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So, I've just finished recording the gameplay all the way to the end of the game, so now all that's left is to write the updates. As mentioned, I expect about 2 or 3, since we've already visited most of the towns there are to visit so this last part of the game is mostly focused on dungeon traversal and boss fights. Don't worry though, there is 15 minute long ending cutscene which nicely wraps everything up! Speaking of timing, during the end credits, the game tells you the total playing time, and so here's mine:  That's 54 hours and 32 minutes. This is when you know exactly where to go and what to do, plus the fact that I rushed through the first part of the game when I had to replay it because of the hard drive crash. If you're playing the game normally, you're looking at at least several hours more but probably more like at least 10+ hours more on top of this. P.S. Wait until you see this one weird trick I use to make my life easier with the final boss! PPS. Also I wish that Mednafen would have sane video recording options so that a 1h recording of a game in this resolution is not 20GB long and encoded in a weird way that I have to after fiddle with FFMPEG to fix.  (Welcome to the new page everyone!) ivantod fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Nov 5, 2023 |
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Nov 5, 2023 20:42
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 20:36 |
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ivantod posted:P.S. Wait until you see this one weird trick I use to make my life easier with the final boss! The Root Clan hates him! Local LPer exposes shocking anti-final boss secret.
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Nov 5, 2023 20:52
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I feel like a flying castle that shoots explosive shells should give us a few more options to deal with the ice than it currently does.
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Nov 6, 2023 19:09
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Seraphic Neoman posted:I feel like a flying castle that shoots explosive shells should give us a few more options to deal with the ice than it currently does. Uh, well, you know, it's... MAGICAL ice! Yeah, that's it!
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Nov 6, 2023 19:51
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I mean, depending on how thick the ice is, a cannon shell may not actually do that much to it if it hits the surface. Considering that the castle is the source of the freezing cold, It's easy enough to believe that "magic ice" is actually the answer.
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Nov 6, 2023 20:07
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 So, we (finally) defeated Duke Pepe (and it still took three fights), and then we stole his airship and then we did a tour of the remaining provinces in Jipang. There we learned about the existence of two Demon Clan castles (not to be confused with the Root Clan castles), but also about something werid going on regarding Kinu's mother who may or may not still be alive (but probably not). We also ventured into a (slightly) dangeroud cave to obtain some stronger equipment, among them a "free version" of a sword which normally costs half a million! Oh yeah and we also found the seventh dark orchid, but it's surronded by mountains and not easily accessible! Anyway, let's continue with our exploration.  We'll head back again to the north side of the province, remembering that on the western side of the river it's a bit too narrow to pass so have to follow the east bank!  On the northern coast, there is another town, as we've learned, the second of only two in this province. So let's visit it!  Welcome to Hagi! Surprisingly no welcoming committee this time. There's also something there to the left, but we'll check that out shortly.  Ah, there's a guy hiding over here!  Another person hiding over on the opposite side! Like I said, same as that other large cave system we've already encountered.  Let's check out inside! First the inn. But this lady is just the doctor who recovers Manjimaru when he gets KOd in battle.  So we'll instead talk to this guy upstairs. Ah, nope. We'll be getting into the middle of it, actually.   I mean we just came from there, but sure, ok.    All right, let's see what's happening over here with the monks! Or rather, the disciples here in the courtyard. Tathagata is the name for high-ranking Buddhist deities and also the title that the historical Buddha (Siddhartha) used to refer to himself. Speaking of "unusual", if you're wondering about the look of this location, here's what it looks like in real life (Tokoji temple in Hagi city):  So, yeah. Let's go inside.  Yeah, that probably isn't going to work, you're right. All right, we're done here, and this is actually the last proper town that we can visit in the game. There will still be two or three places where there are people (or even demons), but as for towns/villages, this is pretty much it. So, now. Before we proceed with the plot, just one small "hidden" thing we can do.  Over here on the map, there's a very interesting S-shaped island in the far northwest. So, let's take our airship and go visit!  Hmm, not exactly four rocks, but there are definitely four things arranged in a square on the west side of the island! I think I may know what's going on here.  Before we can get there, we're again accosed by enemies. And they are a bit tough because of high defence. However they are somewhat worth it for nice EXP and money yield, but I wouldn't use them to grind as it just takes too long to defeat them.   Anyway, this thing here...  ...is of course another hidden tengu. No spells here, this is just the last tengu who can decrease your MP cost of one spell by 1. So go wild! After leaving...  ...and oh my word, what even are you? Ok, ok. Yatagarasu (八咫烏) is a mythical crow deity from Shinto mythology, and yes, it does have three legs again. The word "Yatagarasu" itself comes from "yata" which means "8 ata", ata being an old unit of measure. So "yata" means "8 ata" and is equal to about 144cm and "karasu" (or in this case "garasu") just means "crow" in Japanese. So I guess it's like a a "large-span crow" or something like that. Also 咫 is a cool loking kanji and I've never seen it before. The enemy itself has a strong attack, but not a whole lot of defence so it's pretty doable.  Anyway, what next? Well, I think it's time to see what is the situation with those Demon Castles. So first we'll head over to Kibi province...  ...to this location here. Neither of the two Demon Castles can be reached by airship, due to no suitable landing area. They both have to be accessed by traversing a cave. You can actually see the exit of this cave on the other side of the mountains, so let's go in.  Looks pretty standard.  A chest with 420 ryo... but we already have about half a million in the bank.  It's a typical traversal of a small cave where you have to go up and down the stairs a bit.  Like I said, then we go back up.  This chest has a "Demonic Metal Club" which is weapon for Gokuraku. Surprisingly, despite the name, actually it's not cursed, but it's also weaker than what we already have, so I'll just sell it later!  Anyway, there isn't really anything else of interest in here (even the enemies are the same as outside!), so eventually we just...  ...come outside and find out that we have reached the first Demon Castle. As you can see it's completely surounded by mountains and the ground is quite rocky, so no way to land the airship here! Let's head in.  Welcome to Yakui castle!  Looks a bit different from a typical dungeon here, actually. Don't worry about the chests though, one has a health potion consumable and the other has... 34 ryo. It's just a troll. On the other hand, the fact that there are still Root monster random encounters here tells us that something is likely gone wrong.  Let's head up, then.  Ah, well, this is an interesting situation. We find what look to be some imprisoned demons here! The big guy in the middle looks important, so let's talk to the other two first. You can see it super well, but there is again that fire symbol where Manjimaru and Kabuki are standing. Wait, is this for real? I thought that Kinu's mother was a fake? Hmm. Anyway, the big guy actually has a picture! Ok, ok.  There are also some other prisoners here behind bars, too. They all just ask you to go and save Kinu's mother (or whoever she is).  There's two more of them here, but they're a bit more interesting. Ok, well, whatever might be going on here, I think we'll have to go upstairs and have a look before we do anything.   That's cool, you can actually see the lower floor from here. But what's with the balloon? It has been mentioned that someone has been travelling around in a balloon, but...  Ah, it's one of the sages... of course. And whoever that woman is next to him.  Ok then, that was certainly something.  In the meantime, Ura appears from somewhere.   With this, he takes us to a room where we can rest overnight and refresh ourselves.   Tomorrow morning...  ...it turns out that Kinu may have done something rather unwise.  Sure sure, but I'm still not convinced about exactly what's going on here. However, what I'm sure of is that we're (again) back to just three party members! Kinu has certainly taken all of her equipment with her, however the game does show mercy on you so all the spells she had equipped have been redistributed across the other three characters, or put in storage if there was not enough free slots. So we don't lose all our healing spells which were previously equipped on Kinu for obvious reasons. It's not an ideal situation, but not much we can do.  Let's make our way out of here.  On the way out, you can talk to some of the demons again, but they don't have too much to say. Ah don't worry. We've done it already (at least) six times.  This chest here is pretty good. It contains the "Celestial Spirit Robe", which is of course for Kinu. It's actually a huge improvement from her current clothes, but it will obviously have to wait for a bit! Still, don't get distracted by the fact that other chests don't have anything particularly good in them, because this one very much does!   Good news is, that once you've visited this place for the first time on foot, you can then normally fast-travel to it. Although in this case there isn't any reason to come back, so we'll just move on. Then, let's head to the other Demon castle, the one in Nagato province.  Observing from the air, we see here a similar situation, that we'll have to traverse a cave to get to it. So let's get going.  As we were told, there is a door which needs to be opened. This is done simply by interacting with the fire symbol to its right so no special items are needed.  Traversal here is mostly the same, except this chest here contains one of those items which give full recovery to the entire party including revival of KOd members. Not going to lie, for the last two boss fights in this game, we'll probably end up using all of them.  While traversing the cave...  ...we actually reach what looks like an underground lake! Let's check it out.  A submarine?  Oh, I see. So it goes from a balloon to a submarine, huh?  But before we can do anything...  ...they manage to escape. I guess we'll continue towards the demon castle.  On the way, there are some chests. This one has a Safflower Dagger. We saw that for sale last time, and it's obviously a weapon for Kinu, but actually we already have something better to give her when the time comes (soon!), so let's keep moving.  Shortly after, we reach the castle.  Looks pretty similar to the other one, but... so many chests already! I wonder if anything good is in them? Let's have a quick look.  Koujin is the Japanese god of the cooking stove. Yeah. I mean, there's a bit more to it than that, but Wikipedia has you covered. For us, this is a equipment piece for Gokuraku:  It's a +5 in defence compared to his old Twin Dragon Helmet, which he must have been wearing already for like half the game! But don't worry, this is actually only temporary. Very shortly we'll get a much nicer full set of equipment for Gokuraku which will dramatically upgrade his stats. In fact, it's interesting to note that at this point, near the end of the game, Gokuraku finally starts to have some noticeable stat gains, even some decent amounts of MP will come his way! It's good, because we'll need all the power we can get for the last couple of bosses!  But let's actually talk to this guy standing by the entrance. Sure, sure.  He's not actually blocking the way to those chests. They contain a consumable and another one of those stock certificates that I'll later go and sell.  Upstairs.  Yeah that's a story we already know from back when we were rescuing Kinu at Mt. Ooe. Currently we suspect she is pretending to be Kinu's mother.  Yes, the small island we noticed there. But we have no way to traverse the sea... unless we find that turtle.  Up to the top floor!  The game is not as subtle as it thinks it is. But certainly we should pay them a visit after we deal with the seventh orchid, because of course once the world is returned to peace the game doesn't end, but simply continues and lets you live your life in Jipang. As if. Ah, as we were told, the demons have the key to one of the locked storehouses.  Fubuki Gozen (吹雪御前) approximately means something like "General Blizzard"!  And finally, let's talk to Kain, the leader of this castle. He's this big guy here. Wait, has that stuff... been in the warehouse for like 1000 years? Really? In any case, this is our first key of two for Kurashiki warehouses. Actually on the way there, we'll stop in the equipment shop in Hiroshima...  ...and pick up this White Lion Armour for Kabuki. It costs a whole 272,000 ryo, but we'll need to fight a boss with just three people, so it doesn't hurt to have it.  It's a +13 in defence compared to previously. Ok, now on to Kurashiki.  Let's open this bad boy.  Three chests here. Let's see.  Ah, one more spell is found in a chest (but it's not the last in the game--there's still one more)! The "rain dragon" (雨竜) is kind of like "ice dragon", but attacks all enemies instead. Curious that we find it here like that, but what can you do.  Shuten as in Shuten Doji, the chief demon. I mean it makes a bit of sense that this would be here. Anyway, we can put this on Gokuraku...  ...for a neat +12 in defence, replacing his previous Giant's Armour which he has also been wearing for a very long time! This one too will not last very long at all, but it's free, so... Ok, the last chest.  Excellent! From the conversations we had last time, this is the item that the Root Clan is looking for, because it can remove the curse from the giant turtle! Let's head there immediately.  Standing here, we play a tune on the flute, and...   And there we go! Our last, uh, vehicle that we'll use in this game. So now, we COULD go to the Silver Castle... ...or, we could go and visit the second mermaid village! If you recall, they should have the second warehouse key with them!  There are still some unseen enemies which appear at sea. "Ubume" (産女) is a birthing woman type ghost in Japanese folklore. For, uh, reasons that should be obvious, I can't really post a representative picture of it here, but feel free to look it up on Google. Fair warning though, you might stumble on some fairly graphic artistic representations of this ghost so I would not search this at work. The one in the game at least looks tame. Gives a lot of money, though, so if you need to grind money, this is probably not a bad option.   This one is a little bit of a problem because of crazy high defence. Fire spells do wonders, though.   And hey, for once, it's a completely straightforward name with no ambiguity at all!   Anyway, here's the mermaid island...  ...but we have to park down here and go through the underwater cave to reach it.  Same kind of decor as in the other access cave from the first village. No encounters here either.  There is a chest with 22,000 ryo, though.  The exit leads...  ...to another mermaid village, as expected. Let's see. Also, Tsuruhime (鶴姫) literally means "Princess Crane" (again, "crane" as in kind of a bird).  This all seems very incosequential now but it's actually really important facts. Also "iroha" (いろは) is literally Japanese equivalend of "the ABCs". It's a bit of a complicated story behind it, but it's basically the name of an ancient poem from around 11th century (or possible earlier) which contains all hiragana syllables exactly once. Of course, the Japanese "spelling" has changed a bit since then, so today the actual poem doesn't quite fit 100% (if nothing else, because it contains obsolete kana characters like ゐ, ゑ which have not been in use since the first half of XX century), but the meaning of the name has remained.  There is suddenly A LOT of talk about actually forging a holy sword, even though they have all been "pre-forged" until now... Huh. I wonder what items are those? This is getting very intriguing.  Chiyo, the mermaid girlfriend of Gokuraku from one thousand years ago, for those who forgot.  It's a complete coincidence that Iroha shrine where the holy sword was forged is also there. Yeah that's probably not important. For now, let's go through that doorway.  Interesting that again we see here the monuments to all old Fire Heroes from the original war with the Root Clan!  And finally, here is Tsuruhime! Manjimaru obtained Tsuruhime's Key! All right, there's our second key. Except, it's a bit weird this time. There's actually two possible uses for this key and not just one. But you have to choose since the key gets removed from your inventory once you use it. Luckily one of those ways is mostly a joke, so the correct course of action is to save the game, do the first thing, and then reload it back and do the second thing which is the actual thing you want to do with the key. So obviously, the thing we really want to do with the key is to open that warehouse as it clearly appears to contain some good equipment for Gokuraku, but then, what could possibly be the other thing you can do with this key? Well. Dig very deep into your memories and try to remember the house in Kyoto, where there was a rich daughter looking for a husband. You could buy her various (expensive) items and she would lift the shade to show you more and more of her face. Do you remember that?  It was this fancy house here.   Of course, we pick Tsuruhime's key, and then...  And... that's it. Seeing her face is the reward here (because none of the other items, no matter how expensive, will let you see her whole face), and those three chests in her room are just bait. You can never get to them. Soooo... true, this is basically just a joke, but still. How are you supposed to know about it? Definitely nobody ever says anything about it, so truly the only hint you get is that when you enter this house the same music plays as what you hear when visiting the two mermaid villages. So I guess you're supposed to make the connection that way? Anyway, this is still not a thing in the game whose payoff takes the longest time, but for now, we should head one last time to Kurashiki, to finally open the second of the two locked warehouses!  Here we go!  Four chests here, so let's open them in order. The first one has Chiyo's Shoes.  Putting them on gives Gokuraku +21 in agility (much needed). The second chest has Chiyo's Helm.  This one is +7 in defence. The next one has Chiyo's Armour.  This one is +11 in defence compared to previous. The last chest has, of course, Chiyo's Longsword. Let's put it on.  And it's... an incredible +73 in attack power compared to before! That's pretty insane. But I do have to tell you that despite everything, this is still only the second best weapon for Gokuraku in this game. Still, it will be very helpful for the upcoming boss fight, that's for sure. I guess, thank you Chiyo. That's all I can say, really.
