Koudelka and Retroid

Koudelka is a horror RPG with light tactical battles that appeared on the Playstation in 1999, in the heady days when the massive success of Resident Evil three years prior led to a proliferation of horror games in various genres. I don’t know if SNK was trying to cash in or the market presented Hiroki Kikuta the inspiration he needed to found Sacnoth and direct, write, produce, and compose the game. Either way, Koudelka is an interesting take on all the genres involved and sits alongside Parasite Eve as cool attempts at making horror RPGs in this era.  

I have various lists where I track the games I plan to play someday. Some of them exist in spreadsheets, others in my head or chat logs with friends. Koudelka and the subsequent Shadow Hearts games had always floated around in these lists, but had never risen to the top.  Then in 2022, developers associated with the series and with Wild Arms launched a “double Kickstarter” to fund spiritual successors to both.  RPGs are my favorite genre, but I had only really dabbled in the 9 or so mainline games and countless spinoffs that would serve as the inspiration for Armed Fantasia and Penny Blood. (For what it is worth, I have largely come to terms with the fact that neither of these are especially likely to see the light of day.) 

I joked to Jay recently that I may give up on playing new games and just play RPGs released between 1990 and 2008.  The steady flow of remasters and remakes (who expected a Baten Kaitos Switch release?) has made living that joke easier, but many games and series remain trapped on their original console. Wild Arms games are mostly available on the Playstation store now (of numbered entries only 5 is missing) but the Koudelka/Shadow Hearts series, which is owned by a pachinko company that has shown no interest in it, is stranded on PS1 (Koudelka) and PS2 (3 Shadow Hearts games). My solution, which is something I have been thinking about for a while, was to purchase a Retroid Pocket 6 as an emulation machine to play all these games that I legitimately own, but would have to expend effort to play on a television in the year of our lord 2026. Problem solved! 

Of course, for a dumb dumb like me, emulation is its own expending of effort so the problem was very much not solved. And starting with Koudelka, a game that plays out in about 12 hours over four discs, is sort of like starting on hard mode. 

I have never spent much time on emulation. Maybe these are excuses, but so many games come out on consoles and handhelds I have readily available, and my time is limited so spending it on setting up emulators rather than just playing would require a diligence I just don’t have. In college I played some NES and Genesis games, but very little since then, and those were comparatively easy to set up.  Setting up my new Retroid wasn’t difficult exactly, but my unfamiliarity with modern emulation and a bit of time pressure meant I was operating in suboptimal conditions. 

After several shipping detours, my shiny new Retroid arrived shortly before a planned trip and I was excited at the prospect of having limitless games at my disposal during my travels. Limitless, in this case, means something like 3 or 4.  Rather than creating an enormous library, my plan is to really focus on a list of games I want to play. Also, I wanted to test a few different consoles before loading more into the device.  

The handheld comes loaded with some emulators; I think Duckstation is the default for Playstation 1, and I started there. I loaded the four Koudelka files, one for each disc, into the folder and…nothing. Missing BIOS file. OK, bit of internet research on the right file later, load the BIOS file into what I think is the right place and…nothing. Who knows. Retroarch is also on the device, though savvy fans of emulating retro games will tell you Duckstation is better. Anyway, that loaded the game, though it did give me a warning that without a BIOS file it might not run optimally. Nevertheless, Success! I was playing Koudelka. 

The experience of playing the game was smooth overall, though not without a few hiccups and panic inducing moments. I started the game by just loading Disc 1, which is not the way to play games on multiple discs. The correct way to do it is to create a playlist of all the discs and then choose the next disc from that playlist when appropriate. Of course I didn’t worry about this until I was at the end of disc 1 and couldn’t progress any further. The good news is you can add a save file to the playlist so it is accessible when you play the game through the playlist.  That required putting my files back on the computer so I could create the playlist and rename my save files so RetroArch could find them when playing from the playlist rather than the disc file directly. 

