Will be posting this on both Kino No Tabi I and II's pages since it will mainly be an analysis of the series' themes and are pretty much interchangeable with each other.

The language barrier impedes most of consuming media that would attract us elsewhere. Most Visual Novels and Japan exclusive titles suffer the fate of being forever stuck in obscurity without the ability to even be translated. While some do manage to escape from Nihon hell thanks to fan translations or even full on localizations, the raw poetry of the words, the dancing of words and playfulness of entendres is lost in many instances either way.

Kino No Tabi is a series of light novels published in sparsity since the 2000s, dealing with the protagonist Kino and her talking motorcycle Hermes as they explore the vast world around them, only staying at countries for 3 days max to assess all there is about the land's culture, their practices and alike before leaving and exploring the next terrain.

I do feel that literature is the best art form to encapsulate the human condition. Due to the way we can explore multiple perspectives, narrate of scenery, topics and imaginary fields for the longest of times along with the powerful image formed into our minds without the need of visuals, a story can tell much without ever explicitly showing the cards at it's hands.

While Visual Novels tend to reach literature and theatrical releases a lot more than they do video games in terms of writing, many visual novels tend to be hit or miss exactly due to that, they either accept their enhancements given by the way of visuals and soundtracks, or fall short on properly utilizing it's own medium. Afterall, if I'm going to be stuck reading for the next few hours, you might as well aid the atmosphere with some tunes or do more than put a doodle with a few different expressions to emote for me.

This is where Kino shines. We've got a fantastic soundtrack to accompany us in our travels, a fully narrated game with different voices for each character, animatics and moving sceneries to illustrate the stories being told, all of that culminate in the most beautiful writing conceived about the mysteries of exploring what is in and outside of the mind.

Here is Kino, always pushing forward in order to know all there is in the world. A reserved young teenager who claims to be fascinated with how the world is not beautiful, therefore making it beautiful because of that instead of in spite of it. A neutral presence who will shake hands with the same arm she uses to shoot the heads of whoever comes between her and her journey. A literal vehicle between us and the end who is nowhere in sight at the same time that is imminent and all encompassing.

Did the segregation of lands derive from a societal collapse? Why is there such an abrupt change in structure and technology between every country? Why can Hermes and other vehicles talk with humans? Will Kino ever find a place to confide and be in peace? Why does the world is so chock full of inequality that so many conflicting messages can be shown to the point of the overall narrative seeming schizophrenic, yet never contradictory?

You might get a glimpse of all these questions and more as it's episodic philosophical themes explore said ventures, however you will be hard pressed to find any answers. Much like the best of literature, it leaves a blank space between author, reader and art for you to fully immerse and live with the thoughts and implications these tales will bring with them.

While there is currently no way to play this in english, all of the tales inside Kino No Tabi I and II are all readable and translated in past and future light novels who were translated by fans, and while some of said genius is lost in translation, I could not encourage you enough to read all of it. It is a shame that we might perhaps never be abtle to support an author as fantastic as Keiichi Sigsawa overseas without him ever knowing of how much his works has changed several of our lives for the best, but if the world is what you make of it, then perhaps some change and hope might be in our way, even if the future or the present show no signs of prosperity, hope does not need a reason to be, much like life, our stories, or the world itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBqiIMVXDlw (OG intro)
https://youtu.be/VQsCusQJQMw (PS1 intro, it's really bad)
A year or so ago while looking through PS1 Japanese releases I saw an interesting title “Dokomademo Aoku…” I tried it out, and found the opening had text that was illegible, and the audio quality was rather poor. Curious, I looked it up, and found it was the all ages version of a visual novel called “Hateshinaku Aoku, Kono Sora no Shita de…” I couldn't immediately find a good copy of it, so I let it sit for a while while I did other things (I couldn't have likely read it very well in Japanese at the time anyway,) until in March of this year I acquired a copy of the Complete Edition: an updated full voice edition. And so I started reading Hateao (the shortening I'm using for the rest of this review because the full title is long.)

