How’s that for a teasing tagline, eh? But I will say right off the bat that this certain someone wasn’t me! All will be revealed in time…

For those unacquainted with Slayers, it’s a Japanese comedic fantasy series that has existed in various forms of media since 1989. The original light novel series (written by Hajime Kanzaka and illustrated by Rui Araizumi) was popular enough to spawn its own manga, a five-season animated TV series, two shorter OVAs, five movies, (deep breath) radio dramas, a TTRPG, and a CCG. Oh, and of course, there are video games.

So yes, it used to be quite a popular thing. Slayers was a cornerstone of ’90s and early 2000s anime fandom and was often recommended to someone new to anime due to its parodying of fantasy tropes and slapstick humour.

Although there hasn’t been a new Slayers TV series since 2009 and the last new novel was published in 2019 after an almost twenty-year gap, Slayers still has its fans with over twenty million novels in print.

So, before we dig into this particular Slayers game, I’ll give you a brief rundown of the premise.

Enter, Lina Inverse!

Lina is the main star of Slayers, a pint-sized, avaricious adventuring sorceress with a happy-go-lucky and cheerfully destructive personality. Things just…sometimes explode around her, especially when she uses her signature spell: Dragon Slave. And such is her fearsome reputation as a bandit hunter and walking engine of destruction that people tend to disbelieve that she is the Lina Inverse when she presents herself as such – much to her annoyance and the amusement of her strapping hunk of a friend and bodyguard, mercenary swordsman Gourry.

Across the course of her adventures, she’ll team up with numerous other characters, including the ever-popular Naga the Serpent, some of whom cameo in her video games – including this one.

Lovely Dithered Artwork

This Slayers game was released in 1994 for the NEC PC-9801 computer. Some of you will already be familiar with this Japanese PC and its iconic hi-resolution dithered artwork through accounts sharing images from its games on social media. Sporting a resolution of 640×400 and a maximum of 16 colours from a palette of 4096, the NEC PC-9800 series of computers spanned the 80s and 90s, becoming one of the dominant computing platforms in Japan.

So, you might wonder why PC-98 games look so different from the era’s DOS and microcomputer games? The answer: the need for higher resolutions and sharper graphics to display Japanese characters correctly led to their computers having their own distinct graphical aesthetics that also benefited visual novels and RPGs, leading to an explosion of those types of games – including dating sims and eroge.

Slayers for PC-9801 is not an eroge. It does have elements of fanservice, including one that was cut out of the release version of the game. But we’ll come to that later.

A Translated Experience

The majority of the PC-98 library is a mysterious enigma to us in the West, going unreleased anywhere outside of Japan. But a handful of games have received English fan translation patches, Slayers being one of them. It received its first 100% complete patch from ‘AlphaRobo’ just a few months ago, built on more than a decade of on-off work by earlier fan translators led by EsperKnight. I caught wind of this new release just before Christmas, and well, being a fan of the Slayers TV series and of obscure games and RPGs, it was something I just had to try out. We did so with the Neko Project II Kai core on Retroarch and one of our favourite CRT shaders.

First Impressions

Slayers is a beautiful game. You’re greeted with an intro made up of stills that does a fantastic job of introducing Lina’s happy-go-lucky attitude as she cheerfully reports to a local count that her quest is complete… in front of the smouldering ruins of his castle. It’s like you’re getting a little snippet of the TV series that would debut a year later, a feeling you’ll have often when playing this game.

You’ll also encounter some of its fourth-wall-breaking humour as Lina and Gourry are beset by a pair of unlucky bandits simply named Bandit A and Bandit B, whereupon she remarks on their lack of names, seemingly aware that this is being viewed on a computer screen. This kind of genre-savvy behaviour from characters can be a wee bit divisive, especially when overused, but I’m fond of it and so it made me chuckle.

After being summarily defeated, the Bandits reveal that the ‘Legendary True Dragon’ is somewhere nearby and has lots and lots of treasure – music to Lina’s ears! And so, it’s off to the nearby town of Welnan to scout for information.

