Ringo Biyori (Spice and Wolf closing theme), Rocky Chack
I've been saying that Okamiden takes place in ancient Japan. Now I can be more specific. It takes place sometime between the year 1000 and 1025. I know this because today I met an actual, historic figure, doing what I must therefore assume are actual historic things, despite some evidence to the contrary.
(Spoilers follow)
Actually, I didn't recognize the historic character. Instead, I recognized her creation, who materialized as a spirit thanks to a magical jewel:
Genji, I knew, was from a work called The Tale of Genji. It's one of those contenders for the very first novel. He was brought into existence by his author, Shikibu. Since Genji was written in the first decade of the 11th century and the author died in 1025, the game must take place then (or, since I'm traveling in time, some point in 1026.)
But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.
To get to Genji, Nanini and Chibi needed to enter a doll-house sized temple, which they did with the help of the Lucky Mallet, which lets you shrink things down to bug-size and bring them back to normal. I didn't mention it yesterday, but Nanini loved playing with it, shrinking and growing Chibi a few times before he got annoyed.
Once in the temple, you needed to go through an underwater side-scrolling level, a staple of video games since at least World 4 of Super Mario Brothers. I've always hated them, though I've played ones which were far more annoying than this one. At this point we arrived at the shrine with the magic jewel, but found a woman had been possessed by evil spirits. We saved her, and found out she was Shikibu. I'm not quite sure how a Japanese lady-in-waiting wound up in an underwater temple, but will assume that it was a common practice of the nobility of the time to shrink themselves to microscopic size and visit shrines you normally need a sea goddess to guide you to.
I will note that she looks nothing like the pictures on her Wikipedia article. None of those show an angry woman who feels her literary creation betrayed her by turning into a horn dog. And none of them wear some sort of dragonfish helmet.
While trying to help us, she accidentally summoned Genji. I've heard of the book, but never actually read it. From what I can gather, he's the Japanese equivalent of Don Juan. As you can see by his dialogue, he takes a shine to Nanini (who, judging by the cartoon hearts, thinks he's kind of cute too). He grabs her and runs off, and Shikibu advises you to find them while she gets the jewel ready to use.
What follows is an easy, but cute, game of hide and seek. In each room, after you find Genji, he grabs Nanini, looks for another good hiding spot, fails to find it, and heads to the next room. At one point there's some fourth-wall breaking, when he looks out the screen of the game -- and blows some kisses while he's at it. I'm curious how that would look on a 3DS. But when you finally corner him, you find out it wasn't necessary -- Nanini doesn't like being abducted, and is beating him up.
After that, we find the information we need, which concerns a character from the first game, Waku. Okamiden reminded me of some of his background, which is good. All I remembered about him when I started playing the game was that he and Ammy had a kind of friendly rivalry going throughout the game.
No game diaries for the next couple of days, because I'll be out of town.
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