Remembrances of Games Past, Part #6 - Sword of Hope (Gameboy) (1990) (Kemco)

Channel:

Demiath

Subscribers:

1,590

Published on October 11, 2008 1:44:24 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcHjblnXXKM

Game:

The Sword of Hope (1989)

Duration: 7:28

10,762 views

29

As far as I know, this is the first YouTube video ever of Kemco's 1990 Gameboy RPG "Sword of Hope". The original Gameboy was the first console I owned (but not the first I played), and this game was my very first RPG (my first CRPG was "Dungeon Master 2" years later).

"Sword of Hope" is essentially a simple dungeon crawl which has much in common with both early JRPGs and Western CRPGs of the time. Its' repetitive gameplay and minimalistic graphics may not look like much today, but "Sword of Hope" was probably a very suitable introduction to RPG gaming for newcomers to the genre. Since the vast majority of early Japanese RPGs (such as Final Fantasy 1-6) were never officially released in Sweden during the NES/SNES era, many Swedish console gamers must have been as unfamiliar with turn-based RPGs as I was at the time of "Sword of Hope"'s release.

One a side note, the version of "Sword of Hope" I played had actually been translated into Swedish. This translation was probably one of the worst in gaming history. For example, the word "chest" was translated into the Swedish word for "breast", which meant that the game was full with sentences such as "Theo opens a breast and finds a Sword." Priceless...

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