Slaying Your Expectations of an RPG

Welnan serves as the game’s hub and it’s where we started to notice that Slayers isn’t actually all that much of a stat and gear-based RPG. Here in Welnan, there are quite a few places to visit: a restaurant, an inn, a temple, and an item shop. But there’s no weapon or armour shop. Nor can you access character stats or equipment. At first, I thought keyboard hotkeys might access those screens, but no, you can play Slayers entirely with a two-button mouse. There are just none to be found.

If characters have stats beyond HP and MP (such as attack or defence,) then they’re entirely obfuscated. There is no character levelling; the stats and spells a character starts with are the ones they’ll have for the entire game.

There is some logic to this. Given that this isn’t an origin story for Lina, it would be a little weird to start off as a rookie adventurer. So her MP is accordingly set to 999/999 and she has a full brace of spells. A lot of spells. But we’ll come to that.

Gear acquisition and progression have also been jettisoned. The sole items in the game are a range of consumables, but in our experience, only a handful of them are truly useful. As a fan of gear progression in RPGs, this was a major blow to my excitement for playing the game as I had envisioned all kinds of wild and wonderful weapons and armour. Unless you’re a fan of Slayers, this may already be a dealbreaker for you.

One thing the game does have from the RPG playbook is other party members. At various locations in Welnan, you’ll find familiar and not-so-familiar faces from Slayers media who’ll join your party. You can only pick one of them to join Lina and Gourry; the fourth and final party member slot is reserved for a character you’ll encounter in each episodic quest.

Once again, Slayers’ pixel artwork shines in these scenes, imparting an immediate hit of character personality upon them all as you choose which one to recruit. It feels very much like fan service, not in the usual way, but rather in how you pick your favourite Slayers characters to go on an adventure with. They’re all here from the start to pick from, rather than encountering them along the way.

I’ll now also compliment the writing (and by extension the fan localizers) that also brings Lina, Gourry, and the characters you encounter to life. It’s superb. Just how engaging dialogue and character moments are is a big part of why we were still enjoying Slayers and it all feels authentic to the source.

If you’re playing this fan version, there’s even a combination bunny girl-filled nightclub and brothel to visit. It’s restored content and only partially implemented, so it will fade to black with a missing piece of artwork if you partake in its services. Notably, it’s only Gourry who is depicted as doing so, sidestepping the potential squick with Lina being a teenage sorceress. As mentioned, this was cut out in the released version of the game.

The Point Where the Wheels Started Falling Off…

Okay, now we get to throwing critique at Slayers in a big way. Having decided that, yes, it’s okay if we don’t get to buy gear, and wondering where all the character stats are, my partner and I delved into the main meat of the game: dungeon crawling. Having been told about a ‘Chimera of the Year’ competition and pointed toward the dungeon where competitors would be catching monsters to participate, Lina, Gourry, and companion (Naga in our case) set off for the imaginatively named ‘Dungeon1’.

You’ll notice a couple of things right away: The massive automap dominating almost half the screen and just how tiny your first-person perspective of the dungeon is. I feel it’s done this way because Slayers’ dungeons are all corridor mazes.

Sigh. This is another point where Kit and I’s resolve to keep going was tested afresh. There are no rooms at all, just networks of snaking corridors that go in every direction – including diagonally. And here’s where things get confusing: the directional arrows do not correspond to the map but to the tiny through-your-eyes perspective window. So you end up with situations like the one in the snapshot above where right on the arrows takes you up and diagonally up and left moves you diagonally down and left.

This was maddening to get to grips with. torn between watching the automap and the microscopic view of the dungeon. I’m not sure why they chose to do it this way when the automap is the most prominent aspect. Thankfully, monster encounter rates in the dungeons are refreshingly low, so you’ll have ample opportunity to try to manage navigating them in relative peace. There is also a consumable item that will prevent encounters from happening for a fixed time and one that will reveal the map for the current floor you’re on – sans any teleport warp zones and traps. Both come at a sizeable cost from the item shop, meaning you’ll be grinding battle for gold for quite some time if you want to use them regularly to mitigate frustration within the game itself.

