Faery Tale Adventure was a pretty notable action adventure title back in the late 1980's. But does it hold up amongst other classic CRPGs that are more easily available today?
It was pretty ahead of its time if you compare it to other games from 1987 like Ultima. Especially the Amiga version which had really good music. The author David Joiner did the programming, gfx and music and took about 7 months to make the game and released it almost as soon as the Amiga came out. He used all sorts of crazy tricks, like using the disk drive chip to load the map in parallel with the cpu, so that there was no loading time.
An interview with David Joiner here, including recounting his development process of the Amiga version of Faery Tale: www.abime.net/interviews/view/interview/id/71
Remembered this game in exactly the same way. Heard a guy elsewhere online mention the name and thought "THAT'S IT" and "I wonder if LG did a review of this?"
Mr. LGR, thanks for sharing a game from your childhood. It's always entertaining hearing you talk about all these older games. Shame I was too small a child to get to appreciate these things :"(
I honestly really loved this game. Played it through with the family during quarantine, made some fun memories. I still enjoyed your review, despite disagreeing with most of your criticisms. 😅
For a DOS game from '87, the scrolling is super smooth D: Remember playing this on the Amiga, but having no clue of what to do as I didn't even know english.
That feeling you were describing at the start is one I know all too well. Recently I was trying to recall an old JRPG for the PS1 I remembered renting only once long ago but could not remember the name of. All I could remember was that it had "Legend" in the name and it involved a unique battle system involving inputting button combos that almost felt sorta fighting game like. At first I confused it for Legend of Dragoon simply because that was one of the only non-Final Fantasy JRPGs for the PS1 I could remember (but don't own), but upon looking up footage I realized I was way off (Dragoon's battle system is more akin to Final Fantasy). Only after looking up a list of every PS1 game ever released did I suddenly remember the name: Legend of Legaia. After seeing that boxart again online did the connection suddenly become almost whole, and after looking up footage I went "THERE WE GO! Oh wow why did it take me so long to remember this game's name?"
+BloodRedFox2008 Haha! I've been feeling the same recently about this 2D platformer I used to play as a kid in elementary school! Your comment inspired me to go searching for it! All I could remember was everybody playing Icy Tower in our small computer room with blurred memories of this other game that I enjoyed over that. The parts I remembered were some wintery slides and the character was either a dog or a squirrel. I just looked up Icy Tower, giving up on that other game for now and when I went looking at the publisher's webpage, I saw an oddly familiar title and scenery. Happyland Adventures! Ah man, it feels great!
Legend of Dragoon's battle system may seem similar to the battle system of various FF games at first glance, but it's actually quite different. It's turn based, so there's that similarity, but the fighting actually centers around attacks called additions. You set an addition to use in battle and then when fighting you perform that addition by performing a set of precise button presses that line up with each hit of the characters weapon. As you level up and complete additions properly you'll unlock more difficult and complex additions that are usually more powerful or yield additional SP - which changes up your ability to go into dragoon form, where you can use powerful dragoon additions and magic. There's also a system of combating counter attacks from the enemy. At any time during an attack an enemy can attempt to counter attack and you must is a different button at a specific time to dodge the attack and continue your addition. If I were to compare this battle system to any other game, it'd probably be Super Mario RPG or the games from the Mofhr/Earthbound series.
Thank you Phreakindee. I love the vibe of nostalgia and childhood memories your videos constantly emits. Keep doing what u do and again.. thank you! :)
I know this isn’t really relevant but my dog died in my arms tonight, I have no idea how to cope with it but this video helped me take my mind off it. Appreciate your content and thanks for your hard work.
You have just re-jogged my memory of this very game! Played it on the Mega-Drive around my uncle's when I was 4 or so. Been trying to figure this game and another out for ages now.
Hey LGR, I just wanted to say thank you for making these great videos. Especially the Endless Space one you made quite some time ago, which actually led me to buy the game. But seriously, your videos are great, informative, and they're nice to watch after a long day. So, yeah, keep up the good work!
