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A playthrough of Enix's 1993 role-playing game for the Super Nintendo, Paladin's Quest. This is the first part of a two-part playthrough, showing from the beginning to the party's arrival in the town of Karon. Part two can be found at Paladin's Quest, like The 7th Saga (), is a JRPG that Enix localized and published for the west in lieu of the latest entry in the Dragon Warrior/Quest series. Originally published by Asmik, Paladin's Quest was the work of Copya System, a small Japanese firm that previously worked on games like Dead Heat Scramble and Fist of the North Star on the Game Boy and the 16-bit Super Air Diver series. The game stars Chezni, a kid who lives at a school for the magically gifted. As class is finishing one day, Chezni is dared by a classmate to go mess with the ancient weapon of mass destruction that sits at the edge of the school grounds. He does and inadvertently triggers an attack that destroys the school and kills everyone within. Oops. I guess this would be what the intro was referring to when it said that “Paladin's Quest is the story of Chezni's wondrous misadventures.“ That Chezni. What a rascal. Chezni's “misadventures“ lead him and his friends on a quest to stop an evil dictator who wants to use the weapon to enslave the world in typical JRPG fashion. I have no idea why it's called Paladin's Quest, though. As far as I know, there isn't a single paladin to be found in the world of Lennus. As typical as the setup is, there are quite a few things that Paladin's Quest does to differentiate itself from the crowd of fantasy RPGs. The party has two permanent members, Chezni and Midia, but two more slots are reserved for mercenaries that can be hired to lend a hand in combat. There are quite a few characters to choose from, so you get a fair bit of choice in deciding how to balance your combat abilities. The battle system is unique in that you get to choose which body part (head, torso, leg, or arm) the character will attack with, and the equipment worn on that part determines the damage dealt. It's a weird system, but it's also one that can typically be ignored since you'll generally want to attack with the limb holding the weapon. Magic has to be leveled by type through use (like in Secret of Mana), but instead of drawing from a pool of magic points, spellcasting consumes HP. This means that there is no healing magic. HP can only be restored by using medicine items (of which you can only carry nine at a time) or resting in a town. It also means that you'll end up having to regularly grind outside of towns if you want to level your magic enough to make it useful. The battle interface is pointlessly cumbersome and slow to navigate, and for whatever reason, the menus cover the entire screen. The biggest frustration, however, comes from the item, weapon, and armor names. Like in the Breath of Fire games, they're all abbreviated to make them fit within the character limits set by the original Japanese version, but these abbreviations are ridiculously hard to parse, and the game doesn't offer any descriptions to clear things up. You're expected to somehow intuit that “Tdr sa“ means Thunder Saber and that “Pht cn“ is a Photon Cannon. But the main thing that makes Paladin's Quest stand out is its art style. The graphics aren't like anything I've ever seen elsewhere. The world is filled with surreal landscapes built from pastel geometric shapes, giving it a look akin to an artsy French cartoon from the 1970s. That being said, it's ugly. Unbelievably so. I know tastes are subjective, but I found graphics incredibly off-putting. The soundtrack fares much better, at least. The songs are catchy and the sample quality is good, but they're spread way too thin across the game. A few more tracks would've gone a long way. Paladin's Quest deserves a lot of credit for its willingness to try new things, but the execution is a mess. It's not a complete failure, but this is the sort of game that I would've been pissed to have spent $70 on back in 1993. Final Fantasy II, The 7th Saga, Arcana, Lufia, or even Inindo would've served your RPG appetite far better. _____________ No cheats were used during the recording of this video. NintendoComplete () punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!
