Title: JALECOlle Famicom Ver. Magic John & Totally RAD
System: Nintendo Switch
Price: $7.99
Release Date: 04/23/2025

Story

In this NES action game from Aicom, you take control of John, who must go into an underground world to rescue his friend Yu and her father from a mysterious alien force! Or you could play the US version, Totally Rad, where Jake must do the same with his friend Allison, along with a bunch of very cringeworthy 90’s quips thrown in.

This is the sixth entry in City Connection’s Jalecolle series, and the first I had immediate day one interest in. So thus, we’ll review this series a bit outta order! I dunno if I’ll get all of em done swiftly, and i’ll buy these over time and review them when I have gaps between bigger reviews I’m working on, but if you wanna help speed that up, a Ko-Fi pitch wouldn’t hurt.

I will add a mini ramble for this final part of the section, unrelated to the rest of the review, and one that won’t impact the score whatsoever, since if I’m gonna be honest, learning this bit during the credits really soured me personally and if I wanted to be petty I could give the whole game a penalty for this misc aspect, but unfortunately known scam artist Brian Schorr is credited along with his Dispatch Games cofounder as two key people who worked on this reissue in localization. This seems to reaffirm him being involved in the Gimmick reissue wasn’t a one-off or an accident, but rather a sign he’s more closely related to City Connection now.

Considering he still owes people physical copies of a game developed by City Connection (Game Tengoku) he has still not shipped out as his company went quietly defunct, I find it pretty disappointing to see City Connection take him in despite him ripping off hundreds of paying customers, and them having no real interest in self-publishing their own physical version of Game Tengoku on Switch, or even a collection of these Jalecolle games. This doesn’t really matter to anyone but me, but if you wondered where the Dispatch Games con artist went to, here you go.

Presentation

Jalecolle may be a series new to SFG reviews, but a lot of elements of it mimic the Memory Clip series I covered in the past, arguably to the point you can call them one and the same except this project seems to be fully in-house at City Connection, unlike the Memory Clip reissues. You begin on a starting menu, allowing you to change the UI language, look at in-game achievements, or see scanned manual/box arts, not unlike Zombie Nation’s reissue. Likewise, you can also pick between Magic John or Totally Rad, with the opposite version getting subtitled to the language the in-game menu is set to. So you can see an english translation of Magic John’s completely different script as you play!

Yep, a translation as you play, since in the Hebereke release, that JP-EN translation was shoved off to its own little menu you had to pull up anytime you wanted to see what a cutscene actually translated to. Now you have an overlay for translation purposes, not unlike the Edia RPG collections, only with a much better localization quality and no bugged/missing text anywhere. All in all, a very nice wrapper that continues to polish up the one we’ve covered a few times before.

When it comes to the actual game itself, Magic John is fairly decent for an early 90s NES game. Decent looking visuals, as expected from developer Aicom at the time, and a very catchy NES OST. The cutscene theme in particular is really good, and it comes as no surprise that City Connection decided to give it a catchy remix as the main menu theme for this reissue. I really hope one of the final Jalecolle games ends up being Astyanax, since that feels like a fitting sister game to this one, considering the same contract developer was used and all.

Gameplay

In Magic John/Totally Rad, you take control of whoever you end up playing as, as you use a basic jump/attack system to take out foes and make your way across the different stages. Pretty typical NES platformer stuff, with a projectile weapon that can charge up as your go-to method of attacking, though you cannot charge in mid-air and will have to rely on single shots there. If that was your one and only method of attacking foes, I’d consider it pretty basic with not much variety or strategy involved besides the usual dodge, counter, dodge routine.

Thankfully, Magic John knew that just shooting and jumping wouldn’t cut it, and thus John has a variety of powers to pull from to shake things up and give you an extra hand. Wanna become a lion that can do devastating melee damage and an invincible jump, but with no aerial attack? Sure, take the tradeoff for some extra power. Or wanna gain the ability to fly around and attack in mid-air much easier, but at the expense of a stronger attack? You can transform into an aerial beast and do just that! There’s a fish form too, but he’s pretty circumstantial.

That’s not even counting the non-transform magic you can pull off. If you want to play the game with an exclusive focus on your normal attack, you can just use the health restore magic and dedicate your MP meter entirely to that skill. Or if you want to do some extra damage without transforming all the time, you have several elemental magic techniques to pull off, which help a lot with the stage grunt enemies, but not so much on the bosses. These shake the game up just enough to be engaging for the entirety of the sub 1 hour adventure, and I had an awful lot of run playing through the Japanese version again after going through the US one for Evercade.

It also helps that Jalecolle added some nifty quality of life features, from the typical save state/rewind aspects, along with some neat in-game tweaks like being able to switch magic abilities with the shoulder buttons, or see how much health minibosses have remaining, since a few of the final ones are big sponges that refuse to go down, and with this handy little tweak, I was able to actually learn their weakness and have a much easier time with the game.

They didn’t need to add more than the usual extra info on the border or rewind/save states, but this extra touch shows City Connection truly cares about these gems, which make me eager to go back and check out the Jalecolle titles I missed.

Conclusion

In the end, Magic John/Totally Rad is a great little NES gem. While not groundbreaking by any means, it still provides solid 8-bit action and is presented in a very well done wrapper with more QOL features than you might expect. Thinking hard of what City Connection could have added to make this reissue more packed with bonuses, I honestly can’t think of any, this really is an in-depth port of a random NES platformer, with remarkable care put into the reissue.

Sure, for newcomers to this game it still may ultimately come off as yet another fine NES action game in the end, but the QOL tweaks and comfortably fun romp, plus the neat ability to compare the two regional variants, really does help to make this the ultimate version of Magic John there’ll ever be. Here’s hoping the Aicom sister game Astyanax makes a showing later on in this subseries of reissues.

I give JALECOlle Famicom Ver. Magic John & Totally RAD a 7 out of 10.