So, I just finished one of my bugbears from way back when I first really knew about this thing called "fan translation".
Treasure of the Rudras, or: Why do we even have Apocalypses anyway?So, this may require some background.
Treasure of the Rudras, like Bahamut Lagoon, was an RPG released by Squaresoft late in the life of the SNES. It was, in fact, the last RPG released by Square for the SNES, put out in the middle of 1996, and put together by a very eclectic mix of employees- it was made by everyone who wasn't slated to work on Final Fantasy 7, basically, which meant that the project was headed up by the guy who was behind the SaGa games along with some of his staff, plus a bunch of the guys who worked on Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (Ryuji Sasai did the soundtrack for this game, too), and the art guy for this game would much later do the creature design for Shin Megami Tensei 4. It was basically Square taking all the leftovers out of their development fridge and throwing them together in the hopes that they would make a good game.
There was never really any hope of Treasure of the Rudras being localized for two reasons. The first is that it came out in the middle of 1996, and any localization of the game would take long enough that it would be overshadowed by the Nintendo 64. The second is that it used a peculiar magic system that relied heavily on writing, and translating that to English was a lift so heavy that no one back then would be willing to attempt it. In fact, it was considered impossible by even fan-translators until Gideon Zhi of Aeon Genesis managed to figure out a way to make it work, and even then it took him years to do so. As a result of his labors, however, there is a fan-translation out there for anyone who wants to give this dang ol' thing a go.
The structure of the game is somewhat unusual, but hey, creator of SaGa series. The game uses a scenario system where the player goes through three concurrent storylines, and after all three of these are completed, all of the main characters meet up in the final scenario which is unlocked after fulfilling those conditions. The system works exceedingly well, because the writers did take the time to plot out who is where and at what times in the story, so characters never meet each other in places they're not supposed to be, and all characters experience global events exactly when they're supposed to. The only thing that it doesn't do is record who has taken what treasures and when, but that may have been beyond the capabilities of the hardware at the time. Whenever you save the game, it actually saves the state of all of the scenarios, so whenever you load the game, you can freely pick which scenario you'd like to continue.
The part of the game that people were unable to make heads or tails of was the fact that the game has an unusual magic system that is unlike anything seen in any other Square RPG, and doesn't really have much equivalent in other places except maybe the Ultima series. In each scenario, your entire party shares one spell list, but you actually
write spells into the list. As in, there's a prompt and letters and everything, and there are various base words, prefixes, and suffixes that the game officially recognizes that you can use to build spells and just freely experiment with the magic system however you like. Some spells can be found in chests (usually buffs, which don't use the magic grammar), and whenever you come to a new area, enemies will use new spells that you can copy into your book and use yourself whenever you want so long as you were paying attention to what they game showed during the fight. It's a system that Square never used again, as far as I know.
Unlike the usual course of the SaGa series, this has sensible gameplay, like a fully turn-based Final Fantasy that has all the moving parts you might expect from a Square RPG. It might even have more moving parts, considering that there are actual battle animations for monsters in this game.
So, how hard is the game? Well, you're probably going to be taking a dirt nap fairly often, because the game really expects you to learn all of the ins and outs of both the spell system and the game's combat system- there's a boss in this game that's practically impossible to defeat if you don't put all of your characters in the back row to take advantage of the reduced physical damage to back row characters. It's
that kind of game. Oh, and there are also very few overlapping bosses, either, so each scenario has almost entirely unique content in that arena.
By the way? Soundtrack: Awesome. People always line up to sing Umeatsu's praises, but Square had a bunch of other guys who were at least as good, like Ryuji Sasai, who did this game, Mystic Quest, and SaGa 3/FF Legends 3, Kenji Ito, who did most of the other SaGa games, and Yoko Shimomura, who did a huge pile of stuff for Square, along with the soundtrack for Street Fighter II. It's also quite varied, as each character has their own two overworld themes (one for day, one for night) and their own unique boss music- the only boss music that's shared is the one for end-of-scenario bosses.
The story that the game sets you up with is like this: History works in a great cycle, unchanging from one era to the next. Before humanity, the world was ruled by four previous peoples- the Danan, the Merfolk, the lizardmen, and the Giants. Each ruled the world for 4,000 years, but at the end of their appointed span, they were challenged by a Rudra, a great destroyer. Unable to prevail, their civilizations were found wanting and snuffed out, and the Rudra would become the herald of the race that replaced them.
