The Sega Genesis/Mega Drive received three games from the Valis series. Thus far, I’ve covered Valis, a port of a remake, and Syd of Valis, a bizarre chibi version of Valis II. However, I while I find them somewhat charming, I don’t love them. However, what I’ve been told, both in the comments and on other publications, is that Valis III is where the series actually got good.
Certainly, it’s got the best narrative of the bunch, though that wasn’t a high bar to clear. It also has some neat added features, better level design and bosses, and a new bra for Yuko, so yeah, it’s pretty good. It’s all right.
I got Valis III as part of a care package I received from Retro-Bit. They did a pretty swell job with a re-release through Limited Run Games. I outline the production values in my Valis write-up, but to sum it up: damn. I’ve seen a lot of reproduction and homebrew titles in my time, but Retro-Bit really takes it to the next level. I especially love how the game’s name is etched on the back of the PCB, visible through the translucent case. Nice little detail.
The bad guy this time around is an evil tyrant called Glames. He’s different from the previous evil tyrants because he rules over the Dark World. The only reason he’s invading the Dreamland is because the Dark World is being absorbed into the nether and will soon cease to exist. So, really, he’s just trying to save his world, which is… exactly what Yuko is trying to do. I guess he’s bad because he… has bigger, pointier shoulder pads.
Cham shows up and tries to steal the Valis Sword so she can take on Glames herself, then immediately sucks and gets captured. Yuko saves her, so she becomes a second playable character. Cool! The two venture off to the Vecanti to save Valna, Yuko’s sister, who becomes the third playable character. Rad!
Yeah, one of the new features of Valis III is the ability to switch between three characters. Each one controls the same, but Cham has a whip, and Valna has magic projectiles. Sometimes you’re locked out of character switching, but for the majority of the game, you can play as whoever you want. Dialogue between characters will even change depending on who you’re actively playing at the time.
Valis III plays a lot better than the previous titles. The movement is still slow, and the jumping remains floaty, but the level design feels more like it takes this into account. The weird thing about jumping, though, is that you have to hold up on the D-pad to jump extra high. It was this way in the first Genesis Valis, but it still kind of bothers me.
The bosses are a lot better, as well. In previous games, you could largely just hack away at them, but some of them here require a bit more gumption. They’re still a little clumsy when paired with the movement physics, but better is better.
However, what drives me up the wall is that the cutscenes still have slow-ass text. They at least have better movement, and a lot of it looks great, but a lot of the time, I found myself just waiting for the words to crawl across the screen. I’m also moderately sure now that you can’t speed it up. You can only skip it entirely.
You can hurry along the in-game text, but it has a new, unique problem. The text boxes don’t have any indication of who’s talking, so you kind of have to figure it out for yourself. That, or just go by the idea that the characters are talking to themselves.
I’m also not sure about the translation here. It’s never been great, but it gets really confusing in Valis III. It talks about Nizetti as the “closest of the countries to being perfect.”
What? We’re talking countries now? Are Dark World, Dreamland, and the Human World considered countries, or is Nizetti a country within the Dreamland? I’m guessing this is a mistranslation of “kuni,” which, in Japanese, can mean country, world, or, perhaps more accurately, land.
I think my favorite confusingly translated phrase is in the narrative recap at the beginning. It says:
“Dreamland and the Human world are in danger!! Cheer up, Yuko!!”
Fantastic. I’m again making an assumption here that “Cheer up, Yuko!!” is a weird way to translate “Ganbare Yuko.” Ganbare is, like, a word for cheering someone on. It’s often translated to “good luck” or “you can do it.” Hold on, I can actually check on this.
Nope, I’m wrong. It says, “Stand, Yuko!!” I can honestly say that I’m not familiar enough with Japanese idioms that I can be certain if that’s a way of saying “cheer up.” Sounds dumb, though.
The other big problem I have with Valis III is that the difficulty spikes spectacularly on the sixth level. It’s your typical ice stage, but just to make things extra difficult, they throw in a whole bunch of moving platforms, bottomless pits, and spikes. There are three parts to it and a boss, and if you lose all your lives, you’re repeating the whole thing over again. It’s excruciating.
The end boss is no pushover, either. I was stuck on him for a while, but the trick seems to be trying to keep all the power-ups you collect throughout the seventh stage. If you lose a life on him and have to repeat from the last level, you lose all your power-ups and the last fight becomes extremely difficult. You’ll probably die on him a lot, however, and that means repeating the last stage over and over again. Eventually, you’ll get it memorized enough to power through it and be sufficiently pumped for the fight against Glames.
Speaking of the ending, though, I want to spoil a part from the last cutscene. It’s actually the last line of text that occurs after Yuko returns to the Human World. It says, “Nobody has seen Yuko since then… nobody.”
What the hell kind of ending is that? What happened? I thought she went back to her normal life. Did she appear back in the Human World in the middle of the ocean? I guess I’ll have to wait to play Valis IV to find out. Which never had a Genesis version.
Valis IV was the last in the series, by the way. Unless you count the, erm, pornographic spin-off.
While Retro-Bit’s reproduction cartridges sold out on Limited Run games, you can still play the Valis series via a pair of collections on the Switch. It’s also the best way to play the PC Engine CD-ROM² versions of some of the games, since that’s supposedly where they were at their best. Original copies of the Turbografx-CD go for astronomical prices.
Valis III is definitely the best of the series on the Genesis by a pretty wide margin. Even if it just told basically the same story over again, the sense of continuity between the games is still rather enjoyable. Plus, the design, in general, is just a lot better. It’s still not great, but it’s definitely more with playing.
For other retro titles you may have missed, click right here!
