Occidental Fantasy Gaming (OFG): The Case of the Early 90s SNES

From the period between, say, about 1992 and 1996, I played a lot of SNES games. I didn't actually have a SNES (my parents didn't allow me to have one; my misery-porn memoir about my childhood spent living in a basement subsisting on buckets of fish-heads will include a chapter on this), but it seemed like all my other close friends did, and our social lives tended to revolve around either that or Games Workshop games (or cricket and football for those of us not completely steeped in nerdiness). Most of the time it was Mariokart or Street Fighter II. But every so often it would be something else - something which I now realise was of a genre all of its own: Occidental Fantasy.

Occidental fantasy is a particular type of pastiche of Western medieval high fantasy tropes, made in (usually) Japan. Here, for instance is the bizarrely-titled Knights of the Round [sic], which features up to three players controlling King Arthur, Sir Lancelot and Sir Percival as they, well, basically fight their way through a particularly cheesy 1980s jidaigeki (complete with suspiciously Japanese-looking swordsmanship) with incongruously European furniture.

On a similar theme, but showing that occidental fantasy can be based on Tolkien-esque rather than folkoric tropes, there is King of Dragons, which is more or less exactly the same game as Knights of the Round, but with magic and goblins and the like:

But exhibit A in the OFG dossier is, without doubt, the Squaresoft oeuvre, and chief among these is the original Secret of Mana.

Words can't express quite how nostalgic it makes me feel to watch the first few minutes of that YouTube video, but setting that to one side, notice its key characteristics. The Japanese aesthetic touches (the birds which look like cranes; the fetishization of swords) layered on a pseudo-European foundation; the preternaturally lush green grass and bucolic charm of a British Isles rendered hyper-real by an Asian imagination; that peculiarly East Asian merging of the high- and low-tech; those Tuscany-via-the-Cotswolds cottages. This is the occidental fantasy palette at its most vivid and enticing.

The Final Fantasy series also fill a significant section in the OFG dossier. Feel free to offer your own suggestions; here I have barely even scratched the surface of the iceberg.