Given the veritable treasure trove of Good Shit that’s never left Japanese shores, it's kind of reassuring to play a video game as bad as Ancient Roman – and I say that with my tongue only half-embedded in my cheek.
Ancient Roman starts with the blue-haired 17 year old protagonist Kai Orpheus, an orphan enslaved in a village of evil monsters since birth, conveniently escaping an attack via a tunnel hidden under a barrel in his room. After teaming up with some cardboard cutouts, Kai soon discovers he's actually the prince of New Heinrogue (how neat is that!) and he embarks on a quest to find a cure for the aptly titled "People Becoming Monsters Disease" while saving the world in the process. From there it hits pretty much all of the plot beats one would expect, and there aren’t any major surprises. And as far as I can tell, the game has nothing to do with classical antiquity as its name suggests! (My brother suggested ‘Roman’ is in reference to ‘romance’ which makes far more sense).
In the back of my mind I was always thinking of Final Fantasy VII as I played Ancient Roman. While this comparison is largely superficial and hardly fair, it was still hard to shake: the overworld models have the same kind of chunky, chibi look of VII while switching to more "realistic" proportions during battles; the pre-rendered backgrounds, while not exclusive to Final Fantasy (indeed, fairly common of the era), still reek of VII’s aesthetic, just several times worse. And keep in mind Ancient Roman came out over a year after VII's debut in Japan – furthermore, Metal Gear Solid was released just five months later! Sure, these comparisons to AAA blockbusters are unfair, but in and of itself Ancient Roman's graphics are better fit for something like the 3DO.
There are several design choices pointing to a general lack of giving-a-shit that can't be handwaved by a paltry budget. In fact, these 'choices' are more akin to the 'design choice' of building a car with no brakes that also explodes on impact. I could easily forgive the shoestring were there an ounce of originality driving Ancient Roman, but it’s memorable for all the wrong reasons. The combat is about as vanilla as a turn-based RPG can get, and the difficulty balancing is just about nonexistent: for the most part you won't need to grind, and once you buy the Sleep Axe for Burke the rest of the game is largely trivial – it has a 100% chance to stun any enemy for three turns, yes, including including bosses. Good thing too, as the final boss would require an unholy amount of grinding otherwise.
And I need to give a shoutout to the user interface: it’s so inept it's almost awe-inspiring. Namely, you can't view which stats are affected by equipment until they’re actually equipped and there's no indication of what spells do or how much MP they cost. I can't just chalk it up to inexperience considering these are 'issues' that had been sorted out by the latter-day NES era. There’s also a slight delay in nearly every action, be it text boxes scrolling, attack animations, battle transitions, battle results, etc. To be sure, such pauses aren't entirely unheard of in the earlier days of CD gaming, but in Ancient Roman it’s all just another heap of trash on the compost pile.
Speaking of which: background music often sounds like someone banging their head against a MIDI keyboard, and even the 'passable' tracks would be subpar in just about any other JRPG. What's really maddening is how quiet the background music is in battle compared to the sound effects, which are mixed several times louder. To my knowledge this isn't an issue with the emulator; the game was actually shipped that way.
Yet shockingly, Ancient Roman spans two discs and features fully voiced FMV cutscenes. I was reminded of Parasite Eve, which was also two discs despite only being 10-12 hours long, with most disc estate allocated on fancy CGI. Indeed, Ancient Roman 'only' takes ~15-20 hours to beat (which is a rough estimate, as the game doesn't track your playtime) but unlike Parasite Eve these FMVs are extremely low quality and grainy as all hell, dipping to single digit framerates that would make the Nintendo 64 raise an eyebrow. Some of the cutscenes are particularly endearing in their awkwardness (as is some of the dialog), particularly the infamous exploding head in the opening cinematic, so that at least works to its favor.
Yes, Ancient Roman is a stinker in every conceivable manner, but here’s the thing... I’d be lying if I said I had a bad time. I don’t normally stream games but Ancient Roman was so scandalous I just had to riff on it Mystery Science Theater-style with my friends. It’s a macabre Zapruder-esque experience you can’t help but watch play out. In the same way there are so-bad-it’s-good movies, Ancient Roman is almost so-bad-it’s-worth-playing, and that’s something of an achievement in its own right as the player input games require make it far more difficult for the medium to have funny-bad experiences outside of cutscenes. And like I mentioned before, once you get the Sleep Axe you can pretty much blow through the rest of the game without ever needing to grind, so the pacing ends up fairly breezy.
As such, I can’t endorse Ancient Roman in and of itself, but if you’ve read this and looked at the screenshots thinking “I like the way this sucks” then I would say, sure, take the dive. You won’t find treasure but you might find a funny-looking sea creature.
