I just finished Gulliver Boy, and I wanted to share my thoughts about it.
Some factoids:- It's a 30-40 hour game.
- Your characters' maximum level is 500. You will probably finish somewhere in the 200s, but it's not very tough to get into the 300s. Yes, you level up like crazy compared to other RPGs.
- The battle system is pretty standard. It's like Final Fantasy's Active Time Battle system if you put it on "Wait" mode, with a Dragon Quest-like perspective.
- Your party consists of four members: three main characters plus one sidekick. The three main members never change. They are balanced into a typical fighter/healer/status-magic user group, and everyone can use some normal attack magic.
- The sidekick characters are recruited throughout the game. After recruiting them, you can switch them out freely, and in battle, they fight via AI. There are maybe three that you have to get, and another four or so that you can try to recruit but might miss.
- No random battles! Nearly all battles start when you touch enemies on the screen.
- The game system is very simple. There is nothing to equip on your main characters other than weapons, most of which you find in chests or through story events. Purchased items are only occasionally useful and never completely necessary. In fact, the only thing you really even need money for is staying at inns.
- You don't gain money from battles. You actually have to buy and sell things at different prices in different towns. However, you find money in chests and get it at certain story events, and you can sell some items you find, so it's not necessary to do the buying/selling thing unless you want some very particular expensive stuff.
Now let's dive in.Gulliver Boy seems to me to represent a kind of ideal for Hudson. I'd say that for this reason alone, it's worth a play for any die-hard PCE fan.
Remember that this game came out in March 1995, which was the middle of a major transitional period for video games. Gulliver Boy was like a statement, or even like a bet. The PC Engine had become something of an anime-fan's niche system in Japan. The PC-FX, which had just been released a few months earlier, was built and marketed all around anime, too. It's clear that Hudson had very particular ideas about how anime, full-motion video and games were going to mix, and Gulliver Boy represents part of their vision perfectly.
You've got the HuVideo, which by the way is packed in large quantities onto a single disc quite impressively. But did you know that this game was released concurrently with a TV anime series and a published manga? One wasn't really based off another, but rather they were all planned together.
Not only that, but in the game itself, the whole structure of the story feels episodic, as if each area can be shoehorned nicely into a "Today on Gulliver Boy". The personalities of the characters were designed in a sort of amplified, TV show-like way, too. They all have strong, instantly distinguishable qualities, the kind that's supposed to make a channel surfer become familiar with them quickly.
I am not enough of a connoisseur of anime to say much more than that, but I really want to emphasize how much anime seems to be the blood coursing through the veins of this game.
With that said, I have to tell you that even in Japan, few people really remember Gulliver Boy. Timing is certainly to blame in part - the PCE faded quickly after the 32-bit systems appeared in late 1994, and the Saturn port that appeared a year later looked too "last-generation" to make a big splash. However, there's more to it than that. I hate to say it, but I'm afraid this game really does have some major shortcomings. I can point immediately at the soundtrack, which is polarized at 30% wonderful and 70% awful - a sin to someone who likes game music as much as I do. However, my deeper criticisms of Gulliver Boy ironically stem from the story and the characters, which will take a little time to explain.
You see, there isn't a lot of character development. I mean, the characters in this game are jam-packed with lots and lots of personality, but they don't change and evolve over the course of the story. There's nothing like a proper character-arc, in spite of some pretty major events and revelations. Not many relationships develop, either, and nobody really plays off anybody else. Everybody is just kind of "there".
Gulliver himself also jumps back and forth between being a silent protagonist and being very forward and outspoken, which is a bit jarring. Then there's your best friend Edison (the green haired kid), who is almost always shouting when he speaks. I bet roughly 50% of people who play this game wind up hating this kid.
What I'm getting at is that the cast just isn't that strong. People play RPGs for a lot of different reasons, but I think almost every "great" RPG has a charming cast. Gulliver Boy has a lot of the right ingredients, but it's missing a few key ones, in my opinion.
There is a little bit of silver lining, though, and that's the entertaining NPC dialogue. There are plenty of risque jokes, for one thing, but there's also just so much variety that it's usually worth it to go around and talk to everybody. The characters change what they say after major story events, too.
Speaking of the story, thought, that's my other major criticism of Gulliver Boy. Like the characters, the story itself also doesn't have a very well-structured arc.
To begin with, although you progress in a strictly linear fashion, you always travel freely in your ship from one town to the next along a fantasy-Mediterranean. There's never a sense urgency or tension because you can go and screw off wherever you want anytime.
When it comes to the locales, while there is a nice amount of variety, they don't tie together in much of an interesting way. There's no build-up to a really fantastic place. There's no "Oh my god, this is it!", just "Oh, so this is where we are now, eh?". At worst, it's kind of like driving between tourist traps.
And finally, the antagonists and the goals they create for you to fight them also don't tie together well. I can't explain this in depth without spoiling the story, but here's the best example I can give: there are three really major antagonists that you take on one after another, the last one being the final boss. The thing is, your motivations for fighting each of them have nothing to do with each other. After you beat the first one, and again after you beat the second one, you the player think "Mission accomplished! Let's go home! Wait, what? We're fighting this other guy now?"
So I can see why Gulliver Boy doesn't get talked about a whole lot even in Japan. It's a pity, because they put so much work into so many different parts of the game. The battle system and the graphics are quite good, if not exactly ground breaking. It takes advantage of the CD about as well as any other game on the system, too. I think that with a tweaked cast and story, Gulliver Boy would have been something like a cult classic. What we got in reality, while fun in many places, just doesn't add up to much.
Anyone else played it? Share your thoughts if you like.
Topic: Thoughts on Gulliver Boy (Read 1804 times)
