hoi peeplz, I'm bak 4rom da ded, hapy eastah ig [proceeds to whack you, me, and everyone else reading with the Biblically Inaccurate God Stick] blessed be thy shit, now go, my angle frens are dragon me to Scotland cuz we gotta piss on maggie thacther too
Once upon a time, Koei made a video game of the greatest story ever told. It wasn't Nobunaga's Ambition; that guy was about as far from sacred and pious as you could imagine (boy did Mitsuhide make him pay for it). And it certainly couldn't have been Do Dutch Wives Dream of Electic Eels?, not unless you worship at the altar of ancient erotic adventures. Rather, the company's non-sim game division in the early-1980s, dubbed Comix, released a very loose adaptation of Christ's struggles towards salvation in '84, utterly unlike the rest of their output. This side-scrolling, arcade-style action thing for the relatively underpowered (but surprisingly capable) PC-6001mkII didn't have much presence in its own market. Koei would soon pour the lion's share of their talent and resources into complex, richly themed grand strategy and military simulations over the coming decades. Somehow, though, I think Chrith: Ai no Tabidachi (or Journey of Love) perfectly represents the studio's origins, which were far from prestigious and instead reflected the anything-goes attitudes of early Japanese PC games.
Jesus ain't living on Earth here, but the alien planet Lourdes, ruled by an evil crown prince and ravaged by famine. Now this guy's still prophesied to become humanity's guiding light, working miracles before all is lost, and so this child of peasants finally gets the gig many years later. His katakana name is actually "kurisu", a nod to how this isn't really Christ but a weird alternate universe version Koei's using to get out of trouble with the few Christians in Japan who'd even care. Players control Christ as he must move west across the land, blessing every lost soul in sight with his holy staff while avoiding snakes, soldiers, and other manifestations of the devil. If this sounds pretty simple, that's because it is. Chrith tends to resemble a reverse-direction MagMax or Seicross, as the play area auto-scrolls from right to left with peasants and pests moving in different lanes. Just move onto each lost soul to save them, ending when you've hit 50 people or have lost all your lives. I guess resurrection's a limited-chance offer on this world.
So we're playing not-Christ on not-Earth and it's totally not got a lot going on. Stages all look the same, with the barest of details like silhouetted mountains and a starry night sky. Check out that sick wireframe ground, though. Someone would peg this as an '80s throwback game if released today just because of the grid! It serves a purpose here, though, since a lack of sprite scaling means the developers had to convey depth perception somehow. Chrith hardly plays that bad in the moment thanks to considerations like this, but the choppy, all-in-software scrolling and lack of any music or audio design means this feels limp from start to finish. It's as shallow and repetitive as many players today think the Golden Age arcade classics must be. All I have to do for high scores is run wild around the track, racking up as many worshipers as possible while avoiding one-hit deaths from baddies. No secrets, no hidden mechanics, no nuthin'. Any potential this had to integrate miracles, sermons, aphorisms, and other New Testament-themed nuances just wasn't on the dev team's to-do list, I suppose.
Chrith: Journey of Love has a certain je-ne-sais-qois, mainly due to how it distorts bubble-era Japanese pop perceptions of Christianity (also influenced by U.S. media exports like Cecil B. DeMille's lavish Hollywood epics). Players will immediately notice and likely laugh at the voice synthesis dialogue during stage intermissions. This was possible on PC-6001 models thanks to an add-on chip which a select number of software used, including games like this and NEC's graphic adventure Colony Odyssey. And what you'll hear sounds worse than the best lines from Evil Otto in Berzerk, let alone the iconic taunts of Sinistar. But this at least adds character and a sense of mystery to the game's aesthetic, where an unidentified light (God? Heaven? Some angels?) briefs our hero on principles and goals before heading back into the moral melee. The spartan color choices, typical for this system and akin to early CGA graphics on DOS PCs, also render this ersatz pilgrimage as uncanny as possible. Sitting down with this disk for even a few minutes gives me the heebie-jeebies, like some creepypasta's about to happen right on screen. Bewildering stuff, I tell ya. Just watch Umbrella Terms' review and play this with her fan translation patch for more strangeness!
