I'm trying a bunch of different things to get in Japanese practice, and one of the things I'm trying right now is playing games with simple enough Japanese I can read it okay. This game is Traditional Story, created by a 16-year-old Atsushi Saito (Giraffe and Annika, Gitaroo Man) for the MSX. I know RPG cliches enough I can bring enough context to it to make sense of pretty much everything that's going on; really feels like it's reinforcing the grammar I know.
The story behind this one's pretty cute. It's a game he worked on in middle school back in 1987, and submitted for an MSX Fan magazine contest in 1994. He lost, forgot about it, and set it aside in his closet... until he rediscovered it last year. The game was finished, so he decided to finally give it a proper release. On floppy and everything - the mail order copy you get comes with a floppy disk and a paper manual, along with a QR code to download a disk image in case you don't have a floppy drive anymore. I got my copy from Beep via mail order.
