Remembering Compile: Madou Monogatari

Before Puyo Puyo took the puzzle world by storm, its characters starred in a first-person dungeon crawler that defied genre conventions.

Compile, founded in the early 1980s, was a standout developer in its day. That day is long past now, however: as of November 2023, it’s already been 20 years since the studio closed its doors. In its over two decades, though, Compile showed off influential talent, and became the start of a family tree of developers across multiple genres that’s still growing today. Throughout November, the focus will be on Compile’s games, its series, its influence, and the studios that were born from this developer. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Puyo Puyo isn’t a niche series, and, if anything, is the reason most people even know about Compile at all. It’s a puzzle franchise featuring some adorable, excitable, animated (in all meanings of the word) characters, with some excellent, addictive, and deep gameplay to boot. It never took the world by storm to the degree Tetris has, but the thing about that is that no puzzle game ever has: Tetris is on an entirely different level from most games, never mind puzzle games, and everyone else is fighting for second place. Puyo Puyo, for decades now, has done an admirable job of keeping that fight interesting, and even got to partner with Tetris on a pair of titles released for eighth- and ninth-generation consoles, as well as Windows. That’s not something any old puzzle series gets to do.

Puyo Puyo, though, is a spin-off. That it became the franchise for Compile, tops in sales and their primary focus throughout much of the 1990s, wasn’t an accident or anything, but it wasn’t the original use of these characters or world for the studio. The characters of Puyo Puyo, like the young magic user and protagonist, Arle, and the various slimes used as puzzle pieces on the board, are all from a series of dungeon crawlers: Madō Monogatari. The first game begins with Arle as a kindergartner who has to brave a tower full of monsters and secrets in order to graduate, and they get stranger from there. Though you probably could have guessed as much, if you’re familiar with Puyo Puyo, and remember things like there being a character who is a giant foot with a face on top of it, and a weirdly muscled fish with arms and legs.

Madō Monogatari — Romanized as Madou Monogatari — first released on the home PC, the MSX2, as part of Compile’s series of Disc Station magazine releases. Disc Station was a bi-monthly (and then monthly) disk magazine, containing games to be played on the MSX and then later the PC-9801 and Windows 95. Compile released Disc Station issues for well over a decade, and they were sometimes a place for Compile to figure out concepts, or make games with some of their mascot characters (like Carbuncle, who was a mascot of both Puyo Puyo and Compile in general). The first Madou Monogatari to release was for Disc Station Special: Christmas Edition in 1989. It was a prototype of what would eventually become part of the first full Madou Monogatari release, and, just to keep things even more confusing for everyone, was titled Madō Monogatari Episode II: Carbuncle.

The various Madou Monogatari games were often remade and turned into separate releases on various platforms, often Sega’s. Image credit: LaunchBox Games Database

Compile charged much more for this edition of the Disc Station — about $40, twice as much as usual — since there was a larger than usual game in there and it was one of the Special, more substantial editions of Disc Station. The success of it despite the price increase surprised Compile’s founder, Masamitsi Niitani, who explained in an interview that, “When we asked our customers about that, a lot said it was because Madou Monogatari was so good. Then we figured we should do an official release for it, and that was Madou Monogatari 1-2-3, which also sold very well.” That full game would release on the MSX2 in 1990, and is the basis for most of the Madou Monogatari releases that would follow.

Madou Monogatari wasn’t like the dungeon crawlers of the day in some ways. It was a bright, colorful adventure featuring a child sorcerer just trying to graduate from kindergarten, and figuring out which monsters were out to get her and which were on the friendly side. There’s plenty of slapstick and general goofiness, and while there was also room for the kind of strange, twisted moments that a cuter facade allows for, they still didn’t exude the same kind of darkness that dungeon crawlers were known for at the time. Kei Tatsuki, a programmer for Compile who designed the original Madou Monogatari, explained in an interview found in Complete Compile that some of the monster design was done with Sega’s UFO catchers in mind: the cuter the better, to attract people trying to win some plushies. I’m going to guess that the Wizardry team never had a meeting to figure out something similar with their own games.

Beyond just the visuals, however, was Madou Monogatari’s systems. They’d change over time in some ways, as remakes moved to more powerful and complicated platforms, or as times changed and Compile tried to adjust rather than just re-releasing the same game again on a new console. Dungeon crawlers lean heavily on numbers for just about everything, but Madou Monogatari hid all of that under the surface, where the person playing the game couldn’t see it. Instead, you can tell how well — or how poorly — you’re doing in a battle based on the facial expressions of Arle and her opponents. Which means you need to suss out just how close to failing and falling Arle or her enemies are, based on how they look like they’re feeling. It’s not for everyone, and I understand the desire for less “fuzzy” stats in an RPG, but it certainly can give you more of a connection to the character you’re playing as, given you have to see them recoil and suffer with every spell cast against them.

