Landstalker

Developer: Climax Entertainment

Publisher: Sega

Released: 1993

Anyone who was an RPG fan in the early to mid 1990s can probably tell more than a few horror stories about just how hard it was to find games in the genre on the various consoles. New releases were constantly touch and go when it came to series like Dragon Quest, and Final Fantasy, and other popular games only occasionally saw their way to North American shores. The only series to come out over here with any degree of consistency was Phantasy Star.

Not content to only bring their sci-fi RPG to the West, Sega also had an interesting fantasy property that 

was being reasonably well received in Japan, with its Shining games for the Genesis. Together with the recently formed Climax, Sega started work on the series with Shining and the Darkness, a traditional dungeon crawl RPG released in 1991. After this game, the series evolved into a strategy RPG, and was called Shining Force. It was at this time that a mythology started to work its way into the franchise, as players followed the adventures of the game’s main hero.  It was between the first and second Shining Force that the idea for Landstalker, an action RPG, came up. Originally, the game was to be called Shining Rogue and follow the adventures of Max from the Shining Force series. However, somewhere along the line Sega and Climax decided to part ways, leaving the Shining Force series to be handled in-house by Sega, and Climax to complete Shining Rogue on its own. It was soon after this that Shining Rogue was renamed to Landstalker.

When the game finally got released, it proved to be an entertaining title for some, while for other gamers Landstalker would become the bane of their existence.

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