Sorcerian

About Sorcerian

Sorcerian (1987) is Nihon Falcom's fifth Dragon Slayer game, a side-scrolling action RPG for the PC-8801 in which a party of four ages, works and dies across fifteen self-contained quests and add-on scenario packs.

Sorcerian in Depth

The player creates up to ten characters and takes up to four at a time into a party. Each can be a fighter, wizard, elf or dwarf, and can take one of over 60 jobs, from clown to exorcist, each changing strength, intelligence, protection, magic resistance, vitality, dexterity and karma and what equipment can be used. The fifteen scenarios that come with the game can be played in any order. The whole party is controlled at once: the members run in a line, jump in sequence and attack together, trailing the leader like the Options in Gradius, and some puzzles need a particular class, such as a strong character to force open a door.

Time matters. Characters start at 16, a year passes with each new scenario, and more passes in town while they train or enchant items. Humans grow old at 60, dwarves at 100 and elves at 200, and once old a character may die permanently at any time. The aging system was designed with add-on scenario packs in mind, and Falcom, Amorphous and Quasar Soft all released extra scenarios for the PC-8801 version.

Making Sorcerian

Nihon Falcom released Sorcerian for the NEC PC-8801 in 1987 as the fifth game in its Dragon Slayer line, then ported it to the PC-9801, PC-88VA, Sharp X1 Turbo and MSX2, where it was titled Dragon Slayer V: Sorcerian. Its episodic format, extended through scenario packs, was new. Console versions with different content followed on the Mega Drive by Sega, the PC Engine CD by Victor Musical Industries and later the Dreamcast, and Falcom released Sorcerian Forever (1997) and Sorcerian Original (2000) for Windows.

In Computer Gaming World, Scorpia liked its fifteen separate small quests for their variety and noted that "this is not just hack-and-slash, as there are puzzles to be solved along the way", though she disliked the magic system and warned that some would find the arcade-style action irksome. Games International thought it was more an arcade game than an RPG.