Miracle Warriors: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

I don't know; it was 50/50 for a while.

        

Miracle Warriors: Seal of the Dark Lord

Japan

Kogado Studios (developer and Japanese publisher); SEGA of America (U.S. publisher)

Released in 1986 for PC-88, FM-7, and Sharp X; 1987 for NES and Sega Master System

Date Started: 16 July 2020

Date Ended: 29 July 2020

Total Hours: 10

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: 26

Ranking at Time of Posting: 175/379 (46%)

      

Summary:

Probably the first Japanese console RPG released in America, and the first for the Sega platform, Miracle Warriors is a boring, grindy game in which the player must assemble a team of four characters, collect a series of artifacts, and do battle against a great evil to recover the titular seal and thus save the world from an influx of monsters. As with many console RPGs of the period, real game content lasts only a few hours; the rest of the length is required for grinding for experience, gold, and a few rare magic items. The game features simple mechanics to go with simple controls, including a combat system with virtually no tactics, limited character development and inventory development, and only a thin veneer of lore.
      

*****

     

A lot of you warned me that it wouldn't be time well-spent, but I finished Miracle Warriors anyway, mostly to avoid having the loss count against my statistics. One of these days, I'm going to have to have a frank discussion with myself about how many sunk hours that "won" statistic is really worth. My time is probably only half of what it would take to win it on era-accurate hardware; I made liberal use of the emulator's "fast forward" option to speed through combat pauses and animation (I can't help but wish DosBox offered a similar option after all those combats in Amberstar).

     

Miracle Warriors mostly serves to make better console games like Final Fantasy seem all the more impressive. Final Fantasy required some grinding, but at least what happened after the grinding was interesting. Even the grinding itself was a little interesting, in the sense that it offers actual combat tactics. There's none of that in Warriors, just blunt attacks and the occasional use of a magic item.

          

Getting the fourth companion.

       

Winning the game involves running around from continent to continent, hitting towns, dungeons, caves, and castles, first to assemble the team of four Miracle Warriors, then to equip them with a variety of sword, shield, and armor artifacts. By the time you head for the final battle, all four warriors have a full suite of special items, which the game allocates automatically to particular warriors without your input.

    

There are a few chokepoints that keep Warriors from being a truly open world game. First, you can't explore the sea until you pay 30,000 guilders for a ship. Even then, you can only explore the calm, eastern seas. You need to get a second ship elsewhere to explore the rougher oceans around the final continent. (There is no graphic for either ship; you just walk on water once you have it in your inventory.) There is at least one companion who can't join the party until you find a particular piece of armor. There are some items of equipment that you can't pick up, and areas you can't enter, until you have particular companions. Whenever I ran into such an issue, I just circled around to different areas and returned later. There was always plenty to do.

           

Getting the second ship.

          

Some of the equipment is found in treasure chests in small dungeons that you have to explore, but other times you just have to fight one boss enemy the moment you enter.

        

Finding an equipment upgrade in a dungeon.

         

There's no sense of team combat. The four warriors are more like four individuals who just walk around together. In combat, only one character can attack at a time, and only he gets experience for attacking. Enemies generally only attack the character who attacks them (in any given round), although some are capable of mass-damage spells.

          

The party is pretty low on hit points.

         

There are a few items that can help in combat. Sacred Nuts, found after combat in a few wooded areas, cause damage when thrown. Staffs of Earthquakes can be purchased for 10,000 guilders in a town on the southern part of the map. And on an island in the southeast, you can purchase Stones of Protection (which block enemy spells for one full combat, if they work, which is only about 50% of the time) for 50 fangs. All of these items have maximums, so you can't carry an infinite number.

When you face a particularly tough enemy, there's only one series of actions. First, use a Stone of Protection so that the enemy can't cast mass-damage spells. (Sometimes you have to use multiple stones until one works.) Then, exhaust your Staffs of Earthquakes and Sacred Nuts, both of which can be used without retaliation from the enemy. Next, have the first character "attack" until his hit points are almost gone. Move on to the second character, then the third, and finally the fourth. If he's not dead by the time the fourth character's hit points are exhausted, you need to reload and spend more time grinding before trying the combat again.

          

One of the boss-level enemies.

