Retro Game Challenge 4

Retro Game Challenge 4 is the fourth game in the Retro Game Challenge series, a collection of retro styled games based on the Japanese gaming show Game Center CX.

Background
Retro Game Challenge 4 (JP: ゲームセンターCX 4 有野の最後!? Game Center CX 4: The End of Arino!?) is the 4th game in the Retro Game Challenge series of licensed games based off of the TV series Game Center CX. While the previous two games in the series had not been localized into English, personnel at Namco Bandai observed that the games were still being talked about on the internet years on, and made the decision to take another gamble on the franchise.

Both in recognition of the progress that the indieszero developed games had already gone through and in response to the increasing proliferation of pseudo-retro games on the indie game scene, the decision was made to advance the “Retro” stylings of the series from the 80s to the 90s and early 2000s. Because doing this concept justice required higher production values than indieszero could usually produce, Namco Bandai lent some personnel and resources to co-develop, as well as a significant budget increase, although the majority of planning and design work was done by indieszero.

The decision to localize the title as “Retro Game Challenge 4” despite Retro Game Challenges 2 and 3 not getting English releases was explained by a spokesperson from Xseed as follows: “The first people to care about this release will be those who already know about Retro Game Challenge as a series. We have faith that they'll do the explaining for us.”

Story
The plot of Retro Game Challenge 4 is the same as that of 1 and 2: Shinya Arino, the host of real life gaming program Game Center CX, is so tormented by is inability to be good at video games that his negative emotions have once again resurrected Game Master Arino, an electronic life form born of the real Arino's anger. Game Master Arino has kidnapped you, the player, and cast them back in time to force them to challenge the games of Arino's youth.

Characters
You: The player character of the game is you yourself, kidnapped by Game Master Arino via your Nintendo Switch, turned back into a teenager (assuming you weren't one already), and sent back to the 90s. You can choose a gender and customize your appearance, but the create-a-character system isn't very in-depth. You are a silent protagonist, but you are allowed to pick from dialogue options casting you as either fun loving or stoic, earnest or teasing, or just altogether strange.

Game Master Arino: Arino's negative emotions regarding his own failures at games given form via electronics and digital mumbo jumbo. The game's nominal antagonist, although he doesn't come across as very malicious. He trapped you in the past as a teenager, and occasionally appears from cyberspace to deliver new challenges, refusing to return you to your own time until you complete them all. Alternating between childish taunts, posturing, and encouragement, and obviously putting his game together on the fly, he isn't very intimidating. As always, he manifests as a heavily polygonal floating head with a crown, although he's upgraded his crown to have a design with four face buttons and is showing off his “radical 90s 'tude!” with a pair of sunglasses.

Arino: The Arino of the 90s, who is once again letting you stay at his house while you're trapped in the past. He's aged from a child to a teenager, but his personality hasn't really changed. Perhaps as expected from a future comedian, he's a jokester who slips between the roles of boke and tsukkomi with ease. He's excited to have a friend from the future, but if you try to tell him about the future he'll either misunderstand or just not believe you. He's a balanced gamer who is competent at everything (unlike his real life self), but outstanding at nothing, though he has a good head for puzzles. Voiced in English by Yuri Lowenthal.

Sasano: A friend of Arino's who is known for his incredible good looks. He's admired for his ability to keep a cool head under all circumstances and his friendly, easy-going demeanor. Arino is very jealous of him. He's the thoughtful type who can skillfully chart a course through games based around movement, like platformers and shoot 'em ups. Voiced in English by Sean Chiplock.

Takahashi: Another friend, Takahashi is a kindly, sensitive type, always quick to reassure others or lend a helping hand... even when her contribution doesn't really help any. But she's so sweet she's impossible to get mad at. She's not much of a gamer herself, but she's good with games that give you time to think things through like RPGs and adventure games. Voiced in English by Natalie Hoover.

Abe: A pompadour-sporting delinquent who loves motorcycles. He's hotheaded and always leaps before he looks. Surprisingly good cook. His forte in games is high-speed, high-octane action, like racing and fighting games. Voiced in English by Griffin Burns.

