Northern California based publisher Working Designs worked overtime to bring early Sega fans a decent line-up of role playing games from overseas. Without them platforms such as the Sega CD and Saturn would have been barren wastelands as far as the genre is concerned. Today I’m going to take a look at one of their more curious releases; Popful Mail: Magical Fantasy Adventure (or just Popful Mail for short). This was a remake of an earlier title in the franchise (yes, this was an actual franchise) which took advantage of the Sega CD’s large new software medium by offering up plenty of voice acting and animated sequences. Now that stuff like this is hardly impressive by today’s standard we can take an objective look at the game looking past all the glitz and glam, and that’s what I’m here to do today. With that let’s dive right in for a Popful Mail review.
Popful Mail kicks off with an animated sequence depicting the titular hero chasing down a nefarious criminal named Nuts Cracker in hopes of collecting the bounty on his head. He manages to escape at which point Mail returns to town to find a new target. This is where she hears about Muttonhead; a once kind (but crazy) wizard who has turned to the dark side. With a two million gold bounty on his head he’s an irresistible target for our greedy hero, and so she sets out to track him down and bring him to justice. Along the way Mail will meet new friends; Muttonhead’s former apprentice Tatto, and flying dragon creature Gaw. As the plot unfolds we learn the stakes are higher, but that’s par for the course as far as Japanese role playing games go. The story is told through a significant amount of voice acting and few animated sequences that really pop. In typical fashion Working Designs incorporated a lot of humor into the script, and for the most part it hits the mark.
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| “Boomba!” |
What we have here is one of those genre bending side scrolling platform role playing games. From a side view you walk left, right, and jump. You have ladders to climb as well. Enemies are dispatched by weapons instead of hopping on their head, and they have health bars that appear on-screen when you strike them. It’s pretty similar to Zelda II, but with a few key differences. For starters, Mail and friends do not gain experience points. There is no leveling system; you have one hundred hit points in the beginning of the game and that’s your maximum factor even as you face down the final boss. Like in a traditional RPG however you can purchase and find new equipment in shops and this will give you new forms of attacks, increase the damage you do, or in the case of armor give you a higher defensive value. Each of the three characters has their own unique set of tools. You can buy items in shops from gold dropped by enemies and these include healing items, weapons, armor and accessories. Money is basically the only resource you can grind in this game.
You start the journey with just Mail in your party but soon into the quest Tatto and Gaw join up with you and from that point you can switch the active character during gameplay. On top of each having their own hit points (which means you essentially have three life bars at your disposal which certainly helps during some of the boss fights) each have their differences in handling. Mail is the most agile and fastest of the three, Tatto has projectile attacks but is slow, and Gaw has the worst handling but can jump higher than the other two. It’s nice that they have differences, but for the most part I found myself sticking with Mail because of her versatility.
Basic gameplay is fun. It’s typical walk from left to right while performing light platforming and fighting enemies. The only thing I didn’t really like is the way you progress in the game. There’s an overworld map wherein select you destination ala point and click. From here every environment is the same side view style area. This works well for the dungeon areas, but everything such as towns and the like are interconnected. It sounds interesting, but it actually makes exploration a little boring to be honest. I didn’t find town areas fun to investigate in the least, and though they offer side quests, Popful Mail would be a stronger package without them. The game is also a little unforgiving with large spans of time wherein you cannot recover or buy healing items. This makes the whole thing a bit of a drag to play to be honest. It tries to offer Metroid style exploration, but the developers only went halfway with this resulting in an unbalanced package.
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| A day in the life as our hero Popful Mail. |
Popful Mail is a very good looking game. The first thing I was drawn to is the colorful aesthetic. The outdoor stages really pop with brightly colored scenery, and the characters really stand out against them. Each of the three protagonists animates quite nicely for a 16-bit game. The enemy designs are a bit sub-standard but that’s forgivable. They just lack personality and tend to be drab against the colorful backdrops. The animated sequences are some of the best I’ve seen on the Sega CD. They’re fully animated and take up a large portion of the screen with scene transitions and nice effects as well as great lip syncing. I have no real complaints when it comes to the graphics here. The soundtrack is also really great, but there isn’t a whole lot to it. For a game on the CD medium the developers opted to have repeating songs a lot between the stages. The voice acting is some of the best of its era with hilarious over-the-top performances all around. It perfectly fits the anime motif and lives up to Working Designs legacy.
Looking for some more great role playing games? Check out our list of the top 100 best RPGs of all time.