While this is the first PC-6000 series game I've covered here on Backloggd, it's definitely an outlier in that library, a dying gasp of Koei's origins as this hobbyist venture Yoichi Erikawa started to supplement his family's chemicals business. You'll never hear this mentioned in any official histories beyond maybe a mention in some timeline graphic. And the next Christianity-themed effort by the corporation came nearly a decade later with Tamashii no Mon - Dante's Odyssey, an Xmas '92 adventure platformer sticking closer to its source material than Chrith ever bothered. I enjoy the contrasts between these reverent but stylistically opposed translations of religious lit into mainstream games. Whereas Dante's Odyssey seamlessly blends its game-y bits in with recognizable moments from the original poem, Chrith salvages the surface-level trappings of a generic Christ biopic or children's book for the sake of camp. Neither approach is that faithful, nor sacrilegious. Syncretism among different Japanese faiths predisposed these products' creators to treat Western-import religions and iconography very similarly. It is entirely seemly for a Japanese micro-computer game riffing on Jesus to take liberties via this inter-cultural mangling. In the author's death, all things appear fair. (Wait, that's the Iliad, not the Bible…)
Koei quickly crafted a veneer of majesty, attention to detail, and historic fidelity throughout the mid-/late-'80s, something which they've let go of recently but can still point to and say "we know what we're doing". Yet Chrith: Journey of Love remains a sobering reminder of when this wasn't the case, a period when the Erikawas and co. just messed around, producing whatever silly idea could work on whichever PC they were targeting. This was the same company behind the very first eroge, after all. If you ask me, I think the C-suite and tastemakers at Koei-Tecmo are cowards to deny their beginnings and heritage. Unless this really was a troubled production or something they need to disavow for legal or sensitivity reasons, I think it'd help them to show a little pride for their first efforts. What would Chrith do? Probably send me to the pearly gates with his superweap—er, uh, I mean holy staff, yes, but the King of Kings would have enough love in his heart for even an homage this mediocre and misguided. This wouldn't even be the last time Kou Shibusawa himself diverged heavily from a known mythology just to make a fun enough game, yet I don't hear Imperial scholars complaining about all the inaccuracies in Kamigami no Daichi's version of Onamuchi's labors in primordial Japan. I dunno, maybe Koei should cut itself some slack.
Once upon a time, Koei made a video game of the greatest story ever told. It wasn't Nobunaga's Ambition; that guy was about as far from sacred and pious as you could imagine (boy did Mitsuhide make him pay for it). And it certainly couldn't have been Do Dutch Wives Dream of Electic Eels?, not unless you worship at the altar of ancient erotic adventures. Rather, the company's non-sim game division in the early-1980s, dubbed Comix, released a very loose adaptation of Christ's struggles towards salvation in '84, utterly unlike the rest of their output. This side-scrolling, arcade-style action thing for the relatively underpowered (but surprisingly capable) PC-6001mkII didn't have much presence in its own market. Koei would soon pour the lion's share of their talent and resources into complex, richly themed grand strategy and military simulations over the coming decades. Somehow, though, I think Chrith: Ai no Tabidachi (or Journey of Love) perfectly represents the studio's origins, which were far from prestigious and instead reflected the anything-goes attitudes of early Japanese PC games.
Jesus ain't living on Earth here, but the alien planet Lourdes, ruled by an evil crown prince and ravaged by famine. Now this guy's still prophesied to become humanity's guiding light, working miracles before all is lost, and so this child of peasants finally gets the gig many years later. His katakana name is actually "kurisu", a nod to how this isn't really Christ but a weird alternate universe version Koei's using to get out of trouble with the few Christians in Japan who'd even care. Players control Christ as he must move west across the land, blessing every lost soul in sight with his holy staff while avoiding snakes, soldiers, and other manifestations of the devil. If this sounds pretty simple, that's because it is. Chrith tends to resemble a reverse-direction MagMax or Seicross, as the play area auto-scrolls from right to left with peasants and pests moving in different lanes. Just move onto each lost soul to save them, ending when you've hit 50 people or have lost all your lives. I guess resurrection's a limited-chance offer on this world.