The thing you describe at the beginning perfectly describes a memory I have with one of these "play computers" - A sort of Notebook/laptop thing in orange and blue with several games of which I remember almost none. It was monochrome black n white and generally way behind its time but I remember it fondly. Then there is this HUGE game collection. There was a Battleship game for the Gameboy on there which had cool animations so it caught my interest. I also got to play solomon's key which I only found out about 1 year ago because of a video. Has such awesome music!
I had a solid 20 year run of exactly this sensation for the nes game Solar Jetman. I played(and loved it) at some kids house, who happened to be something like a friend of a friend of my cousin. Needless to say I never saw the kid again, and the vague memory of the game stuck with me, driving me insane until randomly coming across a youtube vid of its game play... then water was turned to wine, dogs and cats slept together, and SNL was funny again. It was wonderful.
To be fair. The genesis Port is alot better, and this game is boring as you said, however if you farm at the grave yard for like 1 hour you basically cant die and finishing the game can be fun. that's my only advice. . Also, if you want to get the turtle early just follow the south road all the way to the watch tower, use a grey key on the door and there is a sea shell inside, which lets you summon the turtle early. takes 20 minutes to get from starting fresh.
Elite Zararus Genesis (more specifically MegaDrive, in my case) version was the very first I ever played and FUCK was it unforgiving to new players! Still, it pushed me to play it more and more. Too bad it was my cousin's console and cartridge and we lived too far apart from each others. Was the Genesis version a cartridge with a yellow tab on the side as well?
There is a chest just outside the starting village to the south that you could glitch by doing a save reload trick and you could keep opening it and getting all the loot. After 30 mins your inventory would be completely full and heaps of money.
@@TheCommanderNZ haaaaaa..... I played on the Amiga. Save and load was anything but trivial... toc...toc...toc...scraaaatch...toc...toc...5 minutes later...
I figured out as a kid that you could stand inside the graveyard walls and stab enemies on the other side safely as they helplessly milled about trying to get me
I remember searching for a couple of NES games that I loved to play as a kid, but I forgot the names. Luckily, when I would finally find them, I would relive only the good memories. Last game that I was searching for a really long time was Joe & Mac - Caveman Ninja. What a awesome platformer.
I remember a racing game from the '90s which had vehicles surrounded by spherical force fields racing on a dystopian future setting. Looking for it ever since.
Yes but my problem with it remains. You're a complete weakling once again when you die, except this time you don’t have any starting loot. Finding your way back to a body is darned near impossible due to the sheer size of the map. Even then without some good stats and loot you’re sure to quickly die due to the randomly-spawned hordes of enemies every few steps. So you *can* find the body, but the point remains: I see having 3 brothers as useless, just stick with the first and reload if he dies.
You aren't wrong from a strategic standpoint... but the game was designed for a sense of adventure and wonder. It wasn't meant to be a strategic speedrun. Although your start is far more challenging with the second brother, and then absolutely BRUTAL with the third brother... the idea is that your knowledge of how the game works has improved to the point that you can make it work somehow... it was an interesting mechanic regardless...
Halls of the Dead? Don't own it and have never played it, but I hope to eventually. Apparently it was made by an entirely different team of designers, and published by someone else since Microillusions went out of business not long after FTA1.
I still have this game sitting on my shelf. I could never get into it. I would always quit around the first combat experience as it was just terrible. Kudos to you for sticking with it. I highly enjoyed watching this.
Like you, this was one of the first PC games I played in 1990 on a 386 with my dad. Spent quite a bit of time on it until we upgraded to a Pentium 120mhz and the game ran so fast you died of starvation within a second of starting. My hazy memory of it was definitely flattering. You forgot to mention that since Julian was the best fighter of the three, and the game was 99% combat, the game was basically over when he died. Kevin was as lame as he sounds, unable to kill any enemies and with no friendly NPCs to make his kindness stat useful. Still feel like trying it out again though...
The game that was a vague memory as a kid was The Legend of Kyrandia and Conquests of the longbow (which was long lost until I found it in the closet :).
