| ~Beyond the Border~ > Akyu's Arcade |
| [VLP] Let's Play The Legend of the Mystical Ninja, Goemon's SNES adventure! |
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| dosboot:
Goemon you say? What's that? It's Konami's series of games staring the ninja Goemon. The cast and setting get a bit goofy here and there, even for Konami. As in: ninjas in ancient Japan eating hamburgers, occasionally stumbling into gameshows, and all around everyone has cartoony, slapstick reactions. If you haven't played it, Legend of the Mystical Ninja is also a real fun game. It's sidescrolling action, but you roam freely during towns in a beat 'em up style perspective before venturing out into more linear, 2D action stages with the boss. Episode 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D5QXZDtpTc ~ The Goemon games tend to have a very large number of cultural references, in no small part due to how the game blends both a feudal setting and a modern setting. There is an interesting webpage that goes into detail about the Japanese cultural references within the game. It's worth checking it out! I'll mention some of these during the LP, but I'm not going to be able to point them all out myself, nor would I be able to add anything for most of them. I also found another, shorter news article that has a few more references. |
| dosboot:
Hey, let's flip through the manual! There's eyebrow-raising pieces of text here and there, plus a bunch of original artwork: (Note: the forum code allows you to click images to enlarge them) ^You don't need me to point out that this is the Western box art on the right, while everything else is in the manual is Japanese art. I probably don't dislike these sorts of Westernized cover art as most people, and if you had to use that art style then I think they didn't do a bad job with this one either. Not my preference, but eh whatever. Mainly I think Goemon looks a bit too odd for me. The enemies are decent, especially given that the game is so flexible with its own seriousness. The clown is the only character I wasn't immediately sure what it was meant to be, but I guess it is the NPC who wanders around the amusement park. ~~~ One thing that didn't escape my attention on the following pages is the mention of the "Dragonbeast" as the primary antagonist. This isn't mentioned in the game, so it seems made up for the Western manual like so much else. These pages go on to claim that the reason the friendly-looking townspeople attack you is because they are controlled by the "Silver Serpent". Whatever. I'm filing this under a "Mushroom citizens are inside the bricks" level of veracity. I also don't know about the "sinjin item" terminology to refer to your collective gear or "the Great Sukiyaki" as some important character who is giving you advice. I assume these are completely made up for the manual too. Everything special is "mystic" or "mystical". This game has a real bad case of what I call the "Link to the Past Syndrome", where one adjective is elevated above all others (magic hammer, magic mirror, magic bottle, magic cape, magic powder...) ~~~ There's going to be a lot of corny text played for laughs and snark! I can't help but point out most of them here. When reading this manual, it's almost impossible not to imagine the person writing it and how they tried to make it fun to read through (and to be fair I think they were mostly successful. This was ahead of the curve for the era, perhaps?). The password system in this game is a little complicated, and I don't always see it fully understood (including by myself sometimes!) First off, there's two types of passwords: When you get a game over and choose to 'end' (quit), you get a very short password that saves basically nothing other than the zone you were in. The second password is the one most people know about: the very long and complicated password you can ask for by visiting Diary Places. It's several lines long, and involves capitalizations, numbers, punctuation and a few symbols like hearts: These long passwords do save everything you have (lives, gold, equipment, etc.), but honestly you don't need to write them down. Visiting the diary places also creates a save point that you can use freely, without inputting the password at all! Well, it is only "freely" usable in the sense that you need to intentionally lose all your lives to reload it, but it still works like a real save file (and restores all the lives you had before, of course). You can use these diary saves to replay minigames, play around with Judo powers, or simply restart if you screw up badly and wasted a lot of your equipment/gold/lives. That can be very important in the later stages! There is no save battery though, so theoretically the password itself is useful if you can't finish in one sitting (and don't have save states :P). This diary-based save file might delete itself when you enter a new zone as well, I'm not sure about that. ~~~ The manual now goes on to describe all the mini-games and specialty houses. If it wasn't obvious before, it's clear now that the writer was inventing their own names for everything: I don't care for the dice game (called a 'Casino' above), so this line seemed oddly fitting to me. ~~~ The goblin minigame ("Demondo", according to the manual) also ranks very low on the ordering of best minigames. I wonder if they are intentionally lampshading this fact or not. Curiously, they refer to the game shop as the "employment office". Am I wrong in thinking that this screenshot is from a different version of the game? I don't think it's ever called that. ~~~ Finally we get to a whole bunch of artwork and lists of items/powerups (yay!). This was always my favorite part of SNES manuals, and I don't think I'm alone. Side note: I'm awfully suspicious at these bomb and scroll items they list. I feel like there aren't 3 types of scroll pickups and there isn't a bomb pickup that grants 3 bombs, but whatever. |
| dosboot:
Episode 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta9wpG8z-RM Ads might appear on this video, you can watch the twitch upload if you want to get rid of them. |
| dosboot:
