Today we will take a closer look at an important in-game location - the Dojo. In Japanese culture, a dojo is a place for meditation and spiritual learning as well as honing one's martial prowess and combat skills. Both in the real world and in the game, the Dojo is a place where a hero can train and prepare for future challenges.
The great Skill Tree grows by the Dojo. It can be accessed to select and upgrade the powers you wield or check which abilities can be learned in the future.
Enter the Dojo to start a training simulation and battle challenging opponents.
Here you will also meet those whom Yami could call his allies.
There are three of them: Tengu, Doggo, and Tancho.
Let’s start with Tengu.
In Japanese mythology, the term Tengu (“Heavenly Dog”) can refer to a number of creatures. For example, Kotengu, also known as Karasu Tengu, Daitengu, or Yamabushi tengu. We'll be focusing on the Daitengu as it specifically served as a basis for the character players will encounter in the game. Daitengu literally means “Big Tengu.” It so happens that the Daitengu had taken on the role of human protector. This Tengu can take on many different forms: man, woman, child... But his main guise is that of a barefoot wandering old hermit, a Yamabushi monk, with a disproportionately long nose. It is believed that the length of the nose serves as an indicator of the particular Daitengu's power.
The in-game Tengu is an AI that was originally running a garrison of Tengu battle models, a kind of a robotic SWAT team. For reasons unknown, it later found itself having to inhabit one of the said models and withdraw from worldly affairs.
Yami have made the following note about the Tengu:
“Tengu can be difficult to understand. Sometimes it’s as if I were talking to a child, but then it looks at me, and I can feel the weight of gods-know how many centuries on its shoulders. It's an AI... Who’d ever thought I’d get to meet one. Everybody’s heard the rumors. AIs aren’t like machines at all - they think as human beings do or even better if legends are to be believed. Some are crazy and evil, but Tengu is one of the good ones. I mean truly, deeply good. It cares for the plants and animals, for everything around it. For some weird reason, it also cares about me. Maybe it's just lonely and needed someone to talk to.”
Besides Tengu, the Dojo houses a giant pet known as the Doggo. It's one of Tengu's creations that doesn't have a prototype in Japanese mythology.
Here’s what Yami has to say about the mechanical canine:
“I don’t like machines. No, scratch that - I hate them. But those things at the Dojo, they’re... different. Tengu built them. It told me that they have something called an “Identity Core,” which holds and evaluates memories allowing them to forge a personality. This one’s just a dog, it even acts like one. I may not like machines, but you gotta be a special kind of asshole to hate dogs, so...”
The third robotic inhabitant of the Dojo, the Tancho Crane, also doesn't originate from Japanese folktales. However, the red-crowned cranes were often depicted as loyal companions to the samurai of old, with some legendary birds rumored to have lived for over a thousand years!
Tancho is another one of the "living" robots created by the Tengu AI.
Yami describes it as follows:
“It's much more reserved than Doggo, but I have to be nice to it anyway. When Tengu told me that this thing could fly me around, I didn’t think much of it. Then we soared through the sky, and I couldn’t see a damn thing without the data, feeling my feet dangling in the air as we rushed through pure darkness. I could not steer, couldn’t do anything. The moral of the story is: this crane could have killed me anytime it wanted. If I want to finish my mission, I gotta stay on its good side, so that it does not drop me into the abyss when nobody’s looking.”
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Some of the artworks used in this article were taken from open sources. We claim no ownership of these images.