Fushigi no Umi no Nadia
"Nadia of the Mysterious Seas" Japan
Advance Communication Company (developer); Toho Co. (publisher)
Released 1991 for NESIdentically-named adventure games released for other platforms, 1992-1993
Date Started: 3 May 2022
Date Ended: 3 August 2022
Total Hours: 22
Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.0/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)
Ranking at Time of Posting: (to come later)
Nadia came up on a random roll a few months ago. Although it was originally released only in Japan, I checked to see if anyone had made an English translation, and it turns out that it did. (There isn't much text in the game anyway.) In fact, it was translated as early as 1998 by an outfit calling itself J2E Translations; they don't seem to have been active since 2004. When I saw how long it was going to take, I nearly dumped it, but I unexpectedly found myself enjoying it. I dipped into it once or twice a week over the summer and just recently managed to finish it. It was a decent contrast to the other games on my plate this summer.
The game is based on a 1990-1991 Japanese animated television series of the same name, translated for English release as Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water. This is the name that the translators chose for the game's title screen, but I understand the Japanese title means something closer to Nadia of the Mysterious Seas. In any event, the show is set in the late 1800s and draws themes and characters from Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. (I got a copy of the book when I was eight, but it took me nearly another 40 years to realize that the 20,000 leagues are how far the Nautilus traveled, not how deep it traveled.) The 14-year-old heroine has a secret past and carries a mysterious jewel called the Blue Water. She and her inventor friend, Jean, hook up with Captain Nemo and an assortment of other characters to battle a warlord named Gargoyle, who seeks to restore the dominance of Atlantis.
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A promotional image for the show. |
There were adventure games of the same name released for the SEGA Genesis and Japanese PCs around the same time, but those don't have anything to do with this Nadia. Frankly, the game has as much to do with the show as C3P0's cereal had with Star Wars.
Characters drawn from the show face off across a variety of different
landscapes, but they could have easily been swapped with different icons
and names to draw from a different framing story. In fact, given the quick turnaround time (the series ended the same year this game was published), I have to wonder if the game wasn't originally developed as a non-licensed title, with some last-minute text and icon swapping.
Without any introduction, the player is given a list of 50 scenarios, organized into 10 groups: Streets of Paris, Stone Circle, Gargoyle Castle, Bunglegun Soil, Warehouse, Pipe-Line, Ocean Floor, Antarctic, Cave, and Temple. Each one has a slightly different map, but the goal is always the same: move at least one of your characters across the map and engage and kill the emperor before the Neo-Atlantean forces engage and kill Nadia on your side. If you have two controllers, you can have a second player control the Atlanteans. The names of both allies and enemies are drawn from the show. Allied characters include Nadia, Jean, Nemo, Grandis, Electra, a lion named King, a whale, and the Nautilus itself. Enemies include Gargoyle, Garfish, Canrobot, a tank, and (for some reason) the Tower of Babel. I don't know if their various strengths and skills have any basis in the show.
Considering my options on one of the "Antarctic" maps. Yes, there are igloos in the Antarctic. |
The game looks like a strategy game, and that's how I originally saw it, but it's more accurate to think of it as an enhanced version of chess. Each round, you can move only one character. Each character is capable of different movement paths and distances. Some can move one or two squares in any direction (assuming there are no obstacles); others can move all the way across the map, but only straight across a row, or only diagonally. The emperor, taking the role of the king in chess, is usually somewhat protected, and you have to maneuver your pieces in such a way that you can reach him. There are no automatic captures as in chess; every engagement between pieces results in an RPG-like combat on a separate screen.
Combat happens when you end a round adjacent to an enemy. If you end a round adjacent to two enemies, you fight both of them. One good way to protect Nadia is to ensure that she can't be approached without engaging at least one other character at the same time. Since you can only move one character at a time, you can never offensively attack with more than one character.
On the combat screen, Captain Nemo attacks a tank. |
There are other RPG elements. Each character has attributes--strength, armor class, and hit points. Many of them have "skills" that draw from a pool of magic points. Most are used in the combat screen, but some, like a long-distance ranged attack called "Long," can be used on the main screen in lieu of engaging someone in combat. And while you move around the map, useful objects pop up at random, inviting you to grab them to gain an edge in combat. There are items that make a powerful attack, heal, restore magic points, allow you to escape combat without a chance of failure, and several other effects.
Most importantly, for our purposes, characters gain experience after each victory and frequently level up, increasing strength, health, magic points, and armor class. (There's also an attribute called "MD" that I never figured out; it might be "Magic Defense.") A character earns about 50 experience points for an evenly-matched battle and levels up every 100 experience points. As your level increases relative to the enemy's, the experience rewards are less and less.
