Another GBW video script (Patreon)

Here's an interesting episode-to-be—a game you've probably never heard of. I certainly hadn't! Ayakashi no Shiro, an RPG by Seta. Despite the obsessiveness of RPG fans, and first-person dungeon crawler fans in particular, this role-playing adventure for Game Boy has vanished into obscurity. It seems pretty ripe for fan translation, but nope! It's a pretty cool game, but really difficult to play through if your Japanese literacy is as spotty as mine, so I'm selfishly hoping this episode will raise awareness of the game and inspire someone to come up with a translation patch.

Game Boy World #057: Ayakashi no Shiro

It's Game Boy World, and this is Ayakashi no Shiro.

Well, it's finally come to this: A Game Boy game I can't really give the treatment it deserves. Ayakashi no Shiro is the second of the four games Seta ever published for Game Boy, and the first to never leave Japan.

It's also the third Game Boy RPG to date, and by far the most traditional take on the genre. Where Final Fantasy Legend was a pretty bizarre take on the Final Fantasy standard and Sword of Hope was more of a ICOM graphical adventure with some role-playing elements grafted on, Ayakashi no Shiro remains highly faithful to the traditions of first-person dungeon crawlers.

It's so true to the Wizardry format that Robert Woodhead should probably ask for royalties. Players travel through a 13-floor dungeon one step at a time, fighting randomly encountered enemies and hunting for treasures.

What sets Ayakashi no Shiro apart from countless other dungeon crawlers of its style is the fact that it avoids the typical Western fantasy or sci-fi trappings so common to this type of RPG and instead sets up camp in feudal Japan. "Ayakashi no Shiro" means "The Castle of Ayakashi," with ayakashi being a catch-all term for various traditional Japanese monsters.

The game transpires entirely inside a Japanese castle filled with monsters, and the player takes the role of a ninja who ventures within to stop the big bad monster on the top floor. Oda Nobunaga figures into the story somehow, because doesn't he always?

While the hardline Japanese elements don't really kick in until you've ascended a few floors, the setting informs the game's style from the very beginning. Your protagonist doesn't use magic, he uses "jutsu."

You begin with a healing jutsu, but as you level up you begin to learn new skills: Raijin, Fuujin, and other spells named after classic elemental gods. In other words, yeah, it's pretty much magic, but all steeped in Japanese folklore.

So basically, Ayakashi no Shiro's gimmick is ultimately a superficial one, but honestly the fact that this was the first-ever portable first-person iso RPG should have been enough to sell it to Japanese gamers. Japan loves itself some dungeon crawlers.

While the RPG truly exploded into popularity in Japan with Dragon Quest, an underlying affection for first-person dungeon RPGs took hold over there long ago and never really relented. Before Dragon Quest, Henk Rogers' Japanese-language Wizardry clone The Black Onyx was a relatively huge success, and even before The Black Onyx came along many computer nerds were simply importing Wizardry games and playing through them in English.

Japan's love for dungeon crawlers gave us the likes of Shin Megami Tensei, Arcana, Shining in the Darkness, and of course Etrian Odyssey. It also accounts for the existence of developer 5pb, the fact that Starfish is still publishing new Wizardry games despite the series having been abandoned in the West more than 15 years ago, and it served as the inflection point for Demon's Souls and Dark Souls, which emerged from the work From Soft did with King's Field.

Ayakashi no Shiro belongs to this long and enduring Japanese tradition. Surprisingly, though, it seems to be fairly obscure, with only a handful of fan sites dedicated to the game.

Never having been released in the West, of course, it appears to be almost entirely heard of in English-speaking RPG fan circles. Aside from a few passing mentions of the game on forums, it may as well have never existed. There aren't even any fan translations of the game.

And therein lies the challenge: Ayakashi no Shiro plays entirely in a very awkward form of Japanese. Typically, Japanese is written with a combination of different alphabets, heavily based around the pictographic kanji script. Kanji plays an important role in written Japanese, not only conveying meaning but also making the written language far more compact.

Unfortunately, 8-bit video games typically shipped on tiny cartridges that lacked sufficient storage space for kanji, though, and Ayakashi no Shiro is no different. However, because it's all set in feudal Japan, the game text displays entirely in classical, calligraphic, hiragana script, without angular katakana to break things up and highlight key terms.

This is a real sticking point for anyone who doesn't read fluent Japanese. And, combined with the game's heavy emphasis on grinding, it makes Ayakashi no Shiro more of a chore than it really needs to be.

To the game's credit, it does include some surprising quality-of-life features. It appears to lack an economy altogether, meaning it circumvents one of the classic start-up sticking points of old-school dungeon crawlers: Damage being suffered by the player's party outpacing the cash necessary to heal up.

You can restore your health and mana point at any time for free by returning to the entrance to the castle, where you can also record your progress. Ayakashi no Shiro offers the rare luxury of a battery back-up, so you don't need to fuss with passwords in order to save your progress.

You'll find another plus in the form of actual in-game maps, which need to be acquired through exploration but reveal an entire floor at a time. Considering the repetitive nature of the castle's corridors, these come as an absolute godsend.

Admittedly, there's not much to Ayakashi no Shiro. It's quite simplistic as such games go, with your party consisting of a single ninja; this naturally limits combat to a simple matter of trading blows, and occasionally using jutsu to heal or hit an elemental weakness.

You can encounter random battles anywhere, but you're practically guaranteed an enemy attack any time you enter a room off the main corridors. But of course, the rooms are where the evil lord of the castle keeps the cool loot you'll want to pilfer, like weapons and curative items.

The battle system offers an auto-fight option, but it's pretty pointless since it causes you to attack random targets. When you have multiple foes against a single hero, you almost always need to focus on a single enemy to thin the ranks ASAP, and Ayakashi no Shiro is no different.

The rudimentary nature of combat here means you need to do a lot of grinding in order to get past the barriers that guard the end of each floor. The exit to the second floor is guarded by a giant spider, but I couldn't even get that far because I hadn't done enough grinding to defeat the pair of snakes that you have to fight before you can acquire the key to the boss' lair.

They damage they dish out together is nearly equal the amount you can restore in a single turn, so in order to overcome them you need to bump up to level 4 or 5. I reached level 2 in the course of natural exploration and grinded through trash mobs for another 15 minutes to reach level 3, and the prospect of fighting the same endless throngs of mice and bats undermined my enthusiasm for further exploration.

Going by Japanese fan sites and YouTube videos of the game, this seems to be the rule of thumb for the remainder of the adventure. Lots of grinding, not so much progress.

Still, for a game of its vintage, Ayakashi no Shiro isn't too shabby. It includes a few nice features that weren't really standard issue for RPGs of 1990, and the unusual setting—while ultimately just window dressing—adds a touch of novelty to an otherwise traditional RPG.

Think of it as the dungeon-crawler equivalent of Mercenary Force, albeit decidedly less accessible for most Americans. The pace, balancing, and language barrier make Ayakashi no Shiro rather less than essential for modern game fanatics, but I could see it becoming a small cult favorite if someone were to whip up a fan translation for it.

First-person RPGs are, as you might expect, incredibly scarce on Game Boy — so far as I know the only other ones we'll see on the monochrome system are Mysterium and a Japan-only Urusei Yatsura game.

In that light, I'd love to spend more time with Ayakashi no Shiro — but only after some kind soul puts together a fan translation patch for it. It's an interest albeit understandably forgotten little footnote in Game Boy history.

For more first-person dungeon crawlers, but only a couple, keep watching Game Boy World.

Next time: Another first-person corridor game!? Kind of....