Magic Knight Rayearth

Dazzling graphics, tons of animation, a cute storyline, and lots of surprises make Rayearth the benchmark by which future 32-bit action-RPG's will be judged.

MKRE en version US est, en plus d'être un excellent jeu, un véritable objet de collection. Revers de la médaille, son prix est à la hauteur de sa réputation... Mais honnêtement l'investissement vaut vraiment le coup !

The sprite-based graphics in this action/RPG are among the most amazing I've seen on the Saturn. Everything from the characters to the terrain is amazingly crisp, colorful, detailed and just plain beautiful. Otherwise, MKR is an ultra-cutesy, anime-heavy game and at times the story and characters are too sickeningly sweet for my tastes, while the entire quest is a bit short and easy. Still, it's a fun little game that packs hilarious dialogue.

Collecting scattered Rainbow Amulets permits access to hidden items (including a hilarious set of voice-acting outtakes), but it's doubtful that your average player would play long enough to find them all. Nothing about the game is expressly awful. The graphics, music, sound, and gameplay aren't bad - just competent to a fault. Die-hard fans of Working Designs or the Clamp series might love the title, but all others should be wary.

The story of Magic Knight Rayearth's localization is perhaps unmatched in gaming history. Filled with embroiled legal entanglements (Working Designs demanded use of the original manga's character names), backstabbing surprises (WD and Sega's infamous "E3 booth fiasco"), shifting alliances (WD switched development from the Saturn to the PlayStation, leaving MKR's future uncertain), and righteous stands for rarely held ideals (WD has finally published the game, at a loss, because it gave its word). The story of Magic Knight Rayearth itself, on the other hand, is a generic anime tale of 14-year-old Japanese schoolgirls. And here's the rub: In the end, the game seems little more than a final punctuation mark to the localization saga. MKR can't fairly be called "old school." After nearly three years of delays, it can only be called "old."

Among the many anime adaptations seen by the Super Famicom, Magic Knight Rayearth is probably not the worst. Such faint praise is all that this repetitive and boring game deserves. In comparison with the Saturn's treatment of this material, which also arrived in 1995 for Japan, this version is decidedly inferior. The effort required by ROM hackers to produce a translated version of the game is baffling when their time would have been better served with any number of other projects.