Miracle Warriors: Seal of the Dark Lord

Last night, I finished Sega's 1987 RPG, Miracle Warriors: Seal of the Dark Lord. The basic premise is that you have to find three companions and then, together as the Miracle Warriors, defeat Terarin, the Dark Lord.

Graphics/Sound
The graphics and sound are overall fairly nice for the time, but not outstanding. The enemy sprites and battle backgrounds are well drawn. A weak point is probably the overworld map tiles, which are merely functional.

The sound is fine, but mostly unremarkable. The boss battle theme does have a driving bass line that I liked, but I'm struggling to remember anything else from the game after I had played it pretty intensively for three days.

Text
The English translation of this game attempts to use Early Modern English constructs (thou, thy, ye, etc.), but like most games that do, doesn't get the corresponding verb conjugation right all the time. Amusingly (at least to me), although the game tries to evoke a medieval setting with that grammar, people and equipment names tend to be borrowed liberally from Ancient Greece (Iason, Argonaut, Titan's Armor, Kronos's Armor, etc.)

Mechanics
Traversing the overworld map is  fairly standard. Combat is where things become nonstandard. You (eventually) have a party of four, but only one enemy is ever faced at a time. Turns generally consist of only one selected member attacking (and receiving the enemy attack) and receiving experience for a successful attack. The three exceptions to this are (a) that use of certain magical items prevents the enemy from attacking that turn, and causes all party members to gain experience simultaneously; (b) certain enemies can use attack-all spells (Flame or Sleep); and (c) enemies get a free attack on all party members if they block an attempt to run.

New party members initially join at one level below the lowest among your current party, so it makes sense to do as much work as you can with as few party members, but this will be impractical or impossible after a certain point.

Party members are identical in terms of available equipment and stats. They differ only in name and in a couple of mechanics:

• One member has a strong advantage against a certain enemy.
• Another has the ability to open locks and is thus needed to progress the story. She is also the only member who can obtain critical hits.

But aside from these aspects, there is very little differentiation among the party, so strategies are limited to spreading out damage among the party in order to stay alive. As a result of this and the one-party-member-per-turn mechanic is that building up a full party is tedious and is probably among the least appealing aspects of the game.

There are two distinct currencies in the game, guilders and fangs. Items and services can be bought only with one or the other. There are merchants who will exchange all of your accumulated fangs for 50 guilders each, but this is generally inadvisable because fangs are needed throughout the game.

One interesting mechanic influenced by Western RPGs is that of character points or charisma. Winning most encounters increases character points by a certain per-enemy amount, but killing others -- such as innocent travelers or merchants -- will decrease character points. Certain places will refuse entry if the party's character points are too low. This is a fairly straightforward system in general, and it would be trivial to keep character points high except that defeating certain enemies will surprisingly decrease character points by a large amount, and yet doing so is sometimes necessary to progress the story. (Without giving away too much, the pretext for the storyline cases is that these guardians were put it place to protect against evil, and do not know that your party needs to progress in order to do battle against the Dark Lord.)

Other JRPGs of the era tended to place enemies solely by map location (and land vs. water). Miracle Warriors also takes type of terrain into consideration, such that the enemies encountered in the plains are different from (and generally weaker than) those encountered in forests, deserts, or mountains. This was a nice touch.

One final remark about game mechanics: As in Heracles no Eikou, equipment inherently has limited uses, but this mechanic is largely eliminated early in the game by hiring a blacksmith to travel with the party. The twist is that, in Miracle Warriors, it is possible to lose the blacksmith later in the game and to have to hire another.

Difficulty
Miracle Warriors depends heavily on the ability to interpret somewhat vague clues. This is standard RPG fare of course, but unlike other games of the era, Miracle Warriors tends not to bombard the player with clues that won't be relevant for the next half of the game (Dragon Quest II and Heracles no Eikou do this much more liberally), and as a result tends to be more linear. The main difficulty is finding new places in an overworld of which you can only see a 5-by-5 grid at a time.

In terms of combat difficulty, the game expects you to exercise good judgment and to attempt to run liberally, especially toward the beginning of the game. (In contrast, many JRPGs tend to make running much more optional.) The game has no qualms about placing Black Monks (one of the stronger enemies in the game, and difficult to beat without a healthy four-person party) throughout the entire overworld map.

The game can be saved anywhere on the map, and it's advisable to do so often in case an enemy decides to have fun with a sleep spell.

Overall, though, the game is probably of average difficulty for the era. It's not a cakewalk, but neither does it try to be extraordinarily vexing (by, for example, throwing nasty insta-death spells at you as in Dragon Quest II).

In terms of quality, it's an okay game, but the combat system is a little weird and repetitive. I liked Heracles no Eikou a bit more, but both have their faults. If you're a hardcore old-school JRPG fan like me, you may find this one interesting in the same ways I did, but given that Sega released Phantasy Star soon after this game, time is probably better spent playing that.

