Tengai Makyo series

[newtmonkey]

Has anyone played any of these games? This is a big series of (mostly) RPGs, and the PC Engine games were pretty big hits in Japan:

• Tengai Makyo: Ziria (PC Engine)
• Tengai Makyo II: Manji Maru (PC Engine)
• Tengai Makyo: Fuun Kabukiden (PC Engine)
• Tengai Makyo Zero (SFC)
• Tengai Makyo: Daiyon no Mokushiroku (SAT)
• Oriental Blue: Ao no Tengai (GBA)
• Tengai Makyo III: Namida (PS2)

There were also some non RPGs and some remakes on systems like the Xbox 360 and PSP.

They are all pretty traditional JRPGs with increasingly goofy elements, though Oriental Blue is worthy of special mention as it is apparently quite nonlinear and a bit more serious than the other games.

I decided to start at the beginning:

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Tengai Makyo: Ziria
A rough start for the series for sure. This came out in 1989, but it's a step down in every way from Dragon Quest II, never mind Dragon Quest III which came out in 1988. It does have some good mazelike dungeons with some interesting situations. Also, the way running in battle is handled is pretty cool. Only the main character can run, and instead of running being all or nothing, the game "rolls" for each enemy. This is a good tactic to use when facing three strong enemies, because you can often get rid of one or two of them simply by running.

Otherwise, the game is very unimpressive. It's ridiculously linear, but even worse, it's extremely repetitive. You basically do the same thing over and over hour after hour: arrive at a town, free the local animal spirit from a rock to get a new spell, go to a dungeon, kill a boss. Annoyingly, every single town in this game is basically the same thing, and every single NPC in a given town basically says the same thing, just in a different way. It's ridiculous. You still have to talk to everyone though, because once in a while one of those nondescript NPCs will actually give you some crucial item.

Although the dungeons are decent, the treasure chests you find in them are 99% worthless. I almost feel like throwing the console out the window every time I laboriously track down a well-hidden treasure chest in some annoying dungeon, only to be rewarded with a potion that heals less than the most basic healing spell, or some useless sword you could just buy from one of the first few towns in the game!

If the game had a great story it might make up for it, but it doesn't. The instruction manual makes this big fuss about world building, and the developers have even come up with this totally bizarre conceit of a fake weaboo "author" who wrote the story for the game (which is why it's "fake" Japan). Dialog is childish, and the episodic structure of the story is something straight out of a Japanese weekly kid's comic. You are the chosen kid, and you must travel the world with two other chosen ones to take down 13 evil bosses. There's nothing more to it.

I feel like I am being trolled, or I'm playing some weird prerelease version of the game. How is this game so highly regarded? Maybe this is just one of those series where it starts getting good with the second game, so no one ever bothered playing this one past the first hour or whatever.

 

[AndyS]

I feel like I am being trolled, or I'm playing some weird prelease version of the game. How is this game so highly regarded? Maybe this is just one of those series where it starts getting good with the second game, so no one ever bothered playing this one past the first hour or whatever.

If I'm not mistaken, it was one of the very first (if not the first) JRPGs that was released on CD-ROM, so Japanese fans have a very strong nostalgia for it based on it being their first experience with voice acting and such. I haven't played any of the games, although I'm curious and will probably try one of the later translated games eventually. It sounds like it might be a bit of a Hydlide case, where a game that was really big over there feels a bit lame to latecomers everywhere else.

 

[Ialda]

Yes the first game was basically the equivalent of a AAA ttile for its time, development hell and feature creep included. Daiyon no Mokushiroku is still one of the most beautiful JRPG I've ever seen, shame about what happened to the franchise after that. Not sure nostalgia is a thing - given what happened some years ago with the free ? mobile ? Jipang Seven thing, I doubt even modern Japanese people know this franchise existed.

I've played Manjimaru on DS, Zero and Oriental Blue with the translation patchs, and the PSP remakes. Tengai Makyo 4 on original Saturn hardware (or equivalent) is one of the reason I bought a mister FPGA. I have loved Tengai Makyo as a franchise for several decades now, precisely because of it's retro aesthetics : DQ in medieval Japan, with an heavy amount of 80s slapstick manga comedy and sense of adventure. It's the pure product of much simpler times, unabashed about it, and which doesn't hesitate to double down on eveything that makes it what it is - be it the shounen manga comedy, the sheer number of maps/cities/spells/transport devices (it's definitely a franchise which started that trend in JRPG to double or triple the amount of stuff because of that CD space storage over classical cartridges), animated cutscenes (remember, before the PS1/Saturn), or the red book music by famous composers. Once upon a time, at the beginning of the 90s, games like Tengai Makyo (or Snatcher) were what the future of Japanese game dev looked like; but the future changed.

