The Adventures of Alundra

The Adventures of Alundra, also known as just Alundra, is an Action-adventure game developed by Matrix Software and translated and localized by Working Designs. The game was released in Japan on November 4th, 1997, in America on December 31st, 1997 and in Europe on June 30th, 1998. The game was produced by Cassandra Beyer, directed by Yasuhiro Ohori and designed by Yasunaga Oyama.

The game plays with a top-down perspective rather similar to that of the Legend of Zelda. However the game is much more story driven and has larger amounts of character development. As well as being arguably more mature than Zelda, due to the absurd hardness of the puzzles, the astonishingly large number of deaths and the themes talked about in the game. Even though the game was well received by critics, with Sony Computer Entertainment calling it the best RPG of 1998 at E3 and selling 100,000 copies in just over a month in 1998, it was not a bestseller.

The game was followed by a sequel, Alundra 2, which bore absolutely no similarities to the first and was generally a worse game in every regard.