Kagami no Kuni no Legend

~ KAGAMI NO KUNI NO LEGEND ~

Victor Musical Industries

CD-ROM

1989

Ah, the memories. This was my first PCE "teen idol" game, and it's a horrible one... at first. It casts you as some dude watching the star of the game perform a concert on TV. After the concert, she somehow gets teleported to some sort of alternate world, and since you have to save her, you get sent there as well.

Yes, I was embarrassed to be playing it during this entire part.

But then it starts to play like a normal anime-style digital comic, and as a digital comic, it's actually not too bad. It usually keeps you exploring and examining your surroundings as opposed to just sitting through Japanese dialogue. You journey through jungles and caves; visit palatial towers and "scary" houses; and run into all sorts of odd people and creatures, including a friendly little dragon looking for its mother.

The "action" is relegated to the top-left quarter of the screen, but the cartoony artwork is decent enough, and the music is okay--the regular game music, that is. The girl's songs are terrible.

There's one of those first-person maze sequences that are usually downers in digital comics, and this one has these weird three-eyed-head things that ask you quiz questions, but they make the process easy on you by simply pushing you back a few steps and letting you try again if you respond incorrectly.

There are some Game Over spots, but they're all a cinch to get past, except for maybe at the last boss, where the necessary string of commands isn't all that easy to stumble upon.