PixlBit

Treasure of the Rudras is a Squaresoft JRPG for the SNES that was never released in this country.  This is a travesty.  It is one of the best RPGs on a system that is loaded with amazing RPGs.  I’ll rank them: Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, Terranigma, Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, Dragon Quest VI, Treasure of the Rudras, Final Fantasy IV, Mario RPG, Dragon Quest V, Tactics Ogre.  That’s the top 10, and Rudras is right in the middle of it.  Have you heard of this game?  If you’ve heard of it, have you heard enough good things to make you want to play it?  If you have heard some pretty good things, have those good things pushed Rudras ahead of other games on your backlog?  The guess here is that the answer to one of the above questions is “NO!”, and so you have missed out on a classic on par with the SNES Final Fantasies. 

This is the reproduction box.  Probably not worth the extra money.

Now, if the game is so great and all that, why hasn’t there been more of a clamor for localization on some sort of online network, or why haven’t more people jumped up and down or stamped their feet like they did for Mother 3?  I can think of a few reasons, the most obvious being that I’m just a bit unhinged and nobody should take what I say seriously.  But let’s put that aside and look objectively at the RPG landscape and see why this one slipped through the cracks.

For starters, you probably want to look at why Square couldn’t be bothered to port the game to North America.  The answer is pretty simple, and a pretty common one for the time- Rudras was released at the very end of the SNES lifecycle, when the company had its “top” people involved with the project that would eventually become Final Fantasy VII.  Rudras was created by Square’s “B” team, those guys who worked on the Romancing SaGas and Mystic Quests of the world.  So this wasn’t a flagship title, and thus perhaps Square felt that it wouldn’t sell well outside of Japan.  To further complicate issues, the game contains a shitload of text, and any translation project would have been time-consuming and doubtful cost-effective.  You see, in addition to the gobs of NPC chatter and insane number of cutscenes that you might witness in a single playthrough, the game’s entire magic system is based off of “words” that must be combined and arranged by the player for form incantations.  These words are gibberish such as “tou” (means wind) and “lef” (means heal) and “na” (makes a spell more powerful if you put it at the end of a word) and each needed to be transferred from Japanese to English.  It must’ve seemed a daunting undertaking, and with gamers’ attention more focused on the next generation of console, I can understand why Square opted out of this one.  At this point I should stop and lay a ton of praise on the guys at AeonGenesis who took the time to release a superb translation of the game- seriously, over the course of what must’ve been fifty hours, I think I found one typo and two or three minor errors.  And I’m always on the lookout, trust me.

Riza is cheating.  She somehow knows advanced spells, but she is on level one.

So, the above two reasons conspired to keep Rudras off our shores, but they might not have been the only reasons.  The Game is HARD, like capital HARD.  I played with an emulator and used save states, and I still thought the game could be brutal.  You’ll be going along for a few hours, polishing off enemies without issue, upgrading, leveling up, all that crap.  Then you’ll hit what appears to be a minor boss, and the thing will demolish your entire party in two rounds.  At that point, you’ll realize that you weren’t using save states as often as you should have been, and that the game hadn’t offered any safe location in which to save for over an hour.  So you have to redo it all- I’m genuinely impressed by those who were able to complete this game in the day before emulators.  Jesus, it can be unforgiving.

Difficulty spikes occur often enough in RPGs that every wary gamer expects them at some point, but Rudras can be just a wee bit unfair in this arena.  Usually your party is more than ready to handle any challenge, but there are those bosses (or random difficult enemies) who utilize element-based attacks that can rip through armor of the opposing type like a hot knife through something something.  You might have 200 HP and enemies might only be attacking for 12, but if you are wearing dark armor and a boss lets loose with a light spell, well son, you are probably hitting the reset button.  So you can get massacred and lose a bit of progress, but the solution is readily available- simply unequip the offending armor and bulk up your elemental defense with a spell the next time you fight.  This will do the job 90% of the time.  Maybe I’ll talk about the other 10% later.

So the game is difficult, but a game can be difficult and awesome at the same time.  Rudras packs so much RPG into its tiny cart that you will come out feeling like you’ve played two games.  And both of those games are damn good.  I’ll start with the structure of the story, which focuses on three main characters who do some world-saving stuff over the course of sixteen days.  You obviously control these three stalwarts, but not at the same time.  At the start-up screen, you choose which of them you would like to play, and control them as long as you’d like.  You can choose Riza, the girl with the mysterious jewel, and play through her adventures for a few in-game days, then switch over to Sion, the generic fighter-dude who just wants to be the strongest guy in the world.  You might follow Sion as he fights his way through some clichéd strong-man tournament, only to decide to switch over to Surlent, the archaeologist mage who accidentally releases some ancient evil and spends a good chunk of time trying to fix his mistake. 

The four main characters.

