Space Fantasy Zone (PC Engine CD/Beta) Subtitled Playthrough - NintendoComplete
353A playthrough of NEC Avenue's nearly-complete 1991 beta for the PC Engine Super CD-ROM2, Space Fantasy Zone.
Played through on the normal difficulty level. I have translated and subtitled in English the shop dialogue and the ending.
The first visit to the shop (following the Stage 1 boss) is the only time I subtitle the dialogue with the shopkeeper. The only time it changes is to show item descriptions, and the items are easy to figure out anyway from the English words and pictures.
This is an extremely cool and well-beyond obscure PC Engine exclusive (it will, however, play just fine on a TurboDuo or a TurboGrafx CD system with a System 3.0 card loaded) that was developed by one of NEC's internal teams.
It was canceled before release, though as you can see the game is all but finished. It seems to be lacking only sound for the intro and a few other bells and whistles. According to the (extremely limited) information I could glean from Japanese forums and blogs, only a few prerelease review copies were ever sent out.
Anyways, the game itself is a spin-off/mash-up of Sega's Space Harrier and Fantasy Zone arcade games - more specifically, it's a Fantasy Zone-themed Space Harrier game that ties itself to the Fantasy Zone story. I don't know if it's canon, but it lines up well with all of the other FZ games (check out Hardcore Gaming 101's article on the series).
The Japanese websites all seem to agree on one of two reasons that the game was probably shelved - either Sega didn't want the game with their original IP released on a system that would be competing directly with their own soon-to-launch CD addon, or they were worried that the PC Engine's lack of hardware sprite scaling would make the graphics unacceptably choppy. As you can see here, that's not really a huge issue. This is extremely impressive for the PC Engine, even taking the SuperCD2/TurboDuo's expanded memory into consideration. It's not as smooth as the 32X Space Harrier port, but it's also four years older and running on much weaker hardware. As much of a die-hard fan as I am of the Turbo, I was shocked by the quality of the game's graphics. The Turbo is, at its heart, an 8-bit machine after all.
Space Fantasy Zone is an extreme rarity even in Japan, so don't be surprised if you've never heard of it before. It's too bad that this hasn't had much exposure. It's a great title that, though short, is super good-looking and smooth, has a good challenge (at least in the later levels), and uses a lot of remixes of classic tracks from the two games it smashes together. It's insanely fun, and the cutesy graphics add a lot to it. If you have a way to play it, whether on real hardware or an emulator, I'd recommend downloading the CD image and trying it for yourself. It was never sold, so it's not like you'd be depriving anyone of potential revenue :)
Im really excited to share this one, so I hope you enjoy it and that you find the translation useful!
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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