Houkai Mura

By: Paul Eres

On: May 16th, 2010

“hey dorks. this game? well. it rules.” –Super Joe

Houkai Mura by Peposoft (developers of Sennyuu and Minishooter RS) is also known as Houkaimura, Breaking Town, or as MrPodunkian calls it, “the most Japanese game”. It plays much like Ghosts and Goblins, with a double jump and similar controls, but with some modern appeasements, such as infinite lives. The variety of weapons you can find in the game is incredible; the video shows very few of them. The bosses and stages are pretty hard, although some weapons make them easier than others. I had a lot of fun with it, although its difficulty may not be to everyone’s tastes.

I learned about this game on one of MrPodunkian’s indie game livestream nights, and watched him attempt to play through the game from start to finish. It took him hours, and he must have died several hundred times. I thought surely it can’t be that hard, but I tried it and died even more than he did. Nonetheless, I couldn’t put it down until I had made my way through the entire game.

Unlike many games with a variety of weapons (like Gunstar Heroes and its “Lightning + Chaser” heat-seeking laser gun) there’s no best weapon; they really did a good job at giving every type of weapon uses in some situations, but not having any weapon absolutely required for any situation; there are no very overpowered or very underpowered weapons.

Posted in Action, Doujin, Freeware, Highly Recommended, Platformers, Windows | Tags: Peposoft

The Monster King

hahaha that's not much of a review but what's really missing is a download link!!
rinkuhero

one sec, still writing it
rinkuhero

still not used to this new blog software, you see — not sure how to save drafts and so on
http://moonloop.vg Eclipse

Horrible walk-cycle aside looks fun
flipzeroto88

Haha, fantastic article! This game must be brand new, I've never seen it before.
Super Joe

why did you link your creepy wiki thing. stop it.
rinkuhero

perhaps you could help with that. please name all of the heroes of the FSA besides yourself.
Zgred

Mr. Podunkian wins the match!
Kyo

I think from now on we should adopt BOTTON as standard spelling in all gaming instructions and such.
http://www.derekyu.com Derek Yu

I always liked the fixed jump in the Makaimura games.

P.S. That is definitely the Hypnotoad at 2:56.
anthonyflack

/pedant – it was just Super Ghouls n Ghosts (the SNES game) that had a double jump, wasn't it?
Z

totally offtopic – but wtf – japanese geocities is still up?
Ma

Could you stop referring to all Japanese indie games as “doujin”? “Doujin” basically means you're not using your own original characters but making a fan game/comic whatever. Can't you change the name of the tag to “Japanese” instead, like you have a “Swedes” tag?
rinkuhero

1) it's how this blog categorizes games made in japan and i don't want to break from derek's format.

2) it's how japanese indies themselves use the word. japanese people who play zuun's touhou games for instance refer to it as doujin, even though they have completely original characters.
anthonyflack

Hmm what do the Swedes call indie games, though? Is there a Swedish word we should be using instead?

Or maybe, we don't have to start describing things in pidgin Japanese every time we talk about stuff that comes from Japan…

Remember when it suddenly wasn't good enough to talk about “horisontal” or “vertical” monitor orientation any more, and everybody who was “in the know” started talking about “tate” and “yoko” and crap like that? It's just jargon.
http://www.derekyu.com Derek Yu

Wikipedia defines it as “amateur self-published works”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C5%8Djin

Also: “In Western cultures, dōjin are often perceived to be derivative of existing work, analogous to fan fiction. To an extent, this is true: many dōjin are based on popular manga, anime or video game series. However, many dōjin with completely original content also exist.”
http://www.derekyu.com Derek Yu

Hm, I don't think that's an apt analogy (the “tate/yoko” thing).

I just say doujin because it seems common and also more descriptive (and easier to say). It's more like saying “I'm going to eat some sushi” rather than saying “I'm going to eat some Japanese raw fish”.
rinkuhero

historically, swedish wasn't as important to videogames as japanese was, so japanese terms for videogames have seeped into english discussions of videogames more than swedish terms have. it isn't pidgin japanese, it's just accepted loanwords that have seeped into english, like kimono and sake (or, a closer analogy, anime).
Super Joe

honestly you should delete the page because i am a tertiary guy at best and it's poisonous to the aims of your dumb project
rinkuhero

you can delete it if you like, it's an open-access wiki; that's what wikis are all about
anthonyflack

My beef with this kind of taxonomy is that it plays into the whole “Japan is a seperate, isolated culture, fundamentally different to the rest of the world” myth, which I became thoroughly sick of when living in Japan. It's pervasive for sure – most especially inside Japan – and it's been going strong for hundreds of years. But it's just not true.

An indie game from Japan is really not so different from an indie game from elsewhere that it requires its own word. Sushi is sushi wherever you go, and bolognaise is bolognaise, and that is descriptive of something quite specific – but a doujin game is really just an indie game, no more or less.

