So my first game to start off this blog is going to be Paladin's Quest.
WARNING SPOILERS ALL OVER THE PLACE.
What an interesting game. What I loved about this game back in the day was the imagination behind it. The setting, the art, the races, the politics of Naskuot and Saskuot. It wasn't just another fantasy setting with human heroes on a very earth like world. Lennus was really like a different planet... I mean the trees were perfect circles!
That might have turned some people off but it intrigued me. Who thought this world up? For some reason, I have a memory of reading somewhere that Paladin's Quest, was based off of a novel. I have not been able to verify that anywhere, but I want it to be true. The fantasy of Lennus almost seems too well realized for such a "simple" SNES RPG.
I also remembered this game being ridiculously hard when I first played it. I think I eventually beat it, but I died so many times and ran from so many battles. It was unforgiving.
So here I go again, with a more mature perspective and sense of strategy :)
This true title screen only appears after the intro events that lead to Chezni leaving the magic school. Truth be told, I like it when games have title screens part way through their beginning.
So something that is interesting to me right away is the text spacing between dialog windows. Here are some examples:
and...
This kind of thing occurs all the time in the game; where sentences are spliced between two windows, leaving just a word or two left over in it's own window, causing things to read a little strangely. If you weren't really paying that much attention to the window previous or you skipped it by accident, you have no hope of figuring out what came first with only "school" or "anything special" to go by.
I'm sure it's just an artifact from the Japanese translation, but I think most games today would at least take the time to organize the ideas into some sort of "meaningful-chunks-per-window".
I remember when I first played this game, I found this part so mysterious. I mean, it's not, saying yes to this dialog option at this point in the game is really the only thing you can do. But I just remember being so intrigued the first time I played by this segment. What was going to happen? Scripted annihilation in battle? Yes!!!
I wish this game had more exposition like this. It happens so infrequently in this game that it seems almost out of place but to me it gives the game more flavour. Back before you had lens flares and pixel shaders and so on, there was just your imagination. Remember those arguments that playing RPGs was like reading a novel? Well, you need more of this to make it count for anything.
Anyways... I'm actually a bit farther than these screens would lead you to believe. I'm about to retrieve the Pupbirds with Tiger, but there was already so much to say about the intro that I had to take a break to write this.
Till next time!
