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| Let’s go Uji City! Image source: Uji City YouTube Channel |
Image source: Uji |
The Japanese city of Uji has created a completely original 2D side-scrolling action video game as a way of both promoting tourism and inviting people to relocate to this historic Kyoto city.
This new “tourism action game” is called Ujishi Ujicha to Genji Monogataro no Machi (The City of Uji The Town of Uji Tea and The Tale of Genji). The game, both in terms of its visuals and sound, is very much modeled after NES era 2D side-scrolling action games.
In the game you get to play as a Heian era (794-1185) noble who has to collect the “fragments of Uji.” The game features several of Uji’s famous products (mainly tea) and historic sites, such as the very well-known temple, Byōdo-in.
Despite the focus that the game has on Uji’s long and important history, it never takes itself too seriously. The game is sprinkled with silly voice clips and plenty of humorous visuals, such as the continue screen, which features your character slowly downing in his own tears. The city of Uji has yet to announce any plans to sell this game, however, they have uploaded several videos showing gameplay footage to their official YouTube channel.
The shortest of these videos is a 30-second commercial, which you can watch for yourself below. The commercial shows gameplay footage and gives some of the background information presented above. It ends with the announcer saying what seems to be the game’s tagline, “You still don’t know the real Uji.”
If that video caught your interest then you might want to check out a longer, almost 6-minute video that shows off even more of the game.
Finally, the city has also released a Let’s Play video, in which you can watch two Japanese YouTubers as they make their way through the entire game. The video is roughly 20-minutes long.
Unfortunately, there do not appear to be any plans for the city of Uji to release an English version of this game.
Source: MDN Design Interactive, Kyodo News
