Nippon: Authorial Presence

Thorsten brags about size.

       

It's been fun having authors Rüdiger Hoppe and Thorsten Suhr/Sommermann visit my entries on Nippon, clearly enjoying the fact that someone is playing their 30-year-old game, while carefully--some might even say to a fault--avoiding spoilers.

Having played almost 25 hours of Nippon, it's hard not to feel like I already know them, what with their initials appearing in multiple island chains and town walls ("RTG" for "Rüdiger the Great" and "SFG" for "Suhr Fantasy Games"); these are mentioned on Thorsten's Nippon Museum as being as much copyright protection as self-glorification.

In the game, you meet Rüdiger's sister in one town:

       

"Bist du Single?"

         

And then in the city of Funatabi, you run into the developers themselves, standing at the end of a long pier:

           

I've been playing for over 20 hours! It's a little late to "welcome" me!

         

I have to admire their restraint in not making themselves mikados, like Richard Garriott would have done. However, I do have to note that the developers have nothing to say if you approach them "friendly" or "normal." They only talk if you choose "submissive."

Having explored most of the game world at this point, I have to offer some praise for the design of the landscape and the towns. The settings that they created are as original, interesting, and evocative as possible with tiles. As you sail along, you encounter archipelagos of complex shapes, broken continents crisscrossed by rivers, valleys fully enclosed by mountains, and snow-capped peaks amidst pools of lava, all surrounded by a black void that sucks your ship over the edge if you sail too close.

       

I sail into a lake surrounded by lava surrounded by mountains surrounded by lava.

        

Among the game's 30+ towns are Yogan Haikyo, a city in the midst of being destroyed by a volcano; Mizu-Do, designed like a giant spa; Kokoro-Kazan, a mountain city with tunnels hewed through the rocks; and of course Ulti-Tori, shaped like Ultima III's Sosaria. Every city has a unique and original layout that incorporates elements of the surrounding terrain and creates navigation obstacles for the player. For instance, in Funatabi, there's a hidden armor shop that requires you to buy a ship, sail it to the northwest corner, and walk through a bit of lava. Lots of other towns have areas only accessible via swimming or finding invisible doors.

           

A dying town riven with rivers of lava.

         

I've been visiting these towns one-by-one as I continue my north-south exploration. I think I've logged 13 new ones since last time. I have to say, it's a bit exhausting to prepare to play this game, as I have to load my map (waiting for ArcGIS to load can take about half an hour by itself), then open and arrange the game window, my notepads, and my translation web site. This is definitely a game that requires two monitors and an Internet connection--something that's going to become a big problem if I don't finish it this week.

Once I have everything open, however, I fall into a certain rhythm. Visiting each city is roughly the same. To start, I explore more or less randomly, talking to NPCs as I find them, until I find the city map. Every city has one, and the developers did a good job varying how difficult it is to find them.

       

This one wasn't too hard to find.

         

The in-game town map makes it easier to plot a path. You have to visit not only all the buildings, but all the open areas as well.

        

Once I have a screenshot of the map, I use it to plot a more systematic route through the town, trying to ensure that I don't miss any NPCs. A single missed NPC can mean serious trouble, and I'm sure I've missed plenty.

          

An NPC has nothing more to say to me after I bungle the approach.

        

Here's where I cheat a bit. Once I encounter an NPC, I take a save state, then quickly run through the various dispositions, reloading the save state after each one. This is necessary because NPCs clam up at about half of your approaches, and the only way to reset them is to leave the town and re-enter. Even if they speak to you, they might not offer all their keywords unless you use the right approach. This isn't quite as bad as it sounds, because you sometimes have information from another NPC that suggests the one you're speaking with has more to say, and you sometimes get hints on the right disposition to use. Even with these considerations, it's pretty bad. I can't imagine completing the game under these circumstances on original hardware.

          

An NPC offers a vital clue.

        

Of course, even if I get them to talk, I have to translate the results. Their sentences are short enough that it's faster just to type them one by one than to get a massive text dump from the game file and to find, copy, and paste from there. Moreover, this far into the game, I only have to use the translator for about one-third of the words. No, that doesn't mean I'm "learning German." I wouldn't have a clue how to construct a sentence from scratch; I'm utterly lost on the gender of nouns, conjugations, and tenses; and of course I have no idea what these words sound like. But simple word recognition is becoming simpler.

