I guess it's time to revisit this blog.
Thing is, I've ended up becoming fairly active on message boards on Gamefaqs.com. When I'm playing a game, I'm usually posting about it there, where usually there's a much bigger chance of someone actually reading what I write. It has worked well for me, but as a side effect I don't feel much of a need to post here anymore.
Several times in the last few months, I've felt an urge to go back a little further in time than my normal gaming, to explore some of gaming history before my time. I've wanted to try out Wizardry and games that predate it. But also, and more particularly for this entry, I've wanted to explore the history of early Japanese Action RPG's. It's a significant part of gaming history that western gamers, myself included, seem largely ignorant of.
But you can't find any online message board anywhere with people actively discussing games as old as some of the ones I'm interested in.
I've been trying to play and learn the game Panorama Toh. It seems to be regarded, maybe a bit tenuously, as the first action RPG. It's also reportedly the first game made by the maker of Dragon Slayer, which might less tenuously be considered the first action RPG game series. (Dragon Slayer is also the series that Faxanadu, an old NES favorite of mine, comes from).
Panorama Toh is interesting. Being a predecessor to Dragon Slayer theoretically makes it a historically important game, and there's a fair share of sites that properly credit it so. However, despite its alleged historical importance, there seems to be a shocking dearth of easily available information about the game. Even the most comprehensive English sources I can find are missing descriptions of gameplay elements that I was able to find within 30 minutes of playing the game.
Of course, this is due to the fact that this game is wildly inaccessible. It was made for a long defunct Japanese computer system and never ported anywhere else. The system itself is not readily available anymore. I've had to resort to emulation to play it, but without a lot of emulation experience, figuring out how to get one to work has been a bit of a challenge, especially when so much of the documentation is still in Japanese.
I figured out that opening the emulator menus would pause the emulator, which has been helpful in trying to translate dialog that stays on screen for a surprisingly short amount of time. I've searched high and low for a scan of the original game manual to help me learn some things, but I've been utterly unable to find it. The best I could come up with were scans of a map that came with the game, though that's a little less useful for a game where the whole map is visible on-screen from the start.
The game is clearly inspired by the original Ultima on many fronts. Commands are placed by typing a letter associated with the command (it's a little ironic that the commands are based on English words when all the text is in Japanese). On the field you can use "I" for inventory or "F" to eat food. An unusual thing about the game is that the map tiles are hexagonal, with 6-directional movement instead of 4- or 8- directional.
At first glance, encounters seem to be set to the tiles, although there seems to be some variation in cases where you revisit tiles. Each type of encounter seems to have its own set of possible commands to use. And English sources on this game are not comprehensive on the actions you can take in each situation.
I've been trying to play it as blind as I can, but I've also been selectively reading things to try and make sense of everything. I've got a sort-of-good feel for the early overworld and getting to the closest town. I've tried to avoid reading anything about dungeons until I can get to one with a light.
You start in the southeast corner of the map. If you happen to try moving northwest, as I suspect a majority of people would, you'll find your first encounter is a pit trap. You can watch yourself fall in in the inset on the lower right corner of the screen.
Your options for getting out seem to be to (J)ump, or to (C)all for help. You can also eat some (F)ood to recover energy.
Jumping seems to be randomly effective. I believe it's more likely the higher your energy is, and you probably have to eat at least one food ration before being successful. Any failure saps your energy, so you seem to have diminishing returns from repeatedly trying it.
Calling for help also seems to randomly diminish your energy, but far less often. But it seems to be usually the better option, at least under early game conditions.
There are plenty of squares that result in encounters with the natives. There seems to be a wide variety of ways these encounters play out.
You can (A)ttack them. I might well be missing some nuance with the quick text scrolling, but I think it plays out as a challenge of strength rather than a fight to the death.
Combat is resolved in the lower right window. You basically mash "A" to attack repeatedly. I assume that more "A" hits means a greater chance of victory, but there still seems to be a random element. Apparently this "mashing" is what gives this game the tenuous "Action RPG" label, at least from what I can see so far.
The winner takes money from the loser.
You can (T)alk to them. Usually they give some random, but useful hint, to apply somewhere in solving the game. But sometimes they decide to turn hostile and attack you.
You can also (G)ive them money. Sometimes they'll just thank you and walk off, but quite often, depending on how much you give, you receive a random item from them. It seems to be a viable way of building up your inventory before getting to a town.
