The Super Nintendo is home to classic role-playing games like Chrono Trigger by Square, Breath of Fire by Capcom, and Kitten Quest Part 2: Legends - Chapter 1 by a random, most likely underage internet person who had a Sailor Moon Geocities website in 1999. That last one is one of the many games made in the SNES version of RPG Maker 2 and posted to the internet in the late '90s, only a few of which survive, for better or worse. Here's our look at three more of those games, freshly excavated from the ruins of the old web.

Note: These games can be downloaded at archive.org or rmarchiv.de (or archive.org’s archived version of rmarchiv.de, if it goes offline again).

Note 2: Check out Part 1 and Part 2 of this historic article series (also readable on Tumblr, as is this one).

"Dragon Saga" by AegisKnight (05-25-1998)

Original description: A young knight sets out on a journey to save the world from the Dargonlord Phalanx.

If you're the type of gamer who likes standing in front of book shelves and pressing A, this game will be hugely rewarding to you (and only you). You play as an armor-wearing dude named Chris who owns a shelf containing books with titles like "HOW TO BECOME A KNIGHT" and "HOW TO SAVE THE WORLD." Chris sounds like a dork.

As soon as you step out of Chris' room, a royal messenger tells you the king wants to talk to you ASAP and gives you some cash to get you "ready" for the meeting. Is it the king's birthday? Are you supposed to buy him a present? You decide to buy nothing and pocket the money.

Note that if you stand by the exit to Chris' room for too long, you'll be accosted by a lady who says "I love books!" and then just stays there, blocking your way and trapping you in this small area of the game forever. Presumably she's waiting for Chris to starve to death so she can steal his dorky books. The only way to avoid this book-loving maniac is going back to the room and exiting as fast as possible.

But this game isn't just about books. No, it's also about magazines. To the left of this area, there's a series of shelves holding issues of mags like Nintendo Power, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Playboy (which the protagonist seems excited to see), and that '90s classic, This is Only the Beta Version, Full Soon to Come.

(Alas, no links to erotic fan fiction this time.)

Before departing for the king's castle, you can talk to the charming local children who live in this residential building/public library/weapons store. One wishes he could join your quest and tells you "your lucky," while another informs you that he has peed himself. This game has the most realistic little kid dialogue in all of gaming.

So, you travel to the castle, fighting the packs of bats that roam the countryside (and likely wetting your own pants at least a little bit, because "packs of bats roaming the countryside" sounds terrifying). At last, you enter the castle and head straight for the king. And by "straight" we mean "after checking all 14 book shelves in here." Unfortunately, they all have the same book, the poetically titled You Find Nothing.

As you explore the castle, you run across a guy in a robe who says he's an amateur magician and asks if you "want to see?" If you say yes, he flashes you. As in, he makes the screen flash.

(Can't guarantee that he didn't flash you anything else while the screen was all white, though.)

Another fun thing to do in the castle is touching the fire in the stove, which causes Chris to say "Ouch!" The level of realism in this game can be frightening sometimes. You can also talk to the guards, who, unlike in previous games, have different dialogue! Well, sort of.

Oh, and you can talk to the king too, we guess. He says he asked you to come here because you are "the one," "the legendary knight," and as such it's your job to "destroy the Dragonlord Phalanx." Most RPG protagonists would react to information like that by going "say whaaaaaaa." Chris is a bit more nonchalant about it.

(Strong "Elizabeth Holmes text messages" energy in this exchange.)

The king says that two of his servants will aid you in your quest to find and kill the Phalanx, whoever or whatever that is: Bryan the Knight and David the Wizard (it's pretty obvious that the dev based these characters on two IRL buddies of his, Knight and Wizard). To start the quest, the trio must climb a nearby tower populated by some bird people that the game hurtfully calls "Freaks" and some cat people called "Jorjes." It's nice to see some Hispanic representation.

At the top of the tower lives a dog person called Pagne, whose character arc can be summed up by the following screenshots:

After defeating Pagne, the heroes go back to the castle, where the king thanks them for their service but warns them that "there are many others to defeat" and "this is only the beginning."

That's right, this epic adventure is only starting, baby! Anyway, that's when the game ends.

According to Makerpendium.de, this game's creator went on to make four sequels for various other RPG Maker programs, but none appear to be preserved. All those joke book titles are now lost in time, like tears in rain. Or pee in wet pants.

"Xemorph: The Nine" by Xemorph Smorg (05-25-1998)

Original description: A man sets out to end the reign of a King and restore world peace & order.

Despite what the name might suggest, this one has nothing to do with alien creatures with phallic heads. This time, your mission is to go talk to the king... and kick his ass. But first, we start with an old man telling his grandson to go pick a book for him to read. After dismissing one book as "stupid" and another as "to boring," the illiterate kid settles on a book called Xemorph: The 9. Wait, is he gonna read a strategy guide for the game we're playing?

The grandfather says that this book is actually "a true story" that happened about 100 years ago, and starts reading. Like most great works of literature, this one starts with a guy standing in the middle of an empty field. If you make him go into a nearby town (this is "Choose Your Own Adventure" book), he can enter a nice inn where he's greeted by a guy who tells him to "Get lost!" and a woman who says "Nice to meet you!" and then yells "I am scared! Ahhh!" From this we can conclude that the book's main character is very, very ugly.

Near the inn is the best part of this game: the graveyard. Not only does it have the graves for real historical figures like Adolf Hitler (1854-1945, meaning he was 91 when he died), Newt "Gingridge" (1956-2013; neither date is correct), and Shigeru Miyamoto (1969-2053, also incorrect; Miyamoto will never die)...

