my favorite thing about playing these 8 bit era titles is seeing how little game design has advanced in the ~35 years since. the formula for turn based rpgs, and console rpgs in general sort of, was pretty well established here - in its simplest, crudest, purest form - and really hasn’t been altered too drastically in the intervening years. in some ways these games have actually become less sophisticated over time, from a design standpoint; mostly in the name of user friendliness. i played this alongside ff16 where every destination is simply given to you and marked plainly on the map so there is literally no opportunity for the player to find themselves lost or confused. and while i’m having quite a lot of fun with that game, it’s a far less rigorous experience that this, where your path has to be sussed out for yourself through thorough investigation/exploration, never holding your hand at any point. their loops do impart a similar feeling, tho; clearly coming out of the same lineage despite the technical/mechanical gulf between them. getting some new weapon/item, grinding it on your way to the next town/cave/shrine/whatever where you get another new item that opens up another destination and so on. basically what it all boils down to is powering up your character so you have an easier time killing guys; ff16 may be a sophisticated modern action game and here all you’re doing is waiting your turn to hit the attack button, but the core experience was remarkably similar to me. there are ways in which the game shows its age obviously - random encounters are about 2x too frequent (altho i do think this is crucial to the game feeling as big as it does tbh, i took a jaunt around the map once i finished it and the enemies had been extinguished and it took me a couple of minutes maybe) and i wish the offensive options were more varied; after a certain point your best bet is to just spam the attack command in every single encounter until they’re dead - but for the most part i was struck at how not-antiquated it felt in spite of its aged trappings. i’ll admit the narrative and aesthetic are relatively generic tolkien-esque fantasy stuff and probably won’t make much of an impression on modern audiences, outside of toriyama’s enemy designs which are beautiful and lively from end to end, but that’s true of most games in the genre if we’re being real. anyone who’s semi-seriously interested in rpgs and can put up with a few age-related annoyances should consider trying this out at least just to see the genre bursting through in a nearly-fully actualized way

played this on ios which i can’t recommend enough. as an idle game, it absolutely washes any of the free to play garbage the app store is flooded with these days. ofc it’s well suited to a more active and engaged style of play but the rudimentary battle system is great for zoning out while you grind for five minutes at a time, too. and with the quick save feature you don’t have to worry about losing your progress if you can’t make it back to the castle. the touchscreen joystick and menus, while a bit unpolished looking maybe, are smooth and intuitive and the fact that you can play it in portrait with one hand is a game changer for me. just a real joy to play on your phone; don’t imagine i would have stuck with it on another platform honestly