Zone 3 is probably the most memorable level in the game, but I also think it one of the more interesting levels when it comes to cultural references. Namely it takes place on Awaji Island, and the developers built it around local points of interest. As mentioned in episode, you can see Konami's headquarters in the end screen for the zone. Konami's headquarters was on Awaji Island (until April 1993), and Mystical Ninja isn't even the only time they reference this building in their games: check out SD Snatcher! ~ The zone starts off with Goemon crossing a bridge with visible whirlpools below. This is the real life Onaruto Bridge and it's famous eddies. More on these whirlpools: --- Quote --- The ocean floor right under the Onaruto Bridge sinks deeply, reaching about 90 m at the deepest spot. There are deep depressions at the sea bottoms on the south (Pacific Ocean) and north (Seto Inland Sea) sides of the Naruto Strait. This unique topography of the sea bottom, along with the seawater?s current according to the tide?s ebb and flow, produces the whirlpools of Naruto Strait. The size of a whirling wave, reaching a maximum diameter of 20 m, is said to be the largest in the world, and that the name ?Naruto? (naru: sound, to: Seto) is said to be derived from the roaring sound of these violent tides. --- End quote --- It's even famous enough to get a shoutout in google maps: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Shikoku/@34.2418469,134.6576403,16.29z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x3551e76a6585fd45:0xd4602fd80d0ed59d!8m2!3d33.7432238!4d133.6375314 ~ The level ends with another bridge, almost surely a reference to the Akashi Kaiyko bridge which links the north side of Awaji Island with Kobe. The Akashi Kaiyko bridge is in fact the longest suspension bridge in the world! In the level, it runs vertically from bottom to top, while the first bridge runs from left to right. This roughly matches the geography of Awaji island, with "up" in the game as "North". Both suspension bridges are depicted as wood and stone in the game though, perhaps more fitting of Goemon's world. The Akashi Kaiyko bridge would not have been finished though at the time of release. Construction began in 1988 and it was still going through it's 10 year construction during the development of Legend of the Mystical Ninja (which you can guess was about 1990-1991). Nevertheless, this bridge was a momentous event. Quoting wikipedia, --- Quote ---It opened for traffic on April 5, 1998 in a ceremony officiated by the Crown Prince Naruhito and his wife Crown Princess Masako of Japan along with Construction Minister Tsutomu Kawara. --- End quote --- It is also frequently reported to be a beautiful sight when it gets dark out, as the bridge is "nightly illuminated in seven different colors to regale the eyes of viewers": I think what makes these references interesting to me is now that I know what makes them special and now that I know that Konami's employees would have been residents here, I get a picture of local pride and eagerness to share their famous sights (and place of work :P). Another observation is that the Onaruto bridge was opened in 1985 and the Akashi Kaiyko bridge was opened in 1998. It seems particularly important that there are no other bridges to Awaji island that I can tell; they only used ferries before 1985. These bridges must have been an important generational event. Furthermore, you can deduce that not long before development of Mystical Ninja started, the developers would have being seeing all the news about the Akashi Kaikyo bridge beginning its construction. It suggests the possibility of a widespread sense of excitement on the island, which then made its way into the game like a little time capsule. I'm reminded of those stories you hear about the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge, how the city held all sorts of events surrounding it and how people got swept up in a craze for a while (one story I recall in particular is how people competed to be "the first" at doing X on the Golden Gate bridge: first person to walk across, first to ride a unicycle across, first to walk backwards across, etc...) ~ Enough about bridges, Zone 3 is also one big amusement park. Both of the websites I linked to in the first post failed to find any particular connection to real world locations on Awaji island (and, in the process, the technobuffalo article also seems to get its facts wrong about the bridges, but I digress). The first website offers the plausible suggestion that the Amusement park is a sideways reference to Konami itself, you know given they are an amusement company located on Awaji. However it seems to me that this level is in fact a giant reference to Awaji World Park Onokoro. Awaji World Park Onokoro is an amusement park whose most unique attraction is a miniature world duplicating famous buildings worldwide in 1/25 of its original size, as well as many other family friendly activities and the usual types of rides. From Japan Hoppers: --- Quote --- It exhibits 18 famous buildings at 1/25 of their original size such as the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Taj Mahal, The Colosseum and The Great Wall of China. They have an exhibition area called "World of Ruins" that has sculptures from the ancient cultures of Iran, Egypt, Mexico and Colombia, and five more replicas of ruins from around the world. Visitors can also find the "Forest of Fairy Tales" outside the building which has exhibitions based on famous fairytales like "The Emperor?s New Clothes," "Three Little Pigs" and "Saiyuki." (English title is "Monkey.") --- End quote --- Now, it's very hard to find straightforward historical information on the English speaking internet, but reportedly this park was built towards the end of Japan's bubble economy. This seems flexible enough to come before the release date of Legend of the Mystical Ninja. (It also passes the goo.gle maps notoriety test and it gets mentioned on an otherwise sparse wikipedia entry about the city :P) Placing the arcade minigame here in zone 3 though? Yeah, that's probably a reference to Konami's location. ;) ~ Finally, going back to zone 2, when you exit the secret passage you get plopped in front of a bronze statue of Ryoma Sakamoto, who is a famous revolutionary samurai. From wikipedia: --- Quote ---"Ryoma has inspired at least seven television drama series, six novels, seven manga and five films." His appeal stems from being "the kind of person onto whom anyone can project themselves", as actor Masaharu Fukuyama described his role playing him in the NHK drama Ryomaden. --- End quote --- It sounds like Ryoma is still a really popular figure today, with his life being described as "cool, heroic and dramatic". Judging by google images, this guy doesn't just have one statue, but numerous ones all over Japan. There is one especially famous one in Kochi though, which is in Shikoku. Now, before Roman Mars gets on my case: I did remember the mantra "Always Read the Plaque" but I couldn't find any transcriptions (or even pictures) online! |
| dosboot:
Episode 3: Bonus Minigames at the Amusement Park https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em65XdSZKuc Playing all the minigames was more fun than I expected! The arcade is still the best, but it's just fun to mess around with all of them. I'm also thinking playing the concentration game is the best way to make money. |
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