         

An NPC named Gandalf tells me about mittelerde.

         

Except for the most obvious throw-away pleasantries, I copy the NPC dialogue into a notepad. About 1 in 15 dialogues gives me some kind of "to do" item that I copy into a different section of the notepad. Many of these items concern cities I've already visited, but I've decided to save "backtracking" for when I'm done with my first pass through the game world.

Aside from that, I check out any new weapons and armor (I recently bought an expensive suit of "master samurai" armor, which creates a constantly-pulsing magic aura around regular samurai armor), re-stock keys, incense, and food, and buy the occasional night in an inn or massage at a spa. Incidentally, getting a massage, like sleeping with a prostitute, sometimes confers experience points.

         

I like to think there's some amusing German reason behind this.

        

If the town has a treasure room, I typically re-visit it as many times as necessary to get my gold up to around 15,000 before moving on. The most lucrative so far has been in Kokoro-Hi, where you can get 2,500 gold per trip for the price of one key.

           

Looting the treasury of an evil god.

         

The main quest has become marginally clearer. It doesn't appear that the Wheel of Time is going to take me home, but rather to dates in which certain things happen at the game's various mountains. An NPC told me I should "consecrate the sacred great mountains of the world by meditating there," which will "call upon the gods who receive you, and prepare the way back." In Chuibukai, an NPC told me the specific date that I need to visit the mountain near its city. 

       

The first piece of hard intel that I have.

       

Operating the Wheel of Time just advances or rewinds the world, however. It doesn't magically transport you. So if you're going to go back 60 years, you'd better be at least 70 years old, or you won't be much use when you arrive. Ditto for going forward in time. I wondered why some of the magic shops offered the ability to age you as well as rejuvenate you, and now I know.

The problem is, I didn't come all the way here just to find the way back, did I? The manual made it sound like I was supposed to stop the emperor's marriage and keep both him and his bride from spending the rest of their lives in misery. I haven't heard anything else about them since the last entry.

          

Is this the NPC who was supposed to have more to say?

           

Beyond that, the game has introduced more mysteries than answers. Here are the five major enigmas occupying my mind right now:

1. How spells work. I learned "magic" (generically) in the last session, but every time I follow NPC clues to find a spell, the game tells me that I'm missing some prerequisite to use it. The "cast" icon on my icon bar doesn't do anything.

2. This pair of items. I've found several artifacts during my travels. Most of them don't appear under the generic "use" button but instead add additional buttons of their own to an already-annoying icon set. This session, I followed several NPC clues to find a "magic ball" and a "mirror of the earth." To get the magic ball, I had to find a secret mountain pass into the "inaccessible island," which has an invisible wall around most of its perimeter, preventing landing. 

         

As promised, I find a crystal ball under a palm tree at the end of a mountain pass.

         

Anyway, the two artifacts seem to work together in some way. The ball cycles among 10 syllables--yonno, san, ni, chi, rei, kyu, hach, shich, roku, and go--and you select them to string them together into two lines of eight total syllables, like "Reigorokuchi Sannikyuchi" or "Hachreinisan Nichisango." The mirror, meanwhile, gives you one of these combinations when you look at it. But if you repeat what the mirror says on the ball, the disk just runs for a bit and nothing happens and I'm an idiot. I just figured it out while I was typing this. It's a teleportation device, isn't it? The mirror tells you where you are, and the globe lets you program a destination. The syllables represent coordinates. I'll have to experiment, but if I'm right, I don't see how the globe isn't horribly over-powered, obviating both flight and the "gate" system, which I also can't figure out.

          

I think I just understood what this means.

          

3. Unsolvable side quests. The towns offer dozens of encounters that seem like side-quests but don't seem to give any option to solve them. For instance, in Chuibukai, there's a guy on an island who says he has malaria. In another area of town, there's a guy who says he has a cure for malaria. There's even a scroll on the floor of his office that suggests something that you might be able to pick up. But I can't find any way to unite the cure and the sufferer. In Yoga-Haikyo, a woman surrounded by lava screams at me to help her escape, but I can't think of any game mechanics that would allow me to do so.

