The Krion Conquest
(C) 1990 Vic Tokai, Inc.
 Magical Doropie
(C) 1990 Vic Tokai

Magical Doropie was a Mega Man clone for the Famicom released back in 1990.  It featured ingame anime cutscenes and a loveable witch named Doropie fighting to save the world from the evil Akudama empire.  The game was thoroughly average save for the cutscenes, which were Ninja Gaiden-ish in execution and fun to watch.  However, when the game was brought to America, all of the cutscenes and even the ending animations were removed from the game.  The title screen was changed as well, from a colorful screen featuring Doropie to a featureless black void containing nothing but text.  Now known as The Krion Conquest, the game was stripped of most of its distinctive personality.

I first received The Krion Conquest for my birthday when I was about ten years old and didn't enjoy it much at all.  I thought that it was way too difficult, and couldn't even make it to the first boss.  After a few tries, I gave up and never really played it much after that.  Had The Krion Conquest kept Magical Doropie's cutscenes intact, it probably would have been enough motivation for me to really try to make it through the game.  As a matter of fact, finding out about the changes between the two games was the inspiration behind my creating this site!

Here are a bunch of screenshots from Magical Doropie's animated cutscenes...  note the anime-style graphics!  In case you're wondering what's going on, the man is a mercenary named Kagemaru sent to recruit Doropie to help fight the evil mechanical Akudama empire.  Conventional weapons don't seem to work against the Akudama empire's robots, so that's where Doropie's magic comes into play!  A twist in the story comes when it's revealed that the evil Empress leading the Akudama empire is one of Doropie's old enemies, whom Doropie had sealed into a robotic body.  The Empress kidnaps Kagemaru, and offers to spare his life in exchange for the stone Doropie sealed her soul into...  when the exchange is made, the Empress transforms into the final boss who you eventually must defeat.  In The Krion Conquest, none of this is explained to you and you're left to make up your own story.




In The Krion Conquest, once you beat the evil Empress the game just kind of flickers "Congratulations!" in the background and scrolls some credits.  In Magical Doropie, you're treated to an ending cutscene!




After seeing the enhanced storyline of Magical Doropie, I was left to wonder why Vic Tokai didn't translate the cutscenes when they brought it over to the States.  At first I thought maybe the cutscenes took up additional cart space and they cut them out to use less memory and save money, but both games have the exact same amount of memory.  Then I thought maybe Vic Tokai didn't want to waste time translating the game, but if my barely-speaking Japanese self can figure it out then at the very least you would think they could have fudged at least a partial translation.  My theory is that they thought Americans would have been turned off by the anime-style cutscenes since anime wasn't big in the States at the time, but that's a really poor excuse for butchering the game's storyline.  And if that were the case, why would they have translated the intro?  Actually, even in the intro, they slightly changed the graphics, like so:



In the conversion from Magical Doropie to The Krion Conquest, Vic Tokai made Doropie's hat slightly smaller and rounded her face a bit.  Maybe they were trying to American-ize her?  Maybe they were afraid that she looked too witch-ish in the cutscenes they had already and didn't have the time to change all of the graphics, so they cut the old ones out to avoid the risk of offending people?  My guess is that it's a little of both, but it's still a mystery at this point.  If you were involved in the Magical Doropie translation effort, I'd love to hear your take on what happened!

One final change that I'll mention is that when you complete a level in Magical Doropie, a picture of a pentagram appears across the screen.  This no longer happens in The Krion Conquest, probably due to Nintendo's policy of prohibiting religious iconography from appearing in games.

Extras!

どろぴ～ア イキャッチコラ特集 - A really cute site featuring different outfits for Doropie and a Japanese overview of the game.

Magical Doropie Box Art - A scan of the Magical Doropie box courtesy of うら　ぱしゅと!


Badly-translated information on the bosses (it's the same in both games):
Thunder Knight!
Yukimaru!
Aqua Knight!
Sky Hawk!