Take this as a recommendation list, either to play or collect. Or ignore them completely, write them off as trash.
With the rise of gaming in the mainstream, and now the booming popularity of Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop RPGs, it's easy to overlook what might have sliped through the cracks in the times where everything was either "go outside and play" or "play Final Fantasy"
These are games I've either owned (or own) or have played before and actually managed to not only enjoy, but wanted to replay. So let's get started, you're resident nerd is here to guide you.
#5: Tower of Doom (1987 - Intellivision)
So before D&D was considered "kinda nerdy, but cool" and before RPGs were one of the most popular genres and not a niche group of games, there was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons games. And the Intellivision had 3 of them. But Tower of Doom was by far the best. It was a rogue-like crawler, and it's fucking HAAAAAARD. I can't survive more than 5 minutes in this hellscape of a game. You can't see where you're going, you have to manage your inventory, watch your health, watch for enemies and hazards. Basically it's like Rogue and Dark Souls fucked on a Magnavox Odyssey which melted into a Colecovision that fell down a flight of stairs and spit out a corrupted Adventure cartridge for Atari 2600 that got struck by a balled up character sheet thrown by that "lightning ball!" LARP guy who's been enchanted by a wizard.
Overall, it's brutal difficulty and addictive nature will leave you wondering if you have a predisposition towards BDSM, the way you keep taking its punishment and begging for more.
#4 - The Bard's Tale (1985 - NES)
This ain't your dad's Bard's Tale. It's more or less your 34-year-old cousin's Bard's Tale. Why am I listing this one over the PC versions? Because this one removes all of the PC aspects, and makes it a console-friendly port. Wanna see a bad PC-to-console port? Play Shadowgate. This one cleans up well. It wasn't nearly as successful as the computer versions, due to a severe lack of depth, but depending on which version you played the NES version could be graphically enhanced or dulled. I think the Atari ST versions are the "definitive versions" of the games. There's a whole trilogy, but only the first game, "Tales of the Unknown" made it to the NES. There was the sequel released in Japan, but only in Japan. Anyway, your goal is to band together with your adventurers and free Skara Brae from the control of the evil wizard, Mangar. Basic high-fantasy. You have several races and classes to choose from, though this is where the NES port is lacking. However, the NES version is superior in combat, where you simply choose attacks and spells from a menu. The only time you have to type in anything is when creating a character's name. The party earns an equally distributed amount of gold, which can be pooled while shopping or redistributed evenly between the party. Why not just have a standard RPG gold pool your entire party draws from? I don't know, but I blame magnets. Nobody knows how those work. All in all, the difficulty isn't too bad. Enemies don't really jump too high in difficulty between story parts of the game. But travel is extremely monotonous, trapped chests are a hassle, torches take up inventory space and nothing stacks, wine and beer are called grape juice and root beer (Nintendo censorship), graphics are unimpressive, music is repetitive and nothing to right home about, your armor class goes DOWN instead of UP which is nauseating to a D&D player such as myself. It's a good RPG for the console, but there's definitely better ones. Of the less popular NES RPGs, this one is at least a very polished turd.
#3 Powder (2003 - GameBoy Advance/DS, PC [Homebrew])
What can be said about this game? Not much. But I had a DS with a flashcart when I was younger and this game occupied a lot of my time. It's a pretty standard rogue-like. One neat function is the ability to pray to a god of your choosing. Depending on your play style, you can earn or lose the support of your god. You god can even fully heal you at random if they like you enough. Enemies range from rats, to imps, to three-legged eyeball monsters, to bugs that can only move diagonally, to dragons, to the humble kiwi. Like any other rogue-like, all equipment is unidentified when you pick it up. Wearing an item attunes it after a while, but you never want to risk it being a cursed negative valued item. The game features saving and loading,, but permanent deaths. It also has settings to change the graphics to more primitive or fantasy-like ones, including ASCII. It's a decent rogue-like. If you enjoy the genre, you'll probably like it. Because it's a free game, I'll credit the creator and link it here.
#2 Roguelight - (201X - PC)
A very neat game. It's a cool style of gameplay, where the lower you go, the darker it gets. You have to use your arrows to see, but you have limited ammunition. So if you run out of arrows, not only can you no longer see, but you're defenseless as well. Every time you die you get to upgrade your character a little more, allowing you to get further into the dungeon. There's a lot of trial and error, but the difficulty is reasonable and the graphics are pretty good. The lighting adds a sense of hopelessness and fear as you stumble around in the dark, desperately trying to collect coins so at least if you die you can go down with slightly more health or arrows next time. It's more or less an action RPG without any extra stats or inventory management, but it makes my list. Check it out here as well as other games by Daniel Linssen. He makes a lot of interesting puzzle-platformers.
#1 The Elder Scrolls 2 - Daggerfall (1996 - PC)
How does a game from one of the most successful RPG series make this list? How can it be considered "underrated," you ask? Well, when was the last time you were thinking about a good Elder Scrolls game and "Daggerfall" came to mind? Probably not very recently. In my opinion, this game still holds up as an enjoyable game that I can mindlessly put hours into. Seriously, I spent 3 hours the other day robbing tombs to save up for a house in Wayrest. The game has many issues. The audio can loop a single note and crash in DOSBox, most commonly with the shop music. There are repeating location names, unfinishable quests, asinine controls, an unnecessarily lifelike bank that requires letters of credit to transfer your funds from one region to another, heavy punishment for accidentally waiting more than 3 hours at a time, the imps in the beginning can be unbeatable if you don't start with a steel or better weapon, arrow hit detection is ass, there's no such thing as stealth regardless of how much you try, you can spend 6 hours walking from town to town, or 2 hours by horseback, or fast travel and die of a disease you didn't know you had. It's a fucking mess. But short of Skyrim, I've probably spent more time playing Daggerfall than any other RPG in my collection. It's been my favorite game since I was 13. There's guilds to join, story to complete, property to buy, horses to ride, graves to rob, shops to burglarize, spells to cast, potions to brew, weapons to buy, enemies to kill, guards to walk backwards away from while they shout "halt"
It's a good game, and it's free now. You can download it (And its predecessor, Arena) from the Elder Scrolls website. Still waiting for them to make Battlespire and Redguard free. Talk about a shitty game, Redguard is definitely one of em.
Anyway, that's my list, as well as my first MyTake. Take it or leave it.
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