Kalin no Tsurugi (カリーンの剣), released 10/2/1987, developed by Crystalsoft, published by DOG

This is another Famicom Disk System game; the peripheral was already starting to show signs of trouble, and there aren’t many disk games left. When you start up the game it seems like a ripoff of a famous RPG:

But it actually doesn’t resemble Dragon Quest much at all. Instead of turn-based random battles, you see enemies on the map, and when you encounter them, it goes into a separate action-battle screen where you run into the enemies to cause damage (like Ys).

The battles are quite fast moving and dangerous — one issue is that you can’t run from battles, and you never know whether the battle will be with 1 enemy who starts across the map, or 8 enemies that start already surrounding you, which frequently results in a game over, because whenever you are hit you can’t move for a short time, making it very easy to get locked in and killed. This is a game that you will get constant game overs in, unless you spend a lot of time grinding easy monsters. But you can quicksave any time on the world map so even if you die you can immediately come back.

The grinding is also a bit frustrating because the way the XP is calculated is weird — there’s a base XP for each enemy, and 10% is added for each additional monster (so if 1 monster gives 100 XP, beating 5 of those monsters in a battle will be 140 xp).

In addition to the basic attacking, you can use your MP to cast various spells by equipping certain items. You start with a fire rod that can shoot a fireball, which is useful. Later items heal you, damage all monsters, or have other such effects. You can change your equipped item during the battle although it’s a bit cumbersome.

You start with some basic equipment near the starting castle. You can get some hints from there and some basic information, but there’s no one to heal you. In this game there are only three ways to heal yourself:

• Healers in some towns that charge 10 gold x level, which is a steep price
• Potions, which cost 30 gold and you can only hold 5, and also which don’t heal that much
• The White Idol, which can cast a heal spell. Since your MP naturally regenerate (even in towns), this is the best method of healing. Fortunately you get it pretty early in the game, but until you do, you die a lot more and have to spend a lot of money on healing.

It’s typical of these early games that they fall short because of these decisions that make the early game difficult to play — this is not the worst example of such a game, but you could save in a position where you have almost no HP and no money, making it difficult to proceed.

This is one of those early games where all the story is in the manual and the game itself has very little plot advancement of any kind. It’s the basic RPG story — evil has come to the land and only the hero can save it.

The first task if you are playing without a guide would be to gather hints and explore the world to see where you can go. As you do you can find a variety of items; the most important thing to do first is heal the princess because this gets you the White Idol. Once you can recover HP with MP you can start building up gold for the equipment. This game reminds me of Esper Dream in that the equipment stops at a fairly low level and you really cannot build your stats effectively via equipment except right at the beginning. So later in the game you have to do a lot of grinding.

The real difficulty comes when you have to go into the dungeons. There are two worlds in the game; the first world has only one dungeon that you don’t have to go into until you’ve done most of what you can do. (However, it has the really important Angel Statue which raises your MP recovery rate and makes it much easier to stay alive).

The big problem with the dungeons is that you can no longer save after every battle, which means that unless you are willing to do a lot of grinding, you have to rely on quite a bit of luck to hope that you don’t get screwed by random battles you can’t win.

Once you do all the stuff in this dungeon you get the Amulet that lets you warp to the other world, where there are five dungeons you have to deal with on the way to the final confrontation. This is basically where I got.

I’m a little surprised at how long I played the game given its issues. It’s definitely more playable than some of these early games. The hints and clues you get are mostly sufficient to figure out what to do (combined with just exploring around to see what you can find).

But I think that the game becomes more frustrating as you have to deal with more and more dungeons, and I’m not sure many players in 2025 will have the patience to make it to the end.