It involves an amnesic hero traveling through time in an attempt to rescue the princess Scheherazade from the evil wizard Sabaron, who has summoned a horde of demons to bring chaos to the once peaceful land of Arabia.

The player engages hostile enemies with various weapons and spells through both real-time solo action on the overhead map and random, turn-based battles fought alongside befriended allies.

Once the commercial viability of the NES was proven in North America by the late 1980s, Japanese developer Culture Brain opened a company branch in the United States and chose to publish an English-language version of The Magic of Scheherazade after making several changes to the graphics and musical score.

The game has been noted for its fusion of the adventure and RPG genres, though journalists have referred to its gameplay mechanics as lower-quality versions of what was seen in both The Legend of Zelda and the Dragon Quest series.

In the game, the player must travel through a series of worlds and defeat the evil wizard Sabaron, rescue Scheherazade, and bring peace back to Arabia.

[9] The majority of play takes place on an overhead map where the player can freely move between separate screens; the overworld comprises numerous landscapes and locales including forests, deserts, towns, underwater areas, dimly-lit dungeons, and palace labyrinths.

[8][10] In the towns, the player can interact with NPCs to gather information and initiate quests, gather new party members, purchase supplies as shops, replenish party members' hit points (HP) and magic points (MP) at hotels, gamble money at casinos, and change character class or save their progress via passwords at mosques.

Reaching higher levels improves the player's maximum attributes (HP and MP) and can sometimes enhance weapon strength or yield new magic spells.

Fighting alone or with up to two allies, the player takes turns trading blows with enemy units by picking commands such as striking with equipped weapons or casting magic.

Peace briefly returned until the evil wizard Sabaron freed Goragora and the demons from their captivity and imprisoned the Arabian princess Scheherazade and her family.

With this, the amnesic hero traverses through five worlds in order to regain his memories, learn new magic, recruit several allies, and defeat the demon overlords.

[16] EGM found the game as an overall mediocre diversion to other RPGs of its time, but similarly acknowledged the gameplay as being "nicely handled" and "easy to catch on to".

One of the magazine's writers, Ed Semrad, appreciated its challenge level and referred to it as the next "decent quest game" following Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

He admitted that both features felt unpolished in The Magic of Scheherazade but proclaimed the soundtrack as "excellent" aside from one "incredibly grating" theme heard in rare instances in battle.

[8] Destructoid contributor Colette Bennett praised the music and found the Middle East-inspired setting unique amid medieval-themed RPGs of its release period.

[30] At the Winter CES in January 1992, GamePro reported that an SNES game titled Golden Empire was officially announced by Culture Brain as a follow-up to The Magic of Scheherazade.

[32] Gaming retail chain Chips & Bits continuously advertised Golden Empire under its SNES role-playing section in US magazine catalogs throughout the early to mid-1990s.

[33][34][35][36] As late as 1996, the Japanese publication Family Computer Magazine listed the game as Scheherazade Densetsu - The Prelude[c] with an unknown release date for the Super Famicom.