Itou: The spunky tomboy with an inexhaustible supply of energy. She's a bold mood-maker who always has something to do, perhaps to make up for how little she has going on in her head. She's a dyed in the wool Gamer Girl whose skills lie in twitch action like fighting and shooting. Voiced in English by Felecia Angelle.

Gameplay
Retro Game Challenge 4 follows the formula of the first two games: Game Master Arino will deliver a challenge for a game you have, and the player must complete it in order to advance. Challenges are generally based around progression (Get to level 3, beat the miniboss in level 4, etc.) or teaching simple gameplay mechanics (Fill your meter and perform a super move, collect the strongest level power-up, etc.), although there are a few challenges based around achieving high scores, performing specific high-level maneuvers, or finding secrets.

Aside from the general increase in production values, the biggest change to 4 over the previous games is the ability to select which games you want to challenge. While Retro Game Challenge 1 and 2 gave games to you in a specific, fixed order, 4 splits its campaign into “waves” of games, with players being allowed to pick which games from the current era they want to challenge. This means players can choose to focus on the types of games they like; for example, someone who finds RPGs boring can skip them all to make room for more action games, while RPG fans can skip out on the fighting games to challenge multiple RPGs in a single campaign. The player can pick up games from previous waves, and by the end of the game they will have every game in the collection, but only the games they chose to challenge initially will be necessary for the final Beat Every Game challenge. You can go back and challenge games that had been skipped previously to eventually achieve an “Ultimate True Ending”, though. If you want.

Game Modes
The neutral, “menu” state shows the player and the currently selected friends sitting on the floor in the current room. The player can hit A to open the side menu and choose what to do:


 * Games: Opens the games menu. The player can select any game they currently have access to, and choose to start playing it, read its manual (every game comes with a fully illustrated in-game manual with controls, story overviews, gameplay tips, hints, and obligatory safety warnings), or look at its challenge record, showing all cleared challenges and any active ones.


 * Magazines: One of the most unique things about Retro Game Challenge has been the ability to read original in-game magazines containing hints, tips, and cheat codes for the games, as well as reviews, interviews with the fictional developers of the games, promotional materials for upcoming games, current best seller lists, letters to the editor (featuring the return of the first game's joke names), and a statement from the editor-in-chief at the end. Retro Game Challenge 4 features longer, more detailed, and more authentic in-game magazines than the previous games, partially due to the need to cover multiple games per magazine, and partially because the larger screen means there is no longer a need to keep each page to only a single paragraph. In addition to the return of GameFan, the core gaming magazine (based on Famitsu in the original Japanese, reworked into a pastiche of EGM in the localization), Retro Game Challenge 4 also represents the increasing number of new game-centric magazines in the 90s with a multitude of different titles dedicated to specific consoles, genres, or just providing a competing voice, all featuring their own running gags in the vein of GameFan's constant revolving door of Chief Editors.


 * Computer: Welcome to the future of communication: The Information Superhighway! Use the computer to access the old internet. Chat on chatrooms, visit fansites and fanpages to games and other media, and even visit an early YouTube pastiche (a pre-rebrand Nico Nico Douga pastiche in the original Japanese) to watch things like game commercials, anime clips, and even a short OVA based off of the Robot Ninja Haggleman series! Imagine an extremely stripped down version of Hypnospace Outlaw and you have a general image of this feature.


 * Shop: Move to JoycoLand, the local game store. At JoycoLand, the player can test play additional games not featured in challenges, usually remakes or special editions of games from the previous three Retro Game Challenge titles, as well as see unique chats about the games or JoycoLand itself, which is owned by a man with a deep love of games but a poor business sense.


 * Chat: Talk to your friends. The amount of dialogue in-game has been massively increased due to addition of four new characters to talk to, with the potential chats you can see dependent on which friends are currently in the room with you, both as individuals and in groups. For example, if you chat with both Takahashi and Itou present, they might start having some girls talk, while Arino and Abe might start bickering. Chatting can lead to secrets or helpful tips to clear the games, but more likely you'll just get jokes or fun character moments. Chats are usually restricted to only be about the current challenged game, but after all the single game challenges have been cleared, chats for every game available will all be mixed together.


