Brandish is not what it seems. Judging by appearances, one might initially assume that it's a top-down action RPG, akin to A Link to the Past and other such games. In truth, though, Brandish is a pure-blooded first-person dungeon crawler that just happens to not be first-person. The camera is the most obvious example of this, and it is what turns most players off. Unlike a standard action RPG, moving left and right will not move the player across the screen, but will instead reorient you to face the direction you pressed. Basically, Brandish has tank controls, including the ability to strafe with the shoulder buttons. If this bothers you, there is an option to switch the turn and strafe buttons, so you move like an action RPG and hold the shoulder buttons to rotate. However, I highly recommend playing with the standard controls, as the way the dungeons are set up strongly emphasizes constant rotation to orient yourself. If you can get into a first-person dungeon crawler, you'll have no problem with this.

If you can get past the initial impressions of the controls, Brandish has a lot to offer. The real-time combat is interesting and varied. Enemies wander the halls, and they have a wide variety of attack patterns and behaviors. The top-down view opens the way both for methodical battles based on positioning and orientation as well as frantic, tense scrambles where an enemy unexpectedly approaches from a bad angle. You gain a few spells as you go that each have different patterns, and I found that each and every one had different uses for different foes.

Brandish also had some very nice QOL features that I was not expecting from a 1991 release. First, the game also features auto-saving every time you change floors, which saved me many times throughout my playthrough. It also has a detailed auto-map that I referenced constantly as I went. The fact that illusory walls display on the map was the cherry on top that made exploration a dream.

The game is mechanically sound, but what made my journey a worthwhile one was the atmosphere. The story follows Varik (at least in the English SNES version, what I played), an outlaw being chased by a sorceress named Alexis. During a confrontation, you both slip into a deep pit, and end up in a cursed underground kindgom, which has been transformed into a monster-filled labyrinth. Your goal is simply to find a way out (while avoiding Alexis). The game begins by simply dropping you into the ruins to fend for yourself, entirely alone. In fact, you spend nearly the entire game isolated, with only the occasional run-in with shops or the aforementioned Alexis. The atmosphere is mysterious and foreboding, and the first several shopkeepers you speak with give off an intense sense of hopelessness and melancholy. You find treasure chests, but you also find dropped items from previous adventurers. As you progress past the initial ruins and enter the tower, the mystery gives way to a grim, determined march. The shopkeepers get less hopeless and more jaded. The last true shopkeepers you meet lament that they could not go further after making it so far. By the end, you truly feel like a hardened warrior.

I would be remiss if I did not talk about the score, which was easily the best part of the entire experience. Every single song is a new banger, which is great when you'll be hearing the same track for 10 floors in a row. The standouts were the file select theme and the two shop themes especially. The first shop theme is a slow, somber waltz, used heavily at the beginning of the game to complement the gloomy tone. As you go, though a more punchy, upbeat theme is used more and more, uplifting you and complimenting each break from the action. I'm going to have most of the soundtrack randomly pop in my head for years to come.

The graphics are nice as well, mainly in the still screens which are very well done. The spritework is mostly rather good, though the insectoid enemies look kind of plasticky, with strange, bright colors (the scorpions and lobsters come to mind).

I could say a lot more about Brandish, such as the puzzles, but honestly if any of this interested you, I would highly recommend trying it. The SNES version is very accessible, though I have heard that other versions are more complete and polished. It isn't too long, though make sure to set your game speed to high, only turning down when the action gets to fast to parse.

I will absolutely be playing the sequel.

