Dragon View

A game which was marketed as a sequel to Drakkhen (literally called "Super Drakkhen" in Japan, and even its copyright screen in the US refers to it as "Drakkhen II"), though it bears very little resemblance to its predecessor in terms of overall design.  While it does retain a similar side-view perspective in key areas and the pseudo-3D view for its overworld, it plays much differently, having you control a single character who can leap, cast spells via magic rings, use items and fend off enemies with two main weapons - your sword and a "hauza", a bladed boomerang that can attack at range.  Because of this, combat is based on skill rather than simple luck - how effectively you can avoid damage and land hits on enemies utilizing your own twitch skills, which makes the overall experience much more fun.  As you defeat enemies you'll earn experience points, which go toward leveling up and giving you a general boost to your stats, and as you venture through the game you'll also find upgrades in chests for your weapons, armor and rings.  Perhaps taking some cues from Zelda, you'll even earn a lot of magical artifacts throughout, which get put to use solving puzzles - from gloves that let you push statues to a magic mirror that lets you bypass barriers or block a single attack.  The presentation is phenomenal too, with some gorgeous backgrounds, gruesome enemy designs and finely polished animation throughout, and even some pretty clever and funny dialog to progress the story.  I, like probably many others, passed this one up because of its ties to Drakkhen, but upon actually playing it, I see that was a big mistake - it's a wonderfully-crafted action RPG with a lot to offer, and a definite hidden gem in the SNES's library.  And while it is a pretty scarce game these days (with bloated prices on the secondary market to match), it has gotten a re-release on Steam, so you can check it out at an affordable price.  Which you definitely should.

Developer: Kotobuki System Co. Ltd. (Kemco)
Publisher: Kemco, Piko Interactive LLC, Bleem!

Released: 1994, 2019

Platform: SNES, Windows

Drakkhen

Drakkhen was noted in its time for being a relatively innovative game; it was among the first to utilize paper dolls to show the party's currently-equipped gear and have a pseudo-3D perspective for its overworld, with sprite-scaling to indicate distant objects and vector-animated ground paths to aid in navigation.  Nowadays, though, it's mostly known for being a surreal and profoundly bizarre experience, with numerous unexplainable enemy encounters throughout - bumping into urns in the road pits you against a giant jackal's head that fires lasers from its eyes, constellations in the sky will randomly attack you during the night hours (pictured: a bird constellation bombarding the party with fireballs), and one particularly deranged random encounter involves a dancing silhouetted woman repeatedly chanting "I love you" in a constantly fluctuating pitch.  All told, though, it's rather light on actual role-playing elements - while there are four playable classes to pick from, you must make a party comprised of at least one of each, so you really get no choice at all in your team's composition.  There are relatively few NPCs to interact with, and nearly all just dispense bits of dialog before sending you off to the next plot point, or just serve as generic shops and Araks (houses of healing); the latter operate for free, though, which is quite handy as the early game is brutally difficult.  Surviving long enough to get to one and heal your injured and dead is a task in itself, though, as enemy encounters are irritatingly frequent and your equipment breaks frequently, necessitating that you carry several backups as you travel (which aren't cheap to purchase, but are frequently found as random drops).  You also have disappointingly little control over combat itself - your characters move and act without any direct input from you, though you can direct them to attack, defend or cast spells (which they will continue to cast until they deplete their MP, or you change their command).   All of these were probably conscious decisions made to lengthen the experience, too, as the overall plot is quite short and can be finished in only a few hours once you know what you're doing. A pretty interesting game for its time (as well as one of the very first SNES games ever released), but its punishing difficulty, simplistic plot and overall limited gameplay ensure its appeal is pretty restricted nowadays, save for those who enjoy games that unapologetically bask in their own impenetrable weirdness.