That description, “fuzzy,” comes from Tatsuki. In that same interview, Tatsuki explained that, “I thought it was stupid when games would represent stats/damage/etc with a simple number. (laughs) Of course, internally everything has a number attached to it, but I think it’s annoying when games would show you that explicitly, like “You received 12 damage” (laughs) Ultimately you still collect gold, so there’s grinding all the same, but we didn’t think about stuff like that in the initial planning stages of Madou Monogatari. And during the development, I told everyone that I didn’t like showing numerical stats. In the past, I had played these old Apple games where everything is displayed with words alone, no numbers. So part of it was wanting to recreate an experience like that.”

So, instead of seeing that Arle received X damage and has Y hit points left, you would instead see her condition slowly deteriorate over time as her face went from bright and cheery to worn down. Like a less bloody version of the Doom Guy inset image, and with that imagery being all you have to rely on to understand how things are going at that moment.

Another change from the usual approach is that every attack is magical in nature. Arle isn’t equipping a sword and slicing through Puyo Puyo slimes, or bashing a skeleton’s bones into dust with a mace. She’s a kindergartner (then a teenager, then a young woman) who can cast some magic spells, and that’s what you’ll find yourself doing again and again. You’ll lean on fire-, ice-, and thunder-based spells, but Arle also learns others like Diacute, used to power up, or Bayoen, which you more than likely know from her yelling it out before something awesome/terrible happens in Puyo Puyo because whoever is using her managed a massive chain of clears.

How these spells are performed changes depending on the game. Sometimes, it’s as simple as picking one from a menu, as is the case with the classic Madou Monogatari titles. By the time you get to the Mega Drive remake of Madou Monogatari I, however, it’s meant to be more like a button combination a la a fighting game. And you don’t want to mess up too many times trying to cast, either, as it’s a mix of real-time and turn-based combat, and failing to attack doesn’t mean the enemy will wait around for you to figure it out.

This is a dungeon crawler, so you’ll spend a lot of time exploring, checking your map, doubling back, and hoping you can recover health before you die. You can save whenever you want, at least, so constantly doing that to avoid losing progress when you inevitably do misread a situation will help keep you going and avoid having to replay huge chunks of game. While you don’t have to do the roguelike thing of going back to the start here, you will want to spend your money at shops in order to acquire the items you need to survive all the way up the tower. Solving puzzles and helping NPCs takes time, you know, and there are always going to be battles to fight on the way.

While releases in this series were constant — in Japan, anyway — from 1989 through 1998, and other spin-offs in other RPG genres arose from it, the franchise has been mostly quiet for decades now. Compile closed 20 years ago now, which has much to do with it, but the scattering of the rights to their work plays a part, too. Sega owns the rights to the Puyo Puyo characters, which, you know. Are the Madou Monogatari characters. D4 Enterprises owns the rights to Madou Monogatari, the series. And Compile Heart, while made up of former Compile developers who, if you know anything about their output, are certainly the ones who were still interested in making RPGs and dungeon crawlers, had the rights to none of the above. Which is why Compile Heart’s Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God served as a remake of Madou Monogatari in 2013,but required D4’s permission to create even though it didn’t have the characters from the original games within it.

In the fall of 2023, a surprise announcement was made, however. Compile Heart, D4, and Sega all joined together (at least in a legal sense) to allow for an actual sequel to the original Madou Monogatari games: a fourth mainline entry instead of a spin-off or remake. And it will be developed by Sting, a studio focused primarily on RPGs that was founded by ex-Compile employees in 1989. So while Compile in its original form is gone, two studios founded by former Compile developers are partnering to make an official sequel to a long-dormant franchise. That’s not nothing.

While Sorcery Saga: Curse of the Great Curry God is the only Madou Monogatari game to receive a worldwide release, there are unofficial translations of most of the original Madou Monogatari titles. Madou Monogatari 1-2-3 was released as three separate Game Gear titles in Japan, each of which has been translated into English in the decades since. The Mega Drive remake of Madou Monogatari I — the last official Mega Drive release in the console’s history — has been translated into English, as has the PC Engine CD remake of the same game that preceded it. The PC-98 edition of Mado Monogatari was translated just this past summer. So, if you have any interest in emulating any of them, take your pick: they’re each a bit different in design, with dialogue punched up, more options, better or worse visuals, and occasionally different gameplay and artwork depending on when in the series’ timeline the game released.

It would be something for re-releases of these to be made in an official capacity, and for those to be released worldwide as well. D4 has been remastering and remaking Madou Monogatari games in Japan for years now — they didn’t pick up those Compile licenses just to sit on them — but they haven’t left the country. Maybe Madou Monogatari will generate interest in the franchise, though, and further partnerships will mean revisiting the originals in a way we’ve never before seen.

