Black/Matrix Advanced

Description

Black/Matrix Advanced is an expanded version of the 1998 Saturn original Black/Matrix. The game is set in a dark fantasy world where the outcome of a primordial war has reversed the moral order of society, leaving black-winged people as the ruling class and white-winged people as an oppressed servant caste, while concepts such as love, freedom, equality, and justice are treated as unforgivable sins. The protagonist, Abel, is a white-winged youth who sets out to rescue the black-winged “master” chosen by the player at the beginning of the game after that character is condemned for the crime of loving him, giving the story a strong emotional core from its opening hours.

Its basic structure is a turn-based, tile tactical RPG, but the Dreamcast version significantly reworks both presentation and content compared with the Saturn original. The DC release changes the character design, adds more elaborate event presentation with large standing portraits, anime-style visual sequences, and additional story material, while also revising later plot developments and replacing the Saturn game’s single ending with multiple endings, including a more optimistic epilogue route unavailable in the original release. It also expands the early “rehabilitation” chapter into a more interactive domestic and exploration-driven section, allows routes where unchosen master candidates can later appear as allies or rivals, and introduces further mechanical refinements that push it well beyond a straightforward port. In battle, players manage positioning on quarter-view maps while also making use of systems such as BP for special abilities and magic, with some strategy tied to timing and resource use rather than simple attrition alone.

Retrospectively, Black/Matrix Advanced is generally considered as the most fully realised version of the original Black/Matrix scenario, despite polarising some original players. Modern commentary tends to praise the game’s oppressive atmosphere, unusual moral inversion, added story depth, and stronger replay value through its branching outcomes, while criticism often centres on the character redesign, some tonal shifts in the new material, and the fact that fans of the Saturn version’s original visual identity do not always welcome the reinterpretation. Overall, it stands as one of the Dreamcast’s more distinctive Japanese strategy RPGs, re-authoring the original into a broader and more character-focused version of the same dark fantasy premise.