Eventually, as you roam around the dungeons, you’ll encounter one or more monsters and the game will switch to battle mode.

Before we take it to task on a couple of other things, I will heap praise on Slayers’ battle screen. It’s just as gorgeous to look at as the rest of the game, with Shining series-like icons for actions, and plenty of big, dynamic character artwork to illustrate combat. It brings the turn-based combat to life and genuinely feels engaging.

Alas, this is where the game commits more crimes. You’ll immediately notice that you don’t have control of your party members. You only pick which actions Lina will take in battle. Meaning that you’re at the whim of whatever actions the CPU decides it will take for the rest. In our experience, it picks the worst one at least 75% of the time: defend. This lack of control makes achieving the goal of the first dungeon, catching five specific monsters, all the more difficult. You’re required to weaken them to just short of death and then use the CATCH command. More often than not, one of your blundering party members will attack if they’re next in the turn order before Lina and actually score a hit at the worst possible moment and kill the monster. Grrr!

(2nd editing pass note: There is an item you can buy that will increase a character’s speed which we now assume puts them ahead in the initiative order.)

Yet again, this can be maddeningly frustrating. There does seem to be some kind of personality effect on an NPC party members’ actions; some characters are portrayed as afraid of battle so will keep hitting the defend button all the time. As for the rest, it will make zero sense what they do. And because there are no visible stats, you have no idea why they miss so often either or what governs the amount of damage they do. They’ll haphazardly attack and cast spells (often of an element enemies are resistant to) and rarely have a decisive effect on combat.

Ah yes, the spell system. I said I’d come to that.

There are six schools of elemental magic, each of them with upward of seven spells apiece. That’s a lot of spells! While there is cause for having so many elements due to how each enemy will be resistant (or immune) to one or more of them (which you discern through the use of a cheap item, a pair of comedy glasses), having so many spells attached to each element feels mostly redundant. The majority of them will be varying degrees of MP cost to Damage attack spells split between a single target and AOE. There are a few de/buffing (not all that useful) and two healing spells. Way too many, and it immediately felt overwhelming as we tried to decide what to cast in our very first combat. They could easily have been compressed down into just a few for each element. MP management becomes the main consideration of spellcasting as there are no MP restorative items in the game. To restore MP, you’ll either need to find a mid-dungeon hot spring or return to Welnan and rest up. And if you know that a hot spring is nearby, you can just spam Dragon Slave as it does the highest level of damage in the game and wins any combat encounter – even bosses.

All this coupled with the tedious maze-like nature of the dungeons really tested our patience and resolve to continue with the game. And this was just 30 minutes into it! And yet, the Slayers charm continued to shine through it with frequent cutscenes and party banter. This is what kept us playing just to see what happened next. And that raised another debate between me and my partner: who is this game for? If it’s for RPG fans, then they’ll be sorely disappointed by how much of an RPG-lite experience it is. And if it’s for Slayers fans, then they may be put off by how the bare-bones dungeon crawling gets in the way of the cutscenes and character moments.

As our resolve wavered when the game started throwing warp zones at us that teleport you randomly about the multiple levels of a particularly savage maze of a dungeon, a saviour suddenly appeared – and had her own experiences with the game to share with us.

Like Tears in Rain

Now we get to the reason behind the tagline. As the wheels bearing this chaotic wagon of a game wobbled and threatened to fall right off, my partner went looking for a guide for us. It’s something we rarely do, but we’d had quite enough of frustrating teleporters and level design in Eye of the Beholder II and Slayers wasn’t throwing us much of a bone at that moment.

That guide saved our playthrough.