          

One particular annoyance is that you can't use healing herbs in combat. Late in the game, however, you obtain some Potions of Resurrection (which, despite their name, are basically just full-healing potions) from Sea Serpents. These add an intermediate step in tough combats, giving you a few more hit point bars to exhaust before the battle is over. I've seen people recently making fun of Phantasy Star for offering a cake shop in a cave; if Warriors was better known, "sea serpents drop healing potions" might become the same sort of meme.

         

There are only ever three "spells" in the game, and none of them are usable in combat. They just rouse your companions and allow you access to certain areas.

          

The game's three spells. "Come, Iason" is necessary to enter some endgame areas.

      

The game generally does a decent job of updating the latest NPC hints to help you with the next stage of the game. I still needed to look up a hint online for the final area, however. The endgame takes place on the southwestern continent, Areos, but many of the locations you need to enter are hidden. I never got a hint about the fact that they were hidden nor where they were hidden, so I needed a walkthrough to bail me out. After that, it was just a matter of finding three keys and then heading to the final dungeon, which for some reason is called Gelkis.

       

One of three keys needed for the endgame.

          

The final dungeon has three small levels, but with extra staircases that lead you astray into the game's other dungeons. If you find the right path, you confront the demon/dark lord/general Terarin at a staircase on the third level. She is presented topless (the way she is on the original Japanese box cover), which I find surprising for a North American console release of the period. Anyway, if you've leveled enough and follow the combat strategy above, you win; otherwise, it's back to the grindstone for a while. Grinding takes a long time at higher levels, even with "fast forward" enabled in the emulator.

           

This is so anatomically improbable, I'm not even sure I'd call it "nudity."

          

After the final battle, the game has more endings than The Return of the King. First, you get some messages on the combat screen. Note the inconsistent tense:

        

Chet defeated Terarin, the dark general, in mortal combat! Entering the depths of the shrine, Chet finds a chest. Within lay man's last hope, the Seal of the Dark Lord!

                    

It's funnier if you imagine that we found a marine seal.

         

Then, there's a scrolling message:

        

Chet and his companions came to fulfill Iason's prophecy and the people of the Five Lands, weary from despair, rejoiced. The elders led the Miracle Warriors to evil's gate. After a raging battle of sword and sorcery, the evil Terarin was defeated. Chet took the Seal of the Dark Lord and used it to once again shut the Pandora Passage, returning peace to the Five Lands.

       

Then a bunch of portraits appear to give thanks. I guess maybe they were some of the NPCs we met along the way, but none of them were memorable enough that I can put name to portrait. 

           

Thank you, random stranger.

         

Then we have some images of the king congratulating the party: "Brave Chet! I knew thee surely would be triumphant! Thy feats will become legend in the land for all eternity."

         

What king are you, again?

          

Finally, the other three companions each offers his or her own message of congratulations. After that, it's finally back to the title screen.

         

My fellow party members, looking like apostles.

        

During my career, I've attended a lot of office parties for departing co-workers. Some of them have even been for me. There's a weird vibe at some of those parties. People who barely spoke to each other are suddenly hugging. The departing co-worker is lauded for doing a much better job than he or she actually did. Statements assure him or her that he or she will be missed much more than he or she actually will. Some high-level manager you've never even met is there to hand out an award or gift card. It's all smiles and support, all cake and cocktails, and the next day you're already struggling to remember the co-worker's face and wondering what the hell that was all about. The end of Miracle Warriors felt like one of those parties. The game simply hadn't engaged me enough with its story and lore for the end to be worth all that fuss.

    

Here's my GIMLET:

    

• 3 points for the game world. Warriors tells a fairly standard backstory and offers a boilerplate quest. Someone went through a lot of trouble in annotating the map not only with the names of the continents but also the various sections of the continents, deserts, forests, towns, and so forth, but none of it amounts to anything. These places have no particular character. Towns are all interchangeable.

• 2 points for character creation and development. Creation consists only of a name. Development takes place by earning experience and occasionally seeing the bar roll over, which increases maximum hit points. 

          

The full party.

        

• 3 points for NPC interaction. You get one-line clues from wandering traders and a few NPCs in towns. They're important to the game but don't offer the same depth of lore as, say, Final Fantasy.

• 2 points for encounters and foes. The game's menagerie of weirdly-named monsters is amazingly unmemorable. Some of them have special attacks, but since there are no tactics in combat, there's really no reason to memorize those attacks.

