Collection essentials #294: Popful Mail (Sega CD)

And now we have the other most famous Working Designs-localized game on the Sega CD. First, you might ask, what does that title mean?? Well, Mail is the name of the main character. Nobody seems to know what “popful” means exactly, but it’s probably something that a Japanese person with a rudimentary level of English came up with when trying to think of a word like “peppy” or “spunky”, I’m guessing. But I don’t really know!

Although the box calls this game an action RPG, it isn’t really. There’s no leveling up in this game, and there’s some gameplay elements you might find in a regular RPG but not really enough to call this a part of the genre. This is more of a side-scrolling action adventure title. It originated as a game for certain Japanese PCs that I know nothing about and received a few ports on other platforms…or maybe I should say remakes, because some versions of this game are extremely different from one another. As I said before, you play as Mail, who is, despite the name, is actually female. Or should I spell it fe-Mail? (Snicker snicker) …anyway, Mail is a bounty hunter who is terrible at her job, and you get to see her spectacularly fail to capture a bad guy in the first anime cutscene. The game starts out with Mail attempting to finally capture somebody, but this leads to a fight against greater evil, and meeting two friends who join up with Mail along the way, those being a wizard named Tatt and a round flying talking creature named Gaw. I don’t remember a lot of the details about the story, but an actual good and deep plot is not really what the game’s creators were going for, and the game instead uses comedy as a big part of its appeal. There’s a lot of voice acting in this game which helps make it funnier, and Working Designs was a great company to localize the dialogue since they have quite a sense of humor of their own.

The game’s progression involves a series of separate levels with a world map to choose between them. But rather than simple quick levels like you’d see in a lot of platformers, Popful Mail’s levels are a bit bigger and you’re meant to explore them to find stuff. Sometimes you have to go back to old levels to access things you couldn’t before. When one of the other two party members joins you, you’ll then be able to freely switch between the different characters. Each one of the three has different abilities in attributes, which is a fun and welcome way to diversify gameplay. 

While I do like Working Designs’ localization, this is an example of when they meddled with the game in a way that arguably made it worse. The original game was pretty easy, meant to be a lighthearted casual adventure. But Working Designs thought it was TOO easy, and therefore made various tweaks to make the game harder. And as a result, some parts of the game seem a bit harder than they should be and can be pretty frustrating. Some fans made a patch for the game to reverse those changes, so at least that’s an option.

One thing I do like about some Working Designs games is that they include bloopers from their recording sessions at the end of the game. In this game they are accessible if you beat it within a certain amount of time. They can be pretty hilarious. There’s not a whole lot of them here, but I think this might have been their first game where they did it (I could be wrong) so I wanted to mention it.

Popful Mail is one of the most fondly remembered Sega CD games. The gameplay is pretty good, but it’s the humor and charm that make it particularly memorable for me. And me having a bit of a soft spot for Working Designs releases cements this one as an essential.