 * Phone: Pick up the phone and make a call. The player can either phone a friend to ask for tips, which will likely be more advanced than anything else available (assuming you don't get sidetracked...), or call Game Master Arino and beg to skip the current challenge. G.M. Arino won't let you skip unless you call him multiple times and make multiple attempts to clear the challenge. He isn't too fond of quitters! You can reactivate skipped challenges at any time to fulfill your completionist instincts.


 * Watch: Hand a game and the controller off to one of your friends and just watch them play. How well they do is dependent on how good a match they are for the game you give them. The friend playing will comment on their own playing similarly to how they comment when you play normally, and you can even ask two friends to play together in multiplayer mode. There is no gameplay purpose to watching – Arino might be okay with you clearing challenges in multiplayer mode, but he won't reward you if you don't do anything! – but it can be relaxing.


 * Move: Decide which friend's house you want to visit (the five friends all have rooms with different décor, so it's similar to picking a menu theme) and which friends you want present (in case you want to be sure you'll hear one person's commentary or try for one specific chat... or if you just want to spend time alone with Takahashi). If you play with one friend group for a long time, the game will attempt to encourage mixing things up by having new friends arrive or leave after a while, but the Move option (which represents ending the current hangout and starting a new play date on another day) can always be used to set things up exactly how you want.


 * Customize: An option that was on the start menu of Retro Game Challenge 2, moved here for convenience. Allows the player to customize their layout by changing their clothes and that of their friends, choose decorations to display in their rooms, and switch out which audio cues to play under specific circumstances (i.e. starting a game, clearing a challenge).


 * Daily Challenge: Another returning options from 2, the daily challenge is a challenge that can be played, well, every day. Each daily challenge is randomly generated by combining a general goal with a restriction, such as “Kill 100 enemies in Fuujin – without dying once” or “Beat the first boss in Super Demon Returns 2 – without any power ups”. Unlike in Retro Game Challenge 2, every game in the collection is represented in the daily challenges, with games not intended to be beaten in a single sitting such as the RPGs, Haggleman, and Demon Returns 3D all dropping the player in a partially completed save depending on what the game is currently challenging them to do (putting them in the correct area in Demon Returns, giving them a specific party configuration, etc.) Clearing daily challenges earns coins, and building up streaks of multiple clears in a row ads multipliers to your winnings. Coins can be spent on new options from the Customize menu.

Wave One
Wave One is a deliberate expectation lowerer: All of the games are simple titles for the Super GameCom (the RGC-Verse's version of the SNES), the challenges are extremely short and simple, and even Game Master Arino is aware of how redundant this is with the first two games. However, when the player returns to the games after completing their challenges, they'll find that they are fun, well made games which were deliberately cut short by the challenges to maintain the feeling. We did not deliberately put bad games in our collection, that would be dumb. Wave One gives three games to chose from, each featuring four challenges:

Pedal To The Metal!: A racing game viewed from behind the car in the vein of Cruis'n' USA, OutRun, or Top Gear. You play as a red sports car participating in a cross-country race from one end of the U.S.A. to the other for a large cash prize. The difficulty is low, with wide roads and forgiving handling, but the game's aesthetic is on point, with detailed backgrounds that fly by to give a great sense of speed.

Super Demon Returns 2: The relationship between Super Demon Returns 1 and 2 is similar to that of Super Mario Bros. and The Lost Levels, which is to say the Demon Returns 2 is basically a level pack for Super Demon Returns from Retro Game Challenge 2, although thankfully SDR2 isn't deliberately impossible. The plot is once again business as usual: The Queen of Hades has once again kidnapped the Princess as a bride for one of her four sons, and turned Damon, the Princess's lover, into a demon in hopes of stopping him from rescuing her. Now Damon must venture through Hades, collecting apples to keep from losing his rapidly declining life force while using the Devil Ride mechanic to ride on the backs of defeated enemies. Can you find the D-E-M-O-N letters in each stage?

Guadia Quest Generations: Coelacanth's signature JRPG series (being a starting game means we don't have to suffer through the regular series of delays, although it is mentioned that they still occurred), Guadia Quest Generations is another Dragon Quest style adventure with monster catching elements. The series has been keeping up with the times: not only have the addition of 8 more bits lead to a predictable increase in graphical and sound quality, but the game also has a comparatively elaborate story, with both your party members and the enemies possessing identifiable personalities and goals. The challenges end before you even see the game's gimmick: after every dungeon, the game timeskips, and you get to play as the previous hero's child!

