A Hydlide History
Virtual Hydlide was released in 1995 and is the last game in the Hydlide series. There hasn’t been a game in the series since and people often blame that on this. Of course, that’s ignoring the history surrounding Hydlide and the company that made it.Hydlide is a bit of a punching bag in the West. If you’ve heard of the series, it was probably through the blue-shirted professional or that angry nerd. Both had notably unfavorable opinions of the game. However, the series was very popular in Japan, with famed developers like Hideo Kojima and Hideki Kamiya describing how Metal Gear Solid V and Scalebound were heavily inspired by Hydlide. More specifically, they were inspired by the original release in 1984 on the NEC series of home computers.
Hydlide on the PC-88 was created by Tokihiro Naito as his directorial debut for T & E Soft, inc. Naito was inspired by JRPGs and no Western titles like Ultima. The game follows Jim, a knight in Fairyland who must rescue the princess from the evil demon Varalys. Jim journeys through the land, kills slimes, learns magic, rescues fairies, and fights a dragon to recover the princess. It’s simple, sure. But for the early 80s, it was your average RPG. The game was popular enough to sell over one million copies on Japanese PCs.
This led to a sequel the following year, Hydlide II: Shine of Darkness. This was a grand step up from the first with a morality system, town, markets, and selectable equipment. All of this was very fresh for the series.
So far, both games were released only on computers until a special version of the first for the Famicom was released in 1986. This was Hydlide Special, and three years later, it would be localized for the NES. This is the version of Hydlide that everyone in the West is familiar with. It is a boring adventure game with terrible graphics, terrible music, and a terrible save system.
For a game that was released in 1989, it is hardly comparable to contemporaries like The Legend of Zelda, Dragon Quest, or Ys. These games are often compared to Hydlide. However, critics frequently forget that not only was the PC release of Hydlide published before these games, but Hydlide Special came out on Famicom before most of them, too. By the time North America received Hydlide, it was over five years old. It’s unfair to compare the game to the others when it was their predecessor and not their successor.
Super Hydlide: Winner of Most Legible Logo of 1990.
Late 1987 saw the release of Hydlide 3: The Space Memories, or Super Hydlide, as it was localized in the West in 1990. Tokihiro Naito always intended Hydlide to be a trilogy and never wanted a fourth entry. It wasn’t until 1995, with the backing of SEGA, that a fourth game in the series was released. However, this wouldn’t be a brand-new game. Naito’s insistence on a trilogy ensured that the next game would only be a remake. Which brings us back to the main subject, Virtual Hydlide on the SEGA Saturn.
Developing an Old Tale Anew
Reportedly, SEGA saw this golf game and decided that T & E had what it took to make something 3D for the Saturn.
Tokihiro Naito returned to direct the development with a team totaling about fourteen people. The game features two full-motion videos for the intro and outro. Jim and Princess Iina are played by live actors, but who they are is unknown. Most likely, white actors living in Japan. It is a similar case to games like Resident Evil or Zelda’s Adventure. Games from this era rarely credited the live actors because it was a new technique. It’s similar to how early video games never credited their developers.
The game was published in Japan on April 28, 1995. Compared to the first game, it performed very poorly. Famitsu gave it a score of 27 out of 40. For those unfamiliar with Famitsu’s scoring system, a 30 out of 40 would be considered subpar, let alone 27.
ATLUS Shrugged
ATLUS West was a strange company from the late 1980s to the mid-2010s. The company did not exist to localize ATLUS games from Japan but rather to publish Japanese games that would have never received a Western release without their support. Virtual Hydlide is one such case.ATLUS' website cerca 1995 showing off their Top Three Sexiest Characters.
Usually, for these imported games, ATLUS West provides a phone hotline for game tips and strategy guides. Even the Virtual Hydlide manual dedicates its final page to an order form for a guide alongside info on how to contact them through phone, fax, or AOL.
