Title: Valis: The Fantasm Soldier Collection III
System: Nintendo Switch
Price: Approx 8500 yen
Release Date: 12/07/2023

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Prelude

Last year, we took a look at the second Valis Compilation, which had quite a few emulation bugs and some big annoyances over how there was a second set not even a year after the first one came out. With nothing done to patch the bad audio of the first Genesis Valis game in that set, I pretty much wrote off the compilation as a cash grab with some minor curious, but nothing else, and how I really didn’t want them to make a third compilation and start making this a habit.

Well, we got a third compilation, and somehow it’s the biggest one yet, with five titles that in a strange way, covers the entire Valis I-IV arc via their alternate ports and versions. My most wanted game for the prior collections finally made the cut, (albeit with some needed content edits) and some of the more obscure home ports and even archival video material made it into this third volume as well. So, is third time’s the charm, or is this series getting milked way too hard with these expensive compilations for its own good?

Presentation

Presented in a similar way to the prior sets here, you have the usual assortment of features. Manual scans, cutscene viewers, sound tests, a few screen size options and customizable controls return, and this time around they actually added a few extra materials that stand out a bit more.

Included in the cutscene viewer for Valis on Famicom and Super Valis, are several promotional videos ripped from VHSes of the time. You have the TV commercial, promotional guide, and Anime promo for Famicom Valis, and a Laser Soft preview video for Super Valis. While I do wish these were pulled from an HD source instead of blatant VHS rips, it is incredibly cool to see these videos included in a set like this at all, since almost no retro compilations these days bother to include video material, let alone actual commercials from the time. Besides Atari 50, I can’t think of any recent examples, and I have a fairly safe assumption that the US release of this set will subtitle all of these too.

For the games themselves, all systems are emulated fairly competently, including the new PC88/NES/SNES emulators thrown into this compilation. The NES game looks and sounds as it should, as does the PC88 game. (for better or worse) The MSX2 Valis even allows you to choose between the PSG or FM audio sources, and both of those sound accurate to my ears (even if not nearly as strong as the X68000 OST).

Genesis Valis III was my biggest worry pre-launch due to how bad the last set handled MD audio, but for the most part it seems to have survived unscathed, with the music sounding a lot like how it should, though the sound effects seem to be ever so slightly off; some of them are very muted or barely play at all, the biggest culprits being the pickup noise for HP and MP refills. Still, this beats the unbearably terrible music emulation from the last compilation, but it’s pretty clear that D4 still doesn’t have a grasp on Mega Drive emulation.

For Super Valis, luckily that looks and sounds just as it should, which is a great thing since the music to that game is incredible and a very underrated score in the Valis franchise. The pixel perfect display mode treats this one especially well and makes the game look razor sharp.

Gameplay

Usual drill applies here, with the five games highlighted in the way I usually do here. Since there are some video bonuses here, I’ll mention yet again how it is rather neat to see those in this set, and I honestly wish the prior two volumes got updated to include similar video promos for the games included in those compilations, as there’s quite a lot of cool Valis material that could be thrown in. I would have been a big fan of them including the Valis Club promotional VHS tapes in some way, shape or form. Still, the videos we did get are pretty solid picks.

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VALIS: THE FANTASM SOLDIER (PC88)– The original version that started it all! We played a version of this in the second compilation for MSX, and that had no cutscenes and was pretty decent to control, but was a frustrating maze-like experience that was completely devoid of fun. Well, this game does have cutscenes, and as crude as they look, they were pretty solid for the time and were what made the game stand out from its competition. Unfortunately, this game still plays poorly, and is honestly way, way worse than the MSX version in a lot of ways. You have a compass to the boss, which is good! But you also have very slow, painful scrolling, terrible level design, enemies that bounce you all around, and a silly health system where picking up powerups can damage you, making it better to just stick with one weapon and focus on grinding out health to survive the bosses.

Easily the worst part of the game by far is finding a boss, and while the compass does help somewhat, that still doesn’t excuse the fact these levels are horribly designed and lead almost nowhere. There’s barely anything interesting in them besides hordes of enemies or ways to loop around endlessly, and if it wasn’t for the compass this game would be borderline impossible to understand.

The MSX version really does play better, even without the compass, and while the music here is absolutely incredible, that still doesn’t excuse the fact that this original Valis game is horrible. There’s a really darn good reason why this got several remakes, and why those remakes are what people think of when they look back to the original game, and considering the story in those remakes are basically the same as they are here, there’s no reason to give this version a spin besides seeing how it all began.

