GamesRPGRediscovering the brilliant and brutal 22-year-old RPG that charges a ridiculous 1,000 in-game coins just to save your gameWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesRPGRediscovering the brilliant and brutal 22-year-old RPG that charges a ridiculous 1,000 in-game coins just to save your gameWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Silmarils)
Sword of Vermillion andLegend of Dragoonare two console classics that have re-entered my life in recent times, but my latest obsession dates back further – to the MS-DOS days of 1992 when I was just six years old. I might have been a year or two older when I first played Ishar: Legend of the Fortress, admittedly, but it’s stolen my leisure time of late with the same ruthless vigor as the old-school role-player’s innkeepers.
Guilty as charged
(Image credit: Silmarils)
If you played RPGs in the late 90s/early 2000s (especially those of the JRPG variety) I’m sure you’re familiar with saving your game at old-timey inns. From Suikoden to Chrono Trigger, pre-FF7 Final Fantasy games and beyond, saving at inns was ubiquitous in the genre; resting almost always restoring your party’s health and MP, with selecting a dialogue option at the front desk letting you overwrite your previous save file. Even today, the likes of Dragon’s Dogma 2 – a game who wears its throwback features firmly on its wizard’s sleeve – continues the tradition, with resting at inns in turn activating an autosave.
Rewind to 1992, however, and Ishar: Legend of the Fortress took a distinctly different approach. It enforced the same stay-here-save-here mechanic, admittedly, but instead of doing so in a cursory way, a la what DD2 would eventually do 32 years later, it charged you for the pleasure – to the tune of 1,000 in-game coins! Which, and this likely goes without saying, was a small bloody fortune. Like so many of its peers at the time, Ishar: Legend of the Fortress was often bastard hard – in its combat and its questing, with virtually no hand-holding, the most obscure puzzles, and a character recruitment system that was both ahead of its time and brutally hit-and-miss in its execution.
BACK IN TIME(Image credit: Sega )Rediscovering the 33-year-old console RPG I spent a year renting from Blockbuster Video after it (optimistically) promised 300 hours of game time
BACK IN TIME
(Image credit: Sega )Rediscovering the 33-year-old console RPG I spent a year renting from Blockbuster Video after it (optimistically) promised 300 hours of game time
(Image credit: Sega )
Rediscovering the 33-year-old console RPG I spent a year renting from Blockbuster Video after it (optimistically) promised 300 hours of game time
It’s also worth noting that the majority of games in the early ’90s didn’t have save systems whatsoever, which likely brought this one into even sharper focus. The platformers of the day, for example, gave you a set amount of lives and continues, and if you ran out of both, it was Game Over and your call if you wanted to start over and try again. Puzzle games, on the other hand – such as the aforementioned Lemmings – offered bespoke codes that allowed you to return to more advanced levels upon restart. And that was pretty much it. In fact, I don’t remember dedicated saves becoming a semi-regular thing until theElectronic Artsgames of the mid ’90s, whoseSegaMega Drive/Genesis cartridges were bulkier with a distinguishable yellow plastic button on the side.
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5Creature Commandos review: “James Gunn’s heartwarming, R-rated tale about super-monsters proves that the DCU is in good hands”
5
Creature Commandos review: “James Gunn’s heartwarming, R-rated tale about super-monsters proves that the DCU is in good hands”