I accept that it's something that most people probably aren't bothered by, though!
anthonyflack

Or perhaps it's better to say: when we talk about “doujin” games as distinct from “indie” games, we're emphasising that old cultural divide, when we should be looking at all indie developers as being a part of the same global community.
rinkuhero

understandable position but it's unfair to expect everyone to follow your preferences for how terms are used and not the common way terms are used, especially when a system is already in place to categorize games this way (and has been used for many years).

do you apply this elsewhere, though? would you prefer that japanese animated movies only be called japanese animated moves and not anime? would you prefer manga be called japanese comics and not manga? i don't think it really implies that japanese is some isolated weird culture if you use the word manga rather than japanese comics.
PhasmaFelis

Dammit, I have tolerated TIGsource's blog posts until now, but this is just over the line.

Homing/Homing was the best weapon in Gunstar Heroes?!? EVERYONE KNOWS it was Homing/Laser. It was like 12 times more awesome! FACT CHECK, peoples.
http://www.derekyu.com Derek Yu

Well, from what I've heard Japanese indie developers (like Pixel, for example) don't really have a concept of a global indie game community. They either haven't heard of it or don't care. Part of it might be language, I don't know.
rinkuhero

i think that's the one i meant, i just didn't know what to call it
anthonyflack

Honestly, yeah I would (or rather just call them all “comics” and “animated movies” and let them mingle freely) but I realise that's just me. I would rather things be categorised by themes or genres rather than country of origin. Most especially now that we can all be part of a global internet culture; those boundaries become less meaningful than they used to be. We can hope.

But yeah, Japan IS an isolated, weird culture (largely self-imposed), and that isolation seems to extend to the indie scene as well. If anything I get the impression that Pixel is kind of a casualty of that isolation.

However, while I DO think it's kind of a big deal in the broader sense, I don't think that the tagging system on TIGsource is itself a big deal.
Locien

There is no global internet culture. The internet is separated largely by language, though the barrier is permeable, it is variably dense. Consider the differences between japanese and english; there is no real lineage between english and japanese, the two are linguistically alien to each other. You'll notice the same phenomena in other languages, though the relationship between how “close” two languages are determines the metaphorical distance between them, ex. a spanish speaking person will find a french site to be easier to navigate than one in chinese. While japan is not “alien”, nor is it just another american/european culture(and nor are gaming cultures representitive of their home culture)(and japan is definitely different from america-I've never heard of a japanese person eat fried butter or fried coke before). What you are doing is ignoring actual phenomena in a way that ignores actual cultural behavior(closer areas tend to be more alike, usually, further areas tend to be dislike, usually) in defining reality. Since there is actual differences in the structure of japan's non-major company gaming scene for other countries', it would be facetious to pretend otherwise; and given that there is a loan word to describe it, it would be useful to describe it.
guestuser

so it's a poorly sprited ghosts and goblins clone with the difficulty taken out of it? how great.
decoy

The weapons are cool but not really balanced, the swiss army chainsaw thing can one shot kill most of the bosses. If you can avoid picking up anything but that and the dark claw, the game is pretty easy.
Malefact

The thing that makes this game stand out for me is the asthetic. I mean, it's got this very raw fanziney feel about it, like the author has just cobbled a lot of sprites and grabbed the tackiest sound effects (a lot of which are from Klik n' Play) and mashed everything together into this colourful, messy, effusive and unpredicatable disaster-gone-right. Just look at the waterfall and the logs in the video. Further down all the sprites overlap and jumble together and glitch hideously off the end of the screen.

And the thing is, it feels to me that a lot of the skill in this is making it LOOK incredibly unpolished whilst actually the central mechanics, like the double jump, and the level construction and assortment of enemies, AI patterns etc – are all really tight. I disagree about the weapons – there are definitely some that are better than others (like the Dark Claw, and the Dragon Breath) but then the game acknowledges that by letting you choose a particular weapon and play the game through with just that one – so for a challenge, you could try and complete the game on hard with just the boomerang.

Another great thing about the way the game is put together is that is makes the experience feel really unpredicatable and surprising – I loved the worm / vine puzzles in the jungle area, and the way all the different cogs work in the clockwork area. There's also an element of finding the best path through a level, like in Sonic, and of exploration in discovering and trying out all the routes and all the weapons. I also found myself constantly expecting that some parts of the game might be totally broken – that maybe some of the bosses were so ridiculously overpowered that I'd never be able to beat them – and so it was really satisfying when I finally completed the game.
Name