I played this one on the Amiga 500. Looked a bit better, especially at night, but the main attraction was the music. Beautiful tunes for battle, night and especially day made the boring slog more bearable. In the end though it's still the same game, my brothers and I managed to beat it through sheer force of will (that desert crypt with the incredibly long hallway anyone?) and determination.
This IP is ready for a revamp. Three brothers vs a necromancer. Animal companions. The Red Knight. The forest maze. The Astral plane. There's so much that can be taken, fleshed out, and expanded.
I used to play that game very intense on the good ol' Amiga 500 and i loved it! The graphics were a bit better than on PC and i loved the music. Yes, the world was huge, indeed, but i was too curious exploring every corner. There were two things i really hated: wandering in the forests (because they slowed you down and those damn wraiths got me almost every time and the steering when the character starved. And a tip: to quickly get stronger, travel to the graveyard southeast and fight enemies with the fence between you and the monsters. As long there are no wraiths... ;)
I had this on the amiga as well. Took a good long time to beat and the last area is pretty weird, but it kept my brothers out of trouble. I never got tired of that music either, especially the battle and night themes.
Wow, I still have the 3.5" disks of this game. I never made it very far, and it's been forever since I've played it! Good video! Have you ever played Veil of Darkness? I used to love that back in the day, and for some reason watching this made me want to play it again!
My game I can't remember is not a game, but a kid's book, that while reading prompted the reader to enter code into DOS to experience certain action sequences. The code I wrote out was supposed to emulate landing a helicopter. I didn't get it to work, but still fell in love with coding.
My hazy memory is of a game which I actually haven't played, but my dad. It was a dungeon crawler on a floppy disc, I specifically remember telling him to give his character two swords instead of a sword and shield. He died seconds later. I felt so bad I told him to do that so thats why I recall that so good I guess, I was around... 5 or 6 years old maybe? But I still remember the visuals so cleary, it's been bothering me for a while now that I STILL don't know the name of the game.. I also remember it being on a 3 and a half inch disc. Just thought I'd throw that out here :)
I bought this game for the Sega Genesis when it first came out and actually played it all the way to beat it, music was much better as it wasn't PC beeper sound, but I agree, there is zero reason to go back to this game nowadays, so now it just sits on my shelf....alone....unwanted. Oh well, great review yet again !
awesome! I totally know how you feel on that, even tho i was born in the late 80s most of my early childhood was games like these and earlier xD rather than what was new back then. x3 the big floppies i totally remember those.
When the earlier brother dies it creates a pile of bones which the next brother can track down and pick up which contains all the inventory the earlier brother had. I have this game on Amiga and it's in my opinion one of the best games in the genre ever created, mostly due, of course to it being among the first... in the genre. And boring?! Are you crazy! There's always something to do, there's always things to find. You can travel on water by turtle, you can travel in air on a golden goose. There are mountains, lakes, thick forests, swamps, deserts, snowy plains, islands, castles, dungeons, dragons, kings and princesses. This game is absolutely phenomenal.
Genesis version was superior in features. Played the hell out of it! Protip: Map is so big, just make bee-lines straight to the things you need to do, otherwise its just a timesink. I LOVED this game back in 1993, so addicted to it and finishing it. If you're a hardcore RPG'er and want to play one of the games worthy of RPG history, id recommend it. For everyone else, u can pass.
I used to play raid on bungeling bay on NES as a kid, and forgot the name of it. Fifteen years after we sold all our games I refound it by chance on youtube. Now I can raid the crap out of bungeling bay all freakin day!
You over-looked that when a brother dies and another brother takes his place - You can regain all the original possessions by finding your dead brothers corpse FTA was my favourite game of the 80's - I played it for months and could simply could not stop - loved the music as well - I still want to know who wrote it
hey awesome review. i love the dos/old school pc reviews you do. ever play a so-so game called shadows of cairn? terrible yet comedic voice acting, lots of running and awkward fighting too. i think you'd make a funny review of it. i oddly enjoyed playing this game back in the 90s.
My hazy memory is an old PS1 game that had a free for all fight between monsters, one of them was a four legged monster with a giant mouth that could make copies of itself. I still am trying to remember the name of it.
