Vay's ad in 1994 did its best to awe players and at a time when CD games were pushing expectations, was this RPG's chance to show off earning a few fans. In 2008, SoMoGa re-released the game on iPhone and in 2024, on Steam with a few QoL features, sharing this classic with a new generation.

Reviews ran the extremes. EGM's review crew didn't think the story was anything special and praised the music, rewarding the game with middling scores in their August '94 issue. On the other hand, Gamepro's September '94 review by Peteroo gave it high marks with praise for the dialogue.

As an example, a fairy met later in the game originally used the power of the wind to send you to a new location. With Working Designs' localization, that power was turned into "seismic flatulence" that did the same thing, but if your party wasn't wearing filtration masks, died on arrival. Yikes!

Vay also marked a milestone for Working Designs' digital editing/sync system which used the game as its "maiden voyage". WD's localization also made relatively controversial changes to a number of things from item balance to story elements from its original Japanese release.

Along with music, voice acting, and sound effects packed on the CD, the game was essentially your basic, turn-based RPG with a few rough edges such as lead-up dungeons of fairly normal fights to bosses that grinding clearly never prepared you for. Good thing that you can save nearly anywhere!

Vay took advantage of the CD format with fully voiced anime cutscenes for key parts of the story. For example, the lavish intro reveals the truth about Vay as a doomsday mech from a hyper advanced society crash landing on your world and sealed away thousands of years earlier following its rampage!

Moldorian was an outstanding RPG for the Sega Game Gear packed with an epic, and charming, adventure. And thanks to fans with a talent for translation and coding, it lives on for a new generation curious to quest through what may be one of the Game Gear's best "hidden" gems.

Your quest can often feel like a traditional RPG in the best sense of the word with plenty of monsters to bash, gear to earn, and a reasonable encounter rate to keep you sane. Being able to save anywhere is also a huge help, especially right before its pretty vicious boss fights.

But combat keeps moving and if you forget to enter a command in time, it might give the enemy time to attack -- or move to the next character in your party. Fortunately, you won't be alone for long as others eventually join you along the way as more of the world opens up.

Its combat distinguished Moldorian even further with a twitchy, real-time element. Characters able to act would move into position which would be your cue to quickly use the D-pad and buttons to issue actions such as attacking, defending, casting spells, or using items.

Moldorian was something of a beast of an RPG on the Game Gear featuring a huge world, detailed graphics, interesting characters, a solid storyline, and an impressive soundtrack by none other than Hitoshi Sakimoto - a grand adventure that did its best to push Sega's portable to its limits!

LIPEMCO! Translations created an unofficial English patch for the game and released it in 2019. In addition to the readme in which they included their thoughts on the project, they also went the extra mile and created a polished translation of the original, illustrated manual.