What Fuwa Bansaku Found

For me, Chandler Groover might be one of the best prose stylists in IF today. And Fuwa Bansaku is no exception, illustrating another tool in the author's already formidable toolbag.

Fuwa Bansaku, a telling of how the titular samurai undertakes a quest from his emperor to investigate a haunted temple, and paying homage to traditional Japanese poetic form and structure, is a lovely piece of work. Mechanically, it is simple. Advance, return and examine provide all the entry commands needed to advance the story and uncover additional player commands that deliver the back story. And this works extremely well. It is an entirely accessible piece of parser IF.

In what it aspires to, it achieves. It is an elegant, clever and innovative work of literary fiction. I urge everyone to spend the time to engage with it.

(Spoiler - click to show)If I have a criticism, it is that I would have liked the second half of the story to have bifurcated. Could I have made a choice that would have altered the ending?

Unlike a previous reviewer, I believe that the parser format, and the requirement to actually type a command, interacting with the text physically gives weight, and forces the player to focus on the prose. In a link format, where the eye is draw to the options before the prose is fully internalised, this story would have suffered. This prose needs to be savoured.

Much kudos to Sub-Q also for bringing works like this to a wider audience. More, please.

This short, haunting piece requires the reader to advance (a) or retreat (r), with a variety of other actions suggested after you look at or examine the scenery. It's very linear, but like much great character-driven interactive fiction, the linearity feels natural as you discover your character and what their limitations and compulsions are.

Interspersed throughout the work are fragments of poetry from Basho, Kikaku, and other 17th-century poets. The end result is a haunting, elegiac work, telling a stylized version of the semi-historical story of Fuwa Bansaku, a 16th-century samurai.

Near the end, the work features a ukiyo-e print by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, a 19th-century japanese woodblock printer; this famous image from his series, 100 Ghost Stories of China and Japan, seems to be the inspiration for this short and dramatic ekphrastic piece.

This is a beautiful use of the format and a moving, haunting piece, which should inspire the reader to learn more about Yoshitoshi, the poets, and of course, Fuwa Bansaku. Very lovely.

This Sub-Q game is tightly focused and compact. You play as Fuwa Bansaku, a samurai based on a real-life Japanese swordsman. You are investigating an abandoned shrine that is rumored to be haunted.

This game uses a small number of directional commands and tightly-written poetry to achieve a compact and peaceful feel.

The story revolves around court drama and the story of the abandoned shrine.

An enjoyable, short piece.