PopFul Mail was very nearly Doki Doki Panicked into a Sonic the Hedgehog game back in the day. Branded Sister Sonic, the intention was to bring PopFul Mail to the west with a new cast of Sonic characters, with the hedgehog's long lost sister in the lead role. I remember reading about this in magazines at the time, and my brain having already been rendered into a slurry thanks to a steady diet of Sonic related products and media, I was excited. Sister Sonic never came to be thanks to a campaign by fans who wanted to see a more faithful localization of PopFul Mail.

Anyway, Working Designs got ahold of this one so nobody wins!

To say Working Designs is a divisive studio is an understatement, though I generally like their localizations when they're not being patently misogynistic (see: Albert Odyssey.) I have no frame of reference for how PopFul Mail should be, but I think it's pretty damn charming for what it is. Mail is a greedy, snarky woman who isn't afraid to use the R-word and doesn't learn a damn thing from her adventure. This is somewhat refreshing, as I've grown pretty tired of greedy characters follow the same tired predictable arc of learning to value the greater good over coin. By the end of PopFul Mail our hero gets everything they wanted: ill-gotten gold, which she practically dives into like Scrooge McDuck. For what it's worth, based on the fact that this plays out in an FMV maybe that was Mail's character arc the whole time. A villain who is clearly meant to be taken seriously but is reduced to an Arnold Schwarzenegger caricature is 100% Working Designs chicanery though, and I like it.

But while I may have a better tolerance than most for the way Working Designs stuffs their scripts with 90s pop culture gags, I am less enthused by the way they tweak the difficulty of the games they work on. In PopFul Mail's case, the difficulty is ratcheted up and enemies are intentionally made more annoying. Or so I'm told. Again, no direct point of reference for the original unbastardized version here, but there's definitely parts of PopFul Mail that are more frustrating than they ought to be.

Gameplay is pretty straight-forward. You play as one of three characters, each rendered in a sort of chibi style with their own strengths and weaknesses. I found Tatt's magical abilities to be more valuable during boss fights and Gaw's stronger jump to be useful during the main levels with Mail losing much of her utility by the last third of the game. Levels are well designed but platforming and combat is nothing spectacular. In fact, if you've played one of the Monster World/Wonder Boy games you already have a good sense for what it's like.

If you like Slayers or similar 90s fantasy/adventure anime, then you'll probably find a lot to like about PopFul Mail, both in its aesthetic style and in the 90s-as-hell localization job it was given. Personally, I got a lot of mileage out of that, and the sort of mysticism that's built up for me concerning Sister Sonic certainly helped keep me invested.