Basement Brothers is a great Youtube channel that finds and runs classic PC-98 games on original hardware. The PC-98 is a computer platform that was only sold in Japan, and was a home platform for Nihon Falcom, the long-lived JRPG publisher. Here they talk about Brandish, a unique style of dungeon crawl created for the PC-98. (38 minutes)
The first Brandish game did get an English port, released in the US on the SNES, but in Japan it got three sequels. It used sort of mixture between first-person and overhead view, with a bit of roguelike mixed in. You viewed the action from above, but your character was fixed to the bottom center of the screen, and the view was behind his back. He could move or jump forward, or strafe to either side, but if he turned 90 degrees the screen would be suddenly redrawn to the new facing. Enemies would attack you in the field in real time, that is to say, combat was not modal but took place on the same screen as exploration.
It was a bit disorienting; you might think that the SNES’s Mode 7 effects could be used there, but no it kept the same quirk. Smoothly rotating the view wouldn’t happen until the PS Vita remake years later.
Basement Brothers digs up lots of classic Japanese computer games that are still barely known in the US. Please check them out some time!
