Some of you who had a Sega CD may have played this game, the rest never even heard of this game. For one thing, this is the only one released internationally... unfortunately for the PAL countries of gamers didn't get it. The Sega CD is notorious for failing to deliver a promising library of games that was actually worth playing. Out of all of the games for the system, only a handful was considered worthy of actually playing on the system. Along with notable games like Sonic CD and Eternal Champions, here comes Popful Mail, Magical Fantasy Adventure. This is a game originally made by Nihon Falcom but Sega made this version. Several versions of this game exist on various systems, NEC PC 8801 in 1991, PC 9801 in 1992, then Sega CD, Super Famicom & PC Engine CD in 1994 in that order. Out of all of them, the Sega CD game was the only one localized in English for North America, so it's the one I'm gonna be playing for this review, thanks Working Designs.


The game stars Popful Mail on a magical fantasy adventure. (Obviously) This scantily clad elf warrior woman is a bounty hunter, trying to get rich and let nothing stand in her way. One day chasing after a wanted criminal Nutscracker who is a puppet brought to life by magic, she fails to capture him only managing to obtain his head. Disappointed to know the bounty can't be claimed for just the head alone, she stumbles into a nearby town finding new bounty on a wizard turned criminal name Muttonhead and is instantly reinvigorated to pursue for the bounty of two million gold. Of course she doesn't really know what she getting herself into, but she doesn't care as long as she makes money doing it.


The game features some quirky characters along the way with companions to play as, and others who will help you or get in your way and cause problems, all of this is done with their own unique personalities. Each version of the game has some noticeable differences but the story remain the same as well as the gameplay, all of them are a 2D side scrolling platformer game with RPG content or simply "Action/RPG" I mean it is written right on the box, who am I to argue with the facts. There is more to say about the game but later okay?

The graphics here is quite nice for a Sega CD... I mean a game on the Sega CD, and yes it is a harsh criticism mostly because Sega CD games hardly did much to exceed the graphic limitations the Genesis had to rival other systems like the SNES or Turbografx 16 at the time, most of the time it was just like playing a directors cut version of a Genesis game offering more content due to increased file size limit. The game has a inspiring anime look to it, environments have some good details and colors and even nice special effects. It even makes use of that good old fashion parallax scrolling, and in some places are very intense on it too. Character animations and special effects all look wonderful and fluid, and all the different areas look amazing.


The world maps also shines some here, having done the best they could with making each place look unique. Forest, caves, towers, sands, sky, snow, so much to see here. While the characters in game look like very super deformed chibi style also with some funny expressions sometimes, there is times where they show character portraits and cut scenes in full detail, so you have a pretty good idea about their appearance. So there isn't anything bad to say about the graphics. Good, fine start.



This is the good part, the presentation, probably because it's the best use of it being on Sega CD which more games could have been like if they wanted to have good presentation. The game uses animated cut scenes to tell the story as well as fully voiced characters. That's right, this game had a cast of voice actors for both the American and Japanese language that has well over 2.5 hours of spoken dialogue and 20 minutes of animated cut scenes. The game starts with the introduction to the story, Mail narrating the past events prior to the start of the actual game, I should point out the intro is just text, not voiced. During each key plot point is animation done with voice overs, it's like watching a anime, instead of being a anime video produced in a big name studios like the ones on TV, these are original lower budget animations. During the game, you can interact with some characters, during this time, they also are voiced as well, you don't get those anime like videos, but their in game character sprites do show something for the play to visualize, not to mention a animated portrait that goes with everything they say accompanied with funny expressions. Seriously, lots of effort put into the writing of the game... wait hold on, is that... a innuendo!? I'm sure the game is for kids, I checked the ESRB on the cover!


The context is pretty much a joke, I don't mean it's bad when I say that, I mean that they tell a lot of jokes. The game has humor, the character's personalities are really expressed through these scenes, the way they speak, what they say, you'll understand just who they are after watching them talk. This is what I like to call charm. It does the job it was meant to do, entertain the player to continue playing and wanting more. It's hardly a dull moment, everyone has something interesting to say and worth listening to, of course if you're annoyed by the voices, you can just turn them off in the options but you do yourself a disservice by not experiencing it least once. Most of the time it is just cliche anime tropes, but I'm not mad, I like it. Some is creative and because it's localized for American culture, it is more relatable when they make the jokes. I assume the original is like this, so I guess the pacing for progression is well.




Another good thing about this game is the music, some very catchy tunes, nice music and ambiance too. Actually, I'm shocked by how good it sounds. You think I wouldn't be cause it's a game on the CD that can play recorded music instead of music from chip tune, but the whole soundtrack uses the chiptune format rather than recorded music. Unlike Sonic CD which had more of the so called "Red book Audio" for most of the game, this one doesn't. There is only three, one for the opening cinematic where Mail narrates the story, one for the title screen and for the ending complete with a song exclusive to the localization complete with singing. Yeah, I should be shocked, why bother making music using a lower quality tools when you can use better ones!? It doesn't matter, if it's good, the specifications don't matter as long as it work well, my only guess was to save data for other areas of the production, had it been done, it would probably been too much to fit on the disc with the animation and voices. Bottom line, it's good. I guess Sega CD was hiding more than meets the eye.



