There aren't many games in the already small Sega CD catalog that are universally praised, such as this one, so I gotta admit, I started Popful Mail with very high expectations, and to be honest with you, I ended up crushing into a wall.

If there's one way to describe 'Popful Mail', it would be clunky. You only have one attack that goes straight ahead, and since many enemies are usually either above or below you, it makes them really hard to hit. Enemy hitboxes in themselves are also random, which becomes a huge problem, especially in the fire prision scene. Here, you'll be forced to defeat a number of little flame enemies in order to escape while you are on a timer, and since their hitboxes are so finnicky and the time window to hit them so small, you can absolutely get stuck here, dying over and over again without being your fault. The worst, however, are the boss battles; all of them are basically the same: A big enemy that's going from left to right, waiting to be hit—some jump from left to right, some fly from left to right, some of them move only in one direction, and some don't move at all to try to change things up. It just gets old really quick. You can change characters at any given time, and you'd think this would offer more variety or a significant change in gameplay, but they are basically all the same. They also made the really weird decision not to set a fixed camera in the middle of your character, setting a 'dynamic' one instead that just scrolls when you are on either its far left or far right, so bumping into enemies is really common, such a strange oddity.

Where this game excels is in its presentation. Character sprites and animations are outstanding; the cut scenes are super impressive for their time; and the fantasy world with its comedic tone reminded me of something like Slayers. The voice acting is probably the best thing this game has to offer. Every character feels so alive, and their characterization is spot on. I don't lie when I say characters like Sven or Slick made the whole game for me; they have no right to be that funny.

The game, however, is mediocre at best. I'd still give it a chance for the story and characters alone; just don't expect thrilling gameplay.

Played this game with Supper's Unworked Designs patch. You can download it here.

I've wanted to play this game for some time. It was always one of those Sega CD games, that I would bring up to other people as an example of games that looked cool on the console. I would always think about playing it but I never would get around to it. It always felt like it existed in the future but never in the present for me, which is ironic because the game is like 30 years old lol. It feels weird to finally have played it. But enough about that I gotta talk about the gaaame. Did it meet my expectations?

I love this game, it reminded me a lot of Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap. They're both side-scrolling action games with a focus on adventure, killing monsters, finding weapons and shops, etc. But Wonder Boy III was more of a Metroidvania. Popful Mail is a lot more linear, you mostly go from set-piece to set-piece beating bosses without ever really returning to previous areas. There are a few times where you are asked to backtrack but they're brief and unchallenging.

I think the game on the whole is on the easier side, though it wasn't so easy that I would have taken WD's difficulty changes lol. There is a noticeable difficulty spike towards the end of the game where the game asks you to do precise platforming. It's kind of weird because the platforming in the final area is way more advanced than any of the stuff you have to do before that. Thankfully you can use one of the two other characters, both of which are a lot easier to platform with than Mail. I think Mail controlled a bit awkwardly in general, but I ended up liking the momentum she carried when jumping. It felt really cool to have to keep my momentum so I could dodge an enemy while I shot projectiles at them. I, unfortunately, didn't really use Tatto and Gaw outside of very specific instances, but that was more of a me thing. I think each of them brings enough to the table to find them preferable to Mail game-play-wise.

The story is what you would expect from a 90s fantasy anime. Evil Overlord wants to take over the world and you have to stop them. I think where this game really shines writing-wise is the characters. I love Mail! I love her so much! She's just such a me-core character. I love how crass she is and how mean she gets with the other characters. And I love that she is motivated entirely by greed. She's just a funny little gal and probably a new comfort character tbh. I think Tatto is a good balance to Mail's high energy, but I wish they had more interactions outside of the animated cutscenes. It kind of sucks that he just disappears from the dialogue once he's added to the party. It's cool that he and Gaw have their own dialogue for cut-scenes if you play as them, but I just prefer Mail so it feels like they kind of disappear from the story mid-game. The characters Mail and Co. meet on their journey are all relatively funny and memorable. Slick has some of the funniest dialogue in the game by far and his English VA really kills it.

In fact, the voice acting is pretty good for a dub from the 90s. Mail and Slick probably have the best performances, but there weren't any voices I hated. Maybe because the story doesn't take itself too seriously, I can accept the goofier voices. Well, the script doesn't take itself too seriously in the English version at least. WD is a pretty infamous localization group and are known for being pretty liberal with their changes to the gameplay and scripts of the games they brought over. I've heard from people who have played both the original translation and the WD version that the original was already comedic in tone, so the way Popful Mail was handled doesn't bother me as much. But I know some others may feel differently and that's understandable. Thankfully, if the voices really annoy you, you can turn them off. I would like to play the game in its original language whenever I buckle down and finally get to learning Japanese (another future goal related to this game lol).

