Sword of Vermilion
A trivial, slipshod, rehash of all the cliches from Dragon Warrior on; an amalgam of the crudest story-telling techniques featuring some of the least-affecting dialogue ever written; a game stuck in the period before 16-bit roleplaying games became art, Sword of Vermilion is a somewhat bizarre game-- technically questionable, but fascinating in the way that clunky medieval paintings of sword wielding jesuses are fascinating. It has a commitment to real-time action that would later be re-introduced to role-playing games and tagged years later as innovative, but it is also a mess of cluttered, quaint, and counter-intuitive menus. Getting treasure out of a treasure chest involves not only opening an ugly menu and then scrolling (which, as always is accompanied by an awful chirping sound effect) down to to the "open" option, but, having opened the chest, you must then re-open the menu, and then-scroll (more of that awful tone) down to "take," at which point you get a cheery little tune and a message like: "you opened the chest, and there was a candle inside!" Also, my first ever favorite RPG. You'd be mostly blameless for taking a tone not-dissimilar to that of our esteemed video-game reviewing colleague about the game:
Or, you can take a little trip through history. Shall we?
As I ran laps around Perley elementary's big, barren field behind the playground every day after school I balanced my fatigue and buoyed my squat fourth-grader legs along with thoughts that every lap around the vast lot was one more penciled "x" in a box on a cross country club fill-out sheet, each filled box building on the last, springing forward on the page from left to right, onward and onward as I rounded the monkey bars and went back out for more. Surely there was some goal, some reward, some t-shirt you could win for running the most laps, but I don't remember it. The goal was always just to get farther, get more points. I was determined, and the thought of going farther excited me, and that was all there was.
Having only been old enough to be in awe of my brother as his 80's twitch skills got him all the way through Shinobi on the master system I only came into my own as a video game player with a bit of an inferiority complex. I knew that I would never be able to score as many points as my brother as my quick-fingered and guitar-soloing brother. In order to prevail in the same way he had prevailed, then, I'd need another way around. Steadily earned experience points would come to replace the hi-scores I'd known. Sword of Vermilion, with it's simple boss sequences and not-quite-action combat style (link to battles) was perfect for me because it could be beaten with the same sheer force of will and patience that propelled me around the field at cross country practice. Thus, it was the first non-disney-sponsored game that stubby-fingered and stubby-legged me could be comfortable with and good enough at to call my own.
At the time I didn't know what I was getting into. But, imagining the sun setting over Vermilion's Malaga, big-shouldered and kingly and beside my queen, I had a home in a kingdom not far from that beaten-down Perley grounds. There were rewards for those untold laps and dungeon crawl toils, I suppose, but they were mostly in my head.
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