Current Events > It's a shame what happened to the Hydlide series.

(+) Yeah! (+)

It pioneered the medieval, open-world action RPG that inspired the later Zelda 1 and Ys, but it released in the West after Zelda, leading to people accusing it of being a terrible ripoff of Zelda. It then had a couple of sequels that had very limited-to-no releases outside of Japan, and then imploded on the hideously awful Virtual Hydlide. Since then, no one has heard from this series again; not even the original game has been released in Japan, as far as I can tell, despite its influential status.

It's kind of sad.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tk2fhCj_bw

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They got a few rereleases here. Wikipedia showing the last back in 2004 for 1, 2, and 3. I mean yeah the series was influential, but it doesn't hold up that well. There are a lot of 80s RPGs that aged far better. To me the biggest shame is that so many action and open world RPGs didn't get released outside of Japan so I have to constantly listen to people talk about how JRPGs are linear and turn-based, when actually action was so much more common in the 80s that was considered the Japanese style in contrast to turn based computer RPGs in America. Open world games also were fairly popular in the 80s and early 90s before the more linear curated experience became the preferred way to do things.

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hydlide 2 and the genesis game are pretty good, but the first one and virtual are horrible. i get why japan looks back on it fondly but murricans should have no reason to

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I remember picking up the NES version for like 10 bucks, and feeling ripped off.

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I absolutely love Virtual on the Saturn. It was one of my first experiences that showed me games can be more than basic stuff like mario.

Don't get me wrong overall it's a bad game, but the ideas behind, and the experience it gave me as a kid give it a very special place for me.
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