Zelda 1 randomizer is popular, and it’s all about procedural generation of dungeons and procedural assignment of items to locations. It’s not as well designed as the original Zelda 1, not by a long shot, but it combines the familiar gameplay of Zelda 1 with the novelty of procedural generation.

I’ve tried those.

Sea of Stars looks as pretty as Chrono Trigger, but its writing is noticeably worse and it completely fails at one of Chrono Trigger’s great strengths, pacing. In Sea of Stars’ defense, it is generally better than Chrono Trigger at interesting dungeon design and its battle system has more potential. But those don’t compensate enough for poor writing and especially pacing.

Chained Echoes tries really hard to fit a 32-bit plot into a 16-bit running time, and it doesn’t quite work. Still, it left me interested in more by the same dev team, especially if trends and tech change so that they can switch to doing a game explicitly inspired by Xenogears and its ilk.