Oct 172018
Battle Lovecraftian horrors and hurl lightning from your fingertips in this adventurous episode celebrating El Viento and Alisia Dragoon!
SHOW NOTES
0:00:00 – Opening Theme (El Viento)
0:12:50 – Main Theme (El Viento)
0:14:16 – Stage 1 NYC (El Viento)
0:15:57 – Intermission (El Viento)
0:23:53 – Stage 2 Park (El Viento)
0:26:27 – Stage 3 Bar (El Viento)
0:28:55 – Stage 5 Temple (El Viento)
0:37:25 – Stage 6 Detroit (El Viento)
0:39:58 – Final Battle (El Viento)
0:45:37 – Opening Theme (Alisia Dragoon)
0:54:19 – Stage 1-1 (Alisia Dragoon)
0:57:27 – Stage 1-2 (Alisia Dragoon)
0:58:49 – Stage 3 (Alisia Dragoon)
1:05:56 – Stage 4 (Alisia Dragoon)
1:09:08 – Stage 6-1 (Alisia Dragoon)
1:11:12 – Boss Theme 2 (Alisia Dragoon)
1:20:13 – Staff Roll (El Viento)
Great episode! I’ve always been on the fence about Sakuraba’s Genesis work, partly because his melodies are hit or miss, and mostly because he used those damn claps in almost every song.
I owned Alisia Dragoon, probably because of a stellar Gamefan review. The game’s music is as good as the box art is terrible. By the way,
The music was largely done by Fumihito Kasatani. Pixelated Audio did great episode/interview with him about Mecano Associates and Alisia Dragoon; everybody should check it out: https://pixelatedaudio.com/alisia-dragoon/
Sent
I loved El Viento. Diehard Gamefan did a spread on Ernest Evans, which was supposed to come out in Sega CD, but it never did in the US, it ended up coming out as a cartridge, after El Viento came out here, even though Ernest was the first out in Japan. I waited a long time for it, and had already played El Viento, so when it came out it was very disappointing, it controlled like Castlevania 4, but Ernest has individual arms and legs and torsos and stuff that move strangely. El Viento played much better. I don’t remember the El Viento cover being so bad, I loved the anime style (Japanimation as the video rental stores called it at the time,) in the game. I bought every Wolf Team game I could get on Genesis, they had a definite Jaoanese style.
Alisia Dragoon was also good, I think I only rented it once, but it’s still got a place in my heart for some reason.
Bayou Billy was much easier when you had a Zapper for the shooting sections, like Snatcher on Sega CD, it was almost impossible with a controller instead of a light gun.
tl;dr: El Viento/Earnest Evans continuity is messed up in the U.S. largely thanks to the delay in the launch of the Sega-CD over here.
So El Viento was released in Japan in September, 1991, and shortly thereafter in the U.S. Earnest was a side character in both versions of the game, in part because Wolf Team was working on a game for him at the same time.
This game was for the Mega-CD; the system launched in December of the same year, and Earnest followed about a week later. EE was technically a prequel to El Viento, and includes cut scenes of Earnest meeting Annet for the first time, and ultimately adopting her as his ward.
One notable thing about the development of EE–based on my recollections from discussions on CompuServe (yes, I’m old)–was that it was one of several games developed for the Mega-CD prior to the hardware being finalized. Because of this, several games (EE, Sol-Feace, and Micronet’s Heavy Nova) were essentially developed as cartridge games with redbook audio and cut scenes added in; beyond these last two elements, none of them took advantage of any of the extra hardware tricks built into the Mega-CD.
As a result of being developed this way, all three games made their way to the U.S. as cartridges in early to mid 1992 (none were released on cart in Japan). The Sega-CD would not be released until November of that year, so Renovation/Micronet probably just decided to get their product to market in cart form rather than wait on the new hardware.
Since these were the bare bones cartridge versions though, the cut scenes (and thus, much of the stories for these games) wound up getting lost in the process. Also gone is the meeting between Earnest and Annet.
While they could have probably just given an accurate version of the backstory in the manual, Renovation, in its infinite wisdom, opted instead to make Earnest Evans a sequel to El Viento, set decades later. This meant making the protagonist in the US version the grandson of the original EE and the son of Annet (who is described as being in her 70s?). But it’s all good: EE the Younger affectionately refers to EE the Older as “Gramp” (yes, singular), so clearly the changes were well justified.
Flash forward to the end of 1992, and the Sega-CD hits the market. Sol-Feace is included as a pack-in even though the cart version (called “Sol-Deace”, but basically the same game) is already out there. Heavy Nova gets passed up for re-release since Micronet already has the sequel ready to go (Black Hole Assault). And Earnest? No sign of Earnest, for whatever reason. (probably because somebody finally sat down and played it….)
So the actual chronological continuity for this series should be Earnest Evans (Mega-CD), El Viento, Annet Again (or Futatabi if you will). It’s probably not worth worrying about, but it is interesting to see how the localization of EE became so butchered on these shores.
As for the games themselves, all three have great music, and El Viento is absolutely worth playing. AA is not terrible, but it’s a pretty mediocre brawler for its somewhat hefty price tag. EE is one of my favorite examples of “Oooh, nice try!”: It sure looked great in those still screenshots!