How much of our current agricultural policy can we lay at the feet of the Iowa caucuses?

[A] savage passage of 14th-century invective about the text-obsessed nerdiness of the Florentine bibliophile and friend of Petrarch, Niccolò Niccoli ...

Yes, that's right, you've correctly deduced from the plot that what we're talking about here is a flip-screen adventure, each screen presenting you with a few baddies to beat up and one or two problems to solve before you can progress onto the next one.

Tora (Kiyoshi Atsumi), our feckless itinerant peddler, dreams he's leading his relatives in a pursuit of the bluebird of happiness, which takes them to a veritable Shangri-La.