Pasokon Retro is our regular look back at the early years of Japanese PC gaming, encompassing everything from specialist '80s computers to the happy days of Windows XP. I've been building my character up for a while now. Learning new spells and gathering equipment when I can, carefully clearing tough quests, felling monsters twice my size, and piecing together stories told in short snippets by scattered NPCs who, depending on your point of view, are either enticingly under-explained or irritatingly undercooked.
As you've hopefully already guessed this hasn't been in preparation for a death-laden dive into Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtree expansion. I've been playing the chart-topping 1987 action RPG Sorcerian and its numerous expansions, which rolled out with much the same impact as Shadow of the Erdtree (at least, within the context of the late '80s Japan-only PC gaming market). Falcom released no less than three expansions for Sorcerian, and much like in From Software's latest wonder, hopping between the standard stories and these new adventures is quick and seamless.
By design Sorcerian has always been a collection of largely self-contained RPG minisodes, a buffet of sidescrolling adventures encompassing lush elf forests and monster-filled caverns. Gathering a party and venturing forth somewhere new rarely takes any more effort than popping in a different scenario disc when prompted—old or new, Sorcerian doesn't care so long as it can read the data on the disc. It does.
