## 2025-01-30 What a strange, interesting little game. It has a lot of history that's worth getting into. **Treasure of the Rudras** is the last [[JRPG]] that [[Square Enix|Square Soft]] ever made for the [[Super Nintendo|SNES]]. And it never came to America! I can't confirm why, but I have a good guess that I'll get into later. For those reasons though, I wanted to try the game out. It's pretty great so far, I'd say. Which you'd hope, given Square Soft had already put wall-to-wall bangers on the SNES for years up to this game's release. It has some of the most gorgeous sprite-work I've ever seen on the console, fantastic music, and a seemingly hefty campaign. I count three campaigns, each with separate party members, and a very suspicious fourth empty space that could lead to a final campaign, **Live A Live**-style. The campaigns are somewhat separate, but all take place cross 14 days, as each group of protagonists tries to fight off the end of the world. There's a lot of Indian myth infused into the game so far which is neat! I have to look up terms sometimes which is always cool for a videogame. How do they go about saving the world? Doing JRPG battles, of course. But what makes **Treasure of the Rudras** stand apart from any JRPG of the era it came from - and this one! - is its magic system. Basically, you inscribe words into a menu, which becomes a book of spells you can cast. Said spells are impacted by prefixes and suffixes. So for example, *Ig* is a single-target fire spell. *Na* is the suffix that makes a spell multi-target, *Lus* is a suffix that makes a spell stronger, and *You* is a prefix that makes a spell stronger. So you can do combinations like: - *Ig* - a regular fire spell - *Youigna* - a powerful multi-target fire spell - *Youiglus* - an extra powerful single-target fire spell. It's super cool! There's a character limit, but I'm sure there's broken stuff out there. You can collect words by thoroughly exploring and yapping with people, who will give you full spells, or prefixes and suffixes that enhance said spells. And what's cool is that you can add spells regardless of whether you've encountered them in a particular campaign. So when I did a day in Campaign 2 and learned the resurrection spell, I was able to inscribe it in the book of the party from Campaign 1. Now you might be wondering: "can I put *FUCKER* in my spell book?" You can! I don't know how it works, but random words still generate spells - but they have massive MP costs to discourage messing around like that, it seems. I'm sure there's something on GameFAQs that has all the best spells to put in your books off rip, but I'm resisting the urge because it's honestly super fun to discover on my own. It gives me a reason to take my time and explore thoroughly, building my spells out almost like a deck in **MegaMan Battle Network**. Oh yeah, and this is why I can see why Square Soft never brought the game out of Japan. Localizing must have been a nightmare, and whether I finish this game or not, I have to find out how Aeon Genesis did the fan-translation, it must have been a fascinating process. That's where I'm at, I'm curious to see if the game holds up long-term!