4. The Gates. There are portals all over the game world. They apparently chew up one of your gate icons and age you a bit, but otherwise allow quick transport between towns or between select locations on the surface and towns. The problem is, I can't get any of them to work. Often, I can enter the initial portal and find myself in kind of a portal nexus, but after that, nothing I do--standing, pressing the mouse button, moving up, moving down, searching, using any of the icons--will let me through the other portals. I suppose this is moot if the globe works as I suspect it does or if I find the flying horse. And sailing doesn't take that long.

       

Okay, but how do I use them?

         

5. My new status bar. Speaking to one of the Buddhas resulted in not an enhancement to an existing status bar but a brand new one, to the right of the existing ones. Moreover, there's a gap indicating a possible place for yet another one. The new bar is unlabeled, and I don't know what it's for. Nothing seems to budge it. I thought it might be for magic, but the "cast" icon still doesn't do anything.

Incidentally, I'm still confused about the difference between the shaded and unshaded portions of those status bars and will happily take explicit spoilers on the subject.

Late in this session, I finally found Mizu-Do and paid a sensei to teach me how to swim, adding another icon to the unwieldy icon bar. (Although as many as it has, I feel compelled to point out that it still doesn't have 26, meaning there's still no excuse for not mapping each action to a key.) About half my "to do" items involve returning to cities where you need to swim, including an entire city (Hinode-Tori) inaccessible without the skill. Swimming takes a rapid toll on health, so you can't do it for an extended period.

          

What an inhospitable place.

        

Most of the rest of my "to dos" involve bringing various items to statues who demanded them. Most of these are weapons, so I've had to purchase half a dozen slaves to carry my excess. Statues also often demand food, so I've tried to keep a variety of food items. A few other tasks are dependent on finding the Amulet of Hi, which should allow me to walk through fire; that's in a city (Fujokawa) I haven't discovered.

          

Another statue wants a yari!

          

I didn't mention combat much in this entry because it's become almost trivial. I blast a few enemies with my cannons or my bow when they won't leave me alone. Supposedly, the experience adds to my standing, which the game currently has me at gakusho, which my translator tells me means "forehead," so I'm not sure how good or bad that is.

I've visited several Buddhas during these voyages, and I've been good about leaving (rather than save-scumming) if I don't know the answers to their riddles. One question, for instance, told me that "a silver flute attracts wild animals" and wanted to know "what do these animals tell the user of the flute." This reminded me that I heard of a magic flute in Namazaki but never found it. I need to give it another try if I want to answer that riddle.

But I got most of them. One Buddha wanted to know why the connection between Watashibune and Funatabi no longer exists; having visited Funatabi, I knew it was because "the ferryman died." (Answering this correctly caused a bump to my mystery meter.) Another Buddha wanted to know how long the nights are in Nippon, as measured by hours. I solved this one in a silly way because I forgot that I had a clock. So I put the emulator in "warp" mode, waited for night to begin, timed its length, and timed when it began again. It lasted 15 seconds out of 60 total seconds for the day, or 25%, so I answered 6 hours and got it right.

           

It's a stupid answer, but I know the answer!

        

As I wrap up, I'm in the city of Atatakami, home of the evil god Hachiman, who is "not home" right now. Hachiman supposedly stole the sun horse of the goddess Amatseru, and the horse can fly, making it possible to visit numerous places on the map ringed by mountains. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the horse anywhere in the city. I'm getting ready to make another pass.

         

A snake attacks me as I enter Atatakami.

       

Nippon has its moments. In basic structure, you could say that it's a lot like Ultima IV: visit towns, get clues from NPCs, fight monsters in between. But the game world is simply too big, and what happens in between the towns too uninteresting, and the character development too limited, to sustain interest for what probably will be at least 40 hours. I'm not eager to make a second pass through all of these cities if it turns out I missed some key clues, so if I don't know what I'm doing by the end of the next session, I'm going to start asking for explicit hints just so I can bring it to a close.

