This is Console History, a special sub-series of my more general History Lessons series, covering console role-playing games, action role-playing games, Metroidvanias, and action-adventure games in nominally chronological order starting in the late 1980s. The chronology is garbled in the beginning as the scope of the series expanded, but it gets more organized later on. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions.
We are finishing up another detour from our nominal timeline in this series. The farthest we’ve reached is Phantasy Star II, the first true 16-bit console role-playing game, which released on March 21, 1989 in Japan. Then I took a detour to play some games I’d missed, namely Glory of Heracles: The Labors of the Divine Hero, Bionic Commando, and Valkyrie no Densetsu. We should have been all caught up after that, but then I found another game I’d missed: Golvellius, which was originally released by Compile in April 1987 for the MSX home computer in Japan, placing it between The Goonies II and Rygar in our timeline (I think… I couldn’t find the exact day of the release, so it might have been after Rygar). Sega licensed the game in 1988, bringing a remade version with a totally new world layout — now with the “Valley of Doom” subtitle — to their Master System console on August 14, 1988 in Japan, and December 1988 in the US. So this isn’t some semi-obscure Japan-only game that I had never heard of, like Glory of Heracles or Valyrie no Densetsu. Nor is it a game I knew about but thought was out of scope for this series, like Bionic Commando. No, it’s nothing less than Sega’s answer to The Legend of Zelda. I have no idea how I missed it.
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