My search for short RPGs led me to this PA thread:
https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/14462/the-best-short-rpgs
Where somebody recommended Brain Lord (SNES) as a 10-hour long RPG.
So I started it yesterday and 12 hours later met the Final Boss:
(Image removed from quote.)
Brain Lord is a Zelda-like game meaning the encounters are real-time and faced straight on the map - no battle transition needed. And just as Zelda it has Attack/ Block/ Jump/ Magic buttons and hidden Heart Containers all over the "world". There are puzzles all over the place mostly of two kinds: push the rock on the floor plate/ guess the correct order of buttons to be pushed. In typical Zelda fashion there are collapsing floors, floor hazards, hundreds of jumps on moving platforms and a magic wand that creates stone bridges in air for you (unfortunately it is found and useable only in the last dungeon in the last 1 hour of the game 
)
The game is incredibly small. You have only 2 towns: Arc and Toronto and 4 Main Dungeons: Tower of Light, Alien Ruins with lasers and robots and shit, Ice Castle and the Final Palace; 4 Bosses in total. There is no overworld - everything is connected via tunnells or forest paths.
I'll never understand why is this game called "Brain Lord" as there is NO reference to anything like that in the entire lore. There were Dragons, Demon King, Ancient Civilization, Orks etc. but nothing related to Brain/ Mind.
---
This is one of the 3 RPGs that I've started and finished on the same day:
- Ys 1
- Undertale
- Brain Lord
I guess I will start Breath of Fire 1 next. Dunno.
Yeah, I played Brain Lord a few years ago... had some interesting ideas and cool puzzles, at first I thought it was a total 'hidden gem' of a game... but once you started getting the companion spirits following you around, the slowdown was too intense and it kept the game from achieving greatness. The art style is weird, a bit more 'western' than your average SNES RPG, it was done by the same team that did 7th Saga iirc, which also applies a similar style.
The shortest RPGs I've ever played were probably:
-Neugier - an action RPG by Wolf Team that's actually score-ranked based on how long you take to beat/what item percentage you can find. A first time playthrough only takes about 2-3 hours, depending on how lost you get in the maze-like chapter 5
There's some annoying platforming elements, but it's pretty cool even despite its short length.
-Exile 2: Wicked Phenomenon - Only took about 2-3 hours. Working Designs, the US publisher, fucked up the difficulty level in the game, by tweaking a variable at the last second which caused the difficulty to shoot through the roof, making the game near-impossible without taking advantages of glitches to beat. But luckily, there's a "de-Working-Design" patch you can get to revert the difficulty back to the Japanese version, I used the patch to play through.
-Exile 1 is a bit longer than 2 (5 or so hours, maybe a bit longer because some of the later levels are maze-like), and a much better game than its sequel.
-Dragon Quest 1 can probably be beaten in under 10 hours, the SNES/GB remakes even less time due to balance and gameplay tweaks (eg. less grinding needed). I'm sure you've probably played this though.
-Ys III - about 4 hours to beat... I recommend the Turbo Duo port, due to the epic soundtrack. Even if the scrolling is kinda choppy whenever parallax is employed.
-Rhapsody - 10 hour long strategy RPG/musical hybrid. The dungeons are really repetitive, towns are like one screen large, and battles are almost impossible to lose. It's got its moments but it wasn't much my cup of tea. I think Disgaea actually started as a spinoff of Rhapsody.
-Lufia 2 - took me just under 20 hours, so it's longer than the rest of these, but it still feels extremely fleshed out, with a developing storyline, great characters, and some amazing puzzle-based dungeons (if you've played Golden Sun or Wild Arms, it's very similar to those, but even more devious and creative). And there's a whole bonus dungeon called the Ancient Cave that plays almost like a roguelike (levels reset to 1 every time you go in, you can only use items you procure in that cave, etc), it seems like something right up your alley.
Borys, I'd definitely recommend you go Suikoden II next, even if it's a bit longer in length than the first game (took me ~35h to get all 108 charas). BOF1 isn't a bad pick, have you played any of the rest of the series? I've played them all but 2, and I like 3 and 5 the best. 5 is radically different from the rest of the series, and most people hated it, but it's got great music and some really neat ideas that were later used in... Dead Rising, of all things. Also have you played any of the Wild Arms games?
