Game: Sword Of Vermilion
This game was originally released for the Sega Genesis - a console I have never owned, or even seen in real life. However, I had played it for a while via emulator a few years ago. For that reason, I was excited when I realised that it's now available on Nintendo Switch, via the membership there.
... and, let's just say I was not disappointed.
If you enjoy old-school adventure games, this might be worth checking out. Most of the game is not hard, and if it feels hard, it's simply because you have not levelled up enough yet. However, you don't usually need to grind for XP that much - I found that grinding helped a little bit at the beginning of the game, so that you always stay a little stronger than the enemies you face along the way. However, once you get further into the game and collect some better EQ, you'll level up as you go instead. But, seeing as leveling up also refills your HP and and magic/MP, it can be helpful to "time" the levelling properly.
With adventure games, the story is always the main thing that keeps me wanting to progress. If I don't care about that, a game cannot be great. Even though modern games tend to have more complex stories and more side plots than these older games, complexity is not in itself an enganging factor. This game has an interesting story, and I also love the fact that there are many towns and people to talk to. Also, there aren't too many "generic" townspeople saying variations of the same nonsense. Talking to everyone doesn't feel like a chore, because they actually say unique and/or useful things.
Another nice thing about this game - and many other games in the same genre from the same era - is the fact that movement does not feel restricted. Where many games have a design that is basically "do THIS, then open the path to THAT", this one feels like it evolves more naturally. Yes, the mechanic is the same, except you CAN, technically, go to areas where you shouldn't be yet. There are no big boulders, roadblocks or other obstacles stopping you from entering places (apart from the fact that you need a pass to enter the final town) - it just doesn't make sense to explore things out of order, because you tend to want to finish whatever task you are currently on. Plus, you gather maps as you progress through the game, and exploring unmapped areas is annoying, so the logical reaction as soon as you set foot in an unmapped area is to step back for now.
Now, for a couple of other notes, and maybe a few complaints.
The graphics style feels quite similar to Zelda II when you're walking between different areas (this is not a bad thing, I like Zelda II in many ways), but the battle system is slightly more limited. Two things about that: During regular fights, you can move freely and slash with your sword in any of four directions. Magic can be fired diagonally as well, so make that 8 possible directions for attack. Your sword is a bit short, though, so you have to get really close to enemies to hit them with it. This feels clunky at times, also because it's not obvious if you get hits in, or even if enemies hit you. It takes a bit of practice to even see if hits land at all - or if you get hit yourself.
Also, no matter how tough and heroic your character is supposed to be, he has no idea how to jump.
Now, okay, maybe I can accept that - it just feels strange from the beginning. The boss fights, on the other hand, are its own level of weird: You can only ever face right. All boss fights start with you on the far left, and the boss on the right. Some bosses fly or jump around, though. If they somehow fly over you and land on your left, you cannot turn around and slash them with your sword - you have to wait for them to get back on your right side, because you can only hit things to the right of yourself. What were the developers thinking with this? Moving left should obviously make the character turn left as well... but nope, not during boss fights.
Finally, something about the item system. Your inventory space is not big in this game. You can carry 8 of each kind of item, and you have to discard something if you want to pick up something new while your inventory is full. Also: discarding something makes it mysteriously vanish, so you cannot put something down, get an immediately useable item from a chest, and then pick the first thing back up. Discard might as well be called "delete".
There are four main item groups - spell books, combat gear, items, and rings. Let's have a look at each group:
Collecting the rings is simultaneously the main object of the game, and completely meaningless for your actual gameplay. The rings are needed to finish the game, but they do not provide any effects or stats.
Spell books are used for casting various kinds of magic - healing spells, attack spells, a spell to get out of a cave etc. Especially with this group, you get to a point where you would obviously like to keep more books than you can carry, and choosing which books to sell or discard along the way is a hard task.
Items - such as medicine, keys, and nearly anything you pick up along the way - are also limited to 8 at a time. In effect, this means that you cannot take a lot of healing items into caves/dungeons, because your item inventory is likely full of other stuff that you need for whatever reason. Discarding items can be hard because it always feels like certain items "might come in handy" later, but so far I haven't found any item I can think of with more than one intended use.
Equipment like swords and armor are generally safe to sell off once you've found a better piece. Even though swords, shields, and armor all go in the same group, you're not usually struggling to hold everything you want. The only "lesser" item worth keeping is the Poison Shield, which is useful if you tend to get poisoned a lot (scorpions poison you if they as much as touch you, and there are some mushroom-like enemies that can also poison you). Even though you get better shields later, the Poison Shield remains useful in certain areas.
I enjoyed the game very much, and I can definitely see how it can be replayable like some other classic games. Even with the somewhat clunky movement and battle scenes, it's still a lot of fun to play - you just somehow get used to its weird quirks, and learn to accept that this is how things work here.
Also: first game I cleared in 2022, yay.
PS: There are a couple of major cheats/tricks. I had tried the first one (super strength trick), but somehow only succeeded in making myself weaker, and having to restart from where I saved before I tried that out. There are supposedly a couple of other similar tricks very late in the game (invincibility trick/ultra strength trick), but I never tried out those. I don't know if the fact that the first trick didn't work is a "user mistake", or perhaps it was patched for the Switch port.