Like with Metal Slader Glory, I'm a sucker for a good story. Whether it be in a tightly picked adventure with thrills and excitement like Yakuza 2, or a slow, contemplative story like The House of Fata Morgana, a good story can make any game brilliant. And today, I want to tell you a tale of a little game called The Stories of Ihatovo.

Ihatovo Monogatari as it's known in Japan, is a Super Famicom game released solely there, never seeing an international release. It's not hard to see why, given that it's solely an adventure game with no battles or many puzzles to solve. This isn't your Gabriel Knights or Shadowgates of old, this is a game that has you walk from place to place and discover the strange world around you and its inhabitants.

The game is focused on the works of Kenji Miyazawa, a poet and children's story writer from the early 20th century. Each chapter is focused on his works, and the player character has to find the journals based on Kenji's works and relive the stories they're based on. One such story has you talking to animals and seeing the tale of Hommoi and the Shellfire, or another about Ozbel and the Elephants.

There's no way to fail in this game, the only obstacle is not knowing what to do next, but the game encourages you to walk around and talk to everyone, and you'll get an understanding of what to do, where to go, and the world around you. The town of Ihatovo is very quirky, filled with interesting characters and things to see and do, so you're never truly lost, as most chapters are contained to one area, but some in the town do require some deduction to figure out what to do. If you're familiar with Kenji's fables, then you'll know what to do exactly, but I imagine most aren't so some exploration is needed.

I didn't expect a lot going into this game, except that it was about fables from a Japanese author that have been held in high regard, much like Aesop's fables have been regarded in the West. What I wasn't expecting was a truly thought-provoking experience full of strange, colourful characters and their many weird, wonderful stories.

As said, you don't really affect the world around you much, just see all the little adventures of the world around you, but it's what you experience that makes this game simply wonderful. Also the ending hit me like a ton of bricks, especially coming off a watch of the animated Night on the Galactic Railroad movie, which definitely helped further understanding of the ending.

But besides those small gripes, I hold this game in such high regard. It's truly a marvelous story filled with great characters and a serene, well realised world filled with stories that you'll want to discover. Also the soundtrack is one of the finest in gaming.

You'll be doing the world a favour by playing this truly wonderful experience.

I can mostly say that I had no idea what I was getting into when I chose to play this game. I had just a long list of games to play through and was scrolling at random, and my 2 year old daughter said, "Daddy, play Clue!" while pointing at 'Ihatovo Monogatari.'

Immediately I was captivated by the charming spritework and the music just lulled me in like I was returning home after being away for a long time. The game is absolute pure comfy in an adventure game wrapping, and it was nothing short of a delight to play, to see the people in the town changing and adjusting with each season, each adventure and learning about their lives.

My daughter even started to recognize several of the NPCs with their portraits and kept wanting me to go and talk to the 'Stove Cat' and the 'Big Frog' as I was playing (which admittedly impeded progress sometimes as I had to backtrack to find those NPCs). But it became something of a routine ritual to play this for about 15-20 minutes after dinner before we started to get her ready for bed.

It's a wildly charming, enthralling game that has many direct ties to an early 20th Century Japanese poet and author who's works I'll certainly be looking into in the coming months. You can feel the love and care put into the game, and you almost feel as if you're part of the little town of Ihatovo by the end of it all.

I won't spoil the ending but it takes a wildly ethereal and spiritual turn toward its end and finishing it is like waking from a dream.

Played the English fan translation - this game is super chill. It’s nice to play a chapter at a time and just vibe out with the art and music. My main complaint is that I wish there were more variation to the songs in the game, tbh. It kind of ends up feeling a little cheap (which it probably was) but there’s some great art and shit in this game and I feel like making the songs feel slightly more involved would have made the whole thing feel a bit more complete, or make it hold your attention a little longer. Still a pretty good time, though, and it’s only like five hours long.

I really wanted to like this game more. I really, really did. It has great vibes and I love the set-up. But it just didn't work for me.

For one, the game's design is lacking: it mostly consists of talking to a list of NPCs in a specific order. It doesn't feel like puzzle solving, and mostly feels like just fumbling around for the square peg.

That wouldn't have killed it for me intrinsically. This is the kind of thing that melts away in the presence of greater things. But the narrative also just completely fell flat for me. I get that it's based on children's stories and all that, but the writing is so dry and the stories are often completely forgettable.