newtmonkey to be fair Ziria *is* mediocre; Manjimaru is what made Tengai Makyo a cult series (even if, by today standard, the game is still an early DQ clone)

 

[Machocruz]

I remember some of the games popping up a lot in magazines that covered overseas releases and/or had import game ads, like Diehard Gamefan. They were only ever listed as Far East of Eden. I was interested at the time, I liked the 2D graphics. But when those magazines faded away, so did these games from my mind

 

[newtmonkey]

Tengai Makyo ZIRIA

Finished! I checked some guides after clearing the game, and they all seemed to recommended grinding up to level 65 or so, but there was no need; my last save had me at level 50 (though I probably gained another 3-4 levels throughout the "boss rush" before the last boss), and I had no difficulty whatsover completing the game.

I'll start with the good, because there's not a lot of it. The enemy art during battle is quite good, and some enemies (mostly bosses) are slightly animated. It's a got some good music. The ending is pretty fun. The characters are all likeable. The overall conceit of the story is interesting, in that the game is supposed to be based on writings from a well-intentioned but clueless foreigner who gets Japan all wrong. However, nothing is really done with this; I mean, how different is this from something like Momotaru Densetsu or Sengoku Basara or any other "historical" Japanese game with absurd fantasy elements?

The best thing about the game is how "magic" (techniques) are handled. Instead of earning them as you level up, you find them throughout the game in the form of scrolls. You can only carry a limited number, so you have to choose which ones seem most useful. You can also learn a few optional sword techniques from masters throughout the world, but you have no control over using them as they just have a random chance of triggering (very rarely).

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Now for the bad, which is everything else about this game. It takes forever to gather your full party, so it's basically like playing a really slow, boring version of Dragon Quest (the first one!) for what seems like a dozen hours or so. Even when you do gather your party, there's just not enough to the combat. Buffing/debuffing techniques are too unreliable to bother with, and attack techniques are too weak for how many points they cost to use. That means that 99% of the game is spent just attacking and healing.

The biggest problem with the game, however, is the overall structure. The land of Jipang is full of villages and towns, but they are all basically the same thing; the villages even have the same exact layout and are just copy and pasted all over the land. Talking to NPCs is a massive waste of time, as within a village or town every NPC basically just says the same exact thing, just in a slightly different way. But you absolutely have to talk to them, because every once in a while, one of those villagers is an important quest character.

The game was rushed to release. Without enough time to actually make a good game (or balance this one), the developers just put a bunch of band-aids on the game. Whenever you hit a difficulty spike, the game immediately hands you some tool to completely negate it. Toward the end, you have a technique that completely blocks all enemy attacks and another technique that completely blocks all enemy magic... these work 100% of the time, even on bosses. This makes the final area, including a tedious "boss rush" against every boss you've defeated over the course of the game, a total cakewalk. The last boss, by the way, is incapable of hurting you at any level, as the quest items you gather in his castle reduce his damage to 0.

It's a sad finish to a mostly sad game. Having said that, I'm looking forward to playing its sequel, Tengai Makyo Manji MARU, as it's beloved by Japanese RPG fans.

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So why is this game so poor? The game has a pretty interesting (and very troubled) history. The initial concept bounced back and forth between being developed as a game and an animated feature, before everyone got serious and decided they'd develop a "killer app" to sell PC Engine hardware.

The first version of the game actually made it into the prototype stage, and the footage I've seen looks very impressive, with large sprites walking around on maps, animated enemies and spells during encounters, and unique animated portraits for seemingly every NPC in towns. It was apparently scrapped due to various problems the team encountered working with the new hardware. Check it out here:


The second version was apparently an action-RPG, and this one apparently was nearly finished, but again scrapped due to trouble with the hardware. I couldn't find any footage of this one.

The third version, which is the version that was finally released, was "completed" after only six months (!) of development. Here's what greeted you when you slapped that $70 disc into the new $600 CD-ROM attachment you bought for your $250 game console:

Barely a step up from ancient Famicom games. The tiles and sprites are poorly drawn with low detail, and there's simply not enough variety. Being a CD-ROM game released in 1989, you'd expect tons of unique monsters, areas, and characters, but nearly every area is identical, and you get a ton of recolored enemies. Take out the voice clips and the two (!) CD audio tracks, and this could easily have been a HuCARD game. Contemporary cart RPGs like Phantasy Star II or Dragon Quest III blow it out of the water in every way, from complexity and variety, to scope and graphics. Hell, even Dragon Quest II and Final Fantasy, both released in 1987, are far more complex and interesting.