Lennus

This post is part of a collection on Games.

After writing this I played Lennus briefly and unfortunately found it pretty disappointing; see my comments here.

Lennus is an RPG for the Super Nintendo with a remarkable art style, battle system, UI, and setting.

While it was released in English as Paladin's Quest, a spectacularly terrible translation made the game hard to play and it sunk quietly into obscurity. Even without translation issues the original release earned a few dedicated fans, managed to spawn a sequel, and then just sort of disappeared.

The trailer below goes over many of the interesting features; to list a few:

  • menus can be operated with one hand, using just the d-pad (you push the same direction to confirm)
  • spells use HP, there is no separate mana system
  • there are roughly 30 NPC mercenaries you can recruit, each with their own attack strategy
  • when attacking you choose which body part to use: head, left hand, right hand, body, belt (?), or feet

Oh, and about that English translation - to point out just two issues:

  1. The English title is Paladin's Quest but the game has no Paladins
  2. Japanese character limits for items (~4 letters) were not changed, requiring looking up abbreviations to understand your inventory (update: turns out this was still an issue in Japanesetoo, only slightly ameliorated by being able to fit more in less space.)

I've managed to get a hold of the two guides as well as the game and manual, so I'll post more interesting bits as I find them. Ψ