When you get to a forest, you'll often find trees with food in them. It seems you can (U)se a rope to get food from the top, but I haven't yet managed to find a rope to try it. Perplexingly, all resources I've read seem to leave off reference to being able to (K)ick the tree. A random fruit will fall. If it is one positioned directly above you, it will hit you on the head and you'll take damage. But if it's one of the other ones, you get some free food.
Snake encounters also seem to be missing information on English resources. You can (U)se medicine, or you can (C)all for help if you don't have any (but if someone comes you'll have to give them gold). This all seems documented online. But you can also (S)earch for herbs, which seems to result in making your own medicine if successful. You still have to (U)se it afterward; my guess is people who had already tried the "U" key before the "S" key never put together that you could try it again after being successful with "S".
I've experimented a bit with trying to cross rivers. Every time I've tried to swim, I've almost immediately died. Since I don't know how to save the game, I've mostly avoided attempting this, though I've read it can be done.
In some spaces, though, you can find a boat or a Nessie that can ferry you across. I haven't encountered either one enough times to be able to discover the full range of available commands and outcomes, but it seems that (G)iving money at least gives you a chance at being carried over.
I've only gotten to the closest town twice, and I've usually had to end my sessions there due to running out of time to play. The towns are also very clearly inspired by the original Ultima, which had a fairly unique way of presenting shops and the like.
The closest "shop" to in the northwest actually seems to be a place for selling equipment rather than buying it. I didn't have much to sell at all, so I didn't do much here.
My last attempt at playing this ended on a troubling note when I went to the next shop over. That's where you actually buy things.
However, (and this also seems to be well documented) there seems to be a game-breaking bug associated with the shops. Instead of charging you the sell price, they actually give you the sell price instead. You can buy unlimited copies of everything there, and it only makes you all the richer to do so.
I prefer not to exploit such bugs where possible, so I'm going to be doing some thinking on how I can do a "legit" playthrough. It's curious, though. I did some rudimentary browsing of this game on Japanese sites, and the most detailed one I read through seemed to make no mention of this bug. Is it possible that the ROM floating around on the English-accessible web is modified in some way?
Well, it could also be that the combination of the language barrier and trying to filter out game areas I haven't been to yet might have made me miss something on the Japanese source. Once I get more familiar with the game and stop filtering online info for thing I haven't experienced yet, I really want to try and look more into this, if possible.
I'm playing this on the side every here and there. Once I decide to spend another evening or two on this, I'll see if I don't have more to update.
Edit, May 30:
I played through this a bit more the other day. I feel like I'm getting a better feel for the intended gameplay loop. I'm not using the broken shop, but I can keep up with things more or less by using the adjacent pawn shop to sell unneeded items I get from natives. When I find trees, I find using the kick option statistically gives food often enough to outweigh any damage you take from it hitting you.
It seems you can't get more than 199 health. Eating 1 food ration restores 10 health, but if you try to go above 199 it gives you a stomach ache from eating too much, and you go back down to 30 health.
I can't figure out how the rope is supposed to work when under a fruit tree. Maybe it needs another items to work with it? I should have gone over the item list again, but I didn't. Also, you can (J)ump in those segments, but I can't figure that jumping actually does anything there.
I tried to take a flashlight into the dungeon. But it was still dark; I think you need both a flashlight and a battery. I met a few monsters in the dungeon, but I wasn't able to "pause" in time to see most of the dialog, and didn't want to experiment too much because I didn't want to die and start over. It looks like monsters can steal items, too, and I wanted to keep that to a minimum.
There's a bank that you can store silver at. I suppose it's good to help you from losing some when you lose random encounter fights, although it seems a little tedious overall to use it. It reminds me of the banks in the Dragon Quest games.
I played a little with the ferries and Nessie again, but not thoroughly. It looks like, in either case, if you (G)ive money/food and then (T)alk, they may ferry you across. But they also may not. There seems to be a random element to it.
In a lot of encounter situations where someone attacks you, you can press "E" to escape. But not, I think, all encounters. Still working that one out.
I don't know why I didn't think of it before, probably just me historically not using emulation often, but it only just recently occurred to me that I could use an emulator save state to not need to start over next time I play. I left off in a decent state, ready for the next time I feel like trying this further.
Edit: June 19
I dabbled a bit more in this game the other day.
