Oh yeah, indeed, there was Mystic Quest (the european name for the first game) before. Although, it was such a different beast it's only with Wikipedia later that I discovered the two games were related.

A fan translation was actually completed in 1999 and kinda big news so you could have played it way back then if you were able to run a ROM patch

Oh really? Nice, I missed that. But well, I didn't speak English either back then, so it probably wouldn't have helped. :)