Indora no Hikari (インドらの光), released 10/20/1987, developed and published by Kemco

This is only the 4th game to center on the DQ style turn-based combat. As was the case with Glory of Heracles, Indora no Hikari still isn’t a precise DQ clone but does some individualistic things. The games wiki lists it as a kusoge but given when it came out, I don’t know if it’s so terrible. There are a few major annoyances, but it avoids two of the common pitfalls of these early games — the game does not drop you into a death trap, and (as far as I saw) progress doesn’t rely on finding obscure secrets or proceeding without any hints. This is the second game to have a battery backup save rather than passwords.

The story is pretty basic — the planet Ibal has benefited from the power of the god Barn, but Barn’s source of power, the Light of Indora, has been stolen by enemies, and you have to get it back. Aside from the conclusion of the story which has a surprising twist, I don’t think the storyline develops that much during the game. At the beginning, you are presented with a smaller task, to heal the sickness of the Princess of the Farei kingdom.

You start out in Farei. One of the frustrations that you quickly encounter is navigating the towns — the towns are much larger than they need to be, and to talk to people it has to be face to face. However, you can go around town and get a lot of useful tips on how to play the game and some pointers on where to go. There are also various shops but since you start with only 100 gold there’s not too much you can buy.

All of the towns, dungeons, and overworld are treated Zelda-style with separate screens. If you are playing without any help, the first thing to do would be to map the initial island area to figure out what is out there. At first I needed to move up a few levels before I felt safe venturing beyond the opening screens, although the initial enemies are easy enough that this is a smooth process.

The monsters are visible on the map and move around; touching one of them produces an encounter.

The battle system is always vs 1 monster (even later when you get allies). It’s pure turn based DQ style.

One other aspect that is obviously Zelda influenced are hidden staircases that you can get by pushing rocks on the overworld. These usually have money in them, but sometimes they have people that sell things. Another possibility is the choice of 3 chests (another seemingly Zelda inspired feature).

Eventually you find the second character, Saba. This is where another one of the annoyances of the game (and frequently complained about features) arises. For some reason they have companions follow you, and they move much more slowly than you do. They can get trapped behind obstacles, and if you change screens when they cannot catch up with you because of an obstacle, they get trapped there until you go back for them or cast a spell that brings them to you. I’m not sure what the designers thought this added to the game — perhaps they thought it made it harder to evade the monsters on the world map?

Furthermore, when your companion dies, the process to bring them back is time consuming and cumbersome. You can just reload your save, of course, but the only other alternative is to go back to town, pay someone there to have the companion’s spirit recalled, then go back to where they died and use a spell to restore them (with low HP so they might get killed again). Apparently late in the game you get a spell that just restores them instantly, but that takes a while.

I only played through the first continent of the game. Basically this is what you do (all of it can be figured out through clues in the towns and by experimenting pushing rocks)

• Get Saba, the first companion (who can move boulders that the main character isn’t strong enough to move)
• Go a temple, where the elder tells you you are the chosen one. He enables you to learn spells and tells you that you’ll need 3 statues to save the world, the first of which is held by a dragon in a nearby cave.
• Find the Silver Arrow under a rock, and buy the Gold Bow
• Go to the Dragon Cave, and use the Silver Arrow in the battle, then kill it
• Have someone in one of the towns use the Dragon Fang you get to make a medicine
• Give it to the princess to heal her, then get the King’s permission to go on to the next continent.

I did not find the game especially problematic (for 1987) in this section of the game. But given what I see people say about the game online, it must be that over the course of the entire game the problems with the system become more acute. I remember that Inconsolable Nung (I wish he hadn’t nuked his blog) played this and he did not like it at all.

I actually used the wayback machine to find his review — he gave it a 25/100, and it does seem like the companion issue was a huge problem.