Ooh, I can copy a bunch of stuff from the other NES game review pages! Anything to make my life on this squalid little grief hole easier. Ahem. Because real copies of this game are monstrously expensive, this review was conducted on emulator (using the palette recommended by The Cutting Room Floor) with a Switch NES controller for minimum authenticity (if we really wanted to be authentic, we'd have imported a Switch Famicom controller, y'see- yes, I can reuse jokes too). As this is a NES game and we are cursed with the knowledge of internal resolutions, the emulator spits out 256 x 240 when you take a screenshot but we decided on 292 x 240 (performed via dark HTML magic) which is a different value from Urban Champion but somehow it looks right for this game and not for that game. Also, I know what you're thinking, the game's title is wrong, it should be The Krion Conquest, but nope, no, not this time. There are several difficulty adjustments made for The Krion Conquest, so this review's based on the Japanese version via Video Smash Excellent's translation hack and played on Mesen, as well as a stream playthrough on a MiSTer.
A 8-bit witch-themed action game, you say? I'm interested in this.
From your friends and mine at VIC Tokai, that video game subsidiary of a gas utility company that gave us Socket and other games, probably, comes 1990's Magical Doropie, later released in 1991 in the US as The Krion Conquest. Now, we technically have a little behind-the-scenes info on this one but we're having to trust Wikipedia- scary prospect, I know- because The Krion Conquest page on Wikipedia paraphrases a long-dead website (excluded from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, even) written by someone who worked on the game, referred to as 'its designer' but exact identity unknown. Some of what's said here lines up with what's inside the game code as seen on The Cutting Room Floor (specifically the Round 5 graphic never showing up in-game because the game just ends after the only Round 5 area) but that doesn't necessarily confirm everything here, so take this with a pinch of salt and let's just hope whoever paraphrased this website did so accurately. The key points paraphrased there are that the game took about 10 months to develop and began life as a licensed game based on The Wizard of Oz, or more specifically Panmedia's Ozu no Mahōtsukai, the 1986 adaptation of L. Frank Baum's Oz stories which aired on TV Tokyo and was later given an English dub (with Margot Kidder as narrator!) as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Unable to secure the license, they decided to make an original game, with the sole remnant of the original idea being the main character's name, Doropie, being a loose transliteration of Dorothy. Additionally, there was internal resistance to having a girl protagonist as the designer was told 'Famicom is for boys' and that players couldn't relate to female protagonists (funny considering VIC Tokai would later make a two-game series all about cool ladies with heavy armaments).
The final bit of insight was that due to the cartridge size and hardware / technical issues (and, presumably, the tight development schedule although that isn't explicitly stated), the fifth and final round was cut short (something that's corroborated by unused graphics documented on The Cutting Room Floor) and the magical abilities had to be scaled back, so powers such as being able to use frozen enemies as platforms and move the shield around. These all sound pretty reasonable and make sense, but again, the original website's down and who knows how accurate the 'paraphrased' Wikipedia version of this account is. There is at least one tidbit we can mention that's properly sourced, this interview with Takayan translated by shmuplations briefly mentions that the game was developed by Seki Tomoki who also did graphics on Battle Mania / Trouble Shooter, and that the 'minor characters'- it's not clear what this is referring to, maybe enemy designs?- were by Ashika Sakura, a mangaka who also worked under the penname Sakurako Gokurakuin and whose best-known work is probably Sekirei (and her personal website has the name 'melti girl' which is a 10/10 website title, no notes).
Moving on to the game itself... In the year 1999, the Akudama Empire suddenly threatens the Earth with an army of robots! Choosing to fight, the Earth's forces are completely overwhelmed, as humanity's most powerful weapons can't even put a dent in them. However, a mercenary, Kagemaru, manages to summon the one force that can defeat the empire's forces and end the Akudama Empire's reign of terror... Doropie! Their robots are only weak to magic, and while their leader, Empress Elysia, had sealed away all the remaining magic users, Kagemaru found the rod to rescue the last one left. As it happens, Doropie was the witch who sealed Elysia away many years ago, and now it's time for Round 2! With four bases all over the world including in the frozen wastelands and the bottom of the ocean, each split into three areas and a boss fight each, and their headquarters in the heavens serving as the final boss gauntlet, Doropie has her witchy work cut out for her. Can she deal with Elysia for good? What caused Elysia to emerge from her slumber? Can you play as Kagemaru or is he just here to star in the cutscenes? The Earth's fate is in the hands of one brave witch...
