So, my friend and I are playing MADARA...

...and boy, this is a weird game.

My friend is a native Japanese speaker and has a bunch of old famicom games. After I got my Retron 5 I decided to make some videos about them. We decided to do an "Endurance Run" on MADARA, not knowing how long the game is. We only knew a few things about this game before starting, which was...

• Konami made it in 1990.
• It's one of only three games to have the VRC6 sound chip. So it probably had good music.
• It's a JRPG, but in the year 1990 so its contemporaries were Final Fantasy I and Dragon Quest.

Part 1 ended up being really long because we struggled a great deal with learning the systems of the game. I wouldn't expect anyone to put themselves through a 50 minute video on this. After restarting things went a LOT faster and I was able to cut things down to a more digestible size.

This game has a lot going for it, and is definitely worth playing if you know how to translate Japanese and can get past the steep difficulty curve.

And part 3 after that

If you guys want me to update this or turn it into a Madara blog let me know.

I'd be interested in seeing more. I bought this game for the music, but never tried to actually play it. And now I leave in a different continent from my famicom, so I won't be trying any time soon.

If you take the time to watch Part 1 pretty much all of the systems and the back story gets explained, so that might make things easier for you. We really try to stay "fresh" by not looking at any FAQs as much as possible. In this case I only looked at a FAQ once to figure out how to revive Kirin, but it turns out you can't until way later in the game (hence the restart). The death penalty in this game is pretty severe as it turns out.

So, in part 4 which was just posted late last night I learned something new about the game:

• Towns that were previously safe can be not-safe and have monster encounters.

Recall this game came out in 1990. The only games that I can think of that also have this happen in them are Final Fantasy 4 and Super Mario RPG, both of which are SNES games. So we might have found a "first" in game history, which is really exciting for me.