Canon - Legend of the New Gods Reviews

Behold: it's Taiwanese Shining Force! Greatest SRPG of a generation? Hardly. But for what it is, it's a solid game. This is a 1996 bootleg title, originally for the Sega Genesis, made in Taiwan by an obscure studio by the name of "Chuanpu Technologies" and localized recently by Piko. Astute followers of fan translations will recognize a familiar face behind the programming - "D," who also worked on the English Der Langrisser translation back in the 2000s. I always appreciate the effort that goes into localizing these obscure, otherwise-forgotten pieces of gaming history. Fan translators are the unsung heroes of the gaming industry! Fengshen Yingjiechuan (I'll just call it "Canon" from now on, I suppose) utilizes the same fundamentals as Shining Force: grid-based, initiative-based combat with things like basic attacks, item usage, and spells with similar AoE ranges. Compared to Shining Force however, Canon gives you far fewer options for party building. To put things in perspective, your party size is 10 for the final boss, and you have 12 units from which to select. Compare this to SF1, which gave you 12 slots and 30 playable characters... well, technically 29 because nobody really uses Jogurt, but anyway... Canon did away with the exploration bits and instead linear-ized the experience. No shops, no secret villages, just battles and dialogue. On the bright side, the battles are mostly good. You have chests sprinkled in most battles to provide for some secondary objectives. You have level design which encourages you to use fliers, while not making them overpowered - a rather difficult feat, I might add. You have multi-level battles, where you'll need to conserve your Spell Points and keep your characters alive throughout several different rooms of the same dungeon. This was a nice twist, and something which Shining Force didn't really do until SF3. Come to think of it, Canon feels much more like SF3, rather than the earlier SF titles, in terms of design philosophy: multi-phase battles, more restrictive party building, harder base difficulty, HP-sack bosses, etc. There are minor flaws here and there. Chests towards the endgame are pointless because they all give you a generic "Elixir of Unity," which is the Canon equivalent to a SF Healing Seed. Certain bosses are not too challenging. There's no way of viewing enemy stats (beyond HP and SP), which can be annoying. There's a weird bug where text boxes will cause characters to flash on the screen. And maybe it's just me, but I thought all the Chinese names got a bit confusing, so I would've appreciated seeing character portrait boxes on screen for whomever is talking. I can mostly forgive the game of these flaws due to the indie nature of it; I counted approximately 10 names total in the credits. One thing which I will say is that the infinite reinforcements can get really dangerous. Perhaps it could be said that the infinite reinforcements are frustrating, but I would say it makes the game challenging in a good way. Canon generally made me think more than most Shining Force games do, and that's a good thing. At any rate, if things are too difficult, it's always possible to grind, given that your levels + EXP will persist even if you fail a battle. Canon's story is loosely adapted from "Investiture of the Gods," which is a mythologized version of the Zhou Dynasty's beginnings. Compared to all the Japanized medieval fantasy stuff, it's a refreshing change of pace, even if it ultimately boils down to the predictable "defeat the evil empire and big bad" setup towards the end. There's something distinctly Chinese about Canon's storytelling and graphics, and I like it. (On a side note: wouldn't it be neat to have all sorts of other ethnic SRPGs, like ones with Indian, African, or Mesoamerican settings for instance?) One more thing to note: the Steam description says it's 30+ hours of gameplay, but I beat the game within 14 hours. There's not much replay value either, given the limited party building... nor is there a difficulty selector, or any postgame content. Still, for the price point, it's a fair value IMO. It's a real shame how geography and timing screwed over this game. Had this game been released in Japan or in the west in 1996, I reckon it would've done fairly well. But because it was a bootleg Taiwanese game, it was forever doomed to obscurity. Don't let its unknown status fool you - this is a good game, and a strong recommendation for anyone who's looking to scratch that Shining Force itch. Between this, all the mainline SF games, fan-mods, the 2 Feda games, and the Arc the Lad series, there's more than enough SF to go around, and I'm happy that all these games exist.

