Emerald Fantasy 2

When you checked your registry last Friday and discovered you still had some Emerald Fantasy 2 gathering dust on your drive, you couldn't even remember what it was. But that magic word in the title—the "2"—means somebody cared about the first one. Yeah, back in the nineties there were plenty of indie RPG games flying under the radar, never making headlines in the big gaming press.

This is text-oriented fantasy in a fairly classic style—your character wanders the world, encounters monsters, collects loot, moves forward. The presentation is pretty primitive, with no graphical ambitions, which was standard practice for games made on a shoestring budget. The game banks on solid mechanics and hoping the world gets under your skin somehow, whether through story or an interesting system.

Whether playing this is fun or frustrating is the real question. If you're the type who loves retro games no matter what, you'll find purity here—no fancy effects, no marketing fluff, just the game. You'll invest time and attention. But if you need decent content to match the effort you're putting in, this might hit you pretty hard in the wrong way.

Games like this matter because they show what happened when you made stuff with no money and no hope of fame. Emerald Fantasy 2 is an archive of amateur creation from the era when indie meant truly indie. Comparing it to today's AAA titles or even better-funded indie projects would be unfair—it should only measure itself against what its creator thought people wanted to see.

Today you'll play it in an emulator knowing you've just opened a time capsule. You'll experience what players felt at the turn of the millennium when someone shared their project over BBS or floppy disk. It's not a proven classic like Wizardry or Ultima, but it's authentic, and that's worth something.