I’ve taken 137 screenshots of Sword of Hope, beaten two bosses (out of a presumed four?) and opened 2 of the 3 gates. I am stuck currently but…this game rules.
I cheated and played the English version which was released in '91 not '89, but y’know. I think it counts.
Kind of a mix between shadow gate and dragon quest, i guess? It’s not really a dungeon crawler, since it feels much more JRPGish, but then it has this first person navigation + light puzzles. It’s an odd mixture.
Mechanically it’s pretty simple - walk around, enemies appear, then you murder them. But there are lots of little wrinkles that make it funny/interesting.
First of all, the random numbers in this game have huge variance. For instance, the boss I just fought would do attacks that did 1-8 damage OR 25-40 damage. Considering I had a maximum of 40HP, that’s absurd. I just fought an ape whose spells did 15-45 damage. What the hell!!!
It’s very funny.
It’s also very funny because the penalty for dying is almost nothing. You go back home and have to heal for a small amount of gold. At level 1 you don’t even have to heal because you respawn with max HP and MP for level 1. You don’t lose any progress, items, exp, etc. It’s very nice!
Another mechanical thing is that everything you do is more or less likely to start a battle - including just examining your surroundings. But it feels pretty fair - just looking around only starts a battle about 10% of the time. However! Sometimes when you try to move to the next screen, it starts a battle, and afterwards you’re still at the same place, and moving to the next screen starts a battle again. Sometimes it starts two battles in a row without any input from you! My record is 5 battles for a single move.
Honestly it’s still pretty funny. The battles are brief and breezy and easy…unless you get murdered in one hit, which can happen.
Also! Spells are not guaranteed to hit the enemy! And this is true for enemies as well, who seem more likely to hit themselves than you!
Also also! Enemies can show up in the middle of a battle, but different types of enemies will fight amongst themselves instead of attacking you!! Nothing like a goblin showing up to murder the skeleton head you were fighting before turning on you.
Also also also! The Fireball3 spell targets everyone all the time…including yourself! So the tradeoff is just Taking Damage, it…rules.
The real star is the writing though, which is phenomenal. The conceit of the game is that all the people in the kingdom were turned into trees, which means you can actually talk to most of the trees and get little hints and flavor text and stuff. It’s such a good idea because they didn’t have to use any memory for sprites of people, but they could still cram a shitload of text in the game.
(I missed a bunch of text boxes here but he was very heroic before he just fucking died)
Also, there are three omnipresent options that result in various bits of text:
LOOK
OPEN
HIT
And you can do that to anything including people. Here’s what happens when you try to open the Shaman:
And hitting people/things often results in these hilarious onomatopoeias
The shopkeeper lady beats the shit out of you too:
The few actual people you meet all have shitloads of weird dialogue as well. The shopkeeper lady will give you a secret item if you visit enough times. The first time you meet Martel he’s a huge dick:
but then later
ALSO HE HAS A PIGEON
AND THEN YOU TALK TO THE PIGEON
BONG
IT’S SO GOOD
Anyway there are also mimics and slugs and treants and they will all kick your fucking ass
I can’t recommend this enough. It’s very breezy so far and each level feels Falcom-ish in how big the jumps are. I’ll see if I can figure out what to do next because I really want to finish this game.