|
Rudora no Hihou (Treasure of the Rudras)
is a
video game produced by
Squaresoft. The game was released in
Japan in
1996 for the
Nintendo
Super Famicom. Rudora no Hihou is a fairly standard console
role-playing game (RPG).
Gameplay consists of directed a two-dimensional
sprite through a gameworld created from graphical tiles. Rudora
was the last game produced for Square by
Keita Amamiya, best known for the
Kamen Rider series. The
soundtrack was scored by
composer
Ryuji Sasai.
The gameplay, highly reminiscent of Square's
Final Fantasy series, is divided into three main areas: the
overworld map, the towns and dungeons, and battles. When in the overworld
map, the player directs his characters to different locations in the game.
Towns contain the prerequisite shops and villagers who offer information,
while dungeons are
mazelike affairs where random enemy encounters may occur. These
battles may also strike on the overworld map and follow a typical RPG
pattern: the player makes choices for his characters (such as whether to
fight, cast a
magic spell, or run away), and then the enemy takes a turn. This
pattern repeats until the characters on one side all run out of
hit points and die.
The game's most innovative feature is its magic system. Whereas most
console RPGs give the player access to a limited number of precreated
spells, Rudra allows the player nearly total creative freedom.
The player can enter various words (called "mantras"
in the English translation) into his grimoire, and every one will have
some effect. There is an underlying framework to the system, however,
which is based on the gameworld's
elements. Certain spells that use the rootword tou for
example, will produce
lightning-based attacks, while those containing aqu will
create
water-based effects.
Rudora no Hihou is set in a world on the brink of cataclysm.
Every 4,000 years, the dominant race on the planet is destroyed by the god
Rudra to make way for a new form of life. As such, the Danans,
Mermaids,
Reptiles, and
Giants have all met their doom. The
Humans are the current rulers of the world, but their race has a mere
15 days of providence left. The story is divided into three major
scenarios, each with a different main character: the
soldier Sion, the
priestess Riza, and the
sorceror Surlent. As the player enters new areas and accomplishes
different tasks, the human race's final 15 days slowly ebb away in a
predetermined day/night cycle. The player is free to play the scenarios in
any order, and may even leave one storyline to follow that of another
character for a time. The actions of the characters in one location and
time may have an effect on the others, as well, both in the general story
and in gameplay. For example, if one group of characters leaves a sacred
relic somewhere, another character may come and find it on a later day in
his own part of the game. After successfully completing all three
scenarios, players must take on a fourth, featuring the roving
thief Dune and the heroes from the previous three chapters in their
final confrontation with the game's major villains.
Rudora was never released in the
United States; it came out late in the life of the Super Famicom, and
American video game developers were already gearing up for newer systems
such as the
Sony
PlayStation. The game had a second chance at trans-Pacific life with
the growth of the
fan translation community on the
internet in the late
1990s. Some early members of the community claimed to have played the
game in Japanese and ridiculed its storyline, however; a rumor even
surfaced that the directer, Keita Amamiya, was fired from Squaresoft for
creating such a "bad game". Added to that was the difficuly in
hacking the game's magic system to be usable to an
English-speaking audience. The one translation group that decided to
tackle the game,
J2e Translations, fizzled and failed. The game seemed like a lost
cause.
However, in
2002, a
French translation group called
Terminus Traduction put out a
French-language translation patch for the game. Later in
2003, the prolific
ROM
hacker
Gidon Zhi of
Aeon Genesis Translations announced that he had successfully hacked
the game's magic system to work with English words. Aeon Genesis then
translated the French script into English, and in
July 2003 they released an English-language translation patch entitled
Treasure of the Rudras.
|
