Things have been awfully lax around here. A while back Grue made a post making wild (ly inaccurate) proclamations of actually doing something soon. We all know (at least, we should by now) what comes of wild proclamations.

Demo Alarms are usually the area of Gayo's expertise, but from what I hear his house and the surrounding area were consumed in an explosive blast produced by the meeting of his computer and its anti-computer. I believe he escaped alive, so he may well return to deliver many great demo alarms in the future, but the future is an uncertain thing. Until then, I've seized the reins when no one was looking.


"Kanji Bouken" (shortened to Kambou) means "Kanji Adventure". Kanji is one of the three mystical scripts of the Japanese language, and the most terrifying. IkimashoZ, a fearless chap who happened to be teaching English in that ancient land, has created a game that not only gives you the ability to battle it out with ji, Japanese letters, it will likely also end up teaching you something in the end.

Kambou is, in essence, a turn-based strategy wargame. Each turn you'll have the option of deploying from your pool of available ji as well as moving and attacking with in-play ji. To complicate matters, ji have elemental types for their attack and defense, they gain experience and, in a particularly brilliant play on the theme, can be chained together into phrases (learned by solving riddles) to use powerful special attacks.

Before you get into the action, Kambou has an extensive (but well designed) menu that lets you solve riddles (see above), buy items, review tutorials, and so on. Combat happens in either one-shot "training" battles, or by following the game's story, told by charming image-and-text sequences between battles (starring IkimashoZ himself, as well as an awesome magical cow from the future).

Overall, Kambou shows a lot of polish and seems to have a fairly hefty length. Its premise is a bit kooky (especially after you've seen the first story sequence) but is pulled off well. Check it out.

Posted on 2007-06-01 20:15:05 (last edited on 2007-06-01 20:16:33)

Great job with the demo alarm, Kildorf. I was wondering about them (looks like Gayo is really inconvenienced, suckage).
Anyways, thanks for filling the spot and generating some buzz. Kudos.
Congrats to IkimashoZ' too for the demo. Seems there's been a lot of work behind it. Hope you keep it up!

Hey Kildorf! Thanks for the awesome demo alarm write up. =D

And thanks Thrasher! I had too many problems with getting the enemy's to spawn also following the 100 AP rule. Simply put, it made the game way to easy for my liking. In the end, I decided to let the enemies spawn on specific turns, but I nixed the 100 starting AP that the human player gets. And, you'll notice that the gained AP is based on how many ji are on the board at the beginning of a turn (this doesn't include ji that spawn after the turn has started). So, the enemy is actually harder up for AP in you. I think in the end it balanced out.

Edit:
I've just reached Hawaii and am currently in the process of getting myself situated here. Once I get into my studies and find out what kind of rigors to expect from school and work, I'll be able to come up with some kind of plan for continuing to work on Kambou. I will end up rewriting it to take place in Hawaii, which is not as cool as Japan, but hey, it's what life's giving me to work with. It's not like there's a shortage of Japanese people and/or language here anyway...