[Loki Laufeyson]

Well, we want more threads about obscure games, and they aren't going to spring forth from the ether!

So, FJ is some kind of action/adventure game for the playstation.
we don't know what the aim of the game is, but it does look really nice.

i haven't played it in a long time, but this is what i (half-)remember:
-blue things on the ground give items? or sometimes instant power-ups?
-red things on the ground make you go rreally fast for a few seconds, it think?
-enemies attack you, you can attack back. i think defeated enemies sometimes drop items too?
-compass things on the ground let you teleport to other areas

so let's play this game, and share knowledge (and maybe screenshots?)!
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[Swimmy]

Roger dodger! Let's piece this thing together. I'll post intro shots so folks who can read Japanese can help out.
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[Deets]

I remember trying this game out on a recommendation from an old axe thread or similar. Pretty neat game!

[Swimmy]

I don't read or speak a lick of Japanese, so this is all a big mystery to me. I uploaded pictures of the text from the intro, but who cares about that?



During the voiceover in this part, the big guy asks a question and the little guy, our hero, responds "Keiji," which is his name I think, since the big guy then repeats it.



After the intro we're dumped in this desert town. The controls work like this:
Hold X to run.
R1 or L1 + Square to shoot. You must be locked onto an enemy for it to hit, I think, and the first gun you start with is very short range, so battles involve trading blows.
R2 and L2 strafe. This is mostly useless.
Triangle and Start open the menu, which shows a map (the same one as in the screen corner) and some other stuff I don't understand.
Select does nothing that I can tell. I thought I heard a noise when I pressed it once, but it didn't happen again.

You can only point yourself in 8 directions, the game will completely skip all the degrees in between.



These little blue thingies seem to be important.



When you pick them up, you get messages like this.



The numbers and letters change. Enemies sometimes drop them as well.



Speaking of, that there's an enemy. They are all robots that I've seen so far. You can't clear an entire map of enemies, they seem to respawn infinitely.



Occasionally a blue thingy will give you a message without any numbers or english letters. *shrug*



I thought it was cute that this one was locked in a pen.



There are transparent red spots on the ground. They seem to have different effects, some of them dangerous. I think this one teleported me, but I loaded a savestate so I could keep exploring the desert town.



These thingies are teleporters. Unlike the red transparent traps, with these you can choose a direction to go after you step on it.



I chose to go east.



This took me to an ice town, which I explored thoroughly. (Ignore the change in health, I died and restarted. I have no clue how to heal.)



I went back west to see if it would take me to the same map. It took me to a desert town, but the map data was wiped.



Next I went north, which took me to a grass town.



This trap froze me in place for a while. Notice the gear in the center is all iced over.



This cute lil enemy took 5 hits to kill and nearly killed me.



I went north once more, to a place the menu called water town. I couldn't find any water. I stopped after exploring it.

Things that would be really nice to figure out:
How to heal
How to save
What the blue things are for
How to fight robots without getting really beat up

The rest of my screenshots are here.
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[Booter]

this is looking pretty hot.

[Deets]

If I recall correctly, picking up the Drum items (the ones with 01, 02 after their names) fills in info in your sub menu compendium, which gives you info about the world/gameplay. I seem to remember the different areas being randomly laid out each game, and you're searching for important items across all of them. Something along those lines. A lot of the items you're picking up in those screenshots (a "necroburst", it looks like) should be equippable or usable from the sub menu.

[Loki Laufeyson]

yeah, and some of the things the blue pyramids give you heal you and refill your ammo.

in the old thread, someone mentiond something about building robot buddies, but i never worked that out
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[Dark Age Iron Savior]

playstation emulation is so suck. seriously, fuck emulating playstation games.

I wonder what Ancient did on this game.
I wonder what the file menu option that isn't stereo/mono is.

deets already pointed it out but basically anytime you pick up something named something like "No. G05" in a game, that's probably going to be part of a database

The sub-menu has it's own music, which is always kind of a weird choice. The beat on the opening area music is pretty choice, tho.

ZP drains as you do nothing. However, health regenerates as well. This is definitely a pseudo-roguelike.
It looks like you gain one HP every 10 seconds, but lose a ZP roughly every two seconds? I think HP might not regenerate while running.
It looks like HP won't regenerate if you have no ZP, but having 0 ZP doesn't seem to otherwise impair you.

Enemies can run out of energy to attack you, although you still take damage from running into them. That's a very curious choice as well.

