MIRACLE WARRIORS: SEAL OF THE DARK

Fate calls thee to bar evil's entry, for you are descended from the mighty
warrior Iason who rid the Five Lands from the evil demon queen Terarin one
thousand years ago. Iason had made a prophecy that Terarin would return to
the Five Lands one day, and that four mighty Miracle Warriors would awaken
to meet her evil challenge.

MIRACLE WARRIORS is an early FRPG for the Sega Master System. You must trek
through the Five Lands, solving a few puzzles, and killing many monsters to
gain fame points, required to enter certain special villages. If you can
awaken the other three Warriors from slumber, they will join you. Find the
armor and weapons of Iason, and the special magic arms crafted for your
companions by the White Monks. After this is done, seek the keys that lead
to the Shrine of the Dark Lord. Can you defeat Terarin herself, reclaim
the Seal of the Dark Lord, and use it to shut the Pandora Passage, bringing
peace back to the Five Lands?

MIRACLE WARRIORS has reasonably good graphics for an 8-bit game, but there
is virtually no animation. When you are not in battle, you are shown on
the Character/Contact screen, with a moving background; you also see the
Map/Menu screen shift (you move the white cursor by pressing the control
pad button), but aside from exchanges of conversation, that is all of the
animation you see. The music is nice, if not exceptional, but there are few
sound effects since there is little need for them.

The game map, which corresponds with the Map/Menu screen map, is large and
a little cumbersome, but it's a very nicely done map. Not all the towns,
villages, caves and monuments are on this map; meaning you must search for
many of them. There are clues to help guide you, but the search will still
be a bit tedious and exasperating.

The puzzles are not too hard to solve but require a bit of careful thought.
However, there is a serious error in a clue you are given near the end of
the game; you are told that a certain town used to be known as Saria, when
in fact, it was another town. You'll have to use a little common sense to
figure out which town it is.

However, the biggest problem in this game is its combat. All encounters in
the game are with a single monster, but even when you have all three of
your companions, only one member of the party is allowed to strike at the
monster each round. The party member who attacks is attacked in return by
the enemy. Experience gain gets to be slow- party members get a little bit
of experience for every blow struck in battle. What makes combat seem to
be unfair in favor of the monsters is that while you are not allowed to use
magic spells in combat, some of the monsters are- and their spells allow
them to attack every member of your party at once. In addition to that,
if you try to flee and are blocked, the monster automatically gets to hit
every member of the party. It's hard enough accepting one monster's being
able to 'surround' four people.

Because MIRACLE WARRIORS is an older game (2 meg with battery backup), it
isn't as sophisticated as some newer Master System Games available, but it
is still a reasonably good game. Sega Master System owners should get their
fair share of RPG adventure when they play MIRACLE WARRIORS. However, there
are serious problems with the game, and it pales in light of several new
8-bit games now available for Sega's Master System. MIRACLE WARRIORS makes
a good RPG, but quickly seems almost primitive and obsolete against the
incomparable PHANTASY STAR.

It's difficult for me to rate MIRACLE WARRIORS on a scale of 1 to 10 since
it's an 8-bit game, and I am used to thinking in terms of 16-bit Genesis
games. Because it's not a *bad* game, and a bit better than some other FRPG
games for the SMS, I'd rate it above average; but remembering the superior
8-bit games now available, I can't go higher than a 6.5.


MIRACLE WARRIORS is produced by Sega of America, Inc.