#daniel brink

Shin Onigashima

As the Japanese adventure (ADV) game genre kept increasing in popularity throughout the 1980s, games became more ambitious in terms of graphics, text and storylines. On microcomputers, where the genre had had its beginnings, using multiple disks or tapes was a standard solution when software grew in scope and size, but consoles such as the Famicom were struggling with size limitations since cartridges were costly to produce and limited in ROM size. Many of these issues were overcome by the Famicom Disk System (FDS) peripheral, which took double-sided rewritable diskettes that could be produced at a fraction of the cost of a cartridge. Naturally, adventure games thrived on the system. Famicom Mukashibanashi: Shin Onigashima (1987) was Nintendo’s first foray into the genre and differentiated itself from the murder mystery craze that had exploded in the wake of the Famicom port of Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken (1985) by basing the game on folklore rather than police procedurals. The game was developed by PaxSoftnica in collaboration with Nintendo R&D4 and was the first FDS game that came on two disks: Zenpen (前編; first part) and Kouhen (後編; last part); in total only six two-disk FDS games were officially released and all of them were ADV games. 

BS Shin Onigashima

At the end of the Famicom era, Nintendo mothballed its two first party adventure game series Famicom Mukashibanashi and Famicom Detective Club with no apparent signs of intending to revive them on their new generation of consoles. Yuuyuuki (1989) would have been the last game of these franchises, had it not been for an unusual 1995 Japan-only satellite broadcast, games-as-a-service peripheral for the Super Famicom called the Satellaview. The add-on allowed paying subscribers to download content such as games, music and magazines to a special memory cartridge through the, for English-speakers, slightly unfortunately named BS Network (“Broadcast Satellite”). Apart from the fact of how far ahead of its time the Satellaview was, the probably most fascinating aspect of the service was the so called SoundLink games, where special Satellaview versions of games were co-broadcast with satellite radio audio that enabled CD quality music and voice-acting to play at set intervals during the game. The trade-off of doing this were that games were only accessible at pre-scheduled time slots, and that the gameplay was tied to a timer in order to make sure that the game was properly synced to the satellite audio (for more information on Soundlink games and their state of preservation, see e.g. the BS Tantei Club article). Following the success and popularity of the first SoundLink game, BS Zelda no Densetsu (1995; a time-attack re-imagining of the first The Legend of Zelda), a number of old and new Nintendo properties got their own Satallaview versions, including Famicom Mukashibanashi: Shin Onigashima. 

Yuuyuuki

After having based their first ever adventure game, Shin Onigashima (1987) on Japanese folklore and subsequently honing their ADV craft by the new thematic directions of Tokimeki High School (1987) and the two Famicom Detective Club games (1988 & 1989), Nintendo and PaxSoftnica returned to their Famicom Fairytales series in the fall of 1989. Rather than continuing adapting Japanese tales, the developers based the second entry in the series, Famicom Mukashibanashi: Yuuyuuki, on the famous Chinese story “The Journey to the West”. This 16th century book is considered one of the Four Classic Chinese Novels and tells the story of a band of characters tasked by a Buddha to travel to India to collect Holy Scriptures. One of the protagonists of the tale is the Monkey King Sun Wukong (Son Gokuu in Japanese) who can probably be said to be one of the most famous characters in the history of East Asian literature and is instantly recognizable by his signature strength, flying cloud and magic extendable staff. The 100 chapter novel is extensive in size and content, but after the initial parts wherein the main characters are established, it becomes highly episodic in its depiction of the different perils the party encounter on their journey. This format lends itself well to reinterpretations, and many translations and adaptations are based on an abridged selection of chapters. Being such an old tale, “The Journey to the West” has been told and retold innumerable times, but is for Westerners probably most famous for being the basis of Dragon Ball (1984). A very popular Japanese TV series called Saiyuuki (西遊記, the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese title) was broadcast in 1978-80 that focused specifically on Son Gokuu, so the source material was very much part of the zeitgeist of when this game was made. 

Zeliard

In 1986 Ken Williams travelled to Japan to sell licenses to Sierra On-line games, and during the stay he acquired the rights from Game Arts to publish a MS-DOS port of their action platformer Thexder. In the coming years, Sierra would port a number of a Japanese games including three additional Game Arts titles: Fire Hawk:Thexder 2, the shoot-em-up Silpheed, and the action-RPG Zeliard. Common to all of these titles are that they are microcomputer games (and stayed on those systems with the single exception of a Thexder port for the Famicom) that play and feel a lot like console games. Zeliard is a side-scrolling action-RPG with a leveling system and a lot of focus on experience point grinding. It was Game Arts third game and their first RPG, and in many ways their first step towards their later RPG productions such as the Lunar and Grandia series. Zeliard was released more or less exactly in between two of the seminal examples of the genre, Zelda II (January 1987) and Ys III (1989), but has remained in the shadow of more popular games due to its computer exclusivity and relentless difficulty curve. 

BS Detective Club: The Past that Disappeared in the Snow

The importance of emulation and recordings in video game preservation is seldom as apparent as when dealing with digital-only games from the 1990s and early 2000s. Services such as Nintendo’s Satellaview add-on for the Super Famicom (SFC) and Sega’s Sega Channel for the Genesis were years ahead of its time, distributing video games downloads over satellite or cable-TV modem in the mid-to-late 1990s for a monthly subscription fee – but have proven difficult to fully preserve. Such is the case for the third and last game in the Famicom Detective Club series, BS Tantei Club: Yuki ni Kieta Kako (“The Past that Disappeared in the Snow”), the peculiar last entry in the series that was broadcast over the Satellaview satellite modem in three parts in 1997, eight years after the release of the second game. Luckily, fully playable rom dumps of all parts of the game made from surviving Satellaview memory carts exits, but they lack the enhanced audio that was co-broadcast with the game data. However, for some games (including BS Tantei Club) VHS recordings of playthroughs made by players at the time have survived and are precious resources to learn about how these games were intended to be played. It is therefore possible to access all parts of this game, albeit in a disjointed way: either as a game without sound, or as a recorded gameplay movie without interactivity. 

Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken

In a cutscene at the end of Metal Gear Solid V, a game set in the 1980s, a man is loading a cassette tape in MSX computer and the characteristic loading noises from a data tape are played. It did not take fans long to find out that the audio contained the header of the 1983 Japanese adventure game The Portopia Serial Murder Case, a game Hideo Kojima famously has quoted as one of the reasons he went into the video game industry. In fact, this by modern standards rather primitive graphical text adventure is often heralded as one of the most influential games in Japanese video game history. Similar to how Sierra’s King’s Quest (1984) shaped the direction western computer adventure games would take, Portopia has been instrumental to the development of the adventure (ADV) genre, but also to Japanese video game interface design in general. 

Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir

In 1985, Yuuji Horii’s murder mystery Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken was ported from its microcomputer origins to the Famicom, where it sold over 700.000 carts and more or less single-handedly popularized and formalized the Japanese adventure game (ADV) genre. In the wake of the Portopia port, ADV games were soon pouring in on the Famicom. Nintendo’s first own attempt at the genre was the 1987 Famicom Mukashi Banashi: Shin Onigashima released on two double-sided disks for the Famicom Disk System (FDS). While popular, the game, which was based on Japanese fairy tales and rather silly in tone, was a far cry from the suspense of Portopia, and for one of their next ADV games, Nintendo set out to create a murder mystery of their own: Famicom Detective Club: The Missing Heir.