The Haunted Hoard: Dark Arms: Beast Buster 1999 (Neo Geo Pocket Color)

Dark Arms: Beast Buster 1999 is a mess of a name that doesn’t do it any favors. The Beast Buster name comes from a set of light gun arcade games that take place in modern cities overrun by zombies, but this spinoff is an action role-playing game that mostly feels like a medieval fantasy. The year 1999 has pretty much nothing to do with its story or setting as well, so Europe was fairly smart in boiling down the title to just Dark Arms which does at least feel fitting since it ties to the game’s focus on forging weapons from the souls of defeated monsters.

 

Dark Arms: Beast Buster 1999 sees you playing as a character known only as the Beast Buster, a human who made a pact with The Master to achieve greater power. Entering the Dark Realm, the Beast Buster is now able to use a special tool to catch the souls of slain creatures to be used in the creation of new weapons. However, as you head to new places in search of power, you eventually encounter a village of human souls and start to learn more about the Dark Realm and the Master as well. The story isn’t given heavy priority, most important developments thrown at you in big chunks that don’t really make the plot that much deeper, but it does at least help to set up a few new objectives in the late game that differ from the usual focus on entering new areas to beat whatever boss monster resides there. It’s the kind of plot that guides things rather than deserves much of its own attention, mostly because even elements like your character having lost their memories when they made their pact lead to very plain resolutions.

What ends up more interesting is the weapon system tied to the soul catching mechanic. When exploring places like graveyards, a nearby hamlet, and Fate Tower, the top-down action has you firing your weapon at the zombies, werewolves, slimes, and mummies, later levels starting to work in more interesting and sturdy foes like knife throwing dolls, undead tigers, or boss monsters like the more expected vampire or the stranger worm with a mouth full of faces. There are little bits of modernity, some enemies utilize firearms or throw grenades, but you can too if you craft them by way of the dark powers granted to you. Your capture weapon fires white bullets, and should they defeat a foe, you’ll absorb their energy so you can later utilize their souls at the Master’s House. After collecting Oums hidden in the world and infusing them with a Seed that works sort of like a blueprint for a weapon type, you can start to craft weapons, the player able to carry up to three in addition to their capture weapon.

 

While the first weapon you’re encouraged to make is a pretty basic handgun, as you start pouring souls into it, it can eventually be upgraded down different paths. Some like a shotgun sound strong, but it can even become a beam laser, and some of the other Seeds you acquire can be made into more eccentric and mystical weapons. The Mano weapons cover your arms in powerful magical gauntlets that are great for hitting foes at close range, the Tentacle weapons start off like Mano but can evolve into ambush traps or waves of tentacles you launch across the room, and specialized tools like a shield or dummy decoy give you weapons with different use cases. Weapons naturally grow stronger as they’re equipped and you defeat monsters, but to evolve them into more potent forms requires frequent enemy captures, leading to an interesting dynamic. You can get some of your weapons to pretty powerful levels, to the point they handle some encounters too easily, but you don’t capture their souls if you fight with those tools. You need to try and find a balance of using the Catcher weapon and fighting with the tougher stuff. An element system also gives you reason to capture enemies, feeding your weapons an ice, fire, or electric aligned monster giving them that aspect that can sometimes wear down foes even faster. The Catcher does thankfully get a bit stronger over the course of the game too so it won’t be a slog to try and take down the tougher monsters with it, but it can sometimes feel like if not for the Catcher encouraging less optimal attacks, a lot of the monster encounters would be a piece of cake.

Oftentimes, the peskiest enemies in Dark Arms: Beast Buster 1999 are ones you are trying to capture, because if you whip out the weapons you’ve cultivated you can often dispense with them quickly. Bosses get off a bit better, most structured well to keep you moving with their attacks or by crowding your personal space, but sometimes you might wonder why you’re overcomplicating things in a regular area when souls to capture aren’t that rare. When you’re still building up in the first half of the game though, there is still some of that balance of trying to decide when to get tough or when to hold back and try to gather those helpful souls, but after what felt like a final boss, the game keeps going for a while longer. You need to revisit old places and find important things in places that were previously a bit curious because they looked meaningful but had nothing at the time. The true final area has a different goal than just fighting your way to a boss, and beating the game even unlocks a long gauntlet if you want to keep using the powerful weapons you’ve built up over the course of the adventure.

 

The gauntlet isn’t that appealing though because the combat isn’t too exciting, especially because of the reasonable but rather tedious limits put on it. Guns don’t use ammo, rather, you have a POW gauge that diminishes when you fire that weapon. The POW refills gradually when a weapon’s not in use, having four weapons advantageous since you can keep switching between them, but it feels like much of the time you’ll still be waiting for something like the Catcher or your strongest tool to regain some power rather than constantly bringing in new weapons to keep up the fight. This is at its worst early on when you’re still trying to make weapons and capture spirits more often, leading to slow fights with some of the plainer foes in the game’s bestiary. It’s not too tedious once you get a decent arsenal, but with most encounters following pretty simple patterns, having so many frequent waits often leads more to buying time than tense moments where you’re trying to survive.

THE VERDICT: Dark Arms: Beast Buster 1999 influences the player to play in an interesting way by giving them one less powerful weapon to capture souls to build up the strength of their other weapons, but it is a shaky balance. It’s not too hard to build up some powerful tools that simplify normal encounters so the difficulty of the game ties more to how often you want to make a catch. Bosses are sturdy even against powerful weapons though to help guarantee some more interesting battles, and some shake-ups in late game objectives help give you something to do even after you’ve powered up a bit. The weapon power gauge does slow things down a bit, but this action RPG still has interesting elements to balance out some slowness and repetition.

 

And so, I give Dark Arms: Beast Buster 1999 for Neo Geo Pocket Color…

An OKAY rating. The POW gauge is an unexciting solution to an issue, that being the game wants to encourage weapon swapping while also not wanting you to steamroll the monsters in your path. The Catcher is usually weak enough that you probably won’t commit to it full time, but it can feel like the other weapon options should have done more to stand out for their utility rather than being hampered by the meter. The decoy dummy is already slow to use and much harder to slip into combat than your more standard weaponry, and even with limits on them, something like a decently upgraded Mano will probably become a go-to because of its mix of strength and speed. The ambush tentacles are fun in concept but sloppy in use, especially since most of what you’d want to use them on won’t move into them, and that’s time you could spend using a more flexible tool. If it was cleaner to swap weapons or you could use them without having to fiddle with cycling through them, it could be interesting to see what strategies a fully available arsenal could provide, but it might have been better to ease up on how much the POW meter depletes and instead figure out how to make the available tools reward interesting utility rather than raw effectiveness. The weapon cultivation system is definitely the game’s strongest element, especially when you’re starting out and tough foes are also potential pay days so you do try and balance out how much you fight with the Catcher versus other options. The game layering some repetition onto its back half doesn’t really help it as you tread old ground with now much stronger tools yet the threats there remain the same. Dark Arms: Beast Buster 1999 might have just needed more space to make its weapon growth system deeper rather than having a few gimmicky paths you probably won’t embrace, but the weapons still work in making combat fairly decent during the greater part of this adventure.

 

Dark Arms: Beast Buster 1999 could have been a compelling new direction for the Beast Busters series, focusing on building up your own weapons to take on the monsters of the Dark Realm, but it didn’t have the space to grow and it released on a console that meant it wouldn’t earn much attention compared its still little known but much more straightforward arcade ancestors. Working to take the souls of your foes is what makes this game work as well as it does despite its shortcomings, but had this series continued on past 1999, maybe we would see just how unique that idea could become on stronger hardware.