NIS America has put out a wealth of content over the years. While more recently, top NIS games have included titles like the spectacular Trails series and Ys games, many of their older releases were tactical strategy games and RPGs as well. Last year we were treated to NIS Classics Vol. 1 which brought back a couple of those PS2 strategy games and now we’re back again with NIS Classics Vol. 2: Makai Kingdom: Reclaimed and Rebound / ZHP: Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman. Whew. That’s a mouthful!
NIS Classics Vol. 2 covers two very different isometric strategy games, Makai Kingdom which was originally released on the PS2 and returns with an added “Petta” mode allowing you to experience the game from another perspective, and the fairly obscure PSP exclusive ZHP: Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman. Both have their positives and negatives but we’ll take a look at Makai Kingdom first.
In Makai Kingdom, you play the ultimate overlord Zetta who is so ridiculously arrogant that he manages to be defeated and forced to bind his soul into a magical book to survive. Now, his only chance to regain his physical form and nigh-omnipotent status is to grind his way back through Netherworld dungeons, transmuting the rocks, flowers, and other inanimate objects into a private army. While the fully voiced dialogue (at least in the cinema sequences) is amusing, it’s also wildly over the top, both in content and voice acting and honestly might be a turn off if you’re more of a traditional isometric SRPG fan. This is definitely not a serious game.
The tactics are serious stuff though, requiring you to summon, equip and juggle (not literally) a variety of different character types in order to defeat weirdly expanding stages in your quest to re-empower Zetta. Once you start playing Makai Kingdom, chances are you’ll find the controls surprisingly complex and honestly, there is so much going on in combat and the menu system to control battles is so needlessly complicated that it’s more than a bit irritating. You’ll get the feel for it after a few battles, but even something as simple as attacking is less intuitive than you’d think.
Complexity is the hallmark of Makai Kingdom though and even finishing stages is needlessly odd, with characters able to throw items from the ground or even characters over the edge of stages to find hidden areas which are more challenging. This makes levels long, grueling, and repetitive, and while it’s clear that this is the natural next step from the Disgaea franchise, it’s almost as if the devs tried to include anything they could think of all at once at the expense of any actual fun. If you love tedious repetition, moderately interesting tactical choices, and a high level of junior high school humor, Makai will definitely appeal to you. But after 25 or 30 hours, the chances are good that the childish presentation combined with the slow-paced and quite frankly uninspired combat will end up more of a slog.
Moving on to the other title on NIS Classics Vol. 2 we have ZHP: Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman. ZHP is a bit of an odd duck because not many people played it in the first place and it was a rather forgotten title on a system that was not all that widely popular. Hardcore RPG and SRPG fans flocked to the PSP because of the wide variety of weird little niche titles but most people never saw the unique PSP library and ZHP was definitely an unexpected title when it came out. That hasn’t changed much and ZHP is still strangely charming even if it isn’t perfect.
In ZHP: Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman, there is a hero called the Unlosing Ranger who never loses a battle. Unfortunately, he’s killed in a car accident on the way to fight Darkdeath Evilman and save the world, and passes his mantle and abilities on to you, a random person on the street. Sadly, you’re wildly unprepared for the fight and defeated in about 5 seconds, as Darkdeath Evilman tries to slaughter the Super Baby and take over the world.
Yes, the plot is beyond ludicrous, but it’s a charming sort of ridiculous and the characters are marginally more loveable than Makai Kingdom. Turns out there’s a Netherworld and you’ve been transported there outside of time in order to train you up as the new Unlosing Ranger, along with the mildly irritating spirit of the original Unlosing Ranger. Your job is to explore an alternate universe, achieve your full potential as Unlosing Ranger, and then return to your world in time to stop Darkdeath Evilman from killing Super Baby. But to manage all that, it’s time to learn to fight.
While ZHP looks a lot like Makai Kingdom, it plays remarkably differently. It might be the right idea to consider ZHP a proto-roguelike since with every defeat you’re returned to the main hub area of the netherworld and reduced back to level 1, but your base stats improve in line with the number of stages you survived before being defeated. Levels aren’t open affairs like Makai Kingdom however. Here you’re making more visceral attacks, skirting around visible enemy detection areas, baiting enemies, and throwing things at them to enrage, poison, or even defeat them as you work your way through the randomly generated levels of ZHP, gaining random items along the way.
In fact, the randomly generated aspects of ZHP are both charming and incredibly irritating because the game also comes with an extremely limited inventory. Use what you have because you can only hold ten items in total. If you’re a potion hoarder (like some of us), ZHP will have you grinding your teeth because you probably forgot to use some things and have to repeatedly use or drop items when you don’t want to. Your visual range is limited to a smaller area as well, so as you search each floor of each dungeon, you’ll come across small pathways that lead to additional enemies and items. In some cases you can even skip whole combat sections, making your way straight to the staircase and the harder enemies below.
ZHP has a unique vibe to it, between the humor, the throwing mechanics, and the strategy involved in the search radius of enemies. It’s a faster-paced game than Makai Kingdom and the menu system is definitely more welcoming as well. It’s still more of a grind than it should be, but it’s a bearable grind while Makai Kingdom comes off as more tedious overall. Of the two, ZHP is definitely more fun than Makai but both games require reservoirs of patience and a deep enjoyment of nonsensical scripts.
While we’ve talked about the titles in NIS Classics Vol. 2, we haven’t talked about the game itself yet. The sound design in each game is quite good overall, with excellent voice acting, decent music, and fun sound effects. But for a re-release on a modern console, the visuals definitely don’t match the sound and music quality. Both games are essentially straight ports with limited updates to the visual presentation. Some of the character portraits are fairly clear but these are standard definition era games and it definitely shows. Graphics are muddy and blocky, and the color palettes are noticeably bland and uninteresting overall, especially in combat phases.
The beautiful pixel art is also sadly blurry and fuzzy here, and there is no upscaling at all on the Switch. Both games have basically been ported as-is to the Switch. It’s honestly a shame because the artwork itself is utterly fantastic in both games, but you just don’t get a chance to see it in all its glory. Perhaps it was too much work to clean everything up to high definition but especially in docked mode, it feels like a criminal oversight on the part of NIS not to modernize the visuals of these titles. ZHP was after all a PSP game and it probably would have been hundreds of hours to fully clean up everything from that tiny handheld screen. In handhold mode, it’s easier to enjoy the games than it is on a 55” TV of course and that’s probably the best way for you to enjoy these vintage strategy games.
You’re getting two very niche titles in NIS Classics Vol. 2: Makai Kingdom: Reclaimed and Rebound / ZHP: Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman. Both have their positives and negatives and they’re unabashedly from their eras, warts and all. Both games play quite well and load times are short, but they’re old games and the menus and visuals have definitely not aged as well as one might hope. Most people will probably like ZHP more than Makai Kingdom and it’s nice to have two very different games in the same visual style, but a bit of tweaking wouldn’t have hurt these titles and at a good 30 hours each, you’d better have a wealth of patience if you intend to finish both games. NIS Classics Vol. 2 is a unique title representing a very specific era in the company’s history and while it’s great to see them preserved, the games in this collection definitely won’t be for everyone! If either game is your style though, the whole collection is worth getting for one of them (ZHP….play ZHP) so go check it out!
This review is based on a digital copy of NIS Classics Vol. 2: Makai Kingdom: Reclaimed and Rebound / ZHP: Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally well on both but looked much nicer in handheld mode. This version of NIS Classics Vol. 2: Makai Kingdom: Reclaimed and Rebound / ZHP: Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman is exclusive to the Nintendo Switch at this time.