Missed Classic: Urotsukidoji (うろつき童子) - The Wanderer

 By Morpheus Kitami

The diamond patterns on the wall are certainly weird-looking.

To the gynasium, where the movie began and where a basketball game is happening. I should be able to find Nogumu and Ozaki (the basketball player) here. One of which is dunking basketballs and the other is pulling Leisure Suit Larry stuff, I'll leave the question of which one is which to the player. The music track here's weird, something that sounds like a midi adaptation of an anime theme which is an adaptation of an ancient folk song. After looking around a bit, Jaku can play basketball for a bit to be able to talk to Ozaki.

If I'm reading it right, Jaku is not a great basketball player and Ozaki pulls him aside. Actually, talk is a strong word, because the only option I'm given is to smell him. Jaku thinks that this is the Chojin. It's looking at him that starts the conversation, in which Jaku asks what he knows about the new religion. Ozaki's heard it since he transferred schools, and it's quite tedious. There's not actually a lot for our conversation to be about. I move away...

These two women don't even look like they're from the same game

...only for these two ladies to jump scare me, complete with aggressive music. "Gaudy" women, to quote Jaku. Is it really possible to be gaudy in an anime? If I see a woman walking down the street with pink hair in real life, she's probably not playing with a full deck, in an anime she's the quiet girl. Though here, she isn't playing with a full deck either, because normal people don't wonder why a "pleb" is walking near them. The game gives a name for her that could be any one of a dozen names. "Stand watch for insects like this", I see the game is throwing out the old horror reliable of making the eventual victim as unpleasant as possible so their death gets a standing ovation. I mean an actual one, not a metaphor for something else.

Meanwhile, smart Jaku here asks Japanese mean girls what they know about the Chojin. Wow, I am playing as a complete idiot. She calls him a sleepy head for not knowing about it. Okay, Japanese mean girls who are cultists. (I should start asking people to predict plot elements of these games, I've been looking at Japanese media for years and still these things get out one to left field) She just blathers on and on, finally ending with something about the cafeteria. I just want to get away from her. Yeugh.

Right, to the room I was trying to get to, and it's the girl's locker room, where I will no doubt find Nogumu after having used the unzip action on himself. I love how every time Jaku speaks, one of the on-screen characters lips move. Nothing but class here. Doesn't seem like anything else for that matter. Time to visit the tennis court.

"What kind of image will we try to make in our heavily dithered game? I know, something that's supposed to be transparent."

Well, I'll give this image one thing, the trees and clouds look nice. I hope it's not just me who thinks this game looks really visually busy. I'd try some kind of filter if my emulator allowed it, since I'd think even purists about this sort of thing would forgive me for wanting to rest my weary eyes from this dithering hell.

Curiously, I get the option to give/hand over something here, well, the word means many things, but in this case whatever it means is irrelevant to this conversation. Looking around and the Jaku really likes looking at the pretty tennis instructor. Guess I better talk to her. Jaku calls her over in such a way that causes her to respond with "too familiar". Damn, I didn't expect to see Jaku get skewered, I thought that was reserved for the ladies. He asks her about someone he's looking for, and apparently that person already left. Good. Well, I can't do anything else around here then.

What's left? Shower room? Ah, another room I can't show you. So I can't show you one woman whose chin looks like she has a giant zit on it. This room is useless, guess I probably should have done what the game told me and returned to the school. Ignoring the underclassmen at first...Classroom 3-C is where Akemi was, curiously the music goes funny, changing to a music track I heard earlier, except now there's some kind of ringing in the background. Weird. I can ask her about five people, including the Chojin. I have no idea who these people are. She mostly just tells me their location, tennis court again. But I was told they were here. What, does this game have some kind of fancy real-time movement system? I can believe it, nearly every Japanese-exclusive game I've played seems designed to test the player's patience.

