Keiji Terui on the Famicom adventure games Yūyūki and Time Twist
Source:http://oni.skr.jp/terui.html
Keiji Terui (照井 啓司) was a screenwriter for the TV anime industry who was active during the 1980′s and 1990′s, having worked on over 250 shows, including Dr. Slump and Dragon Ball. During this period he also had a brief stint as a video game writer, initially being approached by Nintendo to write the story for the original Legend of Zelda. Nintendo would hire his talents again to write two adventure games for the Famicom Disk System, the first one being Yūyūki in 1989, a loose retelling of Journey to the West, and the second being Time Twist in 1991, a time travel story in which a young boy has switched bodies with the devil and must travel back in time to recover it, causing shenanigans along the way.
On November 30, 1998, the Japanese fansite Iza Shutsujin uploaded an interview with Keiji Terui that the webmaster conducted via email, where he provided a few commentary on his work with Nintendo, with extensive focus on Time Twist, the last game he did for the company. I took the liberty of translating the commentary, which is pretty short.
I’m embarrassed to say this, but I was also in charge of the planning and scenario for Yūyūki and Time Twist. I also handled the stage direction for Time Twist. It’s been around ten years since then. I was working as a script writer for TV anime when I was approached by Nintendo (the world-famous Shigeru Miyamoto himself). Both games took over a year to be developed. I wasn’t a Famicom gamer myself and I didn’t know how to write scripts for a video game, so my scenarios might have a strange taste to them.
Yūyūki had a flashy TV commercial and sold quite well, but Time Twist on the other hand, because of the timing of its release, it was released without fanfare and quickly disappeared.
It is said that “the more inefficient the child is, the cuter it is”, but I’m impressed that Time Twist is still talked about in this age where such amazing large-scale games are being released one after the other.
I have a lot to share about both games. I don’t care if it’s not interesting to others...
Since Yūyūki was a hit, I was initially told to make a third game in the Famicom Folk Tales series [a series of adventure games released exclusively in Japan that includes Shin Onigashima and the aforementioned Yūyūki]. Initially we were going to continue the theme of adapting folktales from the world and chose Arabian Nights as a candidate. I spent several months planning towards that direction. However, Mr. Miyamoto from Nintendo asked for a more unique and inspiring work, so the producer, Mr. Hishida, and myself continued planning the game for several more months.
In the end, we settled on a time travel story and added plenty of world history and puzzle elements, keeping in mind with the idea of “making the player use their heads”. Also, because I used to like puzzles and logic quizzes myself...
The producer, Mr. Hishida, was like a younger version of Ittai-san [a supporting character in Shin Onigashima and Yūyūki]. He was gentle, humorous and liked to play mahjong... But that was common among Nintendo employees. After all, following the after-party celebrating the completion of the game, a dozen of us went to the mahjong parlor. Anyway, while I was in charge of the draft for Yūyūki and wrote the script for the second volume, the script for the first volume was actually written by Mr. Hishida.
The character designer for each chapter of Time Twist were different. That’s because we hired three more people on our staff while in the middle of development in order to increase efficiency.
Time Twist has a lost chapter. It would’ve been set during Prohibition-era Chicago. The protagonist in this part would’ve been Elliot Ness, while Al Capone would naturally be on the Devil’s side. The hero would chase Capone, but he would end up being surrounded by enemies everywhere as every citizen of Chicago ends up siding with Capone. It was a chapter I was quite pleased at, but ultimately had to be cut due to lack of disk storage, much to my regret.
