I’ve finished the game, and my previous posts are needed for context.
Part of Book 15 the Man’yōshū via eBay.
There were two puzzles to go to get to the end, with a bonus puzzle of sorts afterwards. Sage number 5 first, though:
65 93 51 51 54
25 33 74 45 55 +64 24
35 23 65 55 51
This had the hint (I was initially wobbly on translating) that it’s related to previous puzzles except given a twist. I realized perhaps the numbers duplicated the same chart as last time but with digits rather than letters; for the “twist” I needed to either flip the diagram over or turn it. It turns out a right-left reflection was correct: rather than counting columns from left to right I needed to count from right to left. The entire grid “twists” in the process. The third cipher line (35 23 65 55 51) as an example:
I had the extra hurdle of running across archaic pronunciation.
Pierson again. His translation: “On the springfields, mist draws in layers till the blossoming flowers are in full bloom, ah, won’t I meet you my lord?”
The third line is “saku hana no” but you might notice it says “vana”. This reflects a shift in sound that happened in Japanese (it originally didn’t have an “h” sound), which of course wreaked havoc with my searches, but I eventually muddled through.
BONUS NOTE: The “h” sounds were originally pronounced with a “p”, but sometime near when the Man’yōshū was compiled the sound shifted to be the “voiceless bilabial fricative” before landing on the modern sound. (That is, pa went to ɸa went to ha.) The “ɸ” sound still shows up in “fu” in modern Japanese, which you can hear in the video below:
The choice of “v” is Pierson’s own; this volume came out in 1929 and he notes that multiple sounds appear for the “ha” character and so he tries to split the difference:
…the “v” I want to introduce is familiar to the eye, easy to pronounce and can serve in the modern spelling as well.
That’s enough historiography-of-linguistics, let’s get over to the sixth sage–
The presence of the @ character gave me immediate suspicion what I was looking at…
GNT@8H NAKUT@W0 HLQQ
…but I went over to pick up the hint anyway, which said that the answer was “in front of your eyes”. This is meant to be the literal PC-8001 keyboard the game is being typed on.
Each letter and symbol has a corresponding character. If you simply line those up, you get the right answer – no other shifting or turning or anagramming or anything like that. I found it to be the easiest of the six puzzles (especially as I could just type most of the letters directly on my emulator!) The @ mark corresponds with the dakuten (that can turn, say, ウ into ヴ)
Despite being the easiest, I found it the most interesting of the puzzles because of the history behind this particular poem. First, an alternate translation.
Oh for a heavenly fire!
I would reel in
The distant road you travel,
Fold it up,
And burn it to ashes.
This poem is by the attendant Sano no Chigami no Otome, part of a series of 63 poems in a “poem-tale” regarding her lover Nakatomi no Yakamori who was exiled.
The second account of travel and longing in Book Fifteen (verses 3723–85), attributed to the exiled courtier Nakatomi no Yakamori and his lover Sano no Otogami, comprises sixty-three tanka, arranged in four pairs of multiverse exchanges between the man and the woman, plus a seven-verse coda … it appears to have been based on historical realities; there was an actual Nakatomi no Yakamori who was exiled to Echizen in early 739 for an unknown transgression and who was pardoned in 741. The Nakatomi-Sano set constitutes a compendium of the conventions of courtly longing.
It includes a hapax legomenon. That’s a word that shows up nowhere else in a set of texts; in this case, the word tatane (“to fold”). It is close to tatam (also “to fold”). This could be a mere typo, but it shows this way in multiple manuscripts of Book 15.
From here the answer (including the invocation of heavenly fire) goes to the seventh sage. I was curious what would happen, given I knew (from the walkthrough) there were only six required answers. It turns out the sage gives yet another puzzle…
…and you’re supposed to send your answer to Micom City for a prize.
I’m leaving the puzzle as an exercise for the reader. This was exhausting enough already. You’re all ready to tackle this now, right?
In all seriousness, it did feel satisfying to finally get the overall pattern of what was going on and how to approach each puzzle, even though I was far out of my comfort zone. One open question is: does the game represent a hapax legomenon of its own? The back of the box emphasizes how “unique” the game is. While it’s not the only word game text adventure, and not even the only one written in Japanese in 1983 (we’ll get there eventually), it might be the only one ever written (including to the modern day) which requires close interaction with ancient texts. So if we narrowly point at that aspect, yes, the game is totally unique and out of time.
Rob did some more sleuthing and found that of the Micom City adventures, Date Adventure was advertised first and would have landed in January, and this game and Ninja Adventure came in February. This is still before the flood of games really starts, so even an oddball game like this might have had more distribution than you’d expect.
The months aren’t exact; I went by first-magazine-ad-I-had-minus-1-month but these are computer stores who might sell something a bit earlier than that. The red-marked games I don’t have copies of so haven’t played yet. There’s at least one more Japanese game in February (at least according to my secondary source that I haven’t cross-checked yet) but March/April 1983 is where the adventures really starts to arrive.