It feels important to mention ATLUS West’s work on this game’s publication because it would have never come to the West without their help. They put some effort into marketing and demoed the game in magazines up until the release. It was released in the U.S. in September 1995 and in Europe in December 1995. Like its Japanese release, it received similar critical derision.
Entering a World of 40 Billion Possibilities
Fairy Tales in Fairyland
Virtual Hydlide’s story takes place in Fairyland, or Dream Land, as the U.S. manual calls it. Princess Iina is the ruler of this realm who uses crystals to protect it. One day the Prince of Darkness Varalys, or Varis, attacks the country and covers it with darkness. In desperation, the princess is split into three fairies and scattered throughout the kingdom to ensure Varalys doesn’t conquer the land. Now it falls into your hands, Jim, to rescue the princess and kill Varalys before he destroys the world.Jim starts out his quest by searching a graveyard for a crucifix. He then uses it to kill the Vampire who watches over the Super Magic Lamp. Jim uses the lamp to see in the dark dungeons of Fairyland. Soon, he finds the Spectacles of Truth in the Trial Dungeon, allowing him to see through hidden doorways. Using them to search the Ruins, Jim finds the Fire Amulet. This amulet allows him to resist fire, which is helpful in his fight with the Mad Dragon in the Volcanic Cave. After becoming a dragonslayer, Jim finds the Flute of Zaldus on its corpse. The flute allows him to open up the Seal Dungeon. Inside lies the Evil Mage guarding the first fairy and the Tears of the Earth. The tears cause the Lost Castle to appear from the lake. Jim journeys through the confusing castle until he happens upon the layer of the Eel. Killing this serpent gives him the final fairy. As the castle collapses, the fairies gather to transport Jim to the final dungeon, the Fortress of Varalys. They give him a Fairy Crest as proof that he can confirm the existence of fairies.
No, really, that's all it does.
Here, Jim fights against the revived Vampire and Evil Mage before confronting the Dark Prince himself. Finally besting the demon, the fairies join together to form the princess. The demon’s magic dissolves, and the land returns to its former beauty. So ends Virtual Hydlide.
Pretty simple story, right? Almost too simple. There is hardly any indication as to what the plot is in the video game. Most of the prologue information comes from the manual which is inaccurate to the game. Princess Iina’s name comes from the Japanese. The manual states that it’s Anna, but seeing how it got both Varalys and Fairyland wrong, I highly doubt that that name is accurate. Also, the manual mentions that the Elder Fairy split the princess into fairies. We never meet said elder in the game. All of this makes me conclude that ATLUS made up much of the story in the manual. That, or there was a sufficient disconnect between the game translators, the manual writers, and the Japanese team that made all these inaccuracies happen.
Also, how do you know what to do if the story is so simple? Didn’t I mention two fairies in the summary when there are supposed to be three? Don’t worry. These questions will be answered in the next section. By myself, of course, because Virtual Hydlide doesn’t ever bother with explanations.
Moving Like a Tank in a Land of Wonder
When you start the game, you are asked to form a world either by using a randomly generated code or by entering your own code. Either way, you start the game in an open field of Fairyland. Your gameplay experience will be partially determined by what difficulty you select. Easy gives you a completely filled map and an indicator of your next objective. Normal gives you an incomplete map but keeps the indicator. Hard removes both. You also start out with a set of leather armor, a ring of power, and the Fairy Crest if you play on easy and a club if you play on normal. The hard mode gives you nothing.Jim is controlled with tank controls on the D-pad. He sidesteps with the shoulder buttons.
The A button brings up the shield if you have one. B and C are attack buttons. Jim has three types of attacks: weak, strong, and special. The B button is weak, C is strong, and special attacks are only usable with certain weapons when you press B and C together. The X button is the interaction button, and holding it allows you to turn faster and sprint. You can also back step-dodge if you press it while holding back on the D-pad. Y opens the map, both the world map and the dungeons. You can rotate Jim on the map screen which makes navigating dungeons and dodging enemies easier. Z opens the status screen.
