JALECOlle Famicom Ver. Magic John & Totally Rad

Genre: Action-Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

Magic John is an Action-Platformer released on the Famicom in Japan in 1990, with the game coming to the Nintendo Entertainment System in the West in 1991 with changes to the game’s dialogue and art style, and a new name, Totally Rad. As far as I can tell, these were the only changes to the game – the gameplay remained the same, but the anime-style portrait of the protagonist and his girlfriend were changed to a more American art style, and the dialogue was changed to what I can only assume publisher Jaleco thought would appeal to Americans at the time, which was extremely nineties style surfer slang. Both releases are included in this port to Nintendo Switch, released in 2025.

Stylistic choices aside, the gameplay in Magic John/Totally Rad is pretty terrible no matter which game you’re playing. Your character moves slowly, you’re not allowed to continue charging your attack while jumping, and while the game’s selection of numerous magical abilities to choose from is enticing, the lack of any way to recharge your magic meter within a stage means you’ll probably just stick to the basic healing ability until you absolutely need to use another one.

As you’d expect from a game from the Nintendo Entertainment System era, this game makes use of 2D pixel art visuals and a chiptune soundtrack, and I think both have aged pretty well, though there’s nothing here I would say is truly exemplary.

Despite that Totally Rad wasn’t exactly a megahit release when it first came out, the Nintendo Switch version of the game has gotten a lot of love. In addition to both the US and Japanese versions of the game, this release comes with a huge gallery of box art, instruction manual art, and promo art, achievements to pursue, a quick save feature, a rewind feature, display and control options, the ability to quick-swap abilities using shoulder buttons, and a frame that includes helpful gameplay info. This is far more than I would have expected for such a niche game.

Still, despite it being an amusing look back at a specific time in videogame history, I don’t expect many will find more than brief amusement with Totally Rad or its Japanese counterpart. The presentation here may be pretty good, but the gameplay is absolutely bogus.

tl;dr – Magical John and Totally Rad are the Japanese and Western versions of the same Action-Platformer, which has a pretty good presentation but the gameplay is terrible. As amusing as this game’s localization may be, the game itself isn’t worth playing.

Grade: D+

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