Outlanders (アウトランダーズ), released 12/4/1987, developed by Micronics, released by Victor

I just passed the 9th anniversary of this blog. I wonder how much longer it will go?

Anyway, what better way to celebrate than with a crappy Famicom game based on a manga. As of a month ago the only walkthrough on GameFAQs was an incomplete one beginning with this: “I will be honest with you. If not for the sake of the NES Completion Project going on, I would not have touched this game let alone make an FAQ for it. This game is totally a piece of crap. The controls are all whack and the fighting system is garbage. In order to even, win a battle you must move around until your enemies are in a straight line and then hold down the B button to slash at the enemy continually.”

Since then, someone has made a full walkthrough, but the game is still as bad as the other writer said. The whole game is divided between single-room style exploration and wider areas, kind of like Deadly Towers.

This is what the battles look like — they are symbol encounters. As the FAQ writer said, it’s very hard to effectively fight because your sword has low range, and the hit boxes are weird. The most certain way to win is to run around until they line up and then you can fight them head on. There might be other ways to do it, but you will get killed very quickly. You also can’t see your HP during battle or how much damage the enemies are doing.

The battles give you money and XP, but to level up you need not only XP but “smile pins” that you find in various places. You can buy weapon upgrades and items.

The game itself is not especially long or big, but it’s so annoying to play that there’s no reason to really bother.

As is predictable, the interface also sucks. The graphics glitch a lot, with boxes appearing over items, things in the wrong place, etc.

This is one of the worst games I’ve seen of these early RPG and RPG-like games. It’s still probably better than Hoshi wo Miru Hito and Mirai Senshi Jarvas, but not by much.