Bandai Design Master Senshi

The Design Master Senshi Mangajukuu or simply called as Denshi Manga Juku is a touchscreen handheld game console developed by Bandai and released in Japan on 1995. Suitable for 8 years old children and above, Design Master Senshi Mangajukuu is the first touchscreen handheld, released one year before Philips In2it.

The console gives the ability to the user to draw up to six frames of animated images. Then the player can save the frames or send them to his/her friends via an infrared port. Only four cartridges (labelled M.01 to M.04) was made for this console. There is also an additional special cartridge released as part of a contest by the magazine Weekly Shonen Jump. Only 300 pieces of them were produced.

Each cartridge has a starting point and then the player can continue with his/her drawing. But what makes this console interesting is the fact that these drawings can be used as sprites by 4 games (labelled G.01 to G.04) that the player can play with this console. Although, because the console can detect only one action, all the games are RPG turn based games.

The console had a decent launch. There were a lot of advertising actions, like the one with the extra cartridge in the Japanese magazine Weekly Shonen Jump. The price of the cartridges was ¥2,000 and ¥2,800 was the price for the games. The initial target was mainly boys since the first two cartridges had starting points from the anime Dragon Ball Z and Slam Dunk. The first game released was related to Dragon Ball Z and then released another one with the name Dungeon Diver. But later another variant of this console released named Paluseata targeting mostly girls along with the third game of the series: Sailor Moon, which didn't go so well.

The fourth game was Rock Man X3. Bandai had the idea to release a pack for the console with the older and the new game packed along, increasing the price from ¥9,800 (standard price) to ¥14,800 trying to lure new customers. However, even if this action was a good deal for new customers, the old owners of the console could not buy the new game without buying the whole package.

Eventually, the small number of games in combination with the only one action based games and the high price led to the players disappointment. Bandai dropped the project in 1996.