Once a certain text-heavy card game opened the door, I started hunting down every game of that type I could find. Around 1997, I came across this obvious trend-chasing knockoff. After trying it briefly, I bought it on the spot. Back then, my standards for a game seeming “pretty good” were extremely simple: if I could rummage around rooms freely and actually find items in cabinets and chests, that was enough to win me over.
I ended up playing this game on and off for more than twenty years.
I first bought it in 1997 and got through roughly a quarter of it during summer vacation. In 1998, with a pitifully short break, I discovered my save was gone and shelved it again. After the college entrance exam in 1999, I finally had time and spent more than ten days on it, only to stall with about the last eighth still unfinished. Once I got to university, emulators became an option, so naturally I started over there too. But the ROM version I had at the time was flawed and would freeze before long. Later, whenever I went home for holidays, I never really turned the Mega Drive back on again.
There were no handy max-level or max-money tricks floating around then either, so by the late game the random encounters had become thoroughly exhausting.
Anyone who played games in that era knows that “Taikong Zhanshi,” or “Space Warrior,” was the Hong Kong and Taiwan pirate-market name often used for Square’s famous Final Fantasy series. It was mostly something you saw on unlicensed cartridges, not an official translation by any means. The Taiwanese company behind this one was called Chuanpu, and the title they chose was shamelessly opportunistic. They did not even dare leave the name on the title screen, presumably to avoid trouble. Quite a few late-era Chinese-language RPGs and strategy RPGs on the Mega Drive came from the same company, including Fengshen Yingjie Zhuan, The Legend of Arthur, Water Margin, and this game.
“Space Warrior” may have been a fake label, but “Magic Warrior” is at least an accurate description. The game gives a lot of attention to magic, and every main character can use it. Spells are roughly split between the powerful ones bought in villages and the powerful ones found inside dungeons. The most distinctive part is the summoning magic, with various spirits and creatures appearing in battle. The artwork clearly received some effort. Even so, I have never been the sort of RPG player who enjoys fiddly magic systems, so that side of the game never really became a selling point for me.
This was also my first encounter with two mechanics that later became familiar: limited-step random encounters in the style associated with Chinese Paladin, and a semi-real-time turn-based system with progress bars. I did not think much of either one here.
In general, the whole game is almost painfully conventional, even dull. To move forward, you have to grind. You have to keep your equipment updated. Before every boss, you are expected to stockpile medicine. It follows that old RPG routine point by point.
Still, being conventional is not the same as being incompetent. At the very least, it manages to tell a complete story about another melodramatic teenager saving the world, and it holds together well enough.
The magazine guide I relied on was decent overall, but it got the second-to-last dungeon wrong. The author thoughtfully wrote down the order for stepping on the switches, but it was useless because the dungeon was random anyway.
Because almost nothing in the game truly stands out, there is not much to say about the late stretch except that I kept going out of sheer stubbornness.
For the final boss, I did not spend time grinding levels, but I did have the full set of ultimate weapons. The fight still took twenty minutes.
And that was the clear.
