How an old-school RPG used my assumptions about the genre against me

polygon.com:

If you have a lot of experience with video games, it can be easy to infer the basic mechanics of a game you’re starting for the first time. But sometimes those assumptions can be used against you. That’s something I learned first-hand during a recent interaction with a devious tanuki in an old-school roleplaying game.

Last week, the first game in the Tengai Makyō franchise — also known as Far East of Eden outside Japan — received an unofficial English translation. Tengai Makyō: Ziria debuted in 1989 for the PC Engine CD-ROM² and quickly rose in popularity alongside RPG powerhouses like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, thanks to the extensive voice acting and high-quality music allowed by the console’s CD-ROM format. The series would continue to be a priority for its developer, Red Company, through 2005 — a 16-year history that only saw one North American release in 1995 fighting game spin-off Far East of Eden: Kabuki Klash.

Always up for a bit of classic, turn-based roleplaying, I took some time to patch and play Tengai Makyō: Ziria over the weekend. The game put me in the role of Ziria, a young boy trained as an heir to the legacy of the legendary Fire Clan to withstand an ancient evil known as Masakado upon its resurrection. The eponymous hero is instructed by his mentor to seek out the assistance of other Fire Clan descendants, despite Ziria’s confidence he can defeat Masakado alone, and sent on his way.

I was struck by Tengai Makyō: Ziria’s resemblance to Dragon Quest, most notably in its first-person battles and use of menu commands to speak with NPCs and check out my surroundings, but I didn’t have much time to dwell on the mechanics before meeting what I thought was my first party member.

While exploring a nearby