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 A few years ago, I never
even heard of the Sega Master System, and a few months ago, I never knew
Kenseiden, for the SMS, would become one of my favorite videogames. And a
until a few months ago, I never knew how few people actually knew about
this game. And until a few days ago, I never knew how little I knew of it
myself.
If you're one of the few who've never heard of Kenseiden, It was a game
released by Sega for the Sega Master System in 1988. Left in obscurity by
much more popular Arcade ports on the SMS, and the fact that the big N
overshadowed all other consoles after it's release of the NES, Kenseiden
was a game about the story of Hayato, a samurai who travels across the
several provinces of Japan, infiltrating the castles of 5 demons, and
slaying them, in order to receive the Dragon Sword, to rid the Demon King
of his power.
Defeating one of the boss demons will give Hayato a new ability, such as a
higher jump, a quicker attack, and a downward slash. Hayato can also visit
training grounds in order to obtain a larger health meter, or stronger
defense, which you'll definitely need, since the bosses are quite
challenging. The music is breathtaking tunes done in the ancient Japanese
style, what you'd expect from a game with a Samurai theme (if you don't
immediately fall in love with the stage 1 theme, you must really hate
sound or something.) Because of the challenging gameplay, the level layout
and the whole Demon thing in general, some people have called this the
ancient Japanese equivalent of Castlevania (The
Castlevania Dungeon even lists this game as one of the
"Castlevania-like games", which first
prompted me to play it.)
As you can see, I was enamored by this game,
and I really needed a way to spread the message about this lesser-known
title. A review just wouldn't be fair, even if it would seem to balance
out my already negative review section. So I figured I'd try my hand at
ripping sprites from the game and making some animations (the walking
animation in the beginning of the first paragraph is my first successful
attempt), since in my hours of searching for Kenseiden fan-stuff, never
came across anything but some cookie-cutter MIDIs. I decided to Google for
'Kenseiden Sprites', when I came across this
message board
post, more importantly, this screenshot of the Japanese version of
Kenseiden:
WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?
If you haven't figured it out, here's a hint: The Animated GIF of Hayato
above is from the US/European version of Kenseiden. This screenshot is
from the Japanese version.
Holy crap, Hayato is BLONDE. As Blonde as an Abercrombie and Fitch Model and a
Playboy Playmate fighting in the middle of Fort Knox. Hayato, who is
clearly of Japanese descent, and as far as I know, the predominant hair
color of Japan has been black/brunette for the past few thousands of
years. And apparently, when they released the game in the US and Europe,
they changed his golden locks to the more Japanese-looking jet black.
Usually, when American companies release a game imported from Japan
stateside,
especially in the early days of gaming, they "Americanized" some of the
Japanese -looking characters and themes, such as changing Japanese names
to familiar " American" ones, and even widened the eyes of characters, and
changed their hair color. But it seems for this game, it was quite the
opposite.
What's the deal? Did Sega screw up the
color-swap (Which it turns out to be, as I'll show later) for the American
version, which may have had the blonde hair, and the Japanese version,
which would have the black hair? Or is there much more? Or am I just
overthinking this, and looking for an excuse for content on my site by
comparing the two? I figured the Japanese game was identical to the US/
European game, aside from the text translation, but I guess I was proven
wrong. So I decided to play through both the Japanese version, and the
US/Euro version again to spot any differences. Be sure to come back soon,
when the second half of this article is finished.
[BACK TO ANGRY ROBOT]
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