Sorcerian

Year 1990, I've got a 286 at home, and a friend from the next street over shows up with floppy disks and the face of a convinced dealer. "It's Japanese." He didn't need to say anything else. Sorcerian from Nihon Falcom was exotic back then — and that's exactly how it played, too.

Sorcerian is an action RPG that Falcom originally released in Japan in the second half of the eighties, and it made its way to the Western PC market at the turn of the decade. It's a game from the same stable as Ys or Dragon Slayer — from a studio that practically invented this hybrid genre. You assemble a party of adventurers and set out into a series of standalone scenarios, each of which is in its own way a self-contained mini-adventure with its own world, traps, and a boss at the end.

The controls are side-scrolling action with RPG trappings — you slash in real time, jump over obstacles, collect items, and upgrade your characters between missions. Building your party isn't just cosmetics; the combination of class and stats matters. But what was confusing back then and remains confusing now is the interface. The menu is layered, the equipment system is unintuitive, and without a manual (or at least a patient friend) you'll easily feel like you're blind in a library. The game doesn't explain things to you; it simply waits for you to figure them out.

Why I remember Sorcerian isn't really the gameplay itself, but that strange atmosphere of a Japanese RPG transplanted into the DOS world. The graphics are colorful to the point of excess, and the music — and here Falcom was always ahead of the curve — is catchy in a way that gets into your head uninvited and doesn't leave until sometime in April. Every scenario looks different, plays different, and that modularity was a remarkable idea for the time. But it's aged unevenly: the action feels sluggish nowadays, and a number of game systems require either nostalgia or academic interest.

Today Sorcerian will appeal mainly to those who know Falcom from other games and want to understand where it all came from. Or to people who love the era when games assumed you'd read the manual and wouldn't give up after the first confusing screen. You can get it running in your browser via DOSBox without too much fuss — and if you don't mind an hour of confusion before the first hour of fun, you'll get a piece of Japanese RPG history in its Westernized form. It's not for everyone. But someone has to appreciate it.