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Hello gang! After getting back from vacation, it's business as usual around here. That said, "Revengers of Vengeance" is one of the oddest titles released from the odd development team over at Micronet, released in 1994 (published in the U.S. by "Extreme Entertainment Group"). For those unfamiliar with them, they were founded in the early 80s by Akihiko Murakami and released a couple dozen games over a fifteen year period, though most were commercially unsuccessful. They are best known for publishing the Gen/MD version of "Raiden Trad" and their "Warrior of Rome", "Marionette Handler" and "Gotha" series (the last of which had one International release with Gotha II, named "Heir of Zendor" for Sega Saturn). Their games typically receive mixed to negative reception, such as this game, their Black Hole Assault / Heavy Nova titles (which garnered extremely low ratings), A/X-101 (which garnered EVEN lower ratings than BHA/HN) and more, but I'll give them credit: their games did experiment with a variety of ideas, and a lot of their games released outside Japan were released in fairly low quantities, so they retain some market value.

"Revengers of Vengeance", known in Japan as "Battle Fantasy", is one of their most ambitious titles. Being a cross between a Simulation, RPG, Shooter and Fighting game, the title garnered a very small cult following with one of the main characters, Rapier/Lepiear (known in the U.S. as Organa) being featured in the cross over Doujin fighter, Cross Theater (and its earlier iteration, Cross Burlesque). One main mode was cut from the International release which was more or less a series of tutorials (replaced with several configurable options), though you weren't really missing out on anything as it was novel at best. The bulk of the game is fighting, but the main mode features a JRPG quest structure where you have a hub town to purchase items, talk to shop owners, learn secrets, accept quests, train stats, gain levels and a 200 day deadline to defeat the main antagonist, Venum. Each character has their own little story and the cutscenes, for what they are worth, are a little odd depending on the character, but done reasonably well overall. One or two characters even have surprising endings.

The concept is actually very interesting, but the execution of each component is significantly flawed in one way or another. The bulk of the game, the fighting, is unimpressive; the graphics are fairly poor (though a few of the characters have some impressive scale like Psybart), the attacks are executed either slowly or with odd delays and absurd pauses, some leaving you completely open to counterattacks, and the main quest requires you to grind quite a bit to beat certain opponents, which would be fine if there was incentive to do so... some characters are easy to beat even with low stats and offer better rewards than really strong or cheap opponents, and you're not required to face every character. The game's performance is actually tied to the "realistic shadows" the game uses -- if you turn them off in the options, the game runs considerably faster, though it feels more like it's just sped up than actually running smoother.

What's worse than that is that you can strengthen stats at the gym, but this raises some and lowers others and costs stamina, which affects performance, but leveling has no such drawback (stats are random) and you can use items as much as you want to boost parameters. If this was Princess Maker, it would be a prerequisite, but since you have other means to raise stats, it's pretty useless, unless you want to speed up the in-game clock. Worst of all, the quests you can take are shooter mini-games that are easy, reward you with lots of cash, give a ridiculous amount of experience, and don't take much time from the in-game clock, making you not even want to fight to grind gold/exp or train at the gym which costs money and a lot of time with little return on the investment. After a certain point, you can buy an item to access the main hideout of Venum and his overly cheap subordinate, Jado (or get vague hints from the Fortune Teller if you want it dropped from an opponent, which is pointless).

Other modes feature a standard one-on-one fighting mode and a strange mode where players could set up characters and watch them automatically duke it out with CPU with customized parameters, which is about as fun as watching paint dry. The only things of merit are the music which is decent and the fact that "AZY" was one hard-working individual, integrating nearly everything into the game, flawed as it is. This is a video showing different things in the game as well as the hidden (and untranslated) mini-game, "Black Ball Assault 2". Enjoy.

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