As a huge fan of 2D Zelda-like games, this is a game that’s been on my radar for a good while, but I’ve just never gotten around to looking at it. My girlfriend happened to mention it offhand a week or two ago, and it jogged my memory and my interest about it enough to finally sit down over the past few days and play through the darn thing. It took me about 10-ish hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without abusing save states or rewinds.

The game opens with a flashback, where the main character is being told of his lineage before his father sets off on a journey that he clearly expects never to return from. We learn of an ancient clan of dragon warriors whose job it was to safeguard the world from darkness, and that you are one of that clan. However, the dragons have seemingly completely disappeared, and your father is going off on a quest to hopefully find one and fulfill your clan’s proud destiny. Upon waking up from this flashback dream, our hero is at a bar in the present, and they learn of a local job to hunt down dragon scales from a nearby abandoned fortress. Seeing it as a clear opportunity to fulfill his father’s wishes, he takes it up at once, and so begins our journey to find the dragons and (of course) ultimately save the world.

The story isn’t really what you’d expect for the depth action/adventure games often had by 1994, but it’s nothing bad, just unambitious. Our silent protagonist has a handful of fellow adventurers that he pals around with, and their dialogue writing along with miscellaneous NPC dialogue is all quite entertainingly written. The twists the narrative takes are interesting enough, but it’s really not the reason to show up (as it were). Compared to other Enix titles and especially SquareSoft titles around this point in the SFC’s lifespan, Brain Lord doesn’t really have a bad story so much as it just fails to stand out from the crowd. It’s not a strike against the game per se, but it’s just one more thing that makes the game that much less novel or interesting to go back to in 2024.

The gameplay is a pretty straightforward top-down action/adventure game. I’ve been calling it a Zelda-clone personally, but it honestly has so much more action than adventure that it feels like its drawing from inspiration outside of Link to the Past, at the very least. You’ve got five BIG dungeons and not much of an overworld to speak of, and 4-ish big bosses to fight along the way. You don’t really get traversal tools or anything like that. It’s just going through dungeons solving puzzles and fighting enemies in a not too complicated fashion. The only really novel mechanic are the fairies you can find as well as buy in some stores. You can have up to two out at a time, and they’ll either attack enemies around you or provide passive benefits like lighting up an area or increasing your attack power. Additionally, while you only get stronger from certain stat boosting items and new weapons/armor, monsters will occasionally drop EXP balls for your fairies, and that’s how they level up. Sure, there are a few weapon types, but the range on the sword is SO nuts that I never found any reason to use anything else (though at least they tried, I guess).

Dungeons don’t really have puzzles, as such, beyond just finding keys and then the appropriate door to take them to. Overall, that signposting is usually pretty good, outside of how massive some dungeons are that can make it difficult to remember where a locked door or now-breakable block even is, but that’s really the whole of it outside the block pushing puzzles and platforming puzzles. Those block pushing puzzles are frankly pretty damn tough, and they’re such brain-benders that it’s allegedly what inspired the title “Brain Lord” in the first place. They’ll probably annoy some, but I like these kinds of puzzles, so I enjoyed them at least x3. The jumping puzzles were far more annoying to me, but as far as Zelda-clones with platforming go, I found the platforming in this far more bearable and fun than the stuff in Terranigma or Beyond Oasis at least. Ultimately, while the moment-to-moment gameplay is fun enough (if a bit too easy), and I certainly enjoyed my time with it, it’s an experience that, much like the narrative, really struggles to be memorable.

The presentation is overall pretty good, if (again) a bit unimpressive for a 16-bit console in ’94. Anyone who’s played 7th Saga will likely find the human sprites looking quite familiar, and that’s because it’s from the same devs as that. Sprites are big and pretty, but they’re not so big that they make actually navigating spaces onerous, which I certainly appreciated. The music is pretty darn good. It’s not like, stand-out amazing, but there were quite a few times where I was going through a dungeon or overworld area and said out loud, “damn, this track really rocks!”.

Verdict: Recommended. I wavered a lot whether to give this an outright recommendation or a hesitant one, but I think this game is overall solid enough that it deserves an outright recommendation. Comparing it to one of these that I played relatively recently, I’d say I enjoyed this game about as much as I did Crusader of Centy. While it doesn’t have the novel design or aesthetics of that game (the highs, you could say), it also lacks the most irritating parts of that game’s ambition (which you could call the lows). Brain Lord jumping and block pushing puzzles may drive some batty, and it doesn’t have a ton that makes it truly stand-out or memorable, but it’s a very competently put together game that I had quite a good time with. While it may be a bit generic, if you’re a fan of 2D Zelda-style games, I think this is still a game you can pick up and have a quite fun weekend with even if it probably won’t be an experience you’ll remember for years afterwards.

Things I Liked About Brain Lord

- Being accompanied by party members in an action RPG, but not having them at my side was a neat twist. Instead they appeared throughout dungeons, kind of reminding me I wasn't alone even though I basically was exploring alone.

- I liked its sense of personality for otherwise being a pulpy action RPG - the item descriptions, various NPCs, or just the funny things like not getting any loot from the first dungeon because your friends broke into the treasure room from the back while you went through the boss in the front. Stuff like tables being smashable, or NPC personalities being told through the decorations in their house are nice.

- The hints in the dungeons' rooms felt like.. friendly in a 4th-wall breaking way. Something funny about all the random puzzles. Idk. It felt like someone just showing me some cool stuff. I guess this didn't always help the world's overall feel, but I appreciated it didn't feel too self-serious.

- The interconnected world. I liked how it never zoomed out to show a world map, instead it just feels like there's a little tale being told about the area around these two neighboring towns. Reminded me of Ys 5's world a bit.

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The level design style is worth noting - the game is literally two towns, a few small fields and then five 4-floor dungeons. It's funny how some of these are accessed - one through bug tunnels under the town, another through a hole someone was digging under their shop.

I think the levels' pacing felt a little long - of all things, reminding me of my game Even the Ocean (its platforming-hevay levels are usually split into 4 big chunks, played one after another). The problem with ETO was there wasn't much sense of drama going from chunk to chunk, so it could feel like 40 platforming ideas laid out end to end.

Likewise, in Brain Lord, the levels sometimes fail to feel like "climbing higher into a tower," etc. I really like the idea of these huge dungeons with warp points in between them, but there was something to be desired with actually conveying the feeling of "Tower of Light" or "Platinum Shrine" or "Ice Castle". That being said, each level DID have unique spatial qualities that made them feel like their names, it's just I think they overall start to get kind of long, with many staircases going between floors. The issue is that it starts to feel like a labyrinthine maze - fine if that's the narrative theme of the dungeon - but it's not, so there's a weirdness there.

I also have a number of complaints about combat or level design mechanics, but I'll leave those out, overall it was a charming game!