Title: Far East of Eden: Tengai Makyou Zero
Platform: Super Famicom
Developer: Red Entertainment / Hudson Entertainment
What's this game?
Tengai Makyou Zero is a Super Famicom RPG developed by Red Entertainment. It's the third game released in the Tengai Makyou series, which started on PC Engine CD with Tengai Makyou Ziria. It's the longest-running Japanese RPG series to not only never have an official English release, but no fan translation either*, which is a shame because it's certainly what I would consider to be an important piece of the genre and industry canon. Each game has brought something relatively unique and novel to the table. For instance, Ziria was the first Japanese RPG to ever have voice acting, way back in 1989.
Tengai Makyou Zero is a relatively traditional turn-based RPG, with a focus on its real-time clock events, colorful graphics, and quirky humor.
What's so interesting about this?
Well, the main thing that sets this game apart is what the developers call PLGS (Personalized Live Game System). It was one of the first Japanese RPGs to use a real-time clock to affect gameplay and the game world in some way.
When you begin the game, you set the clock and input your birth date. From then on, time tracks normally, whether the system is on or off. The date and time have quite a number of effects on the game. For instance, every month, there is a different festival held in the game where you can see different events and speak with different people. Real world holidays are also reflected in-game, and there are special shops that only open on certain days at certain times which offer deep discounts, or unique items to buy. There are also other optional story events in the game that can only happen at certain times, and you can even do things like hatch and raise pets in real time. There is no time limit on the game, though, so there's no need to feel stressed. The real time clock is there just to add an extra layer of enjoyment, rather than any sort of restriction.
Another thing you may notice is that the graphics are really good. Just like another notoriously good-looking Super Famicom game, Star Ocean, this game uses a special chip to decompress much higher quality graphics than would fit on a regular game cartridge. The result is not only a nice extra amount of detail, but also a much wider array of unique graphics, particularly for event sequences.
* But, Aeana, I thought Oriental Blue got fan translated years ago. Isn't that part of this series? Well, sort of. It's a spinoff that does not take place in Jipang. It's subtitle is "Ao no Tengai," and it's not actually part of the Tengai Makyou series.
A note about the title
The person in charge of the fan translation wants to make it clear to everyone that Tengai Makyou and Far East of Eden are not the same thing. One of the running gags in the Tengai Makyou series is that the stories are based on accounts written by a fictional 19th century sociologist/historian named Paul Hieronymus (PH) Chada, which were collected into a book called Far East of Eden. These stories are blatant exaggerations of the way westerners misconceive Japan ("Jipang"). So yes, it's a Japanese game developer parodying the way they feel westerners incorrectly view Japan and its history.
I wanna play it!
Well, good news. An extremely high quality fan translation was just released recently, and it is available here. The translation will work on real hardware, given a donor cartridge that has the SPC7110 chip, but due to a nonstandard expansion technique used to fit the English translation, emulators need to be updated to support it. Currently, the translation can be played on Higan, the Higan accuracy core for Retroarch, bsnes 087 (yes, just that version), and modified versions of snes9x (this includes snes9gx for Wii which has been modified, and the regular snes9x core for SNES Classic's Retroarch).
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