The status screen shows Jim’s level, the attack value of all three attacks, location, world code, the game’s difficulty, and Jim’s defense, whether he is holding up a shield or not. It also leads to the inventory, save system, and options.
Getting Stronger with Equipment and Levels
The inventory is one of the most awkward parts of the game. Every item outside key quest items must be used before Jim knows what it is. This is especially fun because Jim often picks up cursed items, scrolls that turn other items into plants, or notably weaker equipment. You won’t know what each item is unless you use a Scroll of Judgement or use it, usually to your hindrance. Luckily, repeat items do not need to be identified.When I started playing, I had no idea how the game's mechanics worked so here is a video of me getting paralyzed, accidentally opening the map, cursing myself, and turning my sword into an herb.
Jim has a carry weight and an equipment weight. Every item in the game has a weight in kilograms, and if the total weight of the inventory goes above the carry weight, Jim begins to move sluggishly. You can not equip more than the equipment weight, meaning you must stick to light armor and weapons for the early game. However, no matter what, the inventory only has space for about twenty items in total.
Jim has a level that is displayed in the status menu. It only affects his max health points, carry weight, and equipment weight. It does not level up with experience points. Instead, Jim levels up after every dungeon for a total of 800 health points with level 9.
You collect equipment in dungeons, but sometimes, they have a +1 or +2 indicator next to their name. This means that the equipment has an extra level. All equipment can level up to whatever Jim’s level is. Using Stones of Fighter levels up your equipped weapon, and Rings of Protection levels up your equipped armor and shield.
How to Not Die
There are a couple pink crystals scattered throughout the world. They teleport you to the next crystal, but you can’t control where you go, so they are mostly useless.Status ailments are a problem in this game. Every once in a while, an enemy will afflict you with either poison, paralysis, or horror. Poison will drain your health, paralysis will leave you on the floor, and horror will prevent your inputs from registering correctly. Another ailment is Curse, which you can only get from items. Luckily, you can use potions, herbs, and even your weapons to cure the ailments. The Magic Sword cures poison, and if you get cursed by an item, the Master Sword will cure you. Also, the Scroll of Herb turns whatever you select into a medical herb, including cursed items you have equipped. In other words, if you have any problems, turn them into herbs.
The classic Hydlide staple of standing in place to slowly recover health returns too.
How to Get Stuck and Lose Hours of Progress
Jim starts with an indicator on the minimap, telling him where to go if you are playing on normal or easy. Every time you complete a dungeon, the indicator moves to the next one. This is the only way you know how to progress, as the game has no explanations in the form of dialogue, texts, or quests. There are also key items that the game does not tell you about. For example, the second fairy is found in the Fairy Forest. It has an icon on the world map, but you are never told to visit it because that would make sense, and Virtual Hydlide is above that.
Also, there are three gems found inside the dungeons that are needed to suppress Varalys’ power when you fight them. Without them, he will turn invisible and you can’t hit him. The gems and the extra fairy are needed at the end of the game, but it never tells you this. As such, there is a real chance that you either missed one or all of the gems or the fairy in the forest and got locked out of the ending. Your only hope is to reload an old save file if you have one.
High Scores in a RPG
Virtual Hydlide has a points system that works in two ways. The first one is that the points are used in the traditional form to track high scores. On the main menu is a rankings board where you can see previous high scores. However, points are also a currency. Certain weapons, like the Dark Sword, use points to fuel their special attack, and there is a shop where Jim can buy potions, scrolls, and previously acquired equipment. The shop is a great place to get Rings of Protection or Stones of Fighter, but they are costly. The points are deducted from the total through both ways, and the game does not reflect your total score without purchases or special attacks. As such, the rankings are redundant as a player who progressed only as far as the first dungeon will likely have a similar score to a player who made it to the penultimate dungeon.You earn points by killing enemies, progressing the main quest, and sometimes in the form of gold that can be found on the ground or in chests.
