Hello LPBeach! My name is Tanegashima, and this is my Let's Play of the obscure DOS game Zeliard.
The Japanese box art
The admittedly superior US box art
Don't you mean Zelda II?
No, no I do not.
Well okay, they're both sidescrolling action-RPGs, but they're not that similar!
How did we even get such a weeby-looking anime game in the United States in the 90s the first place?
So, funny story about that. Zeliard originally came out in 1987, it was one of the first games Game Arts ever released (you may recognize them as the studio behind the considerably more popular franchises of Lunar and Grandia.) Fast-forward three years later, and Sierra Entertainment (yes, that Sierra Entertainment) decided to bring over and port a bunch of Japanese PC games to DOS. One of these games was Sorcerian, an early effort by Nihon Falcom (yes, that Nihon Falcom, the one that's been releasing the massively popular Trails series and the somewhat less popular but still beloved Ys.) Sorcerian got a very good Let's Play by ExMortis that is currently in the LPArchive. Another one of those games was, of course, Zeliard.
Why this game and not Oregon Trail or Commander Keen?
Most people have actually heard of those games. Zeliard is a forgotten gem with great music, competent graphics, gameplay that was in some sense ahead of its time, a massive heaping spoonful of charm and... some kind of story. Look, games with complex plots and characters weren't a big thing in 1987, we should count ourselves lucky that there's cutscenes at all!
I've waited at least 14 years for someone to make a proper Let's Play of this game and they never have. The LP master list doesn't even list any abortive attempts. So I'm going to give it a shot.
All right, fair enough. So what's the format?
Zeliard's main gameplay loop involves bouncing back and forth between the more RPG-ish sections in town and the dungeon platformer segments. I plan on showing off the town segments in screenshot format with GIFs for certain animations and the platformer segments in video.
What's the update sched-
What's a schedule?
Okay, okay. I'm going to try to post an update every week at least, though I can't make any promises what with work and also the world burning and all. At the very least I plan to put up the first proper update this weekend.
I hope you all enjoy this journey into DOS game nostalgia.