The story starts with the announcement of the closure of Azumi Academy, due to a lack of pupils. The atmosphere is gloomy as the 6 students (it shouldn't be a surprise the main character is the only male student) realize that this year will likely be their last year together as a group. On his way home, Masashi (the protagonist) feels an inhuman gaze from the Homura Mountain, where the God of the Mountain is said to live, and later that night he is attacked in his house by Dojima, the ex-politician who is trying to forcibly develop Azumi Village after being forced out of politics for his alleged connections with organized crime. The students begin to be forcibly dragged into adulthood, the village into modernity, and something ancient appears to be watching over all of it. A very long, and cruel year begins.

Hateao is a bit difficult to place genre-wise, and I couldn't find any official genre for it. 伝奇 (denki, taken from the Chinese Chuanqi) is the term I've seen thrown around the most and I'll link a page I found that describes what that means in a Japanese literary context at the end (if you've heard of Teito Monogatari, it's that,) but if I have to explain what the genre means in the first place I probably need another description for this review.

I'm far from an expert on literary genres but I suppose something like "occult mystery" or "gothic horror" would be the best description of Hateao's contents. The languid country life of the characters being shattered serves mostly to drive the overarching narrative of the forgotten history and ancient pacts which have led Azumi Village to its peculiar isolation from modernity to the forefront, (I've seen theories that the game takes place in the post-war Showa era online, but I think it's meant to take place around roughly 2000. The village is just so old-fashioned it just seems like it could be in the post-war era.)

Before going into the routes, and how I felt about each of them, I’ll mention that while there is no forced route order, this game would be well-served by a route order. Some character’s routes simply have more of the mysteries of the village revealed (you could probably find out almost everything you learn from the Yuuka, Amane, and Ai routes just by doing the Asuna and Fumino routes.) I went in the order of Yuuka>Ai>Amane>Asuna>Fumino and I’ll be going over the routes in that order, but my recommended route order is Yuuka>Ai or Amane>whichever one you didn't do>Asuna>Fumino. The key point being that you do Yuuka’s route first and Asuna and Fumino in a sequence, and last.

I’ll be brief and mostly vague with these, but skip over this part for spoilers in case you want to go in (mostly) blind. The game is split into an opening ceremony prologue>spring>summer>autumn>winter chapter system. Spring narrows down your route choices, and summer is where you determine your route. Autumn is usually where the bulk of horrible shit happens, and where you’ll make the choices that determine the good or bad ending. Winter is: https://imgur.com/q2wC3Dh

Yuuka Route

Yuuka is the shrine maiden of the Homura Shrine and the childhood friends of childhood friends (kind of a weird character trait to have when everyone has grown up together besides Fumino, but whatever.) Her route doesn’t have a lot of mystery but it serves as a decent introduction to the state of the village, and some of the deeper mysteries peek their head in towards the end, (a certain area only appears in this route and Fumino’s.) Has probably the most unpleasant scene in the entire vn as well, if you make it through this route, you’ll be able make it through the rest, probably. Bad ending is ok.

Ai Route

This route is probably one of the most revelatory routes outside of Fumino’s. It’s got a good balance of character drama and mystery. I don’t really care for little sister types like Ai, but this was probably my favorite route. It didn’t feel clunky like the Fumino route, meandering like the Asuna route, and was much more interesting than the Yuuka and Amane routes. Bad ending is meh.

Amane Route

Torture, torture torture. Both physical, and emotional. Just a very difficult route to read, and not a lot is revealed. Probably the closest the vn got me to tearing up. There’s a lot of hopelessness and powerlessness in the autumn chapters of the routes usually, but this one in particular was painful. Amane losing her ability to speak, and having difficulty writing in the winter chapter probably just hit a bit too close to home for me. Bad ending is just kind of lame.

Asuna Route

Scooby dooby doo, where are you? Mostly just Masashi and Asuna getting led around by Fumino until Asuna disappears and nothing much happens until the climax, which either is meh in the case of the good ending, or one of the coolest scenes in the game in the case of the bad ending. Most of the info given here is just a summary of the Yuuka-Amane-Ai trinity, and the ending is very similar to the Fumino route. Bad ending is better than the good ending for this route only.

Fumino Route

The manipulation queen of Azumi Village negs you for roughly 7 hours. This feels like it’s meant to be the “true route” which wraps up everything but it isn’t really that, and as a result it neither manages to wrap up everything, or focus on Fumino. Clunky. Fumino is a fun character though. If you’ve ever played KOTOR 2, imagine a cuter Kreia. Didn’t do the bad ending.

