“Go forth Jim and save Fairyland!”

Hydlide is a name that I feel like I’ve known for years, maybe even a decade at this point. It’s a classic series in Japan with many games to play. Though for people like me, I just never had access to a game like this with the exception of one version that’ll talk about in a bit. I’m really glad some of these older PC-88 games are getting ports to the Switch, giving me a chance to try them. This review will mostly be about the game itself but I will chime in times about this rerelease when I feel necessary. Firstly however, I should talk about the elephant in the room and how the reception for Hydlide is over here.

I’m going to be blunt, Hydlide being hated over here is an understatement. I’m not really sure when the hate for Hydlide really became a thing. I’d like to think it was probably when it first came out. If you didn’t know, we got an NES version of the old Famicom release in 1989. It was released so late here that Japan already got Hydlide 3 published by Namcot on the Famicom. With The Legend of Zelda being a couple of years old by then, it’s hard not to blame people for hating it. Even the Hardcore Gaming 101 article for Hydlide says “it’s largely been deemed a joke by the English speaking audience.” and he’s right too. I’m not sure how much it influenced people’s opinions but popular Youtubers AVGN and Projared have made videos about the game over a decade ago talking about all of the issues the NES game had. It even still gets reviews from time to time. I even found one review from a few years ago that compared the game to a bad mobile game. Though these are all on the NES port, I’ve been told it’s inferior to the originals which I’ll take their word for as I’ve barely ever gotten far in that version. Other Hydlide games have come out here like Super Hydlide for the Mega Drive (a port of Hydlide 3) and Virtual Hydlide for the Saturn. Regardless of their reception, the original is almost never appreciated here outside of the usual comment of letting the audience know it was before Zelda and is old.

Enough of that, now about the actual game. Hydlide doesn’t really have much of a story, only really given out before you start your game. The setting is a land called Fairyland which is protected by three magic jewels. It was all going so well and peacefully until a vicious creature with the name Varalys stole all of the jewels and even worse, turned the ruler named Princess Ann into three fairies that are now split across the land. The land was overridden by Varalys’ own creatures and nowhere was safe. A knight by the name of Jim has had enough of the suffering the land received and he sets off on a quest to recover the jewels, turn Ann back to normal, and defeat Varalys.

To play Hydlide, you’ll probably need to look at the how to play section first that’ll give you some helpful advice on some moments of the game and just the general stuff like how to attack. This game uses bump combat similar to the Ys series but pressing you have a button to change your mode to DEFEND or ATTACK. Defend is good if you don’t want to take too much damage from an enemy while you’re trying to find someplace safe but makes most things a pain to kill and not worth doing for that purpose. Using attack will help with that but you have to be careful as it can lead to you taking a lot of damage. Try to hit them from a spot that makes you safe, the back is usually the way you wanna go. Going head on will a lot of the time will make Jim feel pain. This game is called an “Active Role Playing Game” so you also start off very weak. Before you go on exploring, it’s recommended you grind about two levels before you do so. Leveling up is a slow process but it can feel satisfying to hear that level up noise and seeing your stats go higher and higher. By the end, it’s cool to see how much you’ve grown since the adventure started.

So once you get that settled, the game actually gives you no directions on where to go, so you’ll have to explore this big (at the time) world to find items to help you further and further. You’ll have to journey through many dungeons crawling with tougher enemies and early on you’ll actually be taking damage being in these locations. This is also the case outside with stuff like poison, sand, forests, and water. Not to worry though as staying still in grass will heal you so try to take advantage of it at all costs but also make sure you don’t look away as enemies will sometimes be on you so try to be in defend mode or kill enemies that get close.If you are in a safe spot, you can also turn the game speed to 2x or even 4x to make the process go faster. You also can save anywhere using the quicksave though if you are playing it on a real computer then you can also just save anywhere on it too with a press of a key. Just be careful not to use it in a place where it’ll be unwinnable and make multiple saves just in case.

