Magical Chase on PC Engine: Quest’s 1991 Shooter That Sold Out in a Day and Never Got a Sequel

Magical Chase is a horizontal shooter that Quest built for the PC Engine and that Palsoft, a publisher nobody had heard of, put on sale in Japan on 15 November 1991 — a Hu-Card, product code PL91001, 7,800円 before tax. The Japanese title on the spine is マジカルチェイス.

It sold out the same day, and then it stayed sold out. The magazine reviews were excellent, the reprint the publisher wanted never happened, and two years later a games magazine had to reissue the game itself, by mail, because no shop could get one. Palsoft published five games in about ten months and disappeared; Quest went off to make Ogre Battle; nobody ever made a second Magical Chase. This guide covers what the cartridge is, why it became a ghost, how to tell the 1991 Hu-Card from the 1993 magazine reissue in a shop listing, and how to find either with the code.

• Japanese title: マジカルチェイス, developed by Quest (クエスト), published by Palsoft (パルソフト)
• PC Engine (Hu-Card): 15 November 1991 · 7,800円 before tax, as recorded by the Media Arts Database · product code PL91001, which that database does not carry
• Shipped small: released in limited quantities and sold out on the day, with the publisher’s own reissue never materialising
• Not the 1991 cartridge: the “Fan Edition”, a mail-order reissue organised by the magazine PC Engine Fan for its fifth anniversary and distributed on 30 September 1993 — white case, magazine sticker
• North America: TurboGrafx-16, July 1993, published by Turbo Technologies Inc. — one of the rarest and most expensive TurboGrafx-16 games
• Not a sequel: the Windows release (Bothtec, 10 April 1998) and Magical Chase GB (Microcabin, 4 August 2000) are conversions of the same game

What is Magical Chase, and who made it?

You play Ripple, an apprentice witch who opens a forbidden book called Sleeping Demons, lets six demons out, and has to put them back before her teacher turns her into a frog. Two star maidens, Topsy and Turvy (くるるん and ぐるるん), orbit her as options: you aim them, and they also block small enemy shots. Beaten enemies drop crystals, and the crystals are money — every stage but the last has a shop selling shots, speed, health and single-use elixirs. There are six stages, called seals, each with a mid-boss and a boss, and three difficulty levels: Breeze, Bumpy and Rough. Breeze only lets you play the first three stages.

The interesting part is who built it. As the English Wikipedia article puts it, the game “was developed by the same team at Quest Corporation that would later work on Ogre Battle, Tactics Ogre, and Final Fantasy Tactics”. It was designed by Hiroshi Minagawa, the art director of those games. The music is by Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata — Sakimoto’s first work on the PC Engine and his first with Quest, joined at Iwata’s invitation, and he wrote his own sound driver to find out what the hardware could do. So this cute shooter is, in staff terms, a prototype of the studio that made Tactics Ogre.

Contemporary Japan agreed it was good. In the PC Engine Fan readers’ poll printed in 1993 it scored 26.77 out of 30, third among 485 PC Engine titles; Famicom Tsūshin gave it 26 out of 40. Retrospectives kept it around: Retro Gamer named it one of ten perfect games for the PC Engine, and IGN listed it, next to Cotton, among the top ten TurboGrafx titles never released on the Virtual Console.

Why is a game this well reviewed so hard to find?

Because of how many were made, not how many were wanted. The English Wikipedia article states it plainly: the game “was released in Japan by Palsoft on November 15, 1991, in small quantities, and sold out that same day”, and “Palsoft received requests and made efforts for a re-release, but it never materialized”. The Japanese article says the same thing from the other end — the original PC Engine version became a premium item because so little of it reached the market.

The mechanism was the Japanese wholesale system. A researched Japanese account of the case, which cites PC Engine Fan, Gekkan PC Engine and Marukatsu PC Engine issues from 1991 to 1993, describes wholesalers setting their order numbers without seeing the game: they weighed television advertising, magazine coverage and whether a title was a sequel to something proven, and an unknown maker’s first game on a Hu-Card — at a moment when the PC Engine world was moving to CD-ROM — got a very small number. The same account explains why the shortage could not be fixed: Hu-Card production ran about two months, so by the time a repeat order could ship, the wholesalers who had asked for one no longer wanted it.