Would like to play the Super Famicom version of this someday since I hear that version has a different story, but for now, I'm glad to say I finally played Popful Mail.

**Played via the Un-Working Designs Patch (Which if you consider playing this game, I definitely recommend that version). Slick has left a bit of an impression on me.

Popful Mail is a quaint little game. It's an Action RPG/Platformer released in 1994, by Nihon Falcom and Sega and reworked for the west by Working Designs. I had heard about this game while randomly doing research on Sonic the Hedgehog, and found out that the game was planned to be localized in the West as "Sister Sonic". Having played the game now I'm so glad that plan never went through. The charm and personality of it's characters and world should never be replaced.

That being said, the actual game, itself, kinda sucks to play. The physics they use in the game make everyone kind of feel like butter on the ground and jumping is very odd. You keep your momentum in the air, but when you want to go in a different direction, you keep that same momentum and just go darting from one side of the screen to another. It's very weird and, for lack of better words, clunky feeling. Makes the actual platforming you have to do in-game very difficult at times. It does not help that there's an ice world in the game that accentuates this issue tenfold.

Besides that the gameplay is rather standard. You get from Point A to B on the screen cutting through everything in your path for cash. You'll occasionally visit shops where you can grab food that can restore your health, trinkets that give you some extra buffs, and weapons and armor that'll make killing foes easier. It's extremely simple but I can appreciate that simpleness. What I don't however appreciate are the absolute lack of invincibility frames after you get hit by something. It lasts for roughly half a second, and then you'll just get hit again. This also made some sections and bosses in the game very frustrating, and this is the patched version. The original version absolutely jacks up the difficulty by making the damage multipliers do 3x the damage and makes you, the player, much weaker. They probably did this because, without it, you can finish the game in around 6 hours or less and it would feel like a waste of money on the consumer.

I didn't like the gameplay too much, but everything else is chef's kiss for the Sega CD. The game is vibrant and beautiful, and the soundtrack is full of earworms. The FMV cutscenes are also a treat and the comedic and cheesy tone they took with the dialogue, really makes the game feel like a saturday morning cartoon. I used to watch a lot of anime like this as a kid, so it hit home for me. Also the characters! The titular character, Mail, is a funny, tomboyish elf that'll take on any job as long as she's compensated well. I'm absolutely obsessed with her character design. She was my favorite character to play in the game because of her interactions with the other characters. Although she was weirdly ableist in one scene, but I assume that's just a weird translation quirk.

There's also characters Tatto, a somewhat soft spoken, and friendly magician, and Gaw, a little dragon-like gremlin who has a bit of an attitude. Thank God he's not the comic relief. That goes to another elf named Slick, who constantly finds himself in the party's way. I should also mention that almost all the interactions are fully voice acted and surprisingly very well voice acted as well. It surprised me to hear such lively performances from a medium where we usually don't get things like that for it's time. The actors and actresses breath so much life into the characters.

Overall, even though I did not much enjoy the "game" itself, I enjoyed every other aspect surrounding the game. If the controls and little quirks of the game were tweaked just a bit more, this game would be a certified cult classic. However as it is, the Un-Working Designs patch is the best we've got. I'd love to see Falcom come back to this series sometime, but that does not seem likely for the foreseeable future. With that being said, I'm claiming Mail as my OC. None of you can do anything about it.

Third GOTM finished for August 2023. Beat with the Unworked Designs patch to avoid the usual "Working Designs increased the difficulty for no reason" problem. The gameplay itself wasn't much to call home about, as it's mostly a slippery and clunky action-platformer with a good amount of unnecessary backtracking and bad level design. Movement in the game suffers from a head-scratching move to have two-thirds of the screen behind you, and the other one-third of the screen in front of you, often leading to running into enemies and potentially being hit from off-screen (though you can turn that around in your favor with some bosses). A later level in the game makes this particularly infuriating. The bosses were interesting, but once you got a certain party member in the group they primarily handled all of them, so they didn't feel all that cleverly designed or executed. In some cases, they were downright laughable. The schlocky 90's anime dialogue, while often given through terrible voice acting, was pretty funny and honestly felt like a strength of the game. One of the regular NPCs had me chortling on multiple occasions. It's not a great game, but it does have some charm in its characters and dialogue and the gameplay is serviceable enough to package that all up as an overall fun experience.