...but also famous video game characters like Crash B. (1995-2010), S. Onic (1990-1996; that's right, Sonic's full name is "Sonic Onic"), A. Tari (1977-1984), and of course Mario (1985-2000, fated to die the day Luigi finally gets tired of his bullshit).

Disturbingly, sometimes you can see a ghoul roaming the graveyard, and if you're brave enough to talk to it... holy shit, it's-a him.

(We're assuming the kid who made this RPG 26 years ago was promptly sued by Nintendo and is still in prison.)

There are also some mysterious graves for people called "THE," "WEED," "HOLDS," "THE," and "ANSWER," which might provide a subtle clue about the inspiration behind these headstones. That, or they're related to the bush blocking one of the graves, but nothing seems to happen when you stand next to it and press every button.

You can also visit some of the houses in this town, where we find out that this game is even more realistic than the previous one, because if you touch the fire in the stove, you actually lose health. It is the duty of every conscientious RPG player to touch every fire in every game to see if this happens. Also in real life.

You also meet a town resident who tells you that "That castle in the desert is almost impossible to get into! Only 1 mans ever made it." Whoever that 1 mans is, he reportedly lives near the castle, but you're warned that "he is not that nice." Since no one has given you anything resembling a mission (or even a plot) so far, you go looking for that desert castle and that guy who knows how to enter it. After fighting some giant spiders and three-headed helldogs, you find Mr. "Not That Nice," who says he'll help you get into the castle... if you fight him first!!! We can see how he gets his reputation.

What follows is a battle for the ages. Your enemy's very first hit is a "critical" one, causing you to lose a whopping... 1 HP?! You lost five times that just from touching the fire.

As promised, the poorly socialized knight "transrports" you into the castle when defeated. He also tells you his name is Jorg and asks to join your squad, so we guess we're best friends now. Anyway, you're finally in the castle! Meaning: a small room with an empty throne and two pillars. There's no king to talk to. Unless... you're the king? Was this game secretly a metaphor for "finding yourself"?

If you go up to the pillars and start pressing buttons (because what else are you gonna do in here), you'll find out that each has a different effect: the left one makes the screen shake, somehow, and the right one transports you back to that town at the start. And that's it, you've officially ran out of things to do in this game, unless you wanna go around the map punching dogs and spiders for no reason.

This is, sadly, the last of the games archived in the legendary Fantasy Maker's Vault website from 1998. However, our friend Spatzenfärber at the RMArchiv & Makerpendium Discord managed to salvage two more SNES RPG Maker 2 from the old web. The first one is...

"Kitten Quest Part 2: Legends - Chapter 1" by S-Mercury (08-25-1999)

The developer's website didn't have much of a description for this one, but here's an excerpt from a contemporary review for Part 1: [T]here was actually no plot. Only a cat telling me (by the way this game is pretty strange since the main characters are cats even I was one) that I should go save some guy.

A SNES RPG where you play as a cat? That actually sounds fun! Unfortunately, this is Part 2, where you play as a dumb human. The game starts with your mom telling you "Today you become an adult!!" and kicking you not just out of the house, but out of the entire town.

That's the second game where your mom evicts you the moment you turn of age (after Ductarr: The Rise of Rebellion, covered in the previous article), which probably says something about the age of the people making these.

There's some sort of black hole in the corner of your room, and if you go near it, someone, it's unclear who, yells "AHHH!!!!!!!!!" Is your character gazing into the abyss and finding it gazes also into you? Do you have someone trapped down in that hole like in Silence of the Lambs? There are no good options here.

That's the entire family home, by the way: one big room with two beds in the center and a black screaming hole on the corner. Once you leave the building, you can never come back inside. Your mom changed the locks the second you were out of there, it seems.

Outside your (former) house is a long staircase leading to a portal, which transports you to the inside of an inn. Leaving the inn reveals that it's in a very small town with only one other building: some sort of narrow bar or restaurant with nothing but some chairs and tables and a knight who says "Welcome..." and nothing else. This game is starting to feel like a Lynchian nightmare.

There's another town nearby, also with only two buildings. At this point we recommend being careful and not thinking too hard about the non-Euclidean geometry governing these buildings (avoid questions like "Why is there a patch of grass on the ceiling there?" "What's going on with those windows?" "How do those angles make any sense?") or your brain will start leaking out through your nose.

(As a reminder, someone willingly put this game on the internet for others to play.)

One of the buildings is a shop with two identical shopkeepers who just say "SHOP1" and "SHOP2" at you but won't actually let you shop (rude), while the other appears to be some sort of boat rental service. The attendant there lets you take one of the boats on the pier outside, which means we can now explore the vast seas!

And they are vast... but, unfortunately, also completely empty except for some unpopulated islands and a blimp that produces garbled text if you try to interact with it.

And that's it for Kitten Quest Part 2: Legends - Chapter 1, which did not feature a single kitten, or even an adult cat. It should be illegal to name a video game Kitten Quest Part 2: Legends - Chapter 1 and not have any feline presence whatsoever, if you ask us. You were a disappointment, Kitten Quest Part 2: Legends - Chapter 1.

That leaves us with only one SNES RPG Maker 2 game to cover, which is... an actual finished game?! And good, too?!? At this point, we wouldn't blame you for being skeptical of that claim. Still, look out for the next and final part of this article series, which will be entirely devoted to that one mythical good SNES RPG Maker 2 game.