by Espiga » Mon Jan 25, '10, 11:36 pm
I'm pretty well-versed in silly, obscure to semi-obscure retro games, so here's a few I'd suggest checking out:
The Ys series: With gameplay similar to Zelda (although with less focus on puzzles and more on combat and leveling), and starring a red-haired swordsman named Adol Christin, the Ys games have been released on a multitude of platforms. The best ones were released on TurboGrafx-CD as Ys Books I + II. Also, if you speak Japanese or have access to the translation patch floating about, there's an amazing entry in the series called Ys: The Oath in Felghana (Released for Windows PC) which is actually a complete overhaul of the third game in the series.
El Viento: A Sega Genesis (aka Mega Drive) side-scrolling action/adventure title, El Viento's claim to fame was its GIANT boss battles, which were often so large and pixelated that, well, you couldn't really tell what they were. Fun game though.
Seirei Senshi Spriggan: It's a TurboGrafx-CD Shmup that you can get fairly cheaply on eBay, as far as Turbo shmups go. Also, it has a rockin' soundtrack and a pretty cool weapons progression system where your combination of different coloured crystals that you collect determine your weapon type.
Jimmu Densyou: This game actually sucks. A LOT. However, it's one of those games that's hilariously bad. It's a Space Harrier clone where, instead of playing as a * futuristic space-dude, you fill the role of a lone samurai warrior, attempting to survive in a shooting game environment...with a sword.
Shadow Brain: This game is fresh in my mind simply because I recently helped a friend of mine over at another website with translating certain parts of this into English. It's a Japan-only NES First-Person RPG (think Wizardry, or even Phantasy Star 1's dungeons), but unlike games like Wizardry, Shadow Brain takes place in a very Cyberpunk setting, with a heavy emphasis on technology, even with places like Hacker City. The final area has you going into cyberspace itself and defeating a nasty virus that plagues the world!
Rudra no Hihou: This is a Squaresoft RPG that was released right around the same time as Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger. However, unlike those two games, Rudra no Hihou featured a turn-based battle system in which you could modify the order in which participants took their turn, which would affect when monsters would attack as well. (For example, if you set your slowest person to attack first, then all the monsters faster than that slowest person would attack before your party had a chance to). It also had a system that allowed you to create your own spells by putting together katakana characters, with the characters you use determining the effect of the spell. Because of this reason, it was never released outside of Japan. However, a group of fairly dedicated ROMhackers successfully hacked the system and made it compatible with the English alphabet, translated the entire game, and released a patch that can be placed on the Japanese ROM, if emulation is your thing.
This is just a few of the games from the top of my head. I'm actively trying not to list things that are hugely known, like Chrono Trigger or anything in the Tales series.
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