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Nov 14, 2023 23:58
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 All right, at this point we really should go and deal with the Silver Castle, since we now have means of accessing it!  So, let's take our turtle again...  ...and finally land on that little island.  Then we can just slide down the middle...  ...and easily access the castle!  [SILVER CASTLE]  Inside, a familiar sequence of events unfolds...   I guess we'll have to find our way to the boss and also hopefully to rescue Kinu (and whatever happens to "Ayako" or whoever she is).  There are poison pools in this castle which damage you when you walk over them. At least the ground is not slippery and we can walk normally instead of sliding around. This castle is, as it were, a full sized one, with a lot of maze like up and down going, so I'll try to point out the important bits to save time. The random encounter rate here is a bit high for my taste, though.  These enemies do also appear outside, too. But considering the name, why do they look like foxes? Because the Japanese word for "will-o'-the-wisp" is... "foxfire" (キツネ火).   Interestingly, here too you have these multi level dungeons where you can see the floor below from above.  A cool looking enemy, but what an unexpectedly mundane name! Manjimaru's "divine fire" spell can two-shot this guy   It's mostly just similar looking corridors, but eventually...  ...we find where Kinu and Aya are kept. Obviously guarded by a boss. And, of course, let's not forget, on the other side of that long wall. So we'll have to find our way around somehow!  This part looks a bit different.  This chest has the interestingly named "Sirius Armour", and by Sirius I mean the brightest star in the Great Dog (Canis Major) constellation. The armour is just a little bit weaker than what we already have.  The frozen theme seems to lend itself to some rather cool looking enemies (and not recolours either!). These guys are fairly resistant in general, but don't have a super strong attack, although they can cast back at us the ice dragon spell (the same one that Kabuki has).   Finally after lots of going up and down the stairs, we reach this hole in the ground. If we fall through...  ...we get to another weird looking area.  From here we take the staircase down...  ...and here we are, finally!  Let's approach.  Of course you can say also "no" here. In that case, the battle doesn't start and he just tells you how he's going to have his way with the two women. In any case, you can't finish the game without fighting him so you just have to talk to him again and start the fight anyway. Also, he really does look like an elephant, as we've been told! Not to mention those boxing gloves!  This is another one of those fights which are far less scary than they look (and despite the high HP).  So his main attack is the "body slam" which hits all party members for about 110-120 HP. It's not great, but not really the worst either. He will mostly spam that so you'll just have to keep up with the healing. Luckily, we have some powerful entire-party healing spells, so with a judicious use of the Bone Sword to refresh MP, it won't be a huge problem.  What is a little bit more of a problem is this atack you see above (cool animation!). It's him blowing "frozen bubbles out of his nose" and it deals around 100 HP damage to one party member and has a chance to put them in "frozen" status. This simply means that they cannot perform any actions. Needless to say, you very much want to dispel this quickly as having one of our party members out of action is really not going to work here. So, how do we defeat this guy? Actually pretty easily. As it turns out, he's very weak to fire. If Manjimaru spams his "divine fire" spell, it will do around 400 HP damage each time! So as long as Kabuki keeps up with healing and buffs, this is almost over before it's even begun! That's really all the strategy you need here, truly. The next few bosses will be a real test as they don't really have any obvious weaknesses like that, but for now, we are safe.   And then... things start to happen very fast! (You very much do NOT want to skip the following cutscene!)  Well now. That was rather... violent. Before we continue, a couple of notes though. First of all, on the topic of name, although I already put a note in the subtitles, it's basically pretty simple. Throughout the game, Kinu's name is writen simply as 絹 which just means "silk". However here she explains that her real name is 鬼怒, which is not really a word in Japanese, but can be understood to mean "demon's anger", written with 鬼 (demon), which is normally read as "oni", but does have "ki" as one of its possible readings, and 怒 (anger), which has "nu" as one of its readings, so together, they can also read as "kinu". Second, you have noticed that as I already mentioned, this scene is rather, shall we say, violent. As it turns out, in the PS2/Gamecube remake, this scene was seriously nerfed to completely remove all the gory parts and also most of the blood. So Kinu now holds the other woman just in some kind of magical grip and doesn't really sever her arm or anything like that. Well, just another negative point to an already not-great remake. Seriously, if you ever play this game, DO NOT play the remake. Definitely only play the original either via the emulator (either the initial PC Engine version or the ports for DS or PSP--they are all the same game version) or alternately the game is also present on the Japanese version of TurboGrafx/PC Engine Mini. Anyway, getting back to our story, Kinu has a few things to say after "defrosting" everyone.    And then she uses her magic to...  ...teleport us outside! Meanwhile the castle starts shaking like it's going to collapse. But then, Kabuki of all people decides to have his say.  He goes back into the castle.  And then, even the holy sword wakes up, and the ghost of the lady warrior Matsumushi speaks to us.  I really don't think we need quite this much convincing, so...  ...here we go.  The castle has already partially crumbled, and there are no random encounters nor poison pools any more, so it's really just a matter of walking around until you find her.  It seems Manjimaru is the last to arrive! The rest follows in a cutscene (which is another one you probably don't want to miss either).  All right! The gang is back together, and not only that, but... guess whose hands are no longer tied up with a chain! It took a long time, but Kinu is finally able to fully participate in battle, meaning that she can finally equip weapons and properly attack! Luckily, we already have in our inventory one weapon she is able to use, so we'll just equip it right now. It's our trusty Bone Sword, and it will give her +100 in attack power, which makes her about on the same level as the rest! Aren't you glad we went to the trouble of obtaining it? The less fun part is that you now have to spend time rearranging the spells back to how they were before she left, so I'll go ahead and do that and then I'll meet you outside the castle.  And like always...  ...everything returns to normal! But the ghost of Matsumushi speaks to us once again, so let's see what she has to say.  So this new technique is kind of a familiar deal, you give up your defence stat for one turn in order to increase your attack. It's a bit risky to use, of course, so you should make sure to only use it when it's the right opportunity (e.g. if you're looking to finish an enemy in fewer turns and such).  Heading back to Hiroshima...  ...we can see that there is no more ice and everything is back to normal. I will stop by the stored luggage shop and retrieve an item for Kinu which I stored there earlier today.  Namely, the Celestial Spirit Robe, which as you can see here gives her +18 in defence compared to her previous outfit. Nice. And yet, somehow there are still two more outfits to be found in the game which are better for Kinu than this one. If you talk to some of the people in Hiroshima, now they complain how the weather is too hot. I guess you truly can't please people. The lord of the castle in turn promises to build a shrine to Kinu's parents in the place where the Root Castle used to be. But as for us, we have to head to Nagato province...  ...because we still have a dark and unpleasant cave to traverse, in order to get to the seventh dark orchid.  Well, to be fair, although it's rather large, this cave looks a bit nicer than the others, honestly. We've already picked up most of good loot from here, so there's not going to be that much this time around, but let's see.  Ok, this is a bit dangerous! Buff yourself and use whatever multi target stuff you have! Because there are some reasonably strong enemies in here. I mean this one is really worth it if you survive, you get 5136 EXP and 7524 ryo, which is really a good amount for just one battle. You kind of want to aim to have your characters be on about level 70 by the time you reach the final bosses. That seems to be the optimal spot for a "balanced" run, although people actually do complete this game with challenges like "low level play", or "no spells allowed" (I don't even know how you would do it without spells because to me they are absolutely esential, but apparently it's possible).   Damselfly is a kind of an insect, similar to dragonfly and Kabuso is water based ghost type from Japanse folklore, similar to a beaver or tanuki. Probably one of the easier encounters in this cave.    As for the chests, I guess mostly what's left here is the various consumables and money to be found. Like this one here with a MP healing item (which we don't even need due to bone sword).  Very cool. They have the same name like that one spell of Kabuki's. Expectedly it can cast both the ice dragon spell on us, as well as the frozen dragon which adds freeze status to one party member! Fire spells are certainly the way to go here.   As usual we'll be going up and down in order to access various parts of the cave, so I'll just see you when we run into something interesting again.  Probably doesn't qualify as "interesting", but this chest has 22 ryo, which is a bit of a joke at this point in the game when all equipment pieces have six figure prices; luckily there's lot of good equipment to be found for free anyway, so we're good.  Oh! There's someone there.  Yeah, we're back to that situation from the early parts of the game, where a random boss would be blocking your way.  There's no dialogue or lore here, but what there is is lots of HP. There's been quite an inflation going on with boss HP amounts lately, but actually it's going to get much worse soon! This guy is called "Demonic General Vajra" and has quite an assortment of moves. He can inflict poison and confuse on your characters, so you're going to need to heal that. Also he can cast the reflect spell on himself, so that you get back half the damage you deal to him, which you should also try to dispel if you can. Apart from that he can also heal. But as for attack, he only has a normal one which deals around 100 HP to a single party member. So in the end, this is pretty survivable and is only going to take a bit long because of that HP amount. Give Manjimaru (who is more or less the main attacker at this point due to his sword techniques--in particular Yoshitsune slash is good because it crits 100% of the time) all the attack buffs you can and go to town. Really not a whole lot more can be said about this guy.   With the road now open, let's proceed through the cave.  But literally ten steps forward is another boss!  Yeah, ok, I see where this is going: almost 12,000 HP. This one is Brave Leader Asura, and this one is kind of the opposite of the last. Rather than debuffing you, he can instead cast attack and agility buffs on himself and also a spell that temporarily blocks magic damage. Again this is another somewhat nondescript boss fight: the strategy remains the same, buff yourself up to the gils and go to town. He does have an attack with will hit for 100+ HP, but it only hits one party member so easy to deal with. This one too will take a while because of high HP, but you really shouldn't be in any particular danger of losing at any point since there are no attacks which hit more than one party member.   Finally. Let's proceed.  In face we are already at the orchid base! So, uh, let's just cut it down, right?  Like the first one, this one too gets a special animation.  And then it's gone. Simple as that. There should be none left. Except, well...  ...guess who shows up!   They leave, and the whole cave starts shaking, which will presumably dislodge some rocks which whill end up blocking the exits. Nevertheless, let's try to escape anyway!  But all we can find are blocked paths like this one here.  No luck here either.  A cool location. But anyway, after lots of wandering, we finally reach this blocked hallway:  Are you surprised? Why are you surprised? Of course the ninja ladies are going to save us from an impossible situation, like they always do! The elder sister anyway has that ridiculous cannon and can easily deal with the rocks!  You know what's coming!  Yep.    I mean, is it really over? Just like that? But what about the evil god Yomi?  In any case, we can now exit the cave. But before we can do anything...  ...the Steel Castle appears from somewhere!  A frantic Hoteimaru comes outside...  Yeah, it wasn't going to be that easy. No way. But, let's go Kyoto, as he said.  While we travel, let's see what's up in the villains' lair.  Yes, the Hiba (Fireblade) willage we were told to visit after the peace is restored. Well, looks like we'll be going there a bit sooner, since this situation will need to be resolved. But in the meantime, we arrive at Kyoto.  Yeah. It's just a sea of blood now...  ...with a giant dark orchid looming over it.  Getting down on the ground, you'll find that there's nothing you can really do here. You'll also find that the original random encounters in this area have been replaced by the high-level endgame ones, which is not ideal! So, in the end, the conclusion has to be that we have to first go to the "Fireblade" vilage and see what we can learn there.  Therefore, we make our way to the northwestern part of Kibi province.  Here, there is a large structure we can enter. Not also that you have to walk here because of rocky ground. I'm not sure why exactly since you don't have to traverse a cave to get here or anything like that.  Inside looks pretty nice. Let's see what the locals (who don't appear to be human?) have to say. Sure, but how? Well, that's not helpful. Let's see what people in the other rooms will say.  What is happening here anyway? Ok, well, that's a good first step I suppose. Let's see the second guy here. Ok, gettting better! The last guy: Finally some things are starting to make sense. Orochi is a legendary serpent from Japanese mythology who has eight heads and eight tails. Below you can see a 19th century woodblock print depicting the god Susano-o slaying the serpent.  By Utagawa Kuniyoshi (歌川 国芳) - Visipix.com http://visipix.com/search/search.ph...p;ub=1&k=1, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=314856  In this room is a guy and a chest. A Hell Castle, you say. Well, it seems fitting to end it like that. Indeed, getting to Goutenmyou is QUITE a challenge, as we'll see next time. But for now, let's continue this business with the fire hammer. Before that, though, the chest contains the "Fire Festival Sword".  It's a slight upgrade for Manjimaru with +4 attack compared to his previous sword Muramasa.  Kabuki will take over Muramasa, for a +16 upgrade from his previous weapon. Not a bad deal overall!  The furthest room to the right has three more people. One of them actually just acts as an innkeeper so you can rest here. The other two have things to say. Let's talk to the first one. So, a "Dragon Magatama", huh? Magatama is a "comma" shaped object of which many were found dating from prehistoric Japan and later. They are supposed to be powerful magical objects. You have almost certainly seen one of them before, because...  ...on the picture above, we can see Maya Fey wearing it around her neck. Hm, it seems we have a couple of things to accomplish: first, obtain the Fire Hammer in Iroha temple (hopefully) and then find this Goutenmyou guy and take his magatama. But before that, there's one more room to explore in this building.  Ah, another place with momuments to all seven old Fire Heroes. And three people to talk to (one of them is not currently visible on the screenshot). So let's talk to the first one. Yeah, it seems other than possibly the hammer, we have an issue with the other two conditions... Ah, I'm sure we'll work out something. Although as for a "holy place", the Fire Clan capital city we've heard about sounds promising. For now, let's talk to the second guy. Oh, I'm sure dragon magatama will take care of that one! I know exactly which sword you mean. But we'll deal with that next time, for now let's just finish off by sorting out the Fire Hammer situation, as that's relatively quick(-ish) to do. But before that, you can actually examine the Fire Heroes statues and you get a cute nickname that each of them was known during the their life a millennium ago. So here they are (in order in which we obtained their swords): Benimaru, the Lion King Myouin, the Crow Onnahiko, the Fire Giant Yoshitsune, the Prince of Water Shizuka, the Fireblade Queen Saburou, the Firebrand from Naniwa Matsumushi, the Tiger Lily of Tragic Love Very cool, I like this a lot. I have prepared something a bit related to this at the end in the extra section.  For now, we head a bit north...  ...where the Iroha temple stands.  We are greeted again by statues of Shizuka...  ...but, as we already heard, the furnace has definitely seen better days. Well, let's just go and find the hammer at least.  Some unique enemies do appear in here. These ones are pretty generic although the daydreams can consume their companions to become stronger so be careful of that.    Here you can find these staircases in corners.  They just all lead to the upper floor, so you can take either of them to get upstairs, it makes no difference.  Oh, of course. Let me guess, the hammer is in that room you're guarding, right? But there's a big square hole in front of you, so how do we approach you without falling in? Believe it or not... it's time for block pushing puzzles! Notice that right next to where the party is standing there is a big square block, exactly the size of that hole. There's actually a couple more holes (and a suitable number of blocks) that you can use to reach a few items in chests. But that's pretty much it.  Push the block in, and create a path!  This chest has one of those "full recovery for the entire party" items. We'll save that for a different upcoming boss, where it will surely be needed.  The other blocks are just used to access the chests, like this one here. It has a consumable item (in this case the "Lucky Ball" which gives you randomly a variety of effects when using it in battle). The final chest, though...  The final spell in the game is found here. It causes a lightning attack on all enemies. A forge seems a bit of a weird place to find a lightning based spell, but here we are. That's everything you can find here, so...  ...on to the boss fight!  So this is another boss which doesn't have any dialogue/lore associated (the last part of the game is a bit of a boss gauntlet and there are quite a few of this kind before we get into the real final fights which are all pretty awesome). His name is Sanzou Manta, where Sanzou is Japanese Buddhist equivalent of the river Styx. But anyway, this fight is a little bit tedious. This guy's attack power is not enough to cause significant concern, however he has really high defence stat, and combined with the high HP, means that you'll be whittling him down fairly slowly. Not to mention that he can buff himself to increase his defence further by about 20%, so that can get a bit annoying. Otherwise, he has a normal attack where he hits one character with his club, which he will sometimes randomly do twice. Sometimes he'll cast another spell which completely nullifies magic attacks instead. In both of these cases you can try to dispel or just wait it out, as you prefer. There is really not much I can say about this guy!   Defeating the boss opens the way into the back room. Going past this staircase...  ...all the way in the back, we find another one leading down.  Ah, this looks promising.  ...but it's not the hammer. But it's still good, because this is a piece of equipment for Kinu...  ...which ups her agility by 12 points. Neat.  All right, let's go back and head up this other staircase.  Actually now that I think about it, this looks more promising.  Ah, there we go. Apart from being a "key item", Fire Hammer is also a regular weapon that you can use, but it's not super strong, so it doesn't help us in that way right now. The other chest has another dagger weapon for Kinu, but it way weaker than the bone sword she already has, so...  Well, ok. We got the first condition fulfilled out of the three: we have obtained the fire hammer. Next time, we'll take care of the remaining two and finish this whole fight off once and for all! Take care, and see you next time in the final episode! It was a very VERY long journey, but it's time for it to come to an end!  Since today was all about the seven Fire Heroes, here is some very cool concept art of all of them. None of this appears in the game in any way except briefly in that one flashback sequence at the very beginning of the game. So, here they are.  BENIMARU  CROW  YOSHITSUNE  ONNAHIKO  SHIZUKA  SABUROU  MATSUMUSHI And here is a concept art of their seven swords (two of which are not actually even swords!), it also only appears in the one sequence at the start of the game:  (The weapons in order from left: Onnahiko, Benimaru, Matsumushi, Shizuka, Yoshitsune, Crow, Saburou.)
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Nov 14, 2023 23:58
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That was a gory goddamn cutscene, I love it, though, really well-executed!
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Nov 15, 2023 15:07
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I wonder if any of the artists for this game worked on the og Sailor Moon anime. For some reason, those two really remind me of the villain designs from the first series.
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Nov 15, 2023 15:52
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yeah that is a surprisingly *brutal* cutscene - even with all the darker stuff you really didn't see that kind of blood and explicit maiming (Hell you could see the woman's *bone* from her ripped off arm) until now.
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Nov 15, 2023 16:23
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The "Kinu unleashes her inner demon" scene really delivered, the only shame is those bits when her face is overlaid with a demonic one passed too quickly for me.
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Nov 15, 2023 17:38
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 So lots of things happened last time, but the important parts are that Kinu recovered her demonic strength, we defeated the Silver Castle and got the seventh holy sword, which defeated the seventh dark orchid. Of course, only to then find out that there is a giant eighth one blooming in Kyoto, which, by the way, has been reduced to a pool of blood. So, uh, yeah. Currently we are on a quest to forge a new holy sword, which requires a fire hammer (already obtained), a place to do the forging and a sword originally forged by the Fire Clan in order to re-forge it into a holy sword. So let's just continue with that!  Here are our heroes, leaving Iroha Temple, just after obtaining the fire hammer!  Back in "Fireblade" vilage, this guy here mentioned that Goutenmyou, a super strong Root Clan warrior, may be reached through a cave, east of the village. He's important because he has the "dragon magatama", which is apparently the key to unlocking the long disappeared Fire Clan capital city.  Indeed, very close to the east, we find a cave entrance. It's interesting to note that by going into this cave, we are entering a very long section of the game where there is no opportunity to save. You'll see what I mean as we go through it, but I guess it must have been quite rough back in the day when people were playing this without an opportunity to use anything like save states. So, let's go in.  Well, it's a cave.  Expectedly, this being an endgame area, there are some reasonably strong enemies to be found. The name of this guy is a bit of a chore to say without stumbling over it, but it's just another of ghosts/youkai from Japanese foklore. Its main characteric is that its body is cut into two pieces, which is also approximately what its name means. Pretty annoying because it can inflict poison and paralysis on party members.   It's another large cave, where you have figure out the right way around it to get to the other side.  Very cool design, it seems like all these "ice" enemies are relly awesome looking. This one is fairly strong (can cast a powerful spell that does over 200 HP damage to one party member!), but at least you can only get a maximum of two at a time. Simply because more than that wouldn't fit on the screen! As is often the case with ice enemies, though, it's really vulnerable to fire, so Manjimaru can cast divine flame for about 400 HP in damage to the enemy!   There are various chests around, but mostly consumables and money. And as is typical for JRPGs of this time, we really have way more money than we know what to do with a this point. I would guess probably close about a million Incidentally, the biggest amount of money you can have in this game is 1,999,998 ryo: 999,999 on your person and also an additional 999,999 in storage. Again, way more than you need. Anyway, let's keep going. Since most of the cave looks the same, I'll only point out the interesting parts.  These water pools will definitely damage you if you walk on them...  ...so you will have to cast a spell that lets you walk over them if you want that chest! Spoiler alert: it's not worth it; it only contains a MP restore item which restores around 20 MP to one character!  Obviously, going through here will involve also finding the right combination of up and down stairs to take!  Some of the chests even trigger a random battle, like this one here.  And here, there is straight up no way forward unless you step into the muck. But you do want to go here, because...  This chest contains the "Fire Festival Spear", which is a nice weapon for Kabuki. It has the same attack power as the sword Kabuki took over from Manjimaru last time. But if you didn't find the sword, then it can be useful to get this here instead.  Uhhh. When the enemies are small in size then you have the chance of situations like these... Although in this case the enemies are surprisingly weak so even like this, are not a super-serious threat. Anyway, Mizuchi (蛟) is a serpent/dragon-like creature from Japanese (and Chinese too) mythology.   This chest has a return stone which as you'll recall, allows you to teleport out of the dungeon. We are not in fact going to need it.  In the end, after a good amount of wandering through the cave...  ...we find ourselves back outside. But, I hear you ask, what have we reached here? Is there a town, or a castle, or something...?  There is indeed. Another cave entrance that you can see there. We're surrounded by mountains, and there are no towns or villages, so the only way to go is to enter the second cave. You can't teleport out of there to save, since there's no nearby town you can teleport back to! This is what I was talking about before, that this is going to be a very long section with no way to save. There is one small mercy. That blue pool there refreshes your HP and MP (for all characters). So there's that, at least. Let's just check the map quickly to get an idea...  So here you can see where we are and that it's completely surrounded by mountains. The land is also rocky, so you can't land the Steel Castle either. The original entrance to the first cave was all the way to the west, where that big red secion is. Anyway, we have to continue our journey, so into the next cave we go!  More navigating around the cave...  I actually quite literally don't even want to know. Both of these are fairly strong and can inflict status effects and even steal your money (but luckily, there isn't really anything important to buy at this point, so...).    After some more walking (luckily this cave is a bit smaller than the other), we start to see some weird stuff.  What actually is this? There doesn't seem to be a way in or anything.  Well, this does look like an entrance, but it's not open anyway. Well, no matter. We'll keep going.  Obviously, poisonous pools are still a thing.  But it does lead to this spot. One of the chest has a "Flower Wreath Crown", which is an equipment piece for Kinu.  It's a +2 in defence compared to her previous Moon Helmet that she's been wearing for about half the game at this point (in case you forgot, the Moon Helmet came from the first red chest we defeated, so it's been a while)! It's the second strongest headpiece for Kinu, but we'll be getting the strongest one fairly soon. I actually forgot to do it here, but you can hand over the Moon Helmet to Kabuki or Manjimaru to wear as it is the strongest helmet for either of them.  Of course, still some new enemies. The word "long armed" (手長) in Japanese also has a meaning of "kleptomaniac", so this enemy will of course steal your items or unequip your weapons or armour.   Finally, after a while, we reach another of these parts (technically this just the upper floor from where we were earlier).  Oh. You're here? Well, I guess that means we're going in the right direction then.   Well, the staircase beckons us. And yes, this is still a third dungeon in a row we'll have to traverse without being able to save the game (and this one contains a hard boss fight too). This is actually pretty insane. If you die anywhere along the way, you really do have to start again back at the Fireblade village!  As a show of mercy, there is at least this healing pool over in the corner which allows you to refresh your HP and MP before continuing. Better than nothing, I guess.  Well, all right then. Let's see what this is.  HELL CASTLE But of course. I mean, what else. Well, at least the magatama should be here.  Inside, it doesn't look too great. That's lava, by the way. Don't walk on lava.  This is one of the worst enemy combinations here. First of all, notice how they are all different, meaning it will be difficult to attack them as most of the multi-target attacks operate on groups of same enemies, rather than "all enemies" generally. They have some bad attacks like a hit that always crits, or acting twice per turn or even as a final insult, the ability to steal your money or even remove your equipment. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's not that you will not survive this, because you most likely will, it's just that this particular enemy combination is quite a drain on resources as you'll very definitely need to heal after and such.     Otherwise, traversing this castle is the same as most of the others. That's a poison pool, by the way. Don't walk on poison pools!  It has a couple of floors to go up and down on! At least the random encounter rate here is quite reasonable, especially compared to the Silver Castle which was a bit excessive in that regard!  We go up! Again, I'm not covering the traversal in great detail as we've already seen this kind of stuff multiple times in this game.  Here you can see how we are supposed to be inside that structure we previously saw only from the outside.  Another pretty strong enemy combination here. They don't have any real special attacks, but they do have a crazy high defence and decently high attack. However, if you buff your defence, you should be fine here. Also, fire works well on the mountain demon.    An interesting little area!  