The Video Game Critic

Here are two Genesis reviews for your reading pleasure. Had to reduce Mercs (a re-review) from a A- to B. Fair?
Don't think I'll get much resistance to the Fantasia grade.

VideoGameCritic wrote:Here are two Genesis reviews for your reading pleasure. Had to reduce Mercs (a re-review) from a A- to B. Fair?
Don't think I'll get much resistance to the Fantasia grade.

The main reason the Fantasia game was bad has to do with the fact that the Sega of Japan AM7 Team along with the game designer that worked on the game Emiko Yamamoto (who BTW is a female game designer/works for Disney Japans game division producing many Japanese developed Disney titles with many big names such as Capcom/Square Enix/Konami/Nintendo, etc. More info at Sega Retro: http://segaretro.org/Emiko_Yamamoto) The Fantasia game was outsourced to western French developer Infogrames who is now the modern Atari BTW to do the project instead and even former Head of Product Development at Sega of America, Ken Balthase has said on record that he regrets releasing it in its current "unplayable" state. : http://segaretro.org/Fantasia#Development

Man this was back in the days when the Japanese had the edge on Console gaming compared to western developers that had the edge on the PC market. Even though plenty of well received/successful western developed console games where made such as Earthworm Jim, Cool Spot, Rareware games,ToeJam & Earl, Road Rash, Flashback, Vectorman ,etc. And yes their was a share of crappy Japanese developed console games at the time period. But during the 3rd to 5th Console Generations most of the big successful console games on Japanese made consoles came from Japan, go figure. But during the 6th Gen consoles it was very even for the west and Japan on the console market because of the original Xbox made western made console more relevant again after the infamous market crash. But from 2007 to 2016 during the 7th Gen/first few years of the 8th gen consoles, the west became dominate on consoles for the first time sense the second console generation. And Japan for the console market started putting out the inferior products during that period, with only a share of well received/successful Japanese title that where made during that period. Most of the successful Japanese games where only released on handhelds/Japanese Arcades.

The 7th Gen/early half of 8th Gen was the period the west put Japanese made games to shame on consoles, a big reversal from the 3rd to 5th console generations where it was mostly the other way around!

As a Virtual Console fan, I felt compelled to have at least one Genesis game on my Wii to represent the console. The excellent Sega conversion of Mercs was the game that got the nod, which is a decision I've never regretted.

Sega really did a nice job with the several 3rd party arcade conversions that they licensed to port over in-house and publish for a Genesis release. Every one I've played has been top notch.

Glad someone finally reviewed fantasia. You never really hear about it but it litters used game shops. I knew it was bad but finally someone explained why. Thanks!

I grew up with the Sega Genesis in the early 90s and Fantasia must have been such a stinker that it immediately faded into obscurity. I must have been vaguely aware of the game's existence, but I don't really recall seeing or hearing anything about it, whereas other Disney games got a lot of attention.