Ishin no Arashi: A war of words

Though it's slowly improving, the state of computer gaming in Japan right now is a sad one. Go into any PC gaming area in a Japanese software shop and there will be a small, lonesome shelf with computer games, mostly imported from the West, nestled among a sea of pornographic "games." It wasn't always this way, though. During the 80s and 90s, the NEC PC-88 and PC-98 platforms were a mainstay for many great Japanese computer games, but when those platforms died, they took most of the computer gaming market with it, leaving only the cesspit that is there today.

One of the most prolific game publishers on the PC-88 and PC-98 was Koei. In the 80s they were primarily famous for their historical simulation games, especially their flagship titles Nobunaga's Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. In 1988, they released a new type of game, the "Rekoeition" game. "Rekoeition" games were hybrid-genre games, mixing RPG, strategy, and simulation, and even occasionally action mechanics together. Very few of these games were ever released to the West--the exceptions being Daikoukai Jidai (The Great Age of Sail) which were released on consoles as Uncharted Waters, and Inindo: Datou Nobunaga (Inindo: Kill Nobunaga) whose awful SNES port was released as Inindo. Other series never released included the great Taikou Risshiden (Rise of the Taikou) samurai life-simulation games, the Eiketsuden series of strategy RPGs, and the game which I'm going to cover now, Ishin no Arashi (Storm of the Restoration).

Ishin no Arashi is the first ever Rekoetion game to be released. Its initial release was on the 16-bit PC-98 platform, but in 1989, it got a  substantially changed and somewhat stripped-down re-release/port on the then more common 8-bit PC-88. It was that simpler version that went on to become the "standard." All subsequent ports of the game on other platforms like the Famicom were based on the PC-88 version. In the mid-90s a "sequel" of sorts, Ishin no Arashi: Bakumatsu Shishiden was released for Windows and Playstation. This installment was much heavier on story and RPG/visual novel game elements than its predecessor. A third installment for the Nintendo DS, Ishin no Arashi: Shippu Ryomaden was released in 2010, and though I've never played it, it looks similar to Shishiden.

I'll be playing the original, PC-98 version of Ishin no Arashi for this blog. I first purchased this game in the mid '00s, when Koei re-released many of their PC-98 classics in bundled emulators for Windows in their Teiban series. I later obtained a copy of the original PC-88 version. Here's a photo of both.

The emulated PC-98 re-release is the CD jewel case at the bottom-right, obviously.

As you can see from the above shots, Koei used to include a lot of extras in their releases. Being a historical simulation game, Ishin no Arashi includes not only a manual but a fairly hefty guide to the historical back story of the game. Also you can just barely make it out on the box, but at 9800 yen, this game was expensive--about $70 US in 1989, or roughly $140 in 2017 dollars. Even in Japan, Koei's games were pricey compared to others.

This history of Ishin no Arashi takes place during the bakumatsu period, the era of turbulence in the 1850s and 1860s that ended the 700 years of bakufu, or military government/shogunate, rule, and ushered in the ostensible "restoration" of imperial rule. The bakumatsu period likely ranks second only to the turbulent "Sengoku" period of the 15th-16th centuries when it comes to capturing the Japanese imagination--the overwhelming majority of historical fiction and Japanese-history derived works of popular culture in Japan seems to focus on one of these two eras. (The period in between gets a lot of attention, too)

The bakumatsu was arguably kicked off in 1854, when US Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo harbor and opened up trade with Japan at the barrel of a cannon. The previous 250 years of Tokugawa rule had Japan closed off to the outside world, but Perry, followed by several other European colonial powers, forced the bakufu to open up the country's trade in a series of very unfair (for Japan) trade treaties.

This triggered a lot of unrest in Japan--during the peaceful Edo period of Tokugawa rule, the once-powerful warrior class had atrophied into a class of bureaucrats living off hereditary government stipends, and Perry exposed their weakness for all to see. Furthermore, the emperor at the time, Komei, absolutely hated foreigners, and was virulently opposed to the bakufu's opening of the country, going so far as to issue an edict to "expel the foreign barbarians" in 1863, with disastrous results for those that tried to enact it. The country divided into multiple factions--the sonno ("revere the Emperor") faction, advocating the dismantling of the bakufu and return to imperial rule, and the sabaku ("support the bakufu") faction advocating the continuation of Tokguwa rule. The sonno faction operated primarily out of not-coincidentally-enemies-of-Tokugawa-since-the-beginning western provinces like Satsuma and Choshu, while the sabaku strongholds were in the typically Tokugawa-supporting eastern provinces. Though its initial platform (especially the "expel foreigners" bit) wasn't enacted, the winner was eventually the sonno faction, with the Tokugawa bakufu being dissolved and emperor Meiji being installed as the head of a new government--if only as a semi-puppet.

Ishin no Arashi is all about these political divisions. You control a character that advocates for either sonno, sabaku, or a third, kougi (translates roughly as "public/official") faction that advocates for a third-way blending of the two. (This was a philosophy that that imperial authority should be restored with the shogun remaining an important part of the new government, though the latter never came to pass) Your goal is to unite the country--or at least the important parts of it--under a single philosophy. You could, theoretically, do this in the traditional manner of militarily conquering areas controlled by rival factions. However, winning the game militarily is extremely difficult--the most realistic path to victory is to find powerful advocates of rival philosophies and convince them of the error of their ways through good old fashioned debate.

Sitting down and talking over tea--an Ishin no Arashi take on "combat"

The debate mechanic is the most pivotal feature of Ishin no Arashi and most "combat" consists of a one-on-one war of words, where the loser's philosophy shifts towards the winner's. You can't just convince any old person of the rightness of your cause--to actually fully convert a province to your philosophy you'll need to convert its rulers, and a province's rulers won't entertain debate from just any old peasant off the street. You'll need to start from the bottom up, and will more than likely need a whole party of advocates to succeed.

Sometimes, either accidentally or deliberately, debate fails and you'll need to come to blows with NPCs or armies. For advocates of sonno and sabaku, violent confrontation is inevitable, as the "home base" of these two philosophies can never be converted to the opposite philosophy through debate. Fighting is done through a rudimentary action-based "duel" system.

Ishin no Arashi is a heavy and complicated game for its time, but it's very open-ended. For this reason the upcoming entries are likely to be dense, wordy, and somewhat slow to release. Part of the reason it took me so much time between finishing Deathlord and publishing this update was that I needed to get reacquainted with the game after not playing it for several years, and there's a lot to catch up on.