Why, who's this? Is this Nagumo? I love how every name in this game leaves me scrambling to figure out what the hell is going on. I practically don't remember these names as names, just the faces and general concepts. It's Suspenders McHaircutPlease. (this might as well be his name, the game doesn't tell me anything beyond boy student) I can ask him about the same people I didn't get much out of Akemi for. Oh, good, numerous blocks of four kanji at a time, my favorite. You can tell this game is for adults, they use the big words. It'd be like if I wrote this like I was writing a dithyrambus about the Aphthartodocetaes in diezeugmenon.

I go back to the tennis court. Nothing new to my eye. Oh, christ, am I just going around in this game spamming dialog hoping something new happens? El despertando may end up being right that this game isn't halfway decent, but less because it's vile and more because it's unbelievably boring and tedious. Right, game sound off, metal music on. Not a complaint against the music as much as an observation that the soundtrack really doesn't fit spending hours spamming every possible dialog option. I listened to Lord Vigo - We Shall Overcome, good album, not very fitting to this game. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader if this is supposed to be a pun or not.

So I go around the entire area twice. Nothing has changed. Crap. What the heck am I missing? Third time, nothing. I'm not missing anything, I'm hammering every action I can until it's exhausted. One of two things is happening, the game has put me in an unwinnable situation by accident. Not impossible, but is it really going to be a thing with Japanese adventure games that they're designed so that picking a seemingly innocent option prevents you from winning? Say what you will about western adventure games, but nobody has ever complained about a game becoming unwinnable if you pick the wrong dialog option. It might exist, but its presence is so small as to be ignorable. No game has frustrated me as much as these two Japanese titles have.

Well, if I figure out where I went wrong, I can figure out what I might need to do. Akemi, or pink-haired sidebuns, has four people I can ask her about. Kanzawa, some lady I'm just going to call Kumiko, Ozaki and let's say Sakaneta. I think Kumiko is the Japanese mean girl, but I've definitely seen her name elsewhere. So we're two out of four...probably. Sakaneto should be at the tennis court, but the instructor says he returned home. That leaves Kanzawa, who I guess should show up at the basketball court, but never does. Akemi doesn't know, so let's try Suspenders McHaircut.

Damn it, he had a bunch of dialog I missed. Turns out that when asking him about Ozaki, he talks about a "foot of the mountain person", which is either an actual name or the antagonist in a '70s horror film. It seems to be a reference to his own dating luck, and that he's asking for a date with a pretty lady for information. Do I really have to do this? Can't I just follow these people from the rooftops? This is like making a Superman adventure game where you act out some really mundane scene from a Jimmy Olson comic. I'm not too annoyed, because at least we found the plot.

After wandering around three more times, I try to reenter the classroom Suspenders McHaircut was it. The scene has changed. Listening in, Jaku can hear a woman telling another woman to stop it. Seeing as Jaku is the hero, I bust in. I can't show you what's behind the door, but it involves four women, rope, a leek and a poster of Lupin III. One of them is in pretty bad shape and I have to save her. There's something to be said about how lame an "action" scene is in this game. Oh, god no, the game is giving me speak and listen at the same time. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Actually, Jaku just talks her down...somehow.

I didn't notice this in-game, but apparently her eye is twitching left and right. Solid design work.

Now we get...uh...what the hell is up with her hair? Hitomi is her name, and the conversation more or less centers around her being all right, finding out what the deal with the trio who beat her with a leek. (who may or may not be, makai, and/or the Japanese mean girls from earlier) This seems to coincidence with an event in the movie in which Jaku saves the heroine of the movie from a demon dressed up as a nurse, but this could just be me reaching.

She goes off, and what happens, but Dancis Frake and The Phantom pop up and begin swordfighting. You think I'm making that up? It couldn't possibly be just another hour of wandering around the school trying to trigger an event, could it?

It is. Hey, at least Suspenders isn't in 3-B anymore. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with that information, considering I've gone around the entire school again. Was the game itself made in five days or something? It sounds like I'm messing it up, but there's no info I've missed and no locations I've missed. Ah, right, guess I better search for a walkthrough. The site I used Gram Cats for doesn't have one, I know I searched there, and let's do a general search and SON OF A BITCH! THEY HAD ONE THE ENTIRE TIME!

