Tengai Makyou II: Manji Maru

~ MANJI MARU ~

Hudson Soft / Red

Super CD-ROM

1992

If you're planning to give Manji Maru a try, be advised that it requires a serious time commitment. Fifty hours of my life went into my first playthrough, and while I like to take my time and bumble around a lot, there's no way around the fact that this is gonna be a long trek for anyone, even the quickest players. But unlike modern fifty-hour RPGs, the emphasis here is on true adventuring, not movie watching and endless conversing. You'll visit exotic locations like mermaid villages, and travel via sailboat, mecha, transformable submersible tank, huge flying fortress, and drowsy giant turtle. You'll meet hundreds of people and acquire countless items and spells.

But you won't see all that many cinemas. After some killer opening bits, breathtaking cinematic interludes are few and far between. This game doesn't really need full-fledged cinemas for its story to be effective, however. Dramatic moments like the heroic mutt Shiro putting his life on the line against a billion giant bear mecha, funny moments like Kabuki and his rival inexplicably turning themselves into various beasts, weapons, and structures in a hilarious game of one-up, tragic moments like allies taking arrows in the back or crumbling buildings to the head in order to save your party... we don't need cinemas for this stuff to make a significant impact...

...though there are some memorable ones, particularly a sequence depicting a gory ice cave showdown.

We do need a good battle system to keep the action moving along, however, and Manji Maru comes through in this regard: its fights are over with in the blink of an eye. You can basically turbo-switch your way across the countryside. Now, you won't get great backdrops like you do in Ziria, and you won't see your party running around like in Kabuki Den, but Manji's system is super fast, and that might be the most important thing of all to me when it comes to RPG combat.

And you do get gigantic, animated bosses.

Justin Cheer's great four-part FAQ will help you overcome the language barrier if you don't know Japanese. Basic knowledge of the language really comes in handy later in the game when you need to warp between towns and provinces and keep track of what all your spells do (and I'm not just talking katakana here, folks). But whatever you need to do to play through this awesome game, do it.