Game #216: Courageous Perseus (1984)

While playing Courageous Perseus I was reminded of a bitter truth; that I’m just not as good at action and platform games as I’d like to be. I was able to persevere and beat the game Moria (a very large dungeon crawler made in 1975 for the PLATO system – a distinction not many can claim) and yet I find myself struggling mightily to advance beyond a certain point in this game.

Courageous Perseus is one of the very first action RPGs (which is actually a particular category of games) from Japan. It was released in the same month as Dragon Slayer, and one month before Hydlide. I have not yet attempted to play the former but I did just recently play the latter. I found Hydlide to be a very difficult game as well, yet I was able to persevere and reach the end. I wish I could say the same of this particular game. Courageous Perseus was developed and published by Cosmos Computer and released in 1984 for the PC-88 and FM-7 and then in 1985 for MSX and Sharp X1.

When the game begins Perseus starts with 2000 hit points which are persistently drained at the rate of 1 point per second. Enemies are destroyed by running into them while keeping the Space bar on the keyboard pressed. Sounds simple right? Wrong! The problem here is two-fold as you’ll soon discover. In the screenshot found above, Perseus has attack and defense values. These values both start at zero and then increase with every slain enemy. Almost all of the enemies are invincible to Perseus except one. Perseus can only defeat the light blue soldiers at the start of the game. Once you get your attack and defense values high enough, you can begin to attack and affect the next enemy. The wrinkle here is the game never lets you know which enemy you’ll be able to attack next, so then it becomes a matter of trial and error. The game is so punishing in this way that sometimes you’ll find yourself wandering all over the map to look for 1 or 2 more creatures that you can slay BEFORE you’re able to move on to the next group. This leads us to the second part of the dilemma: the map itself. The game world or island consists of 120 total screens and certain enemy types are only concentrated on a particular screen. This is where strategy is involved because the map of the island is very confusing.

Chester, better known as the CRPG Addict, took the time to take a screen shot of each piece of the game world and then stitch them together. I know a good thing when I see it, but even with the aid of Chester’s map I found that I could only progress to a certain point in the game. Several hours into it, I can now mentally place each of the different enemy types where they appropriately belong on the map, however your health is still on a strict timer. Time is not your friend here and it’s still taking me too long to traverse this maze of a map to reach my enemies. There are caves on the island that make it possible to get around a bit faster, but where you come out is determined at random. You must also leave the screen to re-enter the cave too which places you in danger of nearby enemies, so I have not found the caves to be all that helpful yet.

Here is the order of enemies that have been vulnerable to my attacks thus far. I have not yet been able to make it beyond the scorpions.

• Light Blue Soldier
• Unicorn
• Satyr
• Centaur
• Devil Soldier
• Scorpion

I know not which enemy is vulnerable to me after the scorpions because I always find time depleted before I can move on. There are five different signs on the island that remind me of those found in the Ultima games. Obtaining a sign will grant you 1000 hit points, but even finding all five of them doesn’t seem to grant me or allow me enough time to finish the game.

You finish the game apparently in one of two ways: either by finding the 12 signs of the zodiac (accomplished by defeating an appropriate enemy type) or rescuing the three princesses held captive on the island. Thus far I think I’ve found 3 of the 12 necessary zodiac signs. They are not in a particular area of the island; they just appear randomly after defeating a particular enemy type.

I am now 216 games into this journey, and in almost every single instance, I have been able to persevere and finish the game before moving on. I have not yet been able to do so with this one. And if I’m being honest, I’m not sure that this game has deserved so much attention from me. For the sake of my ongoing mission, I’m going to slide Courageous Perseus into the background. I’m not giving up on it completely and will come back to it now and again, but I must continue on, the list of games yet to play is massively long. I’d like to talk to someone who has actually finished this game to find out how they accomplished such a feat and what I am doing wrong.

Next up on the docket is DND from 1984.

Until next time…