Minelvaton Saga: Sit down, shut up

It doesn’t take a great amount of effort to have at least some surface-level information about a wide range of games these days: Trailers are highly polished, social media accounts tease upcoming releases with laser-guided precision, and while playable demos aren’t quite ubiquitous there’s still a real chance anything from the biggest blockbuster to the smallest indie game will have one available somewhere if you’d like to try before you buy. It’s a great time to be a consumer; anyone can get a good look at official footage, read all about a game’s features, budget for season passes, and ask a dozen or more different people – or even message developers directly before deciding if it’s their cup of tea – and they can do all of this before the game’s even finished.

But it’s all a bit… safe, isn’t it? It’s sensible forward planning, like a pair of mittens kept together with string. It’s the gaming equivalent of asking for a new toaster for Christmas (not a fancy one, of course), picking it out yourself based on a selection of reviews, and then getting a relative to symbolically wrap it up for you. It’s exactly what you wanted and you’ll definitely make good use of it, but all that lies ahead are month after month of your well-researched and publicly-approved product reliably meeting your preconceived expectations. It’s a sound purchase – but it’s not a very exciting one.

We these thoughts rattling around my head I decided I wanted to bring back some sense of “danger” to at least one game purchase, to start something up and not know whether I was about to be delighted, disappointed, or surprised by the mysterious contents within. But I wanted it to be more than some random purchase – clicking away until money’s left your bank account and an order confirmation email hits your inbox is very easy and ultimately a hollow, pointless, experience. That’s not a purchase, that’s just stuff – there’s no story or feeling behind it, just currency exchanged for goods – and it was important to me that my haphazard decision to have some thought and reasoning to it. So I decided I’d trust my old self with an old acquisition – I was going to select and then play a game the way I would have as a child, back when you’d get a new game and know no matter how good or bad it was the next one was months away if you were lucky, the formalised trade-ins and second-hand sections found in game stores to alleviate buyer’s remorse still years and years away, because dedicated game stores themselves were still years and years away (good heavens that makes me sound old). I hoped my instinct-driven purchase would capture that wide-eyed sense of adventure, of being utterly lost with no FAQs or guides to help you, feeling like the digital world extends forever on all sides just waiting for you to go and find your heroic journey within it. A place where strange bosses wait to tear through your remaining lives at the end of previously unseen levels, powerful secret items are potentially (and unfairly) hidden behind every wall or suspicious spot in the scenery, and all the rumours you half-remember about how to see the second special ending are never quite true but never so ridiculous as to not be worth investigating. I wanted note-taking, bizarre game logic and to be surprised all over again. The problem is I’m an old nerd, which means amongst other things that I’ve seen an awful lot of games in my lifetime and even the ones I’ve not directly had my hands on are usually mentioned often enough in passing online for me to be broadly aware of what happens in them: Between all the “Top ten games you’ve never heard of” lists and even plain old eBay suggestions throwing random games in my face (and FIFA, eBay seems convinced I’d like to play FIFA) it’s hard to find a game that’s truly unknown.

Hard, but not impossible. Being a long-term Sega fan means my knowledge of Famicom games outside of the usual suspects and a few notable titles of personal interest (Megami Tensei, Salamander‘s beautiful translucent cart, the eye-wateringly expensive Moon Crystal) is shamefully weak, which made it the perfect format to focus on as I browsed various online storefronts searching for something that both caught my eye and didn’t cost the earth. The only research I allowed myself to do was a quick check to make sure I wasn’t buying some dirt-common English title I’d passed over a million times already that had been given an unfamiliar Japanese rebranding and that was it – no reviews, no videos, and no screenshots that weren’t shown on the back of the box.

And this is how I ended up with a copy of Minelvaton Saga: Ragon no Fukkatsu, a 1987 Taito game with beautiful cover art by Hitoshi Yoneda (you might recognise their wonderful style if you’ve seen the Japanese box art for Sorcerian or Phantasy Star II/IV). What’s the game like? How does it play? Is it any good? Well… normally I’d do a lot of playing followed up with a lot of research before passing all of that information on to you – but not today. This is supposed to be about me capturing that feeling of heading off into the unknown, remember? If you really do need a little more than that: From what I’ve played the game is a relatively pretty but by-the-numbers Famicom RPG, looking and playing a lot like the sort of thing you’d see as a generic parody RPG running in the background of a TV show. I haven’t uncovered a hidden gem with this one or have any wonderful tales to tell you about how it tears up the rulebook after the first half hour and that’s fine – perfect, even, for what I was hoping to experience.

