Mugen no Shinzou
[夢幻の心臓]
1984年3月
“The definitive Role-Playing Game”
Mugen no Shinzo, released by Crystal Soft in March 1984 on the NEC PC-8801, PC-98, and Sharp MZ-2500, is presented as “the definitive role-playing game.”
At the start of the game, the hero—a monk who has lost his final battle on Earth—on the brink of death, utters a curse against the gods. Upon pronouncing his curse, breaking his sacred precepts, and falling into sin, he is cast into a world called “the dream world,” which is neither heaven nor hell. To regain his life, he must find the “Dream Heart,” which holds the secret of immortality, within 30,000 days, and embed it into his body to return to his world and be resurrected.
If he fails to obtain the Dream Heart within 30,000 days, he will be separated from the cycle of reincarnation and doomed to eternal torment.
The dream world is a surreal, baroque, twisted, and dangerous realm, home to other humans in similar plight, alongside half-human beings like dwarves and kobbits, mythical beasts such as Pegasus and griffins, and a wide variety of monsters, including giant scorpions, zombies, demons, and dragons.
The terrain map is represented in 2D and scattered with cities and ruins, offering complete freedom of exploration within an enigmatic structure.
Back then, Japanese RPGs were already depicting their world maps in far more colorful ways than Western titles, with plains made up of forests and mountains. The world map in the first Ultima, released in 1981, was depicted with simple, single-color symbol-like shapes. The plains were depicted as groups of green dots on a black background, the trees were drawn with alternating green circles, and mountains as overlapping white lines. When Mugen no Shinzo was released in March 1984, trees and mountains had become fully illustrated elements, drawn over a green field representing a plain.
The player embarks on a mysterious adventure, exploring the terrain map and its dungeons to unravel the story.
The journey begins in the town of Carlisle. To the west along the road is the fortress town of Macuhan. If the player keeps going west, he ends up back in Carlyle, giving the impression that the map loops endlessly. Yet new locations keep emerging one after another in this dream world, which is actually arranged in a diagonally twisted loop that ultimately stretches across a vast expanse.
Consequently, when the player travels northwest or southeast, the same map keeps repeating at short intervals, while heading northeast or southwest reveals new areas one after another.
Many ground paths are laid out diagonally, and the system is designed so that the player can experience both types of exploration.
The player can move in any of eight directions using the numeric keypad. One day elapses for every 10 steps across the terrain.
In the cities, displayed in the form of interactive menus, the player can purchase weapons and armor, buy and sell tools, upgrade his stats, and obtain information and strategic tips by selecting the desired establishment from a list of options. Across the terrain map, the player can obtain special items and enter dungeons.
Inside ruins, towers, or caves, the graphical representation takes the form of a pseudo-3D dungeon, shrouded in darkness, featuring a straightforward structure that can be easily mapped. The final dungeon is four times the scale of the standard dungeons.
Within, the player must wield torches to illuminate the darkness, or may rely on magic. The player’s vision changes according to the kind of “light” employed and fades over time.
Each dungeon presents key events and battles that drive the story onward.
The beginning of the game is quite challenging, and the player needs to acquire the necessary strength to survive in the dream world, earning enough money to improve his stats, since both inhabitants and monsters strike without warning. In order to survive, the player must first confront farmers, woodcutters, and merchants, claiming their gold coins by force. To restore his health points, the player can camp on the map using the numeric keypad’s 5 key, recovering one health point for every day that passes. However, if the player chooses to rest anywhere other than over a city, he may be attacked at any moment.
Health can also be restored by paying for rest and treatment at inns or hospitals.
If the player falls under the effect of poison, his status will not recover on its own and can only be cured at the town hospital for a fee of 20 gold coins.
If more than 30,000 days pass, it’s game over. Should the player acquire the Necklace of Immortality, a rare resurrection item purchased for 500 gold coins, he will be blessed with a grace of ten thousand extra days. If the player dies permanently, his save file is deleted forever.