There is a continue system that also defeats the rankings. When you die, you have two options: continue from the dungeon you are in with the same inventory or load a save file. Either way, if the player scores high enough, they can input their name into the rankings. Since continuing does not reduce the score in any way, the ranking screen is filled with several high scores from the same save since it does not override older scores.
The only notable part of the scoreboard is that the player gets several bonuses that sky-rocket their score upon completing the game. Outside of the ending, there are no bonuses.
Graphically Abysmal
The player has no control over the camera. It stays at Jim’s back the entire time, and the closest thing to control is slowly turning by pressing left or right. Despite the lack of control, the camera can’t help but swing into Jim’s body in almost every dungeon. Most of the time, it is hard to judge distance from objects you are trying to interact with and enemies you are trying to kill. This is also because the game uses very few 3D models. All of the objects and characters are digitized models or actors.The game has a terrible frames-per-second limit of about ten. Sure, it would be unreasonable to expect 144 fps from a game this old, but the game regularly drops to single digits in dungeons as the concept of walls is too much for the engine. The low resolution combined with the low fps makes it difficult to see what is happening on the screen or what Jim is doing. Also, the game has a very low draw distance. This makes sense as it is a 3D game on a system not designed for it. SEGA believed the fifth generation would be defined by 2D titles, so they built the Saturn with those in mind. Trees, enemies, and items will pop into view regularly, as there isn’t a Silent Hill-esque fog to cover the land. However, with how gray the world is, they probably intended for there to be one.
JIM.
Wonderful Jim art done by WechselnI remember playing through the first Hydlide in Summer years ago. Due in part to a walkthrough, I completed the game in less than a day. Ever since then, I’ve had a bit of a love for the protagonist, Jim.
That is his actual name, not a localization addition. It is such a boring and unheroic name that it has sat with me for years. Whenever I want to be lazy and not create a personality in games with character-creators, I will use Male Preset #1 and name him Jim. He has been in practically every RPG I’ve ever played when the protagonist doesn’t have an official name. So you better believe that it was hilarious when I looked at this game for the first time and saw that Jim looked like this:
He really is the most generic white boy ever made. I love it. He is a real-life Male Preset #1.
Maybe I’m just weird to be obsessed with this guy. But he will always have a place in my heart for how stupidly great he is.
Extra Bits
These are some interesting parts of the game that aren’t worthy of their own section but are too weird to go unmentioned.The manual and ATLUS West’s website state that the game has over 40 billion possible world combinations. You would believe that the long world code that is generated at the start would be used to randomly generate the world and its dungeons, but that is only half of the story. The game has twenty possible designs for the world map alongside seven of the dungeons (the Fortress of Varalys always has the same design.) This means that there are twenty possible maps for seven areas. The number of possible worlds would then be 20^8 or 25.6 billion possibilities. I have no idea what the line “With over 40 billion possible combinations, it’s almost impossible to play the same game twice.” could be referring to.
The game features mostly the same cast of enemies as the first Hydlide, which means that Kobold returns. Virtual Hydlide’s Kobolds are as tall as Jim’s waist, green, wear rags, and carry around sharp sticks. You would expect them to be goblins, but they aren’t. They also almost always take two hits to kill and throw rocks at you when you’re far away from them. When you’re close, they use their stick. Out of every enemy in the game, I died to these annoying bastards the most.
I have nightmares of these ghouls chasing me, laughing at me from the dark.
The vampire boss only needs you to wear the crucifix to hit him in the first encounter. He doesn’t need it in the second fight but does bring bats with him. Either way, the boss is incredibly easy since he is supposed to teleport around the arena and throw fireballs at you but is easily stun-locked. Because of that, here are two videos of me beating him like a pimp looking for money.
There is a set of ultimate armor and sword. The Sword of Light is found in the Lost Castle and has a special attack that doesn’t cost points. The ultimate armor is the Fairy Armor, which is found hidden behind a false wall in the Ruins. Finally, the Fairy Shield is found in the Sealed Dungeon. The dungeon has four levels, but the shield is located on the third one behind a mine cart ride. For the life of me, I could never find the shield after hours of looking for it. I tried to check and see if this was a problem unique to me and got nothing. The timer at the top doesn’t show it because after three hours, I decided to just reload the save and admit defeat.