The chests around this dungeon have mostly various recovery items.  Although this one has one of those full recovery/revive items. You should definitely hold on to those.  There is a curious thing there on the wall, but there's nothing we can do with it. Hmmm.  You might be thinking, what could possibly be in that chest in the middle of lava? As it turns out, just a bone elixir. It recovers 50% of one characters MP, exactly the same as the Bone Sword!  In the end, we get to this point here.  Well then. It's pretty clearly a magatama behind him there, so... looks like it's a fight! This boss actually has a short cutscene by way of an introduction!  Right. Ok.  So, Goutenmyou. As you can see, again lots of HP and super high defence stat, so physical attacks are not going to do great here.  First of all, normal attack. Does around 90 HP damage to one party member, so not too much to worry about there.  The animation looks cool, but this "frenzy dance" is just the normal attack which hits twice instead of once. Also you will be forgiven if you get a Malenia flashback here for a bit!  This is his worst attack: "hellfire". It does round 120-130 HP damage to all party members. Which is kind of not horrible, but you do need to be careful as he will happily do this repeatedly on consecutive turns. Therefore after this attack, healing really has to take priority just in case he ends up doing it again in the next turn. So probably the quickest way to defeat this guy is to just use the so-called "castle wall" strategy on Manjimaru. It involves Manjimaru attacking with his "Shizuka slash" ability, while protected by the castle wall spell. First of all, as you might recall, "Shizuka slash" is the ability where you trade blows with the enemy for 3-5 times, so Manjimaru gets counterattacked after each of his attacks. Also, the castle wall spell negates all physical damage for a few turns. So you can see that these two make a bit of a "broken" combination: protect Manjimaru with castle wall (so that the counterattacks don't do any damage) and then use Shizuka slash and he can do between 300 and 750 HP damage in one turn, since one hit when fully buffed does around 150. There's no real need to attack with other characters at all, they should just be casting buff spells and healing. Kabuki should always maintain attack, defence and agility boosts on the party, while Kinu should use "king's power" on Manjimaru for an even bigger attack boost (they stack) and also of course try to maintain "castle wall" on him. Gokuraku should probably take over the Bone Sword from Kinu for the time beeing so he can be the one to keep refreshing everybody else's MP! If "castle wall" expires at some point before Kinu can recast it, Manjimaru can at least use "Yoshitsune slash" for a guaranteed critical hit. So in the end, not quite as bas as it may look at first, but again due to high HP this will take a little while.   Well then.  I guess we'll just take this then. Manjimaru obtained the Dragon Magatama! As it turns out it was a load-bearing item, as now the whole castle starts rumbling and shaking!  Yeah, things are falling apart, I guess we should make our way out!  There's no more poison, lava, or even random encounters, so it's just a matter of figuring out a way out of here.  But, as the last time when we needed help finding our way out of a cave, we again run into our ninja friends, or at least one of them!  She leads us forward past that strange device we saw there on the wall earlier...  But then...    Well, farewell, friend. You did get us out of some pretty bad situations. Also, I guess now we know what that device in the wall was.  We do have to continue forward, though.  Ah. Looks like all three of them are here.  She starts leading us to the exit, but then...  ...a whole bunch of monsters show up!  She starts fighting them, but they just keep coming.   She makes a suicide attack...  Unfortunate, but as before... we have to move on.  After some more walking around, we finally reach the entrance, where the last ninja sister awaits us.   The whole cave starts shaking even more!  We hurry up out of here. She is burried by the falling rubble.  All that's left is her cannon and a pool of blood seeping through.   Things are getting very, very bad, clearly. But, as for us, we got here we what we needed (but at what cost) and really have to leave now before something happens to us to. Luckily from here you can use either the return stone or the spell that teleports you out of a dungeon.  Incredibly, we're finally back out. If you managed to do all of that without getting KOd, NOW YOU CAN FINALLY GO AND SAVE YOUR GAME! Like I said, this part of the game is pretty insane how long (and how difficult) it goes without being able to save--as you will recall, saving in this game can be done only when you rest at the inn!
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Nov 23, 2023 01:15
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 We shall take moment to rest on the way, but for us, we now have two out of the three components that are needed for the new holy sword. Well almost, we still need to use the magatama to review the Fire Clan capital. The one component we're missing is a sword that can be forged into the new sword. Nevertheless, let's head to where the Fire Clan capital is supposed to have been, and see if we can find any more information. As you will recall, we learned recently that the Fire Capital was sunk into Lake Biwa. The lake happens to be in Oomi province, so let's head over there.  Conveniently, we're right next to a village, so we'll stop here to refresh ourselves first.  And then, let's see where shall we go...?  Oh, hey, check this out. There's the boat we used way back when to cross the lake back when it was all red and bloody!  So, hey, remember this place? Yeah, last time we were here, we were told to come back much, much later. So let's have a look and see what happens now.   Talking to the strange light... Right, so, which sword is it then to serve as basis? It may or may not be obvious, but none of the equipment which we used throughout the game was made by the Fire Clan. It was just "normal" equipment. Well, except one. And it's been a long time since we've got it, and it's just been sitting in storage all this time. Recall, at the very beginning of the game, Manjimaru's mother gave to him the sword of his late father, who was also a Fire Clan member. That sword didn't have a particularly high attack stat, so we just left it in storage and continued on with our journey. Well, now the time has finally come to take it out of there and forge it into something awesome! So, let's just head over to the nearby storage service and retrieve it.  Here it is: The Heirloom Sword. Its attack power is only 19, so we haven't used it in a long time. Reforging will, strictly speaking, not actually change this value, i.e it will stay at 19, but... well, you'll see shortly Anyway, now that we have this, let's return to the strange light and talk to it again.  We actually have to use the magatama as an item from our inventory! There is a gentle light enveloping everybody. Manjimaru puts his hand on the magatama. Kabuki, Gokuraku and Kinu also put their hands on the magatama. And then...  Cool.  Turns out, that building was just the top of a tall tower!  The light guides us towards a staircase down...  ...and down...  ...and down...  ...through several more floors...  ..until we finally reach the bottom of this building. The light heads outside, but before we do that, we should note that we find ourselves in a large hall with a whole bunch of chests lying around. Before it goes outside, the light tells us. In a moment. First we need to check the chests here. In fact the chests contain a whole load of powerful equipment, some of which is actually better than what we already! But there's so much stuff here that we'll have to do it in two turns due to limited free space in our inventory. So we'll check out a few, and then head out to a nearby village to sell/store extra stuff and then we'll come back here (this is not a point of no return--you can leave this place and come back as you please). Out of the weapons we won't use you find here stuff like: The Sword of Amaterasu (for Kinu, but attack power is only 60 compared to Bone Sword's 100--Bone Sword is the strongest weapon she can equip) or Flying Dragon Shoes for Manjimaru which are also slightly worse than the shoes for him we got way back when in a red chest! As for the other stuff, for now, we'll equip the following:  Blaze Leather Sandals for Kabuki, giving a further +7 in agility.  Peacock Helmet for Kabuki, giving a +11 in defence.  Asuka Shoes for Kinu, it's only +2 in agility compared to previous, but still these are the best shoes for her.  Bishamon Armour, the best armour for Gokuraku, with +3 compared to Chiyo's Armour. Bishamon is a kind of a Buddhist deity.  Light Ribbon, the best headpiece for Kinu with +3 more defence.  There's still more stuff here, but our inventory is just completely full, so we'll head out for a bit to put that stuff in storage.  It looks quite ancient outside...  Down here you can just exit back to the map.  Like so.  Checking out the map, we can see that there is now a big mass of land where there used to be the middle part of Lake Biwa. Coming back to the Fire capital...  ...there are still a couple of buildings outside that we can access!  Oh no, more chests! Here we find more equipment, like...  Blaze Armour, the best armour for Manjimaru with a further +4 in defence.  The Sun Robe, the best armour for Kinu, with an insane +19 in defence from previous!  Kusanagi Sword for Kabuki (the best weapon for him), with +2 attack compared to previous. Kusanagi sword (or "the grass-cutting sword") is a legendary sword and one of the three imperial regalia of Japan. Apparently it dates from the 12th century, but mostly everything about it is shrouded in secrecy. It is sometimes a part of ceremonies, most recently in 2019 during the ascension to the throne of the current Japanese emperor, but even then, it's kept under wraps due to its sacred nature, so mostly it's never really been seen, or at least not any time recently. But we get to use it in the game!  Sword of the Immovable, for Gokuraku with a +11 increase in attack power. "The Immovable", or Acala, is another Buddhist deity. And that's about it for equipment upgrades! So, now, we're almost ready to go into the final part of this whole journey, so before that, let's again take a short break to check out an optional extra! First of all, again it's been a long time, but you may recall that the lord of Kanazawa promised us that if we help him, he will carve the face of the person who helped him into the side of the mountain. In fact that was the reason for Kabuki to leave our party for quite a long while, back then. So if we head back to Echizen province...  Just outside of Kanazawa...  ... you find this! So apparently the lord kept his word!  All right, now back to here since we do want to get a move on.  The spirit is waiting for us over here. So we head inside.  You do have to equip it as a weapon temporarily.  Ok, well, now you're scaring me. Exactly what is going to happen here?  The fire comes blazing out of the forge... We actually need to use the action button here ourselves to forge the sword! And as we keep doing it repeatedly... The sword's attack power has increased to 23! Manjimaru's HP is 390! The sword's attack power has increased to 27! Manjimaru's HP is 386! The sword's attack power has increased to 31! Manjimaru's HP is 382! The sword's attack power has increased to 35! Manjimaru's HP is 378! Huh. We are literally transferring our own life force into the sword. But we have to keep going. The sword's attack power has increased to 39! Manjimaru's HP is 374! The sword's attack power has increased to 43! Manjimaru's HP is 370! The sword's attack power has increased to 47! Manjimaru's HP is 366! And so on it goes, until... The sword's attack power has increased to 391! Manjimaru's HP is 22! The sword's attack power has increased to 395! Manjimaru's HP is 18! The sword's attack power has increased to 399! Manjimaru's HP is 14! The sword's attack power has increased to 403! Manjimaru's HP is 10! The sword's attack power has increased to 407! Manjimaru's HP is 6! The sword's attack power has increased to 411! Manjimaru's HP is 2!   Manjimaru forged the Grand Shrine holy sword! Manjimaru learned the "double swastika slash" technique! Well, that was a bit scary. But it's now done at least. Of course, don't forget to actually equip the sword. Unlike the previous holy swords which had low attack value (and which you did not need to specifically equip, just have in your inventory), this one can and should be used as a proper weapon!  Well now. As you can see this sword has attack power of 413 which is, oh, about +283 compared to the his previous Fire Festival Sword at 130 (on the screenshot he has the Fire Hammer equipped because of the forging). So that sounds very good, and it is, but there is a small caveat. The attack power of this sword is... literally your HP value. Well, to be exact, it's 19 plus your current HP value (the 19 comes from the original power of the sword before reforging). So, uh, you're going to need to keep your HP high to maintain this high attack power of the sword. So that whole thing about pouring our life force into the sword was actually real and not just talk. Additionally, as you saw there, Manjimaru learned the "double swastika slash" sword technique. This one is also intersting and does have its uses. It allows you to make an attack of greatly increased power, but at the cost of half your maximum HP. The increase in attack power is quite substantial, so with a little bit of planning (did anybody say "castle wall"?), this is very much worth using. For once, the "ultimate" attack in a RPG game is not in fact useless! So I think this whole forging sequence was pretty cool, but we do need to keep going. So let's head back outside.  Here we discover several more spirits waiting for us. They have words of encouragement.  After all this, we head outside.  Again, Hoteimaru appears with the Steel Castle!   We seem to be saying this a lot lately, but... farewell, friend. You really helped us out on this journey. There is truly only one thing left to do. Go in there and... kill a god. But of course. What else.  On the way in...  ...we discover that the enemies which used to be here have been replaced by much (much) stronger ones! Just look at that defence stat. But with Manjimaru's new sword, this works out not too bad.   Welcome to the... uh, inside. This place is officially called "The Flower Palace". The Flower Palace was a real (albeit not quite as sinister) place in Kyoto (dating from 14th century), but almost nothing of it still stands today. However here is a early 15th century painting of what it looked like back in the day:   Before we proceed...  Yeah! Let's go!  Although it looks like a cave initially, actually it's more like a palace inside.  It's not really a maze as there are not really any corridors.  There are some very strong random encounters here. This is one of the less strong actually, even if he will always attack all party members, but the attack stat is not super high. But don't ask me to explain this name, though.   Mostly, you want to be finding staircases leading deeper in, like this one.  On some floors, there will be chests, mostly containing various consumables to help you restock. Some chests will spring a random battle on you, though, so be careful.  Undulating gravy. What can one even say? Still, maybe the easiest enemy around here. He can poison you, which is annoying.   This guy is a different story. He will casually hit you for like 150 HP in one atack.   Nurarihyon is, as you can imagine, yet antoher from the repertoire of Japanese youkai, this one also known as "monster that cannot be caught"! Although it has only an ordinary attacks it has a rather large repertoire of buffs and debuffs that it can use--it usually doesn't live long enough for that.  