• 2 points for magic and combat. As outlined above, there simply aren't enough choices to make.

• 3 points for equipment. You have a base set of gear that you can buy and a prestige set that you can find, plus a few usable items in combat.

         

The game's inventory screen.

          

• 4 points for the economy. Between healing, purchasing staffs, paying the armorer in Hierax to upgrade your swords, and other purchases, the economy remains relevant through most of the game.

• 2 points for a main quest with no side quests, no choices, and no alternate outcomes.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are decent. Some of the monster portraits are creative and fun. The sound effects aren't interesting enough to deal with the constant, repetitive music, and I thus played with the sound off. The simple mechanics make serviceable use of the simple controller, but there were a lot of ancillary interface issues that wipe out any points I would otherwise give it. It was too hard to distinguish health and experience bars, for instance, and scrolling through menu options doesn't wrap around when you get to the top or bottom.

          

There are some weird monsters in this game.

         

• 2 points for gameplay. It gets some credit for limited nonlinearity, and the total game time wasn't so bad. But the game is otherwise far too grindy, and there would be no reason to replay it unless you just completely forgot what it was about.

          

That gives us a final score of 26. It perfectly exemplifies what a game in the mid-20s means: it's an RPG; you can play it; it doesn't do anything outrageous; you might be glad you had it if you were in prison and had nothing else to do. I watched old episodes of Arrow while I played it. If I had it only for the console, it would be too boring and slow to keep my attention fixed on the television with nothing else to keep me occupied. Maybe if the television had picture-in-picture. What happened to that? I don't even think my brand-new Roku television offers that option.

         

I'm not sure Sega had the best ideas when it came to box covers.

          

Contemporary reviews were very low. The best categorized on MobyGames is from the March 1989 Power Play at 63/100 (March 1989); from there, they drop into the 40s. Almost all reviews, contemporary and current, note the repetitive, slow combat and grinding, which really says something given that these elements were common to console games of the era. Typical is the December 1988 The Games Machine: "Endless repetition of combat, inflexible interaction, and monotonous predictability kills this shallow attempt at an RPG."
     

In contrast, there are a curious number of modern reviews that seek to rehabilitate the game. For instance, if you've ever wondered what kind of gamer could actually be aroused by the endgame graphic of Terarin and her grotesque bosom, check out this coked-up review at HonestGamers.com; the author has won it at least four times. My colleague Zenic Reverie also found some value in the game in a 2012 series of entries (starting here) at The RPG Consoler (and if you're looking for more detail than I provided, his is definitely the series to read), although he was also relatively grounded and ultimately rated the game at 33%.

Kurt Kalata took an interesting look at Miracle Warriors in a 2007 article on HardcoreGaming101. Although he was critical of the Sega version, his worst comments were reserved for the PC-88 and MSX versions that the Sega edition was based on. Neither of the original versions feature any kind of in-game map, meaning you absolutely had to use the accompanying paper map to have any chance of figuring out where you were. The fairy companion actually talks to the party in the PC versions, and the towns are just menu towns. The Japanese NES version is closer to the Sega, although with (in Kalata's opinion) inferior graphics.

        

The final battle from the PC-88 version, courtesy of HardcoreGaming101.

           

I rated Miracle Warriors higher than I rated Kogado's Cosmic Soldier: Psychic War (1987). Although the two games are quite different, they have similar flaws, including boring combat, limited character development, and weird use of multiple characters in the party. It feels like the developers at Kogado didn't really "get" RPGs the way those at Square did (or at Nihon Falcom, for that matter). I don't know if they ever got better at RPGs--and I'll probably never know, because the company seems to have given up completely on western releases of its products after Miracle Warriors. None of its future RPGs--including Mashō Denki: La Valeur (1989), Mōryō Senki Madara: Daikongō Rinhen (1993), Record of Lodoss War (1994), Kisō Louga II: The Ends of Shangrila (1995), and Magical Squadron (1996)--have North American releases or English translations.

   

If my experience with Final Fantasy served to emphasize that not all console RPGs of the era are bad, even if played on a PC, my experience with Miracle Warriors perhaps emphasizes that if they are bad, it isn't necessarily because of the "console" part. I don't know how many more console tangents I'll allow myself--at least one to check out the first handheld RPG, I think--but overall it's been an instructive experience.