What the heck, this is great. Very silly quiz game, tying a typical fantasy world (clearly Capcom was itching to get their hands on that D&D license) to a premise where THE BAD GUYS MUST BE DEFEATED WITH TRIVIA. Great job localizing the bazillion questions to be relevant to early 90s American pop culture, I can't imagine that was an easy feat. I think the D&D-esque setting is well-used, too - the different player classes lend themselves to fun bonuses, treasures add additional fun bonuses, the monsters' toughness scales very naturally to how many questions they pose, and the players' ability to choose their route is ESPECIALLY cool.

My only real objection is that this is very long for an arcade game, with some of the later boards being suuuuuper grindy. I don't really mind that it's a quarter muncher here, since that's a proportionate challenge for the trivia being asked (and the players being given a fair amount of time to respond; Professor Pac-Man this ain't). It just takes a very long time to fully clear it, so much that I dunno how quickly most players are gonna see it through to the end. But for what it is - very, very strong trivia game.

It is weird as hell seeing references to Calvin & Hobbes, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, castration, and Dachau all in the same game.

this game does nothing but showcase how dumb i am.

But really, this game is actually pretty cool for giving english speaking audiences a try at experiencing the classic japanese arcade quiz game, since those things usually never get brought over here. The questions are rather dated trivia, which is even worse given the fact that this game came out like 20-30 years ago, but thats ok in the end. infinite credits are your friend here. You probably shouldn't try playing this alone since that'd kinda just be lonely, but if you have a friend to play with or even an audience to laugh at how dumb you are, then this game is definitely worth a try.

A fantasy RPG mixed with a trivia board game? What could possibly go wrong? Well, for one, this game was released in 1992 and I was born in 1999. Meaning a lot of the trivia here is completely out of my wheelhouse. Some are still probably bullshit even if you're the "appropriate" age for this (the sports questions in particular).

In the land of Capconia there is a Knowledge Tree which grants infinite knowledge (go figure) but this evil guy, Gordian, takes a few seeds from the tree so he can plant his own Knowledge Tree. He also gave a few seeds to some of the dragons of the land. The king of Capconia sends out four warriors to stop Gordian and his minions, but really, he only sent one, the ninja. Each character has a skill that could randomly activate during the trivia battles and the ninja's ability so happens to be the best one. The ninja does double damage meaning less questions you have to answer correctly.

Before you can challenge Gordian's minions, you are given a predetermined dice roll. In order to defeat a monster you must meet the correct answer requirement, and this starts off small enough. In the first chapter or two you only need to correctly answer two to four questions per enemy, but as the game goes on this quickly goes up to six, then eventually eight. This is where my main problem with this game comes in; it's too long. The game has seven stages, and by the fourth one I wanted this slog to end. To make things a bit worse, about halfway through you get rematches with the boss dragons on the board and they're not skippable if you happen to walk by them and you will. There's even a boss rush as you're approaching Gordian. Not all hope is lost however, as there are friendly spaces you can land on. You just have to pray to the predetermined dice gods you land on them. But you thought you could just get an easy heal by landing on an inn space or a helpful item when landing on an elf space? You still have to correctly answer a question. Losing all your HP on these "friendly" spaces still results in a game over.

Update: As I was writing this, I found out that Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 2 has a version of this game that's all Capcom trivia. Wish I knew about this beforehand!

I really love this thing. There are a few similar to this that never left japan with this gameplay style. There's two that gamecentre CX played. But i think this is the only one that made it to the west.

I really hope there's an indie developer out there that tries to recapture the feel of this, a JRPG quiz game. A real blast to play with friends.

Played this on the capcom classics collection on ps2.