Now this is where stuff start to get interesting. The game plays like a 2D sidescroller platformer, but also like a RPG game. Think about it as Zelda 2 Adventure of Link or Castlevania 2 Simon's Quest but leagues better. You run, jump, climb ladders, and defeat enemies all in 2D. You start with Mail but you eventually get more companions, Tatto a Magician Apprentice of Muttonhead trying to find out why his master has gone insane. He can shoot magic projectiles of various elements. Also there is Gaw, a winged long tailed creature who attacks with his claws and fire breath. Each one has unique traits such as Gaw jumping higher or Mail running faster. All three makes a good team, each with their own motives for being on this journey. Let's not forget Mail is only trying to get rich anyway she can.


Collecting gold from defeated enemies is the basic way of acquiring new items. You use it to buy them from shops. You can buy new weapons, shields, and armor to gear up for tougher battles, you can also buy healing items in various forms of fruit, or if you lucky, find them hidden inside of treasure chest. Other than that, you have simple rules for playing the game, fight your way through various environments, defeat enemies and bosses, help various people on their problems, stop the bad guys and claim the reward of two million gold that you wanted. It's a simplistic game with straight forward play.


Well you would think a simple game couldn't be hard right? Well guess again. Zelda 2 and Castlevania 2 was both simple games that was a challenge. Unlike those games, it doesn't suffer from getting lost easy in many areas, useless people who don't help you at all, people who provide no useful hints for the player, or very cheap enemies who have unfair advantage over the player, or ridiculous power up system of gaining obese amounts of EXP for prolong time. This games suffers from the most bizarre thing ever, localization! What do I mean by this? Well our good translators here at Working Designs though the game would be more fun if it was raised to a more absurd difficulty for us American players, as with many games that they have touched they became notorious for this practice. They must have been so proud of this game cause, there is a page in the manual that explains all about the localization process and completely says that's what they did. I didn't even have to research this, they admit to doing it, most developers don't usually go into detail about it. When I did research this, wow, oh my gosh! The results was enough said.


If you beat this game, you have more patience than I do, you are better than me and that is usually how I or most people feel when someone else do things they wanted but can't. You better be in a mood to be challenged like you was when you did play Zelda and Castlevania if you wanna beat this game. I could go into greater detail how bad the changes was but I'll keep it simple, enemies have more defense, more attack power, drops less gold, items in shops have most of the cost tripled the value making them not worth buying at all, and items you can sell value for way less, one item in the game which is gold bars, the only purpose it has is to sell for gold to buy more stuff doesn't have much value making it almost worthless! (Though weapons and armor values remained changed) Yeah, it's that bad, not to mention the stage hazards deal way more damage as you progress ignoring your defense stat.


You could say just get better at the game, sure okay. But why did the changes need to exist in the first place? If it wasn't like that already, why was it a good idea to alter it? It didn't seem like the decision of the developer but the localizer. This is the kind of stuff usually reserved for developer decisions, future reinventions of the game, a remaster or remake, intended by developer not by localizers.


The fact remains, even with the absurd difficulty spike because of Working Designs, I still think it's a great game collaboration and better that more people outside Japan got to play it than never being able to at all. Even more impressive being one of the few to stand out among on a system for being notoriously saturated of poorly designed games, even in my opinion could have been on the genesis or anything else. The localization charms me with the story and characters even if the animation scenes aren't that spectacular, it's the presentation that counts, they went above and beyond making the game appeal to American players. The game is simple with fair rules and gameplay that still manages to be fun. Nice looking graphics and good sounding music. But the difficulty can't be ignored, only a hardcore game would appreciate the "Working Designs' challenging gameplay."


It doesn't help that they expect the player to suffer this harsh challenge and still manage to finish the game in under five hours! Yes I said five hours. You get rewarded for doing that which I won't spoil for you, but I just don't see that possible without some serious practice. This reward or time trial wasn't in the Japanese version at all so it's exclusive to the localized game. I appreciate the effort they did to make it possible for us to play but some was very poor decisions. I'm not the only one who thinks so, there is a whole thread on some rom hacking site explaining every game and their changes in detail that Working Designs messed with and how you can restore it to the original unaltered glory. Honestly if I could I would have just stopped playing if the game wasn't so good but this person when the extra mile for all of us, if that doesn't say something about challenge then I dunno what does. Either way I hope Falcom comes out with announcement of new Popful Mail game sometime soon, Ys has been shining a lot but don't forget the rest of your games especially ones that didn't get the true chance to shine like the ever popular Ys series.