#pc-8801

PC-88 version ending In a random manner… I swear to Harry…

VideoBrain & PC-8801

Zeliard

In 1986 Ken Williams travelled to Japan to sell licenses to Sierra On-line games, and during the stay he acquired the rights from Game Arts to publish a MS-DOS port of their action platformer Thexder. In the coming years, Sierra would port a number of a Japanese games including three additional Game Arts titles: Fire Hawk:Thexder 2, the shoot-em-up Silpheed, and the action-RPG Zeliard. Common to all of these titles are that they are microcomputer games (and stayed on those systems with the single exception of a Thexder port for the Famicom) that play and feel a lot like console games. Zeliard is a side-scrolling action-RPG with a leveling system and a lot of focus on experience point grinding. It was Game Arts third game and their first RPG, and in many ways their first step towards their later RPG productions such as the Lunar and Grandia series. Zeliard was released more or less exactly in between two of the seminal examples of the genre, Zelda II (January 1987) and Ys III (1989), but has remained in the shadow of more popular games due to its computer exclusivity and relentless difficulty curve.