Because the game doesn’t use 3D models for characters, every once in a while, an enemy will pop out of a wall. They’re on the other side. They’re just popping by to say hello.
A skeleton pops in on the right to see how his buddies are doing. They aren't doing too well.
"Congratulations"
The game ends with little fanfare. Sure, the princess and the land are restored, but all you get at the end is a measly “Congratulations.” This is actually how Hydlide Special ends on the NES. In a way, that is precisely what’s wrong with this game.It is ultimately Hydlide, an outdated game with little story. It was fine for the first game to have little to no story. It was a computer RPG in the early eighties. But by the nineties, RPGs had drastically improved in story and visuals. Games like Final Fantasy VI and Crono Trigger had been released by that point and proved just how superior RPGs could be in this new era. Virtual Hydlide came out later and on more potent hardware, yet it is notably worse.
As I was playing the game, I couldn’t help but be bored by the lack of backstory. For example, the Flute of Zaldus. Why was it named that? Who is Zaldus? Why does it open the Sealed Dungeon? Did Zaldus seal said dungeon? Why did the Mad Dragon have it? All these questions are answered in the next episode of NEVER.
What about the bosses? The vampire and the evil mage have no names, yet they talk to you before you fight them. Granted, no one has a clue what they are saying, so they might just be telling you their names. That or explaining all the lore that the game never provides.
I can't tell if he is saying his name or Goku. Maybe Goku is his name.
Another problem is exploration. There is none. The game directs you exactly where to go 90% of the time. This means that the open world isn’t a playground like the first game but an awkward liminal space that only slows you down. The only exploration is in the dungeons. Yet it feels like the game’s twenty designs per dungeon ensures that each one is more boring than unique to each playthrough.
Where are They Now?
Virtual Hydlide is the last Hydlide game. But that isn’t because it was so bad that it bankrupted the company. Tokihiro Naito always wanted three games, and that’s ultimately what he got. He still works in the video game industry to this day, with his most recent project being a director of Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection.T & E Soft, Inc. was formed in 1982 by Ysuo Yoshikawa, who named the company after his brothers Toshiro and Eiji. Though the company did its best, it stopped making video games 1997, two years after Virtual Hydlide. The company was shut down not too long after. Right now, the rights to Hydlide are owned by D4 Enterprise Co., Ltd. It’s one of those companies that only exists to gather as many IPs as possible, like Embracer Group AB. In other words, the only way we’ll see Hydlide again is in a game compilation once every decade.
It’s a shame. Sure, Hydlide wasn’t great, but it deserved a better fate than this. In a way, this is how every video game IP will end up. Consumed by a conglomerate to be repackaged and sold to us again for nostalgia. Hydlide will probably live on in the hearts of the Japanese who grew up playing the trilogy. But Virtual Hydlide will probably remain what it is now. A game only meant to be mocked by enraged video game geeks or the subject of retrospectives written by people with too much free time. But I wouldn’t know anything about that last part.
Do I recommend the game? No. It’s boring. If you want to play a Hydlide game, play Super Hydlide. It is the best in the series by every metric. Enjoy that, if you really need to get your Hydlide fix. Other than that, play The Legend of Zelda or Ys and just pretend the game is more annoying to play than it actually is and you'll pretty much simulate what the Hydlide experience.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Wechseln for the lovely artwork of Jim. There is hardly any fan art of the guy on the internet so it was very kind of him to make some.I would also recommend reading Cassidy of Bad Game Hall of Fame's article on Virtual Hydlide not only because it was a major source and inspiration for this but because it is far better than anything I could have done.
I would also like to thank falsehead from GameFaqs for the walkthrough guide on this game. Without it, this article would have probably taken another week.
