 SEGA DRUNK! Thanks to Flappycat for the request, let's take a look at Landstalker, the treasures of King Knoll for Sega Genesis, one of the few action-adventure-style games on the Genesis along with stuff like Beyond Oasis and the Japan-only Monster World 4. There are a couple of things that make Landstalker immediately stand out. The first is the isometric viewpoint. Just about everything here looks great and calls to mind Super Nintendo games like Equinox, or even Super Mario RPG. The other aspect is that this is the rare 16-bit adventure or RPG game that actually has kind of a light-hearted story. It doesn't have the dark serious save-the-world overtones like something out of the Final Fantasy series, so Landstalker is a bit of a breath of fresh air in that regard. You play as a treasure hunter named Nigel, he stumbles into this woodnymph character named Friday who's being chased by some goons because she knows the whereabouts of the legendary treasures of King Knoll, or at least, uh, she thinks she knows where they are? Nigel says hey what the hell and decides to play along, shelling out a ton of money to this bird to fly them to this remote island where they may be. So you're exploring your first dungeon here solving simple puzzles and finding treasure until the path ends rather unceremoniously and you're dumped out into a strange village where, you guessed it, Nigel has to help solve the village's problems in exchange for a clue about the treasure. Sure, the storytelling structure may be the same old stuff, but the story itself in terms of tone and execution is a nice change of pace from the norm especially when it comes to the dialogue. That's one of the game's biggest strengths. The gameplay falls mostly under the adventure style category with hacking and slashing through dungeons and moving around objects to solve puzzles, upgrading your weapons and armor, but there is a bit of a leveling system here similar to games like Soul Blazer or Illusion of Gaia where you collect this stuff called Life Stock that increases your number of hit points, fill up a full heart of it up top here and you'll also increase strength and defense, again similar to those SNES Quintet games. But yeah, it's your basic adventure game puzzle solving here, nothing too complicated but there is some weird hidden stuff here and there, like where you have to stand on top of a dog or a chicken so you can jump on a guard's head to touch the head of this statue to unlock a hidden treasure. What? Okay, sure. The most polarizing aspect of Landstalker is the platforming and there is quite a bit of it here, and that's going to really, really frustrate some people because, well, you're using a D-pad to navigate all these diagonal angles. It's awkward. Fellow YouTube reviewer SuperDerek had a good bit of insight in his video about this game, use a joystick instead. And yeah, sure enough, the platforming is a tad easier to digest. The thing is, though, you're still essentially just doing guesswork. You have to aim all of your jumps, and that's hard to do considering many of these jumps are based on timing, and in some cases, if you miss your jump, you'll fall all the way back to the beginning of the sequence. That really sucks. Landstalker is a tough game for more reasons than that, though. The combat here can be pretty challenging, sometimes because the angles can be awkward, and sometimes because enemies have a much larger range of motion than you do, but the game does allow you to carry up to 9 herbs that will revive you if you get killed. These are easy to replenish, too, since enemies drop them pretty frequently. So yeah, in other words, Landstalker is a game where you can't be afraid to die a lot, but the game makes up for that in its own way. Two years later, Landstalker received a spin-off game of sorts called Ladystalker, a challenge from the past for Super Famicom, but it never left Japan and it doesn't have an English translation available. A year after that, the same developers for Landstalker made Dark Savior for Sega Saturn, and the development team themselves say this is closer to a real sequel to Landstalker than the Super Famicom game. It's also worth mentioning quickly that Nigel and Friday appear in the Sega Dreamcast game Time Stalkers, but I have not played that one. So yeah, Landstalker has its ups and downs. I like the dialogue and the story and how it's told. The game looks great and has a fantastic soundtrack that fits the game's light-hearted motif. The gameplay reminds me of stuff like the SNES Quintet trilogy, but that platforming, ugh. It's gonna be a deal-breaker for some people. A joystick does help mitigate it quite a bit, but the game still feels like work at times. Landstalker gets the occasional link to the past in comparison, but that's probably not the right way to go. This game is closer to something like Equinox for Super Nintendo, so if you liked that game, you'll enjoy this one. Your mileage will vary, though, depending on how much the game's flaws bother you. The good news is, however, Landstalker is available on Steam for only $3, so if the game seems like it's up your alley, go check it out.