Re-release this: Popful Mail

The game was released quite a few times in the early 90s, and it's time for Nihon Falcom to revisit in the present.

This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Do you know how sometimes, an older game is re-released and remastered by a developer and publisher that had nothing at all to do with the original release? That usually occurs now when something like a decades-old game like Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap gets a remake in the present, after the original developer (Westone) no longer exists and the original publisher (Sega) is licensing out the game to a third-party to handle rather than doing it themselves. In the past, though, sometimes it was just a matter of available resources that put the game in another publisher or developer’s hands as was the case with Nihon Falcom’s Popful Mail.

Popful Mail, a side-scrolling action RPG from Falcom, originally released on the PC-8801 in 1991, and then on the PC-9801 the next year. These computers were excellent platforms for Japanese video games in the 80s, but by 1992, the PC-98 was a decade old: they weren’t quite as cutting edge at that point, and tension between Popful Mail’s director, Yoshio Kiya, and Falcom over the need to expand beyond these aging platforms is what eventually led to his split from the company in 1993.

Falcom would eventually begin to develop more often for the ever-growing console market, and, as Kiya had wanted, on Windows, as well. Falcom’s games appeared on consoles fairly regularly, it just wasn’t always them doing the development in those instances — console versions of Ys games were handled by Hudson Soft or Tonkin House until Falcom finally took the reins for Ys V, Koei produced the SNES port of Brandish, etc., and North American releases always required a publisher willing to put up the money and localize — but they were working towards focusing on this future dominated by consoles all the same. One such way that they handled this was by partnering with Sega, to get Falcom games on Sega platforms, in the very literally named “Sega Falcom” partnership. While Falcom didn’t program the version of Popful Mail that arrived on the Sega CD in North America in 1995 — Sega handled that, while Working Designs did the localization — Falcom did produce their own console version of Popful Mail for the Super Famicom, which released only in Japan in 1994, just two months after the Japanese Sega CD version hit shelves.

There are a whole bunch of versions of Popful Mail out there, is what I was getting around to saying, and in a weird way, none of them are the “best” one. The Sega CD one is considered the superior effort — it has the most balanced gameplay, less backtracking than the PC-88/98 originals, impressively animated cutscenes, voice acting, large character portraits that appear during in-game conversations, larger character sprites — but the “most balanced” part really only applies to the Japanese version of it handled by Sega and SIMS Co. Working Designs, as they so often did, unnecessarily messed with the game’s balance and difficulty to create something less enjoyable than the original developers (and the Sega CD-specific programmers) intended. More on that in a little bit, though.

I’m loathe to refer to Popful Mail as a Metroidvania, since it released in the period before those games were even recognized as such, but it is certainly in the same family as the Wonder Boy titles that have been given the same retroactive genre tag since they focused on side-scrolling combat, exploration, and backtracking (as well as racking up gold to buy more powerful weapons and armors). Popful Mail has got similar bright colors and aesthetics, too, and the Sega CD version even includes the kind of larger sprites and even larger bosses that Wonder Boy titles tended to after a certain point in their own history.

Popful Mail is distinct from these games, however. In the older iterations this is due to a bump combat system, but in all versions of the game it’s because you control one of three characters at a time. You can switch between them whenever you want, but if one of them runs out of health, it’s game over for all of them. So you might find yourself defensively switching sometimes not just if a specific match-up of character speed or attack isn’t to your liking, but also if whichever one you are controlling is running low on health and you don’t want to use up, or cannot use, your healing items.

Mail is your starting character: she’s an elf and a bounty hunter, and she is very concerned about getting paid. Saving the land is kind of just a secondary thing that happens in her quest to collect on a bounty. She attacks with a short sword at first, and has limited range with it whether you’re playing with bump combat or not, but she’ll also get ranged weapons like boomerangs (that you can manipulate the return path of by moving around) or daggers. Tatt is a magic user, the former apprentice of the wizard Muttonhead that Mail is chasing for a bounty when the game begins, and his ranged attacks are a huge help early. Then there is Gaw, who can jump higher and float a real little bit thanks to wings: you get Gaw, your third and final party member, after completing the second act of five, and can return to previously completed locations to find some treasures you weren’t able to reach before, if you want.

Now that we’ve gone over how it plays, we should talk about how Sega originally planned to utilize the Popful Mail license they received from Falcom: to create a role-playing game in the Sonic the Hedgehog universe, featuring Sonic’s not-yet-introduced sister. It’s unclear what the actual title for the game was going to be, but the project was referred to as “Sister Sonic,” which makes it sound like Sonic the Hedgehog is going undercover as a nun to stop some Robotnik scheme involving Christianity. If this premise didn’t already exist in fanfiction, it is possible I just lathe of heavened it into existence.

Back in 1993, Electronic Gaming Monthly reported on the rumor of Sister Sonic. The reaction from fans was not positive: in their eyes, if Popful Mail was going to make it over to North America, the game that these Falcom fans received better be Popful Mail, and not an action RPG shoved into the Sonic universe. Sega was flooded with negative letters in response to the news, the project was delayed at first and then canceled, and a reprogrammed version of Popful Mail with larger sprites, voice acting, and everything else mentioned above finally made it to North America in 1995 instead of whatever it was Sega had planned to do. And we wouldn’t get an RPG in the Sonic universe until Bioware’s 2008 release, Sonic Chronicles: Dark Brotherhood, on the Nintendo DS. You would have a hell of a time explaining that sentence to someone in 1993 if given the opportunity.

