Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken retrospective: Beefing in Kobe | NES Works Gaiden

Another Famicom milestone this week, one that ranks up there with the other legends of the system's early days. Unlike Xevious or Super Mario Bros., however, Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken never officially made its way to the U.S., and its influence took much longer to be felt than that of its mighty peers. Nevertheless, this collaboration between Yuji Horii, Koichi Nakamura, and Enix massively shaped the nature of Japanese console games in the coming years with its innovative mix of visual elements and simple interface mechanics. But rather than go on about it here, I'll simply let this episode do the explaining.
Production notes:
Video Works is funded via Patreon ( / gamespite ) - support the show and get access to every episode up to two weeks in advance of its KZbin debut! Plus, exclusive podcasts, eBooks, and more!
NES/Famicom footage captured from ‪@analogueinc‬ Nt Mini; arcade footage captured from MiSTer with thanks to ‪@MiSTerAddons‬. Video upscaled to 720 with ‪@atemsoft‬ xRGB Mini Framemeister.

[@HybridAngelZero]

As a lifelong RPG fan and lover of Ace Attorney and detective mystery games, it's wild to think over 80% of my favorite games can probably be traced back to this single work as an inflection point. It's my own personal Heiyankyo Alien xD

[@Jamie-nx2cg]

Probably my favourite creator. A journey through the best parts of nostalgia.

[@Wrycon-Inc]

As a video gaming person in my mid-forties that came up with old adventure games, this episode was super informative and interesting. Strong work 💪

[@wantsomecorn]

Look up Chrontendo's History of Japanese and US Adventure games. It's older, but a pretty clear inspiration to Jeremy.

[@cannotcompute]

I am literally watching this at 9pm on the 17th and the intro scared the shit out of me

[@rodneylives]

This is an excellent episode to link from our gaming blog Set Side B, probably on Friday. I'm surprised I had barely heard of Portopia until Chrontendo reviewed it some years ago.

[@WhoIsSirChasm]

Hey, an entire Silver Case reference! If you have no idea what's happening in No More Heroes III, The Silver Case will clear up maybe 3% of your confusion.

[@EnbyeonTTV]

This episode taught me a lot about a game and subject I knew very little of. Excellent job managing to explain all of this and giving the proper context in less than 20 minutes.

[@SEGAClownboss]

Yeah "Portopia" is fascinating and very playable. With a walkthrough you can beat it in like 20 minutes, but left on your own you can twist and wind and engage in a lot of worldbuilding. I figure if it where a Black Box release it'd be up there as one of the NES icons.

[@RemnantCult]

This game was one that Itoi referenced a lot when discussing what influenced him to eventually make Mother, one of my favorite japanese video games, and I was always curious about. Thank you for covering it as always!

[@RabbitEarsCh]

Thank you for this. Between Portopia, SMB1, Heiankyo Alien, Tower of Druaga and Xevious, you've done a lot to really bore out the foundational, primordial games from which all Japanese development oozes out of. It's a lot more interesting to see it through that lens and realize the exact reasons there's such different game design philosophies when you start from very distinct and different priors.

[@FloatingSunfish]

Portopia was so influential, you even get anime and manga references to it every now and then saying "X was the culprit!" Visual novels, Japanese adventure games, and even RPGs definitely won't be the same without it. Also, I played Omotesando Adventure a couple years back but couldn't clear it. I kept getting stuck not knowing where to go, which was the style at the time! 😅

[@RndStranger]

Portopia suffers in retrospect to being so successful that everyone copied it and most of them learned from the flaws and took advantage of having more memory and so did it better. Fun fact about the Famicom port: they were so out of memory on the cart that they had to eliminate some hiragana characters from the syllabary and rewrote the script for that. It would be like if a game in English had to avoid using five letters of the alphabet.

[@absolutezeronow7928]

Excellent episode on Portopia. It's always good when you can cover the influencial games in their proper context.

[@daviddalrymple2284]

Especially since very few of Japan's formative adventure games and visual novels received a Western release (or even a good fan translation). This kind of game is what the series exists for!

[@daviddalrymple2284]

This series has gone 0 days without a Krautrock reference.

[@svankensen]

Gonna go listen to Delay 1968

[@ValkyrieTiara]

That BTTF dub blew my brain clean out the back of my skull.

[@eldebo99]

On channel 88 no less

[@MisterDrBob]

The first Famicom Detective Club game also aped the underground ending sequence. I wonder if it was a more widespread trope than a handful of releases.

[@cube2fox]

It was also in movies before that. E.g. The Third Man, which is apparently quite well-known in Japan, is a detective movie with a famous underground part (sewers) at the end. Could be coincidence of course.

