This Famicom Disk System game is Esper Dream, Konami's first attempt at a JRPG after Dragon Quest became a hit. It's a really early one, coming out less than a month after Dragon Quest II and predating both Ys and Final Fantasy, and like you'd expect out of Konami at the time, it blows most of the competition out of the water. It's the first console RPG I'm aware of where they didn't just do generic medieval fantasy, you can see all encounters on the map, and battles are done as top down run and gun rooms. It's still a bit primitive by modern standards, and the way that towns are connected only through dungeons could easily be a turn off for a lot of people, but I feel like this should have been the foundation for something big, yet it only got one equally forgotten sequel. But the good news is that it has a fan translation, so you can all see whether I'm full of shit or not yourselves.

So for a lot of Neo Geo nerds, this was a holy grail of a fan translation project. Many of us had poked at the untranslated game, loved the sprite work, thought the ability to use fighting game motions in combat was cool, and had dreams of what this game could be. Does it live up to that?

No. This is a bizarrely balanced game that feels like it was made by people who never made an RPG before.