Alright, I know what you're thinking, you're looking at these screenshots and you're practically kicking my door down to tell me this is a Mega Man knock-off. Even I've made that joke before! Magical Doropie isn't exactly beating those allegations with her sprites that looks so similar I'm kind of amazed Capcom didn't kick up a fuss or the weapon selection menu that even changes Doropie's colours depending on what weapon's selected exactly like Mega Man. There's even enemies that have those angry Mega Man enemy-style eyes, but let's head this discussion off at the pass. First, there's at least one thing that Magical Doropie did before Mega Man- you can hold the shot button to charge your weapons including your standard one, predating such a function in Mega Man 4 (2 did have Atomic Fire which can be charged but not the Mega Buster, so I think we can give Doropie a win here) and second, I think dismissing the game as a Mega Man knock-off and calling it a day isn't any fun, you know? There's a few core differences with the structure and mechanics that make it a distinct game from Capcom's more famous series, and so while we'll inevitably compare it to the Blue Bomber's gameography here and there, we'll try and keep it restrained and focus on what makes Magical Doropie, well, Magical Doropie. Some games stay in the shadow of other, more well-known games more prominently, but we should be able to look at them on their own merits, right?
The basics are fairly simple- Doropie has the abilities you'd expect from an 8-bit action game protagonist, with a standard pea-shooter that fires straight forward and a jump that you can alter the height of by holding the button down. She also gets a few luxuries that not everyone was lucky enough to have such as a crouch (where she, adorably, covers her face with her hat! It doesn't look like much but will let you low-profile projectiles) and being able to aim her weapon straight above, albeit only while standing still. She also starts with a fully decked-out array of six weapons- Normal, Fire, Freeze, Ball, Shield and Broom- and Doropie must be wearing a bandana under that witch hat of hers because she never needs to grab weapon recharge items or anything like that, with the only limitation being that some weapons need to be charged up first (with a handy little bar showing your charge level). I've seen some Mega Man fans ask for infinite weapon ammo in some of those games (having had to recharge my weapons more than once on Wily Castle 1 in 2, I can believe it) and, well, Magical Doropie delivers that to you, but what does this mean for the game itself? For a start, it does mean that the rounds can be designed with a full set of armaments in mind, with no restrictions or need to consider if the player has that specific weapon or if they have enough ammo. This leads to something of a trial-by-fire as the first round will expect you to learn how to use these weapons immediately, and pretty much all of them (except Fire, a screen-clear with a health cost) have a use-case here. The first screen after you enter the underground area, for instance, has an enemy you can only hit with the Ball weapon which bounces off walls to hit enemies at awkward angles, and later on you'll need to use Freeze to stop flames to slip by, bring up the Shield to get past some turrets that only fire and become exposed when you're close, and of course you'll need to use the Broom to scale high walls. Being able to try out the Broom in a safe area is especially useful because the game has you Brooming over a very-much-unsafe spike pit in one of the following areas. Better learn quick!
