Death Bringer: The Knight of Darkness

Leaving Soron, his home village, the hero embarks on a journey to find companions and to face together the forces of darkness. Despite being a Japanese game, Death Bringer is more similar to Western RPGs of the time than to their Japanese counterparts, even though it has anime-style character graphics. It is less event-oriented than Japanese games and focuses on exploration. The gameplay is somewhat similar to Pandora's RPG of the same name, even though the two games are unrelated. Both friendly and hostile areas are pseudo-3D, maze-like environments, like in Bard's Tale games. Enemy encounters, however, are handled more similarly to those of Ultima: the enemies appear on the exploration screen, and the battle initiates only if the player character approaches the enemy. The battles take place on a top-down field; the heroes and the enemies move around, but the player can't navigate the characters manually: it is only possible to issue commands such as "Attack", "Use Magic", etc. The game has a day/night cycle. Party members (up to three, excluding the hero) have to be sought out in various cities, rather then joining the hero for plot-related reasons.