 Hello and welcome again to the Super Famicom RPG series, if you missed part 1, I covered Bahamut Lagoon, Treasure Hunter G, Seiken Detsetsu 3, Tales of Fantasia, Star Ocean, Final Fantasy V, and Terra Nigma. Click here to see it. Alright, let's keep chugging right along here. Let's start with two of the very best games never released in the US. First, Live a Live. It's in many aspects a traditional turn-based RPG, but with a lot of interesting ideas thrown in. For starters, there's no magic points, there's no money, and your health is fully restored after every battle. What makes this game great, though, is that it's broken up into 7 different storylines. You can start with any of them, and play through the game in any order that you want. Each storyline has a different theme, and a different variation on gameplay. Once you finish them all, there are two more chapters that bring everything together. In one storyline, you're in feudal Japan, trying to prevent a shady character from sending everything into anarchy. The gameplay in that scenario is predicated on stealth. You can either fight everyone, fight some, or avoid everyone altogether. In another scenario, you're a caveman, and there's no dialogue at all, and the gameplay involves kind of an alchemy system, sort of like Secret of Evermore. In another scenario, you're a gunman in the Wild West, in another, you're a wrestler, in another, you're a robot where there isn't even any fighting. They really went all out making this game as different as possible, and the way everything comes together at the end is inventive storytelling, and it works so well. I wish more games had the balls to be this creative. If you've played stuff like Earthbound and Chrono Trigger, and are looking for more, you have found it with Live-a-Live. Treasure of the Rudras, or Rudra no Hiho, is a fascinating game. Bear with me, because this one's gonna take a while to go over. On the surface, it definitely comes across as just another final fantasy clone, and yeah, it's got the typical JRPG appearance, with an overworld map, dungeons, towns, turn-based battles, and all that. But the game has two major things going for it. Number one is the magic system. You actually create your own spells called mantras, by combining parts of words together. You have eight elements to choose from, the usual stuff like fire, wind, water. But you create your own mantras with how you combine the words those elements make up by adding a prefix and suffix to each elemental word. Now, there's over 400 separate spells in this game, so this means there are a bazillion potential combinations to create mantras. It's a little bit like the alchemy system like you see in Secret of Evermore, but with way, way more possibilities. Here's an example of how it works, courtesy of this Game Facts walkthrough. The mantra is called you-left-nah. You learn as you play that left is a recovery spell. You is the prefix that strengthens the spell, but as a result makes it cost more MP. Nah is the suffix that targets all allies, but that also increases the MP cost. So like that, you just build a recovery spell that heals everyone in your party. That's just the very tip of the iceberg. If you're interested in learning more about how this system works, check out the link in the description to the Game Facts walkthrough, written by Destiny Decider. Thanks, dude. The second reason this game stands out is the story, which is divided into four sections. Three are laid out for you to choose in any order. Defeat all three, and the fourth part is unlocked. Each section has its own protagonist, a soldier, a priestess, and an archaeologist. The actions and decisions you make can potentially affect the other scenarios later on. The gist of the story is that every 4,000 years, the human race is hit with a reset button by a deity named Rudra. The game takes place about 15 days before this happens, and time independently has its own day and night cycle, so time's a waste thing. Things get pretty dark as you might expect, and the characters evolve as the story does. Treasure of the Rudras is an absolutely outstanding game in every respect. I really can't think of anything this game does poorly, or even half-assed. It is a tremendous experience. The English fan translation makes it a little tricky to understand the magic system at first, but the game is still obviously very much playable. Go check this one out. Chaos Seed is as an ambitious game as you will find in the 16-bit era. You play as part of a group of cave dwellers that are in tune somehow with these deep caverns that dictate their planet's health. There's a big misunderstanding, and it's determined that the caverns themselves are the cause of the planet's slow decay. So, it's your character's duty to defend and rebuild the caverns. Oh, but first this dragon splits your soul apart so you end up scattered in all these different dimensions. Whoops. This is a unique story that's told well through the gameplay. It should be said, with such a complicated game like this, you're left at the mercy of the English translation, and the guys at Dynamic Designs did an amazing job, so hats off to them. But yeah, there's just so much to this game that it can be a little tricky to figure out what to do and how to do it. But once you understand, this game is really fun. You build caverns by creating these rooms. You assign a room a particular elemental power, while eliminating obstacles. Really, it's about building an entire system of elemental rooms that flow together to give the planet its energy back. It sounds weird, and it's complicated, but once you get the hang of it, I'm not sure I'm doing this game full justice with this description. Ultimately, all I can say is that it's really cool. Mystic Arc is a more traditional console-style strategy role-playing game. I'm not entirely sure if it's an official sequel to 7th Saga, but it's very similar to that, as well as Brain Lord, another Enix game. The overworld map has your usual random encounters, but there's a proximity map, so you can do your best to avoid them if you'd