Drakkhen was the first RPG on the SNES and played so unintuitively awful, you'd swear it must have been better in its original intended setup with a mouse and keyboard. Now new generations can have their optimism shattered and discover the SNES port was the best case scenario, complete with far more sensical UI and much needed rebalancing.

The mouse's only purpose here is to make you accidentally click on your own party members as they run around in circles blocking your path to further screw up your setup. Most of the keyboard is for hiding what few buttons actually do anything as you stumble through horrible menu designs and accidentally turn the sound off trying to access a basic item. Half the clickable menu is hands you can't tell apart and others are things like the "don't just stand there and let the monsters murder you" button that shouldn't need to exist. It's kind of an achievement in how bad everything works that an early control pad ends up being the ideal way to play despite the genre.

I still wanted to play this game because it does have some moody visual flair, and exploring a hostile world dressed entirely in stuff you grab off castle walls has its charms. But this version just... plays so bad. It's a game that starts you with no explanation including of controls, your characters are naked without bothering to wear any of the clothes they brought as they get jumped and killed by randos, and if you go looking on the internet for instructions, the resolution gets messed up with seemingly no way to resize besides turning the game off.

Once you finally get it to behave, a first area random encounter monster can still just instantly wipe out your party anyway. There is no compass or overworld map to show where anything is or where you're going. Screens have no indicators for what you're looking at or supposed to do. Items and spells are in unexplained gibberish just because. Not because the game is sophisticated and deep, it's a very special kind of inaccessible where your characters get confused and stuck over the concept of walking through doors. I'm usually here for the retro jank but this is mostly the distilled bad kind. This is the kind of dungeon design where the SNES port adding single red pixels to screens was a vast improvement in coherence.

OG Drakkhen is pure, malicious suffering... but it's an important landmark worth preserving, like some medieval torture device in a museum. Before we insisted on distinguishing between jRPGs and wRPGs, a bunch of Japanese programmers ported this game while asking important questions like "What if the controls and visuals made more sense?" and "Hey, what if this mess was actually playable?" They later built a whole sequel out of that logic. It was an experiment and cultural exchange that probably played a crucial role in making modern RPGs from either hemisphere more streamlined and intuitive. A reminder of how every bad game has a playable game struggling to get out with some more common sense.