Soul Blazer

What a fun concept for a game. It's got the ActRaiser-esque split between action gameplay and supervising a growing town, but the action scenes play like ALttP and there's no real management involved on the town side of things. There's not much to the combat, and there's an unfortunate number of times where progression involves standing in place and waiting for enemies to spawn and throw themselves on your sword, but the rhythm of progressing through a dungeon and seeing something new get unlocked in town every minute or two was so addictive that I just had to clear the whole thing in one sitting. Plenty of fun little moments, cool environments, and interesting bits of dialogue sprinkled throughout, too.

played this game for the first time recently & it kind of blew me away. really, the only complaints I have are the lack of music variety in towns & some weird difficulty spikes. otherwise I really loved it, definitely a hidden gem.