And why I’m glad it isn’t.
So it turns out Albert Odyssey isn’t fully translated. Big bummer; I was enjoying that one. But I’m crafty and able to switch things on the fly. There are two other series I wasn’t planning on touching during this deep dive into Enix’s forgotten back catalogue, though. What’s this Cyber Knight game?
Cyber Knight is a space exploration game. It’s somewhat open world, but there’s a clear order of operations that you’ll need to perform to reach the end of the game. A part of me wants to think of it as Metal Max in space, but the games are radically different in so many ways. It’s just the lack of hand holding, need to explore, and excessive menus that connect the two. Cyber Knight also isn’t particularly good.
The story starts off with the crew of the SS Swordfish, a spaceship in the year ~2400, blowing up a plot of land in space. Why did we blow it up? The universe will never know! After turning Rennes le Chateau into interstellar shrapnel, the crew prepares for o warp home. Before they can, they’re suddenly attacked by a squad of pirates. The captain tells his crew to ignore them, but that’s quickly proven to be the stupidest decision ever made in space. The Swordfish is forced to make an emergency jump, which could take the ship to a random location in the galaxy. Fortunately, it’s to a peaceful planet. Unfortunately, the captain died, the ship is broken, and only twenty four crew members remain alive. But we only get to meet five of them! Good news, Commander! You’re the captain now! Get us home.
The crew learns that the humans on this planet are actually from Earth as well. Their ancestors also had to make an emergency jump, wound up here, and have lived here ever since. In fact, the ship they used is still around. We explore it and find a replacement part for the Swordfish. This part allows us to warp between planets and even solar systems. Slowly. But more on that in a moment. The goal now is to return to Earth. We’ll have to traverse the galaxy, upgrade our ship along the way, and settle a group (or two) of rowdy robots that are an existential threat to the entire universe. And that’s god who told us that, not some random dude with a Russian accent.
And that traversal is where I began to hate this game. Doing anything in Cyber Knight is slower than it needs to be. In order to get anywhere, you need to long jump between systems. The planet you arrive at first is random, and there are a lot of planets out there. Only twenty one of them are actually relevant, but every system has between four to six planets. None of them are named, even if you’ve found life on it, so you’ll constantly be flipping between planets trying to find the important one. And there’s an annoyingly long visual sequence that hurts your eyes for every jump. And, for most of the game, you can only jump one system at a time. It’s not until much later that you can leap across the entire galaxy. It’s just so tedious.
And even when you land on the correct planet, there are too many menus to leave the ship and explore. Back out of the leave planet option, back out of the bridge, go to the hangar, select depart. It sounds quick enough when you read it, but in practice (and due to frequency), it’s just more drag.
Exploring is inoffensive at least. You pick two of the five other crew members to accompany you out, and all three of you pilot three of the five modules, which are giant robots. These robots are surprisingly customizable. Each module gets a varying degree of weapons, secret special optional weapons that I kept forgetting to use, and four different defensive aura fields. Weapons each have one of five damage types, and each module specializes in something different (but usually multiple). You can also equip four to five different weapons, so there’s always a way to have all of your tools. My team was Kiri and Vynd. Kiri has high attack stats, and Vynd has the best robot repair skill, which is needed on a long dungeon. Your medic skill is sufficient enough to keep the actual healer at home. They used the Rex, Winner, and Saurus, respectively. Not that it matters much, as all the characters are pretty interchangeable and don’t matter to the story. The three non soldiers each get a scene of relevancy, at least.
…But even then, there’s something annoying about combat. Firstly, it’s also slow. It’s a small tactical grid like Live a Live, but the basic attack animations are ugly and slow. Maybe if there were fewer enemies or they weren’t as tanky, it would be fine? Hell, I’d settle for a reliable way to know if they were immune to my damage types. Which brings me to my second point of contention. Harming mobs felt random. Sometimes a beam would do wonders, other times it would hit for pittance, even if they weren’t blocking. Meanwhile, bosses always hit like a dump truck going 100, but they’re also stupidly easy to trick. Just stand close and punch them. They’ll always defend and never unleash their super attack. In fact, punching things is the easiest way to kill most mobs. They don’t like being punched and will usually defend, so you’ll never take damage while whittling away their HP, if not outright destroying them. It’s just the same tactic for sixteen (in game) hours. That was point three, and here’s a fourth point. With the abundance of enemies, you’ll be spending a lot of time in combat, which isn’t super fun, and it adds to the slowness of the game. And I hear the random encounter rate is through the roof. I played an easy type mod that drastically lowered it (and boosted exp, I believe), and I’d suggest you do too. This game isn’t good enough for that nonsense. There are even fixed battles at choke points!
