funbil

I am somewhat behind on my reading goals for the year, but I have read something in Japanese finally after mostly focusing on Spanish reading. Jirō Akagawa's first short story, "Ghost Train'! Akagawa is one of the most well-known Japanese mystery writers, so it was nice to finally read something of his. The main reason I did and am posting about it is because I wanted to play the Famicom adventure game based on this story. There's also a tv movie that I might post about too.

This is the first story in Akagawa's Ghost series, following police investigator Uno and college student Yuuko Nagai as they solve several cases. Or so it says, I only read the first story. The mystery? 8 people get on a train, but by the time the train reaches the next stop, they're all gone! Uno is given a "vacation" by his boss to the area to unofficially investigate the mystery. He crosses paths with Yuuko and they start to investigate the case together.

An all together breezy read (about ~70 pages) that I had a well enough time with it. It was entertaining trying to figure out the mystery, and I got at least part of it right lol

I'll probably add to this post when I finish the game and maybe the movie. I'm interested to see how they both adapt this. Stay tuned!

I watched the TV Movie adaption of Jiro Akagawa's Ghost Train! This tv movie was shown as part of TV Asahi's Saturday Night at the Mysteries. This is just going to be me quickly comparing the short story and film, so spoilers. One difference I can mention that isn't a spoiler: There's 7 people missing instead of 8 like in the short story! Not sure why this change was made...

Don't have many thoughts on it, kind of in and out, next up is the game!

I have finished the Famicom adaption of Ghost Train and thus done with this trio of Ghost Train versions! This one is much later than the original short story and movie, over a decade later being released in 1991. It's a later Famicom game, the Super Famicom had been out for a bit. There's also two notable names that worked on this game. The original art was by Seizo Watase of Heart Cocktail fame, and music by Koichi Sugiyama, famous for being a terrible person who is thankfully dead... and Dragon Quest music. So how did the game end up being?

The reason I was interested in this game in the first place was the control system is pretty interesting! It has full areas that the player can walk around as Uno and Yuuko. There's not much you can do with this other than walking into people to bring up the action menu, making it not that different from other menu based adventure games. It does give the game a unique look from other Famicom adventure games, but can also be a little tiring to have to bring up the menu for every single action. This is on top of the fact that you can't go to any other area from any other area, you have to go from connecting place to connecting place to get to where you want to be. So it's load the next scene, bring up the menu, move to the next area, repeat until you are where you want to be. Aside from that it's your average Famicom adventure, at least from my small amount of experience with them. Getting clues, asking multiple times about the same topic, hoping to trigger the next part of the story, etc. Now for comparisons between the short story/movie/game!

Now I've finally finished Ghost Train! I might eventually go back and read the rest of the short stories in the series, the book I read it in has them. This game has been on my to-play list for a couple years now, so it's nice to cross it off. I really should play more Famicom adventure games...