Time so far: 23 hours

Nippon: The Age of Sail

My discoveries in the top half of the game world.

           

I'm not ready to say that it works particularly well as an RPG, but Nippon is turning out to be an interesting game that puts an emphasis on open-world exploration. It has an Ultima III-V quality of needing to find cities, people, and clues, but with less guidance as to your overall mission and goals. 

Combat plays such an incidental role that I suspect you could win the game without it. I don't know for sure. It's possible that later stages will have some necessary combats, and I'll be grateful for whatever time I spent in weapons training and character development. So far, however, I think I could have avoided every fight by just ignoring enemies and running past them. They don't really pursue you. In fact, your icons can run right over each other, so they're not even capable of standing in your way. Moreover--and again I could be wrong about this, but I don't think so--the game doesn't seem to have any dungeons. Most of your time is spent in cities and towns where combat isn't even an option.

              

 I still fight a lot between cities in case experience points become important.

         

After the last session, I decided to get more serious about my approach to the game. I brought the world map into ArcGIS as a raster and created a layer on top of it to record the locations of cities, castles, and other physical features. I spent a long, snowy day exploring all of the landmasses in the top half of the map, recording as many locations as I could find. I'm sure there are some others hidden behind impassable mountains, but I have to find some manner of flight before I can record them. There were more than a dozen cities in this area, and almost 150 NPCs. 

          

Unsurprisingly, ArcGIS can't figure out the projection and coordinate system for Nippon.

                          

I ended up re-visiting some of the cities I'd already visited, because I discovered something new (and somewhat annoying) about the NPC "stance" system. Not only do NPCs refuse to speak with you if you pick the wrong stance, but some of them don't offer all of their dialogue keywords unless you choose a particular stance. All this time, I thought I'd chosen the "right" stance because I picked something like "normal" or "friendly" and the NPC continued to talk with me. But it turns out that I needed to pick a different one to get the full story. Expecting players to get it right, or to go outside and return several times for every NPC, was terribly unfair of the developers. There are a few places in which NPCs give you hints about the right stance to take, but they're certainly not ubiquitous.

             

Finding the in-game maps of cities continues to be vital, but so far I haven't been crazy enough to bring them into my GIS system to pinpoint NPCs.

         

Also, based on the fact that a few NPCs in early cities had more to say after I visited other cities, I suspect that some keywords don't unlock until you've spoken to other NPCs. Fortunately, such cases are usually determinable through the context of the conversation. For instance, if Yoshimoto tells me that he heard a rumor from Takagi in Yugure, I know I have to revisit the latter NPC.

I won't give you a blow-by-blow of my visits, but here are the summary highlights.

Gold turns out to be a non-issue if you're willing to spend some time. Since cities re-set every time you leave and return, so do the hoards of gold. In Ubamachi, I could pick up almost 600 gold pieces per visit for the cost of two keys. In Takedo, it was double that amount. This revelation had the effect of making combats particularly pointless. Picking up gold, leaving the city, swapping disks, re-entering, and walking back to the gold is somewhat boring, but if you're binging Jessica Jones at the same time, it's not hard to get into the tens of thousands of gold pieces.

           

Your riches are limited only by your patience.

        

Weapons and armor upgrades, and the associate weapons training, cost a bundle--far more than I could have made from killing enemies at 30 gold pieces a pop. I thought weapons were cheap because they started out at 80, 100, 120 gold pieces in the first few towns. But for good weapons, you need to spend many thousands. Every time I thought I'd seen the most expensive weapons, I found a shop that sold even more expensive ones. And the more expensive the weapon, the more expensive the training. You need three training sessions to get at 100% with the weapon. I wanted to keep a ranged weapon for its obvious benefits, so I finally settled on a kind of bow called a dai-kyu, which I think cost 4,000 gold pieces plus another 7,500 in training.

         

That was a lot of trips to the treasure rooms.

         

It was a long time before I found a shop selling good armor. They're not nearly as plentiful as weapon shops. I bought a set of samurai armor for 2,000, and it looks pretty elaborate on my character portrait.

