Thanks to Edia Co Ltd for the review code
Title: Cosmic Fantasy Collection
System: Nintendo Switch
Price: $49.99
Release Date: 01/25/2024
Story
In this first compilation of Telenet’s space RPG franchise, you take control of Yu and Saya on their quest to free a planet from an evil witch, before leading Van’s quest to save his best friend Larla from an evil king! The original Cosmic Fantasy shows up in English for the first time here, and the plot of that game is fairly typical, with some nice cutscenes spread throughout the game. Nothing too crazy happens in it, but it manages to be a fun ride nevertheless.
The second game connects to the first one, and was the title that previously hit the US back in the Turboduo days, so fans of that console will recognize the sequel a bit more. It too, also starts off pretty typical like the first game, before going into a multi-chapter approach that really enhances the storytelling and makes the plot a lot more engaging, especially when aspects of the first game come into play. Surprising break from the usual tropes here, leading to a story I enjoyed immensely.
Presentation
One oddity I noticed right off the bat relates to the first game in the collection; in the Japanese version of this very collection and the original JP version of Adventure Boy Yu, a theme song by Tomomi Nishimura is used for both the collection menu and the title screen. But in this EN version, we get the excellent CF2 Japanese intro theme as the menu song (which is still intact in CF2 proper, vocals and all), but CF1’s title screen is completely mute; so much so, that when using the debug menu to bring up the in-game sound test, trying to play the intro theme there won’t even work, as the song seems to be fully stripped out of the game. Likely JASRAC related licensing shenanigans at play here, but I do find it a shame as CF1’s intro theme is one of the best parts about that game.
But how do the games present themselves besides that caveat? Well, you have most of the usual compilation features, including the return of the screen size options that worked fine in the Valis sets, scanned, translated manuals, and a cutscene/sound test viewer to play around with. Unfortunately, I did notice the PSG recordings used for Cosmic Fantasy 1‘s Sound Mode were pretty inaccurate and were missing sound channels, which is strange considering how the game itself sounds fine and has accurate audio when you’re actually playing CF1. CF2 uses all CD music and barely has any songs to speak of, and all of those sound fine both in the sound mode and the game itself.
Speaking of the music, Cosmic Fantasy 1 honestly had a way better score than I was expecting for such a simple game. Most of the BGM is PSG based, but it sounds really catchy and well made, with plenty of memorable tunes sticking in my head throughout the adventure. With the intro vocal song gone, there’s barely any CD music in CF1 save for some ending songs, but those sounded pretty solid as well. Compared to other early PC Engine RPGS, the game’s presentation is great as a whole.
Cosmic Fantasy 2 on the other hand, takes some steps forward, and some back with its presentation. For starters, US fans may be a bit annoyed at how the translation in this game is completely different from the 90’s Working Designs localization from back in the day, but for me personally I vastly preferred the new one. All the translated text is overlaid over the Japanese script, and the white font looks far better here than the blue one the US version got stuck with, leading to better readability in general. Word choices may be a bit tough to get used to though, and some of the translation aspects are a bit clunky, but more on that later.
Still, CF2 looks pretty decent, even if a lot of enemy/portrait sprites are reused outright, and the OST here is OK at best, with a really excellent intro theme song, and then a lot of generic tracks for most of the game. You’ll tire of that insanely generic battle theme very quickly.
Gameplay
Per the usual compilation format, we’ll take a look at both games! Being that they’re rather long RPGs though, I’ll refrain from spoilers and keep a focus on the gameplay and how I feel about the translations, and if I felt the experiences as a whole were worth my time.
I already mentioned the aforementioned bonuses and extras for the compilation with how they’re similar to the Valis sets, but one huge difference comes from the complete lack of save states and rewind support; gotta use the in-game saves here, just like real hardware, and unlike the Valis sets, the in-game PC Engine saves work properly this time around.
COSMIC FANTASY Adventure Boy Yu- The first in the series! Being a pretty simple DQ-style RPG, you take control of Yu as he and his motorcycle companion explore a planet and solve a variety of problems plaguing the world, all caused by an evil queen set on domination!
Gameplay wise, Adventure Boy Yu is very, very rudimentary. You go to a town, you find out your objective, you buy equipment and items to prep for it, then do the objective, come back and get told where to go next. It’s as simple as an RPG as you can get, and I found it to be rather fun in that regard, though it does have a lot of quirks of the genre.
Right off the bat though I have to address the biggest issue with the translation provided here, and that comes from how the battle dialogue was displayed. See, normally in RPGs when you attack an enemy, it says something along the lines of “___ Attacked Enemy!” and then the reverse of that, “Enemy slashes at ___!” plays when the enemy attacks you. That’s pretty typical, and every RPG ever formats their dialogue in that way, making it easy to tell what turn it is in battle.
Well in this translation of Cosmic Fantasy 1, they somehow reversed the dialogue in the overlay. Thus, when Yu is attacking an enemy, it goes “Enemy slashes at Yu!” while when an enemy is attacking Yu, it says “Yu attacks Enemy!”, which is completely backwards and very, very confusing.
I was able to correct this in my head rather quickly and enjoy the game, but otherwise this made battles way, way too tricky to understand what on earth was going on, and to make things even more confusing, using magic is just fine, and works as it should, convincing me it’s just a weird bug with how the translated text was put in the overlay. I really hope this gets fixed for the sake of making the battles much easier to understand, as I argue this is borderline gamebreaking in its current state.
