Sylviana (シルヴィアーナ -愛いっぱいの冒
険者
-), released 8/10/1988, developed and published by Pack In Video
I missed this game when I initially made my list but I noticed a week or two ago that I had skipped it. The subtitle of the game translates to “Adventurer Filled with Love” but there are furigana above “adventurer” reading “little angel”.
This is a top-down action-RPG where you run into enemies to attack them (in Ys style). However, there does not seem to be any way to hit the enemies from a right or wrong angle. It seems like when you run into an enemy, how much damage you and the enemy take is simply determined by statistics. There may be more to it than that, but I was never able to actually reduce the damage I took from enemies by how I hit them (and I saw some other comments about the game that agreed).
The story is pretty simple. Sylviana’s mother is sick, and Dr. Doppler demands that you recover 8 treasures that got stolen from him before he will give the medicine. This is pretty much the whole story; there’s one or two further developments but the entire story script of the game would probably be one page.
This is another early game featuring a woman protagonist. So far in these early RPGs I’ve played, the only games that featured a woman protagonist are Legend of Valkyrie and Phantasy Star. A few other games either have women as part of the party, or allow you to create women characters.
The game has no XP or leveling system. The only way you can improve your survivability is to buy or find weapons and armor, and to increase your maximum HP by finding “hearts”. A big part of the game is just finding good places to grind money. You can recover HP either by going back to your house (seeing your sick mother restores your HP to full) or staying at an inn.
The enemies leave behind bags that can have money, items (like curing items and such), or sometimes traps that poison you. If that happens you need cure items or to get back to a town.
If you die you go back to your previous save. This is a Famicom Disk game, but fortunately it has a “memory save” option so you don’t have to deal with the disk save every time.
I started out by farming enemies near the first town to upgrade my weapon, then went into Dr. Doppler’s cave to hear about the main quest. From there I bought healing items and went to the closest cave to recover the first treasure. You can open chests in the dungeons. Doors need keys, and you can also find items that warp you back to your mom’s house (but you can only hold one at a time).
The bosses are all pretty similar from what I gather, they just go back and forth and shoot things. What you need to do is wait until they get left or right and just push them back into the wall where you can kill them.
That’s where I stopped. This game is OK for its time. It is playable and has no serious problems — no secrets or hidden things that you have no chance of solving, and you don’t start out with enemies that will destroy you until you figure out how to play. It’s a bit basic and probably involves too much grinding money, but there are definitely worse games out there than this one.