Character development came from visiting the various Buddhas and solving their riddles. I eventually found my way to both of the Buddhas described last time: the "invisible maze" had a solution by walking through a false pillar, and to solve the other one, I had to purchase a yari for 4,000 gold pieces and give it to a statue.

Each of the Buddhas poses a multiple-choice question about the game's lore, and I'm honestly confused about the whole thing even though I got some of them right. For instance, the Buddha in Samusa-Toshi asks: "Once there were war magicians. They fought in a warlike time. What are these wars called?" The answers were "Battles of the Shugenjas"; "Wars of Power"; "Wars of Shatun"; and "Battle of Yugure." I found the answer--Wars of Shatun--in the "story" labeled "version 3" on the Nippon Museum site. But several of the later questions had answers found in version 2 or version 4, so I'm more confused than ever about which versions were presented to the original players, and in what format.

           

Buddha poses a test of knowledge.

        

Another puzzle, having to do with the city in which the "first tree" is found, doesn't appear in any of the backstories and can only be answered by visiting that city. 

        

It was pretty clear when I got there.

         

The Buddhas I answered correctly all provided increases to my attributes--I guess. If you look at my attribute bars, you'll see that the lower portions are shaded and the upper portions are lighter. Generally, only the upper portions increased. What's the difference? At first, I thought the shaded portions represented my actual attributes as opposed to my maximums, but when I fight in combat, the unshaded portion of my health seems to disappear first, suggesting that it is real health, not theoretical health. Then I thought that the shaded portions simply represented my starting attributes, so I could easily see how far I'd come, except that the shaded portion of "agility" increased at some point. So in the end, I really have no idea what's happening.

Experience points also continue to be a mystery. I gain them with every battle, but what do they do? Why can't I see how many I have? Do they affect the attribute increases conferred by the Buddhas? Do they do anything? Seriously, I'll take explicit spoilers at this point.

The game apparently has a few skills for you to learn. In a dense forest in Kokuso-Do, I met a man who taught me the "Hide" skill, which will supposedly make it even easier to elude enemies. Learning the skill added yet another menu icon. There's also apparently a "Swim" skill to learn in the city of Mizu-Do (which I have not yet found). I need it to visit the Buddha in Hayashi-Tori, among other locations. I might have missed another potential skill in Hayagake-Do, where a monk said I could learn to stay awake for a long time, but then didn't give me any way to do that. There was also a Buddha in the city that wouldn't respond to me no matter where I burned incense in front of him.

Part of my time was spent tracking down special items. I can't remember exactly where I first got a lead on a magic ring. It had been stolen and re-stolen from so many NPCs that I lost track, but I ultimately traced it to Bakamana in Namazaki. When I spoke to her--she had been cursed to stand still by witches--she told me that she hid it on a "rocky island north of here." That island is unfortunately fully enclosed by mountains, as well as surrounded by water, so I'll need some flight mechanism.

In Hayashi-Tori, I learned of the Stone of Toshi, hidden in the far corner of the forest. It wasn't too hard to find the spot. When used, the stone reveals the entire surrounding area, even if the tiles would have been obscured by trees or mountains. 

      

Most of this area would normally be dark because of the trees. (My character has no clothes because I had to give up my outfit to a statue.)

        

A common theme is for little bluish statues to demand an object to allow passage to otherwise-inaccessible areas. Most statues, when you stand on them and search, are unremarkable. But a few demand something. I lost my suit of clothes in Hayashi-Tori to reach the center island, for instance. There was the one that wanted a yari to show the way to the Buddha. Others have wanted specific food items. I have a "to do" item to return to Kokuso-Do when I have a honeycomb.

         

"Thank you. Go freely," a statue says, opening the way southward, after I give it a fish.

         

Only late in the game did I make any kind of progress with a potential magic system. I gather you have to find the game's half dozen spells on individual scrolls. In Hayagake-Do, an NPC named Fuji-San said he made a counterspell to work against witches, and I could find it on an island west of the city. I did find the location, but when I searched, the game just said I found something but couldn't use it now.

