This blog has so far covered Japan’s adventure games with
Omotesando Adventure (published by ASCII)
Mystery House (published by Micro Cabin)
Mystery House II (Micro Cabin)
Diamond Adventure (Micro Cabin)
I’m lacking access to Takara B. D. Adventure (Micro Cabin again, same month as Diamond Adventure) and Odyssey Part 1 (Prosumer, squeaking in right at the end of the year and written for PC-88 with a Kanji ROM). One day!
While Diamond Adventure and Takara have notable connections with both Omotesando and Mystery House, and there are a few games (like The Spy) from 1983 that are linked, the industry mostly moved in different directions. Today’s game reflects that, completing an origin trilogy of sorts for Japanese adventure gaming.
Via Giant Bomb.
1980s Japan had a “bubble” in real estate, especially in the city of Tokyo; in 1990 the Harvard Business Review pointed out that just (in terms of real estate value) the ward of Chiyoda-ku alone could purchase the entire country of Canada.
The other city typically cited as benefitting from the bubble? Osaka, home of the real estate company M・A・C.
Mamoru Imanishi was in the Computer Division, and significantly, a son of the CEO. While he got his start in computers with a TK-80 kit…
From Wikimedia Commons.
…his true beloved was an Apple II; he ran a club devoted to the system and was familiar with import games. He somehow wrangled (see: son of CEO) a separate store and software line in late 1982 called Humming Bird Soft; they started with some PC-88 and Apple II graphics and utility software. Joining Mamoru Imanishi was his brother (Hiroshi Imanishi) and a small team.
The best scan I have at the moment of a February 1984 article in ASCII. It looks like today’s game has credits in the data file but I don’t want to poke too hard at it until I’ve finished.
They made their big splash in January in 1983 with The Palms for Fujitsu’s FM-8 (later FM-7).
Source. The FM-8 was Fujitsu’s first fully built computer but it was thought of as a “business machine”. Hence, a bifurcation happened after with Fujitsu’s follow-ups, the FM-11 being the business computer and the FM-7 being for general consumers. The NEC PC-88, Sharp X1, and FM-7 are the three 8-bit Japanese computers “casual” retro-gamers will likely run across.
The slow rendering speed on the PC-88 (and similarity between Fujitsu’s and Apple’s CPU) led them to make this hardware choice; what was even more daring was that they made the game solely for disk. Quoting Mamoru Imanishi:
I was anxious. After all, it’s a world where you can’t see the future. And I wondered: what extent would there be a demand for disks? I was unsure until the very end if cassettes would be better.
Omotesando introduced adventures, Mystery House introduced graphics, but The Palms goes back to the source — the Apple II Sierra On-Line games — and set a technical standard by a.) being in color and b.) being written for and only published on disk.
(What about the Odyssey game by Prosumer? It landed only a month before, and was in color, but worked on cassette and was allegedly quite slow. I will investigate whenever I get a copy, but for now just note it did not have the same impact The Palms did.)
We are at a seaside village for our girlfriend’s birthday. She’s been wanting a ring at the local shop; we’ve arrived with money saved from hard work. She awaits under a palm tree, but something is about to go wrong.
(Text above: “I’m in front of a seaside shop.”)
The village is laid out like a Sierra-style grid; the only directions are the cardinal ones and up and down (no diagonals).
While I’m at it, in addition to the directions I just mentioned, here’s the entire verb list (as extracted from the data file) — still following my policy of giving myself verb lists early on games in languages I’m not good at.
LOOK, SEE, SEARCH, GO, ENTER, GET, TAKE, OPEN, DROP, PUT, EXIT, LEAVE, OFFER, GIVE, PUSH, PRESS, TALK, ASK, SET, BUY, PAY, KILL, STAB, FIGHT, ATTACK, USE, WITH, BREAK, CROSS, WADE, BOARD, THROW, SWIM, WEAR, REMOVE, PEEL, RUN, ESCAPE, CRY, SHOUT, YELL, TURN, WIPE, RUB, UNLOCK, RENT, INSERT, BORROW, MOVE, DRINK
Ignore the appointment and wander around and you’ll eventually lose; the right thing to do is go into the shop, which offers a RING and a DIVINGSUIT…
…then BUY RING, and find the palm.
Giving the ring…
…is immediately followed by a kidnapping.
I haven’t gotten much farther than this. One last item is a NAILPULLER out in the open…
…but the only other item I’ve found is in the shop, and there’s not enough cash remaining to buy the diving suit.
There’s also a church with a locked door…
…and two cliffs, neither of which want to be climbed.
It looks like our destiny is to chase the damsel in distress under the ocean and have further shenanigans from there.
Just getting oriented has been slow going; it doesn’t help that the font is stylized in a way that seems designed to give headaches. On that last screenshot, the character before the period is a タ (“ta”). I sort of see it after the fact, but it’s taken puzzling above and beyond the adventure game puzzles created by the authors. Fluent Japanese readers are welcome to chip in with how readable they’ve found the text.
Fortunately, the pictures generally are clear. I’m essentially in the reverse position of the early Japanese pioneers playing import Apple II games with dictionaries by their side, scrounging in wonder at a new art form.
