Virtual Hydlide

"The other Hydlide games? Because the first one was so good, you gotta have more."

- The Angry Video Game Nerd

Virtual Hydlide is a remake of the original Hydlide and released in 1995 for the Sega Saturn. The only thing about the game that received any praise was randomly generated worlds.

Why It Shouldn't Get Tool

 * 1) Hideous, ugly, laughable, and dull graphics. The environments are fully-rendered, but all the objects, including trees, enemies and the player character, are digitized sprites that look like something out of a live-action show, the textures are a pile of vomit and look absolutely horrendous, especially the trees and grass, and the game looks like it was made by a college student who looks like a presentation due to its ugly polygonal graphics, and make it look like a game on the mh:awesomegames:Super Nintendo Entertainment System running on the Super-FX chip or a Sega CD game. They are so ugly, in fact, they even give Zelda's Adventure a run for its money.
 * 2) Lack of story. It's basically the same story as the original Hydlide: gather the three fairies, three gems and defeat Varalys.
 * 3) Jim the Knight is a portly-looking digitized actor, wearing armor that looks like it is made of cardboard.
 * 4) Terrible framerate and/or scrolling, often going down to single digits.
 * 5) Awful combat. It's hard to tell when to attack an enemy with melee attacks due to the camera always being behind the hero. There are weapons such as the Dark Sword and Light Sword that enable long-range energy attacks, but you don't get them until later.
 * 6) The shop in the game is worthless because everything it offers can be obtained in the world.
 * 7) Rather than improving the level experience that made the original Hydlide a chore, fighting monsters in Virtual Hydlide is mostly pointless aside from getting points. You only level up in this game by completing objectives.
 * 8) While the randomly-generated world system was praised, the only major difference it makes in each playthrough is the location of each of the items and dungeons so all you do is run to different areas in the game rather than explore. It also changes where treasures are placed in dungeons. This is only a poor attempt at creating replay value, and a useless gimmick.
 * 9) Like Balan Wonderworld, there is no dialogue. The only voiced character is a vampire boss, and his one line is unintelligible.
 * 10) The box art is an ugly mess of random images, including Princess Ann in the front, Jim the Knight in the center, the Mad Dragon on the top left, the other bosses on the bottom right and Varalys in the back.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) The soundtrack is good.
 * 2) Although hideous and ugly, the graphics are surprisingly good.

Trivia

 * There is a minecart section in this game, in which people generally associate with Indiana Jones, and the game this was based on has a soundtrack that sounds like the Indiana Jones theme.
 * The game was likely going to get two sequels, Virtual Hydlide II and Virtual Hydlide III, which would’ve been remakes of Hydlide II: Shine of Darkness and Hydlide III: The Space Memories (known as Super Hydlide on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis) perspectively, but they were cancelled likely because of this game's poor reception, and the Hydlide series has been dormant since.

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