is a Japanese
role-playing video game
Role-playing video games, also known as CRPG (computer/console role-playing games), comprise a broad video game genre generally defined by a detailed story and character advancement (often through increasing characters' levels or other skills) ...
developed and published by
Square
In geometry, a square is a regular polygon, regular quadrilateral. It has four straight sides of equal length and four equal angles. Squares are special cases of rectangles, which have four equal angles, and of rhombuses, which have four equal si ...
for the
Family Computer Disk System
The commonly shortened to the Famicom Disk System, is a peripheral for Nintendo's Nintendo Entertainment System, Family Computer (Famicom) home video game console, released in Japan on February 21, 1986. The system uses proprietary floppy disk ...
, and released in Japan on 24 July 1987.
The game's music was composed by
Nobuo Uematsu
is a Japanese composer and keyboardist best known for his contributions to the ''Final Fantasy'' video game series by Square Enix. A self-taught musician, he began playing the piano at the age of twelve, with English singer-songwriter Elton Joh ...
.
Gameplay
Players explore an
Egypt
Egypt ( , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country spanning the Northeast Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to northe ...
ian town and ruins from a
first-person perspective
A first-person narrative (also known as a first-person perspective, voice, point of view, etc.) is a mode of storytelling in which a storyteller recounts events from that storyteller's own personal point of view, using first-person grammar suc ...
. The game combines role-playing game elements with an
adventure game
An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story, driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based m ...
-like interface. Players may purchase items from shops, though some shopkeepers must be defeated in battle before trading. Battles are
turn-based
Timekeeping is relevant to many types of games, including video games, tabletop role-playing games, board games, and sports. The passage of time must be handled in a way that players find fair and easy to understand. In many games, this is don ...
, with options to fight, use items, or flee. Players accumulate
experience point
An experience point (often abbreviated as exp or XP) is a unit of measurement used in some tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) and role-playing video games to quantify a player character's life experience and progression through the game. Experien ...
s by succeeding in battle and "level up" after gaining enough experience, which increases their
stamina.
Randomly encountered battles with enemies may happen at any time, including when paused to examine the inventory.
Plot
The
player character
A player character (also known as a playable character or PC) is a fictional Character (arts), character in a video game or tabletop role-playing game whose actions are controlled by a player rather than the rules of the game. The characters tha ...
, Daisuke Kusano, is the son of an archaeologist who disappeared while searching for the Tears of Isis, artifacts once owned by
Cleopatra
Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator (; The name Cleopatra is pronounced , or sometimes in both British and American English, see and respectively. Her name was pronounced in the Greek dialect of Egypt (see Koine Greek phonology). She was ...
. During the man's excavation for the Tears, demons appeared and abducted him. The boy soon learns that he must find the Tears in order to save his father.
Over the course of the adventure, Daisuke visits the
Great Sphinx of Giza
The Great Sphinx of Giza is a limestone statue of a reclining sphinx, a mythical creature with the head of a human and the body of a lion. Facing east, it stands on the Giza Plateau on the west bank of the Nile in Giza, Egypt. The original sh ...
, the
Temple of Kom Ombo, a tower of sand, and an underground
labyrinth
In Greek mythology, the Labyrinth () is an elaborate, confusing structure designed and built by the legendary artificer Daedalus for King Minos of Crete at Knossos. Its function was to hold the Minotaur, the monster eventually killed by the h ...
. At the end of the game, he discovers that the demons had been disguised as the kindly shopkeeper. Daisuke receives the last Tear of Isis upon defeating the demons, which summons the ghost of Cleopatra, who releases Daisuke's father from imprisonment.
Development
Nobuo Uematsu
is a Japanese composer and keyboardist best known for his contributions to the ''Final Fantasy'' video game series by Square Enix. A self-taught musician, he began playing the piano at the age of twelve, with English singer-songwriter Elton Joh ...
composed the music for the game.
When developing the game for both the Famicom and the Famicom Disk System (FDS), there were technical differences such as a smaller amount of memory on the FDS which led to a more difficult process creating the same graphics.
Reception
''
Famitsu
, formerly , is a line of Japanese Video game journalism, video game magazines published by Kadokawa Game Linkage (previously known as Gzbrain), a subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, Kadokawa. ''Famitsu'' is published in both weekly and monthly f ...
'' appreciated the game's graphics and animations, and called the characters "cute".
''ITmedia Gamez'' also complimented the game's animations, though felt that too much of the disk's capacity was devoted to these animations at the cost of game length. However, the reviewer thought it was not a bad game, even though it was short, and compared it favorably to ''
The Warlock of Firetop Mountain
''The Warlock of Firetop Mountain'' is a single-player adventure gamebook written by Steve Jackson (UK game designer), Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, and illustrated by Russ Nicholson. Originally published by Puffin Books in 1982, the titl ...
'', an
adventure gamebook.
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cleopatra no Maho
1987 video games
Depictions of Cleopatra in video games
Famicom Disk System games
Famicom Disk System-only games
Japan-exclusive video games
Square (video game company) games
Video games developed in Japan
Video games scored by Nobuo Uematsu
Video games set in Egypt
Single-player video games