I think I figured out the deal with the ropes, but I'm not totally sure because there does still seem to be a random element to it. But, it looks like the number of ropes you have influences the height you can climb. One rope is not enough to reach any of the fruit. But if you have two, you can reach the lowest one. With three you can reach the next lowest, and so on. When you use the rope, it looks like the height of the fruit is directly related to the amount of food you get (which I don't think is the case when kicking the tree). So if you have a few ropes, you can get food more quickly and consistently using the rope than by kicking.
I think I figured out a part of how to save your game. I think the "End" button or one near it gives you an option to save; another nearby button seems to quit the game (while still maybe giving an option to save).
The trick is, it seems to prompt you to insert a data disk into drive two. And I don't know how to emulate that with my emulator. And I can't find anything on it with a Google search. I'm also not sure if it's a generic disk you would make with the PC-88 system (which seems most likely to me) or if it's something specific to the game (which seems less likely, and wholly undocumented online if it's the case). Either way, I couldn't figure out how to do it. In any case, it can be gone around using emulator save states.
I also learned that staying at a hotel actually increases your maximum health, rather than just restoring it. Good to know.
For the second time, I got stuck at the bar. You are meant to type in something to proceed there, using kana characters. The first time I had no idea what to type. This time, I guessed that it was the password that some natives had given me; but I couldn't figure out which button corresponded to the diacritical mark on the last kana. It was while trying to find that by trial and error that I discovered the button that ends the game...
Next time I'll try to find an image online of a PC-88 keyboard, and see if I can figure out from that where on my keyboard to look.
Although I haven't researched it much further, I've managed to convince myself further that the only ROM of this game I can find online may not be an original ROM, but a modified one. I can't believe that the shop issue is actually a bug. It's something that would have been absolutely impossible to miss during playtesting, and it seems to be completely unmentioned on several Japanese sites I've looked at for this. When I get the energy, I really want to look further into this.
06-22:
I ended up having to switch emulators to figure out the bar area, where you have to type in katakana. Apparently, there is no key on my keyboard that will emulate the "@" key on the PC-88 keyboard, which is the key associated with the "dakuten" character in kana lock. A new emulator let me map said key to a Function key, but I couldn't find any such feature in the other emulator I used.
The new emulator runs the game at a faster speed, causing me to question, possibly without hope for answer, what the original native speed of the game actually was.
It turns out that what I wanted to type in the bar wasn't actually working. Later on, I got a previously unseen hint from a native that I had to buy a drink first.
Putting together all the hints I'd seen, you have to buy a drink first (type "sake" in kana, then ask for the radar, then give them the password (which is the English word "password" in kana).
You get a free radar for doing that. What the radar actually does is still a mystery to me.
I think I've probably done all I can do in the game without grinding a ton of money, or going into the caves. On all my full play attempts, I've yet to get a file where I have both a light and a battery. I have the latter on my current one, but not the former. Worst case, I'll buy one. But it's 1,000 gold without the glitched shop, and grinding gold is slow. Most items don't sell for even as much as I pay the natives for them. I've got to wait for Katanas, Translators, and Keys (the best one).
I haven't been selling Katanas because of a hint I got that you need 7 of them. But I think I'm going to switch course on that for a while. I've noticed that when I lose a fight to a native, they seem to always take the item closest to the top of the item list. If I have no ladder or rope, I think Katanas are next. I've decided that for the time being, I'd rather sell them than lose them to the natives. After katanas, my medicine provides a nice buffer from everything else.
In regards to getting food from trees, I believe I was mistaken on the food values being random when you kick. I believe that, whether by rope or by kicking, the values are fixed to the position of the fruit that you obtain. From left to right, they're worth 10, 20, 15, and 5. Put another way, they increase by 5 from the lowest one to the highest. There's definitely a random element to whether the rope works or not, and I still think that the chances increase the more rope you have, but due to the random element it's hard say for sure. And since rope is so high on steal priority, it's difficult for me to keep enough of them to test it.
In any case, it's now clear to me that your best odds with kicking are standing under the 5-point fruit to the far right.
Also, hotels don't always increase your max energy. I only got that from the hotel in the town at the top left corner of the map, and it seems to come from an extra meal they serve you. I don't know if it's dependent on the actual hotel or the room you stay in.
It's not a permanent boost, and trying to eat food while you're over the normal limit will still result in a stomach ache that brings you back down to 30 health.