Here is a ca. 1700 depiction of this monster, and as you can see, it mostly looks the same as the one in the game:  By Brigham Young University - https://archive.org/details/bakemonozukushie00, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74833225  Walking past here, you can actually see the orchid, uh, stalk.  We, of course, need to get to the bottom of it.  And further.  You know like the paper sliding screen used as a door in traditional Japanese houses!   How deep does this thing go anyway?  I mean it's a combination of a dog and a demon, so...   Yes, it still keeps going.  The floors are getting small, so we have to be near the end.  On the next floor, stepping through here...  ...leads to a double-team boss battle. These are "Destroyer King Raga" (left) and "Destroyer King Raja" (right). That's a lot of HP, but their stats are not otherwise outrageous by any stretch. Raga has higher attack but low defence, while Raja is the opposite. Therefore, start first with Raga as he also has lower HP and will be defeated much quicker than the other one. They don't actually have a large repertoire of actions and is mostly the same between them. There is the normal attack (which can also sometimes happen twice in one turn), the ability to put one party member into a frozen state, and Raga can also block magic attacks for a few turns, whereas Raja will block physical attacks ("castle wall"). That's pretty much it. Yeah, so not really much to say here. Here really at least with Raga, the whole party can attack and will be doing reasonable damage because of low defence, so just go all out. With Raja, you can use Manjimaru's sword techniques while the rest of the party is buffing and healing.   After this, we can move on and take that staircase down!  We must be getting near the end, right?  It's very tight here.  Well now, I would say we have reached our destina--  Ah, of course.  For good measure, we get another tag team boss trying to stop us! It's the last one, though. After this there's just the actual final boss gauntlet left. These friendly guys are: The Avici Lion (left) and The Screaming Lion (right)! "Avici" here is a Buddhist expression that means the eight level of hell (the most difficult one). As for the bosses, the one on the left is a little weaker (but is faster), and the one on the right is a little stronger (but is slower). The difference in stats in them is really not huge, so they are pretty similar, although I guess it does makes sense to start on the left again. The guy on the left can cast a strong lightning spell, whereas the guy on the right can cast a powerful fire spell (I guess it matches their colours) and in addition to a normal attack they can both use the equivalent of "Shizuka slash" techinique, i.e. the one where you trade blows 3-5 times (it does under 100 HP ber hit or even under 50 with defence buff, so mostly they will come out worse at the end of this attack!).   But don't worry. We have some real challenges in front of us now!   Thank you for the words of encouragement. Let's head through the door now.  Are these the people of Kyoto? It must be, I suppose they were taken to feed Yomi's energy. Also, we are definitely not going to be fighting Yomi just yet, because...  ...one last time, we're met with the three sages!  Did they... Did they literally combine themselves into one huge monster?  Ah well, let's just approach!  The game helpfully provides a closeup...   ...but after that, it's definitely boss time! From this point on, there's nothing but boss fights to the end of the game! So this guy's name is "Mechanical Beast DEDEBE" where DEDEBE is just a concatenation of the first letters of the three sages' names! Also all the bosses which remain, including this one, have unique music to accompany the fight, and they are all extremely awesome, so I highly recommend listening to them! The repertoire of attacks here is actually surprisingly small, but quite dangerous!  First we have the regular attack which hits one person for around 160 HP damage (or as you can see above, less with defence buffs). This one is not so bad.  Then you have this, where DEDEBE "shoots a pale blue light" at one character. It will do about 120 HP damage plus put said character into "frozen" status most of the time.  Or this, where DEDEBE "showers you with huge fire". This one is very bad as it will do around 200 HP damage to each party member, regardless of defence buffs.  Or this one, where DEDEBE vomits thick mucus at one party member. This will result in that character's defence dropping by about 50 points (although it does no damage). So the best part in all of this is that he will sometimes do the previous three attacks all together in one turn! That's fun. But anyway, what do you do? Well, I guess more or less the same strategy like for the last big boss. He has extremely high defence, so ordinary attacks really won't do much here. Therefore we go again with Manjimaru's sword techinques with the rest of the party providing support. No attacks from DEDEBE will outright kill you, so as long as you keep properly healed (distribute the healing spells across Kinu and Kabuki!) you should be fine. With Manjimaru, just use Shizuka slash (around 180 HP per hit) while protected with Castle wall. Kinu or Kabuki will heal the frozen status if it happens, and otherwise just keep recasting buffs as they expire. So this should go pretty ok like that.  Yeah, yeah.   Yes, let's. As a side note, you can actually leave the dungeon to go back out and refresh/restock at this point if you need to do so. This is the last chance to do so, as from this point on if you continue you are locked in until the end of the game. It's interesting that the point of no return cames so incredibly late, the whole "final dungeon" still lets you go back out if you want! Anyway, as Kabuki suggested, let's just cut this thing down.  Not... quite what I was expecting to happen!   So this is "Yomi (Larva)" which just emerged from whatever that thing is. As you can imagine, this, uh, creature is not very talkative so we go straight into the fight. Yes, I know, that HP amounts looks very scary. But there are helpful circumstances here, actually. First of all, kind of logically, this boss has very low defence stat so Manjimaru's sword techniques will be doing TONS of damage. Also, the boss will often just skip a turn with a comment like "Yomi is looking at XXX" or similar. So it's not that bad. I mean, it's bad, but just not THAT bad. Why is it bad? If you look at the stats below, this guy has attack power almost double that of DEDEBE! Of course, the calculation is not linear, however... he also has the ability to charge up his attack for double damage (and he will often do exactly this)! Luckily, this attack only hits one character, although you can't actually survive it, because it deals around 450 HP damage (which is more than max HP of any of our characters). So, although the strategy of using Manjimaru as the main attacker while buffed is still very much valid, we're going to need something extra here. One option that I found works reasonably well is to use Kinu's summoning spells. If you summon the three red shadows, if you recall, you can actually issue them commands. Therefore, have them protect the tree party members other than Manjimaru (in this game you can also defend another party member when you use the "defend" command), whereas Manjimaru should still have castle wall on most of the time. It may happen that Manjimaru's castle wall expires, but this is not as big of a problem as it seems, because you will get a warning about the double attack in boss's previous turn, so you'll have time to either re-cast it or to prepare in some other way (e.g. one of the other party members may have to protect him--they will die as a result of this, but that's why I told you to hoard those revival items; this is the boss fight you want to save them for!). Yomi Larva will sometimes also do a different attack which hits everybody for about 200 HP, but that one is of course not really an issue. Mostly casting defence buffs is probably a waste of time here as I'm pretty sure that both of these attacks simply ignore defence; the big one certainly does. Otherwise, we employ the proven strategy of buffed/protected Manjimaru using either Shizuka slash or Double Swastika slash. With Shizuka slash, he will do 3-5 hits of around 450 HP each when properly buffed, and with Double Swastika slash around 1500 HP. So it's a matter of weighing it out. With Shizuka slash as long as you have Castle wall, you won't need to heal, but the danger is that some hits might miss you will do less damage (in extreme case they might all miss), but with Double swastika you have less maximum damage, but it doesn't miss and also you have to heal up afterwards. So it's mostly a matter of what you prefer. I would say, there is also one more option here, which is to use Kabuki's "Swearwords" ability to redirect all attacks to him and then protect just him, but I don't use this as then you have to waste a turn from Kabuki every few turns to cast it again which he could be using for other things. And the ability might miss too, so then you have to do it again in the next turn. So that's not really perfect either. So as you can see, the huge HP pool doesn't make this quite as bad as it could have been, but it's still going to take a little while.  Of course, when defeated, there's no dialogue either. Instead, this happens.  And then, of course...   ...it's time for the final boss, Yomi! You cannot go out to save inbetween these two fights, so you need to be able to do them together without dying! This also means that near the end of the larva fight you might want to try to use a few turns to refresh your HP and MP, because you'll be starting this fight with whatever you had left at the end of the last one! At first you might be relieved by the lower HP, and Yomi even has lower attack stat than the larva, plus he doesn't do that double charged attack either. He does, however, have more than triple the defence stat than larva and is also faster and doesn't skip half the turns! In addition his attacks all hit the entire party and will often attack twice per turn. So, uh, yeah. His normal attacks are lightning-based and thus not subject to damage reduction. However, when using Shizuka slash, the counterattack will always count as physical, so Castle wall will work for those fine. Surprisingly, though, we won't actually need to use Castle wall here, because there is this one weird trick. But more on that in a moment!  This is the less damaging of the two attacks ("deadly electric shock"), will do around 120-ish HP to each party member.  This is the more damaging of the two ("Yomi turns his hatred into lightning") and does around 200 HP damage to each party member. In addition to this, he also has the ability to lower the attack power of one party member. So, what to do? Really simple. Just cast Kabuki's Frozen dragon. This boss really seems to have very little resistance to it and it will land probably around 80-90% of the time.  This will in fact put Yomi into "frozen" state where he cannot act. This has two implications: first of all, he of course cannot counterattack Manjimaru's Shizuka slash, and second, he cannot dodge, so all attacks will always land. Of course, you should still be careful, because Yomi will still sometimes sneak in a turn in between being frozen, but as we've already seen, his attaks are survivable so just make sure you're healed before he becomes unfrozen and you will be fine. The main reason for doing it like this is because due to the fact that his attacks always hit everybody, it CAN become a bit hard to keep up with the healing and everything else, so if you use THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK, you can make life a lot easier for yourself.   So, in the old JRPG tradition, we've defeated god! But... what happens now? Well, the game helpfully has a long and detailed final cutscene in which everything is shown, so let's have a look! Warning: There is white flashing during the first half of this video. If you are affected by photosensitivity it may be a good idea to watch with lowered brightness. Anyway, let's enjoy the ending!  And this, my friends, is how you write a satisfying ending to your game. I really don't think this could have ended in a nicer way than how it did. A final weird note, this boss fight still gives money and EXP, even though the game ends immediately after and there's no option to reload your save into some sort of "post-game", since, well, there's no "post-game" here to begin with! Also, in the final bit of the scene note how along with Manjimaru all the other seven Fire Heroes from the original conflice 1000 years ago are also standing! Very cool. In any case, this is basically it for this game. I have tried to show as much as possible of it, although as you saw, it's pretty huge and you can even go back and talk to the "citizens" after certain events, but mostly they just encourage you on or say thanks, so I generally skipped those parts in order to keep things moving. In th end, it was fun for me to play (the game is actually really fun to play and has mostly good balance of difficulty throughout), and hopefully for you too, and thank you for reading this far! I hope I was able to show at least a little bit why this game was so popular back in 1992 and why it remains popular to this day. While it's hardly flawless, it does so many things right and is so well written that it's easy to forgive the flaws. As for the flaws, for one, I wish there was a bit more of actual interaction between our party members, and in general the character development was kept to a minimum during large part of the game, however there were still moments here and there where individual characters got to shine for a bit. Other than that, I really think that this is a pretty awesome game (especially when considering how old it is!). As mentioned, I really thought the quality of the writing in general was high, I guess a lot of that is thanks to Masuda Shoji--if you followed my previous Linda Cube let's play, you can definitely see some of the same touches in this game in a slightly less developed form (not only in writing, but also in the battle system and a few other things). Other than that, I really thought that the "road trip" style structure was interesting and actually worked well to not overwhelm the player with the sheer size of the world, instead allowing to focus on one part of it at a time. Another thing I found enjoyable were the (comedic) villain characters, especially the likes of Kikugorou and others. As for the technical aspects, they are not bad at all, especially considering the platform. The graphics really do make the most of what was possible on PC Engine and, well, who can say anything but praise about the huge boss sprites and their funky attack animations--just stellar work all around. Speaking of which, I just want to again give a special shout-out to the person(s) who came up with a couple of hundred names for all the random encounter enemies (we probably missed a couple here and there, but we did get to see most of them over the course of the game!). Of course, the music too is fantastic, with main themes composed by none other than Joe Hisaishi, but honestly most of the rest is pretty much on the same level. During gameplay, while most of the music is some variation of MIDI kind of thing, the main themes are actually played in high quality versions as Redbook CD Audio. Finally, for those not super familiar with Japanese history and folklore/mythology, this game can even serve as bit an edutainment kind of thing, which is hardly the worst thing in the world. I hope you enjoyed my "translation notes" and that they didn't cross into "keikaku means plan" territory! But anyway, enough rambling, thank you again for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it. Oh, right... before I go, I guess I should mention... We're not actually done in this thread, because there is this thing that exists:  Tengai Makyou III? I mean... not exactly, but... kind of? Anyway, more on that next time. Until then, take care!
