Touhouken Bunroku

Did You Know?

• In the original build, Marco's death by a stray bullet was rendered as a graphically explicit depiction of his head exploding with detailed textual narration.
• The early build also included sexually suggestive material and discriminatory language, all censored prior to official release.

Plot

Touhouken Bunroku is a fourth-year student in the Department of Chrono-Travel Studies at Southeast Asia University's College of Historical Engineering, specializing in spatiotemporal travel via particle fission along the Silk Road. Born into a family of merchants, he dreams of opening Japan's greatest general store in Daikanyama. Inspired by Marco Polo's description of Japan as the Country of Gold, Bunroku builds a time machine and packs bargain-bin goods from Akihabara for a graduation trip to Venice in 1275. He arrives as Marco is departing, and through a twist of fate joins Marco's journey. Their odyssey spans years and continents: encounters with Father Teobaldo, who later becomes Pope; battles with the Old Man of the Mountain in Persia; conflicts over spinel in Badakhshan; and a showdown with Ahmad, a Yuan noble plotting to assassinate Kublai Khan in Xanadu. After six years they reach Dadu and secure passage on a Mongol armada bound for Japan. When the historical Kamikaze typhoon fails to appear, Bunroku overloads his time machine to trigger a storm, but instead summons a squadron of Shinpū Tokubetsu Kōgekitai from the future, who destroy the fleet and kill Marco. Bunroku washes ashore in the Chrono Complex, a prison for temporal violators, where he descends into madness calling for his mother.

Reception

Famitsu reviewers gave it 27 out of 40. Maru Katsu Famicom awarded scores of 4, 6, 7, 6, 6, summing to 29 out of 50. Family Computer Magazine's reader-polled report cards rated it 17.36 out of 30, describing it as a laughingly absurd world whose greatest appeal lies in its wildly unpredictable story, a deliberate contrast to conventional game systems. The gaming book Bad Taste Game Journey said the game exists far beyond the realm of self-proclaimed absurdist cult games, and believed its user-hostile design philosophy rooted in a Yumeno Kyūsaku esque worldview could only have been realized when games were treated as artistic works. GAMESIDE compared it to Idol Hakkenden, stating both cemented Natsume's reputation as king of quirky oddities, and praised its animation-heavy presentation and the Zapping System's technical polish.