Treasure of the Rudras

Rudra no Hihou
Developer(s)Square
Publisher(s)Square
Director(s)Kouze Ide
Artist(s)Keita Amemiya
Writer(s)Kouze Ide
Katsuyoshi Kawahara
Hideshi Kyounen
Composer(s)Ryuji Sasai
Platform(s)Super Famicom
Release
  • JP: April 5, 1996
Genre(s)Role-playing
Mode(s)Single-player

Treasure of the Rudras (ルドラの秘宝, Rudora no Hihou, "Treasure of Rudra") is a Japanese role-playing game released by Square in 1996, and the company's last developed game for the Super Famicom.

The plot incorporates elements from Indian religions, centrally the concept of the wheel of time - every 4000 years the world is destroyed and recreated by a Rudra - the name taken from an aspect of the Hindu god of destruction, Shiva. With several races of beings already eradicated and replaced, the story takes place during the final 15 days before humans are scheduled to be wiped out as well. However, this forces the four main characters who were chosen by fate - Sion, Surlent, Riza, and Dune - to go on a quest to avert the scenario whilst uncovering the source of it all.

While the gameplay alludes to many Square games like Final Fantasy and so on, one notable deviation from the games is that of custom magic system (aka mantra system), in which players can freely create their own spells either by using both prefixes and suffixes contained within the game or just by trial and error. This of course negates the need of leveling up your characters to learn spells automatically rather than manually. Though, despite its creativity, the overall usefulness contained within each imputed spell varies.