Another of the many quirky Enix RPGs for the SNES, this is probably the biggest game of theirs that I totally missed out on (this and Robotrek). Right off the bat, the box art for this game is incredible and punches well above the game's weight. I definitely would have rented/played this as a kid if I'd ever actually seen it in a store. 7th Saga had really nice art, too. This is basically a "sister game" to that one, made by the same people and using the same graphics style.
Wanted to do a retro RPG I'd never played before, and that list is short, so here we go.
Since it apparently needs to be said for the folks in the back.
While this was made by the 7th Saga team, it's more of an action-RPG than a traditional one. What's with the name, though? The bizarre name of this game is probably why I never paid much attention to it. It's probably got the most unappealing name on the SNES. I think it's a reference to how the game is heavily puzzle-based so you need to be super smart to overcome it.
The first name that popped into my head was the main guy from 7th Saga, and here's a crazy coincidence: That's actually the canonical name of the main character in this game, and I didn't even know that when I put in the name.
Is it the same Lemele? Nope, don't think so. Just a cool reference.
Lemele hails from a rich lineage of Dragon Warriors, mighty folk who are probably destined to protect the world and whatnot. Game isn't going to be breaking any ground here.
Of course, most of the Dragon Warriors were slain whilst fighting evil, leaving only...
...Young Lemele, last of the bloodline. He has a lot of responsibility on his shoulders!
So what's he doing now?
The flashback ends with a now-grown Lemele apparently drunk in a bar while the employees try to get him to stop riding the mechanical bull.
"Sir, you aren't a hot college girl! Please sir!"
A few things stand out right away:
1) You can move diagonally, unlike 7th Saga. This makes the controls feel a lot more relaxed, which is good.
2) You can swing your sword in towns, unlike Secret of Mana. My 4th grade school psychologist would have thrown a FIT.
3) Nothing has any names on it. Meaning when you go to the menu and look at equipment, it's all just icons without names. Have to manually click on something to make it show a name. Same goes for items in shops. This is out-of-time for something in 1994.
4) B is the confirm button and A is the cancel button. So, Playstation 1+ RPG style, but also the reverse of most SNES games.
5) There's a jump button, so puzzles can utilize jumping. Rare thing for SNES RPGs.
6) There's no dash button, which is very unfortunate as the walking speed is just as laborious as 7th Saga.
First objective is laid out. Go north to the Tower of Light, get a dragon scale. Wait, I thought the first boss was a giant roach?
I'm gonna need some help getting rolling. Let's see what Nintendo Power has to say about this game:
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So it appears that Magic Jades are a big part of the game, and give you a faerie ally that casts a certain type of magic. Aside from choosing which faerie to have equipped at any given time, most of the gameplay is just slashing.
Still perplexed as to why this game is called Brain Lord to begin with. Because it has puzzles? Lufia 2 had puzzles and you don't see that game bragging about it!
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Here's my goal, the first dungeon out of, I think, five in the game. It's a pretty short game.
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This giant roach is the main thing I remember about Brain Lord and probably the main thing most people remember about it: The game with the GIANT ROACH.
There's one merchant who seems to sell all the Magic Jades, but he also charges exorbitant prices. This is the CHEAPEST one.
HOW DOES 32000 G SOUND?
"How are you feeling about this merchant, Mr. Farley?"
"AN...GRY."
Here's the complete list of Jades and what they do. Far as I can tell, Life Jade is easily the most important by a mile. Power Jade is a good choice for second since it'll strengthen your normal attacks, which are gonna be most of your damage no matter what. The attack ones don't really seem to attack enough to be worth using.
This road goes to Toronto, the site of AEW All Out 2025! This Saturday! And also the second half of this game, from the looks of things. It's blocked off until then.
Barge into the rooms of NPCs and they actually get upset at the intrusion. There doesn't seem to be anything on any shelves either. This game is much, much shallower than 7th Saga.
Starting equipment. See how nothing has a name until you click on it? That'll pull up the name on the blank bottom screen along with a menu of what to do with the item. Having to do this for each piece of equipment to see what it's called seems a little unnecessary.
Buy a faerie jade, and you have to name it. I go with the first name that comes to mind: The Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man Billy Zane.
Not sure why they couldn't just call this the "Power Faerie" or something, but with it flying around, I now slash for like 2x the damage.
Yep, there he is, fluttering about.
Lemele: "Hey everybody! I'd like to introduce you all to my new friend Billy Zane. He's a pretty cool guy."
Bartender: "Dude! Why are you still here? Get out!"
The path north is full of monsters. ...not sure what I'm looking at here. A red orc? Someone's grandpa?
The sword swings in a nice big arc that hits everything in the area in front of you, which feels good. So the gameplay is fun and the visuals continue to be impressive. If this game weren't so short, it'd probably be a sleeper classic.
It took me a minute to figure out how to progress here: You can jump up onto cliffs.
Oh yeah, you only have six HP at the beginning, which means precisely six hits from enemies. ...it isn't much, especially with no heals available. The enemies move really fast too, so good luck not getting hit. Enemies respawn almost immediately when you move away from where they spawned, too. So you're pretty much constantly under attack.
Edit: It appears that enemies drop health spheres sometimes when defeated, so you do have an in-the-field way to recover.
Edit 2: You can buy pieces of cheese at the shop and they restore health, so there's that. Still, getting worn down by attrition is the biggest threat in this game, at least until you get health regeneration after the second dungeon.