So, there’s probably two large areas to criticize this visual novel. The first is the h-scenes, and the, to put it mildly, unpleasant nature of a lot of them. I suppose they manage to get the idea across of how horrible the human villains of the story are, but they tend to overwhelm the supernatural in terms of graphic content and as a result ended up being the part I ended up dreading more than the supernatural horrors. The Yuuka route in particular had a scene that was so nauseating that the supernatural horror afterwards was actually a relief. The Ai (both endings) and Asuna bad ending managed to balance this so I think it was possible, just didn’t really happen for most of this vn. Probably could’ve been cut down massively outside of the Yuuka and Amane routes and been fine, but it’s an eroge so it’s a bit of a requirement. Oh well, you can always skip them.

The second is that while the mysteries of the village are interesting, it never really comes together into anything in particular. There’s more or less enough information to figure out what the hell is going on, but you’ll probably figure it out before the final ending, and then you’re just left with a sort of half-satisfied feeling since there’s no real big “climax.” There’s a post-credits bit after you get all the good endings that’s cute, but it’s not really some sweeping conclusion scene. There’s a sequel however that likely does more with the setup, (and which features Fumino, who was kind of the “Mystery Solver” Character,) so this point doesn’t really drag the game down that much.

Overall, I enjoyed the roughly 60 hours I spent with the VN, and it ultimately turned out to more or less meet the expectations I had from finding the ps1 version a year ago. The atmosphere of Hateao is exquisite, with an excellent sense of location. Music is sparse, but used effectively, and sound effects (well, background ones, some of the “horror” sound effects are somewhat cheesy) are used very effectively. I have no idea when I’ll play the sequel, Atori no Sora to Shinchuu no Tsuki, but I will one day. Hateao seems to have a way of sticking with those that know of it, and visiting another one of TOPCAT’s cursed mountain villages is rather tempting.

On Windows 10 the vertical text option doesn't work properly, however if you use Fixmetrics from the following link it works http://albinina.sakura.ne.jp/ This also will fix the vertical text in Atori. Make sure not to have any compatability settings on it since that will cause Fixmetrics to not work properly.

Denki article I promised earlier:


https://jmystery.fandom.com/wiki/Shindenki_Movement

A hyperlinking manifesto for the funny lil' guy in all of us. You exit that clean Mac OS desktop and meet the eponymous object, framed like a Mayan calendar in all its majesty. Then the camera snaps to a more bizarre scene, a fantastically mundane fire hydrant separate from the hatch. Futzing with it either spews water from the spout or invites you to "Touch Me!", upon which begins an adventure in juxtaposition that would make Carroll proud. It's a non-Euclidean, all-inclusive sojourn into an information age lucid dream, a palate cleanser for our inner child, that most surreal utopia.

It can't be understated just how much Bill Atkinson's 1987 invention of HyperCard (and its scripting language, HyperTalk) democratized multimedia software creation. That's a lot of words to say that Rand & Robyn Miller never would made Cyan Worlds the atelier it is today without such a simple but feature-rich engine like this. And they were far from the first to start probing HyperCard's potential. Earlier digital storybooks, like '87's Inigo Gets Out, showed how you could make a simple but amusing story from postcards and duct tape. This software suit did for collages, graphic adventures, and even more real-time games what The Quill had for text adventures, or Pinball Construction Kit for that genre. We know The Manhole today both for its connection to later masterworks like Riven, but it matters more to me as an ambassador for so many ambitious HyperCard works made up to the advent of Mac OS X. Together with the puzzle-oriented, point-and-click paradigm first codified in Lucasfilm Games' Maniac Mansion a year before, Rand & Robyn's earliest title pushed the medium in new directions.

One could look at this short trip and call it slight or too tedious for what unique content's actually included. It's true you spend a lot of time waiting through laborious scene transitions, a compromise worth making at the time. Not only was HyperCard generally not the fastest or most efficient way to make a Mac game (though certainly the easiest), but all the cool animations and sounds the Miller brothers packed in here slow the pacing down further. I'd argue this gives ample time for reflection on the things you've just encountered, however—let alone how they all connect together. From the start, the Millers had their own predilection towards meditation, with a world that beckons your attention but doesn't demand concentration.

