B-LOG SLAYING: Brain Lord (SNES)

Brain damage (*rimshot*)

    I haven’t done one of these in a while. Shucks. Bear with me if I have forgotten how to do these. This is my first big gaming disappoint with my backlog journey so far. Most of the other games I’ve played and documented have either exceeded my expectations, or at least met them. This game here, this Brain Lord, has definitely fallen quite short of my high expectations. Why were my expectations so high? Maybe because I saw that beautiful purple “e” on the cartridge. Maybe because the few screenshots I checked out before playing looked great. Maybe because the box cover art is badass as all get out. Or maybe because of the few other people on Instagram telling me this game rocked. Well, folks, it really didn’t rock. Now, this isn’t a bad game, per say. I know a lot of people do like it. I would probably suggest it to someone to play through at least once. I bought my copy from Amazon (with a birthday giftcard) for $16 (and the obligatory $3.99 shipping), and I don’t think I’d paid any more than that ($20 including the shipping). Interestingly enough, and I didn’t know this until just yesterday, this game is sort of part of a trilogy of games published by Enix, with the first being The 7^th Saga and the final game being a non-North American game Mystic Ark. Apparently the main character’s name (if you choose to keep the default) is Remeer, is used in both those games as well. 7^th Saga is on my radar to buy, but I’d never heard of Mystic Ark. Maybe that’ll be added to my, “modded PSP non-English games to download” list (ssshh! Don’t tell anyone). I guess I was just hoping I’d get more of a Soul Blazer kind of game (which this game sort of looks like). Even though Soul Blazer has its problems, that’s a game I would like to play again at some point. I’m pretty sure I can’t say the same about Brain Lord. Do you guys wanna look at a lopsided cons/pros list? I knew you would!

CONS

• The jumping sucks. And it’s such an integral part of the game
• The enemies respawn if killed. This is disappointing. Compound this with the fact that they respawn if you just leave the screen and come back, and it’s downright frustrating. Isn’t that NES-type garbage?
• While I appreciate the puzzles, there just is not a good variety of them. Almost all are of the “pushing things onto buttons to open doors” kind.
• The menus are very tedious. It’s a small complaint, but it gets old really fast

Yikes. That’s a lot. The pros are gonna look kind of silly in comparison:

PROS

• The bosses are pretty fun. There are only four of them, but they are all big, varied, colorful, and in general provide a decent challenge
• On the inverse of the puzzle complaint above, the puzzles do break up the monotony of the game. None of the puzzles are brain-bustingly hard, but there were a few that took me a long time to figure out
• Oh yeah! I like the Jade system (and the magic system is good too)

    The cons seem to far outweigh the pros in this game. That isn't to say this game is no good, no. It has it's flaws, but I know people like this game a lot (on Instagram, and a few forums, at least). Is it worth a playthrough? Probably. While you are playing through, expect to run into shit like...
    ...jumping. How can a game get jumping wrong? When I first started playing, I was shocked (and excited) that you actually could jump in this gamed. Seems a little odd for most action-adventure games like this. Too bad any sense of excitement goes out the window the first time (of many) you have to jump across platforms. Ugh. The jumping feels stiff, and it needs to be fairly accurate. I mean, no shit right? Obviously jumping has to be accurate. What I mean is, you need to jump from the middle of a given platform. Say you're on a platform, and you need to jump to one that is in front of it. There's black nothingness in between one platform and the next. So you go to jump, but you hit the "jump" button too late. Even though you are still on the platform, since you waited until you were at the edge of said platform to jump, the jump won't register. You'll go falling into the abyss, like a moron. You have to make sure you jump when you're in roughly the middle of whatever you are standing on. Seems like it shouldn't make one monkey-shit of a difference, as long as you are on the platform when you press the "jump" button. This gets very aggravating, because, as I said, there is a fair amount of jumping in this game. Very disappointing.
    This next complaint isn't as heinous as the bad jumping controls, but it can be annoying. Enemies respawn. It happens in lots of SNES games. Hell, it still happens in games nowadays. It can suck, but it's not a huge deal. Except in this game, you can kill an enemy, walk five or six steps away, then walk back, and that enemy will be alive again. It's great for farming, but it's very irritating otherwise. I can understand an enemy respawning if you leave the room and come back, but just taking a few steps? Bummer!
    As I said above, I do appreciate the puzzles, even though generally I'm godawful at puzzles. But they take puzzles, which are a pretty integral part of the game, and they make them boring and tedious. Most of the puzzles consist of a room with a certain amount of buttons, and a corresponding number of rocks/balls. Once pushed, the balls roll until they hit something (the walls, the rocks, etc). It's usually about configuring the rocks so they stop the balls, and the balls can be pushed onto the buttons to open the doors. They can be fun, and pretty challenging, but when a good 75% of all the puzzles in the game are this basic premise, it gets old. Fast.
    I suppose you could lump this next grievance in with puzzles, but I'd like to bitch about the Dark Zones in the final area of the game, the Platinum Shrine. They look like this:

Whoopie! So much fun!

