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Pachinko Kuunyan story translation and hidden passwords
Ok, so, I've just beaten Pachinko Kuunyan after 40 hours of gameplay.
It was gorgeous.
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One could beat it in 30 and less hours by playing only the easier machines, I feel, but I wanted to beat every machine at least once.
There's TWENTY machines (of which 12 are unique, 8 are reskins), and in each parlor (5 towns, 10 parlors) there's well over a hundred machines to choose from, that way you can check the nails beforehand to see which one is optimal (pins get bent by parlor attendees in order to increase/decrease payout chance).
The music is just soooo good. There's not even a loop that's 1 minute long, but it works. It ranges from the traditional gunkan march to china vibes to soothing music to thrash metal. The drums have some noise but then again that's to be expected, this soundtrack just flatout rules really.
The machines have a good enough variety to keep you interested even though at times the game is a grind (101 machines to drain completely to beat the game--damn it's worth it). They are either hanemono machines (toys in the middle with flapping wings that open) or slot-based machines, or both. This refers to the feature/fever of the machine, which is all you want to do while playing pachinko: activate it, get new music, get balls payout, profit. That's usually achieved by getting the ball into a certain spot, however some machines require some clever nail-inspectioning and ball-aiming and sequencing (see Parade/The Audition).
The artworks from the machines (which you can view separately and without nails/machinery to cover them thanks to one of these passwords) can be either awesome or somewhat lacking, but they have great variety and humor.
You can tell they had troubles with the color limit, and having to display on screen also the outside of the machine didn't help. An example of how well they could deal with that is with Great Thunder, although it doesn't show unless you use the password to view it:
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(added Bad Boys and Oh! My God! for flavor, the 2 that made me laugh very hard.)
I have translated the story from the manual, which is roughly the same that plays through the beautiful intro (I think that 2 second shot of the diviner's hands into the crystall ball that says PACHINKO is pretty fun). As for the rest, like I did for Battle Golfer Yui when I played that like 1-2months before the translation patch and posted about it, I figured out with my lowtier Japanese skills, dictionary app and help from chat (no machine translation was necessary). Easy and short text and script, no kanji though sadly.
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This is the only MD pachinko game (sadly), but it does a good job at enticing players with its charm, personally what strikes first on that regard is the fact that you walk around with Ren's sprite, rpg-style, enter parlor, talk to people, and choose your machine.
The walking animation and the sprite in general reminded me of Phantasy Star 2. The reflections on her chinese dress were a nice touch.
You also often get funny cutscenes, and have a goal in the story.
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The reason for there not being any other MD pachinko games, intuitively, has to do with the Megadrive not selling well in Japan, but selling very well in the rest of the world: you wouldn't get a lot of -very- japanese games on it; unlike the Superfamicom/SNES, where there is a *ridicolous* amount of pachinko games, lots of fishing games, horse racing games, probably way more mahjong/go/shougi as well (md has a few mahjong titles, 1 shougi game, 1 go game which is online only or something, and no horse racing that I know of).
I will post my notes on the story synopsis translation and on the general lore behind the game that I could find before playing it(which means I didn't know I.S.C. was behind the game!!! check The Cutting Room Floor page).
I actually meant to open this thread in order to discuss this page: https://tcrf.net/Pachinko_Kuunyan
There are heaps of hidden passwords and many of them are unresearched. I plan on figuring out what some of them do. You can sorta make out something from their names too, there seems to be something double speed related かけあしーにばいそくーもーどーーーー and other things interesting to try (will report very soon on a later post for sure)
Story:
Yokohama – Pachipachi China District
With the smell of chinese chili oil making everything lively, this is some bizarre pachinko island.
This was originally a normal Chinatown, until a Chinese living here came to learn about pachinko and thus opened a pachinko parlor in the district.
What to do at that point? Why, it was very popular! One after another, pachinko parlors increased and suddenly there were 9.
--And although it was good that far...
A panda that had heard the rumors came from somewhere and bought this Chinatown.
He built a pachinko parlor himself, one that was charming and attractive.
It was from that time.
It was from that time that people went missing one after another...
“If you went to that pachinko parlor, you'd never come back again.”
