If you're browsing Sega Genesis games for something you haven't played, you could usually do worse than a title published by Renovation. They're all pretty cheap, even complete with the box and manual, and usually enjoyable enough that you won't get sick of them immediately. I bought Arrow Flash just to have another Genesis game besides Sonic 2 when I was a kid. I think I paid $12.99 or so for just the cart at Funcoland; this was not a bad price for 1995. Now, none of the shooting games Renovation put on shelves would even classify as "hidden gems." Gaiares was never number one, no matter what that mulleted kid in your Gamepro told you. This didn't stop Arrow Flash from being worth the money at the time, though. That was the magic of Renovation, bringing out games that showed the potential of the Genesis at a price point that even the uninitiated might take a chance on.

This is the sensibility that made me pick out Arcus Odyssey from a stack of carts for the taking in my friend's basement years later, looking to expand my collection. I didn't know what to expect, but the Renovation logo was a badge of endearing mediocrity. The game opens with what must have been a pretty stunning intro for the time: stills of a magical battle, scaling a countryside as the viewpoint rose, and a long-winded story.

Many of the trappings of a J-RPG were there, but a "2 Player Start" option immediately told me it was something else. This is a dungeon crawler, with four characters to choose from the outset, and a small Ghosts n' Goblins-style map leading up to a large castle. In other words, as most other reviews on the internet were content to call it, a Gauntlet clone. That's giving it a bit too little credit, but if you're going to write the game off, then the shoe fits.

It does borrow quite a bit from Gauntlet, but so did Dungeon Explorer before it. Arcus Odyssey adds a few things to the Gauntlet formula that Dungeon Explorer also featured. The goals are usually more complex than just "find the exit," there are non-player characters that progress the storyline, and the stages are a bit more diverse. However, it's not quite the Zelda hybrid that Dungeon Explorer was. You progress linearly through eight acts with no towns or other intermissions in-between. You have magic attacks, but I never really found them that much more useful over your unlimited regular shot.

Arcus Odyssey is a step backwards towards the arcade style of Gauntlet, bringing a few RPG leanings with it. Without an open world to explore or items to collect, the interaction with characters along the way seems drab and pointless. The end result is a hack and slash that wants to transcend the genre, but ends up not doing anything particularly well, not even holding a candle to other hack and slash contemporaries.

It doesn't help that the dungeon design is horrible. The game uses an isometric perspective, and the viewpoint is way too close to the character to get a good idea of what lies ahead. The graphics are pretty typical of early Genesis games, showing their X68k roots. Bullets and enemy appendages are often flying at you from somewhere offscreen and the platforms you walk on leave you little room to dodge. Getting lost in these mazes can be nauseating, and the parallax-scrolling backgrounds don't help matters. You have a tiny inventory to hold some ridiculously named items like "Anti-Poison herb of Wizardry." You'll mostly want to keep health replenishing items in here, since most other items are too finite to really be worth the space. The "potion of invincibility" might come in handy to pass some of the tougher boss fights, namely the final one which just seems like a random downpour of projectiles, but most of the time it's useless since it only lasts a few seconds. By today's standards, the combat isn't very rewarding, and the only checkpoints you have are the beginnings of each level. If you don't survive a boss fight, you have to stumble through the dungeons looking for the required items all over again. With only eight levels to trudge through, I guess it was essential to reinforce this tedium.

A demon spirit guards one of the swords you need to progress in Act 3. I forget which sword it was. Sword of the hero, sword of peace, wind, water, heart, something like that. There's five of these things and you put them on pedestals to unlock doors to get to the end of the level. He talks about how he doesn't care if you believe him, but these swords are the keys to break the curse, et cetera. I'll ruin it for you; he's telling the truth. There are no real twists or alternate paths to the story. One time, during the final boss fight, I was skipping quickly through the text, having already read it all on a previous playthrough. I accidentally responded "Yes" when he offered for me to submit and let him control the world with his ultimate power. Game over. Whoops! So I guess there is that part, but the core of the game is the same as it was in Gauntlet. You get the keys or swords or whatever it is you need to progress and then you go do it. You could make a big deal about the fact that people join you on your quest, but there's little story to go along with any of them. They're about as expendable as options to your shot in Gradius; insofar as, well... that's the jist of what they are. I've successfully killed any charm this game might have had by simply refusing to use my imagination. Sigh.

The music manages to put a little bit of charm back into the game. It's worth mentioning that Wolf Team, the developers of this game, would go on to work on what became Tales of Phantasia, some of them leaving before the game was released to form tri-Ace. Motoi Sakuraba's soundtrack adds some atmosphere to the game with some simple but haunting early FM sounds. Possibly realizing this is one of the game's strengths, the developers added a music room accessible from the title screen to listen to these tunes any time you like. There's nothing here that stands up to the music in the Shining Force or Phantasy Star games, but fans of his later works still might be interested in giving a listen.

Arcus Odyssey doesn't end up being the sum of it's parts. The tacked on elements borrowed from RPGs only serve to drag the game down, since they don't follow through on the depth they seem to promise. You can't really call this an action RPG, it's merely just another dungeon crawler. It can be a pretty competent one, especially when played with another person as intended. The sad thing about that is, the slowdown you'll experience with two players can sometimes grind the game to a halt when there's too much on the screen. Dungeon Explorer simply did the J-Gauntlet thing better, and two years earlier. It is worth visiting anyways? Like I mentioned at the start, most Renovation published titles won't set you back much at all, so if you're at all interested then you might as well look into it.

~Adam Pearson