Wave Two
The era of 3D gaming dawns, and expectations are through the roof! Arino's gotten his hands on a Jupiter-10 (Sega Saturn), obviously the future of gaming! All games from this point onward feature five challenges instead of four, and they're actually a bit of an ask this time.

Max Power Field Kick: A soccer game, as almost all new consoles gain early on. It's more focused on arcade style fun than realism, featuring fast, snappy controls and the ability to make accurate kicks at extreme range. Naturally for a minor licensed game, it doesn't feature real leagues or players, so the devs were able to have fun coming up with Fighting Baseball inspired fake names.

Mutekiken Kung-Fu: Karate Showdown: Geisha Games, the studio responsible for this game, was introduced in RGC2 as an American studio, but by the mid 90s they've absorbed so many Japanese personnel that they're starting to feel like a Japanese company... although not enough to keep from mixing up kung-fu and karate. Karate Showdown is an arcade port 3D fighting game primarily based on Virtua Fighter 2, although the Japanese period piece setting gives it a hint of Samurai Shodown flavor as well. The plot, about martial artists who must stop an evil daimyo from summoning a demon to conquer Japan, is threadbare, serving mainly as a vehicle to justify fights. Said fights are weighty and deliberate, as the polygonal 3D models flow smoothly through their combo animations in a way that boggles the kids' young minds.

Calvary: A first person shooter in which the player controls a special forces operative who must navigate a base full of mutant life forms, collecting a variety of different weapons to fend them off as you search for and destroy the mutant king. Although it isn't in any way a horror game, the dark corridors and fleshy monsters are still creepy enough to give Arino nightmares. Calvary winds up being the most controversial game in Retro Game Challenge 4, as the developers dedication to accurately recreating the early 3D game style extended to the use of a clunky, pre-standardized control scheme with slippery movement and poor aiming, although the game's difficulty is balanced to compromise.

The name “Calvary” comes from an alternate transliteration of “Golgotha”, the hill on which Jesus was crucified. The name doesn't mean anything, the devs (both in and out of universe) just thought is sounded cool.

Wave Three
Wave 3 features games for the Gamecenter, the referentially named counterpart to the Playstation, a newly released console with a strong lineup and loads of public support, in addition to the Jupiter-10. Fortunately, Arino's friend Sasano has one, and he'll let you play his. Because he's such a good friend. Arino is maddened with jealousy.

Wave 3 is also the core of the game as a whole, with the most games both in total and necessary to clear the wave leaving it both the largest and the one in which the player has the most freedom to choose their own path.

Fuujin: A vertical scrolling shoot 'em up developed by KYURI, a newly founded company staffed by former employees of TOMATO, the developer of all the previous space shooters seen in the series. In keeping with the style of shmups of the time, it's a bullet hell game, although the game is definitely balanced for looking scary rather than being difficult, with bullets coming out in complex patterns where most of the shots aren't aimed at the player. The story is similar to modern bullet hell titles like Ikaruga, Thunder Force V, or the later DoDonPachi games: Understated, but present. The game features very few cutscenes and the plot is just “humanity vs. aliens”, but the pilots of the selectable ships and the operator are all defined characters with names and personalities, the game has a distinct art style and unique stage designs, bosses, and music, and the endings are moody and melancholy about the destruction wrought by battle.

The game features three different ships to choose from, with different weapon loadouts. Although large numbers of bullets in complex patterns cover the screen, gameplay is balanced around the expectation that some of the players will be newbies to the shmup genre, so the actually difficulty is low.

Robot Ninja Haggleman: Steel Neo-Tokyo: A 2D side scrolling metroidvania, Steel Neo-Tokyo is the latest game in a franchise that's been present since the first game. The game features high definition 2D sprites and hybrid 2D-3D backgrounds similar to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Silhouette Mirage, and the Playstation Mega Man games, with Haggleman's sprites in particular being especially animated and dynamic, with clockwork gears rotating on his body and elaborate movements in his animations, including a cartwheeling jump directly copied from Strider 2. Compared to Robot Ninja Haggleman 3, the action is faster and more intense, with Haggleman running faster, attacking faster, and able to aim his attacks more accurately.

