Tengai Makyou fans. Anyone play Oriental Blue - Ao no Tengai?

[grahf]

I played this for a few minutes on an emulator, and decided to order a copy. It looks like a fun little game so far. Also, its about 90% kana with very little kanji, so entry level japanese speakers like myself can actually understand it a little

Anyone else give this a play through? How does it hold up to the rest of the series?

[Black Tiger]

I played this for a few minutes on an emulator, and decided to order a copy. It looks like a fun little game so far. Also, its about 90% kana with very little kanji, so entry level japanese speakers like myself can actually understand it a little

Anyone else give this a play through? How does it hold up to the rest of the series?

I bought it when it was first released and then returned it 10 seconds later because it looked like a pirate cart of a Suikoden clone.

I've been avoiding it since its not an 'official' TM and I've heard its a text heavy super non-linear RPG.

But I do plan on giving it a serious try once I finish every other TM game. 

[grahf]

Im actually enjoying this one quite a bit. It does feel a little generic in some spots, but its got quite a charm. I love the music in some of the towns. It may not be a true Tengai Makyou game, but it feels so similar they could have easily called it that.

[Black Tiger]

Im actually enjoying this one quite a bit. It does feel a little generic in some spots, but its got quite a charm. I love the music in some of the towns. It may not be a true Tengai Makyou game, but it feels so similar they could have easily called it that.

I wish they had thrown in a few more specific TM trademarks and released it as an official TM sidestory so I'd have no choice but to play it. 

[Kaminari]

It's as official as a TM can be. It was directed by Kōji Arai, who was also game designer on Zero and Fūun Kabuki Den. It's a very good game with great PSG tunes.

[Black Tiger]

It's as official as a TM can be. It was directed by Kōji Arai, who was also game designer on Zero and Fūun Kabuki Den. It's a very good game with great PSG tunes.

It may be related to TM, but its far from "as official as a TM can be", since its left off of the official tengai.jp site.

[Kaminari]

Yes, I'm aware of that. The likely reason why it doesn't appear at Tengai.jp is because the site is a Hudson property, but Oriental Blue (although developed by Red and Hudson) entirely belongs to Nintendo.

Here's an article of sort I posted a couple years ago on another site.

Oriental Blue ~ Ao no Tengai [2003]

"Once upon a time in the Tengai world... The Blue Land was a beautiful place to behold. Under the kindly rule of the Heaven Lord, Humans, Torcs and Onis were all living in good peace and harmony.

But uncanny fears begin to spread in Daito, the capital of this land. Rumour says that the city is slowly drifting into the Dark World... Playing the role of Tenran or Aoi, you arrive in Daito amidst the growing madness, with a strange manuscript in hand intended for the Heaven Lord himself.

The People From the Dark World are trying to turn Daito into an evil gate. From a mist of darkness emerges the Blue Castle, a huge palace in the sky which is the lair of the Devil Dharma... It doesn't take long before the capital is finally sealed to the Dark World!"

[...]

Stricto sensu, Oriental Blue is not explicitly advertised as a Tengai Makyō volume. At best, it's sometimes labelled as a gaiden, a side story. Nevertheless, if we put aside the most obvious departures (the absence of Torajirō Tsujino as character designer and the lack of recurrent characters from previous adventures -- except perhaps for Hyakki Chūjō, who bears some resemblance to Masakado and Kōtenmei), a couple of details give away some pretty strong clues that this game is still an integral part of the franchise.

Back in 2001, Ao no Tengai was presented at the E3 show as a new Far East of Eden episode planned for the GBA -- its working title was Tengai Makyō: Oriental Blue. The "Tengai Makyō" title was later scrapped in favor of a more elusive tagline presenting the game as a new RPG set "once more in the Tengai world". Marketing wise, that still tells a great deal about the targeted audience.

Semantically speaking, however, it implies that the game takes some significant distance from its "prequels". Indeed, "Tengai" is an archaic expression for any mythical and heavenly place that is, so to speak, "far east of Eden" -- that does not only mean Japan, but the ancient Orient as a whole. The point is that a game which action is set somewhere in Asia doesn't necessarily belong to the Tengai Makyō series... But then again, much of the same can be said of the opposite (The Apocalypse IV being the obvious counterexample here).

Besides, the mandatory wacky humour (which was scarcely used in Manjimaru and Zero, but kind of became the series trademark "thanks" to Fūun Kabuki Den and Daishi no Mokushiroku) is totally lacking from Oriental Blue. The unexpected result is that it actually makes it look and feel very much like the opus that started it all, Ziria -- which, ironically, was bashed outside of Japan for the relative seriousness of its mood and the almost zen austerity of its unique wafu graphic style.

Yet, despite the story doesn't explicitly take place in dandy Jipang but in what is called the Blue East, it still borrows a fair amount of cultural references from old Japan, China, Mongolia and Thailand (though, in true Red tradition, the map of the Asian world is barely recognizable). Definitely more of a fantasy work than a historical journey, this game still features some delightful anachronisms and subtle steampunk elements that have become standard fare in this series.

Finally, one can not escape the fact that Kōji Arai's Ao no Tengai just plays and sounds a lot like his previous Tengai Makyō Zero: an installment that wasn't spoiled by the unfortunate involvement of megalomaniac extraordinaire Hiroshi Adachi -- aka Hiroi Ōji, the legitimate instigator of the original Tengai Makyō concept, who later took way too much personal initiative in the game design department and tried hard (but without success) to turn the whole thing into a Princess Minerva spin-off

[grahf]

Cool little bit of info there. It pretty much sums up the obvious though, once you start playing it. Im curious where you quoted that from?