Jaseiken Necromancer (邪聖剣ネクロマンサー), released 1/22/1988, developed and published by Hudson

The PC Engine came out in late 1987 and was quite successful in Japan. I played most of the PC Engine CD RPGs already, but I didn’t play any of the non-CD games that came out on the “hu cards”. This is the first one, made by Hudson itself. It’s a pretty standard top-down command battle game.

The graphics are noticeably better (at least in terms of the technology) than the Famicom. Unfortunately we’re back to passwords — there was some kind of add-on that allowed for save games on certain HuCard games and the CD attachment had save memory inside it, but for games this early you only have passwords. Fortunately save states can substitute for that now.

I’m trying something new starting with the 1988 RPGs, going back to the way I had originally played the Super Famicom games. I’m attempting to find an instruction booklet and at least starting the game with no information outside of the instructions. From the instructions I learned that I would be able to choose 2 members out of a possible 5 to accompany the main character, and there was also the backstory and a world map. The backstory was simple and standard — find the Jaseiken Necromancer sword to defeat the evil than is plaguing the world. Other than that everything in the manual suggested just a normal old DQ-style RPG.

The first thing you do is head to the king and choose your party members. I chose Kaosu, who is a priest-like character, and Baron, who is a fighter-type character. The other choices are Raimu (a magician using mostly attack magic), Maisto (a fast character who also learns some magic), and Romina. The last character doesn’t say anything about her abilities except that she wants to go. (I later learned from a walkthrough site that she begins weak and is weak for most of the game but by the very end she is one of the most powerful characters.)

The first town doesn’t give a whole lot of information, just some vague information about a shrine nearby and a town where I should be able to get better equipment. So I started exploring.

I levelled up and bought all the best equipment in the first town, and I still wasn’t able to survive long enough to find anything; as soon as I passed the invisible line that brought on more difficult monsters I couldn’t survive enough fights to even see where a town or shrine was, much less reach it.

After enough frustration I decide to look at a walkthrough. The first thing I learned is that the companions are poorly balanced and some are much better than the others. I had managed to choose the worst possible party, primarily because the characters’ agility scores are too low so they miss too often. So I restarted the game and chose the magician and the “fast” character, which was supposedly the best party.

With this party I was finally able to make progress. I reached the other town and bought better stuff (including armor, which is not sold at the first town). They also had a wider variety of spells to buy, but since MP is so limited I didn’t buy most of them. The most important seemed to be heal, light, and anti-poison.

The main first goal is making it off the initial island, but the man in the shrine won’t let you pass without the “Burn Staff”. You get this from a man in the southern shrine, but first it has to be uncursed. Unfortunately the guy who tells you he will uncurse things can’t handle this, so sends you to his master. The master is in a cave, and needs you to find an item in the cave to do the uncursing. With all that done you can move on to the next place, which is a desert area.

That’s as far as I played. As long as you pick a good party, this is a decent RPG given when it came out. As usual it requires a ton of grinding to progress, but most games at this point are like that.