Name: Appare-Den (82.50% in 4 votes)
Type: RPG
Platform: DOS
Company: TGL - Japanese
Release date: 1995
Reviewed by: Lamuness
Legend says, in anicent Japan existed a tribe of Ryu-jin. Being the most powerful living things on earth, they wanted to take the gods' place. The gods then created a enormous dragon and crushed the Ryu-jin into the underground. This enormous dragon then becomes a bunch of islands known as Japan, the Ryu-jin continued to live underground while man started to settle on the top.
A long time later, the legend is forgotten, until an evil Edo Emperor discovers that the legend is not just a fantasy, and starts to use this to fulfill his ambition of ruling the world. The hero of the story is a kid called Gento, who claims to be able to do "anything." Gento, along with his sidekick Benimaru, somehow get into this circle of events. They, with the help of various people all over Japan, aimlessly and mindlessly travel over Japan to find ancient Japanese treasures before the Edo authorities do.
Appare-den is a normal RPG game where you gather info and walk around. Even though it's a "saving the world" game, it's entirely taken in a comical way because the party is just mindless travelling the world not knowing what to do. The battles are slightly different than most RPG games. In most RPGs, a character attacks one by one in order by their agility ratings. However, in Appare-den the whole party all go together and attack at once. So the damage displayed is a total of all the attacks made. This makes the battles more realistic and can speed up battles. In addition, throughout the game there are optional quests, and most importantly, some mini games. Although these mini games are simple and difficult to control at first, they are definitely fun and adds enjoyment to the game. The game has a lot of places to explore, as well as a lot of NPCs who will join you in battles, which adds some fun to it. The game is challenging, but a bit over challenging. se when level up, character growth is so little that it makes almost no difference, and monster get stronger too quickly than Gento et al. do. The first boss will prove to be an almost impossibily for many people. By the end of the game, a minor enemy can surely kill a member in one hit, but we can't. So expect to spend some time just to level up. Graphics wise, it's TGL's Farland Story style graphics so it's nice and the SD characters and comical and cute.
Drawbacks. Level up growth is entirely random, which means u can level up but only one attribute is increased. Another issue is the difference in weapons. Some weapons have a smaller attack power but can deliever multiple hits. However, we have no idea of knowing such unless we equip them and try them ourselves. It will be better if weapons are given a much more detailed attribute info. The above issues I can live with, but the worst worst drawback is the fact that the game is way too buggy. Appare-den is prolly the most buggy game I have ever played. It crashes quite frequently, and miscalculations can be seen quite often (how come my antidote stock went from 84 to 5 all of a sudden?!). The worst bug is that the game cannot take attributes that are too big. If for example you HP is say over a certain limit the game will lag so much when u enter a room and change screen that it's almost next to crashing. And boosting up attributes is not a hard thing at all at the end of the game if you have the money (which I have a lot). So the program should take this into account but it didn't unfortunately. I almost gave up on the game when I see this issue because I cannot go on in the game at all...but eventually got a way around it and finish the game (with some consequences).
Overall, Appare-den, although old, is very fun, entertaining and challenging RPG. However, it's really sad that the game is so buggy that normal people would just give up on it. If these bugs are gone, Appare-den will be a very promising game. Assuming that you do not mind the bugs, if you are into mikos and samurais or simply ancient Japan stuff with a funny plot, then you will want to play Appare-den.
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