Everybody in town started spreading rumors.
In order to defeat this bewitching pachinko place, a person went there and he also went missing.
That person was Renren, an Oolong tea maker.
Having heard the stories about this pachinko parlor, Ren, our protagonist, went to the Yokohama pachipachi chinatown, and her trail also got lost by the bounds of town..
Some years prior, it was predicted by a diviner that a girl from the South would have come, a girl who contained the power of pachinko parlor..
Now the girl became 18 years of age, and she was the only daughter of the oolong tea dealer Renren. She was Ren.
“Mom, I'm going to Yokohama's Pachipachi Chinatown to look for dad!”
With these words, Ren left looking for her father.
|_________________________________________________ _______________________
This game was developed by Soft Vision and released on the 18th of December 1992, it retailed at 8,500 yen.
(we've now learnt that I.S.C. did at least the pachinko/physics/engine-related development, and did a great job at that because the different nail bendings and positionings make a precise difference)
It is the only game developed by Soft Vision on the Mega Drive along with Top Pro Golf 1 and 2. They also published Eliminate Down, which was developed by Aprinet.
Pachinko kuunyan was released inbetween Top Pro Golf 1 and 2, and eliminate down was published afterwards.
They also published two games on the Saturn: World Cup Golf: Professional Edition, known in Japan as World Cup Golf in Hyatto Dorado Beach, which is a British game that interestingly had a Mega CD version set for release in November and afterwards December 1994 but never materialised; this is interesting because World Cup Golf actually came out in 1996 for the Saturn.
The other game they published on the Saturn is Johnny Bazooka, still the same british devs, Arc Developments. US Gold published this outside of Japan.
That's it for Soft Vision-related games, what's peculiar is that there's very little stuff known about them, cause the Soft Vision name is used by so many other companies. You can tell at least these game we've seen are about the same Soft Vision by the logo, the positioning of the logo on the cover art, and such.
Soft Vision or Soft Vision International is/was a Japanese video game developer.
Very little is known about them because the name Soft Vision is used by so many other companies. There is a Japanese company still operating under that name whose lifespan (founded 1987) ecompasses this company's games, however if this is indeed the right Soft Vision, they have retired from the videogame industry and now make IT software.
Their games have a serial number belonging to Coconuts Japan and has that company's name on the back of the box in addition to Soft Vision's own (or in some cases, Coconuts' on the front and theirs on the back); the old Coconuts Japan website lists them as what appears to be an “affiliate”. The exact situation is unknown.
So, Coconuts Japan made a ton of pachinko games including Pachio Kun, I suppose they lent the engine to soft vision, but it is weird that they would write coconuts japan on the back of some of their games and not pachinko canyon.
Now those other 2 golf games both use the Varie sound driver. Varie was a company that made countless F1 games especially with the Nakajima Satoru license, if you remember and were there we've played a very interesting Nakajima Satoru F1 game in here already and that did indeed have the Varie sound driver, this is what it sounds like
As you can tell, although it takes a more hype approach with Eliminate Down, it does seem to be the same sound
Eliminate Down- Tatsuya Matsumoto
Nakajima Satoru F1 Grand Prix Kanshuu – Yusuke Takahama
Top Pro Golf – Masahito Miyamoto
This is interesting to note because for Pachinko Canyon they actually did not use the Varie sound driver, and yet another different guy scored the Soundtrack, Hideki Suzuki.
This guy also scored Deadly Moves aka Power Athletes on the Mega Drive. (later I've learned he also did at least Genocide and Lagoon on x68000)
Pachinko Canyon's soundtrack is actually fuckin god tier, has some crackling noise in the drums but everything else is just fabulous and delivers that China feel VERY well. That China feel that you can get immediately from the box art already and that should be the composer's job to convey in a pleasant manner.
And what would a rpg-ish pachinko game with not good enough music be? Yeah it would be shit.
(as usual, I've streamed this live on my twitch channel, so you can always find videos down there. At the moment the capture setup isn't optimal - waiting for a new MD scart so I can use my ossc with it - so I apologize for some jittering and color not being 100% faithful, but it's good enough)
