A lot of nerds my age grew up with the Nintendo Entertainment System. That wasn't the case for me, however - my dad had a Sega Master System. This meant my first games included "classics" like Walter Payton Football, Great Basketball, and Rescue Mission. Spy vs Spy was on a credit card instead of a cartridge for some reason. And instead of a cartridge with Super Mario and Duck Hunt, we had one with Hang-On and Safari Hunt. (You can imagine why "Safari Hunt" might have aged worse than its NES counterpart. Yeeeeeeeeeeeeah.)
The game that really grabbed my attention though? The first RPG that I ever played. That's right, it's the Sega Master System classic... Phantasy Star? Nope! I wouldn't get to play that one until adulthood.
No, as you might have guessed from the title, it was Miracle Warriors: Seal of the Dark Lord. I remember my dad asking about this game at an Electronics Boutique or something, and they said "Miracle Warriors? You mean Miracle World?"
Even for 1988, this game was about as simple as an RPG could get. Four characters, each with a bar for HP and another for EXP. Three equipment slots for each - sword, armor, shield. You can buy basic equipment in town, and each character has a unique set of magical equipment which is slightly more powerful. There are healing herbs and a few magical items. There's a ship to walk over shallow water and a better ship for the deep seas. That's it. That's the game. Whatever you might think of as a "basic RPG" - this is probably more basic than that. There is very little strategy, just a lot of grinding.
There are a few interesting mechanics. It has a morality system! If you encounter a monster, sure, draw your weapons and take it down. But what if you encounter a merchant? He won't sell you anything, but you can talk to him and get a hint. If you attack him, you can take him down easily - he has very little HP and his attacks don't do any damage - and get a good amount of money, but you also lose a lot of "character points" which can make it impossible to buy the magical equipment or items you'll need in order to beat the game. But if you kill enough monsters, that will make up the character points you lost, so I guess the villagers will look the other way on a murder or two.
Finding the final few dungeons was nearly impossible. Toward the end of the game, you're given a scroll which contains directions to find the end-game dungeons, and it's actually a clever puzzle to figure out - or it would be, if it wasn't horribly mistranslated. So despite putting many hours into this game, I didn't beat it until I was able to look up the solution on GameFAQs many years later.
Even if this game was primarily grinding, it turns out that I enjoy some grinding, and I enjoyed Miracle Warriors quite a bit, even after I went on to discover much better RPG's. I don't know if "nostalgia" is quite the right word for why I like it, but sometimes it's nice to pop in something simple and familiar.
I just love stuff like this, when the game would come with a map or poster or whatever! The Japanese version of the game apparently came with a figurine.
Could this be foreshadowing for the next game I'm planning to talk about? 🤔