Our hero gets into a brawl! Still don't know what these guys are. Knife-wielding goblins? Why is the town just sorta letting them take over people's basements? Is Lemele the only person here who can legally fight back?
These increase your maximum ticks of health by 1. It still isn't enough, your health in this game is paltry.
I find another Jade in a chest (so if they're lurking about, buying them is likely unnecessary, though buying the +Attack one at least was a good move). This one contains Hansel, who is so hot right now. He randomly throws fireballs at enemies. Now I have to choose which of the two to go with-
Nevermind, you can have two Jades equipped at the same time.
I tried this with girlfriends a couple of times and it never seemed to pan out for too long.
Unfortunately, the game now kinda falls apart...just as it gets going. The first dungeon (of five) is extremely long, tedious, and dull. It contains tons of block-pushing puzzles, which start out simple and quickly ramp up to super-counterintuitive inside of the span of one dungeon. Kind of curious what they left for the remaining four dungeons, as far as puzzle difficulty goes.
This upgrade lets me fire energy shots if I charge up, which is super useful and a real game-changer. No more needing to wait for enemies to get close, I can have them defeated or at half health before they even reach me.
This is probably the go-to charge up spell for the game, though you get others, like Magic Missile (which fires three homing projectiles and is theoretically better, but it causes huge slowdown and if one projectile gets stuck spinning in circles, you can't charge again until it hits something).
I hope this guy isn't talking about Elden Ring messages. He'll be hitting "fake walls" that aren't for hours, leaping off cliffs, and "trying finger, but hole"
It appears that the Jade spirits can gain levels if they pick up enough crystals dropped from enemies. Your character can't gain levels, it's just the spirits. This, presumably, makes their specific effects better. They start at level 0 and max out at Level 19, gaining power very quickly (for example, the Power Jade adds +1 attack for each level, for a grand total of +20 attack, which is a LOT in this game).
Each level takes either 3 or 4 crystals depending on the Jade, so you need 60 or 80 crystals to max out any given Jade. They can't be farmed (with one exception) because each enemy that drops a crystal only drops it the first time you slay it. So it's good to A) Kill everything once and B) Find the Jades you like ASAP and stick to them for the entire game.
Billy Zane gets a level too. He's a pretty cool guy.
You also occasionally get stat-up items (for Attack and Defense, specifically) that can give anywhere from 1 to 3 points. They seemed to almost always give 1 point, and after numerous resets I was able to get 2 points out of one. However, there's a trick to getting 3 points consistently:
Thanks to CypressDahlia on GameFAQs for this. Tested it, and it works perfectly. The stat-up items are super rare (and make a big difference given how low your stats are and lack of level-ups) so getting 3 from them is a huge benefit.
"You see, my zipper, it got stuck-"
Look, I gotta go, this dungeon has already gone on for like an hour.
In addition to the dungeon going on and on (and every floor looking the same, so keeping track of anything is tedious), I have to inch forward a lot of the time because of these spikes that pop up out of the floor (basically when you're right on top of them, so inching around is the only way to avoid them). They'll deplete your health to zero in about two seconds of standing on them. This was a dumb design choice.
You and me both dude. So basically this whole dungeon has been block puzzles, fighting rapid-respawning enemies over and over, inching around to avoid spikes, getting lost because everything looks the same...for like 90 minutes. Sound fun? Well, it wasn't. I'm really happy I didn't buy this game as a kid.
The primary objective in the dungeon was to find keys to progress, and there were like 6 of said keys throughout the dungeon. Looking it up, every dungeon is just like this. Uuurgh.
Boss of the tower is the GIANT ROACH, and it skitters about just like a real roach while unleashing tons of these little bugs to chase you around. The fight is actually really solid design-wise. If this game had less tedious dungeoning and more of this kind of boss fight, it'd be a lot better off.
However, I suspect the whole focus of this game was around the dungeoning/puzzle-solving, hence calling it what they called it. It's supposed to be a series of long, tedious tests of your brain.
Back in town, people are smitten with our hero for somehow slaying the giant roach.
"Looking at you makes me wish I was twenty years younger. And a woman!"
The way forward now is to talk to the local blacksmith, who is blocking the town's one route to the next dungeon.
This stairway here leads to the Abell Ruins. There's no real overworld to traverse, so the dungeons seem to just branch right off of the hub town.
A short cavern dungeon follows, where you have to use the Axe to break through boulders. The Axe is sold by the town tool shop, now that the first dungeon is done. This is a terrible weapon with no range, and only necessary for this part. The tool shop also has the Boomerang, a MUCH better weapon, so I picked that up.
Next dungeon: Abell Ruins, a technological marvel from the distant past. That's probably enough for now, the idea of starting another massive dungeon at this hour is too much.
I'll say this, the music in this second dungeon is mysterious and intense. Sounds more like a final dungeon.
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There's a little more to the NP coverage. This is the second of the five dungeons, and it leaves you at that to figure things out. Looks like this is another of the multitude of "there was an ancient civilization with advanced machine tech" RPGs of this era.
That first dungeon was such a tedious slog that I'm not sure how keen I am on continuing this game for four more dungeons. Yeah, it was that bad. Well, Nintendo Power got through the second one, so I might as well get there too. Doing the rest of the game is feeling like a tall order, though, unless the game really starts to grab me soon. If I weren't playing it to cover on here, I would have already tapped out.
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