Uploaded April 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
A playthrough of Atlus's 1995 action-RPG for the Sega Saturn, Virtual Hydlide.
Played on the normal difficulty level.
"They believed that peace would reign forever in Fairy Land, but suddenly... it was shattered by Varalys, who emerged from his dark lair."
Coming along eight years after the initial release of Hydlide 3 (Super Hydlide), Virtual Hydlide was the fourth and final game in T&E Soft's former flagship series. They had built a reputation for producing cutting-edge 3D golf games in the interim, and their success in that space appears to have been a major source of confidence in the early days of the 32-bit generation.
Virtual Hydlide is a hugely ambitious remake of the first Hydlide (youtu.be/lU4fqrYfiHI), built on the technology T&E had spent years developing for their golf titles. It was a Sega Saturn exclusive, and it was a part of the first wave of third-party games to be released for the console.
It adheres closely to the blueprint of the original game. The story still involves a guy named Jim who's on a quest to save the kingdom of Fairy Land after the bad guy explodes the princess into a swarm of fairies, and the game progresses in much the same way as the original. Jim has to hunt down the evil lieutenants (a vampire, a mage, a dragon, and an eel) and find the scattered princess fairies to clear the way to the final showdown with Varalys.
But everything in Virtual Hydlide is far grander in scope. The "open world" now feels truly open due to its scale and the way its layout is procedurally generated at the beginning of each game, and the original's tiny underground mazes have been reimagined as a selection of uniquely themed dungeons. The vampire now lives in a creepy mansion full of bats and zombies, the dragon sits in a lava lake deep within a volcano, and the mage hides out on the lowest level of a crumbling mine.
The game feels like the proper realization of what Hydlide was intended to be in 1984. Like that game, it's impressively forward-thinking in its design, and also perhaps a bit too far ahead of the curve to claim the recognition it deserves. 3D open-world action-RPGs were a rare breed in 1995, and Virtual Hydlide was one of the most advanced and immersive examples of the genre yet. The pairing of digitized sprites with polygonal environments gives the game the means to display a ton of detail in a scene (check out all the furniture in the vampire's mansion!), and the panned stereo effects do a solid job contributing to the illusion that you're inhabiting a 3D space. The soundtrack is also pretty excellent.
I fell in love with Virtual Hydlide the first time I played it, and it was through my experiences with it that I came to respect and appreciate the original game. Today, Virtual Hydlide may appear to have been leaning too hard into its ambitions - the framerate is straight out of a 3DO game, and the sprite scaling makes everything look super chunky - but you do acclimate to the choppiness in time (even when it's struggling to hold 5 fps, it's still perfectly playable), and I found the aesthetic rather charming. I think it was a reasonable trade-off considering the size and complexity of the game world. It looks incredibly dated now, but it predates Ocarina of Time by three-and-a-half years, so I'm willing to cut it a bit of slack.
Virtual Hydlide shot for the stars, and by 1995 standards, it nearly got there. Beneath the timeworn presentation, there's one helluva fun old-school action-RPG experience lying in wait for anyone who's willing to give it a chance.
_____________
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
NintendoComplete (nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!
A playthrough of Atlus's 1995 action-RPG for the Sega Saturn, Virtual Hydlide.
Played on the normal difficulty level.
"They believed that peace would reign forever in Fairy Land, but suddenly... it was shattered by Varalys, who emerged from his dark lair."
Coming along eight years after the initial release of Hydlide 3 (Super Hydlide), Virtual Hydlide was the fourth and final game in T&E Soft's former flagship series. They had built a reputation for producing cutting-edge 3D golf games in the interim, and their success in that space appears to have been a major source of confidence in the early days of the 32-bit generation.
Virtual Hydlide is a hugely ambitious remake of the first Hydlide (youtu.be/lU4fqrYfiHI), built on the technology T&E had spent years developing for their golf titles. It was a Sega Saturn exclusive, and it was a part of the first wave of third-party games to be released for the console.
It adheres closely to the blueprint of the original game. The story still involves a guy named Jim who's on a quest to save the kingdom of Fairy Land after the bad guy explodes the princess into a swarm of fairies, and the game progresses in much the same way as the original. Jim has to hunt down the evil lieutenants (a vampire, a mage, a dragon, and an eel) and find the scattered princess fairies to clear the way to the final showdown with Varalys.
But everything in Virtual Hydlide is far grander in scope. The "open world" now feels truly open due to its scale and the way its layout is procedurally generated at the beginning of each game, and the original's tiny underground mazes have been reimagined as a selection of uniquely themed dungeons. The vampire now lives in a creepy mansion full of bats and zombies, the dragon sits in a lava lake deep within a volcano, and the mage hides out on the lowest level of a crumbling mine.
The game feels like the proper realization of what Hydlide was intended to be in 1984. Like that game, it's impressively forward-thinking in its design, and also perhaps a bit too far ahead of the curve to claim the recognition it deserves. 3D open-world action-RPGs were a rare breed in 1995, and Virtual Hydlide was one of the most advanced and immersive examples of the genre yet. The pairing of digitized sprites with polygonal environments gives the game the means to display a ton of detail in a scene (check out all the furniture in the vampire's mansion!), and the panned stereo effects do a solid job contributing to the illusion that you're inhabiting a 3D space. The soundtrack is also pretty excellent.
I fell in love with Virtual Hydlide the first time I played it, and it was through my experiences with it that I came to respect and appreciate the original game. Today, Virtual Hydlide may appear to have been leaning too hard into its ambitions - the framerate is straight out of a 3DO game, and the sprite scaling makes everything look super chunky - but you do acclimate to the choppiness in time (even when it's struggling to hold 5 fps, it's still perfectly playable), and I found the aesthetic rather charming. I think it was a reasonable trade-off considering the size and complexity of the game world. It looks incredibly dated now, but it predates Ocarina of Time by three-and-a-half years, so I'm willing to cut it a bit of slack.
Virtual Hydlide shot for the stars, and by 1995 standards, it nearly got there. Beneath the timeworn presentation, there's one helluva fun old-school action-RPG experience lying in wait for anyone who's willing to give it a chance.
_____________
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
NintendoComplete (nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!