For its time, and given that the genre was still in its early stages, Mugen no Shinzo demonstrates considerable inventiveness but remains essentially immature, with systematized gameplay and slow rendering that occasionally undermine the experience. Nonetheless, it stands as one of the most significant games in the history of Japanese RPGs, extremely rich in content and events, relatively simple to play, and impressively complete for a role-playing game of its time. The game offers an incredible atmosphere. The player embarks on a journey to survive and come back to life in an extremely dark vision of the world. Regarded as one of the pioneering masterpieces of Japanese RPGs, Mugen no Shinzou has had a significant impact on many games that followed due to its outstanding design.
As the game begins, the player inputs his name. He can resume his saved game by entering the same name at the next startup. There is no character creation, and the status is fixed.
The player embarks on the adventure alone, with no companions by his side.
On the map, battles occur randomly in a turn-based system, and the encounter rate differs according to the terrain type. Enemies along the road are mostly human, whereas venturing off the path often leads to encounters with powerful monsters.
The screen is divided into small sections: the terrain map, the head-to-head battle area with the enemy, and a command selection menu where the player can choose to fight, speak, escape, or hide. Commands can be selected via keyboard shortcuts, or by moving the cursor up, down, left, or right, and pressing the space key to confirm. The left part of the screen is dedicated to displaying the text-based commands.
The player can perform two types of attacks: physical strikes with weapons or bare hands, and magical spells that consume magic power. There are also support magics that can increase or decrease stats.
In combat, the player may engage in conversation with opponents who are either humans or fantastical creatures.
There are three types of conversation: “speak as equals,” “speak friendly,” and “speak aggressively.” The result of a conversation depends on the enemy type and the intelligence of both participants.
Successful conversations may give insights into important items and nearby events. By raising intelligence, evaluating the opponent’s behavior, and picking the right conversational strategy, the player can also avoid fighting or gain hints to solve puzzles.
At the beginning of a battle, the player may attempt to flee without penalty, though success depends on probability. If the player tries to escape after combat has begun, he loses 2 experience points. Success depends on the dexterity stats of both the player and the enemy.
The game also features a “Hide” command to either flee or perform a surprise attack, at the cost of 10 experience points.
The character does not acquire experience levels but can boost his physical strength by paying 100 gold coins at the town’s hospital. Physical strength also affects both attack power and accuracy. Therefore, by increasing physical strength, maximum health will also increase, up to 1.1 times its initial value.
Although there is no level-up in the traditional sense, the system is designed so that the player’s base statistics increases as his physical strength grows.
Thus, there are four fundamental stats in addition to physical strength: intelligence, dexterity, attack power, and evasion —which can be improved by gifting gold coins to the king and spending days training at McCuhan Castle.
However, there is a maximum limit to how much stats can be increased, and to raise them further, the player must use a special item that allows these stats to be raised to their maximum in exchange for his experience points.
The player can also learn magic from a magician in exchange for money. However, he cannot choose which spells to learn; the magician selects the most practical spells based on the number of gold coins the player offers.
The game features 14 types of magic, each with an elegant name like "Fire, become my sword" or "Spirit, be my shield," offering a great variety of spells available.
Casting spells requires magical power. The player cannot cast spells without it.
The player can increase his magical power by buying magic points at the magician's mansion, drinking from the Fountain of Paradise on the overworld map, or converting experience points into magic points with a special item.
Each city thus offers its own characteristics and special events, so the player must immerse himself in each one to develop his various skills.
By pressing 0 on the numeric keypad, the player can open the command menu to switch equipment, use magic, explore towns or dungeons, or save his progress.
Weapons, armor, tools, and even special equipment can break. Although their durability is not displayed on-screen, each item has a set durability value, and with a bit of experience, it’s easy to predict when an item is about to break. Selling it just before then can be a clever move.
Unlike RPGs of that era—like Ultima and Wizardry— which required the use of multiple different keyboard keys, Mugen no Shinzo was designed to simplify the input method. The game employs a dual-input layout. The player moves the character’s position using the numeric keypad and selects commands with the arrow keys.
The main character starts off very weak, and although the player can fight enemies and earns experience points, since there is no leveling system, his stats do not increase automatically, and he never grow stronger. That’s what makes this game unique.
