Keeg

i've always been kind of vaguely aware of Okhotsk ni Kiyu by way of a Mega Man 4 romhack lifting a song from it - really interesting to know that it inspired the direction of menus in JP adventure games for years to come until mice came and shook things up! fun read

Do you know if there’s any sort of text parser scene in Japan that still exists like how there’s still the occasional commercial game in English but it’s mostly freeware games and competitions?

You can actually trace the origins of menu-based adventure games a little further back to Micro Cabin's Eiyuu Densetsu Saga(This was August 1984 while Hokkaidō Rensa Satsujin: Okhotsk ni Kiyu was December 1984). It kind of feels like an attempt at doing a dungeon crawler through an adventure game, I did not like it much outside of the art. It also doesn't have number menus, but is controlled with arrow keys and pressing enter similar to how consoles would do it. There's also Koei's November 1984 game Corridor (https://cohost.org/umbrellaterms/post/80709-corridor-pc-8801) which is also a combo adventure game/RPG controlled purely through number based menus.

If you wanted to stretch the definition of "menu-based" adventure game, you could actually go back to Enix's June 1983 eroge Joshi Ryou Panic (CW for misogyny, queerphobia, fatphobia, etc. if you decide to look it up). This game has a contextual menu-based system controlled entirely by the four arrow keys. So sometimes up may simply be "move forward", but on another screen it is "grab item", or a dialogue option, etc.

There's also SystemSoft's March 1984 adventure game called Miko and Akemi's Jungle Adventure (ミコとアケミのジャングルアドベンチャ), which has a halfway between menu-based and input-based where you construct the parser command word by word through a menu.

On the point of English parsers vs. Japanese parsers, from what I've played it's kind of a 50/50 split. Some are purely English, some are Hiragana/Katakana. The issue was that the Japanese parsers were very basic. In a lot of earlier Japanese adventure games you might get the basic [Direction]にいく line or [Object]を[Verb], if that, other times you can't even put the particle and just put a space. One notable outlier was SystemSoft's Infocom ports in the 90s (not sure if the same SystemSoft as Miko and Akemi's Jungle Adventure), which transferred over the complexity of Infocom's English parser to Japanese (https://cohost.org/umbrellaterms/post/218485-planetfall-pc-9801).

In addition there's a kind of offshoot style of Japanese "parser" that I've seen appear in a few games that I'd call an "obstacle course" parser. Where there's no movement or collecting items, but you are on one screen and have to type the right solution to move on or it's a game over. The parser has a keyword bank for each situation, usually one or two words make a keyword. As long as your answer contains one of the keywords it recognizes, you will solve the obstacle. This can lead to answers where you might have said the opposite thing of the solution, but since you put the keyword you pass anyways, or you can try to cram as many keywords into an answer to see if one sticks. A lot of CSK adventure games fall under this type of parser.

if i recall correctly, Okhotsk ni Kiyu is a work by horii who actually programmed that game and then ported the port for it later. Portopia adopted that and that was the game that got popular, a bit like how Demon’s Souls laid the ground for Dark Souls’s success.

also, check out the playstation 1/sega saturn adaptation of Zork 1 for japanese audiences. it’s wild and interesting. you are grabbing text from the game’s text itself — it’s like a hybrid of what we would do with twine and text parsers but even more cumbersome!