The weapons themselves are functional for the most part. I think the Ball is the most fun to use as you can get different angles by aiming upwards or using jump shots, although it's also the one offensive shot you can't charge which would've been a neat addition. Freeze and Shield are a bit more situational as you need to charge them for just a little too long if you want to use their special abilities as otherwise you just get a normal shot, and it feels like there aren't that many times you get to utilise them where they feel especially useful (there's nothing like Big Eye from Mega Man that it'd be advantageous to freeze in the air, for instance). Broom, the final weapon on the list, is one of the defining aspects of Magical Doropie... For both good and ill. Shoot to summon the Broom and hop on for a ride, shoot to determine your direction (you can't go down, only left, right and up), jump while it's going horizontally to make it speed away and step off at any point to make it disappear. You can also, surprisingly, change weapons while riding it, something I didn't learn until well after I completed it. Considering that you will be relying on this thing and it's something you'll use multiple times per area, it feels a little undercooked. Obviously, the developers had to limit the power of an item that lets you fly around the screen, but this thing has a lot of quirks that really grate on you- it's so wide that it'll often brush against walls when you don't expect it to which makes it instantly disappear, dismounting safely can be difficult after crossing over pits because of the somewhat heavy gravity of Doropie's jumps, the deployment method and being unable to move the Broom downwards means getting the right height is tricky and often leads to you colliding into enemies you can't quite hit while mid-flight or again, brush up against walls and die, if you're a little off when scrolling up the screen on the Broom you'll reach the next room then immediately fall back down (a huge problem in Round 4's first area which is 90% going up with the Broom)... That's quite the laundry list of gripes and they pile up, so it's not as much fun to use as you'd think it would be. I quite like the concept of always having this mobility item available with no fuel to worry about, but this also means the level designs rely on it quite a bit, and the awkwardness means you'll get quite frustrated with it, and it will lead to you dying more than once. Item 2 was always somewhat unreliable to use in Mega Man 2, but hey, you were only forced to use it once!
As for those level designs, they're mostly what I'd call agreeable. There's no huge difficulty spikes and no particular sections that blindside you with a new mechanic you haven't been able to get to grips with yet, so they're easy enough to muddle through. As I said, they definitely lean on the Broom quite heavily with rows of spikes to hover over which can be rough considering how fiddly the damn thing is, but at the very least, there's no knockback when you get hit and the mercy invincibility is generous enough for you to recover, plus the game has almost no bottomless pits, and if you're in i-frames you can step on spikes safely. If anything they feel a bit plain, with not a whole lot to make them stand out from one another, although they do try and mix things up here and there- Round 2 has slippery ice floors (which are poorly indicated as some floors are slippery and others aren't), Round 3 has an oxygen mechanic where you have to get out of the water for air (and your jumping physics are different, this is what got me killed the most here) and Round 4 has you going up the screen via Broom for most of the starting area (although the wideness of the Broom will absolutely make you lose progress). If anything, it almost feels like the game never quite gets started- the first round is to get you acclimated to the weapons and the Broom, and then once you start to get into the swing of things by the end of Round 4 the game's pretty much over as Round 5's just the final boss gauntlet. If it feels longer than that though, it's because you don't get health refills between the three areas of each round (only between rounds) and each area is its own checkpoint, so you get sent back to the start of an area when you die. That's a little rough, as these areas are just long enough that you'll get a bit sick of replaying them from scratch upon death, but at least once you reach a boss room, you can try again from the boss when you die (remember this for later) until you run out of lives, where you'll have to restart the entire round when you continue.
The enemies you'll be facing, though, definitely leave a lot to be desired. Their placement and the way they spawn in veers wildly between ones placed specifically to catch you off-guard (the fast-moving robots that only move horizontally but spawn in specific locations, including a nasty one in 1-3 where they spawn when you're in the middle of a jump at the exact height they need to be to hit you- bait them out first!) and ones that are just placed haphazardly without much rhyme and reason (most slow-flying enemies just shuffle on-screen and keep moving from side-to-side until you eliminate them). This is especially apparent when you're on the Broom with slow flying enemies just being all over the shop without many options for you to deal with them (although switching to Ball can help). It really doesn't help that the enemy types are reused a lot, especially considering how short the game is, and they even share the same palette in each stage a lot of the time so they're not visually appealing either. Sure, some of those Mega Man games and other action games of the time repeated enemies here and there, but different combinations of enemies, cleverly placed together, can create a new challenge (like the Axe Armor and Medusa Heads in the first Castlevania in that one room, you know the one). That just doesn't really come together here unfortunately, which is a shame, and it's not like it necessarily needs to do things like that, but it doesn't really do anything interesting with them at all. The bosses aren't especially great either, with most of them boiling down to waiting, dodging their attacks until they're briefly vulnerable then repeating until dead, although the Round 2 boss, Yukimaru, has an interesting timing challenge with its snowball attack, and the final boss gauntlet is a bit more engaging with you more actively having to get your shots in while avoiding their attacks with timing and skill. Just a missed opportunity that the game's over right after that!