Some time later, in the town of Teijnashi, I met a sensei named En-No-Gyoja who taught me zaubern, which translates either as "conjuration" specifically or "magic" generically.

            

"All wizards start" with this sensei, so perhaps I needed to learn from him before I could learn any other magic?

         

I got a new icon, but nothing shows up when I try to use it. I wonder if I need to go back to the island and search for the scroll again, or whether there are different types of magic, and I need the right types before the associated scrolls will work.

         

Learning zaubern.

         

As for the plot, despite all the discussions with NPCs, I still only have threads. I'm sure the endgame is going to have something to do with the Wheel of Time I found on one of the northern islands. It allows you to set a year, month, and day. I fooled around with it but kept dying "in the course of time," so I assume something is necessary to protect the player from the ravages of time travel before you can fiddle with it.

        

Setting things randomly turned out to be a bad idea.

       

In Tsusho-Jo, I met King O-sama Siramoto and his court. He was depressed after losing his daughter, Princess Kikoro, to Emperor Subarashii. This is the story related in the game's backstories, and I suspect I'm going to have to go back in time to prevent the marriage.

There was something going on with the entire northeast island, containing the cities of Fuko-Mura and Yugure, as well as a pool of lava on a western peninsula. I learned in Fuko-Mura that the volcano had recently erupted because a careless wizard messed around with it. The eruption destroyed the other two cities on the island, including Yugure. Yugure, in turn, was populated by floating heads who proudly announced that they served a demon and were planning to conquer the world.

Miscellaneous notes:

• The world has an edge, like Ultima VI, and if you sail too close, the currents pull your ship over it. 

        

My character spends forever in the void.

        

• I kept meeting "horse doctors" who offered grooming services. I have yet to find a place that sells a horse.

• My slave, who just sits in my inventory, apparently allows me to carry an extra weapon and armor set. I also bought a guard dog who watches over me while I sleep and prevents me from getting attacked in the night. 

• I found two mountains that appear to have some kind of force field across their tops.

         

Preventing the volcano from blowing?

        

• I'm not going to test everyone's patience by repeatedly complaining about it, but I also don't want my silence to be taken as a sign that I've come to terms with the joystick-only interface. It is a constant and unnecessary pain.

• In some cities, I've found masses of what look like teleporters, as in the image below, but they don't seem to do anything.

          

This is where a (L)ook command would come in handy.

          

In probably the most interesting and yet useless adventure, I discovered a "town" called Ulti-Tori on one of the western islands. The interior of the town was shaped like Sosaria in Ultima III, and NPCs stood at the locations of cities, dungeons, and special encounters in that game, relating information about those locations and the roles they played in Ultima. I didn't find anything actually useful in the city (although I was unable to speak to Exodus; I suspect I need to "Swim" skill), but it was a fun homage.

       

An NPC represents the castle of Lord British and explains what happened there.

           

I started this series of entries wondering if the developers really did base their approach on Ultima. This city at least makes it clear that they played it.

          

Though they were incapable of actually depicting the silver snake.

         

That's about all I learned in 16 hours of exploration and note-taking, and in some ways I remain more confused than ever. But I'm committed to exploring the second half of the world and seeing if things become any clearer. I am somewhat curious to see how it all plays out.

Time so far: 16 hours

Nippon: The Inscrutable Orient

A colleague of mine once tried to organize a symposium in Bad Waltersdorf, Austria. It didn't get enough registrants and had to be canceled. I told him he should have held it across the river in Good Waltersdorf. He didn't think it was funny.

                 
Well, I bumbled around Nippon for another four hours, and I can't say that I'm any closer to understanding the story or main quest. In a modern game, that wouldn't be such a problem because the dungeons would be atmospheric and the character development robust and the gameplay enjoyable, but--as I keep stressing--1980s RPG development just wasn't there yet. It was too soon for games with the scope of Deathlord, Fate, Nippon, and many of the others with epic ambitions--particularly when they don't offer mechanics as complex as the best RPGs of the period. I would have cautioned a developer of the time to at least make sure they could replicate Ultima V's combat system, inventory complexity, and depth of NPC interaction before setting out to make a game four times its size.

