1987 · Famicom · Game story
Shin Onigashima (1987): The Folk Tale That Lets You Try the Wrong Door
Nintendo’s two-part Disk System adventure turns a familiar Japanese storybook shelf into a place to poke, question and occasionally derail. A boy from a bowl, a girl from bamboo, a command called ‘change person’ and nine brisk chapters make its fairy-tale world feel surprisingly playable.
In this story
A familiar morning tilts sideways
Shin Onigashima has the nerve to open like a story everyone in the room thinks they know. Grandfather goes to the mountain to cut grass; Grandmother goes to the river to wash clothes. It is the first breath of Momotaro, the sort of sentence that invites the listener to settle in and predict the next fruit floating downstream. Then the game begins to misbehave, politely. Grandfather meets Kintaro on the mountain. Grandmother gives a straw coat and hat to a Jizo statue. Back at home, there is a door that will not open. The tale is not replacing old stories; it is letting them wander into one another’s houses. 2 7
That crowded folk-tale shelf is the game’s first great joke. A peach, a bamboo grove, a mountain child and a winter statue carry their own cultural luggage, so the player arrives with expectations before a command menu has appeared. Shin Onigashima uses that expectation as a toy. The pleasure is not simply recognising a reference. It is wondering which familiar rule will be bent next, which traveller will appear in the wrong chapter, and whether a domestic errand is about to become a quest. Nintendo’s official overview correctly calls it a world where many old tales appear; the better description is a storybook that has forgotten to keep its bookmarks separate. 1 2
Trivia The story’s two young heroes enter by completely different folk-tale doors. Famitsu’s retrospective describes Hikari as a girl born from bamboo, while Donbe appears when hot water is poured into a bowl that floated down the river. The contrast is wonderfully specific: one child arrives through a luminous bamboo-image, the other through an absurdly practical act in the kitchen. Before either has taken an adventure-game step, the game has announced that reverence and silliness will share the same table. 7 8
See it in action
A story is something you touch
This is a text adventure, but it does not ask the player to become a typist or a detective with a notebook full of passwords. A message window tells the current bit of the tale, a command window offers a handful of possible verbs, and the player chooses a person or object when the verb needs a target. Look, talk, take, open, use, give and move are not abstract parser words. They are little invitations to put hands into the illustrated scene. The rhythm is closer to turning a page, pointing at something suspicious and asking an adult, ‘What happens if I touch that?’ 4 3
That command grammar makes a folk story feel unusually roomy. A locked door is not just a sentence saying it is locked; it is a thing to look at, open, revisit and perhaps approach with the wrong item. A strange figure may reward talking twice. The official manual even notes that changing the active hero or selecting the same command repeatedly can change the result. That small rule turns persistence into a form of curiosity. The player is not merely waiting for prose to continue. They are testing whether the prose has another expression on its face. 4 5
Trivia The standard command list includes not only the expected ‘look,’ ‘talk,’ ‘take’ and ‘move,’ but ‘put in,’ ‘defeat’ and ‘change person.’ The manual also says that extra commands can appear depending on the situation. That is why the game’s menu never feels like a dry inventory of verbs. It can suddenly acquire a new way to be foolish, dangerous or unexpectedly fairy-tale-specific just when the player thought the conversation was ordinary. 4
Two children, two angles
The most important command is ひとかえる: change person. Donbe and Hikari do not merely alternate in a cutscene while the player watches. The command hands the scene to the other child. Nintendo says their abilities and the reactions they receive differ; Famitsu similarly points to their separate strengths and weaknesses. It is a simple device with a rich dramatic result. A problem can be a wall to one child and a conversation to the other. A stranger who becomes silent for one hero may reveal a joke, a clue or an entirely new tone when the other is standing there. 2 7
This is where Shin Onigashima stops being a linear recital and becomes a duet. The player learns not to ask only, ‘Which item goes here?’ but, ‘Who should be looking at this?’ Switching characters is a tiny act of empathy. It asks the player to reframe the same place through someone else’s body and social position. In an era when an adventure game could easily make its protagonist a single all-purpose cursor, the two-child structure makes curiosity feel personal. The solution is sometimes knowledge, sometimes temperament, and sometimes simply the willingness to let the other child have the next line. 1 6
Trivia The game lets the player name both children, with up to six characters for the boy and then up to six for the girl. The guide route uses the familiar Donbe and Hikari, but the naming screen makes the old-tale pair slightly more intimate before the journey begins. It is a modest customisation, yet it changes the texture of every later command: ‘change person’ means handing the scene to the name the player just chose. 4 8
The first half earns its interval
The title’s parenthetical ‘front and back parts’ is not a retrospective flourish. The original adventure arrived in two releases: Part One on 4 September 1987 and Part Two on 30 September. Nintendo’s own Virtual Console introduction explains the practical storytelling ambition behind that split: separating the game let it offer a comparatively substantial story for its day. The first part is not a disposable prologue, and the second is not a bonus episode. Together they make one journey with an interval built into its original physical rhythm. 2 7
