Sword of Vermilion

Sword of Vermilion from 1989 is one of the first big RPGs for the Sega Mega Drive – and a curiosity in the portfolio of Sega AM2, the studio led by Yu Suzuki and known worldwide for its arcade hits. Here, for once, the team committed itself to a sprawling role-playing game for a home console, and approached it in its own peculiar way.

The game's most striking feature is how it keeps switching perspectives. Sword of Vermilion refuses to settle on a single view: travelling the countryside looks different from exploring towns, and combat is different again, with the catalogue filing the game under the first-person view that marks its most distinctive passages. At the end of the eighties this was an unusually ambitious construction, the kind only a publisher with a powerful new console could afford.

The Mega Drive had been on the market only briefly in 1989, and Sega needed proof that the machine could carry more than action and sports. A large single-player RPG offering dozens of hours was exactly that kind of showcase, even if today the game reads more as a fascinating experiment than a polished classic.

Role-playing games had a harder time on the Mega Drive in Europe than in Japan: text needed translating, large cartridges cost more, and local players were used to a different school of computer RPGs.

If you want to form your own opinion, there is no need to hunt down a cartridge: on OldGame.cz, Sword of Vermilion boots straight in the browser, so the dungeons are open immediately.