Now you may think this all sounds boring and not interesting and to many it is. Though for me there’s something satisfying about exploring the land to find new items. I especially love it when you get a new item and the game goes BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP as your new item goes at the bottom of the screen. When you finally get a good chance to save, it’ll always be yours and you can continue to do new things once you obtain them. You can even find a new sword and shield to improve your attack and defense. Getting most items isn’t too hard but sometimes it can be tricky like how the key is in a room with a lot of empty chests. The second jewel is also in a dungeon that seems to be random when it spawns, I probably wouldn’t have realized if I didn’t get lucky and see it spawned once and made me wonder how to get it until I finally got it to spawn again when I was lucky.

There’s also the process of finding the three fairies as they are also hidden. The first one is actually one screen under the one you start on where it’s hidden in a random tree but be careful as wasps will come out of the wrong ones and will kill you quickly. There’s another fairy in a tree later on but these trees are evil and will kill you quickly if it’s not the right one, they even move making it hard to dodge them. The last one was the first time I had to use a guide for help. You’re supposed to kill a wizard but what I didn’t realize was you need to have the fireballs the wizard has hit you five times and then you can kill him to get the last fairy. Once you do that, you’re off on the final bits of the game.

The last parts can be very hard. You now need to fight a dragon that can only be defeated in defend mode. Though this rerelease does give you that tip in the scene selection if you can’t figure it out. It’ll take a bit to beat him especially when you need to heal but he’ll be pretty easy otherwise. You then notice the water has been drained and you can get the last jewel and even an item to revive you from death but it’s best if you save it for the final boss. Now I had to just grind a little more and it was off to see Varalys. He’s really hard and will kill you instantly if you go into attack mode. Defend mode also does nothing leaving me confused, thankfully I hadn’t missed an item because you need to go down and destroy the middle grave and finally you can start hitting him with some occasional heal breaks and finally Varalys is defeated. The fairies reunite to be Princess Ann and Fairyland is saved. You’ll get a congratulations screen and then it takes you back to the very beginning to load a new game if you choose to play again. Man it felt satisfying to actually beat the game for the first time.

So, are there any issues I had that I forgot to bring up? Well there’s a couple. For one, the movement could be better as sometimes it’s easy to get caught up on walls. It’s never fully clear when to let go of a direction. This can make going through dungeons a bit of a pain at times especially when you’re low on HP. The rewind feature is not really as good as you can find on an emulator, I assume it’s the same one used for the Valis collections that D4 also had their name on. There was also this weird issue where loading a quicksave sometimes doesn’t register inputs for the first half a second or just locks your controls all together. Though that second one only happened like twice in my playthrough and it’s an easy fix. The framerate can also go low at times if there are a lot of enemies which brings up my next point, the presentation.

To be honest, I really don’t like the music here as it can be a little annoying and the speed of it changes depending on the framerate as well. Though it was never too annoying that I played the game in silence. It also doesn’t use the off brand Indiana Jones theme as that was from Hydlide II. Like I said already, some sound effects are pretty cool to hear which feels like an odd compliment to give ngl. I also like the music that plays when you get the ending because I feel like I’ve done a big accomplishment in my life. The sound is also kind of weird because this game has a scene select to just drop you into important moments like defeating the Vampire, finding the shield, or even seeing the ending but the sound is at a lower pitch. I really don’t get why this happens. I should also note the scans for stuff like the cover and manual are pretty good too but the options in the gallery are a little limited and are also in Japanese only which is fine.

This was a very fun thing to try out. I’ve always wanted to play old Japanese computer games and this one didn’t disappoint. At first I felt like I shouldn’t be spending $6.50 on something so infamous in the US but even with a couple of moments I needed a guide, I still just had fun. Maybe I’m just insane but I liked the experience and wouldn’t even mind replaying it someday as it’s also not a long game. I wouldn’t mind trying Hydlide II someday if they ever port it but I’m unsure if that’ll happen. In fact I would like to review more of these if people were interested (except currently Xanadu because I doubt I’d beat it). If you feel like commenting then you can tell me if you’d enjoy that. Not everyone will enjoy Hydlide especially with the awful reception it has gotten over the years but for me, I appreciate what it did for the time. I don’t even wanna use the term it aged poorly because I hate using that term and cringe when my old reviews use it. It’s also not too expensive and you don’t need to learn Japanese to play this game. That’s all I have to say for now, thank you for reading!