• Canon has the turn system of Shining Force, the graphic style of 16-bit Square RPGs and funny death screams like Langrisser 1. • The story is a liberal adaptation of the chinese novel Investiture of the Gods, and has much of the tropes and issues of chinese literature. • The game can be fairly long, and a lot of battles overstay their welcome, the game is a hard recommendation for anyone, it’s not a bad game but 30 hours of “Meh” is too much for the couple of memorable moments in the game. Canon, originally called Fengshen Yingjie Chuan, was an unlicensed game for the Sega Genesis, developed in Taiwan by Chuanpu Technologies and published in 1996. The game was translated to english by Super Fighter Team for a physical release during the mid 2000’s with apparently little success, since information about that release is scarce. Now published by Piko Interactive, the game released on Steam late into the 2020 as a Rom packed with the Mednafen emulation core. This time the game finally has a chance of finding fans and personally I have to say I have been wanting to play this game in english for a really long time, was the wait worth it? Keep on reading to find out. The games begins with a scene setting up the events of the game and then changes to a character roll, from the start we can see the game has some nice looking art style, the sprites are big and cartoony and use balloons to express emotions making the sprites feel more alive, even when the game lacks any kind of character portrait and the text boxes are as plain as they can be. On the negative side we can see one of the first glitches of the game, when the text box gets full the sprites disappear for a second, is not game breaking, but it is a bit distracting. Also sometimes the text just goes too fast in scenes that play automatically. During the game, everything happens on the map, like a top down Tactics Ogre or FFT, the maps have a classic RPG design so the character always fit in the same scale, and the UI is minimal but one thing I like is the circular command selection, a refreshing take on something that most of the time is just a list of commands. The battle effects displayed on the map don’t have a lot of variety outside of spells, every characters has one default attack animation, and every enemy screams and explodes when killed… That scream gets into your head after a few hours and get funnier the more I think about it. On the positive side, every playable character has a unique design with his own specific spells, and enemy variety is not too shaby, with some interesting design here and there, like Shrimp Soldiers for example. The game plot is based on the traditional chinese novel Investiture of the Gods (aka as Fengshen Bang) and tales the tale of the end of the Shang Dynasty. The plot begins when a spirit fox takes the shape of Dan Yi (Daji) the new wife of King Zhou and encourages his iron rule of the land, so the Goddess Nu Huo (Nüwa) send his two human servants to reincarnate in the land to stop this. Our journey begins with a 15 year old Lin Yun, that after getting confused with a bandit ends up in jail and gets in contact with the rebels that oppose King Zhou, and from there starts his uphill battle against the forces of the King, Spirits and Demons while prophecies start to take shape around him and his role in the war. The dialogue of the story has some humorous bits, specially the banter between Lin Yun and Yan Rong, the scenes of the reckless Nou Sha or the one with the weird Lie Zhen. The development of the plot goes easy at first but once characters start being introduced there is a lot of names and titles flying around, it never gets confusing to the point of making no sense, but more than once I was thinking to myself: who or what are they talking about now? To make things worst there is the eventual name change of character when they get a new title or position. Overall the story was enjoyable but not that memorable, with the exception of a few scenes that come to mind and this is more for how weird or funny they are than for their importance to the plot. For example at one point a mute character starts talking and his companion explains that all along there was a prophecy that in the presence of the love of his live he would talk for the first time… It was so out of the blue and after the fact, that all I could only say was “Yeah, that is chinese folklore for you”. Now let’s talk about the meat of the game, how it plays. The game uses an initiative-based turn system, were the order in which the units take their turn is determined based on their Agility stat, after all units takes their turn, the cycle starts again, this is pretty much the same as how Shining Force handled turns. Usable items are plentiful and equipment while limited, starts appearing in the late game. One issue that struck me with the game is that there is no way to check enemy stats, you can check the stats of your units during battle but not the enemies so I have to think this was a choice made on purpose. Personally I don’t mind, certainly it made encountering new enemies a situation to be cautious, but the same enemy always works in the same way so once you know how an enemy works you can apply the same tactics to deal with it every time. The map design is actually pretty interesting and it shows thoughtful choices by the developers, enemies are positioned carefully and chests on the map offer secondary objectives to spice the battles. One thing to notice is the implementation of battles that take place over different maps, for example you enter a cave and have to make your way through different floors until you reach the boss at the end, in each floor the objective is not to defeat your enemies but to reach the door to the next floor, so fighting or rushing to the exit is totally your choice, in this fights you can also go back the way you came to make enemies appear again, this is useful to get some more levels and healing items before getting to the boss, but it also makes this battles more tiresome since normally you could only save before entering the first floor, this is not an issue with emulation since it offers quick saves. But this is another interesting thing, if you lose a battle, you go back to the preparation screen and you keep all the experience and items you got before losing, so even if you lose it’s not wasted effort. Most of the bosses in the game are not that interesting, sometimes they have some gimmick like being immune to magic or physical attacks, but most of the time they juts have a huge HP pool and AoE spells making the fights a battle of attrition, on the other hand while the final boss has all of the above it also has a clever design for the whole map so the fight actually involves some strategic elements and not just a stat check to see if you can kill him before he kills you. One particular thing to talk about is the technical side of the game, there are some bugs present, the text bugs is one, another is that you can’t use the in game saves so you have to use the emulator quick saves to keep your progress. The emulation options are also pretty limited, you have your integral scaling window size choices, full screen, and the choice between raw pixels or bi-linear filtering, 3 quick save slots and that's it. In conclusion, after a long 40 hour journey through chinese folklore I feel pretty good about finally playing this game to the end in english, but more than a few time I felt that the multi floor battles prolonged to much to the point of having to use quick saves to get a rest for the day. The game was enjoyable for what it is, a bare bones SRPG with some interesting ideas, but it’s hard to recommend to people that don’t have a previous history with the game, the only redeemable thing is that it was developed for the Genesis which had a really small SRPG library but I’m not sure a SRPG fan can have the luxury of being a Sega purist