!!!MARK STORY SPOILERS!!!
Been playing this and its awesome. It's easily as good as the Golden Sun games, honestly I'd put it up there with Mother 3 on the system. Compared to other stuff, probably similar ballpark to Chrono Trigger or FF6, the other 16-bit classics. If this was published by square or something for the SNES in English back in the day you'd probably have more chatter.
If I had to try and sell people on this game, I'd describe it as something like:
You know how in the old Pokemon games, you'd have to talk to people and try weird shit to figure out how to progress and have quite a bit of freedom in choosing your next objective? Modern Pokemon doesn't really fuck with that but it was a big part of the franchise's identity in the older generations to the point that FireRed/LeafGreen introduce the player to the game by telling them that they should talk to people a lot. I'm talking about shit like getting hints that the warden is missing their GOLD TEETH or guessing that a gate guard is thirsty and then reasoning what you have to do with that information, and doing gyms "out of order".
Well Oriental Blue: Ao no Tengai is that idea dialed up to 11, combined with what feels like a proto-very-wide linear structure. From the get go you have a surprising amount of freedom to explore a chunk of world map, find towns and dungeons that you otherwise might not be guided to, talk to all manner of characters, perhaps find a party member or two, get new gear and find new spells, etc. The game has a journal that will update as you discover things in the world but it's never particularly verbose (it's pretty comparable to the FF XI quest log perhaps), so I honestly recommend playing this game with a pen and paper or notebook to jot down things that you find interesting to bear in mind for later. Plenty of NPCs will say random shit that won't make sense without further context, or you'll want to remember where some random landmark was, or a particular shop item might be, stuff like that. As you progress through the game the explorable map will continue to expand, with very light lock-and-key-metroidvania style elements, and shortcuts with the map looping back on itself and things like that too.
I've been occasionally glancing at a rough outline walkthrough if I get really lost but for the most part have been playing without looking basically anything up, and it's been an incredibly rewarding experience. I have no doubt that I'm missing stuff. It appears that you can lose important boss fights and the game just continues along, perhaps with consequences for your party or for the world itself.
In terms of gameplay systems, it's mostly a pretty standard turn based combat system, and standard navigation with random encounters. The wrinkle is the magic stone system. Killing enemies will give you guaranteed drops of magic stones in a variety of types. There are a handful of basic ores that you can combine up into higher tier stones, and if you happen to find a higher tier stone, you can sacrifice it in exchange for a recipe for how to make it from constituent parts. These stones then form a common pool of resources that all party members pull from in order to cast magic. This means that you can finding a new spell is a bit of an event in and of itself. Moreover, because each spell is constructed out of a pattern, you can start to guess at how the constituent parts have to be arranged to get better versions of spells -- there is a modicum of trial and error involved, but for many spells you might have a recipe for one element, and then sort of fill in some logical blanks and get rewarded with an even better spell. It feels a bit like those IQ test series of patterns at times.
Then beyond this you can actually attach these stones to equipment, and certain combinations of stones will let you cast very powerful magic for free. The combinations are pretty cryptic but will be hinted at through sidequests, or dialogue, or just experimenting and save/reloading. I do suspect that this aspect in particular was maybe motivated by a desire to sell game guides, but while I looked up a couple, a few others I stumbled upon myself after some thinking and trying various combinations. Some gear will break easily if you do this process, but others won't and naturally lend themselves to this.
There are also other character-unique skills that are learned on level up, and can attack and defend, or cover other allies. It's a solid system if a bit standard aside from the (admittedly very unique) magic mechanics.
The setting deserves a lot of praise as well. It's this mixture of east asia/japan/china but also southeast asian cultures. Lots of interesting sights and very distinctive feeling towns. There's a town where all the buildings are connected to one another, and another large early city which is a veritable maze with its own sub-dungeons to explore and unique boss fights.
The characters and story are also pretty cool. One thing I really like is that, in line with the game's very hands-off approach and structure, you're never beaten over the head with narrative. It's there, but its found in sidequests and requests and journal entries and random NPC interactions, and the occasionally drawn together into more conventional cutscene-y moments and the like. Similarly you learn about your party members and their backstories and objectives as much from them as you do from npcs and background world building. It's not obtuse, like a souls game or anything, but you have to look for it to get the most out of it.
It's very hard to paint a faithful picture of how cool and unique feeling this game is with text. Japanese copies are pretty expensive though every so often you see them for a bit cheaper, especially if you're looking just for the cart. There's a great English fan translation available as well. As always with GBA stuff, you can very easily dump the rom if you have an old DS or DSLite lying around with a DS flashcart (check out GBA Backup Tool) and the translation is here. Like with Mother 3, ebay etc. is flooded with repros with the english translation already applied. Obviously these aren't legit so be careful with what you're buying. As a side note these sorts of repro carts often will have issues dumping (the dump might work fine but the save format is borked, for instance) so you'll be stuck using the cartridge itself. As a JRPG with random encounters, an emulation turbo option is a nice QoL feature and I wouldn't recommend these as an option.
Some media
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCPct3h1UyQ
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rObqq1jJuo
Full soundtrack -- it's not the best OST in the world or anything but it's pretty damn solid, feels appropriate to the setting and vibes, and is a multi-hour long GBA OST that doesn't sound like ass, which is its own kind of achievement.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOU0wSS7E_k
Official Site is still up lmao. This was a Nintendo published game. Wonder if they'll add it to the NSO expansion collection at some point, would be cool.
Useful gamefaqs threads if you get hopelessly lost
Guide
Party members
Mod gear
Stone recipes
Some other tips:
- Play with a pen and paper, and talk to everyone.
- Your choice of gender impacts the game story in some way, at least where you begin the game. Not sure if anything else.
- TTC quests are how you'll find out how to make modded gear and better magic. Join the TTC in Shanghai (Western starting area) ASAP. Visiting a TTC branch will give you a list of fetchquests that change as the game goes on. Make notes of the sorts of items that are being asked for so that, as per point 1, you can grab the relevant items if you come across them in shops or in the field. TTC quests will often either reward you with an advanced magic stone (which you should immediately disassemble to get a recipe), or have you mod a piece of gear (the pattern of which might be useful and you should memorize and then experiment around with).
- You can combine magic stones in Shanghai, early in the game. Materials aren't consumed if fusion fails. You can test fusions with "test", get recipes with "check".
- Save and reload when experimenting with fusion and modding gear. You can also save before turning in TTC quests and then just check the reward and reload if its worth it (or get the magic stone recipe without giving away any items etc.).
- When you come across a castle don't neglect to go back to it sometimes to see what's up.
- There's no penalty for dying afaik aside from spent resources aren't restored.
- When traveling the world map, staying on roads reduces the encounter rate I'm pretty sure. This also applies in some field maps too.
- Item management is a bit of a pain. Party members have 16 slots and it's dragon quest style for consumables. There is item storage which you can access from any town though.
- Magic lightly scales off of stats it seems but base damage is listed and paramount, so any character that meets the wisdom requirement to cast a spell can.
- Different characters have different stat growth rates and as such you'll probably want to gear them/allocate resources to play to their strengths.
- In shops you can look at item properties with start button, can be helpful identifying some items that might otherwise not be particularly interesting.
- For boss fights, especially early on, have a few characters doing damage, and one that heals. Most boss fights only have one action, and that's usually single target, sometimes multi target, and a status ailment. Make sure allies can heal themselves all in the latter case.
