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.

It's a damn shame that this never got localized, but most of Konami's FDS output didn't get ported to cart. This one is an action game that's very reminiscent of the top down sections of Blaster Master and The Guardian Legend, and while I'm not sure if it's a game that's going to be many people's favorite, it's some solid work from one of the NES's best developers.