Syd of Valis (Genesis) Playthrough
183A playthrough of Renovation's 1992 action game for the Sega Genesis, Syd of Valis.
Syd of Valis is a reimagining of Telenet's 1990 Turbografx-CD game Valis II (https://youtu.be/8nfWGPCzUxU ) that told the story of Yuuko, a Japanese high schooler-turned-scantily clad battle maiden who wielded the legendary sword of Valis to save the world from evil.
This time around the story is pretty much the same, but Yuuko has been renamed Syd, presumably as a result of the mistranslated title. The Japanese Mega Drive game was known as Valis SD ("super deformed"), with the SD signifying the shift in visual style from Valis II.
The game is a run-and-gun platformer that follows the same general flow as the Turbo game while tossing in the ability to switch armor and weapons (like in the PC versions) and to aim upward. On paper this makes Syd of Valis sound like a nice upgrade. In action, however, the game is anything but.
Valis II wasn't perfect by any means, but it had buckets of style and it played well enough to follow through on its vision. Syd of Valis does not.
The core gameplay is a mess. It has the same issues with screen-scrolling as Valis II did - the screen won't scroll until Syd is about 1/3 of the screen away from the edge, meaning that you often can't see hazards until it's too late to react to them - but the Genesis game exacerbates this issue by speeding up the gameplay, increasing the size of the sprites, and reducing the size of the playfield. Syd moves much faster than Yuuko and she's about twice the size, making her an easy target for the huge enemies. The size of the characters also makes the playfield feel cramped, a problem made worse by the needlessly huge HUD that occupies the bottom quarter of the screen.
The controls aren't so hot either. There's no sense of weight to Syd's movement and her momentum seems off, especially when jumping. She takes off like a bullet, but she gets too much hang time, making jumps feel floaty and imprecise. It's way too easy to overshoot platforms, and it's useless trying to compensate with the double jump. And good luck trying to figure out those hitboxes! Sometimes stuff makes visible contact with Syd and hits, and sometimes it doesn't. There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to it. It's not an overly difficult game, but it is an irritating, frustrating one that feels terrible to play.
And just to rub salt in the wound, it's ugly as sin. Most of the backgrounds look like they belong in a Master System game, sprite flicker is a constant issue (notice how much you can't see during that fight 8:32?), and the SD facelift is an absolute travesty.
In the grand tradition of SD spinoffs, Syd's oversized head is meant to be "cute," but the character's design is completely off-putting. She looks like a reject Funko Pop. The enemies fare a bit better (and some of the bosses are pretty cool), but overall, the game is devoid of the charm you'd expect to find in an SD production. It feels so cheap.
They didn't even bother to translate the credits, though, so it's hard to imagine that anyone invested a lot of time or effort on this one. Or maybe they were just embarrassed to be associated with such a lame game. If not, they should've been.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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