The Manhole feels like a dérive, an anarchic dive through unexpected portals to events and characters both showy and quaint. First comes the beanstalk, casting aside the concrete status of the titular object in favor of the unknown. Climbing up and down the vine brings you to the heavens and seas, followed by yet more turns around the proverbial corner. My stroll through this world became a circular rhythm of entering, leaving, and returning to personable spaces, from hub & spokes to beguiling dead ends. And every personality you meet seems to know and accept this bewilderment, the unexplained but hardly unexpected confusion of time, location, and cause-effect.

I doubt the Millers had any Situationist or psychogeographical angle of critique to communicate here. They improvised nearly the whole game as a pet project, a simple consequence of learning how to work with Atkinson's tools and having fun in the process. It's that ease of transferring their creative processes and hobbies into a previously inaccessible venue, the personal computer, that makes this adventure so compelling. Sure, I could criticize how short the stack is, as well as the bits more obviously categorized as edutainment just for Rand's two daughters. (Even then, the rabbit's bookcase of classics has its own idiosyncracies, like the book Metaphors of Intercultural Philosophy which isn't about anything.) Well before the highly regarded, non-condescending storytelling approach Humungous Entertainment's adventures used, I see The Manhole treating any player of any age with empathy and intelligence. Hierarchies and transactions need not exist here. There's a better, more equitable reality promised by the laggy, monochrome disk in your floppy drive.

Enough big words. Let's talk about Mr. Dragon's disco clothes, the elephant boating you through the white rabbit's teacup, and all the linking books and frames later used in Myst for dramatic effect. Observe how easily you can click around each slide, finding new angles in odd places or a delightful audiovisual gag where least expected. Just as Mac OS was the iconic "digital workbench" full of easter eggs and creative potential, The Manhole puts itself aside so that you can just explore, appreciate, and vibe all throughout. It's nice to not have puzzles or roadblocks for the sake of them—if anything's here to challenge you, it's the absence of game-y mechanics or progression. This might as well have been the original walking simulator of its day with how loose it's structured and what few interactions you need to use. And it's entirely in service to the amorphous but memorable, personalized sabbatical you take through Wonderland.

HyperCard cut out the hard parts of multimedia creation, expediting the processes once interfering with non-coders' motivation to finish their work. As such, The Manhole remains a convincing demo of the benefits, philosophies, and cultural impact this technology made possible. Even the initial floppy release I played has a lot of digitized speech and music for its time, and the CD release would leverage that format's increased storage and sample rate to improve this further. Compare this with just the first island of Myst, a place as enshrined in gaming history's pantheon as it is loathed by players seeking to make progress in that game. That single, setpiece-driven location couldn't have its staying power or sense of discovery were it not for Cyan's '88 debut. So much of this game's simple wonder, interconnections, and whimsy would get encapsulated into the '93 title's opening hour, showing how far the Millers had come. This kind of design continuity is hard to accomplish today, let alone back then.

Honestly, I could go on and on and on about this adventure often dismissed as just a children's intro to the point-and-click adventure. In the context of Mac gaming, this was an important distillation of the genre that the platform's earliest game of note, Enchanted Scepters, had pioneered. In my so far short acquaintance with Cyan's library, the parallels between this and Myst are too hard and meaningful to ignore. In The Manhole's defense, you need not play it to understand through cultural osmosis the message and principles it luxuriates in. That's what makes this so perplexing on an analytic level. Though Rand & Robyn made this ditty to satisfy their urges and ultimately start selling software, it's more introspective and uncaring of what you think about it than usual. One can sense the confidence and ease with which this colorful 1-bit universe exists and presents itself. Why rush or insist itself upon any and all who wander in? How can it know who we are, other than a friendly traveler? Our dialogue with such a game should respect both its outward simplicity and the subtleties that creep into view.

I first played The Manhole maybe a decade and a half ago, back when my ex-Mac user dad tried introducing me to this genre and Mac OS software at large. Predictably, I bounced off of it hard, sticking to my fancy PS2, DS, and Windows XP games. But beyond just having a vested interest in older video games and their history now, I've grokked what this unassuming pop-up storybook wanted to communicate. Food for thought, perhaps. Nothing in The Manhole strikes me as therapeutic, though—hardly chicken soup for the gamer's soul. It's as cartoonish, surreal, and irreverent as ever, a brief respite that one can claw into or bask in. Akin to something contemporary like If Monks Had Macs, this piece of history delights in playing the part of a media crossroad, a frame through which new perspectives can be found. I think there's a lot of value in that; if and when I write my own interactive stories, I'll be revisiting this to remind myself of what I cherish in this medium.