So I was really disappointed. Good vibes, and the ending is pretty cool. But damn. Just fell flat.

I wanted to give this game a higher score than I ended up at, but I just don’t think that it works very well as a video game. It’s definitely a beautiful experience. The calm, almost somber soundtrack, the interplay between mundane city life and fantastical little fables, the surprisingly dark places that the stories go, all come together into something unlike any other SNES/SFC game I’ve played.

The problem is that the player’s involvement in this world and these stories is minimal. This makes sense considering they’re adaptations of Kenji Hayazawa’s actual stories, but the result is that the game often struggles to find something to actually give the player to do. It gave me the same feeling that I got while playing through some of the less interesting Disney worlds in Kingdom Hearts games, the ones where Sora and co. just watch a Disney movie and occasionally do something very tangentially related to the plot.

I don’t really know what could have been done to alleviate this problem. It really just kind of feels like a video game isn’t a good medium for experiencing these stories. All that being said, I still enjoyed my time with the game and I’m glad to have been introduced to Miyazawa’s works. I’ve picked up a collection of his stories to read, and I can’t wait to dig into them.

Even if a lot of the morals are pretty obvious within these several fables (basically don’t lie) there’s still something about how it’s all presented. I never knew anything about Miyazawa until having played this, but it’s pretty clear that his style has had a huge impact on Japanese culture. I particularly think of Studio Ghibli but that’s probably just the most famous example.

The stories are mostly pretty simple but they still might make you ponder for other reasons. For example, the story where the rabbit lies about his accomplishments, as maybe we shouldn’t expect some other insecure brute might kill us over it? I mean lying is bad, but shouldn’t we also consider why people will kill over some things that are so frivolous? The story ends up being a bit deeper than I think it intends for that reason. I guess you can never know other peoples’ limits.

Also elephants trample the house of a rich man but the servants are just collateral? It never even mentions them. Also likely unintentional.

Overall I highly recommend it but it certainly isn’t perfect and not even so much a game as something to be experienced. I stop to think if this would have been better represented as a movie or TV show, but no I think the interactivity of the medium of video games feels more intentional. There’s something about exploring an entire town and talking to everyone that immerses you more than simply riding third person behind someone else experiencing these stories. I might say this a lot about art, but it really is something that can be hard to explain.

Beautiful and methodical pseudo-fanfiction about the works of Kenji Miyazawa and really more about his legacy in culture. There's a big element of this game absolutely not having the same takeaway about Miyazawa's works, especially in the way this game thinks of the Galactic Railroad, but it is making delicate and future-looking moves with the adventure game formula that grip the RPG Maker community to this day that make it real easy to not get so hung up on that. Ihatovo Monogatari imposes a quest to chase down a fleeting mythical figure against the daily mundanity of the downtrodden workers, farmers, peasants, and youth. While you float through fantastical moments, life moves on: the young family moves south for the winter, the scorned worker is chased out of town suddenly, the boy you helped out last week died of a fever off screen. The things you chase in life can only amount to the character of your actions that get you there. Live wisely, fiercely, and kindly to struggle along side those who surround you.

On some shitty fundamental level, I probably believe that in order for something to be interesting as a "game" it requires a form of choice. I don't care about whether they have fail states, or whether your interaction with the world is limited--I just need that interaction to be driven by my curiosity, my skill, whatever it may be. Those are choices that I find engaging.

Playing Ihatovo Monogatari really helped put that into perspective for me. I've struggled with, and continue to struggle with, visual novels--not in the sense that I "don't think they're games" because who cares about that and hopefully most people have grown out of that level of bizarre gate-keeping, but in the sense that my interaction with many of them is pretty strictly driven by whether I feel compelled to read more text--occasionally with making choices so I can read how that text branches. When well-written I'm sure the genre is great, but they don't particularly excite me because it just makes me feel guilty about not reading books or watching films instead. They may have accompanying visuals and sounds that resonate and enhance, but for me they don't really have what makes games special.

Games like Ihatovo Monogatari are different because, as inconsequential as it may seem on the surface, having a physical avatar exploring a space to largely the same mechanical ends as a visual novel makes all the difference in the world to me. The game wouldn't be special without its pleasant world-building, characters and story, but those things are allowed to sing because I'm truly inhabiting the world as I explore it.