VALIS: THE FANTASTIC SOLDIER (NES)- Damn it, they somehow made it worse. OK, to give the Famicom Valis some credit, it was released pretty close to the original computer game, and had an impressive promotional campaign, including the aforementioned anime promo worked on by Hideki Anno of all people. So to see that bad computer game go from slow, unplayable garbage to a fast, confusing guessing game really is impressive, but this NES port is nowhere close to what Valis should be, and in fact the story is even changed up somewhat, though not in a particularly memorable way.

There are less cutscenes than the original, and unlike most other versions of this game, this one is very non-linear. The very first stage starts you in a city with no direction on where to go, and going into buildings nets you an assortment of items that can come in handy later.

The main objective of the first level is to find the bosses and beat them up before finding the main foe to defeat in order to exit the stage, which takes you to the dream world and plops you in an even bigger maze-like map to do more of the same. While the original computer game was a maze-filled mess too, at least it had a compass and was generally linear, but this game’s assortment of stages are even more incomprehensible. You will go around in circles, you will die for stupid reasons, and you will fail to find out what to do without a guide. Honestly bewildering how they made a poor game even worse here, and even the music kinda sucks here, outside of the strong Stage 2 theme. Literally the only thing of merit this port gave us was those promos, which are included in the collection via the cutscene viewer. Just watch those instead.

VALIS II (MSX)– Finally! The lone original Valis game missing from the prior sets, presented in the best version that exists. (The X68000 version is graphically superior, but the playability of it is incredibly poor, somehow making this game even more annoying to play) This is not just the PCE game slapped onto computers, but a separate game developed alongside that home version, with its own unique story, one that easily stands as being the darkest and most intense of the entire franchise.

I’m not joking when I say that this game will likely give the US version of this compilation a big fat M rating, and that’s despite the fact that the version in this collection has been edited for content, even with the CERO C rating! See, by “this game is dark”, I mean “this game has blood and gore everywhere in the cutscenes, along with gory impalement and nudity”. Yeah, this plot gets pretty twisted, and the main villain Megas is way more sinister and cruel than he ever was portrayed as in the PCE version, making him come off as a true monster. Compared to the first computer game, the stakes have increased drastically, and the overall plot as a whole is a revenge story with some surprisingly emotional moments.

Unfortunately, being a computer game from the PC88 era, this also means the game didn’t hesitate to have scenes where Yuko is fully topless, and considering her age as a young teenager in this game, anyone with common sense will see why these scenes are not a good thing to have in a video game and why CERO/ESRB/etc wouldn’t approve of it in this state. Thus, in every cutscene where her assets would be displayed, a giant white box has been applied over them.

Some may lament the fact this content edit was made, and I am one who prefers the original experience to be front and center whenever possible, but let me make it clear; if these scenes were not altered like this, this game would never be rereleased. Since all the text, gore, blood and other aspects of these scenes are as they were originally, I think erasing the nudity for the sake of getting the game releasable is perfectly fine, and the overall tone of the story is still intact. I do think the white boxes they threw up are very lazy looking compared to a proper sprite edit, though. An example of one of these content edits is shown below, since it felt like the tamest example from any of the cutscenes I could think of.

So, with great music, intense cutscenes, and a dark story, how does the actual game play? Well, compared to the first game on computers Valis II is like a night and day improvement, and you have a bunch of new mechanics now, from an RPG-style equipment system for your weapons and armor, special abilities that you discover and equip, and no more fumbling around stupidly big mazes to find a boss. Unfortunately, Valis II suffers from the usual sort of design problems from some home computer games of the time, with respawning enemies that love to fall right on top of you, cheap placement of hazards and enemies, and really shoddy hitboxes.

Yuko controls somewhat decently and the usual rewind/states help a lot with this too, but for a game where jumping was originally intended to have you pressing the up key, some of the platforming in this game can get really irritating, even if nothing is nearly as terrible as the first computer game and the maze aspect is pretty much gone. There’s even some autoscroller segments that really make the game choke, and before you get upgrades that improve your max HP the game can feel like a brick wall. It still is a valiant effort and the best version of the computer Valis games, but there’s a reason why the series stopped on computers with this entry and shifted over to consoles.

VALIS III (Genesis)– Masayasu Yamamoto’s home port of the PCE classic! If you don’t recognize that name, he’s a guy who would later work for Chunsoft and be a main programmer on a little game called Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, and I even got a statement from him in an interview a long while ago.

This pretty much takes the PCE game from Volume 1, does a solid job of porting it to the Genesis (albeit with some cutscenes and stages cut), and keeps the playability intact. Awkward hitboxes on some bosses aside, I really enjoy this port and it even feels a little easier than the PC Engine game to me. The music rearrangements here aren’t half-bad either. The sound effects being a bit quiet here is a bummer though.