The Nippon Museum offers a map that came with the game, but it's too stylized for my tastes and gets the geography of the smaller landmasses and islands all wrong. I've been unapologetically using another one from the site that is more geographically accurate, but still manages to avoid spoilers such as the locations of towns. Normally, I'd consider that cheating, but I'll allow it to offset my language disadvantage. Anyway, extrapolating from a measurement I took on the starting island, I suspect the game world is close to 720 x 400.
          

What I love about this map is how it's so clearly Japan.

      
The towns vary in size but the largest so far have been around 70 x 70, which would be really hard to navigate except that each one has a map hidden somewhere. When I arrive in a new town, my first priority is to find the map and use it to plot a basic navigation path.
           

Without this map, I never would have known about a "hermit" living in the southwest.

         
As I wrapped up last time, I was entering a large city on the coast called Watashibune. NPCs throughout the town talked about boats and sailing, and pretty soon I discovered both boat sales and boat repair locations. Boats sold for 1,500 gold pieces--out of my reach but not outrageously so. I could have gone outside and grinded for it. Instead, I let my finances grow naturally as I explored other parts of the starting continent.

A little town on an oasis called Tokoro-Chian offered more lore and potential quest advice than any town so far. I had previously found a door in the mountains that took me to an indoor area with a huge lake of fire. In Tokoro-Chian, I learned that to survive the fire, I need the Amulet of Hi, which I can find in some place called Fujokawa. An NPC named Yosutebito told me that I'll need to find the Wheel of Time in the north to return to my own world. Shoka-no suggested what may be a side quest: the "sun horse" of the goddess Amaterasu has been stolen by the god of war, Hachiman, who lives in the castle of Atatakami in the south. I learned from Ta-is Tagre that I'll need some flying mechanism to reach locations in the mountains, including some important inscription.
             

A key piece of intelligence.

          
I returned to Akuji, the starting town, and trained to 100% with the shuriken. By this time, I had fought enough combats to have enough for the boat and then some, so I made my way back to Watashibune.

Money is a key component to any RPG, but it really makes the world go round here. So far, I haven't found anything like a dungeon full of treasure chests. One city had some gold that I could pick up. (The manual gives you a funny justification for this: "The gold lying in the chambers is mostly illegally acquired and can be used for your purposes.") Otherwise, all income comes from combat. Perhaps in recognition of this, combat is reasonably rewarding, offering around an average of 30 gold pieces for each enemy killed in outdoor combat.
              

Finding a rare "treasure room."

          
There are lots of things to spend money on, including many weapons and armor items that are well out of my reach. A lot of towns have healers that not only cure wounds but also grant you temporary strength or rejuvenate you (more on this in a bit); others cure conditions like blindness, curses, and paralysis, none of which I've yet experienced. Shops sell keys (every city has locked doors), incense, and sacks that increase your carrying capacity. You always have to replenish food. Weapons and armor can get damaged and require repair. You need training on weapons, and you can pay (theoretically) to increase your attributes. You can even pay for things that I think serve only role-playing purposes, such as nights at the inn with optional prostitutes, baths, and massages.
             

Soon.

           
I don't care for the game's dialogue "stance" system and I've mostly been subverting it. I don't know how to fix things if you choose the wrong approach. Almost all NPCs respond to "normal" or "friendly" approaches, but every once in a while, one of them wants you to be "religious" or "submissive" or even "superior." If you choose the wrong thing, they clam up. So I take a save before talking with them and reload if they respond negatively. The game is hard enough.
          

This NPC mentions some of her artifacts as coming from China.

          
I also wouldn't mind if I didn't have to stop and feed my character so often. If the developers were going to make him so hungry, the least they could have done was have him eat automatically. Sometimes I miss the "you are hungry" message--it doesn't re-appear after the first warning--and my character will suddenly die because I haven't been noticing his health bar go down.
           

No matter how much progress you're actually making, it always feels like you're getting somewhere when you buy a boat.

           
After I bought the boat, I sailed up north even though I hadn't finished exploring the main continent. I explored two more towns and decided to get back to Ultima Underworld. Here are a bunch of items from my explorations:
           

• I bought a "gate icon" in one of the towns, which I guess allows me to use the teleporter system. I really haven't started exploring that yet. Some of the towns have teleporters that seem to go to central hubs or something.