Further rogue-ing things up is the red traps.
One made me slower for a while, one did damage to me, one seemed to lay more traps in the area (the status icon was bombs dropping), one warped me to water town.
One gave me what seemed to be a countdown that went away when I hit the warp trap. I presume it was to the death.

PALAMATA are presumably your mechs. It looks like you might have to acquire and combine items to create them (this is presumably the information given by PXX data)

I wonder what that single noise from Select means.

Okay, that's enough for now. Neat game.

fakedit: oh, Koshiro co-composed. That explains the beats.

[Swimmy]

Yeah, it looks like you can combine items in the sub-menu. There are boots and some other body-lookin' parts, so I guess that's how you build robots. The databases probably give useful info, they all have voiceovers like they're System Shock messages or something. All the ones I found are of that scientist guy talking to you.

I want to upload a full playthrough to youtube at some point, since the internet is lacking info on this game. I hope it's not so heavy I can't get to that point.
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[Swimmy]

Cave land is pretty cool. I don't think those crystals do anything.



This item reveals everything on the local map.
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[Deets]

That's the "map gear", yeah

[The Blueberry Hill]

Oh, I'm glad that this thread has come again.

[rye]

this looks like a wonderfully lonely game.

EDIT: I started translating the text in the first screenshots but got tired of looking up kanji I don't know. If someone cares I can keep at it. My japanese is pretty weak.

Have you forgotten?
Someone is waiting for you in your heart (I think the kanji is 心? hard to tell)
New but old, old but new
Important, Important memories.

if someone wants to suggest where i could get hold of this, i'd like to try taking a shot at it and uncovering further mysteries.
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[Swimmy]

If anyone who can read kanji well and wants to Skype/stream with me to tell me what the hell is going on, I would welcome it! I've gotten the hang of quite a bit. I can heal now, and mostly avoid dying. And thinking of it as a roguelike has really helped. But if I knew what my ultimate goal is, that would be swell. It's not like a roguelike like Shiren, where you just progress linearly.
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[Loki Laufeyson]

[Deets]

[Dark Age Iron Savior]

Killing enemies nets you SKILL. I dunno what it's for. At seemingly random increments between 15-30 SKILL points gained, you gain 1 MAX HP.
Like I think I got them around 15, 40, 52, 69, 95, 122, 150, 179 - something like that (I should've taken better notes)
Some enemies give more than one point of SKILL.

From J.B. and his audio logs, I guess ZP is Zenmai Points? Spring Points?
Li-Li seems kind of a whiner.
I have no idea what the H(xx) logs are.
No SILKA or KEY logs yet.

I thought traps got used up but they all seem to stay in that place. Speed traps are nice for backpedaling/strafing away from enemies, although I still think it's a big oversight to not be able to strafe while aiming. You can cheap a number of enemies around corners and even through some thin walls, but that's not always much use in the Grass Lands or when resuming your game in Night Town spawns you in a dead-end alley with an enemy bearing down on you.

If you combine two items and they don't go together, they become two trash items. Harsh.
You can hold 25 items total.

TRAPS SEEN SO FAR:
-Gotta go fast
-Must go slow
-Freeze in place
-Mine
-Death countdown (warp to another map or you die. The dying effect is really cool because you fall on your knees and all the buildings sort of melt down)
-Spawn more traps
-Erase map you've explored so far
-Warp to another area
-Raise attack power temporarily (!)
-Renders walls invisible
-Unknown 1
-Unknown 2

ITEMS AND ICON
Gear w/Pill - ZP for bots
Pill - HP for bots
Gear - ZP for you
Heart - HP for you
Green Paste - Offensive items? At least four varities. One stops all nearby (spawned) enemies in place for a while. Another halves their ZP. One puts them in "freeze" (I *think* this disables new enemies from spawning while it's active)
Red Paste - At least eight varieties. Support items? One raises max HP by 10% (nice), two do the same for ZP (one is for bots), one makes you blink rapidly (enemies will not approach or attacK), one turns you green. One turns you blue and invulnerable. Two promise 50%.....I dunno of what, or for what. One of those two seems to raise your basic attack power temporarily
Boots(?) - At least three varieties. One will automatically warp you out exit-style (with a compass). Another removes status afflictions.
Striped barrel - At least two. One is the map revealing thing.
Fists - Base robutt parts
Crossed things - Robot arms (you need the appropriate arms to use a robot)

oh dang I just built P01! Oh god I just destroyed it by accident fuuuuuuuuuuuck (don't hit triangle while examining your robots and if you do, don't say yes)
Okay I built another one and added arms.
Oh my god robot control is so weird. You hold L/R1 to switch the currently equipped robot in as if you were holding to aim your weapon.
P01 can punch, and also block instead of running.

