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.
When I wrote about Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished – The Final Chapter, I celebrated finally getting my timeline in order for this series. I had started haphazardly, playing things and then realizing I should add other games that had come before, resulting in awkward jumps back and forth in time. With that post, however, I had finally finished playing catch up, and everything should have been in nice chronological order moving forward. But it only took one more post — about Sega’s Master System game Lord of the Sword — to make me realize I had to jump back in time again. Lord of the Sword’s design, which is basically an action platformer game but set in an open world inspired by role-playing games, reminded me of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, a game I really should have covered already. I wrote about Metroid, after all, and Simon’s Quest is the game that added the “vania” to Metroid to create the “metroidvania” genre.