Okay, so one of the biggest things that has made MSX my favorite platform to collect for is the mystery and obscurity of much of the library. I feel like I could collect MSX games for 20 more years and still be seeing games that I've never heard of. Some obscure games that I see are easy to forget about, and some look really interesting and stick with me. This game has been one of the latter.
I first saw the existence of it about a year ago when an eBay seller that I had been purchasing games from listed it for sale. On all of his listings, he allowed for best offer and was pretty flexible with the prices. I got several games for prices that I was very happy with. This one, though, was listed considerably higher than any of the other titles. I looked at it and didn't think much about it at first because I recognized that it was a text-based game which I assumed would be in Japanese. But when the game quickly sold at full price without making an offer, I was intrigued. It always confuses me when people pay full-price on a best offer listing, unless the full price is low anyway and the buyer doesn't want to risk the item flying off the shelf. That wasn't the case here and there surely couldn't have been much competition for this title. Perhaps the buyer was using a proxy service that doesn't allow for making offers. This is just speculation. Maybe they were a Japanese buyer who brought it back into Japan. I don't have a clue.
So I got interested in what it was that I missed out on, and I was really surprised to learn that this game, by Japanese developers which never saw a western release, was entirely in English. Also, the premise of the game seemed interesting and was a bit of a juxtaposition against the colorful and seemingly cheerful art style. I can't find any gameplay videos. Even searching on NicoNico for "ニューアダムアンドイブ" turns up no results. (Although I am absolutely a noob at using that website so it could be my fault) MSX Resource Center lists it as having a bad or uncertain dump. When I looked up the game on Generation MSX, the photos of the game were the exact same ones that the seller used on his listing. The background of the image didn't match the backgrounds of his other images, but this was absolutely an honest seller. Did he take the photos years ago for Generation MSX and just reuse them, or did he not feel like taking photos of the game and just copied some? Again, more questions without answers. The seller's English proficiency was not enough that I felt like it would be worth it to take up his time trying to ask about the photo thing.
This game was made for the SMC-777, and versions for that platform seem to be more common even though the computer itself is much more rare. I found some brief reviews of the game on Tagoo which speak pretty highly of it. I found a walkthrough, which is simply a wall of text with every single command that you need to input to beat the game, so I quickly closed out of that. I found a couple screenshots, and that's pretty much about it. I could maybe dig for a little more, but it seems at this point I just need to play the game.
I've never played a game like this in my life, and I'm not entirely sure exactly why I've felt such a strong desire to play this one. I'd say the fact that it's in English on my favorite Japanese computer has to be a big part of it. Has anyone else out there in MSX world had any experience with this title? I managed to locate a copy in Japan and place an order for it, so I suppose I'll find out soon enough if I was justified in hyping myself up. I don't expect that it's going to take the place of Aleste or Golvellius, but I do hope that it is an enjoyable experience that is very different from any games that I've played in the past.