What Magic Knight Rayearth games are there?
Seven games of its own, and two famous guest appearances.
Rayearth was a merchandising citizen of the 1990s, and the games came quickly: an RPG for nearly every machine Sega and Nintendo were selling. Only one of them ever officially left Japan, the Sega Saturn action RPG, and it left so late that it closed the console’s American life. Every Rayearth game is its own work, not a port of another.
The catalogue below follows the record: the Saturn flagship, the Nintendo handheld and console RPGs, the Game Gear pair, the Pico title, and the series’ modern afterlife as a guest in Banpresto’s Super Robot Wars, where the Rune-Gods finally stand in formation with the other robots of anime.
THE FLAGSHIP
Sega Saturn · 1995
Magic Knight Rayearth · Saturn
Sega’s action RPG of the first arc, released in Japan on August 25, 1995 and in North America by Working Designs on December 11, 1998. The North American box is shown here. Its full story is told on the Saturn page of this archive.
One Knight at a time
The Saturn game’s signature system is a tag team: only one girl fights while the other two follow untouched, and the player swaps between them instantly. Hikaru carries a sword, Umi a foil, and Fuu a bow, where the manga and anime gave all three swords.
The diaries
Between battles, each girl keeps an illustrated journal that fills with her own account of the journey. The English version voiced those diary entries, one of Working Designs’ additions, and printed the text to look handwritten.
THE JAPAN-ONLY CATALOGUE
1994 to 1996Super Famicom RPG
A full role-playing game for Nintendo’s console, retelling the first arc in turn-based form. Japan only: the Super Famicom Rayearth has never had an official English release.
Game Boy RPG
The first of two Game Boy role-playing games, compressing Cephiro into the handheld’s four shades. Japan only.
Rayearth 2nd: The Missing Colors
The second Game Boy RPG, with its own subtitle and story. Japan only.
Game Gear RPG
An RPG for Sega’s color handheld, the rarest shelf in the catalogue today. Japan only.
Making of Magic Knight
The second Game Gear title changed genres entirely: a raising sim, in which the Knights are brought up rather than sent on a quest. Japan only.
Magic Knight Tanjou · Sega Pico
A title for the Pico, Sega’s electronic storybook console for small children: the youngest audience Rayearth ever addressed, and a reminder of how completely the series was aimed at girls of every age at once. Japan only.
THE GUEST YEARS
2019 to 2021Super Robot Wars T · 2019
Twenty-three years after the manga ended, the Rune-Gods joined the Super Robot Wars line-up in T, deployed alongside the robots of Gundam and Getter Robo: the crossover the series’ whole design had been promising since 1993.
Super Robot Wars 30 · 2021
The Knights returned for the series’ thirtieth-anniversary game in 2021, by then senior guests in a franchise built partly on the audience Rayearth helped create.