This 1995 Japan-only Taito release is a follow-up (spin-off, rather than a sequel) to Landstalker on the Sega Megadrive.

Lady Stalker: Challenge From The Past was never released outside of Japan, so – for me – this is a case of: “play the game in Japanese and see how far you can get”. With the help of a few YouTube videos I managed to get quite far.

There is apparently a fan translation in the works, which is interesting, although – from what I can tell – Lady Stalker does appear to be considered one of the “lesser” RPGs in need of a translation on the Super Nintendo, so it’s not a high priority.

Graphically, Lady Stalker is nice. Cute, colourful, stylised isometric graphics make for an interesting world to explore. The combat is random – which is different to Landstalker – and the controls are just a finnicky as they were in Landstalker (directional, and not particularly intuitive).

One big difference over Landstalker is that – in this – you cannot jump. Instead you ‘run’ over gaps, but the speed of your run has to be built up. Losing jump and replacing it with this was not the best idea, in my opinion, but Lady Stalker is what it is. A decent “light” RPG.

I’ll play Lady Stalker some more when it recieves that promised English translation. Until then I’ll keep it filed under “interesting curiosities to be re-visited”.

Note: although the in-game credits state the game’s subtitle as “The Apocalypse Engine”, this is in fact “Challenge From The Past”. I’ve got no idea why the titles are different and it is confusing. There are not two Lady Stalker games – just one.

More: Lady Stalker on Wikipedia