Please help me figure out this puzzle! In this game, there is a puzzle where you are walking around in a forest labyrinth; it's the classic adventure game puzzle of "no matter which direction you go in, the maze always looks the same".
The solution to the puzzle is left, down, right, up, up, left; I have no idea why this is the case but would love to know. I suspect there's some Japanese cultural knowledge you need here, but a quick Google search didn't yield much. (not that the hint really gives much to go off)
The only other information I think is pertinent is that the labyrinth in the game is named ムジナのヤブ知らず; the hint references ムジナ so I think the name of the place is relevant.
You can see the puzzle solution being entered here: youtube
日本語ができるこのサイトをご覧になっている客様へ：このゲームのパズルの解決がゼンゼン理解できないんですよ！手伝ってもらえますかな？
要するに：「ムジナのヤブ知らず」という迷宮のパズルで、正しい方向を選ばなければならないということです。解決は：左、下、右、上、上、左です。でも、どうしてその方向が正しいか分からないんです。下のスクリーンショットはゲームがくれるヒントです。文化的な知識が必要だと思いますけど、それは何か知らないんです。
パズルの解決はこのビデオで見られます：youtube
よろしくお願いします！
I was totally charmed by this game. It's filled with Japanese folklore (knowledge of which is used as the solution to a few puzzles like the monkey statues shown below) and interesting -- but not too difficult -- puzzles. Except the one at the top of this page. There are also some QTE event scenes which are oddly thrilling.
The game isn't available in English so there's not very much discussion about it out there. But in recent years I've finally gotten my Japanese reading level high enough to play this. It's surprisingly challenging for a learner, with notable use of non-常用 kanji (at least, for a kanji nerd like me, it's notable -- to your average Japanese native speaker? Probably not) and classical Japanese-tinged writing.
I realized recently why it's called Heisei Shin Onigashima. The original Famicom Disk System game, Shin Onigashima, came out during the Showa period. But this remake (?) came out during the Heisei period.
This game also does something that I found interesting, which is that at certain points in the game it will give you hints for the original Shin Onigashima game. Turns out once you beat each part of the game (like a Japanese novel, it shipped as separate 前編 and 後編 games), it unlocks the corresponding part of the original game, remade for the SNES. The otherwise out-of-context hints otherwise look really weird, since the originals were for an entirely different system.
I actually have a specific old memory connected to this game. I was bored and sleep deprived at a LAN party with friends, playing Warcraft III and Starcraft, in high school circa like... 2007. I downloaded it on ROM and booted it up... and immediately had no idea what I was reading. I don't remember how much Japanese I actually knew at that time, probably around Genki I or Genki II. But the game immediately jumps into paragraphs and paragraphs of old man speech and it completely lost me.
Years later I grinded all the 常用 kanji, picked it up again, and then I got almost immediately filtered by 吠える. (I mean yes I could look it up, but I really hate searching by radical... it's so slow...)
This set me on a grind for about 1000 more kanji. I'll spare you further nerdy details about where that set came from but it was needlessly elaborate.
Then recently I finally picked it up again, probably playing that same ROM I downloaded in 2007, and cleared it.
It always tickles me to see ゐ and ゑ in name selection screens, even though they're usually allowed there.
"Uhhh, it's a golden Mari-- no, no, a golden Buddha statue."
"It's not a Buddha is it.. whose god could this be?". One of only 2-3 instances where the reading of a word is given in kana.
悪うございました such a cool word... any instance of that adjective conjugation other than ありがとう or おはよう is instantly cool. (this is why Susato is my favorite TGAA character)
Last thing: Just listen to these songs from the soundtrack. It's so good