The Black Onyx 
NEC PC-8801mkIISR
(c)1984 B.P.S. (Bullet-Proof Software)
English Translation
by LordKarnov42

-The Game------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------You Lost It-
The Black Onyx. What can I say? It's one of my favorite dungeon crawlers from the 1980's. The Black Onyx is generally
considered to be one of the first Japanese RPGs, alongside Koei's Dungeon and Nihon Falcom's Paorama-tou and Dragon Slayer.
Released in 1984, it predates The Bard's Tale by about a year, which as far as I know makes it the first FPRPG that has
a non-menu-based city that you explore.

You start out in said city, create your characters [up to five], choose a crude [but awesome] sprite representation of
your characters, go equip them, and delve into the dungeons beneath the city in search of the Black Onyx.

The gameplay cuts straight to the core of dungeon crawlers. There is no magic, no ranged weapons [or concept of range],
it's just your characters, their equipment, and a dungeon filled with things that just don't like you. One of the more
unique gameplay features for the time is conversation. If your party isn't full, you can speak to random townspeople
that you encounter in town and in the dungeons and recruit them into your party [or demand their money!] The thing that
gives the game its most charm however is the sprite representation of your characters. At the beginning they are all
wearing rags and equipped with a club. As you get money from fighting enemies, and you purchase better equipment, it
actually appears on your character sprites. This is 1984. I can't think of many games before 2004 that bothered with
doing anything like this.

The game was popular enough to spawn a sequel also on the PC-8801mkIISR called "The Fire Crystal" which has the same basic
gameplay, but instead of going through the dungeons beneath the town, you explore the catacombs in the town's temple. It
also added a magic system. A second sequel was planned, and judging by the existence of screenshots, developed at least a
little, that took place in the wilderness outside of the town, and another was going to focus around the town's Arena.

Aside from being ported to most of the 8bit Japanese PCs of the era, it was also remade and expanded on the Nintendo
Family Computer under the title of Super Black Onyx, and ported to the Nintendo Game Boy Color under the original title.
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-The Hackery---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wow, I finished this one in twelve hours. Okay, okay, it was coded in BASIC and already had an English font installed and
I had the source code available right there on the disks, but still...! So, yeah, not much to say here. It was in Japanese.
I made it in English. I'm not fluent in the language, so if you're familiar with the game and I got something terribly wrong
please, let me know. I'm working on the sequel now, which is a bit more of a task. It's still in BASIC and still has a font
already there, handy, and used, but the filenames are bizarre non-standard characters, so it's annoying even loading and
saving them. Plus at least some of the text I suspect is hiding in binary code files, so we'll see how that goes.
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-The Credits---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Henk Rogers		Concieved the game.
B.P.S.			Created the game.
LordKarnov42	Translated the game.
Ashura			Gave me immense technical support help.
Ben				Has an awesome forum at http://fullmotionvideo.free.fr/.
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