/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>20575080
To preface this post: I can't find anything on it no matter how much I search.

Like the other guy said, in Touhou you also enter a "hell" in the same way- and, well we all know how that goes. I also know in FF4 you enter a "hell" the same way. And, to further strengthen the comparison, the ultimate sword is obtained in a forge down there. Sounds a lot like Oboro Muramasa!

Well, simply working backwards from there to find the allusion they are working with was a fruitless effort. Where I failed, perhaps someone else may succeed.

I do have a bit of extraneous insight though:

While there might be folk stories about entering Hell, or another world, through a well, there is a more recent scare story from the 80s about there being an entrance to hell in Siberia. I don't know if I would call that the correct answer, but it's the closest thing I've got so far.

The setting of Oboro Muramasa is in a buddhist Japan, and a lot of the stuff you run into will be from that. So I spent a lot of time reading Jigoku, which I'm sure you know is one of Japan's accepted versions of "hell". Jigoku itself is populated by the little oni demons you'll find running around in the hell of Oboro Muramasa, as they are akin to the little devils of Christian hell that do Satan's bidding. Swap out Satan for Lord Enma and you get something pretty similar.

Jigoku has many trials and punishments, including being boiled in a cauldron. I have played Muramasa, so I don't remember if it's a spoiler or not that Jinkuro was punished in this way before escaping hell. But, as you can see, they are very faithful to this depiction of hell.

On the other hand, Odin Sphere is something that adapts Nordic mythology, and should give you a really good idea of how faithful Vanillaware/George Kamitani is to the characters and stories he is working with. I'm sure you'll find that a lot of the details are, uh, manipulated to build the world the way he envisions it.

In other words, I believe it's quite likely that while they may have been faithful to a lot of details, it's equally likely that there is some stuff that has been bent in a way to fit into the world it belongs to. This is probably the case considering the tale of Momotaro, where Onigashima holds a fortress of Oni and the entrance is simply a gate, which must be passed in a similar way to Muramasa where it is a well and you must break the "entrance" with a blade.


TL;DR: The well is in other games I've played, and I don't know why. The rest is my conjecture.