Collection essentials #308: Magic Knight Rayearth (Saturn)

Here we have another game localized by Working Designs, which is pretty obvious as soon as you see the beautiful gloss given to the game’s box art. In Japan this was an early release in the Sega Saturn’s lifespan, but Working Designs ran into a ton of trouble in their localization process, due to the size of the project and securing all the licensing rights since the game is based on a manga and anime series. It wound up being the very last Sega Saturn game released outside Japan by a wide margin, hitting shelves near the end of 1998.

Magic Knight Rayearth originated as a manga series in 1993 and soon received a considerable following. It features three young girls (Hikaru, Umi and Fuu) from Tokyo who are schoolmates and friends, and they get suddenly whisked away to a magical world and are told that they must become Magic Knights and rescue a princess in order to return home. The video game, not surprisingly, is based on the early events of the series, with some additional stuff added for this adaption. 

Gameplay-wise, Magic Knight Rayearth on the Saturn is an action RPG. There are towns where you casually explore, talk to townsfolk, shop, and the like, and then there are dangerous areas where you must fight enemies and surmount obstacles to progress. The three girls are a team, but only act one at a time, and you can freely switch between them. They each have their own health and magic supply, their own weapon and their own skills. 

The game isn’t one of the absolute best action RPGs out there, but it’s pretty solid. It’s been many years since I played through it so I can’t give a detailed critique, but the biggest drawback I can remember is that one of the girls’ weapons (Fuu’s bow) is very clearly more useful than the other two since it can home in on enemies from any distance when charged up while the other weapons are restricted to close range. 

This is a game that I got when I was collecting for the Saturn in the late 2000s (i.e., leading up to 2010), and the photo shows my original copy. I’ve never read or watched Magic Knight Rayearth, but since I’m fond of the Saturn, action RPGs and Working Designs, I still had to grab it, and I was glad to find that it’s quite enjoyable even if you’re not familiar with the source material. That Working Designs charm kicks in sometimes as well, and they put in some of their humorous outtakes into this release as unlockables.

A few years after I played through the game, my youngest sister Rebecca started getting into anime and discovered Magic Knight Rayearth. So, of course, I had to make her play the game, and I was happy that I had it for her. Some of the characters’ names in the game are a bit different from the names in other English localizations of MKR material, and having started with that stuff, Rebecca viewed those as the “real” names for the characters. So we developed a sort of running joke where we’d pretend to argue about what the characters’ names were. I would out of the blue say the name of a character as it appears in this video game adaptation, and she would emphatically correct me by stating their other localized name. Once in a blue moon we still may do that just for fun, as we enjoy bringing up old running jokes.

While MKR wouldn’t be near the top of my favorite Saturn games list, it’s still a game that I have affection for, enough for me to consider it a collection essential.