But it does do one thing that’s hella rad. Whenever you defeat a mechanical enemy, which is most of them, they have a chance of dropping their parts. Taking these to the lab on the Swordfish allows the crew to study them and learn new things. These are always in the form of new weapons or boosts to accuracy. I’ve read this is how you gain more HP for the modules, but I got unlucky and only found one of those. +5 HP from the start of the game is weird. They’re not particularly rare; I just didn’t want to fight. I never figured out what the human stats meant, so whatever.
Visually, the game is hideous. Every dungeon uses pallet swapped tiles or the same mechanical black.
Music is kinda catchy, but only kinda. But there isn’t much of it. A YouTube video has it just over thirty minutes. But it fits the setting well enough.
On the positive side, the galaxy is connected well, and the writing has its moments. I liked that the best weapon is optional.
There’s not a whole lot to discuss past the combat, exploration, and module customization, though. Bland characters, villains, NPCs, graphics, sound, gameplay… It’s just so… 20/50.
And yet, I kinda liked the game. Maybe I’m just embracing the fact that the reason America didn’t get all of these games is because most of them suck, and I’m allowing myself to wallow in that suck. I’m embracing the suck. I am the suck! Maybe it’s just because it’s such a unique game that’s trying something different. Did it work? No. But with some tweaking, maybe it could. It’s similar to Metal Max and Shadowrun in that vein. Not very good, but an interesting play if you’re looking for something radically different from the norm. Cyber Knight got a sequel, and a part of me wants to try it out. Maybe once my main list is finished, I’ll do it. But I need a break from all this. I need something newer, something from 2005.
Sunday, May 17, 2026
Saturday, May 9, 2026
G’day, mate!
Why was it called Astralia? And why was it awful!?
Nekketsu Tairiku Burning Heroes might go down as one of the worst games I’ve ever played. Its final score will be less than middling, and there certainly are worse games I’ve played. But this was, perhaps, the most frustrating one. The repetitive, unrewarding, and bland gameplay, without any redeeming qualities, made this an absolutely miserable experience.
The music is perfectly fine. There are four different overworld songs depending on which of the eight characters you’re playing as, but they’re not exactly memorable. Town themes are… whatever. You don’t spend much time in these places, so they leave no impact. Dungeon tracks are accompanied by the same puzzles, so your brain is turned off while you listen.
The graphics are of a similar quality. Playable character sprites look interesting, but you quickly realize they’re just borderline palette swaps. Many of their battle sprites stand and sway the same way. And I feel there’s only about six (unnamed) NPC world sprites. They add a cloak to a few in one town! Even a few generic bosses share the same knockoff Gilgamesh model. And that includes the most important one. Considering the lack of variety in towns and the limited number of dungeons, there’s no reason for this. Dungeons at least look different, but you visit all of them four times, so it doesn’t matter. They could be Tales dungeons, but you don’t want to do any of them more than you have to.
Gameplay doesn’t wow you either. You only control one person in battle. “Okay!“ I thought before playing this. “I played Emerald Dragon and loved it! This is fine.” If your person is a warrior, then all you can do is attack or use an item. “Atrushan could only attack, so NBD!“ Burning Heroes is a traditional turn based rpg… No skills, no options, no fun. Mages have access to eight spells, but there’s no memory cursor option, so it’s more efficient to just spam attack and hold down your fast forward button. The one thing to note is that you can change your battle formation. This noticeably changes your stats. Certain forms give bonuses to attack, magic, defense, or hit percentage. These would be interesting if your attacks didn’t miss so often, forcing you to only use accuracy forms, or if enemies telegraphed big moves, giving you a heads up to go defensive. Defensive forms also nerf your attack stat so much that it’s not worth it. You also can’t manually move your five characters around in the formation, but they love to randomly move themselves when they level up. This leaves you with your mages taking the front line. I don’t know if being in front means anything, mind you, but it feels wrong. But, hey, there’s a sort of limit break mechanic, which is nice.