The plot sees an army of robots taking over Neo-Tokyo, the capital of Neo-Japan, and converting the entire city into a massive steel karakuri fortress. Haggleman, the fighting robot created by the ninja-roboticist Zenryosai, and his allies, Zenryosai's daughter Koume, robot dog K9, genius baby robot Little Zenmai, and Kazu, the handsome green-clad ninja introduced in Haggleman: Koume Edition, go in to investigate. Haggleman must journey across the Steel Tokyo Fortress, collecting hagglegears that unlock new abilities and weapons and equipment to increase his stats. After clearing many areas and fighting complex mechanical bosses, as well as his rival and evil copy Dark Haggleman, who is revealed to have survived the events of Robot Ninja Haggleman 3, Haggleman eventually is able to infiltrate the core of the Fortress and uncover the mastermind: Chingensai, the mad scientist who created Dark Haggleman and served as the antagonist of the first two games. Having survived his death by uploading his mind into a computer, untethering his mind from a physical form has driven him mad. He now seeks to convert the entire world into machines, and take revenge on Haggleman and his friends in the process. Chingensai has himself become the Steel Tokyo Fortress, being fought as the final boss in a dramatic final conflict in which Haggleman must destroy several of the Fortress's cores while being attacked by security features, escape from the Fortress while the building itself attacks you, then fight the entire Fortress from the outside after it morphs into a titanic, smoking, clanking version of the Great Chingensai, the final boss of Haggleman 2, which attacks from the background. Haggleman and all of his allies combine their power with Zenryosai's ultimate Hagglegear and are able to destroy Tokyo Chingensai in a climactic final battle.

Cosmos Quest: An action RPG resembling the Tales and Star Ocean franchises, with fast-paced real time combat in battle but following JRPG conventions in most other regards. The game is a sci-fi adventure with less focus on more traditional fantasy elements than Star Ocean; while magic does exist, the party doesn't settle down on any medieval planets for a majority of the game, instead journeying freely from planet to planet, all inhabited by technologically advanced people. The increased focus on storytelling in games during the 32-bit era is represented, as focus scenes for each of the party members, diving into their personalities, backstories, and unique quirks, can be unlocked, although there aren't many, only three per party member total.

Cosmos Quest is also the first game in Retro Game Challenge with a female protagonist. Eva Taiyo, a mercenary woman with red hair and a distinctive bionic eye, encounters a pale, willowy woman with elfin features on a routine mission guarding an archaeological convoy. The woman is totally amnesiac, unable to remember anything other than her own name: Luna Rizen. Taking pity on Luna (and cursing her own soft nature all the while), Eva becomes Luna's guardian, a role that quickly proves necessary as all of the most powerful factions in the galaxy seem very interested in her! Being thrust into the galactic spotlight leads Eva to quickly amass a following of new allies, including an upstanding old friend from her days in the military, a roguish space pirate who defects upon deciding that human trafficking is a step too far (and revealing that his former crew were hired to kidnap Luna, revealing that someone with very deep pockets is interested in her), and an android of unknown make that identifies itself as Luna's caretaker.

For most of the game the main antagonist is a Klingon-esque military society. However, in the end the one who manages to obtain Luna's power is Eva's former superior during her time in the Federation military, who had served as an occasional ally throughout the game. The superior reveals that Luna is the last survivor of a powerful, advanced race that ruled the galaxy long ago, and that she possesses the key to awakening an ancient superweapon which the superior seeks to use to “bring order to the cosmos”. Eva's party fails to prevent the weapon from being revived, revealed it to be Zodiac, a massive demon with twelve arms and a body the color of space. Seeking nothing but destruction, Zodiac proves impossible to control, effortlessly killing Eva's former superior before confronting the party in a climactic final battle. After a grueling struggle, the party triumphs, destroying the last vestige of Luna's old empire. With the galaxy saved, all of the party members return to their previous lives... except for Luna, who, with nowhere else to go, insists on following Eva around even as she proves completely unsuited for the mercenary lifestyle. The game ends with Eva once again cursing herself for being so soft on Luna before smiling softly at her antics.

