This is JPN RetroAd Archive, a series exploring Japanese video game magazine advertisements.
The games shelf worked like this back then.
The whole idea of sorting by genre hadn't really taken hold yet, so an RPG could sit right next to a wrestling game, which sat right next to a quiz show, and nobody thought twice about it. That's the thought that hit me, mixing these four together at random.
1. Elfaria (Super Famicom)
An RPG With No Leveling Up and No Shopping?!
Character design by Susumu Matsushita!! (Yes — the same Matsushita whose art has been gracing Famitsu's cover for decades.) "Defeat monsters, earn money, spend it on items" — the basic RPG formula that functioned as near-law at the time — got thrown out entirely. In its place: the "Meld System," where equipment gets strengthened by attaching other items to it. Beyond that, no experience points, no currency required at all. Characters grow stronger by liberating towns that monsters have occupied. Sixteen playable characters. Music by Nariaki Saegusa, and a scenario written by Hiroshi Adachi, the writer behind the PC Engine's Tengai Makyou: Ziria.
Reception split hard at the time. Famitsu's review gave it 31 out of 40, enough for a Silver Hall of Fame nod. But a line that still circulates among player reviews reads, roughly, "garbage until you get it, genuinely fun once you do." Play it for a while and go back to read that line again, and it might be the most honest verdict this game ever got. With no XP and no money, growth running entirely through items, one reviewer went as far as calling it "possibly the ultimate hack-and-slash the Super Famicom ever got." A king finally getting re-crowned by later generations... something like that, maybe?
2. Kinnikuman: Dirty Challenger (Super Famicom)
The Familiar Trap of Manga Tie-In Fighting Games
"I'm the one with real Fighting Spirit!!" — the ad layout for an explosively popular manga adaptation, but even just glancing at the screenshots tells you this subgenre's usual dilemma is fully present here too.
Released by Yutaka on August 21, 1992, this one was developed alongside the anime Kinnikuman: Kinnikusei Oui Souda-hen, and just like the source material, it's an action game built around six superhumans throwing down for the throne.
The problem, though, was execution. The review score landed at exactly 20 out of 40. Player reactions were harsher still, with recurring complaints that button presses lagged noticeably, or that the balance was rough enough that getting caught in a joint lock basically meant giving up on the match. A beloved source material doesn't guarantee a game worthy of it — some things never change, apparently.
3. Power Sports / Quiz Tono-sama no Yabou (PC Engine)
Same Release Date, Different Fights
Both of Hudson's ads announce the exact same release date: October 10, 1992. On the left, Power Sports, a general athletics game covering track, swimming, shooting, archery, and more across eighteen events, part of the same "Power" lineage as Power League and Power Soccer. Timed to the Barcelona Olympics, it even shipped with an "Olympic Mode" — one that almost certainly never went through any official licensing (trademark enforcement around the Olympics was a lot looser back then, to be fair).
On the right, Quiz Tono-sama no Yabou, Hudson's CD-ROM port of a Capcom arcade hit: pick one of eight Sengoku-era warlords and quiz your way to unifying 38 provinces. "Otaku trivia alone won't get you through this" reads the tagline at the bottom, with a bit of an edge to it. The arcade original had already placed 7th in player popularity at that year's Gamest Awards, and the PC Engine port went all-in, casting voice actors Chisa Yokoyama, Chieko Honda, Megumi Hayashibara (♡), and Toshiyuki Morikawa to voice all 4,000 questions off the disc. Sports to warm up the body, quizzing to warm up the brain... not a bad instinct for a release-day lineup, even now.
4. Battle Master: Kyuukyoku no Senshi-tachi / Sword Maniac (Super Famicom)
Living in Street Fighter II's Shadow
1993, fighting games at the absolute peak of their boom, and Toshiba EMI — working with its in-house developer System Vision — put out two very different bets.
Battle Master, on the left, packed in features that were genuinely rare for the time: air guard, guard cancel, breakfalls, dashing. But the reason this game still gets brought up isn't the mechanics — it's Ranmaru, a female character whose design bears an uncanny resemblance to SNK's Mai Shiranui from Fatal Fury. The character designer apparently addressed it directly at some point: the pitch had originally gone to SNK first and fell through, and the two characters just happened to come out around the same window afterward. Less a case of one side copying the other, maybe, and more a sign the whole fighting-game industry was reaching for the same image that year.
Sword Maniac, on the right: a sword-wielding detective named Gia, fighting through 2047 New York in a side-scrolling action game. Stages run as standard action; boss fights switch into one-on-one duels. It didn't stay a domestic-only release, either — it went out in North America through Activision and in Europe through Sony Imagesoft under the title X-Kaliber 2097, complete with the setting's year quietly bumped from 2047 to 2097 for the overseas release.😅
Both ads carry enough visual polish that either could've passed for a page out of an anime magazine that same year. And neither game quite managed to climb over the wall Capcom had already built.
Japan's games market back then was almost certainly smaller than it is now, and yet everyone inside it kept betting in wildly different directions. Some bets paid off, some didn't... but it was never a boring shelf to stand in front of, was it?
All promotional images used in this review are sourced from early-1990s video game magazine advertisements for review and commentary purposes.
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