Imagine being incredibly frustrated at having to play this game for hours only to advance and see this crap.

Ahem. Apparently what I missed was that I wasn't talking to the lady in 3-A enough. That gets me tiny head dude, or dark man. Tall, dark and handsome. One of these things might be right. He apparently knows Jaku, but Jaku can't say the same, basically calling him a bastard. He replies about how cruel Jaku is, and how could he forgot the person in the seat next to him, Nagumo. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh, wow, the game is serious, isn't it? He seems to be asking Jaku to help him get with Akemi. Jaku says she would consider him an insect and beneath her notice. Guess that tracks with the anime, but here it seems contradictory with how helpful she is.

What even are these images?

And then uh...Sanjou Sensei shows up. I don't know who that is. The music changes, before we were talking under the general school music, which is absolutely perfect for a mysterious strange, now it's the intriguing person dialog. She asks what we're doing, Jaku says they're great friends and will study together. Jaku makes something up about them being in elementary school together...and the conversation gets stuck in a loop. Talking to either just loops. I can't leave, so I look at Sanjou. She's in the prime of her youth 24, and teaches English because she studied abroad. I look again, and wait, why has the music changed again, to something aggressive? She's different...she's strong? Crap, the action sequences are almost as boring as the rest of the game. Hmm, I shall ponder the meaning of this as everyone stares at one another awkwardly.

After looking at her a few times, Jaku can smell her. Her perfume masks anything, but she smells faintly of being human. She tells Nogumo and Jaku to buzz off, she and Nogumo do so. Then the music gets really aggressive. Yeah, that's the time to break out the super aggressive stuff, when nothing is happening. Now I'm supposed to track her down. That much is obvious, but I resort to the walkthrough here because I'm not particularly interested in starring in another episode of "Morpheus wanders around a game for no reason". I go to the tennis instructor, who has no information about this, then the gym and gym locker room...so I can see Ozaki and some random girl going to a British dollar store. Then I can go back into the school.

I am insulted by how incompetent the artist in these scenes is. You charged people ¥6800, for these shapeshifting, barely human figures.

Now the first floor has changed, I can only look around, until I eventually find Nogumo. He's right outside the nurse's office. Inside is Akemi and Sanjou, about to commit a very serious breach of a teacher-student relationship.

...and she's a demon. Can't show you anymore after this, but I do note this is apparently uncensored. I will give the artists one thing, for all they lack in general male anatomy and a lot of female anatomy, they get some aspects surprisingly correct. A bit too correct if you ask me. Jaku and Nogumo enter and more talking. So much talking. If brevity is the soul of wit, this game asked for a boxcar when God was handing out brains. As to what happens next, well, I tried to find the English dubbed version of this scene, because it's just a masterpiece of some regard, but this version will do:

What, you want to know what I actually did? Boring. Just clicking through this. Also, note the vast shift between the already goofy game art and the even more different anime art.

More art. Might as well, this game doesn't have anything else going for it.

The, "I wanted to do art for a shonen series, but I can only draw the former villain hero properly"

Unlike the anime, Sanjou survives being a demon, somehow. Jaku also tells Nogumo that there's a demon world and that's where it's from. Nogumo doesn't really understand, but that's okay, neither does anyone else. A little demon pops out of the unconscious body of Sanjou, called Kuroko, or dark child. He doesn't really say anything I find important enough to translate, and then Sanjou wakes up, with the appropriate reaction one has when one is naked in front of one's students. Jaku just tells her someone came and attacked her. She buys it. And the scene ends with some time later.

While I must admit this entry is short even for my standards, I feel this is a good time to leave off in the story and to let it rest for a month because I really don't want to play this game in December for a variety of reasons, most of which should be obvious. See you at the probable end in January!

This Session: 3 hours 50 minutes
Total Time: 1 hour

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There’s a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no points will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. Please...try not to spoil any part of the game for me...unless I really obviously need the help...or I specifically request assistance. In this instance, I've not made any requests for assistance. Thanks!