Here we are at the big inhale, before the console really steps into the spotlight. And by an astonishing coincidence, the occasion aligns with another specific perversion of mine. The next few entries in this thing will be a little more substantial. My work situation is very much Not Normal yet, and I don't have a great idea of if/when that will happen for me again. This might formally become a biweekly thing for the time being. In the meantime, follow Borgmaster and subscribe to the Deep Listens podcast because you never know when Fandom will decide to kill the blogs on this site for no reason.
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Yokai Dochuki
Developer/Publisher: Namco | 5 February 1988 (JP)
Foreknowledge
Third parties arrive on the PC Engine! And who else would it be than those wizkids at Namco, the second ever third party developer on the Famicom. Who was the first, you ask? Hudson, of course.
Yokai Dochuki, which I’ll roughly translate to “The Journey of the Yokai”, is a Namco arcade platformer from 1987. I’m going to be incredibly broad here and say Yokai Dochuki is Namco riffing on Capcom’s Ghosts 'n Goblins. The game has you traversing a handful of platforming levels with a horror/hell/yokai theme, using projectile weaponry to deal with various monsters impeding your progress. There are shops along the way where you may spend currency picked up in levels, making this another game with a little bit of Wonder Boy essence sprinkled into it. There’s also something like a morality system. It’s got quite a bit going on, honestly.
I’ve poked this briefly in the past and honestly wasn’t thrilled. It is one of the handful of HuCards I own, what with me being a bonafide Namco pervert, but I’ve never seen fit to actually play a hard copy of the game.
I do have a bit of a head canon around this one, however. This game was released right around the time Namco and Nintendo began a bit of a public spat. As mentioned, both Namco and Hudson were early comers to the Famicom, and had received something like most favored nation status when it came to licensing and production of games for the system when both came to the platform in 1984. At that point, it was not entirely clear that Nintendo was destined to become a company that produced multiple feature films. Three years later, however, Nintendo was the home console market if you weren’t in Europe or Brazil. When it came time to renegotiate terms around licensing deals, they came to the table with an arrogance and entitlement that may be a bit familiar to anybody who follows Nintendo’s modern legal machinations. This led to some very ugly spitting back and forth between Nintendo President Yamauchi and Namco President Nakamura in the domestic press, not to mention sowing the seeds for some of Tengen’s activities in North America. We won’t get into that all here though.
What matters is these negotiations were certainly grounds for Hudson, Namco, and eventually other developers to seek out other platform options as they came along. Neither company ever fully stopped supporting the Famicom – in fact Namco would release dozens of games for the system even after this point – but going forward it was not a foregone conclusion that the Famicom would be receiving either ports of the latest and greatest arcade titles, or flagship original creations. Yokai Dochuki is the doyen of this movement. The Famicom would receive a conversion of this game four months after the release of the PC Engine version, and while it is not the worst game Namco would publish on the platform, it is by most measures far inferior.
Happy to provide that bit of background, because now I’ve got to play this thing.
Hindsight
Youkai Douchuuki is about as middling a game as I can imagine. It is perfectly fine, but with nothing to recommend it today.
I failed to mention above that this game features not only a morality system of sorts, but also that it ties into the fact that there are multiple endings to this game. I also omitted that you are playing as a young boy named Tarosuke who was sent to the Jikogu, aka Narana, the Buddhist hell world where souls are sent to be purified. His crime? Causing mischief during his (brief) life. The game is a quest to reach Yama, a judge-like figure present in East and Southeast Asian pantheons, in order to determine the final fate of young Tarosuke.
You do that with some ho-hum hopping and shooting in a world filled with yokai enemies which you may or may not recognize from the recent Yokai Watch series from Level-5, all while buying material upgrades from shops. At the end of levels, you play a brief single screen shooter where your goal is to protect a praying Tarosuke while he beseeches an oni for entry to the next level of hell. Here you control a spirit, Monmotaro.
The actual ending you receive is determined as a function of how much money and how many demons you collect in the final level of the game. There are five of these endings, with the best and worst sending Tarosuke to Heaven or Hell respectively.
I did not see these endings naturally because, to be honest, I found the gameplay here a bit too tedious. You are only able to shoot horizontally, so you’ve got to get yourself in position to deal with enemies on multiple platforming tiers. The jumping itself is a bit stiff to boot. It’s not terrible, but in terms of raw platforming I think this is outdone by Bikkuriman World. Maybe not where I'd want to rate in terms of my platforming.
Ah well. It’s just as well that Namco used this game to get to grips with the new hardware. Things will start looking up for them very shortly thereafter. And as for the PC Engine itself, an all time great was just around the corner from this freshman effort.
Oni Appeased: Two. The whole game is beatable inside of an hour, but I am a busy boy with places to do and things to go.
Turbo Ratio: Not applicable. You can pick up a loose copy of the inferior Famicom port for $10, a third the price of a complete PC Engine copy. The arcade version is also available via Hamster for $8, and if you simply must play this game you may as well play it raw.
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