Not only is the rather obscure Active Simulation War DAIVA Story #6 – Imperial of Nirsartia – coming to the Nintendo Switch Online in Japan together with Fighter’s History and Kirby no Kira Kira Kids…
… But Active Simulation War DAIVA Story #6 – Imperial of Nirsartia – is also coming out in the West! Together with Fighter’s History and Kirby’s Avalanche (🇪🇺Kirby’s Ghost Trap), which is a Western-exclusive adaptation of Super Puyo Puyo and not the same game as Kira Kira Kids, just to be clear.
DAIVA (an improper romanization of the sanskrit religious term देव Deva) is a pretty interesting early case of media-mix project from the Japanese games industry. @Pasokon Deacon may have more to share but the gist of it is T&E Soft, known mainly for Hydlide and a bunch of golf games, ported roughly the same game (with slight adaptations based on each machine’s specs, interface and audience) to seven different hardware but changed the story and protagonist in each game, to give a different camp’s perspective among the various factions of an intergalactic conflict.
There was even a rudimentary password system to “transfer” progress from one version to another, for instance simulate two factions becoming allies by strengthening their sides with additional troops. The game itself is quite rudimentary, with strategy sequences akin to early Koei stuff and action sequences halfway between Thexder and Leynos. The Famicom version is by far the most casual version to play through, with barely any of the early strategy / 4X elements to account for, which it trades for a very basic space exploration sequence. This change makes DAIVA Story #6 arguably both the least interesting and also the most approachable version to play today.
e.g. Here is Story #1 on the PC-8801:
Here is Story #4 on the MSX:
Here is Story #5 on the MSX2:
And here is Story #6 on the Famicom:
They all came out in about one year, from December 1986 until December 1987, and not necessarily in numerical order. For instance, the Famicom version (Story #6), published by Toshiba EMI, came out a couple of months before the PC-88 version (Story #1). T&E dressed up the rather barebones in-game story with additional comics, short novels and “choose your own adventure”-style game books. Pretty neat concept! Clearly influenced by the Post-Star Wars Japanese wave of space opera such as Z Gundam, The Five Star Stories (wait no that’s 1989) and especially Ginga Eiyū Densetsu a.k.a. Legend of The Galactic Heroes.
The game isn’t very well known in Japan either – more an interesting footnote than a hidden gem really – but Project EGG and Bothtec did release a physical collection of all seven games titled DAIVA Chronicle for Windows in 2003; Project EGG being operated by D4Enterprise, which is also the copyright holder for this new release on the NSO.