But here’s the worst part of the game. It’s the story. You play as one of eight people (four are unlocked) as they roam around the world, fighting evil, uncovering ancient mysteries, and killing a wannabe god. Sounds cool, right? Live a Live was an amazing game because of that narrative route. Treasure of Rudra was hella rad when they all came together at the end! So Burning Heroes is gonna… No! Burning Heroes doesn’t tell one story from eight perspectives. It tells eight stories about one thing. It’s like those Bob’s Burgers episodes when the kids tell their side of the same story, but with hilarious differences that don’t make sense. However, they’re just too funny, so everyone forgets about why they’re in trouble in the first place and moves on. Burning Heroes is like that, but without the humor. The stories don’t even properly interweave between each other. Your playable character always beats the boss, no matter who showed up first. And sometimes that boss is another playable member who’s now failed in their mission. Sometimes characters even die in other stories. So there is no secret ninth chapter that introduces a proper final boss to wrap everything up nicely, like Live a Live. It isn’t even eight totally different stories like the SaGa games. It’s eight contradictory stories about one villain, with one of three evil side groups thrown in to mix it up. No idea what happens to the other two evil groups in other stories, by the way!
And it’s a shame. The stories themselves are interesting. Naga had some cool beats, Rouga had a heartwrenching moment, and Shen had a neat face turn. Each character gets a lot of loops and twists in their two hour long missions (if you remove random encounters, boost exp, and grant unlimited money). But they’re so short and poorly written. Each character has nearly the exact same personality as the other seven: they’re all hot heads who read the thesaurus. Two are different, so shoutout to Shen and Mevis. And all the enemies shout the same tired insults. In fact, the writing/translation doesn’t help anything, and this is the worst written game I’ve seen. And it takes something truly terrible for me to even notice a poorly written game. I’ve mentioned that everyone has the same personality, but there’s no consistency. Some enemies speak to other MCs differently than others. They shout insults at one, but fall in love with another for no obvious reason. And in another story, they’ll be a bumbling idiot. There’s also a lack of proofreading here. Sometimes the villain is called Project D, but they’re also referred to as Project 8. WTF is that 8? Towards the end, the team just gave up and left in spelling mistakes and garbled text, or didn’t even bother writing anything once. A part of me wonders if the translators knew this game sucked, so they had a lark with it or something. It’s also downright offensive in a few areas, which you might just chalk up to being 2012 humor. A dark time, that was.
The idea of a sparsely told story about warring factions (from twenty years ago), a demon from space (seven years ago), and a trifecta of boss groups (presently) being controlled by an evil demon as revenge from Earthlings on the current planet (unknown) fighting over a plot of land in space named Astralia sounds fun! But the gameplay is so boring, the story is so awful, and the writing offends you multiple times over. And why do the characters who fill out each group get zero reason to join you? There’s an idea of something when they ask you to bring them on, but it goes nowhere. A part of me wonders if leaving free spaces in the group will change the story into something competent, but I don’t care. I’ve wanted to drop this for four days. But I was hopeful that there’d be a proper wrap up. There isn’t. This isn’t even the worst game I’ve ever played, even though it feels like it should be. Nekketsu Tairiku Burning Heroes gets 21 out of 50 points. Its weighted score is 61.17, making it the fourth worst. It can’t even suck properly.
Being on Deathwise. I embrace him at this point.
Nekketsu Tairiku Burning Heroes might go down as one of the worst games I’ve ever played. Its final score will be less than middling, and there certainly are worse games I’ve played. But this was, perhaps, the most frustrating one. The repetitive, unrewarding, and bland gameplay, without any redeeming qualities, made this an absolutely miserable experience.
The music is perfectly fine. There are four different overworld songs depending on which of the eight characters you’re playing as, but they’re not exactly memorable. Town themes are… whatever. You don’t spend much time in these places, so they leave no impact. Dungeon tracks are accompanied by the same puzzles, so your brain is turned off while you listen.
The graphics are of a similar quality. Playable character sprites look interesting, but you quickly realize they’re just borderline palette swaps. Many of their battle sprites stand and sway the same way. And I feel there’s only about six (unnamed) NPC world sprites. They add a cloak to a few in one town! Even a few generic bosses share the same knockoff Gilgamesh model. And that includes the most important one. Considering the lack of variety in towns and the limited number of dungeons, there’s no reason for this. Dungeons at least look different, but you visit all of them four times, so it doesn’t matter. They could be Tales dungeons, but you don’t want to do any of them more than you have to.