The guide we found was linked to in a review video and can be found on an old Japanese personal site that despite being at least twenty-five years old, is still live and being hosted… somehow. And thanks to Google Translate, we were able to put the maps our saviour had made to good use, allowing us to focus on the things that we did like about Slayers. We could vibe to the music, which is also excellent throughout with each dungeon having its own theme. And now that we’d cut the wheat from the chaff from the spell system, we could enjoy the presentation of the sparse combat that rarely presented a genuine challenge. The dungeons are the main meat of the game but sadly, they’re also the worst aspect of it. They feel token, with scant elements of interest inside them aside from the encounters that result in cutscenes. They’re more navigation puzzles than anything you’d normally associate with dungeon design. No riddles, object puzzles, keys, etc.

Here’s what will be my main takeaway from our experience with Slayers and how our Japanese saviour endeared us to the game in unexpected ways. You know how with some websites without visible ‘go to the main page’ clickable elements, you can delete part of the address to go up a directory level? Well, we did that with our saviour’s site and in doing so, learned quite a bit about her love for Slayers – and her experience with the game.

Kyouka, our saviour, appears to have been obsessively (and in some ways aggressively!) a fan of Slayers. She catalogued minute detail on episodes and the light novels, and wrote scads of fan fiction, much of which casts Gourry in a very bad light. Kyouka, bless her, appears to have been quite annoyed that he gets to be so close to Lina.

My partner and I spent a good hour digging through Kyouka’s site, warmed by her dedication to her hobbies and aggressively passionate personality. It was during this dig that we came across this:

Kit and I burst out laughing together as I read out “My brother said he flew through the warp zone while crying and became a pioneer.” Because, yeah, I can imagine someone reduced to tears while trying to map out some of Slayers’ mazes. And ahem, yes, the highlights of the game for Kyouka are the hot spring scenes’ artwork and Lina’s breasts.

Also, I don’t know if it’s just Google Translate picking an incorrect word, but ‘small characters’ being used to describe common random encounter enemies is such a cute term.

(Editor’s note: One of my lovely BlueSky moots clued us in that the “small characters” bit probably is a translation of 雑魚キャラ (zako kyara) which means small-fry characters and is commonly used to refer to common fodder enemies and nameless goons.)

Bless you, Kyouka, you genuinely enriched our experience.

In Conclusion

As of the writing of this article, we’re almost done with Slayers and I’m confident the game will throw nothing at us that we didn’t already see by the end of the first dungeon. And that’s part of the problem: the gameplay becomes stale very quickly. Not enough attention was given to the RPG elements of what is essentially an RPG/visual novel hybrid that in the end, would not 100% please fans of either genre.

Would I recommend it to RPG fans? No. There’s not enough meat on its RPG bones to satisfy. Would I recommend it to Slayers fans? Again, not really; I would recommend watching a Let’s or Long Play of it. Fans of both? Maaaaybe? But only with Kyouka’s guide in hand to ward off the frustration of the dungeons.

Slayers for PC-9801 is a visually satisfying experience with oodles of charm in its presentation but one that will leave RPG fans desperately undernourished. It may also reduce them to tears, too.

Additional Post-Completion Thoughts

Since the original posting of this article, we completed Slayers. It ended as well as it started with plenty of appropriate Slayers charm. And despite its flaws, we were left with a warm and fuzzy feeling. It has also gone on our list of favourite gaming experiences. But, I think that’s in part thanks to how much of a collaborative effort it felt to follow in Kyouka’s footsteps and share in her frustration with the game. Our critique of the actual dungeon and battle mechanics still stands and it feels like you largely build your enjoyment around them.

Would I replay it in the future? Honestly, yes. There is reason to do additional playthroughs as taking different party members with you results in different banter and reactions to each situation. With her pompous and brash personality and frequent “Ohohoho,” Naga’s were a joy to read, especially during the last quest of the game.

I’ll now give a warmer recommendation to check out this Slayers game. But… don’t be afraid to follow in our footsteps and consult our unexpected saviour’s maps to ensure that it is as fun an experience as possible. I’ll leave a link to her site here. You’ll get a warning about it being an unsecured site, but I think it’s just an old website protocol.

https://aya.or.jp/~kidparty/slayers/game/map.htm