That interval has a pleasingly theatrical form even in Nintendo’s later play guide. Finish the first part and the game returns to its title screen, where ‘begin the latter part’ is added to the menu. It is a clean pause rather than an arbitrary cliff edge: the player comes up for air, then deliberately chooses to re-enter the story. XNEO’s original-version walkthrough labels chapters one through four as the front half and chapters five through nine as the back half, showing how the two releases form a nine-chapter whole rather than two unrelated folktale collections. 3 8
Trivia Famitsu calls Shin Onigashima Nintendo’s first text adventure and notes that it was also the company’s first experiment in a story too large for one Disk Card. The format became a path others could follow: Nintendo’s own overview says the two-part approach was inherited by Famicom Mukashibanashi: Yuyuuki and the Famicom Detective Club series. This little fairy tale is therefore also a quiet rehearsal for a long-running way Nintendo would tell stories. 7 2
The joke is often in the extra command
The game’s humour works because the commands let a player behave like an impolite reader. In a conventional telling, a magical object arrives, performs its solemn duty and moves the story forward. Here it can be inspected too long, handed to the wrong person or paired with a target that produces a rebuke instead of progress. The result is not a parody that sneers at its source stories. It is a playful argument with them. The game respects the pleasure of knowing Momotaro, Kintaro or a Jizo statue, then rewards the player for wondering what those figures might say when the usual script is interrupted. 2 7
A walkthrough reads almost like a shopping list from a dream after a while: a mirror, a necklace or bracelet, a telescope, a bronze bell, a mallet, an apple one can ride, and a magic bag of scent. Those are not claims about an unseen mythology; they are the practical objects the original route asks the player to notice and use. Their odd mixture is a good measure of the game’s tone. The fantasy is never arranged into a pristine museum display. It is a cupboard full of old tales, tools and punch lines that the player is encouraged to rummage through. 8
Trivia One later chapter’s documented route contains an item labelled ‘hamburger.’ It appears beside foxes, snakes, vines, a sword and a journey through the same folk-tale landscape. That single modern, cheerful intrusion says more about the game’s comic confidence than a long explanation could. Shin Onigashima will happily put old Japan, children’s-story logic and a hamburger in the same command list, then wait to see whether the player thinks to use it. 8
A wrong turn is still part of the tale
A player who tries every promising verb will eventually discover that this is not a storybook with padded corners. Some selected commands lead to game over. Nintendo’s guide gives two mercies: one button begins the current chapter again, while another resumes from the last save. It is a forgiving structure for a mischievous game. Failure interrupts the telling, but it does not erase the player’s appetite for the weird option that caused it. Instead, the game sends them back to the chapter’s threshold with a better sense of which joke had teeth. 4 3
That structure changes how the player reads danger. In an action game, a bad choice is often recognised by a falling body or a draining life bar. Here the risk may be hidden inside a politely worded command. The player makes a selection, sees a few lines of text, and only then learns whether the fairy-tale logic approved. Because chapters are discrete, experimentation has boundaries; because the response text is often funny, a detour can be worth taking even when it does not solve anything. The game makes space for the childlike urge to pull the lever labelled ‘perhaps not.’ 3 7
Trivia In the final approach documented by the walkthrough, the game presents a prompt equivalent to ‘try pressing it?’—and the successful route says not to press the button. Elsewhere, another sequence requires the player to wait without pressing anything until an ogre leaves. Those moments are wonderfully anti-automatic. A command adventure normally teaches you to act; Shin Onigashima occasionally makes the most observant action a refusal, or a stretch of deliberate stillness. 8
A folk tale with room to breathe
What survives is not merely the novelty of an early Nintendo text adventure. It is the confidence that a well-known tale can be made newly strange without being made unrecognisable. The grandparents’ morning, the bamboo, the river vessel, the companions and the distant island all give the player solid ground. The commands, perspective shifts and jokes keep opening small trapdoors in that ground. A child can follow the broad adventure; a curious player can stop to look at an object twice, talk to someone again or ask the other protagonist to try. The tale moves forward, but it also lets the reader loiter. 1 6
That is why the two-part format feels less like a technical fact than a promise. Part One gives the player time to learn the game’s comic manners: folk-tale recognition, command curiosity and the value of changing person. Part Two can then trust that those habits have become part of the reading. By the ninth chapter, the player has not simply been told a blended story about an island of ogres. They have helped pace it—choosing when to inspect, whom to address, which absurd object to carry and when, against instinct, not to press the button. 3 8
Trivia The original route’s front-half climax includes befriending a dog with kibidango, dealing with a rabbit using a torch, and travelling by riding an apple after using the mallet. These are not a generic checklist copied from Momotaro; they are the game’s own delightfully skewed route through its borrowed story furniture. It is exactly the sort of sequence that makes the title memorable: a familiar folk-tale party, assembled by a player who keeps discovering that the next sensible step is not quite the traditional one. 8 2
Sources & image credits
Facts were checked against the links below. Official media remains the property of Nintendo and the relevant rights holders.
- ふぁみこんむかし話 新･鬼ヶ島（前後編） | Nintendo Classics Nintendo ↗
- VC ふぁみこんむかし話 新・鬼ヶ島（前後編）：紹介 Nintendo ↗
- VC ふぁみこんむかし話 新・鬼ヶ島（前後編）：遊び方 Nintendo ↗
- ふぁみこんむかし話 新･鬼ヶ島（前後編） 取扱説明書 Nintendo ↗
- ふぁみこんむかし話 新･鬼ヶ島（前後編） | Wii U Nintendo ↗
- ファミコンミニ：ふぁみこんむかし話 新・鬼ヶ島 前後編 Nintendo ↗
- 『ふぁみこんむかし話 新・鬼ヶ島』がディスクシステムで発売された日 Famitsu ↗
- ふぁみこんむかし話 新・鬼ヶ島完全攻略 XNEO ↗
