Jonks I got a story about this game.
In the early 90s a friend lent me a CD packed to the brim with emulated games of a few consoles.
for a kid with not much money and just a windows 3.1 it was hog heaven. Every day home from school, a new game to try. Desert strike, afterburner, speedball, MK2, crash test dummies, that one michael jackson game, and so on.
The only downside is I couldn’t save, so could never get that far into RPGs.
I played the start of Miracle Warriors a bunch and it got the first RPG numbers-go-up hooks into me.
Foolishly I never paid attention to the name of the game – my sisters and I just called it “The Abba game” because of the title screen’s resemblance to Abba cover art. I eventually returned the disc. To my great shame, I lost touch with the very good friend who lent it to me, for no reason better than we went to different schools afterwards.
Years later I thought of that game and felt fully stumped as to how to locate it. I remembered an early enemy called “evil mercant” but searches of that yielded mostly links to the excellent tenchu 1. Any people I described my vague bits and pieces from couldn’t help me, as the setting and mechanics are fully generic. It transformed into a bit of a grail for me, though I had no idea how to track it down as I knew very little about consoles before PS1, what console it was on, nothing.
fast forwarding about 20 years, I hear of a wonder boy remake, and remember that on the same disc as this mysterious game I had also played a bunch of wonder boy in monster land. I narrowed it down to the master system and then a page of RPGs on that system, which was only about 10 items. I got a real cathartic rush recognising that cover.
In retrospect I could have probably narrowed it down a lot sooner with a concerted effort and some good research, but at the time it felt insurmountable, and that period of my life almost felt like a dream.
I watched a longplay of Miracle Warriors and it fully cured me of any desire to actually play it. I guess that’s how all grail stories end.
