Game #1334: Valis - The Fantasm Soldier Collection II

 I'm guessing the next one is gonna be numbered X?

 

 Valis: The Fantasm Soldier Collection II is yet another mediocre collection of mediocre games, these one made up of games that should've been on the cart. So, what is actually here? The final game, Valis 4, the cutesy spinoff, Syd of Valis and... the MSX and Genesis version of the first game, y'know, alternate version of the game feature on the first volume? There's no logical reason these games weren't feature in the previous cart besides greed, and to top it all off, it's missing Super Valis, the SNES version of Valis 4. Guess they are gonna release that one by itself since they clearly love money. And the translation is spotty at best, there are grammatical errors, and it's easy to see that the subtitles can't possibly much the amount of words characters spew, heck, in Syd of Valis, one line of text clearly says "12", but the subtitles make no mention of that number.

 Enough prattling about the collection itself, onto the games:

 Valis 4: The next step from Valis 3, this one features new trio of playable characters, each one has a unique skill that will be necessary to proceed, one is immune to environmental traps(Spikes, slides), one can double jump and one can slide.

 Much like before, the enemy placement is super cheap and the platforming and sliding is sometimes obnoxiously precise, all of this is mitigated with the Rewind and Save Anywhere features, making it the most enjoyable game in the cart. I thought it was a decent way to end a fairly unspectacular series of games.

 Syd of Valis: It's cutesy, so you might think it's easier, but nope, it's not. Enemy placement is as cheap as always, and the screen only scrolls when Yuko is dangerously close to the edge of the screen making avoiding some enemies nigh impossible. To add to all this, the game is a bit slippery, particularly with some armors.

 Oh, yeah, while level design is as lame as always, this game has a bunch of really cool ideas, such as equipment. As you go through the game you earn different weapon projectiles and different armors(That actually change how Yuko looks!), and you can swap between them at any time. This was such a cool feature, shame it never made it out of this game!

 Later bosses can be downright brutal... unless you learn how easily you can cheese them with the homing shot. 

 Valis(Genesis): While it has the same cutscenes as Valis 1, the levels are quite different. It was relatively enjoyable, shame it's so slow paced. Yuko runs very slowly which makes the game drag on a bit, but it's not half bad.

 Valis(MSX): The very first version of Valis.... this one is a mess. It's almost unplayable, the screen scrolling is incredibly choppy and the gameplay is very sloppy, you get creamed in seconds flat while bouncing all over the maze-like stages. As bad as it is, I'm happy that it's here, as a piece of history.

 Definitely not as good as the first collection, not that that means much.

 5.0