One week later: The game had arrived, I’m ready to go – so let’s play!

Ah, not quite: The next thing was to make sure I didn’t accidentally spoil it for myself with my fancy always-on internet across a range of devices. I didn’t need to live in a cave for the week with nothing but a Famicom and a tube TV for company or anything as drastic as that (sounds nice though, doesn’t it?) but I did promise myself I’d abide by a couple of rules:

• To not mention the game to anyone until I’d posted this article. This was to avoid well-meaning comments that may influence how I view or play the game like “Oh that! Hey, it’s a lot easier if you…” or “Oof, bad choice there Kimimi! I heard that bit with [some boss] is really rough” and so on. Normally getting a range of opinions can be really useful but I wanted this to be a new (old) adventure, just for me.
• To not do any research on it (beyond that initial name check) or look at a FAQ, ever. If it’s not spoken by an NPC, written in the manual, or shown on the included fold-out map, then I don’t know about it. If that meant I had to spend all of my time with it wandering around in circles, then that’s what the game would be to me.

Those were the basics that would keep this story mine and mine alone but there was something else I was concerned about too: It’s not even close to a full day’s “work” to acquire a complete set of ROMs for an entire generation’s worth of consoles these days, and then fit all those years of gaming blood, sweat, and tears on a storage device so small you could swallow it without needing a glass of water. It’s brilliant and I wouldn’t wish to deny anyone the pleasures of a deep dive through MAME or a fast-forwarding through a fan-translated game they’d never otherwise get the chance to play, but it can sometimes make it difficult to really engage with an older game because anything that doesn’t immediately grab you can be replaced in mere seconds with every other title that ever existed. It’s easy to get distracted, it’s easy to skip past the bits that bore you, it’s easy to keep one eye on a game running in a window while a playlist blares out your favourite tunes and your mind wanders elsewhere while your fingers do the work.

So I knew I needed to give Minelvaton Saga a chance to work its magic on its own terms, that I needed to approach it in the sort of environment it was designed to be played in – with me sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV, phone off, in-game music only (and never muted), and with no other distractions. This all might sound like I’m playing “Eighties Kid in her Bedroom” than evaluating a game and you’re probably wondering when I’ll start chewing on a watch made out of sweets while listening to an EMF tape for the sake of “creating the mood”, but it stands to reason that the game could never be absorbing if I didn’t give it the space to occupy the entirety of my attention in the way a game would have done as a child, back when TVs weren’t necessarily in colour, homes had one phone and it was attached to the kitchen wall, and a reverse-play tape deck was the hallmark of a high-end portable music player.

OK, now I was ready to play.

The game starts, as many brave quests do, with a loved one revealing a great secret on their deathbed. A unique event graphic and sombre music set the tone just as quickly as the chirpy town theme and the cute ever-walking main character sprite shatter it, and from there I’m off to talk to the king, because this is the natural order of things when you’re in an 8-bit world. As you’d expect he sends me off on a fetch quest to an abandoned castle in the east – and this is where things get interesting. Minelvaton Saga comes with a map. A proper fold-out thing made of (coloured!) paper showing the scope of your epic journey, and the location of this castle. From there it was simply a case of walking on over while getting used to the battle system along the way, but even so my little bit of navigation meant the trek wasn’t just a means to an end, but a personal success in its own right too – I’d uncovered my next target, found it on the map, then got there entirely under my own steam. As soon as I arrived I was utterly destroyed by an all-new enemy (which was a good time to check the manual so I could see what they “really” looked like) and am reminded that any progress in an eighties RPG is largely governed by the amount of grinding I’m prepared to do.

