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.
It’s tradition, at this point. Whenever I get my timeline sorted out for this series, and start actually working through things chronologically — as I recently did with Out Live and Phantasy Star II — I always find some other games I missed and end up going back to play them. I’m tempted to tell you that this detour will the the last one, but that’s what I think every time. Hopefully it will at least be brief, and then we can head back to 1989.
For now, though, we’re going way back to June 1987, for the Japan-only game Glory of Heracles: The Labors of the Divine Hero by Data East, for Nintendo’s Famicom. That places it a few weeks after Zillion and about a week before Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished in our timeline. I’d originally skipped over Glory of Heracles because I’d heard it was basically just a Dragon Quest clone (indeed, the first two Dragon Quest games, as well as Miracle Warriors: Seal of the Dark Lord, are the only proper Japanese-style role-playing games to precede it), but then I read that the later entries in the Glory of Heracles series are good, so I decided to play it after all, using an English translation from DvD Translations (who also did the translation for Cleopatra no Mahou). It turns out it has a lot of interesting ideas of its own.
