namelessWrench

The Only Rotten Dollhart Webring

A hideous fruit, disgracing itself.

Allo-Aro



gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

Microcabin occupied a very specific niche within the landscape of early Japanese ADV: after finding success with the Harry Fox (1984) series of cutesy, storybook-esque games, they transitioned into a string of menu-based ADV based on licensed properties like Urusei Yatsura and Maison Ikkoku that offered a more relaxed difficulty compared to the competing detective/mystery ADV of the day, and prioritised allowing players to enjoy the art, story and fanservice over deciphering an exacting string of inputs in order to progress. (Everything's relative, of course—these games still have game-overs all over the place.)

1987's SeiLane was their first non-licensed game produced during this era, and showcased all the expertise they'd cultivated with IP games within the framework of a Harry Fox-esque game. Players control the jerboa Prill on a quest through the Seilane Forest to reunite with his long-lost sister and defeat the evil Maou Puzzle, who has turned the inhabitants of the forest to stone; the setting's all very Alice in Wonderland-esque and plays around with the whole world-inside-a-dream theme, and it's full of cutesy anime-style characters played straight down the line. It's not a childish game, necessarily, but my impression has always been that it specifically found an audience with younger players who were at the right age to be hooked by experiencing all of the very conventional plot twists filtered through the lens of interactivity.

(Incidentally, EGG had Harry Fox listed on their old coming-soon list, which they've since removed from the EGG Console page... I wonder why they skipped ahead?)



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in reply to @gosokkyu's post:

Have they commented on plans for doing PC-98 games in the future? Games like this one and Popful Mail were also on PC-98, and I know for SeiLane in particular the PC-98 version has much easier to read text.

nothing concrete, afaik... they had the PC88 emulator ready to go for a minute thanks to the Telenet stuff they'd been handling, so I imagine it might take them a while to spin up a PC98 emulator just for EGG Console.