I’m starting to get the impression this game might be kusoge on the level of Genma Taisen, but at least Genma Taisen was beatable. I didn’t get that far, and it wasn’t just because I’ve been busy; the game really tries hard to be impossible to play.
Before trudging ahead, an order of business: there are some typos in the text that were not true to the original, and gschmidl has an updated file here. I still haven’t studied the source code but after this post I’m honestly probably just going to go for it; you’ll see why in a moment. The revised download also fixes the function keys to work properly (in hiragana) and also changes the “what should I do?” prompt to be in hiragana as well (like the screenshots in the magazine).
Another one of the mode 4 color schemes.
The first part I worked through was a genuine solve, via the clue that if you leave the starting scene and come back, the car is missing. This suggests the car is in some way important, so I tried whacking with various verbs until hitting “get in car” or “noru kuruma” (or rather, “noru kuru”, のる followed by くる because words need to be truncated to two characters). This reveals a key. Huzzah, progress!
The key did nothing in the left tower, but in the right tower (passing by the dog where the shoot-out happens), at the very top floor, the key unlocks the door.
Immediately upon entering the room, cage bars appear, being drawn in left to right.
It works as an animation but it’s still mysterious about what’s going on.
The game then prompts オリ ヲ ヌクロ! or “remove the cage!” and wow this was cryptic. I guess your character is assumed to have some items because “cut” works. I actually resorted to whipping out my standard verb list and hacking through but by pure accident; “cut” is the very first verb on the list. (I’m not remembering why; I think it’s just the first verb I used as soon as I got the idea to make one, so it has stayed in its place of honor ever since.) This causes a hole to appear in the cage.
I asked in the comments what I was looking at, and Aula astutely noted that the device on the floor in the middle was probably a vertical turntable player. I’ve never heard of such a thing before but this was apparently a big thing in Japan circa 1980-1983; I found after typing “kiku” I could listen to it. I don’t know if this is a hint or just for fun (like, I assume, the fireworks).
Trying to refer to anything else was a lesson in frustration. I did finally get one more thing of use from the room, which was via move / furniture (“kagu”, not a word specifically for a table). This revealed a second key, which I presume I can use somewhere else if I can get out of the room. Unfortunately, the word that’s worked elsewhere to exit a place, てる (it’s shift-F1 on the keyboard, remember the function keys now work) gets a musical response but nothing happens.
As far as I can tell from my playing without cracking open the source code, this is as bespoke a parser as you can get. There are flags for the keys (and items, I presume) but otherwise everything is seeking out a specific word (or fragment of a word) in order to progress. At least Seiko’s Adventure had the decency to frame the guess-the-prompt aspect as a literal Hangman game.
As I already declared, I’m pretty much done trying to solve this normally. I just want to get to the end, if such a thing is even possible.
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