Heracles no Eikou: Toujin Makyou-Den

Heracles no Eikou: Toujin Makyou-Den is a 1987 Japanese RPG by Data East, very loosely based on the Twelve Labors of Heracles, although, like many RPGs, the game is ultimately a rescue mission: Aphrodite needs to be rescued from Hades.

In some ways, the game is better than its better-known competition of the era; in several others, it lags behind.

Graphics/music
The overworld graphics are functional and perhaps par for the course for 1987. That said, towns (but not houses, palaces, shops, etc.) are integrated into the world map, such there is no transition between town and field boundaries. This was pretty neat.

Heracles did have some pretty well-detailed enemy sprites for any game released on the NES, particularly for that era. There were some primitive battle animations -- nothing to write home about, but then again, better than what other JRPGs were doing at the time.

The standout track of the game is the main/overworld theme, which is actually pretty catchy, in my opinion.

Everything else is pretty repetitive and gets annoying after the first few hundred times that you hear it.

Battle mechanics
In this game, Heracles is pretty much a pure physical fighter by nature. There is an assortment of magical items to use, but there is no separate MP system. Heracles must expend HP to use them (a mechanics used in the much later SNES game Paladin's Quest). Depending on when you find/purchase these items, they can either be invaluable or largely useless.

The game had a limited-use weapon/armor system, which seems innovative for the first 1/5 of the game. Afterwards, to progress farther away from Athens, you pretty much need to hire Hephaistos, the blacksmith, to travel with you and repair your equipment after every battle, thus removing this mechanic. One battle mechanic that does stay throughout the game, and which tripped me up in my mid-game, is  that there is a one-handed vs. bow vs. trident vs. two-handed sword weapon system. Certain enemies are vulnerable only to one or two weapon types, and anything other than a one-handed weapon disallows the use of a shield. Since Heracles goes solo, defense is paramount, and the use of a shield can make the difference between getting hit for 1 HP and getting hit for 30 HP. Midway through the game, I struggled to have sufficient defense when the enemies became stronger because I was using a two-handed weapon. Thus, I power-leveled quite a bit to make it through until I could reasonably revert to a one-handed weapon.

Nonlinearity and difficulty
The game is also very non-linear, even more so than Dragon Quest II. Lots of clues are given, and in no particular order. However, given the progression of enemy strength, there is, in hindsight, a more-or-less "intended" sequence of events that I deviated from quite heavily, which probably also contributed to my overleveling. If I were to play this again, I would definitely try a different order, knowing what I know now.

Inventory management is a huge problem in this game. There are 10 item slots, and, most of the game, you will need 8-12 items. This is also where the non-linear part can be painful, because can easily end up with a bunch of items that won't be used for about 3-4 subquests down the road. Note that I'm not really complaining about the nonlinearity of the game. I appreciate the challenge, but it can be tedious to figure out what else is dispensable and what isn't every time you find something.

One byproduct of the nonlinearity is that, if you're like me and train until you can comfortably handle the enemies in an area, the endgame will probably be extremely easy, since the final dungeon's enemies are no stronger than what had been encountered in various previous areas. On top of that, the game tops out at level 30, reached at something like 16,000 experience points. There is an easy-to-defeat enemy late in the game that yields 200 XP. For comparison, Dragon Quest I requires 65,535 XP to max out at level 30, and the most that a single enemy will yield is 115 XP. And even at level 30, the final dungeon is not a complete cakewalk in DQ1, as it is in Heracles. Even Hades, the final boss, was plinking me for 1HP per hit in Heracles, whereas you still have to be mindful of your HP against the Dragonlord in DQ1.

Then again, you could argue that not everyone will be at level 30, but it's pretty hard to be underleveled for the final dungeon if you were well-prepared for the previous areas, and, if you rarely run, you'll probably hit a sufficient level anyway.

Random-number generator hell
What I will complain about is the random-number generator (RNG), or more specifically, the probabilities based on it, in Heracles. I once had eight "random" encounters on consecutive steps, and in general the probability for a random encounter seems as if it's somewhere between 1/4 and 1/8, which makes it extremely annoying to get anywhere until you have (and use) the Holy Bell, an item that suppresses random encounters until the area changes.

Another probability that was set too high was the chance to miss, which seemed to be between 1/4 and 1/6. (By contrast, Dragon Quest I's chance to miss was generally 1/64, going higher for evasive enemies.) This led to rather drawn-out battles, and, in some cases, three consecutive rounds in which both the enemy and I missed.

If Data East had halved or quartered these probabilities, the game would have been more enjoyable, and, I think, generally a bit more balanced given its nonlinearity and the exploration required.