[@daviddalrymple2284]

It took a really long time for North American adventure games to embrace conversation to the extent that Japanese adventure games did. In "Deja Vu", the characters which are key to the plot (Joe, Vickers, and the Sternwoods) are either dead or asleep. In "Maniac Mansion", the NPCs (friendly and unfriendly) will talk to you, but you can't talk back. In most Sierra adventures, you could initiate conversation, but not control it. The earliest American game I can think of that made conversation a key part of the puzzle was "Mean Streets" in 1989.

[@rodneylives]

Infocom titles had conversations of a kind. You "spoke" to other characters by entering their name, a comma, then what you wanted to say, usually a standard command. Sometimes though the game made you have to enter specific things, such as when, early in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you must precisely tell Ford Prefect, "FORD, WHAT ABOUT MY HOME?", not HOUSE, in order to advance the story, because his decision to save you from the destruction of Earth depends on him confusing what you mean by HOME.

[@bishopcruz]

Either mean streets or Indian Jones and the Last Crusade... the adventure game. That was the first one from LucasArts with the dialog tree system.

[@TheSmart-CasualGamer]

@@rodneylives Hitchhiker's Guide has a BUNCH of conversational parts. But most of them (Up to The Heart of Gold anyway, I've never got out of the bit where everyone barring Arthur is in the Jacuzzi) are totally optional. "Ford, what about my home?" is defintely the exception when you're normally just doing things like "Place satchel over vent", "Take toothbrush", "Give Cheese Sandwich to Dog" and "Shout at Prosser".

[@satoukazuma7952]

This game's influence extended even beyond the video games industry, to even affecting the pop-cultural lexicon in Japan. A famous line regarding the identity of the culprit, popularized by Beat Takeshi on his radio show, became a huge meme in Japan, roughly the equivalent of "Luke, I am your father" in terms of being a ubiquitous, oft-parodied spoiler. Anyway, I have to give you many props for properly crediting the other two "Yuji Horii Mysteries" games for the big gameplay shift from text-parser based input to menu-driven commands. Pretty much every other English-language coverage of the game, that I've seen anyway, claims that Chunsoft invented the menu-driven interface specifically for the Famicom port of Portopia, due to obvious hardware differences, whereas in reality, they were just going along with the general trend of adventure games at the time, even in the home computer scene. By late 1985 the so-called "graphic adventure boom" brought on by Micro Cabin's Mystery House had mostly fizzled out, and text parsers were rapidly becoming passé; by '86 they were pretty much only seen in cheap eroge. It's a shame that Karuizawa Yuukai Annai never got a Famicom port, as it was easily Horii's most ambitious game to date, shifting genres multiple times as the plot progresses. It even turns into his first attempt at an RPG in the last chapter, albeit one that looks and plays a lot more like Mugen no Shinzou than Dragon Quest .

[@mariusamber3237]

An extremely important game that most gamers in the West don't know much about. Without it, there wouldn't be Japanese adventure games and later VNs as we know them - or at the very least, they wouldn't be nearly as popular. Not my favourite genres perhaps, but it has to be acknowledged that this one's historically important.

[@HeadmasterAutobot]

Always an event when Jeremy Parish gets to a game that's casting shadows like Portopia!

[@HPRshredder]

Finally someone has the stones to cover the prequel to Miitopia.

[@g.u.959]

Now I’m imagining a crossover of both starring the player’s Miis - The Miitopia Serial Murder Case…

[@kameoosama]

When you mentioned how tantei games were so prolific they got parodies I half expected you to bring up the Capcom published Pro Yakyuu? Satsujin Jiken! Which lampoons the glut of both detective _and_ baseball games lol

[@Swordblade2k]

This series has gone 0 days without a Tim Curry impression.

[@vincentgood2234]

When this baby hits channel 88, you're gonna see some serious shit.

[@Pichuscute]

9:12 What's the Japanese name of this show? I'd be interested in checking it out, but google definitely doesn't like that English name. xP

[@chaospoet]

Days without mentioning Xevious: 0

[@medalkingslime4844]

Oh hey I was just thinking about this game earlier today. Very fun insight into the origins of Japanese adventure games

[@michaelpuglisi6767]

Love the reference to Tim Curry's iconic performance in Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3

[@justinkolata6252]

@4:52 sheesh, haven't seen that slow drawing vector line and fill style of graphics since Twin Kingdom Valley on the C64. I really need to go back and play some more of those early computer adventure games.

[@RichardTroupe]

After now learning about this game, I need to play it. Great informative video!