    Looks fun, right? Ha, WRONG. It's a totally pitch black area. Your light-Jade (I'll get into the Jade's in a bit. For now, just know they are helpful fairies) can't even light the area. These huge Dark Zones are just mazes that you have to get through. Obviously, the rub is you can't see where you're going, or where the walls are. To call these some lazy fucking puzzles would be a horribly understatement. They are the single reason why I most likely won't ever pick this game up to play again. These are so annoying and ill-conceived, I'd rather not waste my time again in the future. So, after the Dark Zones and rock/ball pushing, what other kinds of puzzles are there? A few where you have to figure out the right order to step on buttons (so many damn buttons in this game); a few where you have to navigate a crumbling floor and figure out which way to go; uh, maybe that's it. I'll get to the puzzles more below.

A typical menu screen. Evil incarnate

    God, the menus. The MENUS! Tedium, thy name is Brain Lord's menus. Firstly, every item/weapon/armor/key (there's dozens and dozens of keys to acquire during the game)  is represented by a crude picture. You will often find items in treasure chests, and then you will have to locate them in your inventory. This can be tough, because you won't know what anything is until you click on something, then a subscreen with the name and description comes up. It's annoying. By the end of the game, you know what most of the items look like, but all the Jades are represented by gem-looking icons, and these all look very similar. Do you want to know what the worst part of the menu interaction is? The X-ray glasses. These are used to bring up a map of the current floor of the dungeon you are on. They are really only needed for the first and the last dungeon, but they are pretty helpful for those two. Here's how a typical usage of those X-ray glasses goes (in steps): 

1. Press button to bring up menu
2. Choose "items"
3. Choose the X-ray glasses
4.  Wait for the flavor text to scroll through
5. Choose "use"
6. Wait for dumb sound effect to fully play
7. Here you get to see the map screen. When you're done looking at it, exit out
8. This brings you back to the flavor text screen, where you chose the "use" option. Wait for the text to scroll again.
9. Exit out of this menu, back to the inventory menu
10. Exit out of this menu, back to the main menu
11. Exit out of this, back to gameplay

    How much fucking fun was THAT? EVERY TIME you need to use those X-ray glasses, you have to go through that song-and-dance. Especially in those aforementioned Dark Zones, it's helpful to bring up the map several times. This gets beyond tedious to have to do this four, five, six times in a one-or-two minute span. Just thinking about it makes me very sad.

    Finally, this isn't a part of the puzzle complaint, but this game relies heavily on locked doors. Every dungeon has probably a dozen plus locked doors. This means, a lot of the game is just trying to find keys to unlock doors to gain access to new areas where more keys will need to be acquired. It's kind of lazy, and I feel pads out the experience a bit.

    I think that's all I have for my cons, but I'd like to talk about two others things. These aren't quite cons, and they certainly aren't pros, so I'll just throw them here. Firstly, the music. It's fine. It does it's job. It isn't memorable though. That's a big let-down. Some of it, towards the end especially, really reminds me of the music from Turtles in Time. So, not all bad, eh? Also, the graphics are only okay. They are fairly bland (especially the dungeons. They are usually just one uniform color, like brown or silver), and maybe even a little ugly. Except the bosses, like I said. They look great.

   Okay, I've bitched about this game enough. There was some fun to be had. Let's try to have it!

    I would like to get back to the puzzles. I really complained about them more than I had intended to, and it probably hurts this point a bit. Oh well, that's just the way it is. Disregarding the horrendous Dark Zones, and ignoring the over-reliance on button puzzles, the puzzles ARE a nice change of pace. There's no better feeling, in general, than finally figuring out a puzzle you have been stumped on. This happened to me a few times throughout my playthorugh. Even better, none of these puzzles are stupidly hard, and I only had to look up the answer to one of them (which, doing just a bit of research, it seems a LOT of people had to do the same. I believe it was an instance of bad translation). I appreciate what the developers wanted to do, which was have an action-adventure game that balances puzzles and combat. I can't help but think how much better, and more varied, the puzzles in Link to the Past are, for example. Shoot, that's negative. We are in the positive section of this blog! Sorry. Um, so yeah, the puzzles. They

can suck, but they can also be okay? Ugh

    Okay, something that is genuinely great about this game. The bosses! I always make it a point to discuss the bosses in all the games I play (duh. Anyone who frequents this blog (do those people exist?) knows that!). This game has pretty good bosses. Where so many other

things are disappointing (including the enemies. They aren't great), the bosses excel. There are unfortunately only four, but they all manage to be unique and fun. I'll go into greater depth with each one, but I can say that they are big (except for one), colorful, and very varied. There's a giant cockroach, a large cycloptic robot, some skeletal ghost guys, and...whatever the hell the Demon King is. They all provide a decent challenge and all are fun to fight. Read on for

more detail on them!

