Cindi, I forget, have you played Octopath? Just about to finish it and I really liked it, apart from some repetition, it seemed to have a lot going for it that's missing in modern day RPGs:
-no poorly-explained, over complicated "systems", apart from a straightforward job system and a battle system where you can store up attacks to let loose all at once
-has some basic fetch-questy sidequests but they too don't bog down the game, nor will you miss out on much for not doing them
-has some really challenging main bosses which really require you to exploit weaknesses and shift your strategies mid-battle. Definitely one of the most difficult RPGs I've played in a long while.
-has some optional dungeons and a pretty open storyline
-great music and pixel art
-it's still long af, but fast paced and you actually feel like you're getting stuff done in a short play session (unlike a modern RPG where it feels like it takes 2 hours just to explore a town and receive the next quest and trigger a million cinema scenes padded with unnecessary filler text).
Anyways back to classic gaming... I picked up Ninja-kun and Ninja Jajamaru-kun from the local game shop. Surprised he had Famicom games in there (there was also some other game in the pile which was some weird HK pirate of Batman NES, with a changed stage 1 song and a terrible framerate). Will have to play and report back, I know the Ninja-kun series was quite popular back in the day.
And also in retro news, the SNES port of Tenshi no Uta got a fan translation. I own the PCE CD game, not sure how much it differs from the SNES version aside from not looking nearly as good.
http://www.romhacking.net/translations/822/