In 16 days, humanity will have ruled the world for 4,000 years...
And there are three +1 plots to follow about how we all get out of this mess, so forgive me if I leave certain bits out/get the order wrong a bit.
Sion's ScenarioSion would be
the main character if this were any other JRPG, but this is Treasure of the Rudras, so that's not really gonna happen. He's a young, brash, underpaid knight who wants to prove himself and take after his mentor, Captain Taurus and become the strongest warrior, but on his first mission, it appears that destiny has something else in store for him. It's basically JRPG hero story 1, but things are a bit more complicated in this game, because Sion has to deal with one of the most aggressive macguffins in JRPG history, the Jades. All of the main characters have one, and they always end up in their chosen hosts in a somewhat shady way. Sion and his two NPC buddies end up chasing a giant to the Tower of the Giants, and there's a fight where both NPCs are killed and Sion takes one of the giant's arms in the tussle over the Jade. However, the Jade makes it known that it has chosen Sion as its master through jamming itself in one of Sion's eye sockets- Sion actually has two sprite sets, one where he has his eyepatch and one where he doesn't.
Sion is fairly bad-tempered for the rest of his scenario.
Sion soon acquires some new friends to replace the NPCs that got jacked in the first ten minutes- Foxy, a warrior-woman from across the western sea and the heiress of a wealthy family, Ture, one of the lost race of Giants who, against all expectations, is a caster (though of the D&D Cleric variety), and Sage Ramyleth, the ruler of the surviving Danan peoples. The lattermost tells Sion that there's an apocalypse coming down the pipe, and there are going to be some pretty big signs of that pretty soon, and he's here to help because maybe the humans can deal with that. The even get to see an eclipse, because the planet's layer of perma-smog gets removed. Sion agrees, but first he has to do his tournament arc. You see, the thing about Sion's scenario is that, apart from the beginning and maybe one other spot, Sion's scenario is a boss a minute, basically. Part of this is caused by things other people do in their scenarios, too, and others are because Sion is just an ill-tempered sort of guy.
So they go to the sky islands to talk to the Divine Danans (who Sion has to fight first, too) and learn about the prophecies which speak of an end to the Great Cycle and the Majestic Four who created the world, Mitra, Saizou, Hausen, and Meifa. Along the way also having to fight a horseman of the apocalypse who got freed from the netherworld after someone blew the thing wide open, as well as the giant he beat in the first day. They also get a bird's eye view of the toxic northern continent being suddenly purified. However, in order to act on what he knows and what he has, Sion has to make it back to the surface, and the only airship got stole by a couple of thieves, Dune and Cid. So he goes to Mayura, who will tell him if he goes do a fetch quest for an appropriate offering, but Sion is bad-tempered, lost his eye about a week ago, severely underpaid, and knows exactly what kind of time crunch he's under so he initiates a boss fight and she and the party go at it until they beat on her enough to make her cough up the info they need.
So they land the islands back in the ocean, restoring the world back to the way it was before the islands were raised, which means that Sion is finally able to go back and claim his winnings from the tournament, following thrashing the other horsemen of the apocalypse, and also learn something quite valuable- Captain Taurus has discovered the location of the Rudra Cult's base, and is heading there post-haste, so Sion opts to follow. And after a fightventure, he winds up in the netherworld, because apparently it isn't just for the dead these days- some of the remaining lizardmen found it a convenient hiding spot from armageddon. He catches up with the Rudra cult and Captain Taurus, who, no surprise, is actually the head of the Rudra Cult and demands that Sion give up his jade to help build the next apocalypse monster.
Sion has had a rough two weeks, so he and his party are the only ones who come out of that room alive.
After dealing with that, he is greeted by the apparition of a warrior named Saizou, who tells him that the guy he's really looking for is in the Netherworld fortress of Shumisen, and sends Sion on his way. Along the way, he meets up with Surlent, who has two of the items required to enter Shumisen, and offers to trade for Captain Taurus's Shield so that Sion can have one of the items and get in too- the result of this trade will actually affect Surlent's fate in his scenario, so take the sword unless you want Surlent to get screwed over again- and the trade you choose to make is binding on the other character's scenario.
