While I’ve only played a few hours so far, this is a fantastic game, and the translation seems very well-done. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s perfect, mind you – I’ve already seen a handful of text line-wrapping problems that should hopefully be hammered out in a future update – but I’ve yet to encounter any significant errors in spelling or grammar, and the dialog flows very nicely.

Don’t let the title fool you: from foreshadowing mentions of war and students of the magic school mysteriously disappearing, to an all-out attack by monsters and more I won’t spoil, Magical Vacation quickly becomes more of an epic tale than just a simple vacation.

Gameplay and story-wise, this game feels quite similar to Brownie Brown’s later RPG, Magical Starsign for Nintendo DS, but with the standard d-pad controls of any classic JRPG (as, obviously, a GBA has no touch screen). Really, this is the first game in that series while Magical Starsign is a direct sequel, so it stands to reason they are similar.

The music is also superb, and if the art direction feels reminiscent of the earlier Seiken Densetsu titles (e.g. Secret of Mana), there’s a reason for that – two of Brownie Brown’s founders had previously worked for Square Co., Ltd. (i.e. Squaresoft) and had a hand in developing the award-winning Legend of Mana. If that’s not a good enough excuse to give this game a whirl, I don’t know what is!

A word to the wise, the listed CRC32 is of the clean rom, but the other checksums (MD5, SHA1, SHA256) at the time of this review are of the final rom after applying the patch. A clean, unpatched Japanese rom will have the following checksums:

• CRC32: 59CBE914
• MD5: 814CD6FB465041DA0C39C40D89993339
• SHA1: 565225D6B02DA909D3CF04ADAF419170BABA35AC
• SHA256: A3209CC16050F458B5DECF8008C9C76B95BD5078E5964446B84B9A4B6DFC17EE