Mecha Battle CROSS: While most of the games in Retro Game Challenge 4 are based around genres and trends rather than specific titles, there is one exception: Mecha Battle CROSS is just a Super Robot Wars game. Specifically based off of the Classic Era of the franchise – that is, Super Robot Wars 3, 4, and F – CROSS features most of the elements signature to that series, being a turn-based strategy game featuring both upgradable mechs and pilots who level up like RPG characters, “soul commands” that work the same way as spirit commands, many attacks with battle animations that are much more elaborate than genre standard (although still stiff by modern standards), and lots of in-battle dialogue. The game features the same setup of SRW in being a crossover between many giant robot anime, although the series featured in CROSS were all made up for Retro Game Challenge 4. Fans of the series, information from fan pages, and even clips of “memorable moments” from the made up anime can all be seen on the internet, even prior to unlocking CROSS.

Mecha Battle CROSS crosses over eight series: three traditional super robot series (one science based, one magical legacy of a lost civilization, and one combiner), a military real robot series based on Gundam, two spin-offs from the Gundam-alike, a fantasy isekai series, and a Neon Genesis Evangelion style series that's both psychologically and narratively complicated. Like Super Robot Wars 3, there isn't an original main character.

The plot sees the protagonists of the eight series consolidated into a single unit by a scientist who has foreseen the coming of an alien invasion. The heroes must work together to defeat both the antagonists of all their respective source materials – including an evil underground organization, the evil lost civilization responsible for destroying the good lost civilization that made the magic super robot, the dictatorial nation from the military series, and an evil kingdom from the isekai – and the alien invasion foreseen by the scientist, which has also teamed up with a different alien invasion fought by the combining robot in its own series. After many battles, the enemies are all defeated and the day is saved. However, only if the player was able to clear the game with all secrets unlocked do they gain the secret extra stage and the true ending, in which the scientist who gathered them all reveals himself as a cultist worshiping an evil god from the isekai world who gathered the heroes together to cultivate powerful souls to sacrifice in order to resurrect his master. By recruiting all of the hidden pilots, the heroes' unit now has enough souls for the ritual, so the scientist confronts them in a magitech mecha powered by his god for a final battle.

Although designed with as much concern as every other game in the collection, the Bamco co-produced title can't help but give some ribbing to its predecessors, so the chat dialogue contains more jokes specifically at the expense of this game than any other, most of which are transparent references to the Super Robot Wars classic trilogy. These include the fact that the super robots come from a variety of different series but the reals are monopolized by a single work and its spin-offs, the way that the one real robot series still manages to have a disproportionate impact on the plot, the number of attacks that are just “static robot sprite slides into the enemy” with a different effect layered on top, the Evangelion style series being poorly represented because none of the game's writers understood anything that happened in it, and a chat in which Arino states that the Jupiter-10 version of the game has much better sound quality, but that he's still glad he got the GameCenter version because at least it doesn't have a random save deletion glitch.

Jun'ai Revolution~!: A dating sim with stat grinding, time management, and event based progression, in the vein of Tokimeki Memorial, Mitsumete Knight, and Sentimental Graffiti. The plot is genre standard to the point of not really existing: you're nameable, faceless protagonist, in high school, and girls exist. The game features four heroines: a standard issue childhood friend, a quiet girl with glasses, a spunky tomboy, and a tsundere. You win if you manage to get convince one of them to become your girlfriend come graduation day. Doing so requires finding out what stats they like and grinding them up to acceptable levels via appropriate activities, making and keeping enough dates with them (and having them actually go well), and seeing their special events by going to liked date spots on specific days or with specific stat spreads, visiting them on holidays, and just generally spending enough time with them, all while keeping from collapsing from overwork.

Of course, half the fun of Jun'ai Revolution~! (yes, that punctuation is mandatory) comes not from the game itself, but from seeing the way the teenage cast react to it. The chats and between challenge convos if you play Jun'ai Revolution~! form character arcs for the kids. At the beginning, the male friends are all excited to play a game where you can date cute girls, while Itou and, to a lesser extent, Takahashi scoff at the immaturity of drooling over 2D images. However, as the player progresses through the game, the boys slowly bore and grow frustrated of the detailed management aspects of the game, while the girls are impressed by the writing, to the point where they eventually start talking about the heroines in the game like friends they know in real life!