Six unlucky victims of a plane crash somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. One island full of hunger, secrets, indigenous peoples, and more. No rescue in sight—just the hope of salvaging the wreckage and radioing for any help out there, or somehow completing one of a few viable vehicles to escape in. It's a rough life, surviving on a deserted island leagues away from home, but Mujintou Monogatari (or "Deserted Island Story") livens up this cute Crusoe-de with raising sim tropes and an optimistic aesthetic. Years before the Survival Kids and Lost in Blue series (plus The Sims 2: Castaway Life!), KSS & Open Sesame produced one of classic Japanese PC gaming's best strategy adventures, and I've played enough to say that with confidence. Its lack of exposure and fan translation, even within the PC-98's Anglosphere fandom, saddens me.

| Marooned in Blue |

The story begins like any good disaster movie: a Boeing passenger jet drifts through stormy weather, doing fine until its systems fail for some reason. With pilots scrambling to avert the worst and the civilians on-board panicking at their descent, it's a small miracle that the player-named protagonist awakens intact on a sunny summer beach. Guiding our high-school boy across the coast, we bump into a motley band of castaways: young and precocious Ayase, girlboss sophisticated flight attendant Erina, overbearing but helpful team dad "Professor", talented college-level computer diva Rika, and dependable tomboy student Saori. Teamwork ensues! They set up a simple shack, promise to put aside their misgivings and differences, and set about collecting the food, water, tools, and know-how to thrive here and eventually return home. As I mentioned earlier, this involves drafting plans (blueprints, in fact) for a few potential vessels, from a sail-less boat to a MFing zeppelin! Story scenes happen as you explore more of the island, earn enough trust with your co-habitants, and inch ever closer to the fateful day.

Where to begin with all the systems Mujintou Monogatari throws at you? The game largely revolves around a top-down view of your current location, usually the beach camp where you'll need to return to for rest and planning. Moving the cursor's pretty much required, some hotkeys aside, as you select commands from a sidebar and then many deliciously decorated menus. KSS wisely avoided any minigames or sequences revolving around reflexes, let alone the typically awkward numpad key controls of contemporary PC-X8 software. Instead, players just have to manage a wide variety of stats, both for characters and the camp's resources. Collecting potable water and fruits becomes a daily ritual, even for the exhausted. Raw materials needed to craft even basic tools, like machetes and rope, require extensive forays into the jungles, streams, and plains of this seemingly untamed land. Everyone can build up new and current skills over time, but at the cost of temporarily lower yields or wrecking someone's mental state. It's the kind of careful juggling act you'd expect from Princess Maker 2, with just as many variables for thankfully more predictable outcomes.

| Deserted Island Foibles |

Unlike in Gainax's iconic raising sim series, though, KSS and the developers offer more plot and cast interactions to maintain the opening's strong pacing. For example, I met the island's major tribe a bit before halfway through the game, a pleasant encounter with locals just as curious about us as we are about them. The Professor gets giddy at the sight of seemingly unexplored ruins; Erina struggles to adapt to a life without Western amenities; Ayase and Saori both vie for the title of Genki Girl, if only to mask their loneliness; and an aloof Rika, seemingly the most capable of the bunch, confides her self-doubt with the protagonist she's starting to fall for. There's enough crisscrossing threads and details that the often repetitive tasks and ventures into unknown territory remain intriguing. As the player nears any of the endings they're pursuing, Mujintou Monogatari also starts to probe interesting ideas—mainly the discomfort of both living here and soon having to depart and leave this tight-knight, caring group of people. Additional interludes like a drunken going-away party (which the whole band participates in, concerningly), plus evidence of WWII-era Imperial presence on the island via a long marooned serviceman, enrich the narrative.

All this gets reinforced in the game loop itself, as you must set up search parties with each person's compatibility in mind. Pair the wrong two characters up and they'll fail spectacularly! On the flipside, smart combinations can lead to discovering secret areas or items earlier, and these dynamic duos also do better at item crafting. Almost every aspect here conveys the importance of communication, compromise, and cooperation in desperate circumstances. The group hardly avoids conflict, but they work through these ups-and-downs in a naturalistic manner, which matches the occasionally silly but serious tone of the story. And this really helps because Mujintou Monogatari, though not brutally hard, is still a demanding piece of software. Players have to not just understand the island, its residents, and where you can forage from, but they also need to raise the "civilization" rating back at camp to progress further.