Performance was mostly stable, though I experienced three or four crashes over my 12 hours with the game. With save states I was able to maintain most of my progress, so they were a minor annoyance more than anything. Except for the first one. The first time the game crashed I was on disc 2 and when I booted back my memory card saves were gone and it couldn’t find my save states. I eventually tried renaming an old save state and that worked but did set me back a bit. Somehow throughout this process I also managed to get back onto disc 2 without being in the playlist, so had to redo that later on as well. I am still unclear about what happened here. I managed through it, but it made the experience feel a bit held together by tape and band-aids. I was prepared for subsequent crashes. The one on the final boss was sort of annoying, and it always seemed to happen during James’s turn in battle, which is consistent with the fact that he sucks and is useless in battle.   

As an aside, and this is something I would probably put in a little box on the side if we were the type of site that did such things, imagine being an RPG fan in 2005-2006.  In addition to big releases like Dragon Quest VIII, Final Fantasy XII, Kingdom Hearts, etc. there was a strong schedule of smaller series getting entries including Wild Arms 5 in 2006, Shadow Hearts: From the New World in 2005 (Japan) and 2006 (North America) and Suikoden 5 in 2006.  Exciting times! Then none of those series released a mainline entry ever again. These are dark times. 

As for the game itself, I enjoyed it but recognize it is not without its problems. Koudelka, the eponymous Romani mystic you control to start the game, arrives at a monastery, summoned by a vision of a woman suffering there. She breaks in, finds a wounded adventurer, and the game begins with a tutorial battle. She dispatches the enemy, heals the man, and he joins the party.  They explore the monastery together, begin uncovering its dark past, and some time later find a third party member, a priest.  By archetype and role in battle, Koudelka is clearly a magic user, which includes potent healing spells; the adventurer is a physical attacker and sort of a tank for physical attacks; the priest…sucks? I don’t know, either he is mostly useless or I never figured out how to use him properly. That is fine, the other characters are so strong it barely matters, but odd to feel like one-third of the characters are wasted. 

Battles are tactical turn based, taking place on a flat grid. Characters and enemies cannot move past each other, limiting the field of play, but creating some strategic decisions. Should our tank push as far into enemy territory as possible to protect the other characters even if he is thereby exposed to multiple attacks per round?  Some enemies have elemental strengths and weaknesses, so in theory you should be trying to determine and exploit those, but in reality Koudelka gets so powerful by mid game it barely matters. The main issue with the battles is that very little changes from the beginning of the game through the end so they feel very repetitive.  Even many enemies recur throughout, just getting stronger over time. This is mitigated by the length of the game, so once battles get boring you are likely almost finished.

How much you enjoy Koudelka will be driven mostly by how much the story and characters resonate with you. The characters can feel a bit flat or like archetypes at times, but their interactions and the overall arc is interesting and briskly paced. Edward is a basic adventurer type, but James as a Priest has complex motivations and imposes some actual ethical dilemma and conflict into the plot. Koudelka herself starts out as a sassy girlboss or whatever but her own insecurities and motivations emerge over the course of the game. Even the “villains” you meet in game and those that set these horrors in motion have motivations that make them relatable and almost sympathetic.  The story is told through both emergent devices and a ton of the cutscenes that forced a 12 hour game onto 4 discs, and there is a ton of voice acting throughout.  Personally, I enjoyed the story and its pacing, and found a number of moments in the game almost moving.  There are multiple endings, and, without spoiling, the one I learned has been canonized in later Shadow Hearts games is an interesting choice both from a gameplay and story perspective. 

I am glad I bought the Retroid and got it working. Setup wasn’t difficult exactly but the bumps do illustrate why the vast majority of people are likely to prefer the smooth experience of playing a modern console or Switch (2) to going through the process I did. Koudelka was a tough first game, but perhaps that is good since now I know how to prepare for multi-disc titles and other challenges. I subsequently followed a guide from Retro Game Corps to add PS2 and other capabilities. The suggestions they made were terrific, though extensive, and getting Suikoden IV working was simple and easy so maybe the lesson of all this is to take your time and do things right the first time.