Wave Triotos
A loving rib of Tetris's omnipresence, Wave Triotos gives the player a choice of which version of Triotos, Retro Game Challenge's resident match three-falling block-Tetris stand in, they'd like to play. All four versions of Triotos play the same and have the same challenges, and are all treated as the same game for purposes of the ending “beat every game” challenge.

I am aware that every different version of the game playing identically isn't particularly true to how Tetris ports work in reality, but it wouldn't be realistic to expect one game to contain four slight alterations of the same game.

Triotos 10: Triotos for the Jupiter-10 is the “standard” Triotos, featuring a simple well to drop the pieces in against backdrops of traditional Japanese art and scenes from Japan, all set to traditional Japanese music. This is the default Triotos, with the same themes as the previous version put through a linear increase in visual and audio quality.

Triotos DX: The gritty Triotos for the edgy decade, Triotos DX has an industrial factory theme and has the blocks make heavy metal clanks as they fall over a soundtrack of equally heavy industrial music.

Triotos Plus: The exact opposite of Triotos DX, Triotos Plus is a very Japanese Triotos where clearing lines slowly reveals art of anime girls dressed as characters from various famous fairy tales acting out their stories, featuring peppy, energetic music and a female announcer with a cute voice.

Wild Triotos: A deep cut to Tetris on the Philips CD-i, Wild Triotos is also the only game in the collection to feature FMVs, a common practice among real games of the era but not fondly remembered enough to be nostalgic. Featuring Full Motion Video backgrounds of nature scenes and relaxing music, this is, ironically, the Triotos for gamers looking for a low stress puzzle game.

Wave FINAL
The final round features three games, based on what are considered the three “cores” of the 32-bit era. Only one of the games must be cleared to complete the round, but all three of the options are doozies.

Demon Returns: Revenge of the Queen of Hades: The 3D collectathon platformer. Prince Damon (the game has cutscenes now, so they've expanded the lore enough to clarify that he's a prince) has once again been cursed to turn into a demon by the Queen of Hades in an attempt to stop him from foiling her latest plan. No longer content to merely kidnap the princess, she and her four sons have launched a full scale invasion of the human world, seeking to transform the kingdom into a hell on earth. Damon's only hope to defeat the Queen is by using new abilities granted to him by a new ally, a wise, repentant old demon, and collect Golden Skulls needed to unlock the entrances to new worlds. Damon must once again defeat the Queen's four sons, the Princes of Hades, to obtain their four keys and enter the Queen's castle, then defeat her before she is able to finalize her spell and convert the world into a second Hades forever.

If you've played any collectathon, Demon Returns for 3D consoles will be highly familiar. Damon explores open stages, platforms, fights quirky enemies, and completes puzzles, finding the main progress trinkets, the Golden Skulls, as well as basic currency (souls) and additional trinkets like Demon Coins, which can be exchanged for new abilities from the old demon, and Fragments of a lonely ghost's Broken Heart, which can be exchanged for more Golden Skulls. The game's aesthetic is horror themed but not scary; the world is primarily done in shades of purple and night sky blue, decorative skulls are common, and the enemies are themed after yokai, but the game is cute and cartoony and the enemies are bumbling and incompetent, with the Queen's newfound ability to speak in game exposing her as an easily flustered narcissist who can only control her incompetent minions and bumbling children with frequent shouting. The game has five worlds, though the fifth, the Queen's Castle, is nearly a straight shot to the final boss, much smaller than the first four stages and featuring far fewer skulls.

Code: WARRIOR: The 2D fighting game. Inspired by the likes of Street Fighter 3, Marvel vs. Capcom, and the King of Fighters, Code: WARRIOR features detailed, colorful, and fluidly animated 2D sprite fighters clashing in front of detailed backdrops. Gameplay is much faster and more intense than Karate Showdown, although in the interest of keeping the game playable to newbies who weren't expecting a serious fighting game, the difficulty curve is low and the inputs are nowhere near as complex as any of the game's inspirations.

