I played two FC games this week that didn’t seem to merit their own posts, so I will combine them here.

Minelvaton Saga: The Revival of Ragon (ミネルバトンサーガ ラゴンの復活), released 10/23/1987, developed by Random House and published by Taito

This is the first game in the series that includes Silva Saga and Silva Saga II; I played the last one. This is another game that CRPGAddict randomly decided to play, and you should read his account for more detail. The game is yet another one that mixes the Dragon Quest style of overworld exploration, with battle systems that are action “run into the enemy” style.

The basic story is that the main character is the last surviving prince of a destroyed kingdom that was thought to be dead but has actually been hiding in a town. When his father dies he goes out to defeat Ragon who destroyed his kingdom. It seems like the story is in two basic parts — destroying Ragon to recover your kingdom, and then going after “the gods” (according to CRPG Addict. I didn’t get this far).

One weird thing is that any conversation with an NPC in a town goes to a separate screen like this — I’m not sure what the point of that is. The initial town has weapons and armor that are a bit expensive, and also medicine, which you need a lot of.

The battles are random on the map, and always seem to be against 3 monsters. Their HP are on the right. You run around the map and charge into the enemies to hurt them. Unlike Ys and other similar games, there seems to be no particular place you want to hit the enemy — the only thing you need to be sure of is that you aren’t in a place where more than one enemy can hit you. As long as that’s the case you just move into them and use medicine if your HP get too low.

The first quest is to go to a nearby castle and get a crown that for some reason proves you are actually the prince (couldn’t anyone get that?) This takes some amount of levelling to get the money you need to buy enough medicine. Levelling is generally pretty quick although the gains are incremental (apparently you hit 120-130 by the end of the game). I went into the castle a few times to pull out all the treasure before I beat the boss and got the crown. Unfortunately a game over sends you back to your previous save so you can’t be as daring as you might like.

At this point you get a companion Wizard who can’t be controlled but appears in the battles and helps you. I don’t think they level up.

That’s as far as I played; you can read CRPGAddict for more. I suppose it’s an OK game for the time but the combat quickly gets old.

Momotaro Densetsu (桃太郎伝説), released 10/26/1987, developed and published by Hudson

This is the first game in the Momotaro Densetsu series. I played the Super Famicom version, Shin Momotaro Densetsu, which is apparently the third game in the series. I think this is the first game that is really a Dragon Quest-style game. We did have Glory of Heracles before this that was a turn-based RPG, but it had a number of unusual features that made it not quite a DQ copy. This game, though, fits into what will become the basic RPG standard game for quite a few years.

The story follows the legend; Momotaro is born from a peach to two old people, and he decides to go out and defeat monsters. Like Dragon Quest 1, you only have Momotaro alone for the whole game. One of the famous parts of the Momotaro legend is that he gathers companions as he goes — in Shin Momotaro the traditional companions (bird, monkey, dog) were not actual party members but could do random attacks and other such things. It’s the same here.

The battle system is as you would expect — attack, defend, magic, item.

I believe that it’s always a 1 v 1 fight.

The game has a lot of atmosphere and they clearly were not lazy on developing the theme, even if the story itself is not particularly good. Your goal at first is to visit various wizards to learn spells. But in the end, the game is mostly grinding levels and money, and the 1 vs 1 battle system doesn’t offer many strategic possibilities. In 1987 this would have been a welcome game for people who wanted more Dragon Quest, and it’s better than some of the other games of the time (the next one I’m covering is Hoshi wo Miru Hito…) But I don’t think it’s worth playing now. There was a remake for the PC Engine that seems to be more playable.