    Finally, this game has two interesting mechanics. Firstly, the magic. You can get several magic spells (I ended the game with five, but I know there are more), and you can use them as you please. You can cycle through them with the shoulder buttons. Each one has a small bar

at the bottom of the screen, and to use the spell, you have to attack and hold the "attack" button, until the bar fills up. Each spell has a differently-lengthed bar. Some spells have bars that only take a second to fill, some take two or three seconds. It's interesting and different. I like it. Also, you can find things called Jades. They are all fairies that help you through your journey.

That white alien-looking guy is the defense Jade. I used him quite a bit

    The Jades can do lots of different things, including: giving you offensive/defensive buffs; giving you actual offense (some shoot fireballs or lightning); lighting up dark areas (as I mentioned above); or revive you if you die. There could be more, I didn't have all of them. Before I started using them (I didn't touch them for the first few hours of the game), I noticed that some defeated enemies left these small blue balls. I couldn't pick them up. I eventually ignored them, until I started using the Jades. These blue balls (tee hee) are experience for your Jades. They can all be leveled up! Honestly, I didn't notice a huge difference with some of my leveled Jades. I think the highest level I got to was 9, with maybe two different Jades. I'm sure there obviously is a difference between a Jade at level 1 and a Jade at level 9. I think it's a subtle one. But these guys give the game a small sense of strategy. It's a neat concept.

    That's my list of pros, however I have something else to add. I discovered this in the town of Toronto (why it's called Toronto, I have no idea. I'll be a monkey's uncle, and all that jazz). There's a small boarding house/apartment type building. On the second floor, there's a hallway with three doors. There's a guy standing outside of his room (the door on the far left), complaining that the room next to his is so loud. He wants to file a complaint to management. If you go into that room (the one in the middle), you'll find two newlyweds standing near their separate beds. They want to be left alone. If you go to the room next to THEIR room (the room on the far right), you'll find a guy standing right near the wall that is adjacent to the newlywed's room. When you talk to him, he stammers about how he's fixing the wall. Demons had broken it, and LEFT A HOLE, when they invaded Toronto. If you've can't quite piece this little narrative together, let me help: a newlywed couple is fucking in their room (otherwise known as "consummating the marriage") so loudly it keeps their neighbor awake. Meanwhile, their OTHER neighbor is peaking in on them doing the nasty, through the hole in the wall. This is incredibly awesome. This little throwaway thing makes me like this game much more than if it wasn't included. 

For reference, this is what Toronto looks like

    This is a flawed game. This is an annoying game. This is, at times, a LAZILY INFURIATING game. But, it's not a bad game. It's just very odd. There are only five dungeons (and only two towns), and each one is VERY LONG (and it gets monotonous after a while). You notice it more because of the lack of dungeons. If they had included one or two more, and shortened the length of each one (maybe took out a few locked doors or Dark Zones), I think the game would flow better and overall be better for it. In each dungeon, you'll experience bad platforming, puzzles (both good and bad), drab colors, boring enemies, and great bosses. I would suggest this game to fans of Enix, or specifically the Soul Blazer trilogy. This game isn't as good as those games, but it's worth playing once, at least. I bought mine for about $16 on Amazon, and that's all I'd pay. So, play it if you have it, or buy it cheap if you find it. But don't really seek it out. It's just not worth it. Sorry for being such a scrooge.

The final screen. I missed the screen that said "Fin".

BOSSES:

Giant Cockroach (located on 4th floor of the Tower of Light)

Fear me!

    He's a big, green cockroach. Pretty random boss for this place. He scurries along the outside of the walls of the room. He won't physically attack you (although if he touches you, it'll hurt), he'll just move around. After you hit him the first time, he will continually shoot out little yellow cockroaches. These bastards are very annoying. Besides these, the big cockroach has no offensive attacks. He just continues to move around the room. Killing the little guys can be tough, because there's usually a lot of them, and unlike their large counterpart (parent?) they like to try and attack you. Kill these little buggers (har har) while you whale on the big one. After you've smashed the big one enough, he dies in an amazing explosion of fiery fire. Observe:

I love when roaches explode when you kill them

    This guy can be annoying, but he's not super tough. Next!

Cycloptic Robot (located in the laboratory in the Site of Civilization)

Robot testicle?

