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IGS Corp

Danso Toshi: Stray Road (断層都市ストレイロード) is a cancelled cyberpunk RPG that was in development around 1993 by IGS (AKA International Games System, アイ・ジー・エス) planned to be released on the PC Engine CD. The settings are quite similar to another cancelled IGS RPG titled “Blunders”: from the available screenshots it looks like players would have been able to explore a fantasy world filled with sci-fi cities and weird monsters. Combat was turn-based, looking similar to Phantasy Star.

Lots of details about Danso Toshi: Stray Road were published at the time in PC Engine Fan magazine and IGS flyer: if you can translate the most important parts in English, please let us know! Some information is also found in japanese fan sites (translated with Google):

“The hero who wanders in search of lost memories in the “fault city” that was once born in the barren wilderness called Tokyo. Eventually he gets caught up in a huge conspiracy.
The February 1993 issue of the monthly PC engine is introduced over two pages. Release price 8900 yen Scheduled release date is written as scheduled to be released in March. It feels like it’s boiled down to the very end, but it has been discontinued.”

Someone on Twitter said a former IGS employee revealed the reason for the game cancellation was a complaint by Aya Sugimoto, a ‘80s / ‘90s J-Pop singer, actress and gravure idol that was hired by IGS for the game promotion and to write a song for the OST (Le SOIR Eternal Farewell). We are not sure about what happened between Aya and IGS, so if you can find more details please let us know!

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Others, PC Engine / PC FX

Blunders (Branders) [PC Engine – Cancelled]

monokoma

01-05-2021

No Comments

Blunders (AKA Branders, ブランダーズ) is a cancelled cyberpunk RPG that was in development around 1992 by IGS (AKA International Games System, アイ・ジー・エス) for PC Engine. From the available screenshots it looks like players would have been able to explore sci-fi cities in a top-down view, with turn based combat similar to Phantasy Star. At the time PC Engine Fan magazine published a 2-pages preview of Blunders, so there are some details available: if you can translate the most important parts in English, please let us know!

Thanks to Celine for the contribution

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Nes / Famicom, Nintendo

Indy the Magical Kid (Shounen Majutsushi) [NES – Cancelled]

monokoma

10-07-2017

2 Comments

Indy the Magical Kid (Shounen Majutsushi Indy – 「少年魔術師インディ」) is a cancelled Famicom (NES) turn-based RPG that was meant to be published by IGS Corp. Somehow it looks like a mix between Dragon Quest and Mother / Earthbound. Previews and screenshots from Indy the Magical Kid were published in many japanese gaming magazines at the time and some scans of those were gathered by Video Games Densetsu on their blog. Character designer for the heroes of the game was Hiroshi Fuji (mostly known for Valkyrie no Densetsu and Valkyrie no Bōken), while enemy design was by Yūichirō Shinozaki (mostly known for The Tower of Druaga and Baraduke)

Indy the Magical Kid was based on a short series of “choose your own adventure books” with the same title, published in Japan by Futabasha / Recca-Sha. By searching for more details about these gamebooks, it seems Indy the Magical Kid was written by the same author as the Final Fantasy 2 gamebook and fans feel the two interactive novels are quite similar.

These japanese adventure books were more complex than the average “choose your own adventure books”: other than choosing different choices at the end of each chapter to change the story accordingly, readers were also able to use dices and gather money, items and experience, that would be used to resolve combats and other key events.

As in most gamebooks Indy the Magical Kid had multiple endings depending on your choices, so we can assume that the Famicom game could also have offered many different endings and multiple storylines. The plot of the game would have probably followed the one seen in the books:

“During the absence of his master, Indy – an apprentice magician – has unlocked the seal of the “Magical Inferno” for curiosity. In order to escape from this world he will have to exterminate demons with the help of master’s cat Miau and another magical girl, using weapons, rods, magic-letters, and spirits’ protection.”

As noted by GDRI a short video of Indy the Magical Kid was shown during a Japanese TV Show titled “The TV Power” and it could have been developed by Graphic Research. Looking at this footage (re-uploaded on Youtube by Dosunceste) it seems that by using magic portals players were able to jump into different parallel dimensions of the same world in which NPCs, cities and dungeons were slightly different from each other.

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