Burai

~ BURAI ~

Riverhill Soft

CD-ROM

1991

I took a chance on Burai because it was inexpensive and the character designs displayed on its cover look really cool. When I powered it up for the first time, the kick-ass opening cinemas made me think I'd stumbled upon a diamond in the rough.

But just moments later, I laid my eyes upon the most primitive in-game graphics I'd ever had the "privilege" to be blinded by in a PCE game. Understand that I can tolerate bad graphics; it was the ridiculously sized playfield (a mere one-fourth or so of the menu-and-stats-dominated screen) that I found particularly appalling.

I concluded that the game was pretty much useless, as I couldn't even see enough of the surrounding land to have any clue of where I was supposed to go. And so Burai stood rotting on my shelf for years. Eventually, I decided to play it and finish it once and for all, if for no other reason than to finally clear it from my queue.

Well, its premise is fairly interesting. You have to play through seven different mini-quests, which focus on wacky characters who meet up for one final adventure during which they search for mighty weapons, hammer on some villains, and make a "dramatic" charge through the ultimate bad guy's castle.

And it all actually works because the game keeps things easy on the player. The mini-quests are short and straightforward: typically, you make your way to a nearby town, hang around the town to power up, and then venture out into the world to find a maze-like area (be it a tower or cavern or mountain path). You'll experience event scenes and fight bosses and mini-bosses along the way.

Even when a given mini-quest diverges from that rudimentary pattern, affairs remain simple and fun. For instance, one young fellow needs to bust out of prison--not exactly a unique theme, but the rogue gets to free other "criminals" along the way, some of whom team up with him to pummel the guards.

The game does very little to annoy the player aside from the infamous playfield scrunching, and even that isn't much of a problem, as the overworld proves to be quite linear and the (first few) dungeons are far from tortuous. In just about every area, you can find enemies who regularly drop restorative potions, so you don't have to make many "inn breaks" during the requisite leveling. Plus, most of your enemies can be dealt with pretty quickly, and the random-battle rate is perfect. (Encounters are spaced out at nice intervals so they don't become annoying, and they happen at an amazingly consistent rate: you can usually tell when you're about to be attacked just by listening to the music, as confrontations occur at the same part of the tune nearly every time.)

Speaking of the music, it does seem to suck horribly at first, but play on and you'll get to hear some surprisingly nice field and town themes. There's also one particularly cool rock number that accompanies certain "showdown time" event scenes (though the quality is odd in that the track sounds like it was recorded in a cavernous area).

These nice things make the game playable, but not necessarily memorable. But then your characters finally get together, and the overworld opens up; and the game ascends to another level. The last stretch covers quite a bit more territory than the mini-quests that precede it, but by the time you reach that point, you'll have a good handle on how the game works, and you shouldn't have much trouble figuring out the lay of the land. Despite suddenly having a whopping eight different characters to suit up, you'll find that matters remain convenient: enemies drop lots of equipment articles, most of which can be sold off for tons of cash. And matters become more interesting thanks to some really cool tasks that you need to complete, like butchering an ogre and then finishing off his persistent, "never say die" body parts.

You never know when you might find a secret weapon or be assaulted by one of the many mini-bosses. You might be stumbling along in a desert when you suddenly find a remarkable blade lying in the sands, or you could be jaunting along merrily when all of a sudden a giant gorgon or octopus or mammoth (with minions in tow) decides to attack you.

Some of the last few dungeons are absolutely enormous, but unlike the huge labyrinths in broken shit like Last Armageddon, they never quite become drags because Burai sticks to its roots of simplicity and convenience throughout.

When I finally decided to play this game in earnest, I pretty much promised myself that I wouldn't end up making it out to be some sort of Cinderella story if it somehow proved to be acceptable. Then I found myself staying up really late, pressing onward to see what kind of weapon I'd find or boss I'd fight or event I'd experience next. The secrets and dungeons and crazy characters made sure that whenever I put the controller down, I did so begrudgingly. I'm not sure there's any better sign of a good RPG than that.