Ihatovo Monogatari, Hector's Super Famicom celebration of Kenji Miyazawa
Developer: Hector
Publisher: Hector
Director: Jun Tsuruya
Scenario writer: Seiichiro Mawatari
Character designer: Hiroyo Odachi
Soundtrack: Tsukasa Tawada
Genre: Edutainment adventure game posing as a fourth-generation JRPG
Progression: Linear
Country: Japan
Platform: Super Famicom
Release Date: 1993 (fantranslated on 28\12\2018)
Exploring the history of videogame RPGs means being constantly exposed to the incredible amount of variance those cultural artifacts displayed since their earliest days in terms of systems, art direction, narrative and inspirations, showing how futile the most stringent efforts about genre categorization often end up being, and how this heterogeneity, as paradoxical as it may sound, could end up being one of the defining traits of this large and diverse family of games.
One of the best examples to showcase this kind of situation may very well be Ihatovo Monogatari, a Super Famicom title presented as a RPG despite not even trying to be one, instead opting to celebrate the career of a beloved Japanese author, Kenji Miyazawa, by effortlessly mixing a variety of ludic and narrative elements taken from different contexts. This game, which was mostly ignored back when it was released in 1993, ended up being recognized for its cultural relevance later on, fostering a re-release on Nintendo’s Satellaview digital delivery platform (one of those forgotten early online videogame distribution platforms that back then seemed almost science fiction, like Sega’s own Meganet, which I briefly touched upon talking about Dragon Crystal) in 1996 to celebrate the centenary of Miyazawa’s birth.
Even then, it would have never managed to see the light in English were it not for the valiant efforts of Tom and DDS Translation, who released their fantranslation patch in December 2018, finally making this unique title available to a wider audience.
Going back in time to the spring of 1993 and projecting ourselves into a random Japanese video game store, after being overwhelmed by the colorful ocean of Super Famicom games, one of them would perhaps have caught our attention because of its bizarre, avant-garde, almost Dadaist box art, as well as the oblique glance cast by the protagonist with his bowler hat, almost a defiant attitude by someone surrounded by legions of shounen heroes, burly fighters and starships.
Had we decided to return that gaze, we would have made our acquaintance with the aforementioned Ihatovo Monogatari, a bizarre product of eclectic team Hector, also known as Hect, which five years before had developed a title that could pass as a parody of our own contemporaneity, America Daitouryou Senkyo, the first (and only, as far as this uninformed European knows) simulator of U.S. presidential elections, developed according to the sensibilities of a Japan that was still healing from its devastating ‘80s economic crisis.
Upon a quick examination of the back of its box, the small screenshots showcasing Ihatovo Monogatari would have given us a similar impression to many JRPGs of that era, with sprites whose relatively realistic proportions could remind of Laplace no Ma and Phantasy Star III, an association I immediately made when I first looked at its box while browsing an eBay Japanese store almost two decades ago. Even to this day, whether because of Hector’s own RPG-focused marketing, the game’s niche appeal or some sort of laziness when looking at lesser known retro titles, one can still find Ihatovo Monogatari described as an RPG, including in most Japanese sources, when in fact the Story of Ihatovo is a rather unique mix of edutainment, graphic adventure and digital celebration of the talent and themes of an author that had become unforgettable to the Japanese audience, Kenji Miyazawa.
Ihatovo Monogatari is far from the only one to occupy this ambiguous and indistinct space between different genres: even without considering titles that emerged in different geographical contexts and periods, like To the Moon, it’s easy to associate Hector’s effort with Moon: Remix RPG Adventure by Love de Lic, which came out a few years later on PS1 and has finally managed to land in the Western markets in the last few years, noticing how references to the RPG sphere, even if they are included in the title, can sometimes allude to thematic resonances or deconstructive intentions, rather than to an adherence to the ludic or stylistic features associated with Japanese RPGs, even more so considering how they were already extremely heterogeneous back in 1993.
