Retro Review - Landstalker

After playing The Immortal I wanted to play other games of the same genre or similar, I found several, there are really many games of this style, however, there was one that caught my attention because of its aesthetics. At first I thought it was a The Legend Of Zelda, because the protagonist looks a lot like Link (it really looks a lot), but it was not. Even so, I found a RPG game, which is possibly one of the best of this style, a really entertaining game.

That's why today's Retro Review is about: Landstalker.

Landstalker: The Treasures of King Nole or simply Landstalker, is a game which tells the adventures of Nigel (Link copy of the saga The Legend Of Zelda), he is a treasure hunter so he is always traveling and living adventures to find them. One day, while on one of his hundreds of adventures, he meets a fairy named Friday, who is being chased by a group of villains, who want to capture her because she knows where the treasure of King Nole is. Friday asks for Nigel's help to save her from these villains, in exchange for helping him guide her to King Nole's treasure, in an unparalleled adventure, full of challenges and many treasures. A simple plot, but much more entertaining than many games I've been reviewing these last weeks.

Landstalker is an isometric view game, just like The Immortal, which I did a Retro Review a few days ago. It's a pretty colorful game, but not so bright colors, in fact, some colors look a bit saturated, but still it's not a game that visually is bad, in fact, it's quite good.

There are a variety of scenarios, but many, so it is quite nice to be able to go in those places, they are also very well decorated, in the scenarios we can always find certain elements, small or large details that fill with life to the vast majority of the places where we have to go. Despite the limitations of the Mega Drive, this game is able to recreate certain areas such as forests, dungeons, villages, castles and many other places, quite decently. It really is a nice game in these aspects.

The character design is largely quite simple, but with great charisma, most of the sprites have a relatively small size, but with enough elements and details to be able to stand out on their own. Nigel, our protagonist, presents a design with better quality over the other characters, and also a set of animations more fluid and varied, logically, so it stands out much more to the rest of the characters in this game.

The music of Landstalker is everything we can expect from a game of this style, with melodies that convey adventure, mysticism, mystery, each of them fits very well with the situations of each moment of the game and especially fit very excellently with each scenario to which we are going to go. It is really important that both the scenario design and the soundtrack make a good union, since in this way they manage to create a much more immersive atmosphere. The soundtrack of Landstalker has 37 melodies, some of them are not as good as others, but in general terms, it is a pretty outstanding soundtrack. The sound effects, despite not being the strong point of this game, are quite good and manage to fulfill their main objective.

Landstalker is a game that manages to mix several genres, among them we have platforms, real-time action RPG, puzzles and an adventure game with isometric view. It is a game in which the scenarios have a relatively large size so the exploration element is quite important and necessary to find certain items or secrets in the game. This is a game in which we will solve several puzzles of great complexity, in terms of gameplay this is the most "difficult" aspect of this game, as we must think very well at the time of being able to solve them, some may perhaps get to frutarlos when we try to solve them (it has happened to me), but then when we solve it is satisfactory.

Like any good game with RPG elements are the typical villages where we can buy items to heal the life of our character and items that serve us to perform certain magics. This is one of the most memorable and cliche aspects of this type of game, but still one of the most beloved by players.

The control of our character is extremely simple, we will not take practically nothing to learn to move in the scenarios and despite certain limitations with respect to the mobility of Nigel, it will not be so much trouble to our gaming experience, although there will be sections of platforms in which if we do not correctly press the button for our character to jump, possibly Nigel will fall into the void.

As I have already mentioned Landstalker is an Action RPG and the combat is the most typical of the games of this genre, the enemies appear on screen and we can attack them using the sword of our character, so simple, really no any kind of complication with respect to combat, but despite this simplicity in terms of combat, Landstalker is a game so entertaining that sometimes you do not even realize this detail. Landstalker will give us many hours of gameplay, I completed it in 2 days playing calmly and with pauses, but it can easily be completed in a few hours.

Landstalker is a gem of a video game, simple as that. One of those games that I did not know until recently and it really is one of those games that is worth playing, even if it is only once, because they are very entertaining due to all the elements and factors that make it a highly recommended game.