Also, something I did in the town at the top left apparently resulted in me losing all my inventory. I don't know if it was at the bar or the hotel. That was a few days ago, and I've managed to recover without starting over.
06-23
Okay, selling the Katanas ended up counter-productive. But not too much so.
I finally got a light, and got my first real taste of dungeon diving. So, it turns out the batteries for the flashlight have a pretty short duration. I couldn't get through even a third of the dungeon before both of the ones I had were gone. Thankfully I'd saved before going in.
But I did learn that the dungeons are where the requirement for 7 katanas comes in. At least two of the dungeons, as well as the pyramid, all have enemies that can't be fought without 7 katanas.
There's a ghost in one of the dungeons that turns out to be friendly if you give him some food. He gives you a fair amount of exposition and also offers you a spell you need, but implies you need the sage's stone (or philosopher's stone) from the castle.
I got an armor upgrade as the last thing I did this morning. I thought I'd got one from a treasure chest in the upper right dungeon, but I guess it was too old to use. But after I got my 7th katana, I returned to the bottom middle dungeon and beat the enemy there for an actual armor upgrade.
Speaking of the 7th katana: I can't be sure without more testing, but it seems like overall I've been having an easier time grinding up on the east side of the map rather than the west side. I suspected at one point that the west side might be considered a higher level area, with natives that are harder to beat. There's enough randomness to it all that I could be imagining it, but when I moved back east I really seemed to begin retaining my ladders and ropes for much longer, making it much safer to keep my katanas. It didn't take too much time at all after that to get to that number 7.
I'm going to see on my next session if my new armor is enough to get me into the castle.
7/6
I had forgotten that I hadn't posted finishing this game.
The armor allows you to beat the guard in front of the castle. In the castle, presuming you're able to beat Dracula there, you get to meet the king, get a special stone, and open a special chest that gives you enough money to buy the powered suit. The chest requires you to type the Japanese word for "key" to open, but you have to talk to the king first.
The stone's name is interesting. It's kenja no isi, which I recognize from Dragon Quest as the name for the series' Sage's Stone, which is a literal translation. But it might also be a mistranslation in that series, or a mislocalization in any case. Because it's also the word for the Philosopher's Stone from old alchemy legends (famously part of the title of the first Harry Potter book, although here in the U.S. they also used a different name for it).
Once you have it and leave the castle, the overworld changes. The layout is the same, but there are no more pit traps or snakes, the natives change their dialog (and no longer stick around after speaking), and there are monsters on the map. The final stage of the game involves hunting these seven monsters down and defeating them. You also want to go to the cave with the ghost to learn a magic spell from him.
At this stage (I'm not sure if it's an event trigger or a result of having the powered suit; I suspect the latter) you can rest at a hotel to bring your HP up to 999, with an additional bonus at the nice hotel in the corner town, to get up to 1200 HP. The seven bosses vary in difficulty; the ones you can see closest to the castle are the easiest. You get a nice HP boost from beating them, and you can get most of the easier ones in one go.
It slowed down a bit after that for me. Several of the bosses couldn't be beaten in one attempt, even with the magic and as much health as I could get. But they don't heal up after you escape, either. So I'd have to go back to a hotel, and back to the castle too if my stone's power ran out, and start fresh. Some of the strongest ones took quite a few attempts to beat this way, making this last part of the game rather tedious.
Some of the monsters are hidden. You can walk over each map square to find them, or you can press "W" to cast a spell to reveal them. ("W" is also what casts your combat magic, but it takes energy from the stone.)
For whatever reason, I had to fight the mummy twice. Maybe he's meant to be beaten last, and will resurrect if not so? I'm not sure.
After beating all of them, you can go to the top floor of the pyramid (but not the last staircase!) to talk to an NPC to finish the game.
Overall, I had a fair amount of fun with the game. But, on my last run, I never got a shovel and never found out what happens if you beat the enemy in the northeast cave that requires one. I also never figured out what the hammer's purpose was (though I have a suspicion it may be another monster that requires it; I may not have realized because I already had it). I also never got or saw the tank that's shown on the game's intro.
So I want to go back and experiment a bit more. But I started playing the designer's next game, Dragon Slayer, and got more absorbed by it than I expected. If/when I get back to Panorama Toh, if it's still in the near future, I'll post here again.