Normally the answer to “How much grinding is Kimimi prepared to do?” is “None at all.” (and perhaps part of the reason why I enjoy dashing through certain games so much) but when it’s the sole focus of your attention and the only thing that’s going to move things forward it becomes an almost pleasantly meditative activity – you stop trying to make the game catch up with you when it’s so much more relaxing for you to slow down, to stop wondering when the next thing worth noticing will show up. And when that happens you start to see things that were right in front of you the whole time: The unremarkable overworld graphics are filled with pleasantly plump trees, bright tiled paths between major locations spare you from the harsh encounter rate, and water that “animates” to give the impression of sunlight playing across the surface on a clear day. It’s all very basic stuff and not anything special even when measured against other console games of the era (this unfortunately came out in the same year as the debut games for both the Phantasy Star and Final Fantasy series) but here, as the only Famicom game I’m currently playing and as the only object in the entire house that’s currently vying for my attention, Minelvaton Saga is my own secret world of monsters and magic. Venturing out and whacking enemies before heading back to the safety of the local inn becomes a pleasant loop even if I’ve achieved “nothing” for all the time I’ve invested in the game so far. Daring to venture a little further into that castle before scurrying back to town becomes more important than whatever grand plot I’m supposed to be a part of, and my eventual reward is to see – really see – out there on the map in a way that screams “I am a boss and I am going to ruin your day” (encounters are normally completely invisible and random) a giant golem standing in the doorway to a room – a room with a special chest inside! This is clearly where I needed to go, and so I rush into battle and get myself thoroughly beaten in a manner that suggests I’ve still got a lot of grinding to go. So it’s back to the safe arms of the overworld, although the regular monsters aren’t really cutting the mustard when it comes to XP gains any more. I decide to throw caution to the wind and head north of the starting town for a change, just to see what’s up there. I find a few desert tiles in a forest clearing – it’s a nice enough visual bonus but I get really excited when walking around on them triggers an encounter with a group of scorpions – this has got to be my new grinding spot! Ah. Those scorpions are kind of… lethal. Really super deadly scorpions that are saying “Maybe leave this bit for later” with every back-to-your-last-save critical hit.

I don’t go back up that way again.

I turn back to my paper map and spot a village to the south – close enough that I might be able to reach it so long as the forest between there and me isn’t filled with things that’ll eat me alive. Thanks to a mixture of my previous grinding and a little luck, I make it to the forest village of Moruto, and find it’s not just another place for NPCs to roam but filled with helpful equipment shops! Several thousand G later and my little blue hero is now one serious sword-fighting teenager, ready to take on those golems and possibly win. But before I head out I discover a tantalising little village mystery – a chest tucked away behind a locked door in a spot you can only reach by going down a hidden ladder… where do I find keys? The manual doesn’t mention anything…

All of this intrigue and excitement comes in part from the simplicity: When item chests are normally blue and you spot a red one then you know in your bones that’s something worth investigating. When you engage in battle with an all-new enemy you’ve got no idea if you’re about to earn a few pieces of gold, get unceremoniously sent back to your last save, or just manage to escape with your life. A tile-wide bridge across a river would normally make no difference to anything but when you’re caught in that little bubble it becomes a new sight on an epic, endless, adventure.

I did wonder before I started if that feeling of being completely absorbed by a game: Not just “Playing it a lot” or “Having a really good time” but having it occupy my whole consciousness, even if only for a little while, had gone because I’d grown up, or because my tastes had changed, or if games themselves had evolved beyond that sort of thing. I’d say nothing’s changed apart from how we choose to interact with them, and for me giving myself some quiet time to sit and allow myself to do nothing but play a game – one game to the exclusion of all else, even if only for an hour a day – was a revelation. I found myself thinking about it when it wasn’t on – looking through the manual, taking notes, and checking the map not just for clues but to imagine what I’d be getting up to on those named seas and remote mountains, wondering what brief sentences would drive me to distant towns and towers. The modern way of doing things, where everything you need to know is contained within the game itself, is a great feature and something we all benefit from but being able to prepare for your next adventure over breakfast with a pen and paper in hand allows the game to seep into reality, your manual becoming more than a set of reference materials to something that might just contain the answer to your latest problem if you check it just one more time. This is not to say that eighties-style RPGing is by any stretch of the imagination how games “should” be, but it is a way of playing I’d forgotten, and forgotten how to appreciate.

There’s a very good chance I’ll never see the end of Minelvaton Saga, or even accomplish anything of real significance in my time with it – I am very happy with that. The game’s become my private little quest, walled off from all notifications, firmware updates, and unexpected messages. When I’m playing it’s just me and my little guy, wandering around in the a perfect green forever and the game neither knows nor cares that I’m over thirty years too late for this nonexistent hype train – and I don’t either. Because when I’m playing this, I have all the time in the world.

[This post wouldn’t exist without the generous support I received via Ko-fi! Thank you so much for making this possible!]