Retro Achievement Mastery 141 - The Legend of Ghost Lion

There’s a lot of interesting things about this game, but first, look at that box art. Can you tell which one is the American box art??? God, that’s bad. It looks like it’s AI generated.

AND the title screen has the lesbian flag! Yay!

Legend of Ghost Lion is a licensed RPG on the NES, based on the 1988 movie “Beyond the Pyramids: Legend of the Ghost Lion”, which is a WEIRD-ass movie. It’s extremely obscure, not super well recieved, entirely in English, but released only in Japan. It stars the girl from Full House, and a bunch of other American actors, but was shot by Japanese producers and subbed into Japanese. The game was then roughly translated into an RPG, and released on the Famicom. And you’d think a game like this would NEVER have a chance at being translated into English, but Kemco kinda defied logic. They often translated their stuff even when it made no sense. God bless.

Ghost Lion is an RPG that I heard, and was often decried during the day, as just a sub-par Dragon Quest clone. But honestly that does it a lot of disservice. So it’s actually good, right? Well, no. Actually I don’t like this game very much at all, and I was EXTREMELY glad to be done playing it once I was. It starts off good but it’s an awful slog by the end. But the Dragon Quest clone bit? That I argue. It has a lot of very interesting and unique ideas! It just kind of doesn’t do any of them super well. It’s a “Dragon Quest Clone” in that it’s an RPG, with the combat showing enemies in front of you instead of to the side. That would be a Final Fantasy clone. And also the graphics are a liiiittle similar. Everything else is very different.

In Ghost Lion you play Maria, a 12 year old girl (who according to the american box art is a 20 year old jazzercize instructor) who’s parents are researching old myths in Africa. They go missing one day exploring the legend of The Ghost Lion, a lion who was defeated by an ancient hero. You take the hero’s spear and go exploring the caves, where you find a lamp and fall into a river and wash away. You find yourself in a weird fantasy world, and must explore 6 different disconnected parts of this world, doing little quests and mini stories, like stopping evil werewolves and other such things.

The combat is unique, in a way. Yes, it’s a turn based RPG, but you have two commands: Fight and Run. Run barely ever works. If you use Fight, you can use “Tools”, or “Call”. Call is the game’s main combat gimmick. You can find items around the game, like that spear and lamp, which you start with, which can be used to summon ancient spirits to fight for you. These spirits have spiritual power, which goes down as they attack and as they’re attacked. If it goes down all the way, you need to resummon them. You can summon as many spirits as you have. These spirits each have their own abilities, stats, and levels. You’ll mostly just be using the spear, it’s by far the most helpful. The “Tools” are items that Maria can use. She can attack as well, by using weapons she finds from the Tools menu, but it can be more helpful to use status inflicting items and summon spirits. Summoning Spirits DOES use up your “Dream”, though, which is basicalyl your MP.

Notably, this game has no EXP. That’s the main thing that differentiates it from Dragon Quest. Dragon Quest is an EXP grinding slog, and Ghost Lion gives absolutely NO reason to do combat, at all. This is actually a problem. Instead of getting EXP to gain levels, you explore dungeons and find shards of hope, which give you (and all your spirits) a level. All the enemies give you is gold, which is used to buy very, VERY little. All the shops in the game essentially sell the same items, very inexpensive bread which heals you, and by the end it heals you VERY little. You have a few things you need to buy otherwise, but you’ll never be hurting for money.

This becomes a major issue by the end. The run button works 11% of the time, enemies take 3 hits to kill in the final two chapters of the game, it has you fighting three at once, you get NOTHING to fighting them, the encounter rate is WAY to high, and they dodge attacks literally half the time. It’s nuts, some enemies seem to have dodge rating, and every enemy in the last two areas are way WAY too dodgy. And since you need to summon allies over and over, combat is a little slow paced. Since there’s no real variance in this game, since you gain levels at the same rate going through it every time, this means the final two chapters are just sloggish luck roulettes. I actually enjoyed the first four chapters, those were kinda cool and fun, but the game gets VERY tedious by the end, which makes it very hard to recommend.

In the end, Ghost Lion is a very fascinating game with a lot of ideas, not all of which work, and is maligned for the WRONG REASONS (Dragon Quest clone, pah) rather than the actual problems it has. Its very hard to recommend, though it’s quite fun to talk about, at least. And the art is nice, I’ll give it that.