Arabian Dream Scheherazade (アラビアンドリーム シェラザード), released 9/3/1987, developed and published by Culture Brain

This is the game that was released in English (2 years later) as The Magic of Scheherazade. I rented that game as a kid and enjoyed it, but it turns out that it was rather heavily modified from the original Japanese release.

First off, the graphics were modified — as usual, the comical anime-style art for the protagonist was changed to a more “serious” style, and the stat display below is different as well.

There are two other big changes, besides some more minor ones. The English version uses a normal XP/level system, whereas the original Japanese version allows only one level up per chapter (5 chapters). You do this by gaining a certain amount of XP and then finding a trapped princess in a dungeon — these dungeons were completely removed from the English version. For the first chapter you need 400 XP for the level up, which would put you at level 4 in the English version.

The second change is that the field and dungeon maps were made considerably smaller and simpler to navigate. Some dungeons were removed entirely.

Here’s the backstory copied from Wikipedia:

Many years prior to the opening of the game, the land of Arabia was taken over by the malevolent demon Goragora and his army of minions. A magician named Isfa, harnessing the power of the blue star Airosche, vanquished the demons and sealed them underground. Peace briefly returned until the evil wizard Sabaron freed Goragora and the demons from their captivity and imprisoned the Arabian princess Scheherazade and her family.

The player character takes on the role of Isfa’s unnamed descendant, who unsuccessfully attempts to save his lover Scheherazade from Sabaron. As a result, the player’s memories are erased, his magical powers are sealed, and he is thrust into a different time period. He is quickly greeted by the catlike spirit Coronya, who possesses the ability to open a passage to travel through time. With this, the amnesic hero traverses through five worlds in order to regain his memories, learn new magic, recruit several allies, and defeat the demon overlords.

You begin near a town, which is helpful. One thing that is weird is that you have to hit select and then use the directional keys to pick what actions the A and B button will do. I couldn’t figure out at first why I was just jumping around but you have to assign “talk” to the B button. The townspeople give various advice, and you can buy some healing items but no weapon upgrades or anything of that nature. You also need to buy the “Magical Voice” item so that you can find hidden staircases on the map.

If you are playing this without help, probably what you want to do first is wander around and map the area, finding the second town and the various dungeons, and building XP and money. You can easily earn enough money to use the inn in the first town and buy extra breads (they’re much more expensive in the second town).

One other strange aspect to this game is that you sometimes fight RPG-style turn battles. Here you can use some companions.

These battles are kind of pointless; I feel like they just put them in to make it seem like the system is more varied and complex, but they could have been left out. Eventually if you hit 400 xp (which is a lot) you want to find the dungeon with the fairy that can increase your level, and let you use the Rod (which you start with in the English version). Finally, you have to locate the door to the past (each chapter has a “past” version) and go back there.

That’s the extent of what I played. Given the time this came out, I don’t think it’s a terrible game. The English version is much friendlier to play and is probably overall a better game, despite the greatly reduced map content (although maybe that’s a good thing?) The Japanese version follows the pattern of many of the games from this period where it’s really hard to even get started because of how confusing the areas are and such — it’s not as bad as some of the games where you can barely even play it, but it’s one of those games where you will not feel like you are making much progress at all for a while.