Saint Seiya Ougon Densetsu Kanketsuhen (聖闘士星矢 黄金伝説 完結編), released 5/30/1988, developed by Shinsei, published by Bandai
This is a followup to the first Saint Seiya game. Initially I thought it would just be the same system, but it isn’t quite — it resembles the first game but probably due to the part of the story they were covering, there are a lot of differences. These games only cover the first major storyline of the manga, with this game covering the second part, where the heroes have to battle through twelve temples and defeat the Gold Saints before finally facing the Pope. Because of this, there is no exploration of the kind there was in the first game. It plays out essentially as successive stages.
The game still has the action sequences from the first part. Each of the four heroes has two stats, Cosmo (attack power) and Life (HP). When you defeat enemies you earn Seventh Sense points, which then later can be spent to increase the cosmo and life (to limits that increase as you go through the stages). The game penalizes you for grinding too much because if you stay in one place too long, boulders will start coming down. Each stage will generally end in an RPG-like battle.
The battles are basic RPG attack battles, although you can also talk to the person and sometimes dodge their attacks with the arrow keys (supposedly, this never worked for me). You can switch out characters but the character you switch out won’t be able to participate until the next stage. Depending on the boss you might be taken to another action stage before you can fight them, and you might have to do other things before you can hurt them.
The problem with this is that basically what you have to do is follow the original storyline, so that if one of the four characters fought a particular boss you want to be using that character. But there are no hints in the game itself for this.
I didn’t find this game much more fun than the first one; maybe if you are a big Saint Seiya fan you would like this but otherwise it’s barely an RPG and I don’t think worth playing.
I’d say both Saint Seiya are not good games in today’s standard. It was very creative though in the old days.
The 2nd game is actually much more polished than the first. But you really have to master the timing for dodging for boss battles. Once you get it, it’s a much more manageable game to beat. The dodging window is quite wide but it’s at an unexpected point (forgot if it’s earlier or later than normal ppl think).
The first game is almost impossible to beat without cheat