like. The battle screen really looks great. Honestly, it's probably my favorite part of this game. It reminds me of the Breath of Fire series. All the enemies, attacks, and spells look really sharp. The battle system itself, though, is as standard as it gets. If you're looking for something different or a unique twist, you won't find it here, but if you're looking to scratch that JRPG itch with something basic, Mystic Arc can provide that no problem. The story is, again, very standard. Are you sensing a theme here? Something is collecting souls from various worlds as part of this interdimensional portal, only you manage to escape. This goddess tells you what you gotta do to save everyone. The different worlds are all very diverse, but as a whole, the game is just kinda dull, and a lot of worlds just involve fetch quests that take forever. I guess after playing Live-a-Live and Treasure of the Rudras and Chaos Seed, this game falls kinda flat by comparison. All I can say is that if you liked 7th Saga, you'd like Mystic Arc. It's not a bad game at all, it's just that you can find much better. And with that, we get even simpler, with Alkahest. This game does not mess around. It knows exactly what it is, a straight-ahead, completely linear, top-down action RPG using all sorts of weapons, with 8 stages, 8 bosses, and lots of upgrades as you progress. You get some friends to help you too, but you can't control them directly. You do at least have the ability to trigger a special attack from them occasionally. Honestly, the story barely even matters, it's just kind of there. Not that different from a game like King of Dragons or Knights of the Round. So yeah, if you're looking for a good old-fashioned, simple Zelda-style gameplay, then Alkahest is for you. The thing is, there's no battery save, just a password system. And really, there's not that much more to say about it. If you like this kind of action, it's there in space. Bear in mind, there's not much in the way of puzzles at all, but Alkahest is still a fun experience in its own way. Ganpuru Gumblin's Proof is also an action RPG, but with a little more meat on its bones. Thematically, it's a departure from the rest of the games on this list, with kind of a sci-fi Wild West theme. In fact, this game is really funny, and had me laughing out loud more than once. The game takes place in 1880, where two spaceships thought to be meteors crash into Earth, one containing the valiant space sheriff Zero, the other containing the evil criminal Demi, who has the strange ability to turn other creatures into aliens, or something. I'm not sure exactly. And of course, they all start attacking townsfolk. Our nameless hero, meanwhile, volunteers to have his body possessed by the space sheriff Zero for some reason, to try and hunt down the evil villain through mazes and dungeons. As for the gameplay, again, it's very much like a Zelda clone, but with more emphasis on the action than puzzle solving. It is kind of fun to play this style of game with a projectile weapon, kind of like Smash TV or Zombies 8 My Neighbors or True Lies. You also get shotguns, machine guns, and eventually a flamethrower, all with unlimited ammo, so that's awesome. The game is very forgiving as well, respawning you with full life right where you die. There's not a lot of depth in Gumminsproof. What you see is what you get, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Lastly, there's Ease 4, Mask of the Sun, not to be confused with Ease 4, the dawn of Ease, for the PC engine. Those games tell the same story, but are pretty different games. Ease 4, of course, brings back Adol from the previous games, as he finds a message in a bottle from the distant land of Celceda and sets off on a quest to answer the distress call. Sounds simple, but things get more complex as they go along, and the way the story is told is very well done. I wouldn't say you have to play the first three games in the series to understand the story, but if you're familiar with them, then the story of this game is way more rewarding. As for the gameplay, if you remember Ease 3, that had a side-scrolling combat approach similar to Zelda 2 for NES. Ease 4, however, harkens back to the first two games of the series with top-down combat, and the game really works well in that regard. It is kind of odd, though, because there is no attack button. You just have to run into enemies with some strategic timing. You just have to hit them kind of off-center, if that makes sense, otherwise you take damage, as well as the enemy. And you have to stay moving at all times, or you'll be killed before you know it. This is definitely a welcome approach to this style of game, and I like it a lot. It has kind of a schmup feel to it, if that makes sense, because there's a much larger emphasis on quickness and reflexes. It's definitely unlike any other game on this list. While I'm talking about this series, I have to mention Ease Memories of Celseda, which is kind of an updated version of this game, and was deemed by the developer as an official replacement in the story canon for Ease 4. That was released for PlayStation Vita about a year ago, so that option is available for you, too. And I also have to mention another game in the series on the Super Famicom, Ease 5, Lost Kevin, Kingdom of Sand, where Adol is off to investigate a desert city that vanished. The gameplay isn't the same as Ease 4, however. As now, it's a traditional sword and shield fighting, which is kind of a bummer, but there's a magic system as well that allows you to mix and combine elements to create new spells that you can equip. So that's pretty cool. Also, in an interesting twist, this game was released twice on the Super Famicom, the quote-unquote normal version, and an expert version, where the difficulty is presumably jacked up. Either way, I'd recommend Ease 4 over either version of Ease 5. Okay, that about does it for this list. Next time I hope to talk about the Romancing Saga series and the Shin Megami Tensai series, along with a few other games. Thanks for watching, and have a great rest of your day.