Super Black Onyx
Well, I'm not sure this one is super obscure so much as forgotten by time more than anything. Super Black Onyx is a Famicom exclusive remake of the PC game, The Black Onyx. The game was fairly well documented in its time as one of the earliest Japanese exposures to the RPG formula put forth by games like Wizardry, being somewhat of a first person dungeon crawl with a lot of mapping (or for modern kids, FAQ searching) to do.
You start off by choosing your character from a large pool of presets, class and all. There are heroes (basically fighters), mages, and monks, and you have stats and skills for all three, which you can change with a simple change of equipment. After a brief look at the surrounding sea, you journey into the town level of a looming tower in which your goal is to find the Black Onyx, which bestows great power. You will quickly begin to experience random encounters, in which you have three options: run, fight, or talk. Running does the obvious, as does fighting. By talking to characters, though, you can recruit them (up to 5 in a party) to join you. Select the team members you want, then hop into the lower dungeon layers to earn money and fight some lower-level goblins and the like.
Fighting is what made this game stand out to me. In battle, after choosing to fight, turns begin to be taken automatically, with your party lined up on the left, and your foes on the right. Your character's weapon will rapidly fly across the screen, pause next to the enemy, then come flying back. This is where it gets unique. Your characters will throw their weapon straight forward at the enemy opposite them. By pressing up or down mid-flight, you can change its trajectory to go toward a different enemy. In the fraction of a second in which your weapon pauses next to the enemy AFTER touching it, you must press the A button to atrack. Bad timing sends it back with no inflicted damage, so battles become much more actively engaging than you would expect from a game of this type. By pressing B, you can pause the battle to change your direction... try to run or talk it out, change which weapon you are using, take on a defensive stance if you have a shield, or use items like potions to recover or gems for new magic. The fast-paced battles are surely the centerpiece of this game and what made it worth writing about for me.
Exploring the first person maze is very typical of the NES/Famicom games of the day, with no real scrolling; you jump from screen to screen rapidly. If there is a floor or ceiling, just press A to travel through it. There are black walls, and touching one will warp you to the last one you touched, making a convenient warp network. The backgrounds are decent, but not great, and do get old after awhile. There are tons of shops and NPCs to encounter, so working hard to upgrade your equipment is pretty easy... and did I mention it's all in English? Menus, descriptions, shops... you name it, it's in glorious, readable English.
I'm not often in the mood for these old-school dungeon crawls. I'm a console and arcade guy for the most part, and the oldPC style isn't in my wheelhouse. However, I like combat here enough that when I do get in the mood to bust out the graph paper, this will be near the top for me, along with Shining the Holy Ark. Much more enjoyable than I would have expected, but I wouldn't expect it to make a bunch of converts. If you're into these kinds of games though, this is one of the more impressive ones I've played!
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