Whether that happens or not, we are talking about niche dungeon crawlers who aren’t even necessarily enjoyed by the people who are normally into that sort of thing. The key takeaway from Madou Monogatari for our purposes is that these were vitally important games to Compile’s own success and history: they helped propel the Disc Station to the level of relevance it achieved, and they were widely ported in their day for a reason. And, of course, the existence of Madou Monogatari led to the creation of Puyo Puyo, which, in the post-shoot ‘em up years, was Compile’s key focus nearly to the end. Puyo Puyo’s legacy isn’t exactly Madou Monogatari’s legacy, but the two are intertwined forever, and the studio has lived on in bits and pieces through the former for decades now, and will get a chance to live on through the latter, too, sometime in 2024.

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Googling “Madou Monogatari” to see what games in the series even exist, and coming away more confused than when you started? That’s normal. Again, this is a series whose first release had “Episode II” in the title. Let’s see if we can cut through some of that confusion to give you an overview of the franchise.

There are five Disc Station releases in the series: Episode II is a prototype of what would eventually be Madou Monogatari 1-2-3, while the others are mostly spin-offs and prequels. Madō Monogatari: Michikusa Ibun (Disc Station Vol. 3, 1994, PC-98) is a prequel to Puyo Puyo that turns the story information in that game into a dungeon crawler. Madou Monogatari: Chaotic Final Exam (Disc Station Vol. 12, 1996, Windows) features you playing as Arle once again, but alongside other key characters from the series. Madou Monogatari: Tower of the Magician (Disc Station Vol. 16, 1998, Windows) has you playing as Schezo, a sword-wielding dark mage, rather than Arle, in his own quest to ascend the Wish tower. And Mado Jeongi: Elysion e Bimil was released in the Korean edition of Disc Station in 1997, in its fifth volume.

The PC Engine CD edition of Madou Monogatari featured enhanced visuals in comparison to the MSX2, PC-98, and Game Gear editions of the original.

Madou Monogatari 1-2-3 released in 1990 for the MSX2 and 1991 for the PC-98. Most of the subsequent releases and remakes in the series are based on this in some way. The Game Gear received three separate releases, one for each phase of Arle’s life depicted in 1-2-3: Madou Monogatari I: Mitsu no Madouryoku, Madou Monogatari II: Arle 16-Sai, and Madou Monogatari III: Kyuukyoku Joou-sama. There’s also a fourth Game Gear release, Madou Monogatari A: Doki Doki Vacation, which is just one part of Madou Monogatari: A.R.S. — the part where you play as four-year-old Arle, in a prequel to the game that explains how a six-year-old could make it up a magical tower full of monsters intact.

Madou Monogatari I: Honoo no Sotsuenji is an enhanced remake of the first part of Madou Monogatari 1-2-3, for the PC Engine CD. Released in 1996, it utilized the additional power of the platform to release what’s arguably the most feature-rich version of Madou Monogatari I out there, but given it released in 1996 and all, the other two weren’t made, so it’s also as incomplete as every other remake besides the Game Gear trio. Madou Monogatari I was the final Mega Drive game to receive an official release in Japan, and it remakes the dungeons, reworks the scenarios a bit, and changed the combat from turn-based to the fighting game-style button press system mentioned above, so it is, for all intents and purposes, a completely different game than the others in more ways than just getting a fresher coat of visual paint with some quality of life additions.

Welcome to Frogmart. *ribbit* Image credit: LaunchBox Games Database

Not everything was a remake! There were also re-imaginings, like in the case of the Super Famicom’s Madou Monogatari: Big Kindergarten Kids. Rather than taking place inside of Wish tower, Arle, still in kindergarten, goes out into the world for her quest this time around. You’re still exploring and fighting, you’re just not in a first-person, 3D dungeon crawler this time.

Every single one of those games, even more obscure Disc Station releases aside, has been unofficially translated, so you’re able to play them if you can figure out how to patch and emulate. There’s one that sticks out as not being patched yet, though, and that’s the Sega Saturn release in the series, simply known as Madou Monogatari. This 1998 game was the last game in the series developed by Compile, when they still had the full rights to Puyo Puyo and all the characters contained within. Rather than a first-person dungeon crawler, it uses an isometric perspective, and you make your way through mazes with a party of characters, solving puzzles and fighting battles along the way. You can read about (and visually compare) what the game was aiming for in its pre-release state compared to what eventually released: Compile was feeling the effects of its financial woes at this point, and Madou Monogatari on the Saturn didn’t end up being exactly as envisioned because of that.

And next is Madou Monogatari 4, which is expected to release in 2024. It’s unclear if it will receive a worldwide release, but Compile Heart (and the publisher/developer they’re a subsidiary of, Idea Factory) aren’t shy about global releases even for the extremely niche RPGs they’re responsible for creating, so this might actually be the best chance we’ve had at a Madou Monogatari title not needing an unofficial translation down the line to make it playable for non-Japanese speakers. And if that goes well, who knows? Maybe emulation and translation patches won’t be necessary to understand this significant part of Compile’s past anymore.

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