Sion being aggressive and bad-tempered has meant that his party actually has arrived in time to make a preemptive strike against the apocalypse. Sion's team breaches Shumisen and destroys the next Rudra while it's under construction and confront Gomorrah, the Guardian of Evolution. Gomorrah is a pretty interesting guy because he's the guy who actually turns the crank on the apocalypse every four thousand years, and he's pretty open about what he does. He doesn't know why he's doing it, but his job is to clean up the old to make way for the new- those decisions are above his pay grade. However, his role means that Sion concludes this is the guy who needs to get beat.
Now, before I talk about the fight with Gomorrah, I should talk about the game's combat system a little more. You see, there are two things this game's combat system really cares about. First are buffs and debuffs, and the second are resistances and weaknesses, in ways that aren't usual. You see, as far as equipment goes, it's impossible to have a resistance without having a corresponding weakness to an opposing element, so if you are strong against fire, you're weak to water, and so on. So there are some bosses where you may want to downgrade or remove equipment altogether because sometimes having even an empty slot is better than having a bad weakness. I'm mentioning this now because Sion's ultimate armor is a nefarious trap as it provides Light resistance. Now, you're already taking your sanity in your own hands if you go into the fight with Gomorrah without Dark resistance, but if you go into it with a Dark weakness, you may as well forget about Sion contributing anything ever.
However, the fight? Pretty dope. It's so awesome that they made the Fake Rydia fight in Final Fantasy 4: Interlude works pretty much the exact same way, only it was more lame because direct sequels to FF games tend to have problems, and it didn't have the battle animations that give the enemies in Treasure of the Rudras so much of their character.
Vs. GomorrahAfter the fight, Gomorrah congratulates the heroes on their victory, remarking that Saizou was right to trust in humans. They find out that Saizou is one of the members of the Majestic Four, the ones who created the world and put the apocalypse plan into action, but they don't get much more out of Gomorrah before he dies, aside from the fact that while they may have forestalled the apocalypse for now, they haven't actually dealt with the root of the problem- Gomorrah, as powerful as he is, is just the guy who turns the crank, when the guys they're really after are the planning board, who are out of reach, and Sion has no way of knowing how to get to them because he jumped the gun and killed the only guy who might've been able to tell him- so it's going to be up to someone else to handle that little detail.
The thing about Sion's route is that while he is helped by an ancient sage, and his aggressive nature does allow him to postpone armageddon until further notice, he's such a meathead about things (and surrounded by meathead enablers) that he doesn't actually get much new information about why the Great Cycle is going on, who else is behind it, and what steps need to be taken to actually bring an end to the cycle of destruction and rebirth. So while he does destroy many powerful and important enemies, he learns almost nothing about how to stop this nonsense from happening again. Considering how truthful and forward Gomorrah was with answering his questions, he might've taken the time to ask him some more before jumping right into the boss fight. I have no doubt that if Sion was involved in FFVI we'd only need one world map, but in Treasure of the Rudras, stopping the apocalypse is only really half the story.
Oh well, at least there are other characters around who are willing to ask those kinds of questions.
Riza's ScenarioThe first thing that the game wants you to know about Riza is the Chosen One. She is full-blown Chosen, she's the one spoken of in the ancient Danan Prophecies, she was even born with her Jade, and she is the one who will Save the World.
Things turn out to be a bit more complicated than that, though.
But Riza's story, for some fair chunks, is about playing Captain Planet in a world that's polluted pretty much everywhere, and Riza has both the tools and talent to do it. In fact, the first thing she does is literally clear the air. She meets up with a resistance leader from the City of Babel, where the mayor, Culgan, found and used an ancient air-purifier to keep the air clean around his city, but, he is charging an arm and a leg for people to breathe his air, and has a big ol' squad of legbreakers to enforce the Clean Air Freedom Act. Thankfully, Riza is pretty good at most sorts of fighting, so she's just the muscle they need to take on Big Air. They find that the machine is full of trapped magical butterflies which do the air cleaning, so they go up and find the mayor, who sics a guard robot on them. The thing about this boss is that it exists to teach players to use the back row. Not using the back row means not winning, because the boss hits too hard for you to win otherwise.
It's one of those games where you have to use every part of the combat system.
So, you blow the machine, kill the mayor along with his guard bot, and free the butterflies, which clean up the permasmog that had covered the planet. With that done, Liza and Garlyle seek adventure elsewhere, because there's just a whole lot more for a chosen one to do. Such as rescuing another party member, a lizardman named Pippin, who insists he's the prince of all lizards despite the fact that he's the first lizardman that anyone has seen on the surface in thousands of years. They end up moving on, and encounter Surlent and his party, who are on their own travels.