Every time I see box art for games like this, it reminds me of what Conan Obrien said about Atari game art: "...promises far more than the game could possibly deliver"
I played the Amiga version at my friend's house in 1988, and yeah, I remembered the music and the graphics but forgot the name for a decade. Even though I've never seen it since then, the music always goes through my mind every few weeks or so... Maybe I'll get to see how accurate (or not) my memory is as I watch this review :)
My friends and I used to play this on the Amiga. Man, I had no idea how bad the music was on the PC version. Come to think of it, I didn't know there was a PC version. I did know that there was a sequel game (I don't remember the name) made for Windows many years later. You had all 3 brothers at once.
Turtles on the Amstrad, commodore 64 etc had a couple of pages of codes in the manual that you needed to enter to play. We lost the manual as kids and couldn't play the game again.
I remember back when I was 4 or 5 years old, my daycare had an old Mac, and on that Mac was an adventure game that took place in some sort of castle. I remember that we could never play it for more than 5 minutes, because of a wizard at the top of a set of stairs that would always kill us. I wish that I could remember the name of that game.
I know that feeling about having a game stuck in memory, but don't remember the name of it... Took place in a castle (atleast I think it was a castle), where the different screens acted as rooms, with an isometric viewpoint a'la Double Dragon, and a huge amount of traps and enemies to deal with (but no way to defend yourself, as far as I know...)! Had it on either Amiga, or Commodore 64/128... First game to ever make me miss children's broadcast... Damn you nostalgia! XD
The game I can't remember is (well I have quite a few) but I'll share two of them. The first is a game I played as a demo on possibly a PC Gamer demo CD in the mid to late 90s (possibly 95-97 around that time). It is a 2D adventure game. I remember this game, the main character was a guy with blonde hair and wearing middle ages type male clothing with buckled shoes and white stockings. Anyway, You started in a house and you had to click on objects and the character would say something about the object, like clicking under the bed, he would say something about "fluffadusties" and the difference between dust bunnies under the bed and belly button fluff (possibly called "fluffadisties navalus") I do remember in the demo having to go outside into a garden like area with a washing line and I think one of the goals was to find a mushroom. The game demo ended around here when you had to go into the village. I remember on the same magazine as the demo, there was a 2 or 3 page spread about the game showing screenshots of it. The second game I really want to know what it is. I also played it on a PC magazine demo CD, possibly PC Gamer. I played it also in the mid to late 90s, possibly on the same CD as the first game. This game is a 3D role playing adventure game. The graphics were quite good and the game began with a shot of the player in bed, a young elf or something like that, Its the morning and the player gets out of bed. The game starts with your mother asks you to go into the cellar and get something (I forget what it is) but when you go down there I think there is something you pick up here and or a mirror you walk through that is a portal to somewhere else. What I do remember is being inside a tree after this and having to race in carts against some fairies (or some similar magic people) and having to do laps around a small course that went round the middle of the tree. If you beat them you could continue on. I remember an indoor area with a locked gate and you had to find a key to open the gate, but I don't know which order that part came in, I think this area ended the demo. One area I do remember is an outside area, a desert like place and you were on a cliff overlooking the desert. There were creatures here which had faces a little like cthulhu and you could talk to them. I don't remember much else except an Ankh amulet rings a bell, but when I search for games with Ankh amulets in them, I only get the PC game Ankh, which isn't it. So if anyone knows, please reply as I really want to know what these are!
You I have no idea what you've done for me. This game was in fact one of those infamous games I could not remember the name of. I played the Mega Drive version more than I feel comfortable admitting, had every strategy guide and never managed to beat it. Years!!! I have been trying to remember...thank you and damn you as well lol.
My game whose name I just can't remember was a fixed-screen space shooter for windows 95 I think, kinda like Galaga but every level was episodic and the enemies were already on screen at the start of every level, without anymore appearing. You deployed a claw to grab powerups and every 5 or so levels there was a boss, usually the same bigass jet-looking ship, but it was awesome, miss that game.
Is it just me, or does the music at the very end of this video sound remarkably like the PC speaker rendition of "Erana's Peace" from the original EGA version of the first Quest For Glory game?
