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.