Developer: Infogrames, Kemco (SNES)
Publisher: Infogrames, Classic Digital (Windows)

Released: 1989, 1990, 1991

Platforms: Amiga, Atari ST, MS-DOS, SNES, PC-98, FM Towns Marty, Sharp X68000, Windows, Linux, Evercade

Legend of the Ghost Lion

Dragon Quest was of course an extremely influential game in its time, instrumental in pulling Japanese RPGs from their crude beginnings and showing a high level of polish and imagination that set a high standard for future games and remains a hallmark of the series even today.  Even in its earliest days, though, there were plenty of games that drew heavy inspiration from it; some quite good (Final Fantasy, Phantasy Star), others hilariously awful (Hoshi wo Miru Hito), and still others just okay.  Ghost Lion falls into the last of these categories, though it does at least have some unique mechanics and an amusingly off-beat presentation to help it stand out.  Instead of levels, hit points and magic points, you get Hope, Courage and Dreams, and though there is only one central protagonist, you summon allies to aid you in battle through magical foci.  There are quite a few, too - you begin with a spear that summons the tribal warrior Moja, but by the end you'll be calling up giants, armored dwarves, giant frogs, wizards, gnomes and several others.  Each runs off a "Power" meter that both fuels their attacks and serves as their health, and once it hits zero, they vanish.  However, you can immediately summon them again at full power without penalty; in fact, you'll want to do that as having as many allies on the field as possible will draw enemy attacks away from Maria.  If she drops, you immediately lose the fight and go back to your last save point.  Combat tends to be pretty drawn-out and tedious for that reason, and between that and the frequent random encounters, the game's pacing definitely suffers for it.  It's also not a terribly appealing game on a presentation level - the graphics are just passable and the music, while fine in the overworld, gets quite repetitious and irritating in battle.  Combat also feels rather pointless overall, as you don't gain levels via the traditional method of earning experience points.  Instead, you find "shards of hope" in treasure chests that serve as level-ups, which also means you have to thoroughly explore each area and endure even more random encounters as a result.  All in all, just an okay NES RPG, though like all games that have unique ideas in the mix, it's worth a try for genre fans.

Strangely enough it's also a tie-in to a film, though the plot of the game and movie bear only the faintest resemblance to one another...

Developer: Kemco

Publisher: Kemco
Released:1992
Platform: NES

The Sword of Hope / Sword of Hope II

A short-lived and mostly-forgotten duology of RPGs for the original Game Boy, Sword of Hope was also a rare entry in the genre from Kemco, a developer mostly known for licensed tie-in games.  But does Sword of Hope have anything to offer RPG fans today, or is it one that's slipped into obscurity for good reason?

The Game Boy was of course Nintendo's big contender in the world of portable gaming, and it wasn't hard to see why it became such a big hit, having a huge battery life compared to its competitors (in no small part for lacking a backlight or color) and a surprisingly strong library of games; hell, it launched with Tetris, which is arguably the most popular video game of all time even today.  RPGs were a fairly uncommon sight for the platform, though, at least before Pokemon came along and became the worldwide phenomenon it is today.  The first three SaGa games were localized as "Final Fantasy Legend" and the first Seiken Densetsu as "Final Fantasy Adventure", but for the most part RPGs remained Japan-exclusive on the Game Boy.  

Sword of Hope was one of the few that tried to compete, though, and it was a decent enough effort for the time.  The game was created by Kemco, a company mostly known for licensed tie-in games; however, they did also publish well-received ports of three PC point-and-click adventure games on the NES, affectionately known as the Icom trilogy - Shadowgate, Deja Vu and Uninvited.  They were very much products of their time, with numerous puzzles that didn't make a great deal of sense (requiring you to use the spear to defeat a troll - sword, hammer or sling will all result in death.  Or more famously, opening an already-open star map, taking a star from it, then using it to kill a wyvern) and the barest minimum of animation, but were still pretty well-liked in their time and continue to get rereleases even today, most recently appearing on a compilation called "8-Bit Adventure Anthology".  Shadowgate even had a successful reboot in 2014, reworking it to a more modern style of design while retaining its iconic dark imagery and music, so it's clear these games, flawed though they were, have a lasting and unique appeal.

