What I have for you today is a review for one of the strangest Japanese RPGs of all time. This is Wakusei Woodstock: Funky Horror Band for the Sega CD (or Mega CD in Japan). It was the first game Sega published for their 16-bit add-on hardware. They never released it outside of Japan. In the early 90s there was a puppet musical group called the Funky Horror Band which released several music videos and singles. This is based on that property. Yeah, it’s pretty strange to be honest but I went in with no bias. Unfortunately Funky Horror Band is pretty poor overall.
Funky Horror Band begins by allowing you to name the main character who is a blonde haired youth from a small sleepy country town on the planet Woodstock. Things get shaken up one day when an alien ship crash lands nearby. It’s the Funky Horror Band; a musical group of flamboyant aliens. It’s up to your character to help them repair their ship so they can return to their homeland. Or at least that’s what I think the game is about because it’s in Japanese and translation resources are sketchy at best. For the most part I was left wandering around and filling in the blanks myself. It’s not a big deal because this RPG is more akin to early Dragon Quest titles than modern role playing games with rich scenario.
What’s kind of neat is that the game begins with an animated music sequence featuring what I hear is one of Funky Horror Band’s big hits. I had high hopes especially after watching the introductory sequence depicting the ship crash landing. What I got was not what I expected. Funky Horror Band gives the initial impression that it’s going to make ample use of the CD format. As an early release for the add-on this would make sense. Unfortunately that’s not the case. Outside of a few presentation elements and voice overs the game looks and feels like an early Sega Genesis game. Something like even Dragon Quest V looks an entire generation ahead of this release. That’s just plain disappointing especially given how unique and interesting the themes here are.
Funky Horror Band (despite the weird name and themes) is a very traditional RPG. That’s not to say it doesn’t have it’s own unique elements, because it does (for better or worse) but we’ll get to those later. You view the action from the typical overhead perspective as you wander the planet via a world map which contains within it town areas as well as dungeons. Dungeons are where you go to progress the story, and in towns you purchase supplies and get clues on where to go next. You have your typical hospitals for healing and item stores. Because of the fact that this game isn’t available in English the icons really help out with showing you what’s what.
The battle system is also incredibly traditional. Enemy encounters occur at random on the world map (and within dungeons too). These take place on a separate screen where you view the enemies from head on and activate commands via the menu. These include your typical attack, spell, item, etc. From here there are a few deviations from the norm. For starters instead of actual magic you have musical attacks and songs that heal. It plays into the musical theme quite well and I love how the sound effects are based on which instrument you’re using. It’s easily the best part of Funky Horror Band. Then again, I’m a real sucker when it comes to music themed RPGs.
Now we get to one of the major problems in this game. Maybe there’s something I’m missing what with not being a Japanese speaker and all but so far as I know your party size caps out at 2. We have the main character, and an alien from the Funky Horror Band. The secondary party member is only there some of the time. It feels very limited especially for a 16-bit RPG, and on add-on hardware at that. Through most of the adventure you’re on your own so I guess the fact that you get a friend for some of the time is something at least.
To make matters worse you don’t gain experience points from battle. You only get money and items. At least the tools and healing items you get are more frequent than in your typical role playing game but the language barrier makes it difficult to tell even what they do. For an English speaker you basically have to experiment, although some NPCs do throw out hints. Again, you’ll need to have some form of translator (I used google translate on my phone and it does help). So because you cannot gain levels how do you get stronger? Well I was getting to that. You can increase your stats with new equipment and using items. It’s about as user friendly as it sounds. A more traditional approach (considering the otherwise traditional elements of Funky Horror Band) would have been much appreciated.
Unfortunately the whole game is just too straightforward. Despite the method by which you ‘level up’ it never feels like you have any freedom in particular. There are obviously good choices, and bad ones. You’ll never want to make the game harder for yourself especially when there’s nothing to gain from it. Add to that the small party structure, limited in-battle abilities, and you have yourself a very barebones RPG where even grinding doesn’t give you a natural advantage. Funky Horror Band has the skeleton of a great Japanese role playing game, but the meat to it was too experimental in all the wrong ways. It seems clear the developers didn’t have a lot of experience with the genre and leaned too hard on the license and themes to sell it.
With that said, I do think the musical theme is the most charming part of the game. The fact that you use instruments to attack the enemies is great. Furthermore, the little touches are downright magical. Things like treasure chests being guitar cases, and using songs to heal your party is really neat. All of this deserved to be in a better game if I’m being completely honest. Even the fact that the translations of enemy names are all puns to Western pop culture is incredibly funny. It definitely makes up for their lackluster designs.
Things are going to get really bad now. Now we’re at the game’s graphics. Funky Horror Band is a very ugly game. To be blunt it looks like a first generation PC-Engine title. It’s plenty colorful and all, but outside of battle the environments have almost no detail behind them. Town areas, the world map, and even dungeons look like something from MS Paint. Not by modern artists, but by a kid throwing together a few designs back in the early 90s. It’s really that bad. Within battle you must suffer through plain black backgrounds, and very ugly enemy designs. The one saving grace is that the animated sequences are some of the best on the Mega CD. Animation is limited, but the art is on point.
When I hear that a game is based around a musical theme I expect a good soundtrack. Even moreso when said title is in CD format. Unfortunately Funk Horror Band suffers from being an early release for the platform. The opening theme is great if you’re into Jpop (and even catchy if you aren’t, like me) but aside from the voice overs everything is rendered by the Genesis hardware. That means it’s bleeps and blips, with random samples from real instruments. The soundtrack is pretty bad. I muted the game after a few hours because I was very bored with the bland music. The voice overs are entirely in Japanese but they’re muffled and low quality. Overall the audio is very poor.
Funky Horror Band isn’t just mediocre. It’s pretty bad to be honest. The engine clearly doesn’t take advantage of the add-on hardware most of the time. Sega did a poor job of selling the Mega CD in Japan when this was one of their headlining titles. Admittedly I don’t know much about the license, but I imagine this only served to cheapen it.
