About Hydlide

When Hydlide was released in 1989 in the US it surely had a big problem. Everybody expected another game like Zelda, but Hydlide's game design was already very old, considering the Japanese Famicom version was out three years earlier and even that was just a slightly modified port of the original Japanese homecomputer version from 1984. So what qualified Hydlide to be recognized by many as one of the worst Action/RPG ever? The graphics are not well done, but one could argue that its still an improvement over the original homecomputer version. The music is very repetitive. And I mean very very repetitive. After spending lots of dumb leveling up time (another negative point of the game) the music makes you go mad. Well, at least you can turn it off. Besides the leveling up there is not much to do except searching treasure chests which are hidden all over the 25-screen "small" world and in some of the mini-dungeons. You have to rescue some fairies, beat a dragon and finally the end boss. Problem is, there are no NPCs which give you clues about what you actually have to do or where to search. So the game can become very frustrating if you don't have a walkthrough. And if you have one you will instantly see how small the game actually is.