Shadowrun

Shadowrun for Sega CD is a little-known game (and one of the very last ones released for this console) that is based on the FASA RPG of the same name and has only very little to do with its much more popular brethren for SNES and Genesis.

It is twenty-first century, and the humanity faces a difficult period that follows devastating wars and other disasters. Magic and technology co-exist, supernatural powers, mythical creatures, ghosts, cyberspace, where hackers meet and fight each other, street deckers which can be hired to do the dirty work, anarchy and struggle between mighty and corrupt corporations - this is the world of Shadowrun. Unlike the two other Shadowrun games which are set in Seattle, according to tradition, Shadowrun for Sega CD is set in the futuristic city of Neo Tokyo. The player controls a party of characters with different backgrounds: the street samurai Rikudo, the shaman girl Mao, the decker (a hired mercenary) D-Head (who also happens to be an elf), and Shiun, a former member of a mighty corporation. Their first assignment is to hunt down a ghostly warrior who has been disturbing a segment of the city for quite some time. As the player begins their investigation they plunge deeper into the dark world of intrigues and find themselves fighting on different fronts.

Shadowrun for Sega CD (unlike its two other counterparts) is a distinctly Japanese game. It is a hybrid of the Japanese style of adventure, along the lines of Snatcher, and turn-based party RPGs. In adventure mode, the player interacts with the game world by choosing commands ("Look", "Talk", "Move", etc.) from a menu. There are no real puzzles, but rather realistic detective work: the player talks to people, gathers evidence, accesses the internet, talks to informers, and so on. But often they find themselves in places where they navigate their characters from a top-down view and fight enemies. The battles occupy the whole screen and the player can move around the battle field, using melee, long-ranged, and magic attacks, like in early Ultima games. The outcome of an attack is decided by a dice roll. The player can stop the dices themselves or they can let the computer do the rolling for them. There are also cyberspace fights which occur when the player encounters a hostile hacker in the matrix world.