Playing the What Was That Game game. A common theme seems to be:

1. you were young
2. you only remember bits of the game
3. the game didn’t make sense
4. you didn’t understand the game on a deep level

Just like an old movie that you saw when you don’t understand common themes, genres and things only learned by experience. “Oh, it’s a side scroller rpg with blah blah elements”. Those things you can only recall in hindsight. And so the people on the forums of WWTG seem to suffer from severe piecemeal description hell. “I was young, I don’t remember much of it … but it went something like this”. It’s a challenge.

Casually, CameoEX mentioned another lost game and started yet another mystery:

CameoEX: there was another one that i am trying to remember…was like a family including the pet that you played as…
Me: that rings a bell…
Me: each member had certain powers?
CameoEX: i just remember that there was a house…and each family member had different abbilities…yeah
CameoEX: the pet was like a puffy looking thing or something
Me: yeah, and you could go back and switch out..
CameoEX: yeah
Me: crap! I remember that one.

We couldn’t even remember the platform. We thought it looked pretty advanced so we guess TG-16. Slowly, we gathered some more clues, like was it a platformer, what were the characters like. I could remember bits and pieces but we weren’t getting very far. So I searched on moby games for “family pet” in the advanced search, just searching game descriptions and BAM! someone happened to write this for the description:

Legacy of the Wizard

This is an action game with role-playing elements. In it, the player controls members of a family (including two parents, two children and a weird pet) as they delve into a large dungeon. The object of the game is to collect a variety of items and use them to defeat several bosses. Each character has different jumping and fighting abilities and is able to equip different items, so using multiple characters is essential to success. Defeating the final boss, a dragon named Keela, ends the game.

Yep! That’s it! Hilarious. Another mystery uncovered. And, very much so, since I haven’t seen this one in almost 19 years … I remember it looking better.

I hadn’t even thought of this game until CameoEX mentioned it. It was passively lost. In fact, I think I remember the feel, animation, the enemy sprites as different games. The chibi look was weird and unique. The house/home concept was really cool. I remember you could burn off ice tiles with the fire mage. I remember dying a lot as the magey types (although I didn’t understand why). It was beyond me.

FF7 turned a lot of people’s perception upside-down. Whether it was just timely or perfect, FF7 is the reference to which I would have compared any of the early NES RPG games. Titles like Zelda and this one (Legacy of the Wizard) were accessible hybrids, although I didn’t know that at the time. When Cameo played, I didn’t understand the HP/MP bars. Years later, when playing FF7, I found it neat that I could spend time leveling and then have more of this mysterious “HP/MP”. If I had been in that frame of mind, I probably would have played FF1 on the NES, but I didn’t. So gameplay elements were lost on me which made searching for this even harder.

For sure, I’m going back and beating this thing. I don’t know if it’s going to be the same. Cameo mentioned that it was about as long as Zelda, I remember him beating the end boss. I bet it’s not that long really, I don’t think you even need to keep all of your family alive when you beat it.

Also, it will be interesting to see how scary the end boss is. I remember the sprite being very large and I was amazed that we weren’t dying.