You will also read that the publisher went bankrupt straight after the game, and that this is why no reprint came. Treat that one carefully. The Japanese Wikipedia article on PC Engine Fan does say a reissue stalled on “the publisher’s bankruptcy” combined with Hu-Card supply in a CD-ROM era, but the passage carries no source, and the researched account above calls the “Palsoft went under right after Magical Chase” story wrong. What can be checked is the catalog: the Agency for Cultural Affairs Media Arts Database holds five packages under the Palsoft brand — this game, two Mega Drive cartridges in December 1991, another Mega Drive game in August 1992, and a Super Famicom mahjong game on 25 September 1992 — and nothing after that. Whatever the legal story, the label lasted five games and about ten months, which is the part that matters for a sequel.

The 1993 Fan Edition: when a magazine reprints a game

With the publisher unable to supply, PC Engine Fan (Tokuma Shoten) did something almost unheard of: it reissued the game itself as a fifth-anniversary project. Pre-orders were taken by mail, the deadline of 31 July 1993 was pushed to 9 August because demand overran the magazine’s expectations, and the copies went out on 30 September 1993, by post only — never through a shop. The reissue came in a white case with a sticker marking its PC Engine Fan connection. It, too, became a premium item.

This matters when you shop, because both versions come back from the same search and from the same product code. At Suruga-ya the 1991 release is filed as マジカルチェイス and the reissue as マジカルチェイス 創立5周年記念 / PC Engine FAN版 — “fifth anniversary commemoration / PC Engine FAN edition” — and both records carry the same maker (パルソフト), the same date (1991/11/15) and the same code (PL91001). The words in the title are the only thing separating them. On 17 September 2026 the shop’s own copies were ¥133,000 for the 1991 cartridge and ¥140,000 for the Fan Edition, the latter flagged 超プレミア価格！！！ — “super premium price”.

Why is the American version famous too?

Because it was even scarcer. Turbo Technologies Inc., the NEC and Hudson joint venture set up in 1992 to relaunch a TurboGrafx-16 that was failing in North America, published Magical Chase there in July 1993, after the game had been shown at the 1992 Summer CES and slipped from November 1992 to January 1993. The English Wikipedia article’s summary is the one collectors quote: “Because it was released in limited quantities near the end of the console’s lifespan, Magical Chase became one of the rarest and most expensive TurboGrafx-16 titles, commanding high prices on the secondary collecting market.”

The American cartridge is not quite the same object: it has redrawn sprites and an altered foreground and background in the first stage, and the maker’s name on the title screen and ending is Quest alone. It is also locked to its own console: a TurboGrafx card is the same shape as a Hu-Card but reverses eight of the 38 connector pins, so it will not run in a Japanese PC Engine. If you are buying in Japan, the Hu-Card is the one to look for, and the price gap between the two regions is a matter of which collectors are bidding, not of which game is better.

Why was there never a second Magical Chase?

Three separate things had to go right, and all three went wrong. The publisher stopped: five packages, the last in September 1992. The distribution made the first game look like a failure on paper even though it sold out, so nobody was queueing to fund a sequel. And the developer moved up a weight class — Quest spent the rest of the decade on Ogre Battle (1993), Tactics Ogre (1995) and work on Final Fantasy Tactics, then withdrew from game development and was acquired in 2002, which is why the rights to Magical Chase sit with Square Enix today.

What did come back were conversions, not sequels. Bothtec released a Windows 95 version on 10 April 1998, with the original redbook audio, and re-released it twice as a budget title. Microcabin put Magical Chase GB: Minarai Mahoutsukai Kenja no Tani e (マジカルチェイスGB ～見習い魔法使い 賢者の谷へ～) on the Game Boy Color on 4 August 2000: it keeps the parallax scrolling, cuts the graphics and simplifies the music, drops the hardest difficulty and adds hint screens. It is the same adventure on a smaller screen. In 2000 the PC Engine version also appeared on Dream Library, Sega’s rental service for the Dreamcast, which closed in 2003 — and the game has never been on the Virtual Console.

