Genpei Touma Den

Genpei Touma Den (源平討魔伝) (alternately Romanized as Genpei Tōma Den, with a macron, Genpei Tooma Den, which uses the incorrect transcription of the macron, or Genpei Toumaden, translated as two words; note that Genpei ToumaDen is the MAME title) is a beat 'em up arcade game that was released by Namco in 1986 only in Japan. It runs on Namco's System 86 hardware, and was later ported to the NES, TurboGrafx-16, and Sharp X68000 platforms. It was also later featured in Namco Museum Vol. 4, for the Sony PlayStation, under a new name of The Genji and Heike Clans - along with another of Namco's Japan-exclusive titles, the horizontal scrolling shooter Ordyne (which featured a cameo from Namco's signature character Pac-Man, and much like this game, used a Yamaha YM-2151 FM sound chip for its songs). The TurboGrafx-16 port was re-released on the Wii's Virtual Console in 2009.

The character controlled by the player is that of a real Japanese samurai, Taira no Kagekiyo, who fell at the Battle of Dan-no-ura, at the end of the Genpei War, in 1185. Over eight hundred years later, he is resurrected, and has to make his way over the Imperial Regalia of Japan - fighting other characters who actually existed such as Minamoto no Yoshitsune and Saito Musashibo Benkei on his travels, as well as collecting the three sacred game items, and defeating his arch-enemy Minamoto no Yoritomo.

This game has three types of stages: Small Mode (standard), Big Mode (with large characters, and usually boss fights), and Overhead Mode (like Small Mode, but as the name suggests, viewed from an overhead perspective). Most stages have torii at the end of them, which are used to transport the player to a different stage. Most of the Small Mode and Overhead Mode stages have multiple torii at the end of them, which lead to different places on the map of the Imperial Regalia; Big Mode stages, however, only have one torii at the end of them. If Kagekiyo is unlucky enough to fall into a pit in any of the Small Mode stages, he will end up in a non-standard Overhead Mode stage known as the "Pit Stage" (from which there are only two ways to escape - and one of these two does not always work).

The game also features the Sanzu River, the place believed in Japanese Buddhism to separate "the current life" and "the afterlife", resembling the concept of the Underworld or Hell. Therefore, mythological characters such as Emma-O, God of the Underworld, and Sun Goddess Amaterasu, appear in this game (the former in the aforementioned "Pit Stage" and the latter in a non-standard Small Mode stage called the "Bonus Stage").

Shortly after the release of this original game, Namco released an RPG-style board game of under the same name. Then, in 1988, they released a Famicom version of the board game entitled Genpei Tōma Den: Computer Board Game. Instead of platforming like its arcade counterpart, its primary focus was on turn-based fighting.

A sequel to Genpei Tōma Den, named Genpei Tōma Den: Kan no Ni, was released in 1992 for the NEC PC-Engine. Surprisingly enough, this game was also released in the United States, under the name of Samurai Ghost. It was the first and only game in the series to ever be released outside of Japan - until that aforementioned fourth volume of the Namco Museum series was released worldwide in 1996.