I purposely made each of those three scenarios seem banal, but only so I can now tell you that while each starts in a fairly generic fashion, each also takes a turn or two at some point that will keep you invested in what otherwise is a fairly engaging story.  Yes, there is a deep evil that is accidentally unleashed; yes, there is a fighter who just wants to be the best; yes, there is a girl with a mysterious backstory who is looking for her mother.  None of those things were very interesting or original, even in 1995, when the game was released.  But the world that these characters inhabit, and importantly, the history of that world, IS interesting and worth exploring.  There are other themes in play here- the destruction of the environment through rampant industrialization, the definition of mortality, racism (or creaturism, in this case) and intolerance for those different than oneself.  I’m not saying that any of these topics are explored deeply in any way, just that the world of Rudras is filled with things that you might not normally see in an RPG.  Even if some of these things are seen in other RPGs, they aren’t all seen in the same RPG.

But I’m getting off topic here.  More about the story and the world.  So, here’s the gist of it- the prophesies (hang in there!) seem to state that a great cataclysm is going to destroy the world in sixteen days, but nobody knows how or why.  You have these three very different characters who are affected in three different ways by this momentous news, if they are affected at all.  Through their journeys, however, you will learn everything you need to know about this at least marginally compelling mystery.  Riza will work on the pollution, Sion will unify the world in a pretty unexpected way, and Surlent will crack the mystery of death itself.  Days pass in game, plot points are parsed out slowly and tantalizingly, the world expands well beyond what you’d originally expect.  The main characters will cross paths (of course) but never join up with each other- each of the three heroes has their own party of four unique characters to control.  A mysterious thing that happens to Riza on day seven might be further explained when you play through that day with Surlent.  You can do each of the three main quests separately if you’d like, but the story benefits from playing each character in chunks.  This way you can see and appreciate all the interesting ways they interact with each other.  Playing through one character’s story before attempting the others may leave you scratching your head as to why certain things are happening.  You might know that Sion has done something that is affecting Riza, but you have no idea what, and playing as Sion would illuminate these happenings and make for a more coherent story.  But play it however you want, just make sure you play it.  This is a traditional RPG with some untraditional ideas and a sprawling mythology that requires you to pay attention every time a character starts in on some plot exposition.  You won’t be bored with the talk, and you won’t be sorry that you invested the time.

The story is twisty, what with all the character switching, and the magic system is no less so.  As I said earlier, you create spells by combining prefixes and suffixes with various “core” syllables that as a whole make up mystical words.  One of the options on the menu screen is “enscribe”, and you can just pop on over there at any time and start plugging in words until your heart’s content.  Most of those words will end up being gibberish that serve no great purpose, but it can be fun.  Type in “ultima” and you might expect some grand spell in the Final Fantasy tradition, but all you’ll get is a wind spell that costs 25 MP (a lot in this game) to cast, but damages enemies for shit.  The trick is to talk to every townsperson, open every chest (as if you wouldn’t do these things anyway) and basically scour the world for any world blurbs that you might turn into a spell.  Often, your reward for traversing a particularly stretch of dungeon is a hint at some new and improved version of a spell that will make your subsequent journeying that much easier.  Enscribing the correct snippets will make spells more powerful, more efficient, and will lower their MP cost; enscribe willy-nilly and you get results like the one mentioned above.

Here’s where you can add an extra layer of strategy to your time playing Rudras: You can pick a character like Surlent, and play through is quest until day twelve or so.  By that point, his journey is nearing its end, and he has gained access to nearly a full arsenal of powerful spells.  He can heal for more, damage for more, and most importantly, he has found those elemental defense spells that make boss fighting that much easier.  Write down the names of those spells and then switch over to the beginning of Riza’s quest.  She might be on level one, but with a bit of enscribing, can cast some of the most damaging spells in the entire game.  This may seem like a cheat, and truly, it can make the second and third characters’ playthroughs quite a bit easier.  But the tradeoff is a loss of comprehension of how the three stories actually tie together.  This Is not how I chose to play the game, but there is no penalty for choosing to do so.  Perhaps it can be seen as a difficulty mitigator, of sorts- if you can’t get any further with one of the characters, just switch over to another and have them learn the spells that can make all the difference.  Look- whenever you hear a game has a multi-scenario story, you expect the characters to run into each other in all sorts of cute ways, to change things plot-wise that will affect the others.  But you might not expect this added level of meta-strategy- the ability for the player to act as a conduit between the three main characters so that each can benefit from the others’ knowledge.  Eh, but maybe I’m just overthinking a simple design choice made by outside-the-box-minded developers.

The gameplay otherwise is pretty standard.  Towns and dungeons, earning levels and solving mysteries.  It’s done well, and you play these types of games to do these types of things.  You’ll enjoy it if you enjoy role-playing games.  The graphics are perhaps a notch below Final Fantasy VI level; this was a B-team effort, so I’m sure that Square’s coffers were being stretched thin by the ginormous number of FMVs they were creating for FFVII.  Look at Rudras today and look at FFVII today….. admit that you’d rather control the pixelized cuties in the former than the jagged blocks of the latter.  The characters and environments in Rudras are all nicely animated and pleasant to look at, but I’d be lying if I said it was pushing the hardware, even back then.  To be honest, however, there were times when I thought Rudras was running off the same exact engine as some of those SNES RPGs- I can’t be sure that the graphics are being reused from game to game, but it might be the case.  Perhaps a little bit of research is in order.

