I can't believe I played through and beat this game.
Believe it or not, this game has a bit of a story to it as well as names for the characters. You are a knight named Jim. Someone has stolen a jewel and unsealed Boralis (named Varalys in-game), and Boralis has turned the princess into three fairies with a magic spell before unleashing monsters all over the land. It's up to you to find the three fairies and defeat Boralis to break the spell.
Compared to other games, this one is pretty simple and basic. Believe it or not, this game came out before all of the big RPG's of the 1980s in Japan on the MSX as far back as 1984, and was ported later on to other systems with even the Famicom version - known in Japan as Hydlide Special - coming out in 1986, a month after Zelda and not before like I stated in the video. Interesting. By the time the game came to the States, it was the summer of 1989, all the big RPG's for the system except for Final Fantasy had landed on the NES, and the game ended up feeling basic in comparison to everything else up to that point.
At the start of the game, the D-Pad lets you move around. Holding A lets you attack as you move around, as opposed to staying in defense mode when you don't have A held down. You can tell which mode you're in by looking at the lower-right corner of the screen. B lets you cast spells, although that will be explained in time as we don't have any magic yet, since none of the spell names at the bottom are lit up at the start of the game. Select brings up an in-game menu, while Start pauses the game.
The in-game menu lets you look at your inventory, switch between normal and fast for the game speed, save and load your game, and use passwords. The save and load commands save a game into memory and load it up, respectively, but that in-game save will disappear the moment you power off or reset. This is where the password comes in. At any time, you can pull up a password. Be sure to write it down carefully and keep it where you can find so you do not lose progress.
To the right of the gameplay screen is your health, your strength, your experience and your magic points. You'll also be able to see what monster you're fighting and how much health that monster has left. Each white notch on the gauges indicates a unit of 10, so you have 100 points for each of these four stats. In the case of life, strength and magic, the long white line indicate your maximum values for those stats, which will increase over time.
You'll want to start the game by going to the east of where you start and holding A while rushing at the slime enemies. You'll need to do this to gain experience and strength. As you do this, watch your health. If you start running low, stop fighting enemies and stay in the light green grass to slowly recover your health. If you flash red, you've taken damage; if the monster flashes red, the monster has taken damage. If any enemies approach you, get away from them until your health is back up. It is possible for your health to dip slightly if you run around a lot so be careful. You can heal in other areas, although healing will be slower. Once you're healed up, go back to grinding for experience. You don't want to game over, as losing the game and re-loading or using a recent password cleans the slate for the experience gauge, meaning that you'll start at zero experience for the current level again.
When you fill up the experience gauge, save your game and get yourself a password. You don't want to do all that progress again. At Level 2 comes more life, more strength and more magic points. You'll be able to take out those slimes more easily, but you should still be careful. You'll also get the Turn magic. To use Magic, select it with B so the name of the spell is white, hold A, then face the direction you want to cast it in and press B. Turn just turns an enemy around and away from you. You'll need to get even stronger to get the good magic, such as Fire at Level 3. Fire lets you shoot a fireball in the direction you are facing.
When you reach Level 3, you won't be able to get experience from the slimes any more...so you'll need to fight more powerful monsters to get stronger at this point. We'll be doing that next time.
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