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Nov 23, 2023 01:16
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Well, I was surprised by that end, with what was coming up to it, I expected it to be notably... darker. Because goddamn I know that most jRPG's have some, uh, killy moments, but goddamn that was like putting the cast through a meat grinder.
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Nov 23, 2023 02:01
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I haven't watched the very final cutscene yet, but this whole LP was a trip. You can definitely see the roots (no pun intended) for what comes in Lindaa Cubed, and a lot of the almost absurdist humor shines in both. Those final two dungeons though... did the director just decide there wasn't enougn death and decided to crank the dial up to 11? I'm looking forward to your next LP.
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Nov 23, 2023 05:19
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That voice on Yomi cracked me up--it's unmistakably Shuichi Ikeda, aka Char from Gundam. he has a weirdly extensive track record with JRPG bosses
Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 08:25 on Nov 23, 2023 |
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Nov 23, 2023 08:23
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Mister Olympus posted:That voice on Yomi cracked me up--it's unmistakably Shuichi Ikeda, aka Char from Gundam. he has a weirdly extensive track record with JRPG bosses That was a blast. I didn't know about this game at all, it looks very interesting both in terms of writing and gameplay. I admit, killing every character at the end felt a bit forced, especially with the three ninjas, at least Hoteimaru got a genuinely heartfelt cutscene. But they're all back (and so is everyone else) at the end so I guess that evens it out. It's definitely a strong ending, even answering one question I've had since the beginning of the game (if Mari birthed the Fire Clan and Yomi the Root Clan, what is humanity and why do they look identical to the Fire Clan? Because humanity is the byproduct of both races joining together, it turns out). I also learned quite a bit about Japanese geography and mythology which I didn't expect, but I greatly appreciate. Thanks for all your effort, ivantod! Can't wait for III, whatever it is.
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Nov 23, 2023 13:45
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This LP has been really good from start to finish, and i'm looking forward to the next one. Also yeah I thought Yomi sounded like Char but I wasn't sure. Shuichi Ikeda really does get around, doesn't he?
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Nov 23, 2023 16:30
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Nurarihyon is honestly curious as he's often a major bad guy in almost every iteration of Gegege no Kitaro, when other Yokai (that weren't made up for the series) can shift from being heroic to antagonistic depending on which series. But man that's some obnoxious flashing lights in the final cutscene but the ending is quite sweet.
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Nov 23, 2023 19:42
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Thanks for the ride thus far, ivantod.
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Nov 23, 2023 19:46
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Hey as always thanks everybody for kind words!Robindaybird posted:But man that's some obnoxious flashing lights in the final cutscene but the ending is quite sweet. Yeah, the flashing is a bit annoying. In fact in the Nintendo DS and PSP ports and also in the version included on the Japanese edition of PC Engine Mini/Turbografx Mini, they've modified the game slightly, to make the flashing less pronounced (the game is the same otherwise). But since I'm playing the original PC Engine CD version on an emulator, then you get to see everything in its original form.
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Nov 23, 2023 19:55
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Also say, out of curiosity, since the ULTIMATE SWORD is empowered by the protagonist's max hit points, does that mean that you could make it arbitrarily powerful with sufficient tolerance for grinding?
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Nov 23, 2023 22:00
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PurpleXVI posted:Also say, out of curiosity, since the ULTIMATE SWORD is empowered by the protagonist's max hit points, does that mean that you could make it arbitrarily powerful with sufficient tolerance for grinding? You can't really make it arbitrarily powerful because this is not Disgaea  , so the max level a character can reach in this game is 99. However, if you do grind Manjimaru up to level 99, he will end up with 520 HP, so with that and plus all the attack stat gains he gets up to level 99, the total attack power when the ULTIMATE SWORD is equipped will be 899 at full HP, so about 50% more from the total attack power where we ended up at level 69.
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Nov 23, 2023 23:13
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I see Manjimaru got to enjoy his "happily ever after" at the nicest possible level  This game has been a trip and a half, and this thread has been an education and a half. Looking forward to more!
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Nov 23, 2023 23:23
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Okay, I watched the ending finally. I did have to laugh at Yomi's "Humanity is the combination of the Fire Clan and Root Clan" when the strongest person in the party is half-demon and another member is a thousand years old. I think we need to set some definitions here. Speaking of, I may have missed something, but IS Gokuraku actually 1000 years old? That would mean he was alive during the original war between the two clans, and seems like something that should have been a major deal, but I don't remember that at all. I am phone posting, so reviewing past updates is kind of a pain, mind.
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Nov 24, 2023 00:23
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Randalor posted:Okay, I watched the ending finally. I did have to laugh at Yomi's "Humanity is the combination of the Fire Clan and Root Clan" when the strongest person in the party is half-demon and another member is a thousand years old. I think we need to set some definitions here. Yeah, I think he's alive due to feasting on his mermaid waifu's flesh, which is obviously very taboo. I'm also assuming she was already dead at the time for reasons I can't recall, and Gokuraku most likely partook of her in grief in some odd way of honoring her memory. Also, apparently Fire Clan back then had some serious game, if they were able to use the Root Clan's ultra competitiveness to get them in bed. "Hah! See how feeble you are, Fire Clan, to be groveling at my feet! In what matter am I not your superior?!" "In bed~" "...Okay, I know you're playing me, but I'll play your game to amuse you, and prove that the Root Clan is superior!" "...Oh. Wow. Uh, turns out there's something I'm not superior in." "Well, I'm up for another round or too, if you are~" "And that, child, is how you were born." "...aaaaaaAHHHHH-----" 
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Nov 24, 2023 01:26
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Thanks for the LP, the game was nice, although it got a bit dark near the end - good thing that the ending made things better. From what I understand, the first Tengai Makyou game is also set in Jipang, just on the eastern half; are there any references to the lore from this game (the Fire/Root clans, Mari/Yomi) or is it a completely separate story/mythos?
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Nov 24, 2023 05:47
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Gilgamesh255 posted:Yeah, I think he's alive due to feasting on his mermaid waifu's flesh, which is obviously very taboo. I'm also assuming she was already dead at the time for reasons I can't recall, and Gokuraku most likely partook of her in grief in some odd way of honoring her memory. Very Melon posted:From what I understand, the first Tengai Makyou game is also set in Jipang, just on the eastern half; are there any references to the lore from this game (the Fire/Root clans, Mari/Yomi) or is it a completely separate story/mythos? ivantod fucked around with this message at 10:43 on Nov 24, 2023 |
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Nov 24, 2023 10:39
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Tap tap is this thing on? All right, how's everyone been doing? Good? Good! Better not waste time, so let's start by watching a video.  And then, check out this awesome title screen!  So, apparently, it's going to be a tumultuous story about Kabuki. Well, all right. Let's get started then.  Here is Kabuki, after the theatrical performance is finished. Thankfully he no longer carries that large banner on his back! Before we explore more around here, we can see that on that table on the left there are what look like tree envelopes. Those are some letters that Kabuki received from his friends. Which friends? For example, this friend:   Well, it's always nice to hear from friends! Let's check out the second letter, you can probably guess who it's from by this point. Also, I'll mention in a little bit about the "Kita-za" thing, so don't worry about it for now.   This is funny, but of course Kabuki is not actually a fake actor as will soon be confirmed. Anyway, moving on to the third and last letter, which is of course from Kinu.  "Noh" is another kind of Japanese stage play. Also, as you can see, we'll need to be careful in this game to distingush "Kabuki" with capital K and "kabuki" with lowercase! As before, Kabuki has of course a reaction to it.  He's delusional. But also note how the characters are already a lot more talkative in this one. In the previous game, Manjimaru barely said a word over the course of the game! Here, there will be a lot more banter between party members and in general more actual conversations, apart from just NPC chatter. However, we will nevertheless start with some NPC chatter, as there are people here to talk to!  Like this guy right here! We already did, but thanks.  We can't go back through to the stage, so let's just move on to the adjacent room instead! Kabuki received 5000 ryo! As you can see, the money is still expresed in ryo (両), old Japanese currency. Also it's very nice of the game to start us up with a whole 5000! Anyway, this person has a bit more to say. You may be confused here, because you already know that kabuki theatre is performed exclusively by male actors, even in female character roles. So what are they even talking about? Don't worry, we'll get to all of that in just a few moments. But for now, this person still has even more stuff to say! Kabuki reads the letter straight away!  I envy you, because unlike me, you get to appear on the centre stage of a kabuki theatre. In fact, presently, I have arrived in Kyoto on some trifling business. We haven't seen each other in a long time, so I would like to have a few drinks with you. So I sent someone to pick you up. The two geisha, Yumetaro and Komamoto will be waiting for you at the teahouse. They are very cute young ladies. Then, I will be looking forward to seeing you again. -- Orochimaru. So, Orochimaru is one of the main party members from the first Tengai Makyou game, and we'll find out soon why he's back in action. This game does contain references to both previous games, but although we haven't played the first one, don't worry, as I will keep you informed as far as is necessary to follow this story. And now back to our regular programme. It's going to be a little while before we get to talk to Orochimaru as there is a city full of people to explore before that!  For now, there are three more people over on this side of the building. First the wardrobe lady at the bottom. And then the two other actors up in the dressing room.  And three more peope up here. Don't worry, we will make it out of this building... eventually. Well, all right. Kabuki has clearly done well for himself. But let's go downstairs now!  There are more people down here, among them this guy who seems to be blocking the entrance. Ok, sure, but first on the south side of the building there's two more people. I guess they sell tickets here.  I guess we're behind the ticket counter.  The altar for the stage god is over here in the corner, so let's give our thanks.    So this guy moves and we can finally go outside!   Here we go! As you can see, we actually exited through the stage door on the right side. But we can also get back in through the main door!  Let's first talk to that lady in the middle!  And also this guy here...  And just one more person up here. Over on the left side...  ...is the gift shop. So let's see. Not exactly, no. But maybe now is a good time to explain a bit this theatre business. As you saw, Kabuki is performing in a theatre called Kita-za (北座), literally "The North Theatre". It, along with Minami-za (南座), which literally means "The South Theatre" (and where Okuni is performing), are two of the most famous Kabuki theatres in Kyoto and Japan. Both were founded in the 1600s, and Minami-za is actually still in operation to this day (although the current theatre building dates only from 1929), but Kita-za closed down in the mid-late 19th century and no longer exits as a theatre. But, let's head back outside.  This situation looks interesting. There's what looks like a "white fox shrine" and a guy standing next to it! Kabuki obtained grilled tofu! Inari is a (fox) god of general household wellbeing, and here is an actual Inari shrine:  But let's ofer it some tofu and see what happens. After giving it tofu, we do get indeed a message. Yeah, apart from the first sentence, I have no idea what the rest means. But it looks like some kind of a prophecy, so we'll see I guess. There is a bunch of these across the country, and you can feed each one some grilled tofu to get a message like this. After this first one, grilled tofu is not free and you do have to buy it, but it only costs 2 ryo, so it's not going to cause a strain on the budget. I wonder if you get some kind of a reward for finding all of these and giving them tofu? It remains to be seen. By the way, in the above screenshot, you can see a bunch of Kabuki fans blocking the town exit! So no leaving until we talk to Orochimaru! Also, I wanted to say... after it ended up as a pool of blood in the previous game, they have sure rebuilt Kyoto nicely!  On the south side of town is, of course, Minami-za, The South Theatre, the one which still exists today in Kyoto. Oh. Well, that's a shame. I was hoping we could meet her! But, let's head inside!  A couple of people here, but first...  This theatre has a gift shop too!  You know how it goes in every Sakura Wars game, right? You can buy photos of the game's female characters in the theatre gift shop! And while this is not a Sakura Wars game, it was made by quite a few of the same people, most notably Hiroi Ouji who was the director for these games but also later for Sakura Wars and also as already mentioned, this game's composer too (let's not forget that both this game and the Sakura Wars series was made by Red Entertainment!). Anyway, I wanted to take a moment here, and explain a bit the Okuni situation. As it turns out, a kabuki actress named Izumo Okuni (1578-16??) is an actual real person who lived in 16th and 17th century Japan! A former miko (shrine maiden), she's generally considered to have invented the art form of kabuki (lit. "song and dance art") and subsequently recruited a bunch of women for an all-female kabuki troupe, and as such, the women were playing both male and female roles. She eventually retired in the early 1600s and her whereabouts and fate after that remain sadly unknown. Here she is, peforming a samurai role:  So, as a matter of fact, at the beginning, all kabuki performers were actually female, but eventually, there started to appear complaints that it is "not moral" for women to perform like that, and in 1629, the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, decreed that women are from that point on forbidden from performing in kabuki, and this lead to most of them being replaced by male actors, resulting in the form of kabuki we're all familiar today. But it did start first with all performers being women. Clearly in our story, both male and female actors coexist at the same time. Needless to say, Okuni the game character doesn't have too much to do with the real person other than the name and profession. But for now, she's on an overseas tour, so we'll just have to move on.  Let's come back over and talk to this guy. I guess a clever way to teach the players how to read this name (阿国), because it has a kanji in it with several different readings (阿), but the name uses a reading which is not common when this kanji is used in names. The guy at the ticket counter: "Princess of some country", you say? Interesting. Right now, let's talk to the little guy standing by the door there. This actually takes us into a cutscene, which I'll explain after.  