Magical Chase (TurboGrafx-16)

Magical Chase stars a student witch named Ripple who accidentally sets free a pair of demons from a forbidden book known as Sleeping Demons. With the fear of being turned into a frog by her teacher, it is up to Ripple and her two star friends to capture and transfer them back into book.

The game is infamous for being among the rarest and most sought after TurboGrafx-16 games. In North America, the game was only available by mail-order and was released near the end of the console's life span. The Japanese version didn't fare much better with its publisher Palsoft filling for bankruptcy around the time of the game's release, resulting in a small print run (although it was re-released by Japanese video game magazine PC Engine Fan by mail-order). Needless to say, its sales weren't very good, sealing the game's fate of falling into obscurity.

Despite that, it was received positively by reviewers of the time and has since gained a cult following thanks to its addictive gameplay, an excellent soundtrack, beautiful graphics, and pushing the hardware to its limits.

The game would later see a port (both Japanese-exclusive) for Microsoft Windows and Game Boy Color in 1998 and 2000 respectively.

Sound Test#

In the Japanese version only, go the difficulty select screen and press Left, Down, Right, Up, Select, Select, Select, Left, Right, II to enable a sound test.

Strangely, this cheat was disabled in the US version. Despite still checking if the player has successfully entered the cheat for the sound test, an additional BRA instruction was added just before the code that is supposed to load the sound test, this results in said code never being executed.

To re-enable the cheat in the US version, open up the ROM in a hex editor and replace the bytes 29 at 0x7C733 with 00 before doing all the steps mentioned above. It should be noted that the song titles were not updated or localized to take into account of the changes to the character set between the two versions. As such, any text that would have been in Japanese will be displayed as garbled text.

Regional Differences#

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The US version of the game received some major graphical overhauls.

JP	US

• The plain low-color title screen logo from the Japanese version has been completely re-shaded with a zooming golden 3D design and shiny lettering.

JP	US

• The main character Ripple has been completely redrawn, with the new sprites featuring more realistic proportions and detail in general. She has a new animation when hurt, but her injured animation when the game is paused (as well as her regular sleeping game-pause animation) remains the same, except for the redrawn broom (to match her other new frames) and the now missing magic wand.
• The first stage received the biggest overhaul. The colored building blocks foreground and mid-background found in the Japanese version have been replaced by a more detailed medieval castle, and the furthest background now features a distant sunset and a more shaded green countryside. The new mid-background also reveals more of the furthest background.
• The very first enemy in the game has gone from a simple colored block/stump to a little animated gremlin.
• Jack's floating shop has also been completely redrawn. Once a simple straight-on side view of a hot-air balloon carrying a small house, it now sports a beautifully drawn jack-o-lantern balloon and detailed house, all in a 3/4 perspective.