Hydlide

This post was originally drafted, but never posted, very shortly after the previous post. It wasn't quite finished, and I don't remember my whole train of thought, but I thought I'd try and finish it and move on.

In my tour of trying out old action RPG's, I decided to take a second stab at a game I've actually tried once before, long ago: Hydlide.

I remember seeing this advertised decades ago in Nintendo Power, and I remember hearing mention of sequels. I tried it out some twenty years ago, in the interest (even then) of filling in some gaps in my gaming history.

I ended up being a little frustrated by it. It started out interesting enough, but ultimately I reached a point where I couldn't figure out how to proceed.

I figured time, with additional experience and access to the original manual would present a great opportunity to rectify that.

Unfortunately, though I can't say I have a clear memory of my original experience, I'm pretty sure I duplicated it almost exactly, and this game has left a bad taste in my mouth because of it.

It starts off on a good note. It's a classic adventure game with RPG elements. It really seems like something right up my alley. It's a lot more simple than I expected, with the only controls besides movement being a toggle between attack and defense modes. (I'd forgotten that the NES version also added spells and a button for that). You get various special items, but as near as I can tell they are all automatically activated just by having them.

It's a very small world map. It takes a few power-ups in succession to gain access to all of it, but once you can get through all the opening caves, you can basically go anywhere.

(From here on out, I'm not going to take much care to avoid potential spoilers, so be warned).

And therein lies the problem that I ran into. Once you get through the opening caves, nearly all of the rest of the map opens up. But from that point on, there's seemingly nothing that you can actually do there. You have a relatively engaging first half, followed by an extremely empty second half.

Because the map is small, it's easy to retrace your steps and travel it over and over. After retreading it maybe a dozen times, I can't find a single thing left to do on the map that yields any unknown result at all.

Where that leaves me: I see a dragon-guarded castle on an island that's completely inaccessible. Outside of that island, I've crossed probably every tile of the map multiple times, killed everything that seems killable over and over, tried everything I can think of against enemies that don't seem killable. No more treasure appears anywhere, nothing new happens.

The game just comes to a jarring, screeching halt.

I feel like I must be missing something obvious. It's hard to see how the game would have been so influential if no one had been able to solve it back then. But I've racked my brain so much and still can't crack it. Maybe it was popular precisely because different players had to talk to each other to figure out the things they couldn't on their own?

I've ended up putting it on hold; I haven't touched it since I first drafted this. I want to go back to it eventually and try yet again with fresh eyes; if I can't figure it then I'll probably finally look it up. 

One current line of thought is that maybe the solution to the game is missable; maybe you have a window beyond which the game is unbeatable, if you don't do something within a certain window. I still can't imagine what that might be, but it's worth looking into. It feels like the only thing I haven't thoroughly explored.

Update November 5, 2024:

I beat Hydlide several months back (not entirely without outside help). I'd like to write a more detailed writeup, but I don't have a moment right now and hope to get to it before I forget about my blog again.