(Note this review was made somewhere around 2020, before I even made a Backloggd account.)

Here is a review I wasn’t expecting to do early. I was expecting to do the Super Famicom game first but I felt like finally tackling this game and it’s going to be really hard to get motivation to do the Super Famicom game. So, is this game any good? It was made by Sega after all so maybe this is who we needed to make this series have a good game. (It should be noted that while Sega is credited with development, it seems the actual staff had no one notable developing it).

Despite its name, the story in this game is more of a what if scenario then an actual adaptation of the story from the Manga/Anime. There’s a lot of weird changes in this game like somehow the three girls have their weapons but never seem to actually get escudo. I don’t want to go too much into it because I don’t want to spoil the anime and it doesn’t really matter too much. Basically the girls have lost Mokona and they use the communicator they have to locate Mokona. Yeah that’s pretty much the whole plot.

This game is an RPG and you’ll be going around four locations which are the Forest of Spirits, Village, Forest of Silence, and Zagato’s Castle. You can play as any of the three girls on the overworld, though there’s only one point in the game that it actually matters. I don’t really understand why you always switch back to Hikaru when entering a location. When you’re in these locations you can talk to NPCs, go into buildings to...also talk to NPCs, and you can even sometimes find treasure chests that contain free items to use. You’ll want to go into buildings to get some advice, buy some items, or go to an inn to rest up and save. When you’re walking around you’ll also get random encounters besides the Village where there’s no random encounters. This is where the other gameplay comes in, the battling.

The battle system is rather odd. You have to wait for any of the girls to be able to do a command, once they are available you can press the button to bring the menu and you’ll have all the time you want to do something. However just pressing the button while one of the girls is ready for action is not enough, you’ll need to mash right on your D-pad to spin the bottom part of the screen, you see the faster you go, the more power your attack has. Let’s say you have all three girls ready, you don’t want to use one immediately after the other because your attack will be weak. You’ll also have magic to use for each girl and you’ll learn more as the game goes on. You do have a meter for how much magic you can use so be careful what you use. Your health is also the square border around each character, if it goes completely black the character will be knocked out until you can revive them or win the battle. If all three lose all of their health in a battle, you’ll have to reload at your latest save point.

The enemy variety is a little small and even then they somehow still have repeats of similar enemies. Even some of the bosses just look like stronger variants of a normal enemy. This game also reminds me of Dragon Quest 1 where you only fight one enemy in every fight you do, though that doesn’t stop the enemy from having moves that can hit all three of you at once. The game is not too challenging, there were only two times I actually had one of the girls get knocked out before winning the fight and only received a game over one time in the game. Though I will say I probably did overgrind due to a trick I learned. Actually I don’t even know how you level up, you get gems which are currency from enemies but I never really knew what caused me to level up. I want to say you get experience from just hitting things because Umi seemed to have the highest level and it felt like she always got the one hit kills on weaker enemies but I can’t truly say what triggers a level up.

The combat though is still pretty flawed, for one thing it just gets annoying when you want to get a specific character to use but the spinning makes it hard to land it properly, you can slow it down by pressing left but you might not want to do this incase the enemy gets a quick shot on you. What’s also annoying is sometimes the game just goes to the next character without letting you spin, this might just have been me trying to skip dialogue quickly but it still can be annoying to have happen. Also be careful when pressing the button too much because sometimes I accidentally skipped dialogue like two or three times because of trying to skip the random flavor text about how powerful or weak the attack was. Then we have the magic all three girls can use. Most of the magic I did use was usually for Fuu because she can heal your team for pretty low use of magic and can even give the whole team more defense. I remember using Hikaru’s and Umi’s offensive magic early in the game but stopped around the end part of the game. Maybe I could have experimented more but the sword most of the time gets the job done, you can’t even use magic for the Forest of Silence anyway since that’s how the forest was like in the Anime which makes it more limiting.

The worst part about battles are the lucky cards. These somehow are very useful yet also very annoying at the same time. You can get one randomly when you pick one of the girls to attack and it can be full health restore for everyone, full magic restore for everyone, 500 free gems, putting the enemy to sleep, giving you 100% critical hit chance, the ability to dodge attacks, one hit kill an enemy, Running away from battle, having all three girls hit the enemy at once, revive one of the girls, and even an unlucky card that reduces your magic or HP by half. Now while it can be useful, the problem is it also wastes your turn so sometimes when you want to do something like heal with Fuu, you won’t be able to due to these cards. The worst one is the run away card because it forces you to run away and it’s so stupid. They should have given you the option to not accept the card and just let you do an attack or use an item. If this card worked in boss fights, I would have been even harsher about this mechanic.

I should also point out there are two areas in this game back to back where all they do is give more story, you don’t even get to do anything in those areas and I don’t understand why. Was the game rushed or something? It just makes the world map feel like there will be more than there is, there’s even this floating rock cave area in the top right of the map but you never go there, it feels so deceiving. The game is also pretty short, it took me less than 4 hours and even then I had moments I paused the game to do something quick.

Presentation wise it’s not too bad. The game graphically has some charm, it uses a lot of the chibi look the girls would sometimes have in the anime and manga. It all looks nice and nothing is too ugly. I will say though that when enemies are low on health they get this weird color palette and I really dislike it, especially on characters like Zagato and Ferio. (I’m still not sure if this was an emulation issue tbh). The music on the other hand is just there for me. I wouldn’t say it’s bad but I can’t really say it's memorable though I’ve never been a big fan of Game Gear music to begin with.

With all this put in mind for me, I do think this is a bad game. It’s just too shallow to be considered fun. I really wanted to like it but it just never got to the point of being fun. It can’t even get simple things right sometimes and the plot just wasn’t anything special. The sequel isn’t even a normal RPG, it’s more of a strategy game. Whenever that gets a fan translation I’ll probably play it. Even though I wasn’t a fan of this game I still would like to thank the people who made this fan translation even possible so I could play it and talk about it here. I’m just hoping to someday actually play a good Magic Knight Rayearth game, maybe one day.