Image credit: Lost Media Wiki

So, we didn’t get Sister Sonic, but we here in North America did get a Working Designs-ified version of Popful Mail. It has voice acting, but it has the kind of voice acting Working Designs preferred — occasionally grating. The balance of the game is completely off now, as Working Designs decided to make the game difficult even though it was never meant to play that way. Your characters all do reduced damage, and take far more damage from enemies, too: just a handful of hits means a game over. To make matters even worse, they for some reason jacked up the prices of healing items, so you end up spending a bunch of your gold earned from defeating enemies on healing items instead of stronger weapons and armors, which means you need to grind to defeat more enemies for more gold, which means needing to buy more healing items, which means more backtracking… it’s not unplayable or anything, it’s more just a question of why? Why did you do this, Working Designs?

This is a question regularly asked of the now-defunct publisher, to the point that there is an entire line of fan-made patches for games from the 1990s that come labeled as “Un-Working Designs” — the point of these isn’t to do the kind of whiny and weird things you hear about being patched back into North American releases sometimes, like making skirts short again or re-adding cleavage to teenage anime girls, but instead the goal is to get rid of the parts of the Working Designs experience that messed with the balance of the games they were localizing. Why did Working Designs reduce the money earned from battles in Lunar: Silver Star Story, forcing you to grind against enemies they also made more difficult to kill in order to be able to afford anything? Why did they feel the need to make Magic Knight Rayearth so much more difficult than it was by increasing enemy speed and attack power? Why are you suddenly incapable of taking damage in Popful Mail without dying? Working Designs will never answer for their crimes, no, but at least dedicated fans figured out how to patch this particular stench out of these games.

The Un-Working Designs version of Popful Mail for the Sega CD is the superior version for English speakers, because it is now the Japanese game, but in English. Yes, it still has voices that grate — Mail’s voice is about the only one that you hear all the time that isn’t going to aggravate you, but what can you do, it was 1995, this was too often how these things worked at that point, learn to live with it — but otherwise, it’s a real good game. The other issues are minor, like how the camera doesn’t show you quite enough of what’s in front of you, making for a whole lot of leaps of faith by you, but any other major issue has been patched out so that the game plays like the one SIMS Co. programmed and Sega signed off on, and even that camera problem isn’t as serious as it was in the un-patched version, since you’re less likely to die if you bump into an enemy that was offscreen before your jump.

It is kind of odd that the Falcom versions of the game aren’t as good since it is their game we’re talking about here, but that has more to do with the Sega CD version being superior than it does to any kind of inferiority in the originals. The PC-88/98 versions look and play like a cross between some Dragon Slayer games and Ys, borrowing the side-scrolling from the former and the bump combat of the latter. I haven’t played these myself since I can’t get a PC-88/98 emulator to work to save my life*, but Hardcore Gaming 101 has played them all, so here’s that:

Visually the PC versions resemble Xanadu and Legacy of the Wizard, two previous Falcom games directed by Kiya. The characters are short and squat, with a large portion of the screen devoted to the interface. Attacking is done by running into bad guys (similar to the bump system in the early Ys games), although you sometimes have to jump on them. Eventually, you get throwing weapons, magic spells, and other projectiles, which makes things a little easier, but the platforming feels a little awkward with such tiny characters. While the graphics are tiny, they’re quite vibrant and generally pretty attractive, while the cutscenes are outstanding. The FM synth soundtrack is excellent too.

*There is a PC Engine Super CD version of Popful Mail that is pretty close to the PC-88/98 versions of the game, so I will likely give that a whirl at some point just to see how different it is with bump combat. I love bump combat.

Then there is the Super Famicom version of Popful Mail, developed by Falcom instead of being licensed out. Oddly, considering Falcom’s pedigree, this version that transitioned out of bump combat and into the similar kind of sword-swinging, magic-slinging play of the Sega CD version isn’t supposed to be quite as good as the others. It’s not by any means a bad game, but there was a difference between what you could do developing for a CD-based platform (Falcom’s preference for consoles in the past, plus the format where many excellent Hudson versions of various Falcom games lived) and a cartridge-based system, and those differences are very apparent when comparing and contrasting Sega CD’s Popful Mail and that of the Super Famicom. It’s not just graphics or cutscenes or voice acting, but also that you now can’t save wherever you want, but are instead relegated to saving in inns you happen upon.

I’ll likely still give that a whirl at some point, because as said, it’s not supposed to be a bad game, and I am fascinated by how there can be three different good versions of the same basic game that are somehow all dissimilar. What do you mean there are countless other games I could play instead of scratching this particular itch? Sometimes, you just gotta know.

Anyway, all of this is why Popful Mail could use a re-release. A definitive one, that includes the multiple versions of the game that already exist, that also removes the odd choices Working Designs made in the North American Sega CD version. And while we’re wishcasting, it should also include a remastered version of the game that blends the various versions together, a la Falcom’s Memories of Celceta. Or hell, just pretty up the original original versions for modern consoles with an option to switch to the old-school graphics and sound, like you can in the Wonder Boy remakes. I’m not picky, I’ve created a number of scenarios here, all of them much more capable of convincing people to play Popful Mail than how I ended up doing so (converting a Sega Genesis Mini to play Sega CD games, finding the Un-Working Designs version of the game while looking through various fan patch efforts).

If you’re looking for a good action RPG to play, and can be convinced to go through the same steps or similar that I did to get your hands on it, then Popful Mail is worth your time. I won’t blame you one bit if you sit back and wait for an official re-release, though, given how few of these projects Falcom works on at a time — they still haven’t remade all of the Ys games, and Ys games are money — we might need to wait for some random developer and publisher to be interested in Popful Mail, like keeps happening with old-school Sega titles.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter.