Retro Arena: Neutopia II (TurboGrafx) vs Crusader of Centy (Genesis) · 3:56am Aug 4th, 2018
A new edition of Retro Arena is up and two Zelda clones’ steps into the battlefield for this round. The first game is Hudson’s Neutopia II which saw a release on the TurboGrafx in 1992. While Sega’s Crusader of Centy on the Genesis would attempt to cash in on the Zelda popularity. The idea of using established concepts has been around since the start of gaming. Even today, its hard to not see a clone of another popular series like Elder Scrolls on store shelves. During the Golden Age the market was mostly filled with clones of games from Zelda to sports to fighting, there was always something using a similar concept. Of course, that’s not to say there weren’t games that even though they were in the same genre didn’t come off as a rip off. Mortal Kombat and Killer Instinct come to mind as both series are in the fighting genre but were not the same thing.
Both games follow this trend of a true and tried formula of using an overhead style with dungeons as levels. Neutopia II is in fact among the few RPG and adventure titles on the TurboGrafx. Most of this console's games included platformers like Bonk or shootem’ups such as R-Type and Magical Chase. Aside Dungeon Explorer, most of these types of games were on the Turbo CD with titles like Y’s Book I and II. On Genesis, Sega managed to produce some of their own in-house RPG titles which included the Phantasy Star and Shining Force series. It was a response in failing to get JRPGs that mostly landed on the Super NES (obviously due to Nintendo's cut throat policy for third parties). Crusader of Centy is mostly considered a clone because of using similar mechanics. However, the console it was on had a handful of both genres which is a lot more compared to what its competitor received.
