Maharaja (NES)

 Pre-1990 RPGs, with a scant few exceptions, are largely considered by modern players to be unfair, hostile, boring, and borderline unplayable. And to be honest: there are a lot of games that fit that bill, plopped out onto the market in the wake of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest's massive success, hoping to ride their coattails. But still, in the same way that I occasionlly play a AAA game in the interests of fairness, I do the same with old RPGs. This time, it actually paid off! A bit.

 

The setting was a big draw for me: I really like India-inspired fantasy (I might as well take the opportunity to recommend a novel I recently read in this genre: Empire of Sand, by Tasha Suri). Also, once I started playing, I was hooked by the graphics. They're mostly confined to a box that takes up a quarter of the screen, and there's very little actual animation, but there's a lot of detail and charm in them. There's a lot of of points of charm in the game, too. For example, instead of just getting new magic spells automatically as you level up, the spells are called mantras, and you have to get to Shiva's palace so he can teach them to you after you've levelled up. (Luckily, the first mantra you learn lets you teleport to locations you've already been to, so it's not too much of a chore.)

 

How the game plays is a combination of the menu-based adventure games that were so common on Japanese microcomputers in the eighties, with turn-based RPG battles thrown in, too. Though both aspects are somewhat simplified from their pure forms. There's only ever a few exits, one character, and maybe one or two items to interact with in each location, and furthermore, you only ever fight one enemy at a time, and you never recruit any party members. As simplified as the game's two halves are, they both also have a foot each in oldschool eighties obtusity. 

 

The adventure part of the game includes at least one maze of identical patches of jungle, as well as characters who need to be given items to let you pass, with no clues in that direction at all. Furthermore, there's no in-game information on what items do, what stats different pieces of equipment bestow, or what effects mantras do. It's possible all this stuff was listed in the game's manual, in which case, disregard all this as an unfair criticism and blame me for playing a fan-translation via emulation. One thing that can't be so easily excused is the predicable bugbear of grinding. The game's story is actually pretty short, so the runtime is greatly padded by requiring you to grind for levels and money for new equipment to be able to survive the gauntlet of newly powerful enemies.

 

I can't really say that Maharaja is a great game, nor can I say it's a bad one. For its age and in its genre, you could even say it's an unsung classic! But unless you've got the patience for RPGs and adventures of this vintage, there's a good chance you'll hate it. Personally, I enjoyed it, and the simplicity of it all really made the game feel like a digital Fighting Fantasy book. So I guess I do recommend it, with those caveats.