There are specific triggers needed to proceed--and that's where most of my problems with the game showed up, namely in the snow village chapter--but they're easier to forgive when your stumbling gives you the opportunity to soak in scenes; to see if that dog you passed earlier has something to say; to check in on the woman who sings outside her home; to stop by the theater to see if it's playing something new, or anything at all; to experience a new work from the local poet; and so much more. The synopsis for this game mentions "the opportunity to play the role of a temporary school teacher"--something I apparently missed out on, which is okay. [Or it's referring to a largely off-screen role in one of the chapters, perhaps.] As simple as the verbs are that you're equipped with in dealing with this small town and its outskirts, they feel more powerful because they were perfect enough for me to express my own engagement.

And it's a world that earns that engagement. The story--an elaborate and lovely tribute to real-life novelist and poet Kenji Miyazawa--is filled with bittersweet parables about the nature of humanity, communication and place. The vast majority of chapters are standalone snippets where the [at least I'm pretty sure] unnamed protagonist, motivated by his search for seven of Miyazawa's journals, stumbles into resolving and witnessing conflicts in the region. It's all accompanied by charming art, including beautiful cutscenes that tend to conclude chapters. [Props to the English fan translation as well; I don't know if it's a fantastic localization, but I do know it communicated well enough for me to get a lot out of it.]

The aforementioned triggers are the only kicker, and unfortunately there were times I found them to be frustrating enough to hurt what really works here. In those moments the expectation the game sets for you to walk back and forth between these triggers doesn't feel like an opportunity but instead like an inorganic roadblock. The vast majority of this confusion can be avoided since the town provides, depending on how you wish to look at it, two to four reliable "hint" hubs that can nudge you in the right direction. But sometimes even knowing the key players in a developing story, even with the assistance of these hubs, isn't enough, leading to wandering around and hoping you talk to the right character that reveals, oh, they just had this important item stowed away and sure you can have it, or even actions as simple as leaving the area.

So the awkward remnants of games past are here, but I still couldn't be happier about getting around to it, and it makes me feel incredibly grateful to fan communities that devote their time towards making these sorts of experiences more accessible. It seems fairly celebrated here on Backloggd which is great, but it's still very much an unsung moment from this period in gaming and I'm thrilled to have experienced it myself.

ihatovo monogatari is a special and unique game. few are really like it. in a sense, i suppose it's the 90s equivalent to a "walking sim", as there really is no gameplay to it beyond walking, talking to people and rarely using an item. but i wouldn't consider that a bad thing.
the game is based on some stories from the 30s that were apparently very popular in japan (night on the galactic railroad, it got an anime movie in the 80s which i might check out soon)
between the lack of gameplay, and me just not wanting to spoil it, there's not really much i can say about this game other than "i recommend it" but i'll try to do a quick summary
you play as... actually i dont think the name was ever said, but you arrive in the small quiet town of ihatovo, and look for journals belonging to kenji. each chapter of the game has you go to a new place and seeing a new story fold out, giving you another journal each time until you can finally meet with kenji. but my description doesn't quite do it justice, it's got a lot of charm and heart to it. in some ways it almost gives off a professor layton vibe.
just know its a pretty slow game, and despite the lack of gameplay, you will still need a guide. its also pretty short.
but despite those flaws i would still a must play game for the super famicom. experience it for yourself

This feels like a great 'indie title' before that the term was really established as we have today. It's really short even for a SNES title (just a few hours), and it has no gameplay elements other than some items you find and have to use a certain places.
It plays out like a exploration story in a cozy village. Some fairytail like short stories, with the life lessons that come with it (and some nice art here and there!). The end which i will not spoiler puts everything in an unique perspective, and is surprisingly emotional. Not a great game because of the lack of gamemechanics, but a great experience. You have to play it with a visual novel mindset.
A must play for people that like unique indielike narratives and are looking for an unique atmosphere!

ps: If you look at Kenji Miyazawa's wikipedia page (especially his history and works) you will be amazed how much of his personal life is sewn into the game. Gives it a whole new layer. This game was a gateway for me to get to know a influential author from the early half of the 20th century. His works have great adaptions in visual (anime) form. So in the end i got a lot out of this one-sit experience.