Arabian Nights: Desert Spirit King (SNES)

Arabian Nights: Desert Spirit King (or Arabian Nights: Sabaku no Seirei Ou, if you prefer) is a game I wanted to play long ago, back in the time when there was an overlap in the latter stages of the RPG phase I had after having played Final Fantasy VII and Breath of Fire III, and the early days of the Dreamcast giving me access to SNES emulation for the first time. I wasn't able to, though, as at that time, there was no translation. But the idea of an RPG with a middle eastern-influenced fantasy setting had me interested.

 

It eventually did get a fan translation in 2012, but my RPG phase was long since dead by then, and I was well into my "strong distaste for RPGs" phase. But in recent years, that feeling has waned heavily, and so I eventually got around to playing Arabian Nights. It's an incredibly okay game! It's got a few interesting elements, a lot of boring stuff, and they all kind of cancel each other out.

 

The plot is surprisingly dense: centuries ago, a wizard named Suleiman enslaved the eponymous spirit king, Ifrit. Then, a while after that, some unknown evil attacked, and though Suleiman was unable to save his own life, he did seal Ifrit away in a magic ring, telling him that after he's granted a thousand wishes for a thousand masters, Ifrit will be strong enough to face this threat and avenge him. The game starts with a young girl finding that ring, and being the thousandth to do so, wishes to bring peace to the land. Ifrit finds this highly inconvenient, since the previous 999 wishes were all easy stuff like riches and immortality.

 

To bring peace to the land, Ifrit, his new master Shukran, and a boy-thief they meet called Harty go off on a quest to find the eight crystals containing Ifrit's sealed powers. Along the way, they'll also find other spirits, some of them have been sealed like Ifrit was, some of them have been up to other activities in the intervening centuries. All of them happen to be various flavours of bishounen, though, and whether they're friends or enemies, they all talk to each other in a certain way. Like, if there had been an English version of this in the year 2000, the Geocities fujoshi would have been eating it up, posting their fanfictions and character shrines and such.

 

So, back to the game itself. The positives: it looks great all-round. The character portaits, backgrounds, battle sprites, it's all just really high quality pixel art. The battles themselves also bring up some aesthetic poits of interest of their own! Battles take place on a diagonally-aligned rectangular field with a really cool border around it. The field will be themed to the kind of area you're walking through, but unfortunately there's only one border, as nice as it is. Furthermore, the game's main mechanical gimmick is the cards system. You or your enemy can play a card before the turn starts, and they all have various effects on the battle, as well as changing how the field looks.

 

There are forty cards in total: eight elements that come in levels one to five. The effects they have include inflicting elemental damage on all the caster's opponenets at the end of each turn, nullifying the enemy's attacks, boosting or reducing the stats of one of the sides, and so on. Playing cards happens before the turn starts, and if it's not replaced, a card will last a few turns. If the enemy plays a card, you can replace it with one of your own, but it has to have the same element and/or level as the one currently in play. It's an interesting system, but it's one that doesn't really meet its potential, for reasons I'll now go into.

 

The game's got some problems, and most of them are related to battles. THe encounter rate is incredibly high, so by the time you get to anywhere you're meant to be, you're going to be overlevelled. Even boss fights only take a couple of turns of spamming attack. So you can pretty much ignore the cards altogether, as well as the other magic and special attacks to which you get access. Also, there's some weirdness regarding walking: when you're in a town or dungeon, you walk pretty quickly, but only in the four cardinal directions. On the world map, you can walk in eight directions, but you move incredibly slowly. A few hours into the game, you do get given a magic carpet that speeds up your world map movement, and partially fixes the encounter rate problem too, but it's weird that the two kinds of movement are flawed in different ways.

 

For all its problems, though, I have been enjoying Arabian Nights: Desert Spirit King. It's a nice little RPG, and the plot keeps introducing new twists that have had me playing more to see where it all goes next. When I first started playing it, I neglected to save, like an idiot, anddied in the first dungeon, losing nearly half an hour's progress. It's a good enough game that I just started again, instead of just giving up in frustration! If you've got any affection or nostalgia for old-fashioned RPGs in the year 2025, this is one you probably haven't already played, and is worth your time.

Lord Monarch - Tokoton Sentou Densetsu (Mega Drive)

 I first tried this game out a few years ago, when the translation patch first got released, and I immediately bounced off of it. It seemed to be a boring, passive game that mostly played itself, with little input or agency for the player. I recently gave it another chance, though, ans this time, I don't know what's different, but it really clicked with me, and got me hooked!

 

So, it's a real time strategy game for the Mega Drive (a cohort which is stronger than you might think, also including games like Herzog Zwei and Dune II, which is basically the start of what people think of as real time strategy games), and since it's from a time befroe the genre was really codified, it's pretty unique one. You mostly don't have to take charge of building or directly controlling units. They'll just kind of do that themselves. Your soldiers will build forts and roads, and the forts will generate more soldiers.

 

Your input, especially in the ealry stages is pretty much managing the tax rate in real time, and even there, there's a marker advising you on where the best place to put it is. Building forts (and bridges, and other projects) takes money, and your income is determined by some secret algorithm that takes into account the number of forts you have and how high the current tax rate is. However, you need soldiers to do your building and fighting, and their generation is controlled by a similar algorithm that takes into account the number of forts and how low the current tax rate is. 

 

For the first few stages, you'll probably be able to get by pretty easily by just adjusting the tax rate how the game tells you to. Before long, though, you'll have to start telling soldiers to do things like building bridges and fences, sealing up monster-spawning caves, and even directing the directions in which they expand your territory, rather than just letting them spreadout wherever's closest. Another thing you'll start finding use in is ignoring the tax guide and setting it to maximum or minimum for short bursts when you feel like you need a quick injection of either resource.

 

Something I haven't yet mentioned that deserves a mention is how the game looks. Lord Monarch was originally released on Japanese microcomputers, and has been ported to a bunch of different systems. I think the Mega Drive port might be the best looking of them! The graphics ingame are small but detailed, being both full of character as well as clear and readable. Out of actual gameplay, there's an overworld map and a bunch of cutscenes, both of which look amazing. The map is full of really nice isometric graphics, while the cutscenes are made up of big, beautiful pieces of still pixel art. And in all cases, the colours are incredibly bright and bold. It doesn't make use of any special trickery like some Mega Drive games have, but it's still one of the best-looking games on the system.

 

Lord Monarch is a really great game! It's a shame that it never got officially translated at the time of its release, but luckily, yet again, twenty-first century fans have stepped in to fic the mistakes of twentieth century corporations. It's a little odd, and very different to most other strategy games, but it's definitely worth giving it a try. Or even two tries, as my story attests.