Well, these two have clearly found each other. As I've mentioned already a couple of times, Ziria is the main hero of the first game, who (as said in the cutscene) liberated Edo from the evil Daimon Cult. Well, that was fun, but let's head back outside as we're done here.  Let's talk to some people! Kyoto is actually a bit smaller than it was in the previous game, so now it's all on one map instead being divided into four sections. Well, technically, it's thanks to our fans, but I see what you mean. Although I'm not sure what I can do about them deciding to block all the exits from the town. Right, you might remember this from the first game, a place where you could go and read news articles in the previous game. The only problem is, they were completely inacurrate! I'm assuming nothing has changed, but we'll certainly have a look later.  That's a bit unfair.  Up here there is a bridge, but it's blocked off... we're definitely being railroaded a bit in this first part of the game!  More impassable bridges over here, shame we can't get to that cool looking building. But let's at least see what this guy says. Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji) is a temple in Kyoto, originally built in 1397, and here is what it looks like:  By Jaycangel - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33554210 Unfortunately the building you see on the picture is actually from 1955, as the 14th century original was nearly completely destroyed in an arson fire perpetrated by a mentaly disturbed novice monk in 1950. It was then rebuilt over the next few years and the 1955 rebuild is what still stands today. Yukio Mishima even wrote a novel about the whole event in 1956.  This exit, too, is blocked. So we'll just continue talking to people. Yes, yes, in a moment. Oh no. When you say nefarious businessmen, you can't possibly mean... the five brothers? Let's hope.  Kyoto certainly still has the slum district at least. This is of course still a reference to the famous homeless person known to have lived in that part of Kyoto in 1960s and 1970s. Funny, so that's where the Taikun from the previous game ended up.  Indeed, and "Wadokaichin" (和同開珎) is also the name of the first currency ever minted in Japan (inspired by contemporary Chinese currency), too, way back in the 8th century, but possibly even in the 7th century. Here is one of them:  By PHGCOM - Own work, photographed at Tokyo Currency Museum, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9520472  In the other hut is the former Taikun and his two servants! So his two servants have differing opinions, But let's see about Taikun himself! Well, I'm glad he's reached enlightenment, because I do remember him being quite a jerk in the last game.  One of the slum-dwellers is also here blocking the second bridge to the Golden Pavilion! Right, but I think it's a pretty bad idea to say stuff like that in a game. Anyway, let's go and see a bunch of other places in Kyoto.  A couple of people in the inn. Huh, that's odd. But maybe so many of his fans came to see the performance? This is actually a slight change in game mechanics. In the previous game if you get a status effect during the battle, you could heal it by "walking it off" or by sleeping at the inn. This is no longer the case, and you have to either use a recovery item or pay at the doctor to get it cured. It's a bit annoying, but what can you do.  We can annoy a person upstairs in their room! Indeed Ziria did, and Tsukuba was the starting place in the first game which we haven't played here.  You know what, let's go in here. It's better to get it over with.  And when you hear the words "unscrupulous businessmen" and the like, you know it's the Ashimotos!  The other brother:  The equipment shop. But the shop is also not open for business yet! I'm starting to see a pattern here.  The doctor's office. So, just to reiterate the change in how status effects work. And yay, the cursed equipment is back!  Item shop. The game is not being subtle. Being given those 5000 ryo at the start should have raised suspicion.  Over here is the left luggage store where we can put away extra items. The inventory system is identical to the previous game, so that includes also all the limits that it imposes. Mm-hm, yeah. Doesn't look like we'll be able to use any shops at present. So Kabuki actually does start the game with a bunch of spells (and actually some pretty useful ones too). But clearly that will have to wait.  So you will remember these guys from the previous game, their news articles are hilariously inaccurate and usually the exact opposite from what actually happened. It's more or less the only thing you can spend money on right now, so we might as well. So let's see the articles. OKUNI ON AN INTERNATIONAL TOUR! The overseas performance was made possible by the invitation of a princess from a Western European country! The people involved are fulfilling the wishes of the princess, who is crazy about Jipang and who wanted to see a live performance of kabuki. The candidates were two of Kyoto's main kabuki actors: Kabuki in Kita-za and Okuni from Minami-za. But speaking of Kabuki... that womaniser, should he be allowed to make moves on the princess? No! Therefore, even though their abilities are on a par, Minami-za's Okuni was chosen to go on the tour! The performance fee is estimated at 10 million ryo. If Kabuki had been selected, both Jipang's dignity and princess's virtue would have been at danger, so a source close to the event reports feelings of relief at this choice. Wait, what is this? Have they suddenly started to report actually accurate news? Let's check out the next article. THE EXCESSES OF KABUKI Kabuki Danjurou, who made his name by fighting against the Root Clan, it is well know that he's been making a racket night after night, throwing his money around and causing a disturbance around Kyoto. This newspaper has finally caught up with him and found out what he's really been doing. Apparently he gathers the women and demonstrates his skills in front of geishas, using scrolls that he keeps in the storage. He even gave some of his scrolls to the women. The owner of the storage room has said, "Every time he brings the scrolls, some are lost or damaged". Oh, how the mighty Fire Hero has fallen! Well, a neat way to explain how come he's doesn't any more have the abilities he had when the last game ended! The other guy here has something else. Sure.  Cool. But at least for now, we can't use the map in the way we did in the last game, during the travel. To be honest, it was never really essential to have anyway. The flipside is that on this one, you can already see where some of the places are located without having to look for them, so... All right, we've truly spent too much time at this place, so let's move on.  Another item shop... This is just another QOL change in the game... in the last one, you only could see the name of the item, but not what it does (although I think it may have been listed in the manual--anyway, now you can see it in the game directly). The actual shopkeeper of course tells us to come back tomorrow. How surprising.  And, one more place. Well, let's talk to the owner. As you can imagine, this is a gambling establishment, but we'll get to that another time. It's anyway closed right now.  Finally, this is the teahouse we've been told to go to and meet with the two ladies who will take us to Orochimaru. They are standing right there in the middle in colourful clothes, but as you can see there's an upstairs here too, so lets check out that first before we trigger the next plot event!  Ok, sure. Let's go back down.  First, there's this guy standing by the entrance. Ok, let's talk to them!   You can of course say "no" if you're not ready to trigger the next part of the plot and come back later.  They just take us to the inn next door...  ...to a room on the first floor.      They continue to talk behind closed doors.   A few of them show up. Kabuki uses all of his money. And there it is. I knew that those 5000 ryo won't last. The party gets a little wild, though.  So a few things here. We got a brief summary from Orochimaru about what happened in the first game along with the picture of that game's three main characters, Ziria, Orochimaru and one last one whom we haven't yet met. Second, the Golden Pavilion was somehow replaced with a different golden building, and well, it looks like Daimon Cult is back. In addition to that, Orocihimaru comments how he gave some scrolls to Kabuki during the war with the Root Clan. Indeed, those powerful spells that Kabuki comes back to us with in the second part of the game are the same ones that Orochimaru used in the first game! As for the "Bando" region, it's the old name for Kanto region, where Tokyo/Edo is located. Also it's nice to see that it's easy to get Kabuki to go into action, he just needs the right motivation, like... all the women of Kyoto disappearing!   You can hear a bit more from some of the people, like this guy! And there we go, it took a little while, but we finally got our task. So let's get on it.
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Dec 3, 2023 00:23
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 As you can imagine, all the shops and everything else is open for business now. Not that we have any money, though. So to start with, let's go to the storage room and retrieve at least our spells first.  So, all things considered, this is not actually too bad to start with. We got a fire attack which hits one enemy, a lightning attack which hits all enemies, then his standard attack, defence and speed buffs, a basic heal spell and a couple of debuffs to use against the enemies. It could honestly be a lot worse than this! So I'm going to transfer all of those to our inventory. Unfortunately, there are no other items nor money to be retrieved from storage, so we are definitely sitting exactly at 0, money wise. But since we're already here, let's take a look at Kabuki's starting stats and equipment.  Actually, he starts already at level 13, so he has a somewhat decent HP (108) and MP (51) amount, so that's pretty good. As for the items, he only has a basic healing item, apart from the letter and the photograph of Okuni we got at the theatre. We'll put those two in storage as we don't need them for now. As for the equipment, he has a "Prop Sword", "Stage Costume", "Headband" and "Wooden Clogs". This is not great, obviously, so we will soon start by earning a bit of money to improve that. He does still have most of his abilities from the previous game, so that's also not bad.  If we approach the bridges which were leading to the Golden Pavilion, we can see that the building has been replaced by something else, and also the bridges are both gone. Before we head out, I just want to see what kind of nonsense is being sold in the Ashimoto's shop.  Ah, yeah, we're not going to afford any of that. Surprisingly among the expensive items there is a "Water Crown Clock" for 100,000 ryo, which allows you to see the gameplay time (but it does have another secret purpose) and "Flash of Light" for only 2,500 is a multi-use item which allows you to easily escape a battle. So we might pick up those at some point. There is also a "Painting of Sunflowers" which doesn't do anything. The two items at the bottom are just equipment "Holy Lotus Cakraratna" (a kind of a sword) and "Daffodil Robe". In any case, nothing we have money for right now. However, we do want to improve our stats just a little bit. For that purpose...  ...we're going to head bit outside of town. So I'm going to do a few random battles here just to earn a bit of momey and then I'll meet you back at the equipment shop.  Here. Let's see what we can buy now.  So I only have 80 ryo after a couple of battles, so we'll just pick up this "Blue Hilt Longsword" to replace the "Prop Sword".  But this is already +3 in attack power. As you can see, the equipment/stats system works pretty much the same as in the previous game. Even the equip screen looks identical! Anyway, this upgrade will help a bit for now, but we'll upgrade our equipment quite a bit more while exploring.  Now, let's really set off on our journey. We don't really have any significant pointers, so... let's just follow the roads and see where they lead.  Of course, there are as usual random encounters on the way. The last game explained these by the presence of the Root Clan. Not sure what should be the reason for the monsters roaming around this time, but in any case they are here. But... what's this? The battle screen is now in side view! Yes, yes, we now get to actually see our character(s) in battle like in a Final Fantasy game of this time period. Unfortunately, another thing has been taken over from Final Fantasy, which is that it's no longer possible to see the enemy HP numbers. Oh well. Of course, like in Final Fantasy...  ...the characters will also do a little attack or spellcasting animation, depending on what command you select! Actually, I lied. I'm just going to quickly do a couple more battles to upgrade our equipment a little bit more.  First these "Messenger Tabi" for a speed increast of +4. By the way, "tabi" are Japanese socks/shoes with a split toe, like these ones from Edo period:  By Samuraiantiqueworld - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12742183  And also this "Elegant Battle Surcoat" for a further +5 in defence. Now that we are a little bit better equipped for the journey ahead, let's go for real.  For now, we'll just follow this road south. As you can see bridge to the west is broken, so we can't go that way.  This enemy is a little bigger, still nothing to worry about. By the way, as in the last game, we have Japanese symbols for Level (段), HP (体), and MP (技) displayed on the battle screen. Other than the different look, the battle mechanics are pretty much the same as before, too.  Anyway, over here by the fork in the road, there's a sign. Let's see what it says. Toba village: 2 ri east, 1 1/2 ri north. Fushimi village: 1 ri south, 2 ri east. Mt. Arashi: Cross the bridge to the west and climb north. Well, that's pretty useful. A "ri" is an old east-Asian distance measure, the equivalent of about 4 kilometres. And as for Mt. Arashi, I would love to go there as it's really beautiful:  By TakuyaMurata at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17836517 For now, let's just head to Toba village. So we need to go a bit to the east and a bit to the north.  And here we are.  This is not a big place, as you can see. Let's see what kind of information we can find. Huh, that's interesting. The weird building in Kyoto is also made of gold, so...   We can come over to the northen side, where we can see a rather large-ish castle behind a moat with a raised bridge. So we're not getting there from here. However...  ...there does seem to be another entrance, from which people are brining what looks like gold into the castle. Hmm.  Well, let's talk to this guy for a second.  On the east side of the castle, there is a bunch of people. The soldiers just tell us we can go through: I'm having a sneaking suspicion that we'll need to pass through here sooner rather than later... I did feed grilled tofu to the Inari shrine, but I'm kind of going to skip posting what they say, since it's either spoilery or repeats what you can learn from the villagers anyway. So I will keep feeding them, but I will let you know if anything interesting is being said. But ok, let's see if there are any people in the houses.  I think we need to meet the "Golden Guy" soon(ish).  Here at the inn, we have another person...  Well, to be fair, we don't have at the moment any reason to go to Mt. Arashi, so we'll just talk to the rest of the people and then head over to Fushimi, in hopes we can find out more about this golden person and in general what's been going on here.  In the doctor's office. As you can see the situation is pretty dire. However the game does show mercy on us. That chest in the corner has a consumable that cures all status effects, if you're really in an emergency!  The equipment shop. Indeed. We're not in the mansion yet. Therefore, we'll make another small upgrade here before we proceed.  So for now we'll pick up another one of those Japanese conical hats ("Sandogasa"). This gives us +3 in defence. But that's everything here for the moment.  So let's try heading south to Fushimi and see what we can find there.  We'll retrace our steps back to that intersection...  ...and head south.  Enemies are definitely getting slightly stronger, but still nothing we can't easily manage.  Ah, here is Fushimi village, and the road continues east past it.  Here we go. But before we proceed, I can't help but notice those holes in various objects, which look like they are a remainder of someone running through them!? Perhaps this guy will tell us what that's all about? Let's see. Well, I guess not. I'm sure there are other people here, though.   Huh. Ok, we'll check that out.  We've earned some money on our travels, so let's stop also by the equipment shop for some further upgrades.  Like these "Miner's Tabi" which increase our agility by +6!  The item shop.  Let's see what the situation is like at the doctors office. The doctor just offers to cure your ailments (if you say no, he asks "why are you so afraid, after all I only gave wrong medicine to people twice this year"), so we'll talk instead to two sick people over on the right. Well, that's some good info I guess. Let's try to get to the bottom of the situation with all these objects that someone appears to have run through.  