• The countryside is swarming with NPCs like priests and farmers as well as enemies. They don't typically attack you, but if they happen to be on the screen when you initiate combat with a monster, they'll join the battle against you. I don't know if there are any karmic implications from killing them.

• Even though the game has a day/night cycle, with the screen going dark at night, shops remain open 24 hours and the NPCs stay where they are.

• You can't take the day/night cycle too literally, though. Years pass as you wander around, and even more as you pay for training. My character started at 20, I think, and I suddenly noticed he was 50! I had to pay for "rejuvenation" to stop him from dying of old age. It's nice that feudal Japan had that option. I wish that the modern world had it. 

• When I stopped at an inn for the night, I decided to try the "bed and a woman" option. The German word was weib, which Google Translate tells me can also mean "wife," so I might have made a big mistake. There was no special message, but I got 250 experience points! That means that there's a way to convert gold directly to experience in the unlikely event that you ever run out of things to buy.

• Oddly, after waking up from the above encounter, I found an NPC in my room. He said his name was "Schoco la de," said he was a "murderer," and insisted that I was in his room.

• There are a lot of jokes and puns in the NPC names. So far, for instance I've encountered Cha-in-ma-il, Skusi-san, Chingis-kan, Qwerty, and Razmataz. I'm sure there are dozens of others going over my head because they mean something in German. For instance, "Ta-tagre-is," which is clearly Tattergreis, or "doddering old man."

• Purchasing a clock gave me a new menu option that tells me the time and date. 

          

It is 19:00 on Day 14 of Year 714 in the Month of the Kites.

          

• I bought a slave! They were selling them in one of the northern island towns. I have no idea what they do for me. The manual doesn't mention them at all. There are also guard dogs for sale, but they cost more.

        

You may think this is poor role-playing, but I'll give him a better life than he had behind those bars.

          

• The same shops will go by different names from city to city. The healer is arzt in one city, alchimist in a second, and doktor in a third. Sometimes, there's no shop name at all, so you have to check every building and talk to every NPC.

• I spoke to a daimyo in one of the cities. I was hoping he'd give me a quest, but he just boasted about how much power he had, "second only to the shogun." 

• I tried to visit that goddess's castle on the island in the starting continent, but the game wouldn't let me dock my boat alongside it. I think you have to have a grass square. 

            

I knew I was making progress when I was able to translate this without help. "You can your ship here not leave."

          
Entering the combat screen from the boat causes you to use the boat's cannons as the primary weapon. They're pretty devastating, but anything that can attack you at sea is equally tough and can damage both you and the boat. You can blast helpless enemies on shore, too, but you get only experience, not gold, from winning boat combats.
           

Naval combat.

          
Touching any land while sailing the boat causes it to become damaged. It's hard to avoid this in narrow rivers.

One thing that I still haven't experienced is any sense of character development. I think maybe I'm supposed to burn incense at Buddha statues to "level up," but each city that has such a statue also has a puzzle associated with getting to it, and I've come up short. In Ukosa, the statue was at the end of a maze of pillars with invisible walls between some of them, and I could't find a way through. An NPC said something about walking through the "central pillar," but none of the pillars that seemed to be "central" (no matter how I looked at it) would allow me to do any such thing.
            

Getting nowhere.

            
Meanwhile, in Ubamachi, a northern city ruled by Shujin, the Buddha is in the mountains. Supposedly, there's a secret path to get there, and an NPC directed me to a statue to ask about it. The statue told me to give it a "yari." I had no idea what this was, but I later found a weapon shop in a different town selling them for 3,450 gold. That'll have to wait.
        

Will I be able to get it back afterwards?

         
Thus, well past the six-hour mark, I'm still a bit clueless. My only consolation is that it sounds like German players of the time were, too. I'll give it another 3 or 4 hours, at least, before deciding whether to continue. I'd lean towards a premature ending, but the next game, Ranadinn, is also an Ultima-inspired title with epic ambitions. Please moongate me out of this era.