Enemy difficulty is based on the map. The first scenario has Level 0 and Level 1 enemies; the fiftieth has some enemies at Level 80. It thus makes sense to take the scenarios in order, and even to repeat the same scenario multiple times as a type of "grinding."
Checking the enemy's statistics. |
That's the theory, anyway. After I got some experience, I realized that the enemy AI is so poor that you don't really have to play the game the way it's clearly intended. (Obviously, that wouldn't be true with a skilled second player.) The enemy fails to take obvious chances to kill Nadia and doesn't do a very good job protecting his emperor. Thus, you're encouraged to build up only one or two characters and just send those powerful allies directly across the map to the emperor, leaving the rest behind to do nothing, rather like decimating a chess opponent by playing nothing but your queen. You occasionally lose this way--there's a lot of randomness in combat--but losing just means you have to play the scenario again. I found that I rarely died. Most characters level up after every couple of combats, which completely restores hit points and magic points. You don't have to conserve your resources when you know you're getting them all back every two or three combats.
The enemy uses a "Long" spell to lob a cannonball at one of my characters. It's one of the few ways you can attack from the main screen instead of the combat screen. |
One thing I liked about the game is how tactics continually evolve. In the early levels, strength is paramount. No one has enough spell points to use magic more than once or twice per scenario. Items like "Boosters" (despite the name, they're an offensive weapon) and shotguns are so much more powerful than your own attacks that you run around the map collecting them. "Boxes," which restore magic points, are worth their weight in gold.
I win a scenario! |
In the late game, physical attacks are nothing. Spells like "Freeze," "Charm" (which just stuns), and of course "Heal" are vital. There are a lot of offensive spells like "Throw" and "Long" that do massive amounts of damage but also have a high chance of failing. Adding to the mix, you don't exactly "take turns" in combat; sometimes, you or the enemy gets two, three, or even four moves in a row. You can never tell, so you have to plan for the worst and hope for the best.
If this spell works, I should be able to kill the emperor in one hit. |
Fifty is a lot of scenarios, and at higher levels, they get particularly tedious since almost every character (enemies included) has healing spells. There's nothing more frustrating than whittling 500 hit points away from your enemy only to watch him restore 300 of them with 10 magic points--and he still has another 250 magic points to go. Having more hit points also gives enemies more time to decide to flee, at which point they appear in some random part of the map. When the emperor does this after you've spent 20 minutes trying to reach him, it's maddening.
Still, I enjoyed the scenarios overall, in limited duration. Just as you probably wouldn't want to play more than one or two games of chess per day, that was about my limit for Nadia battles, which is why it took me so long to win.
At first, I wasn't even sure there was a winning condition. I thought maybe the game was just about the individual scenarios. I skipped some of them and replayed others. After I'd completed about half of them, I started jumping directly to #50, hoping to win it to see if anything happened. When I did win it on my fifth or sixth attempt, and nothing did happen, I figured that was it. But a note on a random web site mentioned something about an endgame cinematic, so I sighed and kept at it.
When I'd won all the original 50 scenarios, the game suddenly presented me with a new row of five more! The title of the new group was "Space." I nearly packed it in at that point, envisioning yet another row appearing after I'd won #55, but I read a synopsis of the show and learned that the end takes place in space, so I figured that might be the last row after all.
I played the five additional scenarios, and the game finally ended with some animated scenes of the characters dancing around the screen, followed by some credits.
It gets only a 16 on my GIMLET, doing best in character development and magic/combat (3s), but as often happens, the game is a bit better than the rating suggests, since it really wasn't intended as a classic RPG.
Nadia got me thinking a lot about the relationship between strategic board games like chess and strategy wargames. I have written and deleted a couple thousand words on the subject; I keep finding holes in my logic. I suppose I ought not to write anything at all about chess, which I don't like and am horrible at. (I've never known which of these is the x variable and which is the y.) Suffice to say, it seems to me that a game in which you move only one piece per turn is fundamentally different from a game in which all units can act per turn, but every time I try to articulate the consequences of this distinction, I get lost in a morass. Maybe some of you can point me to existing writings on the subject or offer your own thoughts.
For now, I'll just say that because I suck at chess, I'm always envisioning ways to change the rules more to my liking, such as introducing dice--rolling to capture another piece instead of the capture happening automatically. Or giving each player a list of "spells" they can apply at their discretion, once per game, like a spell that lets a particular piece double its movement, or a spell that resurrects a lost piece. Nadia basically represents these ideas come to life. It turns out what I've always wanted from chess is to make it more like an RPG. How astonishing.