Miracle Warriors: Seal of the Dark Lord / Haja no Fuuin

The white squre on the right is your location in town, and the left window is the person living in the house.

In 1987, ASCII Entertainment and Kogado Studio made Miracle Warriors for a large number of systems (MSX, MSX2, PC88, FM-7, and NES/FC.)  The game was slightly remade for the SMS version and the game difficulty was tweaked.  It came out in the US in 1988.

The blue bar is XP, and the lower white bar is health. The upper white bar is the enemy health.

Unsurprisingly for an older game, the game feels pretty primitive.  Basically, you move a square on a map to get to various towns.  When in a town, you use the same method to move from house to house.  Meanwhile, a screen depicts your hero and his fairy companion as he explores.

A knife costs a great deal of money.

One problem with the game is that the game is pretty unforgiving.  Weapons cost a lot of money.  You have a character point system that counts down if you kill “good” wandering characters.  If you fight the wrong monsters early on, you might lose too much health and not get enough money to heal.  If you lose a party member, you have to spend a large amount of money and it’s much simpler to reset the game.

You can talk to a merchant to end a battle without fighting one.

On the other hand, the game is fascinating.  It’s a completely original method of exploration, and the enemy sprites are fairly large.  While it is terribly difficult, it is an unapologetic level of difficulty.  The game is fairly open (though you are unlikely to survive the exploration.)

Weaponry has endurance. In this case, a knife has 50 endurance. When it wears out, you have to pay a blacksmith to repair it.