Apart from Ziria and Orochimaru, Tsunade is the last of the three main characters from the first game. She's... energetic.  Those barrels are very funny.  This place has a ton of Inari shrines. I'll feed them later. For now, more people to talk to! What in the world is happening here.   Finally, let's check out the inn. Ah, so it's another letter from Orochimaru to us, and not to Tsunade!  The lord is intent on taking over the vacant spot of Taikun and thus taking the control over Jipang. If he's working together with the Daimon cult, it must mean that they have enticed him by promising him that position in reward for his cooperation. This was the favourite way of operating by the Daimon Cult also during the battle four years ago. Kabuki! You must sneak into the lord's mansion and find out his true intentions! To access the mansion undetected, it's best to use the secret tunnel, leading from the mine. I look forward to your success as a Fire Hero. Yours, etc. -- Orochimaru. Well, all right. We mostly figured it out already, but now it's confirmed.  There is another person in the inn, over here, looking at that hole.  Let's continue to the east and try to find the mine.  We'll follow the road north.  Like in the previous game, this is one of the strong enemies which still appears in the beginning area of the game. Fire does extremely well against it, though.  Tsuchinoko (lit. "child of hammer") is a mythical snake-like creature with a thick mid-section. Kind of like this:   Anyway, here's what looks like a mine going into the mountain. Let's see.  This is the Momoyama mine. Here, there's only an inn and nothing else.  There are people, though. Uh, the "cat"-bastard?  Let's head inside.  Here, there are a few things. First of all, we can actually take the pickaxe!  It's a weapon and give us +8 in attack power! On the other side there is a miner's suit. It's up to you wheter you take it or not, but if you do take it Kabuki will put it on and you won't have to deal with random encounters in the mine. You can also proceed without it, but then of course there will be random encounters. It has no other significance, so it's completely your choice.  Inside the mine, looks like you'd expect. As you can see, I decided to equip the miner's suit on Kabuki.  Over to the side, is a room with... well, there's no other way to say it, two cats. Interesting. The chests have 50 ryo and a MP recovery consumable. Also, is that Kanbie "the golden guy"? Let's keep going.  Here we have a ladder which we'll ignore for now. Let's talk to that person. Interesting...  A bit north is a dead end and another ladder. We'll take it.  Deeper into the mine, and a sign! Do not enter! Large-scale nitric acid production!  That looks dangerous there... so, of course, we have to... From the veins of nitrate rock, a large quantity of gas is escaping! Kabuki obtained the Nitrate Stone! Is that safe to hold? Anyway, there's nothing else here, so we can go back up to the other ladder.  ...and then down.  And down.  Looks golden here!   Another cat! Actually I also want to thank the game authors for not having these cats speak in "meow-speak", if you see what I mean. They just speak normally! "Pick up that can!"  Up here is one of the miners.  And another cat!  Over here is the person we were looking for.  Cool machinery, but what we really care about here is the ladder going up.    And one more ladder...  ...takes us right in front of the lord's mansion! Let's see what's inside!  That looks rather garish... and golden. Garish... and golden.  There are actually random encounters in here, like these orcs. They are quite easily dispatched by a single multi-target lightning spell. Other enemies in here are not quite so weak.  On the right side there is a passage...  ...leading to some prison cells. Let's gather some information! The last one has the most important message! Nice, thanks! Also what would be nice is to catch up to this Okuni lady and find out exactly what her involvement in all of this is. Clearly she's not "just" a kabuki actress. By the way the chests on the left have 100 ryo and a HP recovery item. The ones in the pile on the right are just scenery. Let's return to the main hall.  This is a more dangerous enemy combination, not so much because of the Kobold but more so because of the Catboy (which I guess are the cat people we saw in the mine). They have a bit more defence and HP than you would expect so you probably want to buff your defence just in case.  Ok, let's check this out again. Kabuki examines the golden lion statue. Inside lion's mouth, there is a switch! Let's push!  It reveals, as we were told, a staircase going upstairs.  Let's see. There is a staricase further up, a chest on the left, and also what looks like some kind of weapon storage in the room at the bottom. It was mentioned that we might find some good equipment here, so...   Well, it's only +3 in attack power compared to the pickaxe, but still it's free so... Down in the weapons storage room there's another chest...  This one is actually a pretty nice upgrade...  ...since it gives us +10 in defence compared to our previous equipment. We're definitely going to need this one soon!  On the other side of the room there's a person! Personally, I think you're stupid, but that's just me.  Let's continue upstairs.  It seems we might be reaching our destination...  Definitely. Let's approach.  Well then. Interesting that he also mentions shogun's spies. Maybe it really is true about Okuni. Nevertheless, as you can imagine...  Boss: Golden Kanbie HP: 340 ...we go straight into a boss fight! Here too, the battle proceeds in a side view like this, which means that we unfortunately lost the huge detailed animations that accompanied various boss attacks in the previous game, which personally I will miss as I think they really looked awesome. As a matter of fact, it seems that the Tengai Makyou series creators agreed, as this was the first and last and only time a Tengai Makyou game used a side view in battle like this. The next game went back to "first person" view and it stayed that way for all subsequent games! As for the strategy here, there's not too much to say. It's mostly going to be trading blows and healing as you go--running out of MP is definitely an issue here so try to space the healing properly and I would recommend not bothering too much with other spells, except maybe the defence buff. In any case, he has the ability to temporarily block magic attacks, so... Kanbie's agility is also pretty high, so you won't really even have time to do much else except attack and heal anyway. As a final annoyance, he has the ability to temporarily lower your attack power, but casting attack buff on yourself will counter that. Weirdly, this is actually surprisingly hard for a first boss, but eventually...  So there's a bit of a new thing here in boss fights. After this message...  ...we get a new command in the menu: "Finishing Blow" (止め). So, uh, I guess let's use it and see what happe... You don't have anything to deal the finishing blow with!   And he just... leaves? But hey, at least we still get money and EXP for doing this battle!   Kabuki obtained Demon King Sword!  A foreign made sword with a name like that... it should be safe to equip, I think. It even gives us a +14 in attack power compared to the previous! Ok, jokes aside, it is actually safe to equip this, it's not cursed or anything like that.  In any case, we're done here for now, so we can leave.  On the way down, you can talk again to these guys, but they are mostly just thanking your for making the lord "wake up" again. Well, except that one guy who wasn't in prison. He's disappointed that the lord would give up his ambitions just like that.  This guy here, though, has some info for us. As you might expect, those two names sound a bit similar in Japanese. As for "Aqua Regia", as a chemical substance it's a mixture of nitric acid (HNO3) and hydrochloric acid (HCl). Although neither of the two substances is able to do it by itself, when put together, aqua regia can... dissolve gold! Of course, we already have one component for this (nitric acid which we got in the mine), so we'll have to find the other one somehow. And then there's of course this whole spy(?) business with Okuni and her visit with the princess of a foreign country and... yeah, as you can see there's a much more involved plot here, compared to the previous game.  But for now, we can leave and think about what should be our next move. More on that, of course, next time (including picking up a second party member already!). In the meantime, I hope you're enjoying this, and until next time, take care!
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Dec 3, 2023 00:23
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 So, hello everyone and welcome to this LP of Tengai Makyou: Fuun Kabuki Den (a.k.a. "A Tumultuous Story of Kabuki"). This is the third and final game of this series that came out on the PC Engine platform, and it was published as usual by Hudson and Red Entertainment in 1993, about one year after its predecessor, Tengai Makyou II: Manjimaru. It's not a "numbered" game, but numbering in this series is anyway weird: the 3-numbered game came out years after the 4-numbered one and the next game after this one was numbered zero and moved on to Super Famicom/SNES platform (only to then jump over to Sega Saturn two years after that). What is this actually? As mentioned, this is not a "numbered" game, but chronologically it fits right after Tengai Makyou II: Manjimaru because the story is officially set one year after the conclusion of the war against the Root Clan. It's a bit like a "side" story and a sequel to both previous Tengai Makyou games in one although you generally don't need to have played either of them as the game does explain the necessary parts. The main character this time is Kabuki, who works as, well, a kabuki actor in Kyoto, but is pulled back into action when the villains of the first game (Daimon Cult) return and try to mess with people of Jipang once again. There is much more to the plot than that, so I'll just let you discover it as we play rather than spoil it here. Wait, did you say plot? I did indeed. You will be forgiven for being a bit cautious here, since Tengai Makyou II: Manjimaru, for all its good qualities, didn't really have much of a cohesive plot beyond the "destroy all orchids" McGuffin. This game however, does have an actual plot that develops over the course of the playthrough! Although it's definitely a shorter game than its predecessor, there is pretty much more of everthing in it: more plot; more actual character dialogues, including with the party members; more cutscenes and with much more detailed animation, and so on. So we're definitely in for a good time in this one! Mechanically (battle system, etc.), the game very similar to its predecessor with only small changes. As usual, the game purports to be based on the works of a XIX century scholar named P.H. Chada, but as I've already explained this is of course a total fabrication. The game does however, include as usual some brief quotations from said P.H. Chada, and this time they are even straight up in English:  Yes, that photograph is still of Karl Marx. Some final notes As usual, I don't expect anybody here has played this game already, but still please refrain from posting spoilers about stuff we haven't yet seen in the game. As a small warning, I will generally assume that you have read the LP of the previous game, so I may not explain things in my typical excruciating detail which were already extensively covered there, but I will give at least some pointers. Any references to the first Tengai Makyou game, I will explain in more detail since we skipped over that game here! And one last thing! There is one last thing you really need to know about this game: it secretly wants to be a Broadway musical. And I'm just going to leave it at that for now. And now, enjoy the game!
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Dec 3, 2023 00:24
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Hell yeah, the best protagonist we could have asked for.
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Dec 3, 2023 01:09
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ivantod posted:So, as a matter of fact, at the beginning, all kabuki performers were actually female, but eventually, there started to appear complaints that it is "not moral" for women to perform like that, and in 1629, the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu, decreed that women are from that point on forbidden from performing in kabuki, and this lead to most of them being replaced by male actors, resulting in the form of kabuki we're all familiar today. But it did start first with all performers being women. Clearly in our story, both male and female actors coexist at the same time. Of course what happened first was that young men started taking on the roles of women, but that too was banned for being "immoral", and thus only the manliest of men could be on stage doing manly mens things. Nothing immoral or erotic about that, of course! Kabuki wouldn't even be allowed to pretend to womanize on stage in the real Japan.
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Dec 3, 2023 01:51
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Oh man, more Kabuki. And the guys from the previous game, whoever they are. And some blingy guy who can't be killed. Seems this will be a fun journey too.
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Dec 4, 2023 15:23
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ivantod posted:Y'know, when I watched this video I thought it was odd how the VA pronounced the name "Ziria", and then it clicked when the names of the other Tengai Makyou 1 party members were mentioned: Aren't these three's names a reference to Jiraiya, Tsunade, and Orochimaru, well-known characters of an old japanese folk-tale?
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Dec 5, 2023 00:03
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Very Melon posted:Y'know, when I watched this video I thought it was odd how the VA pronounced the name "Ziria", and then it clicked when the names of the other Tengai Makyou 1 party members were mentioned: Indeed they are, but I'm using the spelling "Ziria", because that's how the game publisher officially spells it, as seen on the game CD case:  But when written in Japanese with katakana, then it's written as ジライア (Jiraia) which is also how you heard it pronounced in the cutscene.
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Dec 5, 2023 00:16
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ivantod posted:Indeed they are, but I'm using the spelling "Ziria", because that's how the game publisher officially spells it, as seen on the game CD case: Ahahaha now I'm not sure if the game devs butchered the romanization intentionally or if it was an honest mistake; to be fair, romanization for a lot of Japanese media back in the 80s/early 90s was all over the place so I can see them spelling the name like that. (I thought that the name was pronounced like Syria the country) But knowing that these were also the folks behind Linda Cubed makes me think that it's intentional/a troll, so who's to say what's right
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Dec 5, 2023 02:13
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Relevantly to this thread, a translation patch for Tengai Makyou 1 just got posted on romhacking.net earlier today
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Dec 7, 2023 04:40
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Cirina posted:Relevantly to this thread, a translation patch for Tengai Makyou 1 just got posted on romhacking.net earlier today Wow... that's pretty crazy, I don't think anybody even had much of an idea that people were even working on it! Having just gone through a "translation" playthrough of Manjimaru I can only say that making a proper fully edited translation of one of these games is quite a monumental achievement. There's no other way to qualify it--there's a good reason no official translations ever came out: it's because all western publishers were aware the amount of work it would be to get this into something playable by western audiences where you don't have the luxury of being able to easily post translation notes alongside the game. Apparently they will also be translating Manjimaru, but that's going to take quite some time (years, I'm sure). ivantod fucked around with this message at 07:20 on Dec 7, 2023 |
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Dec 7, 2023 07:13
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I made this account just to say that this is loving awesome. I've been wanting to play Manji Maru for years but this is the next best thing! I'm loving the Ziria fan translation and I hope this gets one too. God bless them. I'm a programmer and I've tried my hand at romhacking. Learning Japanese might actually be easier.
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Dec 14, 2023 05:48
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