Monthly, recently bought
MGS V finally and installed
Hollow Knight this week)
