Heroine Anthem II

[NightWolve]

This is a temp placeholder post, I just wanted to upload/share these Wayback screenshots to someone. It's a 2004 thread on my offline backup of RIGG/Retro ISO Gaming Guild, an ancient PC Engine forum primarily. I hope to rebuild it and upload it again here to keep the threads/history shared. Anyway, this post may be deleted, so I wouldn't bookmark it or anything, I just temporarily want the screenshots.

I came across chinese rpgs about a year ago and been addicted to it since! Well maybe me being chinese also had something to do with it XD

Chinese RPGs are probably never heard of by USA rpg lovers and here is a preview of some of the biggest titles.

here is a popular title in China Heroine Anthem 2










Heroine Anthem 2.; its a sequel to Heroine Anthem: The Elect of Wassernixie (or bride of Mermaid if you will). Heroine Anthem is a story follows the girl Edda, who drowned at sea trying to save this boy while on board a slave ship. She was saved by the mermaid prince, who turned her into a mermaid intending to make her his bride. She fled the palace of Mermaid under the help of a lobster named Bedin, wanting to find her lost sister; who was also sold into slavery. During her advanture in the mermaid world, she finds out that Ragnarok is upon the world, and the Dark Ark of Noah has also returned (the Dark ark of noah has monsters trapped in it since the time of the great flood). So bascially she is trying to stop it from happening and finding her sister. The game is split into two parts that tells one whole story which is an interesting way for an RPG to present itself(like the way Matrix's 2 and 3 presented itself).

The entire game takes place in a 2D world (well 3D pre-rendered background) and there is no world map, so going from place to place takes alot of walking or running around through forests, dungeons and moutains etc.

Music wise I think its very well written here is couple of music samples hope you'll enjoy.
http://www.rit.edu/~wqd9695/HA2/mus...les/Track01.cda
http://www.rit.edu/~wqd9695/HA2/mus...les/Track04.cda
http://www.rit.edu/~wqd9695/HA2/mus...les/Track17.cda
http://www.rit.edu/~wqd9695/HA2/mus...les/Track20.cda
http://www.rit.edu/~wqd9695/HA2/mus...les/Track29.cda

graphic wise it is 2gb of pure 2D graphics. I would show some frames, but I can't seem to get this tool working right, so maybe at a later time.

Battle system wise it is also quite different from many of the traditional rpg battle system. Each character has special moves that takes up SP(SP can only be gained from being attacked) and then each takes a certain amount of time and when u select a move it is allocated onto his or her action bar; certain moves take alot of the time and certain takes very little and you can do this for all characters and these characters will excute all the list of actions you have allocated onto their action bar. So timing is definitly a very important element in this game, it could mean wining and losing an important mission. and all the characters can be attacking at the same time causing an effect of linear motion battle system like Tales of Destiny. Once a characters action has ran out you'll be prompted to select more actions. Character placement are also up to u, u get a 3X3 grid to form your formations. Characters in the front actually do get attacked more than characters in the back and also ur spell has ranges so how u place ur character can also mean whether or not ur spell will effect them in battle to save them.

Magic system is also quite interesting. Through out the game you find rune stones that has certain vocabulary attached to them individually. To create magic spells u need to learn the enchantment of it to get the spell to form properly. You can also form summon spell, which I've yet to be able to do so, since u can only learn certain enchantments at a certain stage of the game.

Cutscenes in this game is done with real nice anime and decent CG and converted into Bink Video. Some reason WindThunder never makes HIGH res CGI movies for their game, so some of the movies seems blocky. I guess the intention is let the game speak for itself rather than having high res cutscenes to speak for it.

here is one movie. u need divx to watch it, quality is bad but I'm no coding expert so there
Gameplay movie for HA2 FEAST YOUR EYE ON THIS BEAUTY!

And the second game I'm here to present is a game called Fantasia three kingdom!!!  losely based on the story of Romance of Three Kingdom several important events of that story were taken to formulate this amazing game. I wrote a review for it but the site is under construction so I'll link it when its back!!! :p

here is a preview for you all who loves RPG

[Gilgamesh]

I don't know if you're aware of that, but it's worth mentioning that WindThunder has made the first 2 Heroine Anthem games available for free download from their official website:
https://www.heroineanthem.com/vocal_version/en-US/index.html
As far as I know, a Simplified Chinese version was also available but now it seems your best bet would be to check if it was saved in the Wayback Machine.

[NightWolve]

Wow, I can't believe this post motivated someone to register and reply to it!

Yeah, hard to believe but I knew about that link because a veteran localizer shared it with me a long time ago given his English localization projects!!! The company removed the DRM protection from the 2000's era and let the world have the games for free, yeah, it's surprising! He also has a sitting nearly finished Magna Carta localization project but wanted help for final finishing touches so it's not getting released until then or maybe never unfortunately...

You must be pretty old skool to remember Heroine Anthem and the Chinese RPG PC era! Anyway, welcome, I know I've seen your name before, it's familiar!

EDIT: I looked at my old RIGG PC Engine forum offline copy, I found a member Gilgamesch / rocco.hilton (at) gmx, was that you or coincidence ?? Were you a member 20 years ago ??