After overcoming the early learning curve and once the character’s skills have greatly increased, Mugen no Shinzo shifts into a straightforward exploration experience that maintains good overall balance.
The player has complete freedom to choose the order of events, and although the game encourages exploration, reflection, and experimentation, various ideas were implemented to deliver information and hints that guide the player. He can get hints and directions from characters in towns by paying them a small amount of gold. These hints are often explicit, clearly indicating the destination or the required action according to the situation. However, some of them are intentionally cryptic and force the player to experiment with different possibilities.
If the player succeeds in speaking with an enemy on the map, he can also receive valuable clues about important locations close to the battle area, including exact latitude and longitude coordinates.
To this day, the world of Mugen no Shinzo, with its innovative 30,000-day system, still feels fresh and original. The 30,000-day limit is equivalent to about 80 years, which is roughly the length of a human life in real time. Seen from that perspective, it actually seems pretty realistic.
Although the game can usually be completed in the first 10,000 days, the concept itself significantly enhances the experience.
The enemies, inspired by Western folklore, are huge and take up nearly a quarter of the screen, leaving a powerful impression, greatly enhancing the player's ability to picture the game world.
Colors and textures are created by shifting the color tone of each area and using generous shading techniques.
Images are shown during event scenes as well. A picture of the town, merchants, and guards appears together with the menu.
In ruins and before entering caves, a contextual illustration appears, taking up roughly a quarter of the screen, making the adventure more engaging.
There is a total of 59 images, along with the Crystal Soft logo, not counting the opening and ending images. Of these, 53 are enemy illustrations, matching the 53 different enemy types. Each enemy features a unique, large-sized illustration that is never recycled anywhere else in the game. The remaining 6 images are special illustrations created specifically for event sequences.
Mugen no Shinzo adopts an avant-garde visual production, using large illustrations to emphasize key scenes that fully express the events’ situations.
However, on the original hardware, the display speed is extremely slow, and the number of loading times becomes a problem. It takes roughly 10 seconds just to render one image.
In combat, it takes about 10 seconds to draw the enemy, and when the fight is over, it takes another 10 seconds to display the Crystal Soft logo. When the player enters a town, it takes 10 seconds to draw the scenery, and upon entering a shop, it takes another 10 seconds to display the shopkeeper… The pacing is undeniably bad.
Mugen no Shinzo's main program is entirely written in BASIC — a language known for its relatively slow execution speed. Each shop uses a separately created program, and everything is connected together using slow-executing merge instructions, which adds even more delay.
Although there is no background music, the battle sound effects are memorable, even incorporating disk loading noises to represent specific situations. On the original PC-8801, sound output is limited to a single beep tone; however, with clever programming it can be used to play simple melodies.
In those days, PC games were frequently packaged with assorted physical extras designed to provide information or content that couldn’t be represented within the game itself. Mugen no Shinzo comes with a Reference Manual and Reference Cards that explain the gameplay, along with a 15-page Magic Book detailing spells, special items, and the town’s shops. The book also includes tips on how to access the final dungeon.
The game’s manual even explicitly mentions that a protective sticker should be placed on the disk.
A booklet titled Dream World Genesis describes the origins of the 15 worlds that shape the universe, the holy sword linking them together, and the birth of the dream world amid total war and chaos.
The worldview is unique, suspended between the real world and the afterlife. Every character who appears are rivals also trying to escape the dream world, just like the protagonist. The story is fragmented, dramatic, and challenging to understand.
The world’s balance - its sheer size and mystery, and the variety of things to do – is perfectly crafted, ensuring the game never becomes repetitive.
This is an RPG in which the player owns thoughts and imagination affect his fate. Depending on his decisions, his experience will change dramatically.
Mugen no Shinzo stands as a masterpiece whose many innovative and wonderful ideas laid the foundation for the golden age of Japanese role-playing games. This golden age endured throughout the 1980s, and emblematic Japanese titles such as Mugen no Shinzo, The Screamer, Zavas, released by Popcom Soft in 1988, and Haja no Fuuin, released by Kogado Studio in 1986, were notoriously challenging, yet their unique systems and worldview captivated many players and left a lasting impact on modern RPGs.