It's a shame because Magical Doropie's presentation does some heavy lifting here, there's a lot of charm to be found. It's not just that Doropie herself is as cute as a button (although it helps!), there's also the cutscenes that take an obvious cue from Ninja Gaiden's Tecmo Theatre storytelling style (clearly VIC Tokai was paying attention to all the hot trends of the era). These range from using big, expressive portraits of the characters which look great (Doropie's got quite a range of emotions in these scenes) to smaller, scaled-back art and even one or two cutscenes that use in-game sprites too (I particularly like the one before Round 2 showing groovin' in victory). You even get anime-style eyecatch screens between rounds, really adding to the 'forgotten magical girl series' feel the game has going for it. It makes me want to like the game a lot more than I do, because it's cute! The music, contracted out to Aicom (as detailed on The Video Game Music Preservation Foundation) and composed by Kiyoshi Yokoyama (of Chimera Beast fame!) and Masaki Kase (of Shock Troopers fame!) isn't quite as strong as the visuals but a lot of the stage songs are kinda catchy, which is a good thing since you'll be listening to some of those songs on loop for a while and they were stuck in my head for quite a while afterwards.
I'm really torn on this one. I love witches in my video games, so I really, really wanted to enjoy Magical Doropie. As I was going through my notes, replaying the game to double-check things and take stock of what I'd written though, it slowly dawned on me that, well, I just didn't like it that much. The main thing is the game hinges pretty heavily on the Broom mechanic that just feels off and never really becomes natural or fun to utilise, even if it's a perfect fit for a witchy action game, but there's a lot of other problems too- slapdash enemy placement that can't decide on what kind of challenge it wants to give the player, plain level design that only sometimes goes in interesting directions, and even stuff I haven't mentioned yet that I've got to cram in here because this is already like 3000 words long so I gotta stop somewhere [Cry me a river, I'm the one who's gotta proofread it. - Ed] like items placed in the rounds not appearing when they're supposed to, enemies very rarely dropping health items which is a problem in a game where every scrap of health is precious... Hell, even the weapon menu has a problem, as you can very easily accidentally select Fire by mistake and it automatically performs a screen-clearing attack that snips a whole third of your health without any way to stop it, argh! It's such a shame because this does have a lot of charm, but it appears the development ran into technical and cartridge space problems that couldn't be surmounted and you can definitely feel that the game may have been kicked out the door before it was fully cooked. The developer site paraphrased on Wikipedia even mentioned that they wanted to do a sequel but decided against it once they found out how expensive Super Famicom development kits were, which is a little heartbreaking because a sequel probably could've taken the interesting bits and made them flourish, but it never happened, and we just have plain ol' Magical Doropie, a below-average action platformer that, while it has a lot of charm and guts, can't compete on a system with some really tough competition in that genre (I really shouldn't have played this after beating Shatterhand, should I?). I really had to think about the score on this one, and so it did pain me to give it a two, but feel free to bump it up to a three if you like witches even more than I do (which you don't, liar, I'm the witch fan around here).
For doing its best but not quite casting its spell, Magical Doropie is awarded...
In a sentence, Magical Doropie is... Not a magical time.
And now, it's that time, folks!
EXTENDED PLAY!
First up, manual scans!
Not mine, goodness no, the Japanese version of this game is expensive nowadays, but this very good website has the scans for you.
No, they don't identify what the health-up items are meant to be. Pumpkins, maybe?
Next, secrets and cheats!
These are all exclusive to Magical Doropie and have to be entered on the title screen.
There's two sets of them with two codes each- two character codes, two more traditional cheat codes.
Character Codes
Press Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, A, B, A, B on Controller 2, then on Controller 1...
... Hold Select and press A to play as Kagemaru.
... Hold Select and press Start to play as alternate costume Doropie.
