Tengai Makyō II: Manji Maru
天外魔境II 卍MARU1992Tengai Makyō II: Manji Maru
天外魔境II 卍MARUThe young hero Manjimaru sets out to save the land of Jipang.
Tengai Makyō II Manjimaru is a 1992 role-playing game for the PC Engine Super CD-ROM². It follows young Manjimaru Sengoku on a quest to save the world from the Roots clan. It became the best-selling PC Engine game in Japan.
| RELEASED IN JAPAN | 1992 |
|---|---|
| DEVELOPER | Red Company |
| PUBLISHER | Hudson Soft |
| MUSIC | Joe Hisaishi |
The overworld covers more than 20,000 screens, and the game has about 300 enemy types. It also holds 48 bosses.
The cutscene animation runs for over 90 minutes, and about three hours of speech is voiced. The soundtrack uses 24 CD music tracks and more than 80 PSG chiptune tracks.
The Fire clan and the Roots clan have been rivals in Jipang for centuries. The Roots clan attacks Manjimaru's home village, and he sets out with companions.
Danjūrō Kabuki is a kabuki performer and swordsman. Tarō Gokuraku is a fire-breathing giant. Kinu is a girl who is half demon, and her white dog Shiro travels with her.
Oji Hiroi led a team of more than 100 people. He wanted more than 50 endings, but the technology did not allow it, so he wrote one plot.
Lead programmer Hiromasa Iwasaki later gave the budget as about 500 million yen.
It was remade for the GameCube and PlayStation 2 in 2003, and for the Nintendo DS in 2006.
Manjimaru shows the CD-ROM² format at its most ambitious. It proved that a large, fully voiced RPG could sell on the console.
It also helped the series become one of the most popular RPG lines of the 16-bit era in Japan.
- The game never came out in English. Victor Ireland of Working Designs ranked it first on his personal list of the greatest games.
- The series began with Tengai Makyō Ziria, the first RPG on CD-ROM.
- Its composer, Joe Hisaishi, is known for his Studio Ghibli film scores.
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