Chester Field (チェスター・フィールド ～暗黒神への挑戦～), released 7/30/1987, developed and published by Vic Tokai

This is another early action/RPG hybrid for the Famicom, and it pretty much continues the pattern of involving more frustration than fun, despite having a lot of potential.

The first mystery is that when you turn the game on, it labels it as “Episode II: Challenge to the Dark God.” As far as I can tell, there never was an Episode I, but maybe there was a fad at the time for doing things like Star Wars Episode IV. Here’s a story summary copied from Moby Games: “The Kingdom of Guldred has been invaded by General Guemon and his dark forces, who have killed their king. A brave knight named Gazem fled for a paradise of sun and pleasure named Chesterfield Island with the deposed queen and their daughter Karen. But Guemon’s forces were right there and sunk their ship, killed the queen, abducted Karen and left Gazem for dead. Fortunately for Guldred, Gazem barely managed to breathe the kingdom’s sorry plight to a brave knight named Kein before he died. Now the fate of Guldred rests on Kein’s broad shoulders…”

The game plays out over eight stages, although you can travel between them (in a somewhat cumbersome way). The hero Kein can jump, duck, and attack. He begins with 100 HP and can get up to 200 by healing with items, resting at an inn, etc. You get XP for beating the monsters, and each stage you can level up twice (so by the end of the game you can be level 16). You also earn money that you can use to buy weapons, armor, and shields.

Each stage has some sort of dungeon you need to go through. On each stage you need to find an item as well as defeat the boss at the end of the area. The outer areas of the stages have houses that you can visit to get hints, or buy things.

The game plays decently, although the movement Kein is a bit stiff, especially when you try to turn him around. You can get passwords from the inn, and if you die you lose half your money and go back to the beginning of whatever area you are in, but you keep any XP or items that you got.

There are two big problems with the game that make it not really worth playing, in my opinion. The first one is that there are a lot of pits that cause instant death (including ones that require you to jump on small moving platforms). This is common from the action RPGs of this era — Zelda II, Castlevania II, Getsu Fuumaden, and other games all have them, I suppose because pretty much all side scrolling action games of any type had them. But it’s annoying to have 200 HP but then have to go back to the beginning of the area because you couldn’t hit a jump on a tiny platform.

A second problem is that the dungeons are extremely difficult to navigate. This is the map of the second stage. You have hidden pits (and the outer areas and other places often have hidden areas in the ceiling or hidden walls you have to find). There are also loops at the side, and a lot of one-way passages. This makes the map hard to navigate because all the screens basically look the same, and it becomes really difficult to tell whether you are in a new area or whether you looped around.

As with the pits, this is typical of games of this era. I would love to read any kind of history or interviews with designers of this period to know what they were thinking when they made the games. Reviews often criticized these games for being too difficult so it’s not just that it was a different time and nobody knew any better. Maybe they were just too limited in the ways they could make a game challenging or take longer for the player? (Or as I’ve said before, they just wanted to sell strategy guides)

Another complaint I saw from Japanese players is that for some reason the opening and ending text is in English. There’s a video of the game on Youtube titled “Chester Field: You Need an English Dictionary to Play.” The comments are all saying “This is nostalgic” but then “This was impossible to clear without a strategy guide” and “I started up the game and had no idea what I was doing.”

Anyway, I don’t think this is really worth playing now.