Remember when games started with saucy sorceresses blasting both of your pauldron-wearing badasses down into the cursed underworld? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Nihon Falcom already had a history of making some of the best dungeon-crawling odysseys a Japanese PC player could buy. Brandish kept that legacy relevant, and then some. Modern players can laugh at the snappy, initially jarring over-the-shoulder camera, or wonder where the hell they're going in the game's early labyrinths. But I love how this game rewards an unction of patience, a mentality of adapt or die befitting the premise. What would you do if you were Ares Toraernos, decorated mercenary now marooned in the depths of a fallen kingdom? How would you worm your way out of this hell, beleaguered by monsters, deathtraps, and mysteries on all sides? We peer down into this man's trials by fire, yet are thrown to and thro as he methodically rounds corners into one gauntlet after another. To say nothing of his unwanted nemesis Dela Delon, the aforementioned magical minimally clothed madame hunting you down! This wouldn't be the last time Ares—and you, his far-off companion—has to face the bowels of madness and come out intact.

Speaking of jarring, that camera. It's definitely something you can get used to, unless it gives you genuine motion sickness. (Dramamine works for that…unless you're allergic, in which case I understand.) Swapping between mouse and keyboard controls, something new for a Falcom title of this vintage, also asks for some dexterity. But I don't consider this the kind of filter that you can find in more demanding ARPGs like Sekiro or Ninja Gaiden Black. Getting to grips with Brandish asks for a mix of tenacity, analysis, and maybe a few false starts. It's a breezy play, coming in around 8 to 12 hours, give or take. Replays are even encouraged by the game's own ending sequence, which summarizes your playtime and related stats before awarding a ranking. This system would later pop up in Falcom's own Xanadu Next, a boon sign if any.

Should you try Brandish out for size and the split-second camera snaps throws you off, don't panic! Getting used to it took me some time, and yet it paid off so well. I almost want to pity folks like SNESDrunk who, having played the SNES conversion, wrote this game off entirely because of this aspect. Keep an eye on the map and your compass to reorient when needed—even better if the version you're playing has both on-screen at all times.

I'll let you in on a secret: you should be playing the PC-98 version. Or the PSP remake, if experiencing the minimal albeit charming story matters to you. Yes, only the SNES port was ever localized, but I'd take the PC original over it any day. The awkwardness of the console version stems mainly from its reduced HUD and lack of mouse controls. Brandish's lead developers, first Yoshio Kiya (of Xanadu fame) and then Yukio Takahashi, wanted to move Falcom's game designs beyond simple keyboard or joystick schemes. While both Dinosaur and Popful Mail started off Falcom's 1990s stretch with PC-88 era controls, Brandish & its cousin Lord Monarch would explicitly target mouse users, keeping keyboard as an alternative. I tend to use both options, with keys for strafing and mouse to switch between interactions.

Brandish has you crawling through several multi-floor dungeons, each increasingly challenging and claustrophobic through a variety of means. Like the older, arguably more brutal CRPGs Kiya & co. had made, you have limited resources to work with, from deteriorating weapons to a set number of loot chests per level. One thing you'll always have is a chance to rest—if you aren't maybe fatally interrupted, that is. Resting works here much like in classic Rogue-likes, with harsh consequences should a monster attack you as you sleep. But it's your main way to recover health & mana, and an incentive to learn each part of every dungeon. Finding one-way tunnels with doors is a blessing, and managing your limited-space inventory comes naturally. I think Brandish often feels harder than it is; being able to rest & save progress anywhere plays into this. We're years ahead of actually brutal classics like 1985's Xanadu, or even something contemporary like SEGA's Fatal Labyrinth.

Character advancement is also just as interesting here as in Kiya's earlier works. You have to balance between growing physical and magical strength, as well as health, via how you fight enemies. It's very elegant: striking and killing with weapons raises the former, and doing it with spell scrolls helps the latter. This maps almost dead-on to Xanadu's physical-magical dichotomy, just without that game's emphasis on leveling individual weapon experience. Here you can easily switch between armaments, choosing which mix of speed, power, and animation frames works best. Fire and cure spells come quickly, too, enriching your action economy as early as the Vittorian Ruins. By the time I get to truly challenging areas like the Dark Zone, I've maxed out my stats and can only hope to find better gear for my travails. This brings in a bit of that Ys I feeling, where you know only your skills and wisdom can get you through this struggle, not just grinding.

