/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5770147
I found out about Penta Dragon entirely by chance just yesterday and decided to play it since it's a fairly short 3 hour sort of thing and had a translation patch.

Right off the bat, I had never felt so much sttitude and personality from such an old title. It would strain me to compare, but even with just a few short moments of dialogue, Penta Dragon is just full of personality on its own.

At first the only thing that reminded me of Zelda about Penta Dragon was the movement and visual similarities between it and Link's Awakening.

I was a surprised and very interested to learn that Penta Dragon was actually developed and published by two not-nintendo companies an entire year before Link's Awakening was released.

It feels almost as if it's a subversion of Link's Awakening, or a deconstruction of how to make an action-adventure game on the handheld.

There aren't any stats, but there are lots of different kinds of items. Nothing in the game tells you what they all do, you have to figure it out on your own. It's so different from Zelda in that way, because in Zelda, when you get an item you're told immediately what it does. In Penta Dragon there's no manual you have to figure it out all yourself.

The levels are all very big, and all of them are different. It is mostly straightforward, but all of them stand out in their own way, and encourage exploration. However, random encounters with minibosses happen frequently and consistently and you are always kind of on the move.

The screen moves fluidly along with movement. There's no map or screen border. Each level is just a big labrynth.

I had a great time playing it. It has so much attitude to it, and was ahead of its time. It hit a spot in terms of action-adventure in a way LA never did. (i mistakenly thought this thread was about LA)