Look at that, Kagemaru outside of the cutscenes! Doropie also gets a different fit with a beret and a jacket, looking more like a vintage mahou shoujo, bless her. These are simply sprite swaps so nothing else really changes (no new cutscenes or different abilities) but this also includes the sprite used for the Broom- Kagemaru uses something a bit more high-tech while alt-costume Doropie uses an arrow with a heart on it, cute! The only other things to note here are that alt-costume Doropie's extra life icon changes to a face that resembles one seen in the cutscene after Round 1 but seems to depict someone else, the clone boss in Round 5 changes depending onyour character, and finally you change back to normal Doropie once you reach Empress Elysia in the final battle. Still, it's a nice little change to have a new sprite now and then, isn't it? By the way, you can enter either code before selecting Continue to change your outfit mid-session!
Other Codes
Press Up, Down, Up, Down, Left, Right on Controller 2, then on Controller 1...
... Hold Select and press A to go to the Round Select screen.
... Hold Select and press Start to become invincible.
These might seem self-explanatory, but there's a few notes to be made here too. For the Round Select, press B to show which number you're selecting (and reset both to 1-1), use the D-Pad to change the numbers (with the first being the round number and the second being the area, 4 taking you to the boss of that round) then press A once you've made your selection. Any selection starting with 5 will take you to the first room of Round 5 to begin the boss rush, but 5-4 acts strangely. Selecting it shows the hexagram animation, then Round 5-3 Clear! (the only way to see the Round 5 graphic), then the pre-boss ALERT!! screen, and then... Well, one time it just hung on a white screen, another time it played the pre-Round 5 cutscene, then an eyecatch screen without a round number, and thendon't click if you don't like glitchy graphics 'cause Doropie ended up in hell. Maybe it's just loading garbage data, but someone who knows computers better than me should look into that. As for invincibility, it does exactly what it says on the tin until you reach a boss encounter, at which point the invincibility is switched off for the rest of that play session. You'll have to get a Game Over and enter the code again to re-enable it.
As mentioned, this review's based on the original 1990 Japanese Famicom release of the game, Magical Doropie
Let's take a look at what changed for the 1991 US NES release, The Krion Conquest.
(That's right, no European release, boooo,)
Much of this is documented on The Cutting Room Floor as ever, so be sure to visit them instead of wasting time on this silly old website. Anyway, outside of some renaming in the opening cutscene (the Akudama Empire is now the Krion Empire, Doropie is now Francesca, which ties in with what the game was nearly called in the US, Francesca's Wand) and different music on the title screen, the most obvious change when playing is that the continue feature's been completely removed- losing all your lives at any point makes you restart the whole game. That's rough, especially for a game with fairly infrequent checkpoints that also doesn't restore your health until you clear a full round of three areas and a boss. Less obvious but equally insidious is the removal of one of those checkpoints- if you die in a boss fight, you're sent back to the beginning of the third area, not the boss room, making it a lot more difficult to learn the boss patterns as you'll be trudging all the way back between attempts. These two changes make the game way more difficult to complete, and I'll fully admit, I haven't beaten this version. Not that I've got any real interest to anyway- all the cutscenes aside from the intro were removed, and the ending is just the word CONGRATULATIONS! and the credits that roll in the boss room once you defeat Empress Elysia. Whoof. They also removed the hexagram that appears when you clear an area and all the cheat codes mentioned above. There's also two very minor level design changes and a slight fix to one of the boss fights in the final round, but that's about it, the rest of the game is definitely worse for the changes made.
Now, if you're looking for rereleases, sadly there weren't any offic-
Oh, do you hear that? The shrill, deafening sound of lost Japanese featurephone games?
Yep, released on January 14th 2004 via Genki according to Game Watch's January 2004 digest, this is exactly what it looks like- a heavily-miniaturised Magical Doropie you can play on your mobile phone for the low, low price of ¥315. This doesn't appear to be archived on the Keitai World Launcher, nor does there appear to be any footage of the game online, but what we can surmise is there's a new Easy mode and a mysterious Upload option. That's about it. Still, it's cute to see an even tinier Doropie.
Finally, a promotional video.
This marketing video has a tiny bit of Doropie animation at 1:21! It's also got her commenting on the action throughout. Look at her go!
... So, like, if anyone has that old staff website preserved, can someone share it, please?
