Uncharted Waters: New Horizons
Uncharted Waters: New Horizons is a trading/exploration RPG developed and published by Koei, set in the Age of Exploration (16th century). It released for SNES (Super Famicom) in 1994 as part of a broader multi-platform release. The SNES version's music was specifically praised for taking advantage of the console's sound chip, considered superior to some other ports.
Availability: Nintendo Switch Online — Super Nintendo Entertainment System app (Nintendo Classics)
This is a systems/mechanics guide rather than a linear walkthrough — a fixed step-by-step route isn't the useful format for a trading-sim title.
Controls / Starting Systems
Players choose one of six protagonists at the start, each tied to a distinct nationality and career path: João Franco (Portuguese explorer, son of Leon from the first Uncharted Waters game), Catalina Erantzo (former Spanish naval officer turned pirate), Otto Baynes (English privateer/naval officer), Ernst Von Bohr (Dutch cartographer), Pietro Conti (Italian treasure hunter), and Ali Vezas (Turkish merchant). Each protagonist represents a different in-game career/path, and the six characters each have their own distinct narrative with a separate ending.
Progression Architecture (Career, Trading & Exploration)
Core gameplay blends mercantile trading, global sea exploration, naval combat against rival merchants and pirates, and RPG-style character/career progression. The overall structure is largely open-ended, but developing the chosen character's career is explicitly necessary to advance that character's plot/story. Because each of the six protagonists has a distinct career path and separate ending, Phase 1 coverage for this title functions more like six loosely-linked character campaigns sharing one world/systems set, rather than a single unified story — a completionist approach would require picking and following through one protagonist's career-advancement track at a time.
Required Objectives
Career advancement (tied to the chosen protagonist's specific path — exploration, piracy, privateering, cartography, treasure hunting, or merchant trading) is the mechanism that pushes that character's plot forward. Naval combat against rival ships is a core recurring system used both to advance in some careers and to defend trade routes.
Completion Path
Completion is defined per-protagonist: choosing a character, then progressing through trading, exploration, and combat to advance that character's specific career milestones until reaching that character's narrative ending. The specific milestone requirements for each of the six career paths (e.g., what exactly ends João Franco's story vs. Catalina Erantzo's story) were not itemized from the sources accessed this pass.
Still confirming
- Precise per-protagonist ending requirements and any character-specific missable events were not confirmed in detail; this is consistent with the game's open-ended design making a single linear "completion path" description inherently approximate.
- Whether the SNES version's six endings differ mechanically from the enhanced FMV endings noted for the Saturn/PlayStation ports was not fully verified — sources indicate the SNES version predates those enhanced editions but exact content differences were not itemized.
- Specific trading mechanics (goods list, price fluctuation systems, port requirements) were not verified in enough detail to state as FACT.