Moving onto the next game Maru recommended, this is the Zelda clone series of the PC Engine. Neutopia is a game I've heard Maru talk about before but I've never tried. He said it was just okay, and that's about the place I'm at if not a bit lower. I played the English version of this and used save states a lot mostly for preserving bombs and making getting through the game a bit less time consuming.
Neutopia is a really shameless Zelda 1 clone with some NPC elements from Zelda 2 thrown in for good measure. You have a top-down perspective with a main character going through 8 dungeons to get 8 power objects to then fight a big bad guy and rescue the princess at the end. It's not a terribly memorable game in regards to anything about its presentation, but it's doesn't really fail at any element of the presentation. It's honestly a really surprisingly well translated game for 1990, with only some minor punctuation errors here and there. The game just isn't terribly ambitious, so it didn't leave much of an impression with me.
This is pre-LTTP, so your main character Jazeta's main attack is just sticking his sword out directly in front of him like Link does in Zelda 1. This wouldn't be so bad if Jazeta weren't also taller than his feet are wide, so you have a big problem of your sword hitting a relatively small area in front of you compared to how tall your hitbox is. The sword is borderline useless a lot of the time with how numerous and fast enemies are, and that never improves throughout the game. Your sword only gets more powerful, never wider or larger.
This is heavily mitigated, though, by the fire wand that you get relatively early in the game. This is something Neutopia copies from YS moreso than it does from Zelda, but that fire wand is an invaluable tool with how it can not only fire at range, it also gets more powerful the higher your health is (and it gets stronger the higher your max health gets as a result), and it's also a ranged attack that you can fire even diagonally. All that said, the combat is routinely quite frustrating and while the bosses tend to be easy to very easy, the normal enemies swarming you is easily the most difficult thing in the game.
Outside of that, the dungeons aren't terribly interesting, and are very derivative from Zelda 1 in how they're mostly just a series of rooms. There aren't really ever any larger puzzles or even rooms bigger than one screen, and dungeons don't even have keys aside from locking the boss room. The dungeons are more exercises in bomb conservation/use to find the increasingly numerous hidden rooms in each successive dungeon, and battle gauntlets as you fight through trying to find the crypt key and the crypt itself to fight the boss in it. There is also one hidden upgrade for either your shield, sword, and armor (to help you block more projectile types, hit harder, and protect against damage better respectively) in each dungeon and sometimes hidden in the overworld.
The overworld itself differs a bit from Zelda in that there are basically four of them, and you unlock a new one every time you beat the two dungeons in the previous one (with the last two simply unlocking the path to the final boss). There are NPCs scattered all over the place, either in staircases behind bushes you need to burn down or behind a very obvious wall you need to use a precious bomb on, but most of them simply give a little (often nearly useless) information or yet another potion or bomb shop. It really does suck that there's no overworld map, but none of them are too terribly huge, so it's not so bad. It is a little funny how even the way you talk to NPCs, automatically walking halfway up the screen to them so text can appear on the screen, is also nearly exactly how Zelda 1 does it XD
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This isn't an utterly terrible game or anything, but it's definitely not a good game. It's got a lot of unpolished, unambitious, and uninspired design to it, sure, but it doesn't do anything particularly unforgivably poorly. What this reminds me of more than anything is Blossom Tale on the Switch. A Zelda clone that mostly just reminds you of better Zelda games you could be playing instead. However Neutopia has the added hurdle of not having aged that well in the nearly 30 years since it came out, and also needing to use passwords to save if you're playing on the real hardware. It's not a terrible use of your time, but I don't think I ever would've played it had I not gotten it on the PCE Mini.
Neutopia is a really shameless Zelda 1 clone with some NPC elements from Zelda 2 thrown in for good measure. You have a top-down perspective with a main character going through 8 dungeons to get 8 power objects to then fight a big bad guy and rescue the princess at the end. It's not a terribly memorable game in regards to anything about its presentation, but it's doesn't really fail at any element of the presentation. It's honestly a really surprisingly well translated game for 1990, with only some minor punctuation errors here and there. The game just isn't terribly ambitious, so it didn't leave much of an impression with me.
This is pre-LTTP, so your main character Jazeta's main attack is just sticking his sword out directly in front of him like Link does in Zelda 1. This wouldn't be so bad if Jazeta weren't also taller than his feet are wide, so you have a big problem of your sword hitting a relatively small area in front of you compared to how tall your hitbox is. The sword is borderline useless a lot of the time with how numerous and fast enemies are, and that never improves throughout the game. Your sword only gets more powerful, never wider or larger.
This is heavily mitigated, though, by the fire wand that you get relatively early in the game. This is something Neutopia copies from YS moreso than it does from Zelda, but that fire wand is an invaluable tool with how it can not only fire at range, it also gets more powerful the higher your health is (and it gets stronger the higher your max health gets as a result), and it's also a ranged attack that you can fire even diagonally. All that said, the combat is routinely quite frustrating and while the bosses tend to be easy to very easy, the normal enemies swarming you is easily the most difficult thing in the game.
Outside of that, the dungeons aren't terribly interesting, and are very derivative from Zelda 1 in how they're mostly just a series of rooms. There aren't really ever any larger puzzles or even rooms bigger than one screen, and dungeons don't even have keys aside from locking the boss room. The dungeons are more exercises in bomb conservation/use to find the increasingly numerous hidden rooms in each successive dungeon, and battle gauntlets as you fight through trying to find the crypt key and the crypt itself to fight the boss in it. There is also one hidden upgrade for either your shield, sword, and armor (to help you block more projectile types, hit harder, and protect against damage better respectively) in each dungeon and sometimes hidden in the overworld.
The overworld itself differs a bit from Zelda in that there are basically four of them, and you unlock a new one every time you beat the two dungeons in the previous one (with the last two simply unlocking the path to the final boss). There are NPCs scattered all over the place, either in staircases behind bushes you need to burn down or behind a very obvious wall you need to use a precious bomb on, but most of them simply give a little (often nearly useless) information or yet another potion or bomb shop. It really does suck that there's no overworld map, but none of them are too terribly huge, so it's not so bad. It is a little funny how even the way you talk to NPCs, automatically walking halfway up the screen to them so text can appear on the screen, is also nearly exactly how Zelda 1 does it XD
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This isn't an utterly terrible game or anything, but it's definitely not a good game. It's got a lot of unpolished, unambitious, and uninspired design to it, sure, but it doesn't do anything particularly unforgivably poorly. What this reminds me of more than anything is Blossom Tale on the Switch. A Zelda clone that mostly just reminds you of better Zelda games you could be playing instead. However Neutopia has the added hurdle of not having aged that well in the nearly 30 years since it came out, and also needing to use passwords to save if you're playing on the real hardware. It's not a terrible use of your time, but I don't think I ever would've played it had I not gotten it on the PCE Mini.