Renga in Blue 
The coconut that winds up on the beach after the kidnapping looks important. Break it with the nailpuller?
that’s what bonked us in the head into unconsciousness, but the game doesn’t let me refer to it any way I’ve tried
COCO is a NOUN (I went ahead and dumped the noun list too) so maybe later.
Ah, I’d thought we’d been bonked on the head by the kidnapper.
I wonder if that’ll be a “WITH WHAT?” thing again.
Ends up being OPEN DOOR / WITH NAILRIPPER bit later underwater
(Still progressing, update likely tomorrow)
I have finished the game and you will be pleased to know the coconut does become of vital importance (but not until later)
A few notes:
Odyssey was also released on disk within a month or two of the tape. The funny thing is that the very next ad under that particular Prosumer one in the 1/83 issue of I/O is the first Hummingbird Soft ad that mentions The Palms. Thus you would think that it also might have made it out by the end of ’82, but it must have slipped a bit, as the game itself says 1983.
The credits are:
Program by “DR. KASARI”
Graphic Design by “Hiroshi & Etsuko”
Color Design by “Etsuko & Yutaka”
Coopelation (sic) “Ryuchan & Masako”
Mamoru is also listed a few times in the code, and IIRC he may have been “DR. KASARI” himself, based on stuff I’ve read in the past (I actually own that issue of Login, but it’s stuck in storage with most of my other magazines). “Hiroshi” is obviously his brother, and Etsuko and Yutaka are the two women in that photo, who handled most of the graphics. Essentially this same team is also credited in The Knight of Wonderland, but by the time of The Abyss, the main designer was listed as “Kobayashi”, although it’s known that the same women did those graphics too (and the ones in Recapture as well, I believe).
The font is typical 8-bit katakana, and yeah, it completely sucks to read Japanese that way, although it was common at the time.
I’ll save talking about the credits until my last post in case anything comes up. I should mention there’s a twitter post
https://nitter.net/zerocreate/status/1620740220932218880
that talks about “the Neyagawa couple” who worked on Palms and Wonderland but also Blade of Blackpoole for Starcraft. I assume that means Hiroshi & Etsuko?
I poked around a bit more and found this:
https://fm-7.com/blog/archives/156
It appears that the Neyagawa couple was actually Masanori and Etsuko Takano, who were working out of their house as “Sleep River Soft”, and were contracted by StarCraft to do their early Sirius Software adventure conversions shortly after they had done some of the graphics for The Palms and The Knight of Wonderland, where Etsuko (as “Ettchan”) is also credited in the code, although Masanori doesn’t seems to be mentioned in either of them.
It looks like they must have kept going for a while and done other conversions, as the company is also credited with doing the PC-88 and X1 ports of Gradius a couple of years later.
ha, I was just coming for an update
https://gdri.smspower.org/wiki/index.php/Sleep_Rever_Soft
found the same thing on a different page
btw, I love that excerpt from Blade of Blackpoole, it compares them to Ken and Roberta Williams!
I just noticed that Oh!FM-7 actually put a staff list up for The Knight of Wonderland:
https://fm-7.com/museum/products/vitpdgtz/staff
This lists Masanori as the lead programmer, and Etsuko as both an assistant programmer and graphic artist. Since Mamoru is listed as the producer in both games, and Hiroshi is credited here with the game design/scenario, that would lead me to believe that “DR. KASARI” might actually be Masanori, and that the Takanos were responsible for more than just some of the artwork on these.
One other piece of info: A MAC/Hummingbird ad in the 12/82 issue of I/O mentions their “long-awaited” PC-8801 adventure game, with a request to “please wait a little longer” for a FM-8 version, so The Palms must have started development on the 8801, before they decided that the graphic display was too slow. It think it mentioned in that Login article that the development took around 3 months, so that would probably account for that. I also noticed that the back of the FM-8 game box has a 1982 date, so they might have had it printed before some of these delays
I can’t say that I have any difficulty making out the individual kana characters, but reading entire Japanese sentences composed of nothing but katakana is pretty miserable, and downright headache-inducing at times. IMAGINEIFTHEINGAMETEXTWASINALLCAPSWITHNOSPACESORPUNCTUATIONFORAROUGHEQUIVALENTOFWHATTHISWOULDBELIKEINENGLISH. Pretty bad, right? The meaning gets through if you slow down and read it carefully, but it doesn’t feel natural at all.
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I’m not fluent in Japanese, but I study it as a hobby, and I can say that the text in this game, while not pretty, is definitely readable. You can see it’s written exclusively in katakana (a Japanese sillabary) which has only 46 characters, as opposed to a couple of thousands kanji characters. (It’s pretty obvious why they did this – both due to memory constraints, as putting 2000+ characters in your video memory wasn’t practical at that time; and due to low resolution, as a lot of kanji are way to intricate to put in a 8×8 pixel grid).
Actually understanding text written purely in katakana, I imagine, is a bit tricky – but again, i’m not qualified to judge it, as I don’t know a lot of the words used here.
I just noticed that the girlfriend is blonde on the title screen (and box art) but brunette at the palm?