The only thing that continued is a wink. Quest put Ripple’s name on a staff weapon in Ogre Battle and Tactics Ogre, implying the apprentice witch grew into a great one, and Jack, the pumpkin-headed shopkeeper, turns up in Ogre Battle too. A shooter heroine retired into a strategy series, which is as close to a sequel as this game got.

Where can you buy the Japanese Hu-Card today?

Suruga-ya: search the code. PL91001 works there, and it is clean. On 30 September 2026 the default view returned two listings and both were this game: the 1991 Hu-Card and the Fan Edition. Prices as of 17 September 2026 were ¥133,000 for the Hu-Card and ¥98,000 to ¥140,000 for the Fan Edition, with marketplace lines from ¥91,667 and ¥82,770 alongside. Asking the shop to show sold-out items as well gave results: 9, all of them this game: first editions with damaged cases, manuals or cards, a Hu-Card on its own, a manual on its own. The Japanese title マジカルチェイス works too: in the default view it showed results: 4 (this game: 2; Game Boy Color conversion: 2).

Buyee: search the title with the platform. The code is a poor filter on an auction site. Measured the same day, the search for PL91001 showed results: 5 (this game: 2); the rest were a model railway set and Honda motorcycle bearings that happen to carry those digits. マジカルチェイス PCエンジン showed results: 16 (this game: 12) — loose Hu-Cards, boxed copies, a sealed one, two Fan Editions and a Fan Edition box with no card in it — against four that were not: two arrange CDs whose titles list other PC Engine games, a December 1991 issue of a games magazine and a 1991 toy-show catalogue. The bare title マジカルチェイス returned 34, which drags in the Game Boy Color game, the Windows release and the soundtrack CD. So the title-plus-platform search is the one to use.

Read every listing title before you bid. Huカード or PCエンジン means the 1991 cartridge; 創立5周年記念 or PC Engine FAN版 means the 1993 reissue; GB means the Game Boy Color conversion; 説明書のみ is a manual on its own and 箱のみ a box. And treat every number above as a snapshot: the listing counts as of 30 September 2026, the prices as of 17 September 2026. A game with this few copies in circulation moves in steps, not on a curve.

Why search Kataban for this one?

Because the Japanese name is the way in, and the catalog carries it. Checked in a desktop browser on 30 September 2026, マジカルチェイス returns two results — the 1991 PC Engine Hu-Card and the 2000 Game Boy Color conversion — and Magical Chase returns one, the Hu-Card. The card gives the platform, the 1991 release year and the kana to look under on a Japanese shop shelf (マ).

It gives the code as well, though the code did not come from the database. The Media Arts Database row for this game, M756770, has no product code field at all. PL91001 comes from outside it — Suruga-ya prints it in its own product record for both the 1991 cartridge and the Fan Edition, and the Japanese catalog site Picopico Daihyakka lists it with the same 7,800円 price the database records. We added PL91001 to the Kataban catalog on 17 September 2026 from those two sources, so the card for the Hu-Card now shows it, and searching PL91001 finds the Hu-Card. It is a real code, and it is the fastest way into a shop.

Magical Chase · マジカルチェイス · PC Engine Hu-Card, 15 November 1991 (PL91001) · Palsoft (パルソフト), developed by Quest (クエスト)

Where to buy: Suruga-ya.jp — code (PL91001) · Buyee — title (マジカルチェイス PCエンジン)
See the Hu-Card on Kataban →

A game that sells out in a day and is never reprinted leaves no second chance, and a studio that graduates to strategy games does not come back for the shooter. What is left is one Hu-Card from November 1991, a white-cased reissue a magazine made in 1993 because readers would not let it go, and a price tag that says how many of each exist.