1. The Faery Tale Adventure (Sega Genesis)
Not altogether easy to figure out what to say about Faery Tale Adventure. First of all, it has what may be the best password system I've ever seen in a RPG -- as painless as it's possible for such a thing to be. It basically acts exactly like a game with battery-backed save, except you of course need to write down the password before powering down. Kudos for that.
Graphics and music are serviceable, but no more, so enough about those. The game is put together in a highly unusual way, with a world map that seems dozens of times larger than any other RPG I've played -- but most of that is essentially empty space. Journeying between locations takes five minutes or more. Even the dungeons have huge tracts of land, entire wings, devoted to...absolutely nothing. And the NPCs are pretty few and far between, and say very little.
In some ways I really like that, since it subverts the "a purpose to every room and a treasure chest 'round every corner" trope common to RPGs, and makes playing the game actually feel a bit like walking in the wilderness. It reminds me of Lord of the Rings Vol. 1 for SNES, though that game is more overtly structured.
The manual includes a map of the entire game world, which is obviously crucial, though it can be a little demoralizing to realize that walking for two minutes translates to about a centimeter's worth of map. The manual also has a weird, almost adversarial attitude towards the game, at one point advising you to use the equivalent of save-state cheating to game the treasure chests! The people who ported FTA seem to have been ambivalent about it, or at least worried that it was too hard; even before you get to the walkthrough at the end (which covers the whole damn game), there are broad hints in the item descriptions and so forth. That said, there are notable omissions (like, say, not telling you how to sleep) and at least one outright error, each, on the map and in the walkthrough.
As it turns out, the difficulty curve is reverse-exponential -- you start out weak as a kitten, but after you reach a certain threshold of strength (Bravery), there's essentially no reason whatsoever to ever get killed. I kept expecting to be challenged, but even the final enemy was a pushover. Probably the hardest part of the game -- after surviving the beginning, that is -- is making it through the game's two major dungeons, where the mapping items (Bird Totems) don't operate. Similarly, the puzzles and fetching-quests mostly get easier as the game goes on, as long as you follow the principles of visiting every named location on the map, and carrying enough Bird Totems to know where you are.
The anticlimactic ending (albeit with one nifty mini-puzzle that I solved by accident) has kind of left a sour taste in my mouth after a game I otherwise enjoyed. Still, I think it's a fine game, and certainly a distinctive one. When the
CRPG Addict said he was giving up on the DOS version of the game because it felt boring and empty, I think someone invoked the cliché that "it's all about the journey, man".
And actually, Faery Tale Adventure really is an RPG about traveling. And that mostly works for me. A-minus.