Originally posted on Facebook on 14 January 2023
Alrighty! Time to talk about Landstalker.
After playing Crusader of Centy AKA Soleil on the Mega Drive Mini II, I remembered that there was another action/exploration/RPG on the first Mega Drive Mini that I hadn't given a chance yet - and that game is Landstalker.
So I played it straight away after beating Soleil.
In Landstalker, you play as an elf boy treasure hunter with a sword, and you go around the world talking to NPCs, exploring dungeons, solving puzzles and doing general adventuring stuff. It's your typical classic retro-game action/adventure fare. Lots of people online love to compare it to Zelda, and this time, I would be inclined to agree - it's got plenty of dungeons, that's for sure!
The game is played in an isometric perspective, similar to Light Crusader. I suppose the "pseudo-3D" nature of the isometric graphical style was rather appealing for developers back in the day - it allowed them to create games with concepts such as "height" and "depth" that might not be so easily done with a regular overhead perspective.
The instruction manual refers to the game as having advanced 3D graphics... I suppose this game along with "Sonic 3D" was what people thought 3D gaming was... before actual 3D games were invented.
(By the way... the mega drive mini doesn't actually include any instruction manuals........ so how did I know what the manual says, hm? 😉 )
...
(...it's because i also just so happen to own the game on the actual mega drive of course. 😃 😃 😃
I love Mega Drive games because they came in those nice plastic cases, so secondhand games tend to still have the instructions included.)
Anyway! The game is really good in some areas, but really really really REALLY annoying in others.
I'll start with the good.
The game has a fun world to explore, with lots of hidden treasure chests scattered around. The game is FULL of puzzles everywhere, even outside of the dungeons. There's always a button to press, a hidden passage to find, a box to pick up and put down somewhere else - there's always stuff to be on the lookout for, which makes adventuring through the world pretty engaging.
The graphics and dialogue are very charming - the world feels like a fun place to be in, and everything stays light-hearted and cute, which is always a feeling I like to have with these kinds of worlds. The characters actually have a lot of personality in this game, which I enjoy.
I like talking to all the NPCs in the towns, and there's a good amount of bonus stuff to find in the towns if you go poking around too. NPC dialogue actually updates pretty frequently throughout the journey to match with the story, especially within the central castle town. I always love it when games have this much attention to detail with NPC dialogue.
The dungeons are very mazelike, and very intricately designed. There is no in-game map at all, so the dungeons really put your spatial awareness skills to the test.
I like that the dungeons do properly occupy space in a cohesive way - so if you remember whereabouts the previous rooms were, you can get a good idea of how everything is connected overall. This is especially important when you need to jump down from the higher floors and land somewhere specific below.
Each and every room in all of the dungeons is unique in some way - there's a new puzzle to solve in every room, and the layout is distinct in each one, so it's not too difficult to keep your bearings even though there's no map. There were many moments where I was feeling pretty good about my ability to keep the rough layout of the dungeon in my head, even when it was getting more complicated later on. I think this is a sign of good dungeon design. It feels fun to figure out how everything's connected, and how to traverse the maze to reach the rooms you need to get to.
Overall, I felt the quest had a satisfying number of dungeons, with a large variety of different kinds of puzzles and riddles to solve. It never become too repetitive or samey, and each dungeon had its own distinct "feel" or "character" to it.
I'd say I had a good time with the game!
However, I really feel like I need to talk about the annoying stuff now. Because WOW this game is really really annoying!
The very first thing you're going to notice when playing Landstalker is that the controls for movement are awful. Unlike in other contemporary isometric games like Sonic 3D, Light Crusader, Super Mario RPG, etc, you are unable to move in all directions. In this game, you are strictly limited to diagonal directions only. And annoyingly, they make it so you actually need to press two D-pad directions at the same time to be able to move properly. If you only press one direction button, you become sort of "stuck" to one axis, in a way that's difficult to describe.
...If they had simply let you play with a "skewed D-pad" control scheme where pressing "up" meant moving "up-right", that would have been great... but instead they had to make it as awkward as possible and force you to have to always be pressing two direction buttons in order to do any basic movement.
It just feels really bad to move around in the game... but you do eventually get used to it. You HAVE to get used to it, because the game as absolutely unrelenting and unforgiving!
By far the biggest problem with the game is how extremely unforgiving it is, and this was very much done on purpose, by the looks of it.
There are many platforming sections where you need to jump on lots of small moving platforms, and if you fall, you're sent two rooms back and have to climb all the way back up to where you fell to get another chance. Platforming is pretty tricky in this game, as the isometric graphics can cause ambiguity as to where the platforms are positioned in 3D space. (and also because the movement controls are so awkward to begin with).