Thankfully, I found the rest of the translation to be mostly fine. Some odd grammar choices here and there (some spots a comma was meant to go ended up replacing them with ?, and some dialogue had no spaces in some instances) and a very stilted script, but one that was perfectly legible and easy for me to understand. The story was made clear, the subtitles for the cutscenes were pretty well done, and all the items/spells worked and translated like they should. Outside of the reversal nonsense with the battle scenes, this is a fairly solid translation effort that I say brings this simple DQ like to the west in an OK fashion. They definitely didn’t machine translate it, that’s for sure, but I do feel another pass could have been given in some spots of the script.
COSMIC FANTASY 2 Adventure Boy Van– Taking place on the planet Idea, you take control of Van who must set out on a rescue mission to save his kidnapped Larla! As noted before, the first game ties into this one a bit later and some twists are thrown in to make the game a lot more interesting on a story level compared to the first one. Otherwise in terms of gameplay, there have been a lot of tweaks.
First off, the UI in general has gotten a well-done facelift over the first game. No longer do you have to hit select to check certain things like the Map, as now those extras are just bundled in with your usual A button menu as a second page. Equipping is easier, checking status is way easier, (though you still have to do this often to see how equipment impact your stats) and this even applies to the battles, which flow a lot faster in terms of the speed of your turns.
Unfortunately, to offset the increased battle speed, CF2 has an outrageous encounter rate. I found each new area of the game to be much easier to grind up and adjust to than CF1, leading to an easier difficulty balance in general and thus the enemies not being as cruel nearly as much as in the first game, but almost every few steps you take leads to an encounter, and most of them have two to four enemies at a time now, even in the earliest parts of the game!
Before you get magic that multi-hits enemies, there will be times where you’re more than equipped to deal with the enemies and will just be mashing A non-stop just to get these constant fights over and done with. It also doesn’t help the flee command isn’t the most reliable here, and when you’re dealing with enemies that do 1-3 damage to you, these extra battles are just a chore to sit through, especially with no speedup feature or any sort of QOL offered whatsoever. The removal of the auto battle function also slows the game down a bit, since later on you’ll be getting more companions to join your party, a lot of which are very temporary, and the more you have in the party, the longer each of your turns take. You also now have to manually select each character during a turn, which is silly considering the first game automatically shifted to the other character during battles.
So needless to say, while the battles and level grinding here is much easier, there are a lot, lot more of said battles to deal with on your way to the endgame. Still, the game being a lot more balanced in general, the chapter system for the story, and just more variety and story detail in general lead to CF2 barely being a better game than the first as a whole. Translation wise I didn’t notice much off here and appreciated the more faithful translation compared to the Working Designs script, but there were instances of some commas being replaced by ? marks and making some sentences look weird. At first I was also thrilled to see the dialogue for battle was done in the right order this time, but when using magic you get a reversed sequence for the text boxes, starting with the spell effect and ending with the declaration of the spell. Not nearly as ludicrous as CF1’s text swap, but still another translation annoyance I’d like to see patched and corrected.
Otherwise, the game is fine, the subtitles work fine, and the story was still conveyed to me pretty well in my blind playthrough of it, and I really dug the gameplay loop and overall polish a bit more than the first game. Still, even if the first title was a little more difficult, at least the encounters weren’t as constant as they are here! On the other hand, this has the better story and is much easier to get into, so both titles have their own merits with neither one being a truly excellent game.
Conclusion
Ultimately, I found this to be a pretty fun set of some classic RPG adventures, and having the first Cosmic Fantasy translated into english for the first time ever was a big treat. Both games were fun, with CF2 excelling in story and CF1 nailing the simplistic gameplay, but neither title managed to combine both aspects as well as I’d have liked them to, and for the current price, I find it a lot tougher to recommend these games with each of them having some roadblocks to enjoying them. Either you’re a big old school JRPG fan who won’t mind the tedious parts, or you’ll be annoyed by one game having too much grinding and difficult fights, and the other having too many boring encounters.
I also found the reversed battle text in Cosmic Fantasy 1 especially annoying, and while I personally got used to it very quickly, that aspect of the translation should really be patched to correct this, as I can see it confusing a lot of newcomers. CF2 having the same weirdness with the magic system was equally irksome, but at least you don’t use magic in that game as much as all the normal attacks in CF1. Otherwise, I found both translations solid save for some minor grammar errors here and there, and weird instances of commas becoming question marks. I definitely prefer CF2’s new translation more than the older Working Designs one solely due to all the stupid jokes getting cut out.
Still, for $50, this is a very fun pair of JRPGs, but with barely any QOL features to speak of, I struggle to recommend this as easily as I’d like to. CF2’s twists alone are worth the asking price I’d reckon, but to appreciate that more you have to go through CF1, which is a fun game bogged down by some weird translation quirks, and is rather simplistic at the end of the day. There’s also the fact that CF2’s encounter rate is just excessive, and some sort of QOL tweak to speed up battles would have made things much smoother. Still, I especially appreciate retro RPGs getting translated into English, and I’m particularly eager to see how Collection 2 shapes up, with those being Super CD games and all, and having way more to translate.
I give Cosmic Fantasy Collection a 5 out of 10.
Seafoam Gaming 