Special thanks to gschmidl who helped me get the file up and running and everyone in the comments who chipped in. And very special thanks to the author of the walkthrough; I likely never would have even figured out the premise of the game without initial guidance. I’m expecting/hoping if Date or Ninja Adventure pop up sometime they’ll be a little less stressful to play.
Renga in Blue 
There was one adventure, written just a few months after Puzzle Adventure, that has a very similar theme. Iroha Uta no Nazo for the MZ-2000:
http://mio.servequake.com/~takky/emuz2000/ohmz/irohautanonazo.html
You can find the original listing in the 8/83 issue of Oh! MZ (pp. 75-85). It looks pretty interesting.
I found an old review page where someone described both Date Adventure and Ninja Adventure in detail. The former was trashed thoroughly (you have to do everything in a certain order, which he found too arbitrary), but he praised Ninja as an ultra-difficult but clever series of death traps.
It’s a pretty brittle parser, it doesn’t surprise me the games in general were the type to require specific responses to things
the fact the game ended up being a contest of sort connected back to Micom City makes me think the author was connected as an owner or employee and not just someone who took them on their offer to publish
would also explain the “preliminary” ads for Time Bomb and Travel, the former which was late and the latter seemingly just never coming out
“an alternate translation” should be a link but doesn’t actually link to anything.
fixed, thanks!
Do you have an idea of what the references to the + and the Q are?
I think those were diacriticals? I admit I just avoided them and searched for the strings like they weren’t there.
Yes, the “Q” and “+” were 100% indicating dakuten marks.
Wow, congrats on finishing this! Even knowing the language, I pretty much gave up on this one after a few minutes… Not saying that it’s a bad game necessarily, but just extremely niche and well outside of my interests. With no interest there was just no motivation to chip away at it.
Anyway, according to my own admittedly non-rigorous research, there should be at least TWO Japanese adventures from Feb. ’83, both from Enix: Seiko’s Adventure and Mari-chan Kiki Ippatsu. The latter might be considered more of a mini-game collection than a proper adventure though. There’s also the issue of it being an 18+ game, something that will become more and more frequent as time goes on. I personally believe such games deserve fair documentation as much as any other games, but I understand that the subject matter makes a lot of people uncomfortable, and that there are considerations for posting images from said games on a public webspace… At any rate it’s a whole can of worms that we don’t have to get into now.
For Seiko’s Adventure I ran into similar issues trying to run it as we had in Mystery House II. About halfway through the game I get a BASIC error that crashes the game out and I can’t continue. I’ve tried several different dumps in just about every emulator under the sun but no luck. Hopefully you’ll find a combination that works, or maybe someone can try repairing the BASIC code?
Mari-chan Kiki Ippatsu I am not considering an adventure. I will mention it when I hit Seiko. (There is a new “erotic” game out called H9 that does the rock-paper-scissors thing but the game is haunted, so kind of low-fi horror.)
We have some other adult games for ‘83 and I will be playing them (although the one that concerns me is one for the MSX in English that’s really obscure). I will figure out what to do with screenshots when I get there.
I will do a BASIC repair run if I need to. Do you know what’s up with the first puzzle?
OK, it seems like the stand alone images of Seiko’s Adventure are bad, but the versions on compilation disks like the Super System 88 pack actually do work and are completable. I finally finished the game, and I really didn’t like it at all, but not unlike Puzzle Adventure it is a very unique specimen that does do some interesting things, even if it often feels more like a tech demo for N-88 BASIC than an actual proper game.
What do mean by the first puzzle, exactly? If you mean opening the door to the spaceship, note that the verbs must use the imperative tone. That is, “look” would be ミロ instead of ミル, “get” is トレ not トル, etc. The parser is without question one of the most worst I’ve ever seen, but the game makes up for it somewhat by basically turning it into a game of Hangman. Even the owner of the Old Games Shinobi Blog, who seems to be an exceedingly patient and forgiving gamer, had few kind things to say about this game.
The MSX game you’re talking about I assume must be Yobai? I messed around with it some time ago, all I really remember is being amused at how poor the English was. It’s like someone tried to remake Softporn Adventure entirely in Zero Wing-grade Engrish, pretty hilarious stuff honestly! But yeah I didn’t get too far, and there doesn’t seem to be a walk-through for it anywhere.
I might be mixing up games, but if I’m thinking of the right one you have to say the right thing on the first command or you lose
and it felt kind of inexplicable
sounds like your description checks out, though. anyway, game won’t be coming yet so I have some time
A walkthrough for Yobai seems to be here: https://w.atwiki.jp/retropcgame/pages/438.html
Did a bit of research (is that exasperated groaning I hear?), and have an update on Japanese adventures released before 3/83:
– Takadanobaba Adventure (Prosumer, PC-8001/6001, 2/83)
It appears this was released a bit earlier than the dates generally attributed to it. See I/O, 3/83, p.544. Also note the ad full of unknown vaporware adventures and RPGs by “Hobbit”!
