A Ningyō Tsukai is someone who operates the puppets in a Bunraku theater. The puppets used in Bunraku are quite large and operated by three men each, who are clad completely in black to remain invisible to the audience. The puppets can be mechanically quite complex too, if for example face is supposed to be transformed into that of a demon during the play. The Japanese fascination with mechas has its historical roots, Bunraku goes back to 1684, though the term is little more than a hundred years old.

The game Ningyō Tsukai, developed by Forest and released in 1992 for PC-98 and 1993 for FM Towns, has nothing to do with Bunraku as such. It is a vs. fighting game featuring mechas. Ningyō (人形) simply translates as doll. The Japanese language does not distinguish between dolls and puppets, and a mecha can be seen as a doll as well.

Vs. Fighting on the PC-98

When Ningyō Tsukai was released on 1992-05-29, it was the first vs. fighting game for the PC-98. Later, other series would have more games and be more popular, most notably The Queen of Duelists and Sword Dancer, but Ningyō Tsukai was definitely the first.

It was, in fact, among the first vs. fighting games on a Japanese home platform in general. At the time of its release, vs. fighting was a new thing. Street Fighter II, the game that had made the genre popular, was little more than a year old and had not been ported to any domestic home platforms yet. You could play Fatal Fury on the Neo Geo and Battle Blaze on the SFC, the original Street Fighter on the PC-Engine Super CD-ROM2, Hiryū no Ken Special: Fighting Wars on the Famicom and a some old Kung Fu titles on the MSX. That was it.

This is not Metal & Lace

About the same time as the FM TOwns version (October 1993) Megatech released Metal & Lace for DOS/VGA in the US. Metal & Lace, though a Ningyō Tsukai license, is quite a different game. It took the battle engine and the graphics, but completely changed the setting and added lots of extra gameplay mechanisms.

Ningyō Tsukai is a straightforward fighting game, no money, no power-ups, and not much story. It is set in a world without men, just robots and pretty girls. An engineer named Rika Mizuho (sharing given name and looks with the Japanese equivalent of a Barbie doll, Licca-chan) has built a fighting robot, MIMI (featured on the FM Towns box cover on the right). Now she will fight six adversaries in three rounds each. After each successful round, her opponents will be shown wearing less than before. If she (i.e. the player) loses, she will get undressed instead.

I guess there is some sort of background story, but it just fills two text screens. You can find them in my first look at Ningyō Tsukai. I hope someone who reads Japanese will translate them.

Ningyō Tsukai 2

Ningyō Tsukai was Forest's first game. Their last game was a sequel or enhanced remake, Ningyou Tsukai 2. It was released for PC-98 in 1996 and one or two years later for Windows. It has never been translated, but the Windows version runs without problems on a non-Japanese computer.