Sanada Juuyuushi (真田十勇士), released 6/27/1998, developed and published by Kotobuki System

This is a somewhat odd game — it appears as a top-down RPG but in a way it’s more like an adventure game. The title translates to “The Ten Sanada Braves,” a reference to a group of fictional ninja that served the (historical) warlord Sanada Yukimura in the sengoku period. They have appeared in a lot of fictional media since the late Edo period; the best known of them is probably Sarutobi Sasuke.

The story is relatively basic; Yukimura’s father Masayuki tells him to gather the 10 braves and defeat Tokugawa. That’s the entire game; the final boss is Tokugawa.

Getting the ten braves requires talking to specific people, finding items, and sometimes defeating enemies. Often you need to recruit one Brave to open the path to the next area as well. For instance, the first Brave you recruit is Sasuke; you just have to talk to him, then go back to the first town to get a letter from his master, and deliver it to him. He then joins you to get revenge on Tokugawa.

When you get people on your team, you need to supply them with soldiers, who are basically the HP of the game. You get these soldiers by recruiting them from the random battles on the world map — you offer them Rations, and then you should add them to the appropriate person (for instance, recruited Ninja should go to Sasuke and recruited Samurai should go to Yukimura, otherwise you will have to also pay them in “weapons”).

You also have to pay attention to the loyalty stats of each Brave, which goes down based on various things. You especially need to bother with this if you are assigning the “wrong” soldiers to a warlord. You can increase the loyalty by giving Rations to the unit. If the loyalty ever hits 0 you have to fight a battle against the revolting soldiers, and the Brave then has 0 soldiers (same as if they were defeated in battle).

There is no equipment; the entire battle system is based on a compatibility chart between the attacker and defender, and of course the number of soldiers each side has.

If you choose not to try to recruit the enemies, all you can do is attack, and the effectiveness of the attack is entirely dependent (I think) on the compatibility. For instance, Samurai are very effective against Ninja. So in the beginning area Yukimura can cut through all the enemies. All you get from victory is money, there is no XP in the game.

It’s kind of an interesting system I suppose, but it doesn’t feel much like an RPG because there is little feeling of character development. Battles are more like a puzzle than normal RPG battles and most of the rest of the game is just figuring out how to recruit each Brave. So it might be interesting if you are looking for an early NES game with unusual gameplay but it scores very low on the “RPG qualities” meter.