– Cosmo Cross (Xtal Soft, PC-8801, 11/82)
I’ve known about this one for many years, but always dismissed the “adventure” part of its description, as it just looked like a quirky action game. However, I recently watched a partial playthrough video of its slightly later X1 port, and was surprised to see how it does indeed transition to a (primitive) parser-driven adventure-esque section for much of the game, which has inventory items, limited exploration, and maybe even a couple of puzzles. It was also released a month earlier than what is usually listed. See I/O, 12/82, p.476.
– Yūreisen (Micro House/Shinkigensha, PC-8001, 11/82)
This turned out to be the most interesting of the lot, as it was long considered to have been a commercial release from around 4/83, but I discovered that its true history is more complicated than that, and seems to be largely forgotten. The well-known NEC platform-focused PC Magazine started in 1983, but it was preceded by the more obscure The Micro Communication, which started as a quarterly in 1981, and then went bimonthly later in ’82. Its 7th issue (cover dated 1/83, but actually released 11/20/82) featured a very early article about adventure games arriving in Japan, which was accompanied by a type-in game, Yūreisen. By 1/83 they were selling it on tape, and eventually released it as the first game in an adventure series under the Shinkigensha label, which is how it’s generally known. See I/O, 12/82, p.488 & I/O, 2/83, p.48qq17, etc.
no worries, this is good! Did you see ever mentioned Takarajima? That’s the other game by the Ghost Ship author (Yasuhiro Kume)
That should be “I/O, 2/83, p.487”. Not sure what happened there.
If you want to go directly to Cosmo Cross’s text adventure part, I have done some ELITE HACKING:
LOAD”CAS1:”
When it’s done loading CCROSS,
1240 HANTEI=1
520 TNS=1
RUN
Then enter the password at the start screen (XTAL) and as soon as the first enemy appears, press F5.
The parser appears to be very simple – enter the verb, then the noun, then possibly a disambiguation, each on their own line (e.g. OPEN / DOOR / LEFT).
Setting the emulator (I use pc8801mk2) to print to a file, you can LLIST the BASIC code and see what actions/objects are available. I’m not sure what the HELP key is.
Yeah, Takarajima was first published as a type-in in the 9/83 issue of PC Magazine. The first ad I can find for the commercial release is I/O, 12/83, p.594, although I’d guess there’s a slightly earlier one in PC Magazine. They also published a second type-in of Yūreisen in the 6/83 issue, for the PC-8201. It’s a shame that most of these have never been scanned in, as they had very in-depth coverage of the early adventure game boom in Japan.
@gschmidl That walkthough of Yobai is sadly incomplete, it gives up pretty much right at the finish line. I was however able to finish the game on my own, so I’m sure Jason can do it too. No special knowledge of Japanese is necessary and it’s very short.
Impressed you managed to get all the way through this one. Japanese wordplay puzzles are one of those things that sound like an absolute nightmare to behold, considering how much information you can put down in such a short amount of syllables. TBH, even such a puzzle in an English game originally made for English consumption is so time-consuming that you’re building something around it. (Thinking of the cryptography puzzle in Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, the case they didn’t adapt to the video game)
I wonder if the reason why this one came off as comparatively easy is because of its focus on ancient texts? As strange as it sounds, such texts are usually well-reported on, as opposed to a game that makes up its own, which could go any number of ways depending on how easy it is to enter the author’s headspace.
I think the restricted corpus mainly helped me in that there’s some very similar theming throughout (love, unrequited love, flowers, other random pieces of nature) which I gather is how Matt T. approached solving the second puzzle
it’s not like I’m good enough to anagram to any word whatsoever but having “hana” to latch on right away with the third puzzle was key to reducing the possibilities
similarly with the reflection puzzle I listed out three different methods and I zeroed in on the one that most resembled one of the haka poems
It’s amazing that you managed to complete the Puzzle Adventure, even though it’s very difficult for native Japanese speakers.
The first and second sages have exactly the same image, but if you look at the process of how the images are displayed, you’ll notice differences. The same differences apply to the third and fourth sages, etc.
Also, I haven’t been able to solve the final puzzle. The Man’yōshū contains thousands of poems, and even each poem has multiple ways of reading it, so I couldn’t figure out which poem the author considered to be the correct answer.
I’ve completed the Ninja Adventure and Date Adventure, so if you have any questions, please ask in the comments.
You mean as it gets drawn, there’s something that vanishes by the time the art is finished? I’ll have to take a look (and maybe crank down the computer clock speed).
I suppose the straightforward question is: could I get copies of those two games? I don’t have downloads of either (Date / Ninja).