Riza heads to Cyruune to talk to the king continues following the course of her mother, who went to Mantra Peak and beyond, and the team must first pass through the Mantra school to learn anything. And this is the part of the game where you really start learning about how the spell system works, as there are a bunch of hilarious books that talk about how the game's spell grammar functions that are written as a set of transcripts of exchanges between a professor and a failing student (said dropout is a boss a little ways down the road). Along the way back you encounter a pair of thieves, Dune and Cid, and Riza convinces them to cough up a couple of important artifacts that they stole in another scenario (there's also an optional encounter with them where you can shake them down for a fairly substantial amount of cash).
They do eventually find her mother, but after passing the test of Mantra Peak and speaking with mistress Zora about how to clean up the pollution contaminating the world, the Netherworld blows open and Riza's mother gets possessed by an evil spirit, so they have to beat Riza's mom in order to move on. From there, they have to go into the underworld to get the seed of the great tree, which they need to purify the northern continent, and down there they pick up Marina, one of the surviving merfolk, who has an egg of one of the guardian Hegs, protectors of the ocean. However, there's no clean water to hatch it in. After they leave the underworld, they have a misunderstanding boss fight with someone whose job it is to watch for things coming out of the netherworld, but that's all cleared up, and Riza leaves the Holy Grail behind in case someone else needs it.
After they get back to the surface, they plant the seed of the great tree, which grows instantly and purifies the toxic northern continent, and the tree has a message for Riza: While she may clean up the planet, the destruction of the world will come down from the heavens and is set to occur in nine days. However, the Jadebearers may yet be able to save humanity from destruction at the hands of the next Rudra, as it is not yet perfect. While exploring the continent, they meet Surlent, who is in someone else's body, and he has need of the Holy Grail, so they tell him where they left it and send him and his party on their way. Oh yeah, and the sky islands fall to restore the landmasses as they once were, which opens up a big pile of travel options. They come to a town of Merfolk, and since that place still has pure water due to being in the sky for thousands of years, Marina sets the egg to hatching- and this means that Riza and the others have to purify the ocean before its pollution spreads to the water that's still clean.
It's a two step process. The first thing they do is go into the ruins to close off the source of the pollution, which was let loose by an ancient ruler as a tool against his enemies. While down there they find out that the person they really need to talk to about all this nonsense that's going on is the goddess Meifa. The second step is going deep underwater to the ruins of the Abyss, where they kill a couple of bosses created by the pollution and then activate a Danan purification defice which cleans up the water, and allows the Hegs to swim freely out. With the water once again clean, they had back to the surface, and hitch a ride to the statue of Meifa.
The statue of Meifa is a giant tower, and when they reach Meifa herself, it's time to TEST YOUR MIGHT, as usual. After winning, Meifa tells Riza that the source of destruction comes from the Moon, so the statue actually launches out of the atmosphere to deliver the party to a moonbase which is the source of the destruction that comes from the heavens by way of a giant space laser. After navigating the base, Riza and her party challenge Sodom, the great machine that controls the Moonlight system. One of the things about Riza's scenario is that bosses tend to be marathons, not sprints, and Sodom is the biggest expression of that as he has high defenses and very few weaknesses. He is quite beatable, however.
vs. SodomOnce he's reduced to a pile of junk, they return to Meifa, who tells them that the humans' capacity for extreme violence has allowed them to do more than any people who have preceded them, and she also spills the beans. The cycle of destruction and rebirth was started by the Majestic Four- Mitra, Saizou, Hausen, and herself, and the only way to ensure that it is brought to an end is to defeat Mitra. Garlyle asks her why she hasn't done anything to defeat Mitra herself, and she responds that Mitra has grown too powerful for her to defeat, and now only the jadebearers stand a chance of overcoming Mitra's immense power. Meifa has even prepared escape pods for all non-Riza party members to use to get back to the surface, as they would only be instantly obliterated if they tried to face Mitra.
After saying their goodbyes, Riza waits for the other Jadebearers to arrive on the Moon.
the thing about Riza's quest as opposed to Sion's, is that Riza's team really is the A-Team of the story. Because they're willing to jump through all of the usual protagonist hoops, like listening to prophecies and generally not going tl;dr to the setting, they're able to learn a great deal more about what's going on and actually end up exactly where they need to be a full day ahead of pretty much every other protagonist on hand.
Of course, Surlent has his own, unique difficulties.
(Cont. Next post)