Nostalgia of Magic

Developed by the unknown developer IKGN Soft and published by KOGA, Nostalgia of Magic certainly looks old for a 1997 game, even by Korean DOS game standard. Apparently emulating the visual style of the first Ys games, with tiny sprites and sparse coloring, it rather looks like a late 1980s home computer game. Even in cutscenes, which are zoomed in and show much more detail than the regular game graphics, the 8-bit style is preserved. Only during combat, which is not at all like Ys but held in typical JRPG fashion, the characters are replaced by much more realisticly pixeled sprites. Oddly, only one half of the unusually wide battlefield is displayed at any given time, with the camera scrolling abck and forth during attacks.

The game design feels equally archaic. The different regions of the game world are accessed in fairly linear order, but it got the same kind of undocumented hidden passages, unspecific aims and inconspicious event triggers as the classics. Other than most 8-bit games, though, enemy encounters can be seen on the map beforehand and therefore be avoided, but once they see the player party, they hunt them down relentlessly.