Oh geeze, Cave Land is a claustrophobic nightmare.

wtf you can't switch to your robot or heal them when your ZP is zero aughhh
Also while you use a robot both your and the robots ZP is draining (I think).
A robot will be destroyed if it's HP reaches zero. You'll still see its stats in your menu and you can mysteriously use items on it but none of my items seems to revive it. If you build a new one you don't keep the upgrade from the old one :(

Still haven't figured out what Select does. Or why there's a "x400" by individual area maps.

the effect in Brick Maze :D

[Dark Age Iron Savior]

a few additions:
-One kind of trap makes your current robot "rust" status. I don't know what this actually does since this affected my robot before I found arms for it so I wasn't actually using it at the time. One of the barrel-looking icons cures this.
-There's another trap that messes up your controls. Also it seems there are multiple status ailment-curing items.
-Pressing Select toggles whether you'll pull out your currently equipped robot or your gun when you press L/R1
-Some of the green paste/jar items seem to destroy enemies and replace them with items
-The H(xx) INFO records seem to be semi-vital to progressing. Together they help you find certain squares on the map where high-level J(xx) data is. H01, H03 and H04 all help in this. H01 and H02 update when you get new drops of that data. I'm not sure what H02 is for, exactly.

that's enough for now.

[Booter]

um this game has some insane music
i started in the arena and then went to the blue dot and teleported 'E'
and now i am in some desolate seeming place
flamethrowering robots in the face
i healed no prob but created garbage when combining :(

[Dark Age Iron Savior]

last night, amid a number of considerably more confusing and vexing you say no to drugs, juicy j can't dreams, I had a very brief moment of relative respite during which I dreamed that I was playing this and finally came across a boss-type area as I had been half-longing for in my previous session. It was an extremely dark, oppressive construction site-looking place called "CALCULATUS", and I had spent but a few seconds there soaking in the mood when I discovered that while the enemies in this area were kinds I had seen before, they were all roughly the height of the screen and moved about three times as fast. The only refuge I had was to run under metal platforms which blocked them from moving towards me - although most of them were completely indifferent to me, insignificant as I clearly was.

[Dark Age Iron Savior]

Okay, another bit of advice: the second time you follow a set of clues from Hxx/INFO data, you are not approaching the same kind of scenario as what the previous clues led you to.

On a COMPLETELY UNRELATED NOTE, if you see a teleportation panel with a color different than you are used to, it would be a good idea to make a savestate and also to have a good amount of robot ZP refills and/or some invincibility items.

[Loki Laufeyson]

has anyone noticed this tower? at first, i assumed it was just a piece of background, until i noticed two things:
1 - it appears in multiple areas
2 - it stays in the same place. for example, you see it in the north, so you find the transporter and go north. now it's in the north east. you go north again, and it's in the east. then, instead of pressing f12 to take another screenshot, you press the power button on your keyboard and turn the computer off. bah. i didn't see it the next time i played.


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[Deets]

Pretty sure the Tower is your goal, or at least a signpost indicating your relative location in the world.

[Loki Laufeyson]

i got to the tower! it lies just off the edge of the grandmap (which doesn't loop, i you weren't already aware)

it looks like this

then that enemy killed me, so i didn't get to look around
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[Dark Age Iron Savior]

The Hxx data you sometimes get from enemy drops or ground items directly relates to the Tower (at least at first).

01 tells you roughly how many areas you are away from the Tower, but only based on the area where you picked up that data. It updates if you pick it up in a new area.
03 shows you what the specific cluster of areas around/containing the Tower are, based on the colors of the areas.
04 tells you what quadrant of the overall map the Tower is in.

I'm still not sure what 02 does, but it updates every time you get a new one like 01 does. Maybe you need it before you can actually get to the Tower (some day I might check if you can get to the Tower without picking up any H data, but that would require going through 100 areas, so....

There's no real reason to stay outside once you're there. Enemies abound and there's no real cover.

[field balm]

Beautiful looking game, especially the desert town. I am constantly surprised by the depth of the j-psx library.

more threads like this please sb!
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[Loki Laufeyson]

if you think desert town is beautiful, you should see night town!



damn
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[The Blueberry Hill]