Wisdom is something the people who built these tunnels clearly lacked. The old king of Vittoria, having plunged him and his people into this condemned netherland, had done a fine job setting up spiky pits, poisonous wells, mechanical log rams…the works! Much of Brandish's joy comes from solving all these navigation micro-puzzles while keeping distance from wandering foes. It's hard to fall out of the game's quick "one more floor!" flow. You're never truly alone, either. Shopkeepers occasionally pop up throughout most dungeons, offering both supplies and musings on their lives and the surrounding lore. A certain woman warlock loves to show up and taunt you, only to get bamboozled by the same hazards you've faced (or are about to!). It may be a crunchy 1990 action-RPG with all the aged aspects that entails, but I'd never accuse Brandish of being lifeless. The sequels would only improve in this sense, adding more and more NPCs and story without ever sacrificing that essential oppressive atmosphere and isolation.

Nothing's quite as gratifying as reaching the king's Fortress, packing more heat than a whole army of knights, fearing not so much the bestiary as you do the conundrums. Why is everything so damn fleshy here? How are these pillars moving around the room in such a bizarre way? Will I have to tango with invisible enemies again, or golems awakening around me as I open a suspicious chest? And where am I going anyway?! Brandish avoids the potential worsts of these questions by equipping you with one of gaming history's best mapping systems. Predating the likes of Etrian Odyssey by more than a decade, the game's minimap demonstrates why this game would always have a tough time converting to console play. This precise mouse-based minimap, with multiple swatches you can use to mark map items & boundaries, is itself quite fun to tinker with. Later games would challenge your map-making skills further, going as far as adding enemies that passively destroy your map over time and space! That's not an issue in this first game, thankfully. Falcom's maybe a bit too nice in that regard.

For that matter, I can't shake the feeling that Falcom, still reeling from their turn-of-the-'90s staff exodus (to new studios like Ancient and Quintet), held back on Brandish's ambitions. Popful Mail shares something of a similar fate: these are two wonderfully made adventures, no doubt, but also compromise in key areas. For the former, difficulty balance and repetition can set in later on. For Ares' first expedition into darkness, it's more so the developer's restraint in making truly complex dungeons. I just wish the complexity of both puzzles and combat areas ramped up quicker here, something the rest of the series fixes. Sure, a lot of folks might get stumped at the 3 and 5 floor tiles puzzle in Tower, but there's maybe a couple headscratchers here at best. Likewise, combat's sometimes trivialized by the ease of jumping over and away from foes, many of which lack ranged attacks. I can forgive all of this since the rest is just so good, but the creative compromises I've noticed on replays mean I can't really rate this higher. (Brandish 2, incidentally, gets an extra half star for its ambitions despite introducing some more jank of its own.)

Kudos to the boss designs though, especially later on. I'm especially fond of the Black Widow, Lobster, and final boss fights for how they make use your available space to the maximum. Yes, you fight a gigantic lobster towards the end. Brandish sort of gets the Giant Enemy Crab stamp of approval.

All that said, the original Brandish was as awesome & appropriate a successor to Xanadu's legacy as Falcom fans could have hoped for. Hell, it even reminds me of the best parts from Sorcerian and Drasle Family (aka Legacy of the Wizard). Rare is it that an ARPG this old still feels relevant to modern play-styles, from Souls-style character building to the simple but effective itch.io puzzlers made today. It's telling how only Falcom could effectively bring this series to consoles, despite Koei arguably having more resources at the time for their SNES ports. Kiya, Takahashi, and others soon working on this series would iterate on the rock-solid foundation set here. The real downer is how quickly folks turn away from the series itself because it's either funnier or more convenient to crap on the third-first-person perspective. Few ARPG-dungeon crawler hybrids are as consistent, engrossing, and replayable as this.

The studio's largely moved on to more profitable pastures, with Ys and Trails being such huge tentpole series sucking up their time and resources. My kingdom for even a simple port of Brandish: The Dark Revenant to modern platforms! And my heart to those who give this series a chance.