    This one, as you can see by the picture, is a large, round robotic thing. He has an orange "eye" in his center, and wouldn't you know it? That's his ONLY vulnerable spot. It opens and closes periodically, so only attack when it's open. He only really has two means of attacking,

and both are pretty passive-aggressive: firstly, he hovers around the room. Coming in contact with him hurts. So, don't touch him. Secondly, there are two of the big steel balls in this room. These are the ones you push around to solve the button puzzles. These things roll around the room, so they have to be avoided. Occasionally, he will magnetize himself, and pull you (and the balls) towards him. If you get sucked into him, you die instantly. To avoid this, you have to constantly jump while he is trying to suck you in. This will keep you far enough away. I found the boomerang was the best weapon to kill this guy with. He might be a little easier than the cockroach, but that insta-kill attack killed me twice.

Ramus (located at the top of the Ice Castle)

Sorry, crappy pic. It was tough trying to isolate these guys

    Ramus is a little grey goblin that is just up to no good! For whatever reason, the fight isn't against him, but three spectral skeletons. Perhaps they work for Ramus? Who knows. Certainly not me. These skeletons float around, and cannot be attacked regularly. They have to be hit with your newly acquired "stop" magic. If you hit one with this, he will become vulnerable for a short time.

Very vulnerable

    Each one has a set amount of health, so they can each be killed. All you have to do is avoid them floating around, and just try to focus all attacks on one, until he is killed. Once you take out all three skeletons, the battle is over. The skeletons have no offensive attacks, per say. They just try to float into you. It seems most of these bosses aren't overly aggressive. They'd rather sit back and just let you die on your own. However, this battle does take place on an ice floor with some holes in it. That adds an extra layer caution to your battle plan. These guys are tough, and probably tougher than the robot, but a step below the cockroach (I remember him really giving me some early-game problems).

The Demon King (located on the fourth floor of the Platinum Shrine)

Doesn't it look like he has a goofy smile?

    This big green, goofy looking clown is the final boss of the game. Hell, he's the damn Demon King. I can't imagine many demons wanting to take orders from him. But, that's besides the point. This battle has several stages, and it's decently tough (and fun).

    Firstly, he moves around the room, swinging his big scorpion-like tail. That's all he does. It's easy to avoid, as the tail doesn't have the greatest range. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to hurt him. The only way I found was to use the Lightning Bow and shoot him right where his tail connects to his body. An awkward vulnerable-spot for sure, but it doesn't take too many shots to destroy his tail.

Sans tail

    His tail will eventually explode, and his "face" (I guess?) comes out from the middle of his body. He still moves around, but now he shoots fireballs. They arc in the air and hit the floor. These fireballs will cause the floor where it hits to become weak. If you step on that spot, the floor will break. If you fall in any of the eventual-holes, well guess what? You're starting this whole battle over again. Besides the fireballs, if you are directly underneath him, he'll charge at you. At any rate, you have to attack his face. I found it pretty easy to stand to the direct left or right of his face, and just whale away. I was using the heavy mall weapon. Hit his face enough, and the next phase of the battle starts.

    One of his arms will detach after the face has taken so much damage. This arm is basically a big centipede. It can transport around the room and shoot two tough-to-dodge energy balls. The Demon King still moves around and shoots the floor-destroying fireballs, so be aware. You can either attack the centipede arm, and destroy it, or continue attacking his face.

    Either way, eventually you'll have to attack the face so many more times that his other arm detaches itself. It's a flying pterodactyl-like creature. It only flies around the room, and has no other attacks. He's pretty easy to kill. I would suggest trying to kill the centipede first, then forcing the pterodactyl to come out. I had both the centipede AND pterodactyl out, and it got to be a little overwhelming. At any rate, kill both those detached arms, and the final phase of the fight begins.

Armless (love those tortured faces though)

    I must admit, I don't think you actually have to kill both those arms for the final part of the battle to take place. I think it's all predicated on how much damage his face takes. Once it has sustained enough, the "mask" (for lack of a better word. It's the blue-ish thing you've been attacking since destroying his tail) comes off. He still moves around the room, and he still shoots fireballs (by this time, the floor should be pretty cracked up, and it probably has several holes), albeit he moves a bit faster. All you have to do is continue to attack his newly exposed face (love those tortured faces on his back. Like he's trapping doomed souls), and avoid the holes, until he explodes. Once this happens, the boss is defeated, and the game is over.

    This is my favorite boss of the game. He's decently tough, there's lots going on (mini-phases, if you will), and I think he looks cool (despite being goober #1). I ended up using two Reviving Mirrors, two Apples, a Chicken, and a Heart. The toughest part of the battle is keeping an eye on the floor while you're fighting. You want to avoid the cracks when possible, and you REALLY want to avoid the holes, obviously.

    We've come to the end of this post. I think I've covered everything I wanted to about this game. In the end, I'm glad I played it, but I don't see myself playing through it again (at the very least, not for YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS). Again, find it cheap enough, grab it at least. It's uncommon and looks great on a shelf in a SNES collection.