Arcana

A 1992 Super Nintendo role-playing game developed and published by HAL Laboratory. The catalogue lists it as single-player with a first-person perspective, and that detail matters: this is an old-school dungeon crawler rather than the overhead Japanese role-playing game the platform is better known for.

Movement follows a grid. You advance one square at a time and turn in ninety-degree increments, viewing the environment from inside the corridor. The style descends from Western computer role-playing games of the eighties and appeared only occasionally on consoles, where the overhead format had become the default. Combat is turn-based and staged as your party facing a group of enemies directly ahead.

Card imagery runs through both the presentation and the systems. It is not a card game in any mechanical sense, but cards serve as the organising motif for characters, spells and summoned allies, giving the game a visual identity distinct from the swords-and-dragons fantasy that dominated the genre at the time.

HAL Laboratory is remembered today for very different franchises, so this title reads as a detour within their catalogue. It also documents how broad the studio's output was in the early nineties, before it narrowed toward the work that made its name.

Played now it demands patience. Grid exploration means drawing your own maps, random encounters arrive frequently and the pace is slow. For enthusiasts of the format it remains an interesting example, simply because so few games of this kind were made for the SNES. No browser-playable version is attached to this record.