With Karate Showdown having the supernatural plot, Code: WARRIOR features a more sci-fi plot, similar to KoF's NESTS Saga, with a mysterious underground organization, a plan to clone the strongest fighters, and a boss character heavily based on (a properly balanced) Igniz. Although the game naturally lets you play the arcade mode with any of the playable characters, the game's “default” protagonist is an artificial fighter created by the evil organization, although unlike K', he was taken away from them at a young age (by his “mother”, who is actually the scientist who created him and took him away so that the boy she viewed as a son wouldn't be made to fight for evil) and has no idea that he's not a normal person; his personality much more in line with a generic shonen protagonist than a snarky anti-hero. The game does feature a secret boss for super players, a copy of Ash Crimson who is mentioned in a magazine as “foreshadowing for the next game”, for real unstoppable warriors to challenge.

Truly, the Last Fantasy: After two games of being teased in best-sellers lists, a game from The Last Fantasy, Retro Game Challenge's Final Fantasy pastiche, is now playable! Based on the three mainline entries for the Playstation, as well as similar titles from the era like The Legend of Dragoon and the first two Grandia games, TtLF features all the hallmarks you would expect: ATB battles, charmingly low poly models of anime-style characters in front of lavish pre-rendered backdrops, heavy customization based on the Materia system, and a complex plot.

The main protagonist is a mercenary, like Cloud, Squall, or Ryudo, and like them he is dragged mostly against his will into a war with an evil political entity (an expansionist corporatocracy, combining familiar elements of the Shinra Corporation, Galbadia, and Alexandria) due to being hired by a perky, emotionally attuned young women. After the initial Evil Emperor antagonist is dealt with early on, it's discovered that the true enemy is a godlike entity that threatens the entire world if unsealed. The game references its primary inspiration liberally, and the plot features human experimentation like Final Fantasy VII, slight time travel like VIII, and enemy aliens like XI, although the truncated length means that the plot never gets mind bendingly complex. Like many 32-bit JRPGs, the game is spread across multiple discs, four in this case, and each keeps itself fairly self-contained.

Disc one is mostly about the party – an array of JRPG mainstays, including the hero's first client/kindly love interest, a muscular and boisterous warrior, a perky female ninja in the Yuffie Kisaragi/Sheena Fujibayashi mould, and a shy, prepubescent mage – forming up and fighting the corporatocracy while it's revealed that the reason the lead protagonist is so anti-social is because they were subjected to human experimentation prior to the game, ending with the president of the corporatocracy being killed by a mysterious new villain, setting the party off on a new quest to defeat him.

Disc two has the party set off on their journey to stop the villains from unsealing various spots of power, with the primary plot revelation being that the party's wise mentor character had arranged for them to be in position to save the world in the first place, such as by rescuing the protagonist from the lab where he was experimented on, by traveling back in time (his time travel artifact doesn't have the power to make another trip so, fortunately or unfortunately, time travel doesn't come up in the plot again).

The third disc exposes the nature of the power that the villains are searching for: they're alien in nature. In the past, (conveniently humanoid) aliens landed on the planet, but the first people to discover them were the agents of the corporation, who had all of them subjected to inhumane experiments in hopes of wielding their vast power. The game's antagonists are revealed to be survivors of the alien scouting party, reclaiming the power that is rightfully theirs in order to take revenge on all of humanity. The party is shaken to discover that their enemies were subjected to the same pains as the hero, but swear to defend the innocent humans of the world.

The final disc features the entire world map, giving the party a chance to complete any remaining side quests and go equipment and megaboss hunting before the final dungeon and the confrontation with the alien leader, who has reacquired his race's ancient power. However, after he's defeated, the final twist occurs: the game's final boss is the mentor, who is actually the founder and first president of the corporatocracy. When he time traveled back to set up the events of the plot, he was the one who ordered the protagonist experimented on, in order to both make him a viable host for the aliens' power and to implant mind control on him, allowing him to be controlled and letting the first president seize all the power he now possesses. With the aliens' power, the first president can power his time travel artifact for decades to come, allowing him to learn all of history, discover everyone who will ever oppose him and slaughter them in their cribs, and rule humanity for all eternity. It's only with the support and encouragement of the party the hero has begrudgingly come to view as friends that he manages to become more than a human weapon and throw off his role in the corporation's evil plans, leading the party to confront the first president as he attempts to control the alien power in a last ditch effort and is mutated into a twisted monster for his efforts. After he is defeated, he is killed, not by the party, but by the alien leader, who survived his battle and decides to call off the destruction of humanity after seeing the party's good hearts.