Wait, is that weapon he uses throughout the floating logs/cave level some kind of throwing Michael Jacksons?
nikki

how do i play fullscreen ?
MisterX

Oh, it was not until after I've tried out every weapon that I noticed that only the first “weapon” allows you to play through the game and pick up the different weapons as you go, instead of having to stick to a single one all the time.
rinkuhero

i think it says it right on the title screen: alt+enter. that's standard for games for switching from full screen and windowed; did you try that?
rinkuhero

i found the dark claw good in terms of never missing but it was fairly week, it takes forever to kill bosses with it; my favorite weapons were the knife that goes up, fowards, then backwards, and the whip. someone else in this thread felt the chainsaw was best (since it's the most powerful), but it also is hard to control and pushes you forward like you're hanging on to a lawn mower or something.
rinkuhero

yup
bradf

There is a cultural divide between Japan and the rest of the world when it comes to independent games. I think it is a shame, but I guess it is due to “doujin” games having a specific subculture and history almost exclusively within Japan whereas indie games from everywhere else in the world seem to interact a great deal more. Japan has always had its own “doujin” thing going on, where the occasional release gets leaked out into the wider world. Unfortunately this leak seems to be one-way.
I guess with a sort of “global scene” being established and gaining momentum the boundaries between “doujin” and indie will hopefully become blurred with a greater deal of outside interest in Japanese developers and fans – who will hopefully in turn recognise that a “community” outside of Japan exists that they could potentially be “part of” and exchange ideas and bodily fluids with. But I guess a lot of this is due to Japanese tradition of not paying much attention to non-Japanese things as well as language barriers.

Is the term doujin contributing to this boundary? I don't know, but it certainly is a good way of acknowledging that there is indeed a boundary.
Moose

The understanding I had from my Japanese person is that “doujin” means “[made for the] same [kind of] people”- in other words, “for people who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like”. In these terms, a game like Gridrunner Revolution or DROD which is designed from the outset for a niche audience could be called doujin, but an indie game that – although independantly produced – goes for mass appeal could not.

Honestly, though, I agree with bradf that the distinction is useful. If we wind up defining Doujin as “the awkward ones that you have to import from Himeyasoft or pick up on CD at Japanese otaku fairs that you can't get to” (ie, Touhou, EFZ, etc), then that's fine. That said, since this is freely downloadable I wouldn't necessarily put that tag on in this case..
nobody

Yeah, Lightning and Chaser (homing lightning beam) was probably one of the most broken weapons ever in a video game. It even made the harder difficulties a piece of cake for me in GH.

Homing and Homing… uhh… not so much.
bombboy

It is, though!
rinkuhero

i'm surprised then that you disliked the term 'doujin' but said nothing about calling it 'the most japanese game'. i would think the latter is worse, no?
anthonyflack

…
anthonyflack

If I objected to things Podunkian said I'd be here all day.

But yeah, I do think that the boundary between “doujin” and “indie” have been blurred to the extent that you can't really pinpoint any meaningful difference any more. I mean, Cave Story is doujin but The Underside is not. Warning Forever is doujin but Clean Asia is not. Houkai Mura is doujin but Action Fist is not. Tower of Heaven appears to be doujin but isn't. Etc.

Apart from that, I basically agree with Bradf.
rinkuhero

those examples are all doujin games and western games that are cloning those doujin games, though — they're certainly at least in the doujin tradition, as are visual novels, jrpgs, and dating sims made in the west.

to me there are still clear differences between japanese-style games and western-style games, and a game is almost always immediately recognizable as one or the other. it doesn't really blur that boundary just because sometimes the developers of a japanese-styled game are western, and vice versa.
anthonyflack

If it's a style thing, then shouldn't the “doujin” tag apply to any game that had elements of that style?

(And man, something does need to be done about these tabbed text boxes getting smaller and smaller…)
rinkuhero

it should apply to any game that totally fits into that style, not just any game that has elements of it (because everyone takes elements from everywhere), but yeah. for instance, fatal hearts, cute knight, aveyond, heileen (sp?), and those other western indie visual novels and jrpgs would probably best be characterized as doujin or at least pseudo-doujin.
anthonyflack

What about games that resemble Cave Story…? ;)
TIGSMelly

Honestly Paul, the Dark Claw is seriously overpowered. After dying a good few times in the earlier areas, I decided to stick with the Claw and suddenly I only died 5 more times in the next 5 levels. About the only place it's not stupidly useful is on the first area of the final level, as those medusa-head-wannabes take a ton of hits and keep attracting the shots (that's where I died 3 of those 5 times trying to get a weapon that was good for the place. After that I got the Claw back as soon as I could).

And against bosses, it's still very useful, you just have to be at mid-range from the boss and turn towards it and mash the button and his health drops very fast, without having to worry about aiming the more spastic ones.

That you don't lose your weapon when you die just makes it even more unbalanced.
prsn

Has anyone run into a bug where after cycling through weapons for a while, you suddenly can't attack at all anymore? It happens to me consistently.

Also, why do you have to press the cycle button a million times to get past the missile and the cigars?