It’s hard to believe, but once upon a time, Rumiko Takahashi’s Ranma ½ was one of the most popular series to grace the emerging Western anime fandom of the ’90s.
Ranma‘s popularity is important to understand, because otherwise the rationale behind a fan translating the series’ main foray into the RPG genre would be nigh impossible to follow. Ranma ½: Akanekodan Teki Hihou, commonly translated as Ranma ½: Treasure of the Red Cat Gang, is very basic. Its combat is easy to the point where spamming attack or your most recently acquired special attack is sufficient for most encounters. There are no sidequests, the story is a MacGuffin hunt so rote it’s generous to even call it a plot, and any intriguing details are largely watered-down elements of its source material.
It’s not an awful game, mind you. It’s a perfectly functional Super Famicom RPG that looks nice enough, has little in the way of major frustrations, and clocks in less than ten hours. None of its shortcomings are so great as to make the play experience painful; it’s just that playing feels like going to a restaurant only to find that the sole item on the menu is a breadbasket. Even if that bread is great, it’s not a substitute for a full entrée. In my case, the experience mostly left me longing for the full course meal that was its source material.
For the unfamiliar, Ranma ½ is an action-comedy manga published from 1987 to 1996 by Rumiko Takahashi. It centers on cocky kenpo prodigy Ranma Saotome and fiery tomboy Akane Tendo, two betrothed teenage martial artists who constantly have to fend off various unwanted suitors with gratuitous amounts of cartoon violence. Further complicating matters is a curse that switches Ranma between male and female forms when he’s doused with hot or cold water, respectively. Many of the aforementioned suitors are similarly cursed but turn into animals instead.
If any of that sounded interesting, it pains me to tell you that the plot of Treasure of the Red Cat Gang reads more like the fundamental outline of a Japanese RPG plot with the cast of Ranma ½ inserted for mild flavor. Ranma and Akane are hanging around when an ancient evil band of cat-themed bandits kidnaps Ranma’s father Genma. The pair pursues them only to be captured and whisked off to a continent full of interchangeable rural towns. From there, Ranma, Akane, and other members of the series’ supporting cast must seek out three mystical objects before the titular Red Cat gang can use them to take over the world.
Despite the lack of an enticing setting or even an interesting setup, that isn’t necessarily a death sentence for a Ranma ½ RPG. There’s a lot of humor to derive from this cast, even in played-out scenarios. In fact, half of the jokes in the original came from mixing melodramatic romantic feuds with incredibly goofy martial arts bouts. There are actually a good many Ranma arcs centered around retrieving various MacGuffins, and what elevates those are Takahashi’s irreverent sense of humor and pitch-perfect grasp of visual comedy, slapstick, and action.
That humor isn’t absent from Treasure of the Red Cat, and what little is there is very much appreciated. I was repeatedly entertained whenever Ranma’s rival Ryoga would unwittingly abandon the party due to his abysmal sense of direction, and I was delighted to see that the game remembered just how terrible a father Genma is. But it’s all too spaced out and none of it affects the story to any significant degree. It doesn’t help that the fan translation, currently the only way to play this game in English, is often quite flat. It’s perfectly legible, and the characters seem to be written accurately. But it has little beyond that, and there’s a sentence or two sprinkled within that feels disconnected from the surrounding text. Like the rest of the game, it’s not awful, but it’s also nothing to celebrate.
The aesthetics actually fare better in this regard. While the game is full of villages starved for distinguishing features, a rotating door of generic cave dungeons, and largely unremarkable sound effects and music, the character sprites are quite strong. They’re not the most diverse set of sprites out there, but they represent the cast quite well. My favorite sprites are probably the damage animations for some of your party members, which are appropriately cartoony for a Ranma ½ game. Enemy sprites are likewise quite evocative of the series’ goofy art, which at least means that combat gives off a “Takahashi” vibe.
Combat itself is about as simple as it gets for the genre. It’s a turn-based attack with “Attack,” use special moves with “Special,” and item with “Item” affair. The only noteworthy part is that the special attack resource, Ki, is not indicated by numbers, but instead a bar with no clear values. Defending fills the bar very slightly, but you’re usually fine attacking or using whatever AOE special attack is on hand. Level-ups fully restore HP and Ki, and they’re surprisingly frequent, so the combat ends up largely challenge-free. There’s even a surprisingly functional auto-battle feature to speed things up even more. Difficulty might occasionally spike with a boss, but it’s nothing an item or two won’t solve. And just in case the rather frequent encounters begin to bore you, Ranma comes equipped with a (manga-accurate) guaranteed flee in his “Special” menu.
Outside of combat, the experience remains thoroughly uneventful. The game has no side objectives, and its few unique elements barely warrant mentioning. Even without a guide, it’d be hard for anyone to get lost, which is technically a plus, though it speaks almost as much to a lack of variety in this case. There are instances where the party needs to use their cursed forms to access certain areas, but it’s very infrequent and this idea isn’t used elsewhere. The cursed forms don’t even affect combat consistently. Ranma can go into battle in either boy or girl form with no effort or repercussions, while Ryoga and Mousse, who turn into a pig and duck respectively, lose access to certain moves in those forms. Shampoo, however, can turn into a cat and suffer no penalty. It’s fairly easy to imagine a version of this game where managing the transformations factors more into combat and exploration, so it’s quite disappointing to see one of Ranma ½’s most notable plot points play such a minimal role.
While the game is as much a good fan experience as it is a standard RPG, as a longtime devotee of Takahashi’s work, this outcome seemed reasonable to me. Ranma ½ as a series was always more well-suited to the fighting game genre, even if the few examples of Ranma fighting games were lesser versions of their contemporaries. The recent anime remake gives me slight hope that someone might ping Arc System Works for the next pass, though I won’t hold my breath.
As it stands, Ranma ½: Treasure of the Red Cat Gang is as standard an RPG as can be. It elicits neither anger nor joy in any significant capacity. As I neared the end of my playthrough, I came to realize that whatever appreciation I had for Treasure of the Red Cat Gang came less from the game itself and more from it getting a fan translation to begin with. As mentioned previously, Ranma ½ was incredibly popular among ’90s anime fans, but leaving it there is probably underselling it. It was actually comparable in reputation to Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z. Unlike those series, though, it lacked staying power in the collective minds of the new millennium’s anime fans. It’s still loved as a classic by many, but that love is largely overshadowed by the adulation heaped on newer offerings.
But that early 2000s love is what I find most charming about Treasure of the Red Cat Gang. It may not have much to offer outside of the fact that it’s a Ranma ½ game, but I still find myself impressed that the translators at “the Ranma Team” put time and effort into bringing it to an English-speaking audience all the same. Not every translation project needs to be motivated by a desire to see a forgotten masterpiece or some obscure cult hit. Sometimes the impulse lies in love for a work and a desire to see all of its offshoots, or even simply a respect for others’ love. Even if killjoys like me can’t look beyond its shortcomings, I never once felt like this game intruded on my time or the translators’ time. It probably isn’t worth yours unless you’re the biggest of Ranma diehards, but there are much worse niches to fall into.