It is unclear how Hector, a team that would later slowly fade from the scene without much fanfare, was able to come up with such a peculiar product, but one can theorize its development started out as the personal initiative of Jun Tsuruya and Seiichiro Mawatari, Ihatovo Monogatari’s director and scenario writer, and, playing Ihatovo Monogatari, one can almost feel their happiness in celebrating a beloved author, an intent that becomes quite obvious since the second NPC you end up talking with, not to mention a number of not-so-subtle puns, like the hotel’s name.
The unique mix of gameplay and aesthetic traits chosen by Tsuruya and Mawatari, after all, also partly reflects the figure the works he wanted to honor: in the Japanese literary landscape of the early decades of the 20th century, in that pre-war Taisho period that also featured figures such as the celebrated, revolutionary Ryuunosuke Akutagawa and the Romantic Kyouka Izumi, Kenji Miyazawa embodies an interesting synthesis of cultural interests and life experiences, defining his role as the forerunner of fairy-tale and children's literature in the Japanese language.
Born into a rather wealthy family in the country town of Iwate, in the prefecture of the same name located in northern Tohoku, Miyazawa lived his childhood during the Meiji period, when Emperor Mutsuhito’s new government brought about the rapid modernization and industrialization of Japan, after centuries of Edo seclusion. Growing in such a complex, often contradictory context, Miyazawa developed a number of very different beliefs and interests, combining a traditional adherence to Mahayana Buddhist mysticism, associated with his adherence to the Nichiren pauperist school (which, in an age where haibutsu kishaku-style Shinto activists had just attempted to sideline Buddhism due to its long-standing association with the defeated Tokugawa shogunate, could itself become a political stance) with a modern passion for agronomy, classical music, Western philosophy and a concern for workers' rights in the agricultural countryside context familiar to him and his family.
His stance, which always tried to combine the preservation of traditional popular culture with the introducing a number of social elements meant to improve workers’ lives, is somewhat close to the position developed by Pier Paolo Pasolini in my own country a few decades later, making Miyazawa a moderate, provincial Socialist in an Empire that was rushing into its industrial and military boom, where that label was carefully avoided for its subversive potential and "red" organizations, including those with no ties whatsoever with the Third International or the Soviet Union or, indeed, without any proper Communist beliefs, were not tolerated. This was especially true when, as it was with Miyazawa, Socialist beliefs also fostered the kind of pacifism that was anathema to a Japan that, after winning the Russo-Japanese War and expanding its influence in post-Qing China during the First World War, was projected into even larger, and more ominous, expansionist ambitions, slowly transitioning from the Taisho era’s illusion of a Japan driven by an idealized, anti-colonial Pan-Asiatism to the early Showa era’s mask-off descent into Japan’s own full-fledged imperialistic phase, both on its own soil and in the Chinese and Korean theaters.
Miyazawa’s own work as a writer, for that matter, is best understood by considering how he perceived his literary activity as an integral part of his religious duties, for the same reasons that led him to give up his profession as a teacher to create a local association (later closed down by the Imperial authorities) aimed at teaching young farmers the principles of modern agronomy, not without disputes with the more traditionalists who refused to use Western technologies, before a lung disease abruptly ended his earthly experience in 1933, at only thirty-seven years of age.
Despite also being a prolific poet in his youth, Kenji Miyazawa went down in history for his fairy tales, many of which were later adapted into anime with great success. Such is the case with Gauche the Cellist, The Life of Budori Gusuku and The Night of Tameyagahara, though the most famous undoubtedly remains A Night on the Galactic Railroad, which inspired Akira "Leiji" Matsumoto's celebrated Galaxy Express 999, where he was able to combine a number of very concrete social themes, common among the people he knew, such as destitution and child labor that also affect the life of the story’s protagonist, Giovanni, with its dreamlike sideral train scenario, echoing European authors of the previous century such as Dickens, Zola or Verga.