[@ArcaneAzmadi]

Oh, _this_ is the game that's the origin of the ancient Japanese meme "Hannin wa Yasu"!

[@settopgames]

YOU GOT ME WITH THAT FINAL LINE, HOW DARE YOU

[@karenelizabeth1590]

15:00 Hey now Percy is smarter than he seems!

[@davidscott9257]

why doesn't this man have 1 million subs

[@r-yv5uz]

How did I find this?

[@Skyskysky92]

Really enjoyed this episode. I was curious about the origins of the VN/JRPG genres and this episode's overview was exactly what I wanted. Thank you!

[@skRapKlan]

It's amazing to see ideas flow around like this, the inspiration in game dev run deep and seeing it layed out like this is so much fun! Thanks for your great work in making these episodes!

[@TheSmart-CasualGamer]

犯人はヤス!

[@JeremyParish]

Whoa, spoilers, man

[@TheSmart-CasualGamer]

​​@@JeremyParish On a related note, when do you consider a game too old for spoiler warnings? I saw somebody give a spoiler warning for Final Fantasy VII recently, seemed a bit odd to me, as it's a pretty well-known twist.

[@hemangchauhan2864]

I'm so happy Portopia got a high quality retrospective on YT Hopefully more people understand it's importance ing gaming.

[@MrMegaManFan]

The best thing about this game is that it only cost me $1.02.

[@bishopcruz]

The question should it be portopia or port pier?

[@JeremyParish]

It's Portopia. jdpecon.com/expo/wfkobe1981.html

[@bishopcruz]

@@JeremyParish learn something new every day

[@johnnygrind77]

I never heard of this game and wanted to learn a lot more about it. I'm glad there's a fan translation of it being played start to finish on KZbin. I was not expecting the ending portrayed!

[@axelmurphy2397]

SPACE

[@zubizuva]

OK then! So what is your favorite Can album? Mine is Soon Over Babaluma.

[@RenoNV775]

Love this series. the amount of knowledge and history is incredible. Thank you.

[@willmakesfilms]

great video. BUT THE TEASER FOR THE NEXT VIDEO!

[@deiruru]

Played thru this a few weeks back; great timing! Still an amazing and trailblazing game.

[@lucianonicolasgarcia7311]

Excellent video. This is the content that makes a difference in retrogaming.

[@Stripehat]

This is one of my most favorite channels on KZbin. Thank you!

[@GargusSCP]

I recall coming across Princess Tomato and the Salad Kingdom through a write-up on Team Rocket's Rockin' back in middle school. If NES Works and Gaiden are unlikely to come to it any time soon, I'm glad the Gaiden series gave me some context for its roots!

[@absolutezeronow7928]

February 1991 for NES. It's going to be quite a while before NES Works gets to Princess Tomato, one of the few adventure games that made it over here.

[@chris9085]

you are doing the lord's work, sir

[@WqDnbY52l0]

Thanks for this

[@One_Missing_Worker]

There it goes, your one opportunity to talk about Disco Elysium. Lt. Kim Kitsuragi disapproves.

[@BrianRRenfro]

Saw the title and thought it said, "Porntopia" and I was like, "Ahhhh yes, it is Japan after all!"

[@jamesmoss3424]

Nintendo should have released portopia renzoku satsujin jiken in the USA in the first place. 😀👍🎮

[@DaneeBound]

*(Square) Enix

[@ValkyrieTiara]

Never in a million years. The translation work required would have been unlike anything seen in gaming to that point, or indeed anything that WOULD be seen until Final Fantasy IV was localized on the SNES in '91, a good 6 years after the NES's launch. Honestly, that amount of text might not even have fit on an NES launch cartridge, as EN text tends to eat up much more space than JP text. And even if they had done it, it likely would have bombed. They built their entire brand in the US on the idea of the NES being a kid's toy. That said, it's interesting to imagine what the world would be like if it had come out here and DIDN'T tank. Would gaming "for grown-ups" have caught on? Would the cultural shift have been big enough to stay Nintendo's censorship hand in the 90s? What ripple effects might those things have had? We'll never know, but it's fun to think about lol

[@TheSmart-CasualGamer]

@@ValkyrieTiara It's worth saying that this guy comments this sentence on almost every video on this channel, all that changes is the game's title.

[@JeremyParish]

Yeah, when James Moss says "It's good that they didn't release this game in the USA" you know it's a real goddamn stinker

[@ValkyrieTiara]

@@TheSmart-CasualGamer Nooooo, I got memed! 😂

[@Belzeboobies]

I can tell you had a lot of fun with the filmed bits of this retrospective.