So we're playing not-Christ on not-Earth and it's totally not got a lot going on. Stages all look the same, with the barest of details like silhouetted mountains and a starry night sky. Check out that sick wireframe ground, though. Someone would peg this as an '80s throwback game if released today just because of the grid! It serves a purpose here, though, since a lack of sprite scaling means the developers had to convey depth perception somehow. Chrith hardly plays that bad in the moment thanks to considerations like this, but the choppy, all-in-software scrolling and lack of any music or audio design means this feels limp from start to finish. It's as shallow and repetitive as many players today think the Golden Age arcade classics must be. All I have to do for high scores is run wild around the track, racking up as many worshipers as possible while avoiding one-hit deaths from baddies. No secrets, no hidden mechanics, no nuthin'. Any potential this had to integrate miracles, sermons, aphorisms, and other New Testament-themed nuances just wasn't on the dev team's to-do list, I suppose.
Chrith: Journey of Love has a certain je-ne-sais-qois, mainly due to how it distorts bubble-era Japanese pop perceptions of Christianity (also influenced by U.S. media exports like Cecil B. DeMille's lavish Hollywood epics). Players will immediately notice and likely laugh at the voice synthesis dialogue during stage intermissions. This was possible on PC-6001 models thanks to an add-on chip which a select number of software used, including games like this and NEC's graphic adventure Colony Odyssey. And what you'll hear sounds worse than the best lines from Evil Otto in Berzerk, let alone the iconic taunts of Sinistar. But this at least adds character and a sense of mystery to the game's aesthetic, where an unidentified light (God? Heaven? Some angels?) briefs our hero on principles and goals before heading back into the moral melee. The spartan color choices, typical for this system and akin to early CGA graphics on DOS PCs, also render this ersatz pilgrimage as uncanny as possible. Sitting down with this disk for even a few minutes gives me the heebie-jeebies, like some creepypasta's about to happen right on screen. Bewildering stuff, I tell ya. Just watch Umbrella Terms' review and play this with her fan translation patch for more strangeness!
While this is the first PC-6000 series game I've covered here on Backloggd, it's definitely an outlier in that library, a dying gasp of Koei's origins as this hobbyist venture Yoichi Erikawa started to supplement his family's chemicals business. You'll never hear this mentioned in any official histories beyond maybe a mention in some timeline graphic. And the next Christianity-themed effort by the corporation came nearly a decade later with Tamashii no Mon - Dante's Odyssey, an Xmas '92 adventure platformer sticking closer to its source material than Chrith ever bothered. I enjoy the contrasts between these reverent but stylistically opposed translations of religious lit into mainstream games. Whereas Dante's Odyssey seamlessly blends its game-y bits in with recognizable moments from the original poem, Chrith salvages the surface-level trappings of a generic Christ biopic or children's book for the sake of camp. Neither approach is that faithful, nor sacrilegious. Syncretism among different Japanese faiths predisposed these products' creators to treat Western-import religions and iconography very similarly. It is entirely seemly for a Japanese micro-computer game riffing on Jesus to take liberties via this inter-cultural mangling. In the author's death, all things appear fair. (Wait, that's the Iliad, not the Bible…)
Koei quickly crafted a veneer of majesty, attention to detail, and historic fidelity throughout the mid-/late-'80s, something which they've let go of recently but can still point to and say "we know what we're doing". Yet Chrith: Journey of Love remains a sobering reminder of when this wasn't the case, a period when the Erikawas and co. just messed around, producing whatever silly idea could work on whichever PC they were targeting. This was the same company behind the very first eroge, after all. If you ask me, I think the C-suite and tastemakers at Koei-Tecmo are cowards to deny their beginnings and heritage. Unless this really was a troubled production or something they need to disavow for legal or sensitivity reasons, I think it'd help them to show a little pride for their first efforts. What would Chrith do? Probably send me to the pearly gates with his superweap—er, uh, I mean holy staff, yes, but the King of Kings would have enough love in his heart for even an homage this mediocre and misguided. This wouldn't even be the last time Kou Shibusawa himself diverged heavily from a known mythology just to make a fun enough game, yet I don't hear Imperial scholars complaining about all the inaccuracies in Kamigami no Daichi's version of Onamuchi's labors in primordial Japan. I dunno, maybe Koei should cut itself some slack.