Cosmic Fantasy 4 Chapter 1

~ COSMIC FANTASY 4 CHAPTER 1 ~

Telenet

Super CD-ROM

1994

I'm a huge Cosmic Fantasy fan. I'm fond of every game in the series except for this one, which is a disgustingly awful dud. I'll always be annoyed that Telenet allowed their otherwise-wonderful series to be tainted by such repugnant dreck. Nonetheless, I must concede that there are positives to cover, namely...

The characters. Well, you can't go wrong with Yuu and Saya, and there are some cool new good guys on the scene. A few of the villains (the ones who show up through the first half, basically) are crafty and funny.

...So yeah, that's the good stuff. Here's the bad:

The digital comic scenes. Starting a traditional-style RPG off with a stretch of comic-style play is an interesting idea. But watching Yuu blow off Saya to flirt with some idiot and talk to tech guys isn't thrilling.

The story. There are very few cinemas, and when they're finally implemented, it's for stupid stuff like the cat showing up and singing. The drama, humor, and touching moments that the Cosmic Fantasy games are known for are mostly absent here.

The battle system. CF3 kept things quick and relatively simple. Now we get this "waiting for bars to fill up" nonsense. The process feels very slow and tedious when you're using just one character--which you will be for a long while. Once you put together a competent band, it becomes a fast and somewhat enjoyable system, but it still feels sloppy.

The dungeon design. Telenet made the dungeon-crawling stretches longer by using cheap ploys like concealed pits that make you climb back up to where you were and switches that reveal pathways all the way on the other side of their respective floors. Not to mention that there are lots of irritating, multi-monster random battles (and I say this as someone who doesn't mind the encounter rates in the earlier episodes).

The length. The epic adventuring of CF2 is a distant memory. This is over very quickly--you'll be beating the tar out of the weak final boss before you know it. Just imagine how short it would be without the annoying time-wasting nonsense in the dungeons and the frequent fighting. And I'm not going to let it off the hook here just because it's a "Chapter 1," as CF4-2 would fare well as a standalone effort.

Saya molestation. Now here's a brilliant idea. Let's have a salivating fire demon use its tentacles to tie up and sexually assault one of the sweetest and most endearing characters in the series. That'll please the fans. Remember the amazing CF2 ending? It's hard to believe that Cosmic Fantasy went from that to this.

The music isn't bad, but it's completely forgettable, while the graphics are pretty decent on the whole but occasionally sliced up by dopey, gratuitous "SNES-like" effects. In fact, instead of doing things the CF way, this game seems to have been striving to be like other RPGs that were making names for themselves at that point in time. It's too bad... but don't lose faith in the series here. Things start looking up again in Chapter 2.