Pirate's Treasure

Summary
Pirate's Treasure (海賊の宝) was a game released on November 17th, 1987 in Japan and December 19th, 1987 in America. The game was developed by Ocean Games (海ゲーム) and was published and distributed by Namco (ナムコ). The game launched on the NES (鼻), Famicom (ファミコン), and the Master System (マスタシステム). The game was a pirate adventure game and cost 30.00 USD in America or 3350 yen in Japan.

Development
Pirate's Treasure was the work of the companies leading designer, Yoshioka Koizumi (小泉義昭). Koizumi imagined a pirate game after seeing a Japanese stage play about the swashbuckling adventures of a pirate in 1985. He imagined a game much like Nintendo's (任天堂) new Legend of Zelda (ゼルダの伝説) game, just with a seafaring theme. He brought the idea up to a higher-up at the company who told Koizumi that the game wasn't what the company wanted at that point in time. However, after the failure of Ocean Games newest game, Neo Racer 2: Revenge of X, they brought the idea back to Koizumi a year later, asking him to begin development and save the companies dying reputation. Koizumi thankfully said yes.

The game officially began development on January 27th, 1987, only 10 months before the game officially released in Japan. The game was never changed significantly during its small development.

The game never had many problems in development, with the only major problem being the bugs. Of course, the game would have the Ocean Games signature litany of bugs. This would mainly be because of the small development time for the game, restricting developers to fix the problems.

Launch
Pirate's Treasure received great scores and sold around 100 units in its first initial week on the market. Overall those sales numbers grew to be around 745k in total, becoming the bestselling Ocean Games game up to that point. The project did so well, that the Japanese manga magazine Hobby's Jump (ホビーズジャンプ ) created a limited manga series which lasted for only 1 year. This is because in 1988 the magazine sadly shut down. During the same time that the Pirate's Treasure manga was running there was a Neo Racer (ネオレーサー) manga running on the same magazine.

Gameplay
Pirate's Treasure's gameplay would be much similar to Nintendo's Legend of Zelda, with player's exploring hidden dungeons, fighting away dangerous enemies with your sword, and the top-down perspective. However, the game would not mimic Legend of Zelda in every way.

Controls
The game's controls would mimic those of other top-down action-adventure games released at the time, with the player being able to walk up, down, left, right, and would also include the rare ability to walk diagonally.

Move Upward - You'd be able to move upward by holding down the up button on the controller's d-pad.

Move Downard - You'd be able to move downward by holding down the down button on the controller's d-pad.

Move Left - You'd be able to move left by holding down the left button on the controller's d-pad.

Move Right - You'd be able to move right by holding down the right button on the controller's d-pad.

Swing Sword - You'd be able to swing your sword by pressing the A button on the controller.

Use Gun - You'd be able to use your gun by pressing down the B button on the controller.

Open Inventory - You'd be able to open up your inventory by pressing down the start button on the controller.

Pick Up Object - You'd be able to pick up objects on the ground by pressing down the Select button on the controller.

Graphics
The graphics for Pirate's Treasure would be fairly advanced for the system, looking like an advanced version of the game Legend of Zelda.

The game would have a lot of diversity in the graphics, utilizing the entirety of the NES' color palette. For example, the ocean would include all of the NES' blue color shades with the lighter shades being closer to the shore and the darker shades being farther out at sea.

All of the graphics in the game would look very nice and colorful overall, with the game being commended for this fact after the release and even years on, people would still talk about how nice the game would look on the system.