Gameplay doesn’t wow you either. You only control one person in battle. “Okay!“ I thought before playing this. “I played Emerald Dragon and loved it! This is fine.” If your person is a warrior, then all you can do is attack or use an item. “Atrushan could only attack, so NBD!“ Burning Heroes is a traditional turn based rpg… No skills, no options, no fun. Mages have access to eight spells, but there’s no memory cursor option, so it’s more efficient to just spam attack and hold down your fast forward button. The one thing to note is that you can change your battle formation. This noticeably changes your stats. Certain forms give bonuses to attack, magic, defense, or hit percentage. These would be interesting if your attacks didn’t miss so often, forcing you to only use accuracy forms, or if enemies telegraphed big moves, giving you a heads up to go defensive. Defensive forms also nerf your attack stat so much that it’s not worth it. You also can’t manually move your five characters around in the formation, but they love to randomly move themselves when they level up. This leaves you with your mages taking the front line. I don’t know if being in front means anything, mind you, but it feels wrong. But, hey, there’s a sort of limit break mechanic, which is nice.
But here’s the worst part of the game. It’s the story. You play as one of eight people (four are unlocked) as they roam around the world, fighting evil, uncovering ancient mysteries, and killing a wannabe god. Sounds cool, right? Live a Live was an amazing game because of that narrative route. Treasure of Rudra was hella rad when they all came together at the end! So Burning Heroes is gonna… No! Burning Heroes doesn’t tell one story from eight perspectives. It tells eight stories about one thing. It’s like those Bob’s Burgers episodes when the kids tell their side of the same story, but with hilarious differences that don’t make sense. However, they’re just too funny, so everyone forgets about why they’re in trouble in the first place and moves on. Burning Heroes is like that, but without the humor. The stories don’t even properly interweave between each other. Your playable character always beats the boss, no matter who showed up first. And sometimes that boss is another playable member who’s now failed in their mission. Sometimes characters even die in other stories. So there is no secret ninth chapter that introduces a proper final boss to wrap everything up nicely, like Live a Live. It isn’t even eight totally different stories like the SaGa games. It’s eight contradictory stories about one villain, with one of three evil side groups thrown in to mix it up. No idea what happens to the other two evil groups in other stories, by the way!
And it’s a shame. The stories themselves are interesting. Naga had some cool beats, Rouga had a heartwrenching moment, and Shen had a neat face turn. Each character gets a lot of loops and twists in their two hour long missions (if you remove random encounters, boost exp, and grant unlimited money). But they’re so short and poorly written. Each character has nearly the exact same personality as the other seven: they’re all hot heads who read the thesaurus. Two are different, so shoutout to Shen and Mevis. And all the enemies shout the same tired insults. In fact, the writing/translation doesn’t help anything, and this is the worst written game I’ve seen. And it takes something truly terrible for me to even notice a poorly written game. I’ve mentioned that everyone has the same personality, but there’s no consistency. Some enemies speak to other MCs differently than others. They shout insults at one, but fall in love with another for no obvious reason. And in another story, they’ll be a bumbling idiot. There’s also a lack of proofreading here. Sometimes the villain is called Project D, but they’re also referred to as Project 8. WTF is that 8? Towards the end, the team just gave up and left in spelling mistakes and garbled text, or didn’t even bother writing anything once. A part of me wonders if the translators knew this game sucked, so they had a lark with it or something. It’s also downright offensive in a few areas, which you might just chalk up to being 2012 humor. A dark time, that was.
The idea of a sparsely told story about warring factions (from twenty years ago), a demon from space (seven years ago), and a trifecta of boss groups (presently) being controlled by an evil demon as revenge from Earthlings on the current planet (unknown) fighting over a plot of land in space named Astralia sounds fun! But the gameplay is so boring, the story is so awful, and the writing offends you multiple times over. And why do the characters who fill out each group get zero reason to join you? There’s an idea of something when they ask you to bring them on, but it goes nowhere. A part of me wonders if leaving free spaces in the group will change the story into something competent, but I don’t care. I’ve wanted to drop this for four days. But I was hopeful that there’d be a proper wrap up. There isn’t. This isn’t even the worst game I’ve ever played, even though it feels like it should be. Nekketsu Tairiku Burning Heroes gets 21 out of 50 points. Its weighted score is 61.17, making it the fourth worst. It can’t even suck properly.
Being on Deathwise. I embrace him at this point.
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