Thanks to Ratalaika Games for the review code
Title: Traysia
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $5.99
Release Date: 04/24/2026
Story
In this Genesis exclusive RPG, you take control of Roy, who joins a group of travelers in a new land in search of adventure, only to get roped up in a battle against some terrifying magicians who want to conquer the continent!
Localized all the way back in 1992, this reissue makes the bizarre choice to edit the US script significantly to be more authentic to the Japanese original, while also adding a new Spanish translation. The thing is, Traysia’s plot is incredibly barebones even in this more accurate form, which makes the choice to retranslate the script here rather confusing.
The plot ain’t winning any awards for memorability or emotion, and fixing the dialogue to be more consistent with the original script wasn’t a thing anyone was begging for. You lose some funny lines of dialogue the original translation had as a result of this, but there’s a reason none of those funny lines became memes people reference to this day. I cannot read Spanish, so I cannot comment on that translation.
Presentation
The usual post Aero 2 Ratalaika Wrapper returns. (Do we call it the Neo Ratalaika Wrapper? The Shinyuden wrapper? They don’t seem to be interested in going back to the older one…) The usual applies, with various screen size options, basic CRT filters, a sound test and manual scans. This time around the manual and box scans are all good with the Japanese scans no longer looking like they were photographed off someone’s table, but they have their usual redactions of trademarked terms.
The game itself sounds pretty decent, with your usual Telenet quality OST and some memorable songs like the field and battle themes, but a lot of songs here are rather boring. Speaking of boring, the game’s visual style looks real dull, with a weak color palette, messy looking tiles, and a HUD that looks like an ancient computer game’s UI, even though this was a Genesis exclusive from the get go and was made in 1991. The enemy sprites in battle animate, but that’s about the most I can praise Traysia for visually.
Amusingly, the normal battle theme will play for a split second before shifting to whatever theme is meant to play in a battle, meaning if you happen to engage in a normal battle, you’ll just hear the first second of that song loop at the start of every fight. Otherwise this might just be the worst presentation to come out of an officially released Genesis RPG, and is remarkably bland.
Gameplay
The usual Ratalaika QOL features return, and boy will you be thankful for them here. You have your usual save states, rewind and fast forward options, with Fast Forward still being a mechanic that works better on Switch 2 than the OG model. Huge shame, since you’ll be abusing that fast forward feature constantly to make the battles and exploration not so boring. Turn up the Fast Forward speed on a Switch 2 and you can zoom through the battles and make exploring the ludicrous map design much more tolerable, and even slightly fun!
There’s also cheats, which consist of your usual infinite Health/MP stuff, and also one where you gain 9999 gold and stay put there, which can make the game much easier. Granted, Traysia was already easy to break into pieces, so this just makes that easier. Either way, this is a game I truly do advise you make use of the QOL for, since Traysia’s entire experience can be summed up in the single word; Boring. The story is boring. The music is mostly boring. The visuals are really boring. The characters are boring. The combat is boring. Speaking of, let’s discuss that combat since you’ll be stuck with it for most of your playtime. (No way to turn off encounters via cheats, sadly)
The battle system in Traysia could have just been another Dragon Quest style, menu based battle system that went by quick and easy and was inoffensive, just like the Cosmic Fantasy games Telenet had made, but no, Traysia wanted to be quirky. You and up to three party members are in a square box with the enemies, with your attack/defense commands being used to also move your character around. Move to an enemy in Attack and you’ll hit them. Stay put or move in defense and you’ll defend. Have enough MP and you can even use magic, but cannot move while using it.
The problem comes from how slow the battles are, and I mean really, really slow. This is where the fast forward QOL really comes into handy and will make the battles tolerable, and even pretty fun once you get to the point of defending a few times, then hitting the enemies that came at you to kill them all in a single turn.
Otherwise every battle plays the exact same. Walk up to enemies or have them walk up to you, and take up time just doing that. Trade blows in a very basic combat system until someone dies. If Roy dies, the game ends, but if anyone else does, you keep going. The random encounter rate here isn’t the highest I’ve dealt with, but it still is frequent enough to be a big nuisance especially with how gargantuan the dungeons are, with a lot of nonsensical paths made just for the purpose of you getting lost and nothing else. Bring a map with you or abuse that rewind feature for your sanity so you don’t run around in dumb circles all day.
I mentioned earlier how easy this game was to break, and that can help you here, even if there’s still no way to slow random encounters or speed up battles. See, while some RPGs let you put just one item from each equipment category on your character, Traysia doesn’t seem to care about that for accessories. There’s a very cheap, early game item called the Power Staff (“Stick” in the old translation) which gives you a decent defensive boost, and even without the infinite gold cheat it is real easy to get enough gold to buy multiple staves and stack them on your characters, making them have late-game defense levels from the very beginning. That way you won’t be at the risk of getting sent back and redoing those annoying dungeons if you die, and when a RPG needs you to cheese it in order for it to get remotely enjoyable, that’s a big problem.
Conclusion
Wander nonsensical map layouts, go from point A to point B, battle enemies in a boring battle system, and watch nothing spectacular happen in the plot. Ultimately, that’s the gist of Traysia, both back in the original release and even now.
Despite the QOL, I was caught off guard by just how boring this game was. Sure, it had a bad reputation as a bad game (so much so that someone involved with it apologized for how Traysia turned out on this very site), but this was less bad from being poorly made or infuriatingly difficult, and more bad from being a snoozefest without the QOL, and a very tedious RPG with it that feels like you’re wasting your time on Earth playing it. I’ve played far, far worse RPGs on the Genesis/SNES, so this isn’t the worst of the worst from the 16-bit era, but Traysia is definitely from the bottom tier of RPGs of the era, enough to make me ask; who on earth wanted to localize this back in the day, let alone re-localize it now?
If you’re a Telenet completionist you’ll probably want to pick this up, and the QOL makes it the most playable version by far, but even the improved version here isn’t enough to fix the multitudes of ways Traysia is one of the most boring RPGs I’ve ever played in my entire life. If you are a Switch 1 owner stuck with the less powerful fast forward speeds, I am so sorry for you.
I give Traysia a 3 out of 10.