You might not have played Treasure of the Rudras (SNES)

Treasure of the Rudras (Rudra no Hihou) is a JRPG by Squaresoft from 1996 that was never ported to english, but received a fan translation.

Gameplay: JRPG, Single Player
Treasure of the Rudras is one of the older Squaresoft JRPGs. It has a rather simple save the world storyline but also a lot of unique features.
First off TotR has 3 storylines you can/have to play through. Each story follows a different group of heroes on their personal quest during the "last days" of the world. Sometimes these groups meet, but usualy you will only see the results of actions the other groups did at a certain time in the story. Spells have to be learned from people/books in the world or 'guessed' and then written down inside a spellbook to be used. This feature is particularly interesting because you can use the player knowledge you gained from one storyline while playing the other story lines.
The 3 storyline structure also helped in making the game have a lot more content than would normaly be possible on a SNES cartridge. The different groups go to the same locations at different times during the game. That allowed the developers to reuse the same art assets, but change up the map for different gameplay. In one instance a cave that has been visited by 1 party is later explored by another; the second party finds the cave flooded with water though, which changes the caves layout significantly.
All in all a very interesting game I would recommend to everyone who likes JRPGs.

Get the Fan-Translation here or test in an online emulator.