Description
Long time ago, humans lived in a paradise, the Garden of Eden. But the brave and audacious members of the Fire Clan were banned from Eden, and had to seek shelter on the Earth. They built their own paradise - the land they later called Jipang. However, the evil demon lord Masakado wanted to destroy Jipang, and the Fire Clan fought and defeated him. Now, many years later, a young thief named Ziria learns that he is a descendant of the Fire Clan. He must now find the other members, and prevent the resurrection of Masakado by his followers.
Tengai Makyō: Ziria was the first role-playing game released on a CD ROM; thanks to the medium's greater storage capacity, the game was able to include full-screen anime-style cutscenes with voice-overs. It is the first entry in the
Tengai Makyō series, and is generally considered the first RPG with significant humorous content. The game's setting parodies many aspects of feudal Japan, containing comical and sometimes deliberately stereotypical portrayals of characters and plenty of supernatural elements.
Basic gameplay mechanics follow a template introduced in early
Dragon Quest and
Phantasy Star games. The player navigates Ziria and other characters who eventually join him on a top-down overworld, visiting towns to rest and buy supplies, and facing randomly appearing enemies in round-based combat viewed from first-person perspective. Each character uses his or her own unique weapon and equipment types. Magic spells cannot be bought or learned automatically when leveling up; they must be sought out in specific locations, often those not required to visit in order to advance the story.
The game's overworld is fairly vast, divided into provinces, each containing several towns and other locations. It is possible to teleport instantly from the world map to any previously visited province.The game emphasizes overworld exploration; dungeons tend to be smaller and less maze-like than in many other contemporary role-playing games. In towns, the player can gamble and deposit money in banks; this money is preserved if the party is annihilated in combat and transported back to the town, with the money it was carrying cut in half. When a character levels up, his or her hit points (HP) and magic points (MP) are fully restored.
Alternate Titles
- "天外魔境 自来也" -- Chinese spelling (simplified)
- "天外魔境 Ziria " -- Japanese spelling
- "Far East of Eden: Ziria" -- English title
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Trivia
CD-ROM
Beside being the starting point of one of the most successful and long-running RPG series and of semi-humorous RPGs in general,
Tengai Makyou: Ziria holds another record that will never be broken: it was the first role-playing game (and one of the first games generally) that came on a CD ROM.
Extras
Tengai Makyou: Ziria comes with a thick manual (72 pages) that contain not only story summary, character introduction, gameplay explanation, etc., but also a comic-book intro to the game, and a whole "Making Of" section that introduces the developers and shows how the game was made.
Hiroshi Adachi
The
Tengai Makyou games are supposedly written by the western 18th century historian "PH Chada" who makes appearances in most of the game's manuals. Paul Hieronymus Chada is the pseudonym of
Hiroshi Adachi. "P.H." stands for "Prince Hiroi" [Japanese: "Hiroi-ōji"]. "Adachi" is the anagram (reverse) of "Chada". As an in-joke as he is credited as the main responsible for the goofy cultural misconceptions of the world of Jipang.
Jipang
The country in which most
Tengai Makyou games (except
The Apocalypse) take place is called
Jipang. Except the addition of supernatural elements and many anachronisms, Jipang is pretty much the same as medieval Japan. The modern word "Japan" is actually based on the word
Jipang, which was the way European adventurers of Middle Ages called this country. This word, in its turn, comes from the Chinese
riben, which means "the origin of the sun". The Japanese also use this word to name their country (
nippon or
nihon in Japanese pronunciation).
Release history
There are both standard CD and Super CD releases of the game. The CD version is the original commercial release from 1989, while the SCD version was released as part of a promotion for the PC Engine Duo in 1992. It was sent for free to the first 30,000 people to purchase a PC Engine Duo. The SCD version of the game is virtually identical to the CD version, except that it has fewer (though longer) load times.
Title
Starting with this very first game, all
Tengai Makyou games have an English alternate title
Far East of Eden, which appears on game covers and as a sub-title for the main title. Contrary to a popular opinion, "Far East of Eden" is not the translation of "Tengai Makyou".
Tengai Makyou can be roughly translated as "Magical Border Outside of the Sky".
Information also contributed by
jotaro.raido and
KaminariThis entry to the MobyGames database was contributed by
YID YANG 
(162395) on Dec 19, 2004.
