NES Games I (and sort of my friends?) Beat #56: Swords and Serpents 

It’s no secret I’m a fan of old school, turn based role playing games. As a fan of this genre there’s not a lot of selection on NES. You have your Dragon Warrior Quadrilogy and your Final Fantasy 1 and that’s it for most people. While there are others like Might and Magic, Advance Dungeons and Dragons: Pool of Radiance, Ghost Lion, and Dungeon Magic, outside of action RPGS like Crystalis and Faxanadu that’s about it. Enter 1990’s Swords and Serpents, developed by Enterplay and published by Acclaim. It’s bit of an oddity in more than a few ways.

RPGs weren’t a huge genre here yet in 1990 but something like this is a bit more approachable to the average gamer. Gone are towns filled with fetch quests and shops, rather the whole game takes place in a singular dungeon with 16 floors of chaos to explore. While there are shops and helpful monks and clues scattered throughout the floors the pacing in this game is not to be bum rushed by all the villagers with exposition instead you, the player, is given the freedom to go where you want, when you want. As long as you survive the random battles, there’s no fear in jumping up a few floors other than how comfortable you are doing so. Also the freedom to pick what kind of team you want at the start between a theif, warrior, and mage and any combination of those classes. 

Like in most RPGs these random battles give you experience but not just to who finishes the enemy off or whoever is still alive, no your party has a collective level. They shift the focus more on the gear you find and the stronger gear you have, the stronger your individual stats are. This incentivizes exploration even more so as not only do you want to explore even nook of the level for stairs to advance but also to find all the awesome hidden items as well as spells. There’s also warp zones and sometime switches you need to find to advance. As the levels progress, their design gets even more challenging to navigate as the game adds almost puzzle tier elements with some of the later spells you obtain like the ability to walk through walls. It is a little obscure to know which walls to walk through but in the modern day of the internet I don’t hold it against this game as Zelda has plenty of that too.

The presentation in this game is really impressive for NES as well, think the dungeon crawling segments of like Dungeon Magic (a game released much later I might add) but done so much better with a handy map that fills in as you go. The animation on the sprites of the characters and in battle are really detailed too and are impressive in their own right. The music is good, a bit repetitive given there’s only 3 tracks but at least their pretty good.

Battles are standard attack, heal, spells, all basic stuff. They can get a tad bit repetitive but for its time it certainly could have been way more grindy. Mostly you’ll find yourself watching your health and then mashing A until the enemies are gone but that’s really most RPGs for ya. They can seem a bit boring when you take advantage of the insane 4 player feature and allow everyone to take on a character as a well due to the warriors and thieves just mashing A, not realizing or caring that the mages have been saving them from death countless times. All the intensity of battle is thrust onto the mages because their actually engage in what’s happening on screen. This is why my recommendation is two players that way you can both control a mage and a fighting class or just go in solo like I did after my friends lost interest in the game. It’s not as easy as people might make it seem either as if a character dies you have to take them to a temple to heal them, basically this game’s inn and church rolled into one. These are only located on certain floors though (in intervals of 5) and thus the tension is real when your characters are low on health and MP. If you die you start again at your last save (which can be done anywhere but it warps you to the last temple you hit up) but there is a catch, there’s no save feature in the game, instead you get a series of passwords, one for each character and then a game code. In the modern days of cell phones, just take a picture of each. This still means if you die you have to reinput all these codes to start from where you last saved which is a pain as it takes a bit of time however it’s not a big issue as this game isn’t too unforgiving. I don’t think I ever managed to die as even when you low on health you can just flee battles and hope it works long enough to get back. But will it? That’s the tension. 

The nice thing is Swords and Serpents will allow you to choose how many players will join at the start and continue any previous game with any amount of players, another level of freedom to how and when you can play the game, it’s not situational, I can play it by myself of with friends. It’s this kind of freedom that modern game design doesn’t always account for. This would be a pretty standard game if not for the freedom it provides the player. The ability to completely take the game at your own pace and do it your way is that Zelda feeling that we’ve been missing in games for so long and it’s crazy to see that great level of game design implemented here. When I analyze this game more in depth in my video review of it I’ll delve more into why these aspects of freedom are truly what I’m looking for in games and why Final Fantasy 13 has failed so miserably by violating all the rules games like this set up.

There’s not much to complain on here, this is a great RPG with fantastic presentation in terms of graphics and design. The game’s sense of exploration and freedom are its strongest suite and while the battles are pretty standard fair they do the trick. Aside from the password system and the serviceable but lazy 4 player implementation this an absolute gem and hey for once a cheap obscure game! It can be had for around $5 and for the 20 or so hours you could get out of it I’d say it’s well worth the price. I’m giving Swords and Serpents an 8.7/10.