The Sword of Hope

A fairly complex first-person dungeon crawler for the GB. It was pretty close to a launch title in Japan but didn't come out until 1991 for us Americans. The story follows Prince Theo, son of a king corrupted by an evil dragon, as he tries to gain the trust of three magicians to overthrow his father's evil reign. The presentation is extremely "tell, don't show" which can be laborious, but the music is good and overall the graphics are surprisingly expressive given such a limited platform.

If you like drawing (simple) maps out, or tend to enjoy old school dungeon crawlers, this is a fun, if simple challenge. The major problem is that this seemingly short game can take ages to actually progress through thanks to its broken encounter system. Every time you enter a "hostile" square you have a chance of a battle. There is also a chance that one or more of the exits to your tile are blocked by monsters and you must fight your way out. HOWEVER, any fight ends with you re-entering a square. This means you may be stuck in a string of two or more fights in a row without any input from you at all, and every time you fight again, the exit blocking encounters re-shuffle. If you fight an exit-blocking enemy and spawn into the tile again, you might have yet another fight which could actually re-populate the exit you just cleared with an enemy... again. Long story short, the world map is probably not even 100 tiles long but it feels like 4000 because of how fucking annoying the battles are. The tile re-loading mechanic essentially doubles the game's length.

At least the battles are easy. The overpowered fireball spell is learned at level 2 and costs only a single MP despite doing 12+ damage in early game where you get hit for 1-2HP and enemies don't have more than 5HP. You're a mage prince, so you learn a lot of magic that can be applied at various places in the map so there's a bit of interactivity in that aspect as well.

As far as this being an experience I actually recommend everyone goes out and plays, though, I have some major reservations overall. It's a total slog even if it is impressive that the game is even functional on such a primitive handheld. If you have like an entire weekend and you're desperate for a game of this type I think it's worth it, but other than that I'd steer clear unless you're a hardcore RPG fan or collector.