Battle of Olympus (オリュンポスの戦い), released 3/28/1988, developed by Infinity, released by Imagineer

This is a side-scrolling Zelda 2-like game, although it may be closer to the type of game that is later called “Metroidvania.” There are eight parts of the world and you can travel somewhat freely at the beginning but if you don’t have the right items and such to progress, you will have to go elsewhere. The RPG features are mostly equippable items and weapons. It was released in the US as well, so probably a good number of people have played this game.

The game is based on ancient Greek myths (sort of). Your beloved Helene has been captured by Hades, and the main idea of the game is to first find Zeus who will order the other gods to grant you their blessing, then find the other gods in the various areas of the game, and finally go to Tartarus to defeat Hades. A lot of characters and items from Greek myths appear in the game.

As with the other games of this type, you can enter houses to talk to people for hints. Orpheus (the main character) starts with a club, and can just jump and attack. There is no real ‘sub’ weapon although you get some items that are used with select. You earn olives that are used as currency to buy things.

The starting enemies are already annoying because you can’t hit them until they jump. I explored around a bit without a map or anything; I came across Athena in the next area but she threw me out. It turns out I had to find Zeus first. Once I did that, Athena gave me a shield.

The shield allowed me to block attacks from these spear throwing enemies, and was supposed to let me beat the Lamia.

But I tried to beat the Lamia about 15 times and I could barely even get one hit in, so this is as far as I got. Since there’s no way to level up or anything, it’s purely a skill issue here. Anyway this game is available in English so plenty of people have reviewed it, played it, and recorded their plays. Moving on:

Aspic (アスピック), released 3/31/1988, developed and published by Crystalsoft

This is a port of a 1986 computer game. It’s a hybrid that combines first-person dungeon, top-down RPG, and action battles. I found it very difficult to play.

The game is a sequel to a 1984 game called “Lizard” that was an entirely first-person maze RPG (never ported to consoles as far as I can tell). In that game the hero needed to find the Scroll of Truth to break the curse on a princess, but now he returns to the kingdom and finds the princess has been kidnapped. A wizard came saying he could break the princess’ curse but ended up kidnapping her to take her to become the wife of the serpent Aspic. So the hero now has to go save her. (I will spoil the ending at the end of this post…I guess I probably don’t need to spoil warning a 1988 game that nobody is going to play, but just in case.)

I had a really hard time even starting the game; the emulator had a hard time recognizing the disk side swap (a problem I’ve never had with any other FC disk games). I was about to give up but eventually it somehow worked and I was able to play.

The overhead view looks like this. The big problem is that whenever you reach the edge of the screen, the screen scrolls very slowly about 4-5 tiles over, making it very annoying to wander around the world. In this initial area you only meet other humans like farmers or warriors. You can get the warriors to join your party as kind of expendable grunts. The farmers will give you tips. If you go into the starting castle there’s a first-person maze.

I found the maze graphics very offputting as well. It was often hard to tell where I had moved; sometimes the walls seemed to lack continuity between moves and the graphics were slow to update as well. The initial castle has nothing in it despite it being medium-size; even the king just says “go save the princess.”

What you should do is go down to the Sea World area to go in some towers. Here you can fight monsters.

The battles are action. You just move forward and hit the enemy with your sword. It will knock them back and do damage, but they might run if you are not careful. If you have other party members, they will get half the xp (and you can have them fight as well).

At the beginning you have no gold so you can’t heal effectively or do anything, so the best thing to do is get grunts and have them fight (with your MC getting half the XP), and then if they die, just go back to the starting area and grab another one.

Apparently the game is not very long, and once you get used to the combat you can defeat anything in the game with little trouble. But I found the slow pace of the game and the visuals too annoying to keep playing. One thing this game is known for is the bleak ending: once the hero defeats Aspic, he returns to the castle with the princess. The king tells him to leave because he has been cursed by Aspic. What you have to do is go to the evil world, recruit a few monsters there, and then go back and kill the king. Once you do this, the main character possessed by Aspic becomes king. It turns out that whoever kills Aspic inherits the curse, so this cycle will continue for all eternity. Pretty surprising ending!