Giovanni’s best friend, Campanella, gives us another chance to showcase Miyazawa’s own multifaceted interests, since his name was taken from a 16th-century Campanian friar and utopist, Tommaso Campanella, known for his The City of the Sun, and it’s likely because of Miyazawa’s influence that this name also ended up resurfacing later on in JRPGs with one of the most enigmatic antagonists in Nihon Falcom’s Trails saga, also named Campanella.
Back to our Ihatovo Monogatari, the attempt to repurpose Miyazawa's dreamlike tone in videogame form can already be observed in its opening, with the fantasy train that takes the mysterious protagonist to the eponymous city of Ihatovo, whose name stems from the adaptation of the name of Miyazawa’s hometown, Iwate, into Esperanto, an attempt to work out a universal language that the author became passionate about in the mid-1920s during his conversations with Esperantoist Gustaf Ramsted, the Finnish ambassador to the Japanese Empire.
Ihatovo, which the author in a famous passage placed "in the fields of Little and Great Claus, in the same world where Alice traveled, in the northeast of the deserts of Tepatar and in the far east of Ivan's kingdom", in the Hector-developed title will act as a hub during the mission of collecting Miyazawa’s own notebooks, exploring the surrounding regions and reliving, chapter by chapter, events and situations inspired by his main works, until the final turning point, in a journey that even Western users can finally experience.
The player can interact with Ihatovo’s world by directly exploring its areas in a top-down two-dimensional context, while its story progression is based on talking with a variety of NPCs and searching for various key items, like a simplified adventure game.
The story of Ihatovo Monogatari soon shows, alongside an explicit celebratory intent, an anthological style, with the player brought to interact, no longer in paper form but directly through the virtuality of the video game medium, with characters and situations already familiar to the Japanese audience the game was aimed at, even if the game’s final stretch shows a desire on Mawatari’s part to merge the wildly different settings of Miyazawa's corpus into a wider shared universe of sorts, going so far as to sketch out an eschatological component.
In its straightforward, playful simplicity, Ihatovo Monogatari owes much of its appeal to the successful combination of three different talents, that of the aforementioned Mawatari, a lover of Miyazawa capable of reworking his style into event-based dialogues, that of Hiroyo Odachi, who worked on its graceful graphic design, including a number of beautiful sprite arts used for its main events, a choice reminiscent of home PC JRPGs and early visual novels, and, lastly, that of Tsukasa Tawada, who composed its evocative soundtrack, a challenging task considering how important music was in the author’s own work, something that the game itself acknowledges, between musical festivals and the presence of the abovementioned Gauche.
While Mawatari and Odachi unfortunately do not appear to have continued their careers in the Japanese videogame industry after Hector’s demise, Tawada managed to make a name for himself, working as a composer for a variety of Pokémon and Harvest Moon spinoffs, not to mention his collaboration with Chunsoft as the sound designer for a number of Dragon Quest titles, including Dragon Quest VI and VII.
From that shelf back in 1993, Ihatovo Monogatari questions us even today, in this time of expansion of the videogame medium and of the range of experiences it’s able (and willing) to convey, regarding the cross-media relationship between literature and videogames, the boundaries of authorship and celebration, the possibility of posthumous interaction between authors and players and the importance of mixing different genres and sensibilities to create unique titles.
While a number of RPGs have tried to repurpose novel series, especially in Japan and Eastern Europe, with examples ranging from Ryo Mizuno’s Record of Lodoss War, Yuuto Ramon’s Gdleen, the Strugatski brothers’ Hard to be a God and STALKER or Andrzey Sapkowski’s The Witcher, and a number of others have included some sort novel-style narrative in their experience, like with Kiyoshi Shigematsu in Sakaguchi’s Lost Odyssey, Ihatovo Monogatari still choose to operate on a completely different logic, opting to defy its genre, rather than its source material, by becoming an un-JRPG of sorts.
*I posted a thread about Ihatovo Monogatari on the r\JRPG subreddit on 30\12\2018, back when its fantranslation first surfaced and, late in 2022, I wrote a piece about it on a magazine in my country.