Crafting becomes increasingly important even before you've fully mapped out the island, and it's the clunkiest system for sure. Every team member can equip various items to aid in exploration, most of which are only accessible after checking out enough hotspots or surveying a given range of the wilderness. Once you've found key items in the wild and added them to a ramshackle crafts shop, then the manufacturing can commence! This involves a lot of less-than-satisfying fiddling around in menus, flipping between screens to assess resources needed for creation vs. what's available at the moment. Still, this spate of poor user interface design didn't bother me for too long. Arguably the trickiest section in this game is the opening hour itself since you've only got a lifeboat's worth of rations and liquids to work with. Moving quick and taking a few risks early on pays off.

| All the Pretty Sights |

Beyond how well it plays and immerses one in this torrid scenario, Mujintou Monogatari has lush, memorable audiovisuals and style to accompany players through their journey. I think people had to work harder than usual to make an ugly PC-98 pixel art experience, and KSS certainly succeeds at visualizing a gorgeous, inviting tropical realm. So many UI windows, land textures, and background CGs pop out in their 640x400 resolution glory, working with the platform's system rather than against. Maybe the music could have been catchier or better developed to match, but it's still a nice set of tunes, ranging from poppy marches to pensive background orchestration. A lot of people clamor to these mid-'90s "aesthetic" PC-X8 adventures and xRPGs for the character designs, among other often pervy reasons. I'm glad to report that the characters here are distinctive and as fashionably dressed as expected from the genre; illustrator VOGUE renders all the men, women, and woodland critters in glittering detail, yet still portrays them in dirty and less flattering situations without issue. So much thought clearly went into how the game looks, sounds, and portrays its subjects, more than I'd expect from a '94 raising sim targeting a largely male otaku audience.

And that's another area in which this excels: a general lack of pandering to any one market. There's a couple raunchy moments (yes, there's the Obligatory Hot Springs Episode), and something of a romance towards the end with one of the leading ladies, but it's tame compared to even KSS' other raising sims back then. We're far from blatantly erotic Wrestle Angels or sussy Princess Maker stuff, for better or worse. Sequels to Mujintou Monogatari would dabble with more fanservice, sure, but it wasn't until Mujintou Monogatari R and then a separate 18+ series that KSS and the remaining developers settled for easy money. The original game acquits itself nicely, balancing the occasional red meat for otaku gamers with no-nonsense, respectful treatment of each heroine's agency and complex characterization. (It's kind of weird how the Professor gets the least development here despite his age, but at least he's not just an oji-san stereotype played for laughs. Cold comfort, I guess.) I'd hesitate to deem this entirely wholesome, yet I'd be more justified in recommending this to anyone curious about PC-98 ADV/proto-VN soft than, well, a bit under half the commercial library which sits firmly in NSFWville.

KSS had found a strong niche by '94 thanks to intimidating but rewarding sims like Mujintou Monogatari, and they wouldn't be going anywhere awful for years to come. They remained one of the last well-balanced publishers releasing PC-98 exclusives into its waning years, and their exploits on Sony's ascendant PlayStation proved even more fruitful. While the first sequel to this desert-island fantasy largely reused the premise and tried out a different set of tropes, Mujintou Monogatari 3: A.D. 1999 transplanted the gather-craft-escape format to an earthquake-ravaged Tokyo, evoking the majesty and it-can-happen-here horrors of kaiju media and certainly the '95 Kobe quakes from that period. Sadly, like many once acclaimed but overlooked Japanese PC game franchises, this one ended up in the easy-horny pit, a victim of cash-grabs and hastily made ero-anime from KSS' own in-house animation firm, Pink Pineapple. Let's not allow that to become the legacy of this obscure series out West. Rather than settle for that or the downgraded (though admirable) Super Famicom port, I hope communities like this endeavor to try out and appreciate the PC-98 original, and ideally get some fan translators interested. Mujintou Monogatari earned a kind of prestige few other sims on the system could, hence its console successors, and it'd be a shame if this didn't get the historic reappraisal it deserves.