[Capes] Inuyasha with the Family

[Brennan Taylor]

My wife and kids are big fans of the Japanese cartoon Inuyasha, featuring a half-demon swordsman and a time-traveling schoolgirl from modern times. The series is about unrequited love and big fight scenes between powerful demons. Since everyone is so interested in the show, I thought I would run a game for the family using the series' characters and setting. After thinking about it a bit, I decided that Capes would be the perfect system, since my kids understand it, and it simulates superhero fights similar to the demon fights that are seen on the show.

I spent about an hour making up the iconic characters from the show on the online Flash Capes Character Generator (the following won't have any meaning unless you are familiar with the show). I made up the traveling companions Inuyasha, Kagome, Miroku, and Sango, the four core heroes of the show. I also made up three of the recurring villains, Naraku, Kagura, and Sesshomaru. There is a big cast of minor characters, so I quickly statted six of these out as well using the Minor Parts page of the character generator (Shippo, Kilala, Myoga, Jaken, Kaede, and Totosai). The nice part about this is that any of us can easily grab a character we've seen on the show and bring it in without having to spend any time building a character, even the five minutes that Capes usually takes.

Yesterday after dinner, we all sat down and played for about an hour-and-a-half, getting through two short pages. In the first scene, my son (10 years old) chose to play Inuyasha, my daughter (8 years old) took Kagome, and my wife Sango. Since these are all heroes, I thought I would throw in some opposition and played Naraku. I narrated the group walking through the forest, and the demon Naraku flitting through the trees nearby. Everyone got into the narration, using common visuals and lines from the show, and we played out two conflicts in the scene: Event: Inuyasha loses his cool, and Goal: Cut Naraku in half. I got my butt handed to me as a single villain opposing three heroes, but Inuyasha did indeed lose his cool and rushed off into the forest after Naraku was cut in half (interestingly, Naraku gets cut in half a lot on the show, too, but it's always a golem puppet, which is how the narration went in our game, too).

My daughter was eager to set the next scene, which she stated was Naraku's mysterious castle. She again took the role of Kagome and my wife played Sango, but this time I was Naraku's demon servant Kagura, and my son played Inuyasha's brother Sesshomaru. We weren't sure at the start which side Sesshomaru might throw in on, but he ended up helping Kagome and Sango. Again, the scene encompassed only two conflicts (mostly because it was getting late), this time Goal: Defeat Kagura, and Event: Sango and Kagome are delayed long enough for Naraku to implement his plan. As the sole villain against three protagonists again, I lost completely. As a consolation, these two scenes netted me a total of five story tokens. Not bad for less than two hours of play. Kagura had a building collapsed on her, and was smacked five ways to Sunday by sacred arrows, the hyraikos, and Sesshomaru's sword Takijin, and in the end escaped (as she always does) by flying away atop a giant feather. Naraku's plan was successful, however, and Sango and Kagome were seperated from Inuyasha and the rest of the companions. Who knows what nefarious scheme he will implement next...

Capes is a versatile game, and it handled this setting just fine. Since the demons on this show are basically superheroes, it wasn't much of a port. The whole family is interested in Inuyasha, so it was an easy sell, too, which is always good as far as I'm concerned. We didn't have a lot of conflicts and we jumped to resolution in the last scene before everyone's turns were over, but we were all getting tired and it was about bedtime. All in all, it was a good time and I will definitely be playing it again. Everyone really got into narrating things in a way that called back to the show, and yelling out the special attack names just like the characters do as they used the abilities on their sheet.

[Matthew Glover]

Brennan, how old are your kids? (I hope that's not too personal.)  At my FLGS, the kids who usually just play Yu-gi-oh have really taken a shine to Capes.  I've shown Capes Lite to kids as young as eight and had a blast watching them going back and forth with it.  I was a little startled at how quickly they absorbed the rules, but I guess coming from a strongly competetive card game background was a benefit.  None of them had ever done any roleplaying, though, and I can always see the creative potential of the game drawing them in.   

[Brennan Taylor]

My son is 10 and my daughter is 8. Both of them have no problem absorbing the rules. My son plays Yu-Gi-Oh! all the time, and I'm the one who can't figure that game out. Capes is great for kids because it has really strong structure, and very strict turns. Everyone gets their chance to play.