I bring this up because Sword of Hope is very much built on the same gameplay model, and even uses a similar UI - a small viewing window depicting the current scene, with a mini-map at the bottom showing the directions you can travel in from the current location, as well as a list of verbs to utilize in order to interact with characters and objects you encounter.  Mostly in the form of looking (also used to talk to characters), opening or hitting something, though you will also occasionally have to use an item or cast a spell to proceed too.  In a rather strange twist, the story explains that most people in the world have been transformed into trees, and indeed, they're a very frequent sight - almost every screen on the overworld has some visible, and you can speak with them to get bits of backstory or clues to progress.

The basic formula is interspersed with RPG elements, too - you have stats, experience points, levels, equipment and spells that can only be cast in the thick of fights.  Fights themselves occur randomly when you move to a new screen or attempt to, and at times you'll have to fight several in a row - sometimes as many as six or seven before the game finally gives you a break and lets you go the way you want to.  However, fights are at least relatively quick and painless for the most part, which is a good thing as you will frequently have to grind out levels to defeat bosses and farm money for upgrades from shops in order to stand a chance.  This design ends up being a bit of a double-edged sword - the world is more tightly designed than most RPGs of the time, largely free of huge swaths of empty land that had little to interact with; on the other hand, you still have to grind quite a bit to succeed, and that can get pretty tedious when you're getting into several fights in a row while barely managing to progress to where you need to go next.  It also doesn't help that you cannot sell your old gear to recoup some of the money - as soon as you upgrade to a new weapon or piece of armor, the old one gets tossed and never seen again.  Bizarrely you also don't seem to have the ability to pick targets for spells - they hit enemies or even yourself randomly, which is rather a problem and makes using attack spells rather useless when you can attack with a weapon and reliably do damage to an enemy without risking your own health.

Puzzles, as you'd expect from a point-and-click of the era, are not always clear, sometimes coming down to guesswork or just abusing the game's built in hint system (using the Grace spell at the temple).  The game's translation doesn't help either, with some clunky dialog and occasional inconsistent spelling, sometimes within the same scene ("alter" and "altar" both get used at the temple).  And of course, having to backtrack anywhere is always a pain when you're probably going to get into a dozen fights on the way there and back.  Finally, the game utilizes a password system rather than a battery backup, which isn't the worst I've seen (16 characters); however, it also uses Greek letters and symbols instead of just straight letters and numbers, which can make writing them down a bit trickier.

Not much has fundamentally changed in Sword of Hope II, which came out the following year in Japan but took another five years to appear in the west, debuting in 1996 - a time when the Game Boy's popularity was fading (and would continue to do so until Pokémon debuted in 1998) and the handful of people who had purchased the original game had probably forgotten all about it, especially since several high-profile RPGs like Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy III (VI), Phantasy Star IV, Shining Force II and Chrono Trigger were all out by then.  A bit of a shame, as the sequel is an improvement over the original in virtually every way.  With a revamped UI that features a much larger viewing window, far greater detail in its visuals, more animation, better music, a more polished translation with a lot more dialog and story to experience, and some basic features that were absent in the first (selling items, battery-backup saves, and you can save anywhere you like) being implemented.  You also get more party members this time, which makes combat a bit more varied and strategic.  It's a significantly better game than its predecessor, though its long-delayed release left it little hope of competing with other big names of the time, which resulted in it selling poorly and becoming a rare and expensive title in recent years (though it is available on the 3DS eShop for however much longer that lasts).

Kemco's Sword of Hope is a name that's rarely spoken these days, and after playing both games, I can definitely see why - the original was very much a product of its time, with clunky and rather dated adventure game design paired with a mostly forgettable, awkwardly-translated RPG experience.  Its sequel was denied its due owing to a long-delayed western release, so despite being a substantially better game and even a decent RPG for the Game Boy, it simply had no chance of competing with all the amazing titles that were being released on the 16-bit platforms in the intervening years.  They might be worth a quick look to RPG buffs or big adventure game fans as a novel and relatively obscure series, but if you're looking for high-quality '90s RPGs to add to your collection, there are simply too many better options to spend your money on over these.

Developer: Kemco

Publisher: Seika (SoH1), Kemco (SoH2)

Platform: Game Boy, 3DS Virtual Console

Released: 1991, 1996, 2012

Recommended version: The 3DS version is an emulated port of 2.