Long lost Falcom game now available! The link has a zip file that contains an emulator and the game...
https://archive.org/details/inoue-no-dorasureBack in 1984, Nihon Falcom were ready for a new hit game. The employees Yoshio Kiya and Tadanobu Inoue developed two games concurrently, for the best one to eventually be selected for publication. In the end, Kiya's PC-8801 game was selected and published as Dragon Slayer in late 1984. Inoue's FM-7 game was published under the name 井上のドラスレ (Inoue no Dorasure, lit. “Inoue's Dragon Slayer”) as a type-in program in the October 1985 issue of the monthly PC magazine Login. The game was thought more or less lost – it's quite a rare magazine – until I dug it up by contacting a kind Japanese person who had it!
Both Kiya's and Inoue's game were based on the 1982 Apple Ⅱ title The Caverns of Freitag, as I recently discovered and wrote about. Inoue's, though, is little more than a port, and a somewhat lacking one at that: unlike Freitag, it has no bow and arrow, only one playable view, a simpler map, and it plays far slower. More importantly, though, enemies only move once every two turns, which makes a “kiting” strategy optimal: attack, retreat, attack, retreat. Due to this, the gameplay becomes entirely formulaic, and doesn't feel like much of an action game – it's understandable why Kiya's game was chosen instead. It's one heck of a historic curiosity, though!