If you like video game music, then you’ll…… well, what does that mean anyway?  Taste is called taste for a reason, and the music in Rudras might play to your taste.  There were some tunes in the game that I enjoyed….. a somber town theme (those always seem to be some of my favorites) and a rollicking boss battle theme in particular stood out.  I wouldn’t say that Rudras is my favorite soundtrack of all time, but I liked it for the most part.  There were very few tunes that grated on the nerves, but I never really found one lodged in my head.  The soundtrack is all over the place in tone and theme- there were some tracks that sounded more suited for a Turbo Duo game (not a bad thing!) and others that seemed to come straight from the SNES vaults.  I’m one of those people who thinks a soundtrack can make or break an RPG (think NiER or Paladin’s Quest.  Please think of them.) and I’d rate this one as a positive if not a draw.

There are frustrations to be found as well.  There are those sporadic difficult battles that might leave your controller broken in a heap on the floor if you don’t bother to use save states.  A game should never be so difficult that you feel forced to save it every three rounds for fear that you will lose some hard fought progress against a particularly difficult foe.  Unfortunately, I resorted to just such a tactic several times.  You see, battles (in addition to what I’ve already said) have, for lack of a better word, a weirdness about them that makes it difficult to plan a successful strategy.  Here is an example.  You can fight a herd of little enemies, and for the first two rounds your party will have the speed or agility or whatever to attack first.  But the second that one of those enemies is a hit away from death, you can practically guarantee that they will attack one last time before you finish them off.  There is no rhyme or reason to it, but it happens almost every time.  You whittle them down and expect to land the finishing blow next round, but have to wait while a sudden jump in their speed grants them a last attack.  That’s just….. strange, and I don’t really understand why it happens.  The fickle nature of the enemy speed statistic can cause what would appear to be some unfair deaths on those big bad bosses.  There are some guys who finish a round with a devastating spell that nearly knocks out your party and then attack first the next round with another group attack that just wipes you out.  You don’t have any chance to heal at all.  The boss essentially attacks twice in a row, and if those two attacks are the nasty ones, your party is dead.  I can only imagine how difficult these fights must’ve been to gamers who could not utilize save states to cheaply save it every single round.  I had to reload every single time a boss pulled one of these double whammies and then have my characters defend so that they’d survive to the next round.  Once that nasty bout of damage is done, however, the boss will go back to attacking at the end of each round.  Manageable when you can play the game on an emulator, but a cheap design tactic that would have lost the game points if I had played it back in the day.

Hey!  How'd he get his HP so high?

Other minor niggles- since the stories overlap somewhat, you can end up treading the same ground with two difference characters.  This doesn’t happen as often as you’d think- each of the three characters’ quests is completely different, and they each end up exploring parts of the world that the others’ don’t.  But there are certain hub locations that you will end up visiting over and over again- you won’t soon forget Thor Volcano, Sodom Castle or Mantra Peak after completing the game.  Once your characters have more freedom to explore the parts of the world that are not vital to their main quest, you might choose to revisit other dungeons anyway.  Treasure chests restock for each of the characters, so that all-important life leaf that Riza picked up when she was forced to go through some tower is still there should Surlent decide to sidetrack and visit.  Because of the overlapping stories, there will be times when one character visits a location on day five while another visits on day ten.  Thus, the enemies that populate a particular region may not be on the same level as your current party, and as such may be too difficult or too easy.  In other words, the game has a few balance issues.  I do want to stress, however, that for a story that is forced to juggle so many elements involving both characters and time, these balance issues could have been so much worse.   

As with any game, you can boil it down to the four Nintendo Power criteria (fun factor! Is one of the four) and still miss the whole point of what makes it good or bad.  Treasure of the Rudras looks and plays like your typical RPG, albeit with the aforementioned exceptions.  That is what brings you to the dance, as they say, but not what allows you to score.  The interlocking stories are interesting, the in-game systems serviceable even when familiar.  Nothing super-innovative to hang this review’s hat on, though it does try to be experimental in a few different places.  But who cares when you get this much enjoyment out of a game?  I almost a good point of reference for my feelings at having played Rudras is Mega Man 9.  Remember how everyone marveled at how Mega Man 9 was just like 2, and how it just had that feel that brought you back to 1988 or whenever the hell you fell in love with Mega Man 2?  Rudras (for different reasons, obviously) evoked that same sense of nostalgia that made me fall in love with games like Chrono Trigger, Terranigma, and Final Fantasies IV and VI.  It’s a good game even without the nostalgia factor, and one that every RPG fan should check out.  Treasure of the Rudras is the 20^th best RPG of all time.  That's really high!

OVERALL SCORE: (36/40) Buried Treasure