Sword of Vermillion on Genesis / Mega Drive

A relatively unknown RPG on a system not known for having RPG's, Sword of Vermillion on Genesis was an unusual take on single player RPG's that kind of worked and I loved it.

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You wouldn't want to go back and play this game now because you would get bored to tears. It was rather representative of the types of games we had available back in the early 90's though. Town exploration with new items and quests to be accepted in order to progress to the next town, very little reason to ever backtrack and an array of linear dungeons at each stop. The story was pretty important to hold your interest since the fighting because a bit monotonous after a while.

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around the town the top down view was very familiar as there are a ton of different titles that used exactly this style of exploration

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When traveling from city to city the game adopted a 3-d view which was cool at first but later on just became too difficult to keep track of where you were heading. Everyone eventually just followed the minimap especially after the fog of war got taken away once you found the map

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the encounters were all random and it would change perspectives back to the top-down where you could fight or you could run to the edges of the screen.

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Boss battles were the only kind of bad thing about this game, they were pretty lame and the bosses were the same every time except one or two

The game was a decent length and the story was pretty solid. The combat system was a little weak until you got some magic because your hitbox on your sword was absurdly small. Enemies damaged you simply by touching you and their attacks rarely were ranged. They would follow you around the screen in a rather stupid and predictable pattern. Most enemies were very easy to escape from without even trying to engage them.

SOV was trying to avoid being just another turn-based RPG, which was all the rage at the time.

The boss battles were pretty bad because it was always this long necked dragon thing and several other varieties of big beasties that really weren't very challenging. You could also only face one direction and the attack patterns of each boss didn't change a great deal. Also, regardless of what kind of gear you were actually wearing you would appear in full set of plate mail. The boss fights therefore, were not really looked forward to because you already knew what you were in for. I thought this was rather lazy of the devs on an otherwise great game.

It was also one of the last games i ever recall buying which came with a massive user guide. It was a lot of fun having this huge compendium come along with my game and it was over 100 pages of full-color awesomeness.

I think you'll get bored pretty quick, but if you feel like diving in the ROM is available for free here