Description
Arguably boasting the most intriguing premise of any
Paul Panks game,
Ghost of the Fireflies sees the player initially directing the actions of Camphora, a phantom beetle, through the environs of Atsuta Jingū... plotting revenge against Sugawara no Michizane for reasons not initially clear. Navigating this tricky scenario is achieved with the assistance of Raiythius, a sassy Zen hellhound sidekick with a penchant for conveying enlightenment through physical pain and micturition.
While the setting of this text adventure is quite explicitly and thoroughly
Japanese, the game boasts even stranger cameo appearances than previous Panks games, including a suffering
Jesus of Nazareth at the start screen,
Bruce Lee as the shopkeeper (with
Mr. Miyagi in the eaves) and founding father Ben Franklin, murdered for cheating in a gambling game with Wyatt Earp and his posse at the Oibara Inn. All this plus the game's author himself (hinting at some bizarre post-modern denouement) as the frontman for the house band the Singing Nobunagas!
The gameplay, largely a matter of roving between areas picking up that which is not nailed down and killing that which can be overcome through physical combat (but now nearly featuring -- see trivia -- an alchemical magic system of sorts), doesn't live up to this extraordinary setup... but certainly the game steps out from the cookie-cutter fantasy accusations leveled at many of the author's other works.
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Trivia
This game took dead last place overall of the 27 eligible finalists in 2007's 13th annual Interactive Fiction competition, likely due to the disqualification of two simpler games by the same author.
This entry to the MobyGames database was contributed by
Pseudo_Intellectual (34150) on Oct 25, 2007.