Super Valis: Akaki Tsuki no Otome (SNES)- Often treated in the same manner as the SNES Castlevania Dracula X game, being assumed to be a low-effort remix of the PCE original, Super Valis is honestly a solid game that I argue is even better than the PCE version. While the PCE game had multiple characters with different attributes, none of them really felt that fun to play as and no matter who you picked, you still felt as if you were handicapped in some way. The story was pretty solid, and the music was OK, but the levels were a big step back from Valis III and it definitely is a rough game.

Here in Super Valis, though? You just play as Lena, and she can do her usual attack and jump routine along with the new ability to run by double tapping on the D-Pad. You no longer have a magic system, but instead finite powerups that you stockpile and redeem with the X button, using them with the A button, and a lot of these powerups resemble the magic abilities you could pull off in the PCE game. The levels are a lot more simple and to the point, sharing thematic elements with the PCE versions but none of the level design, and being able to run makes this feel like a really fun, speedy Ninja Gaiden-like, which I dig!

The music is also just incredible and has nothing in common with the PC Engine score, with Castle Vanity’s theme being my pick for one of the most underrated songs in the Super Nintendo library. Being able to stockpile and switch between special weapons with the shoulder buttons (though they are awkwardly mapped here, with R being the R button, and ZR being the L button, since L is stuck as Rewind and you cannot remap this game strangely enough) is pretty handy for taking out bosses, and going through the linear stages is honestly a lot of fun!

Sure, Super Valis is pretty straightforward and doesn’t have the cutscenes of the PCE version, (in fact, there’s only one non ending/opening cutscene in the entire game) but you can choose between multiple different difficulty options if you so choose, and the experience as a whole manages to feel short and sweet rather than trying to bloat the game with gimmicks or stupid difficulty spikes. Outside of a boss rush near the end of the game, this game isn’t really too terribly tough either, though there is a harder setting if you wanna feel masochistic. All in all, a good remix of Valis IV that I prefer to the PCE original, as it tries to do its own unique spin rather than just copying Valis IV, removing content from it and calling it a day. If you enjoyed Valis IV and wanted more of it, then I think you’ll really enjoy this one.

Conclusion

We did not need a third Valis Collection by any means, but a good chunk of the games here are still fun and I’m especially happy to see a few of these reissued for the first time ever. Super Valis is a game I argue is better than its PCE sibling, the Genesis port of Valis III is a fun insight into a programmer who would later go on to do greater things, and the MSX Valis II is likely the only way we’ll ever see that chapter of the Valis saga retold. Of course, having the original PC88 game that started it all is very nice to see, even if it feels a bit redundant due to the MSX version being on the last volume, and for the game itself being rather terrible. The Famicom Valis isn’t that good at all and is more notable for the promo videos made for it than the actual quality of the game itself.

So with those five games, is this worth picking up as an import, or when this inevitably gets a US localization? Well, yet again the Japanese version is completely devoid of english, so don’t pick it up if you want to play these in english, as it won’t be patched when the US release drops later on down the line. As a whole though, I feel this set really shows that Edia is milking this IP as hard as they can without bothering to do much else with it, and the fact this is easily the most expensive out of all the compilations really has me dreading a $60 pricepoint when it drops in the US, and if it’s anywhere close to that level of absurdity, then I really advise you to only pick up this compilation on sale.

Heck, if you have a remote interest in any of the games included in this volume, you can almost certainly buy better versions of them elsewhere. Valis 1 and 3 have more polished versions in the first volume, and Super Valis is on the US Nintendo Switch Online app, right now for you to enjoy, in full english to boot! Pretty much the only game unique to this set that gives it an edge over the previous ones is Valis II, which already had to have gone through some content edits just for it to get past CERO and see the light of day again at all. Despite how godlike the music is and how strong its story is, I still can’t recommend MSX Valis II unless you are willing to put up with frustrating computer game design, and while it’s infinitely better than Syd of Valis, the PCE version of II is a more accessible game, even if the level design there is the definition of bland.

So with most games in this set having better versions in the first collection, Collection III is really struggling to have reason to exist at all outside of satisfying completionists and the diehard collectors for the series who want to play every imaginable version out there. Really it comes down to the manual/video scans making this more than a boring set of ROMs at the end of the day, and for finally unearthing the last unique Valis game missing from these modern reissues. Still, if the first two sets didn’t do it for you, then you really don’t need to pick this one up, even if I find this third volume better as a whole than Volume II’s inaccurate, low-quality selection.

I give Valis: The Fantasm Soldier Collection III a 6 out of 10.