And it's not just the platforming that can be tricky. There are plenty of other things too - such as a button on the floor that opens a door on the other side of a room, and you have just BBBAAARELY enough time to reach it before it closes again - and I'm talking literally less than one second of leeway here.
There's dungeons that have splitting paths, but if you choose the wrong way, it sends you back to a previous room and you have no choice but to traverse it all over again. Have fun redoing all those tricky rooms! And you better hope you remember which path was the wrong one, once you get back to the split!
The main thing is - the game truly doesn't care how tricky or annoying the rooms are to traverse. When it asks you to do something, it's gonna make you sit there and try it over and over and over until you do it. And when you inevitably fall or get sent back and need to go through it again, you better hope you've had enough practice at it so it doesn't take too long to get past it another time.
There are absolutely no helping hands. No extra tools that you could go get from somewhere else that might make things a bit easier. No way to compromise or skip some segments. The game asks you to solve a room, and that's what you have to do. It doesn't matter if it's suddenly asking you to demonstrate significantly more finger dexterity than you've had to demonstrate up until now - you're gonna sit here and try it until it works. And if it's too much for you to manage, then tough luck - you just don't get to progress any more. Come back when you've gitten gud.
There aren't very many optional dungeons in this game, there aren't many optional rooms within the dungeons, and the adventure overall is extremely linear - which means that the vast majority of the tricky puzzles are ABSOLUTELY MANDATORY to progress. The puzzles that aren't mandatory generally have a health upgrade as a prize, which you always really want to get, because of the other annoying thing about the game...the combat.
The combat in this game is overall...bad. There is really only one thing you do in this game, and that is you press the A button, which makes you slash the sword a little bit in front of you. And that is the entirety of the combat right there.
It seems like they were going for Zelda 1 style combat, but it just doesn't have any of the nuance. Enemy attacks are not telegraphed very well, so it is often impossible to predict when you're about to take damage or not. Enemy behaviour isn't all that varied, so the different types of enemies don't really have much to differentiate them other than having more HP or stronger attacks.
And also, unlike Zelda, you really don't have any other tools to help you. There's no boomerang, no bow, no sword beams - there's just no way to engage with the enemies other than just bashing into them face-first and hoping to not take too much damage as you do so.
However, it seems like the developers knew this was a problem to some extent. You can carry up to 9 of a healing herb with you, and when you die, you automatically use up a herb, just like the bottled fairies from Zelda. The best plan of action is to just stock up on the healing herbs before tackling a dungeon, and faceplant into every enemy, relying on your stock of herbs to keep you going. In this way, the combat isn't really that problematic - you can largely get by just fine - but it isn't really all that engaging either.
(the healing herbs are called "EkeEke", and every time I get one, I keep thinking about that Monty Python quote that goes like "Ekke Ekke Ekke Ekke Ptang, Zoop-boing!" and it makes me laugh)
I played Landstalker on the Mega Drive Mini, but it's also available on the Nintendo Switch "Mega Drive Classics" collection - the biggest difference there is that the Switch collection has a "rewind" functionality that isn't available on the Mini.
...and I'm not sure whether or not I regret my decision to play on the Mini over the Switch version... If I had access to the rewind button, I would have definitely been using that thing constantly. There are so so so so many segments where one tiny slipup means you have to redo a whole bunch of previous rooms, and it'd be just so so easy to press that little rewind button to avoid all the repetitive struggle of redoing the rooms over and over.
But on the other hand..... I kinda didn't mind it? I went into the game with a mindset of patience. I was prepared to spend however long it took to beat the dungeons, and being forced to redo so many rooms so many times gave me a deeper understanding of how everything was connected, and gave me a better grasp on the ways you can control the game to avoid mistakes in the future.
And it seems like the game was kind of built with this kind of progression in mind, maybe? Some of the later jumping puzzles require some real finesse, and if I wasn't forced to keep retrying the earlier stuff, maybe I wouldn't have had the correct muscle-memory to comfortably pass the later stuff. Who knows?
I'm also glad I can say that I beat the whole game "legit". I know it's meaningless - I don't fault those who use rewinds at all - but I'm pleased that I can say I didn't need to use them to beat the game anyway.
So my recommendation is.... if you have a lot of patience and want to play a real classic tricky dungeon-crawling adventure with really cute graphics, then Landstalker is a great time. I really liked it overall, despite its problems. But if you're not so keen on the idea of suffering such harsh punishments for small mistakes, then I'd recommend you try it on the "Mega Drive Classics" collection version that has the rewind button! 😃
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