It's The Year Of The Super Famicom (2024)

Slapping a stack of instruction manuals going “Now I say Now I say see here”, I may have bought a Super Famicom in response to not finding my Super Famicom (still MIA). So I might as well play “it”. By “it” I mean Super Famicom games on the MiSTeR. I’ve started doing that. Let’s put them in their own thread how about it.

First up good job me for putting Chrono Trigger on my Pledge list then immediately starting Final Fantasy VI. I did feel better that other posters said they got stuck at the Sabin fight, because I certainly read the Japanese but did not understand how to input fighting moves. Selecting “Techniques” and then inputting the move while the icon is on “Sabin” and then later he just does or does not do the move is such a weird choice. Then again you also could be out of Edgar’s complete machine set if you don’t randomly buy his equipment with Tina before he is even in your party.

So yes I am playing it in Japanese, as millions of people before me have. Calling him Sabin in this post will be the last time I correct myself because turns out like all the characters were renamed for FF3.

I was double right about my own emotions. I am trying to stop myself from ever playing FF16 again. This has actual characters and motivation and there are things happening in a sequential order. In FF16 there are giant massive time-skips that feel like “we have a story to tell and do not care for the connective tissue”. They might as well say 17 minutes later or 250,000 eons later. It doesn’t matter for the relationships in question.

An additional asside I watched the beginning of God of War PS2 on mute. You are introduced to Kratos and his flavor savor (it was the 2000s). He is standing on top of a cliff. He looks upset. He falls off the mountain. The camera zooms in on his facial hair flapping in the terminal velocity. It cuts to black as he reaches the ground. it says “Three Weeks Earlier”. @dylan and I held our mouths and tongues from hooting and waking up Neo Rude.

So I had previously played through FF6 on an emulator in English with the Prima Guide Book for the PS1 version open. And wow. FF6 expects you to know what Final Fantasy is and that this is the next/final one for SNES. Which, good assumption! I remembered in my many years ago playthrough that I barely held on because it never goes “you should heal,buy equipment” you are just thrown location to location. It owns!

I stopped at the first split party select event. Excited for more.

Next post: Ganpuru:Gunman’s Proof.

25 Likes

Whoops I forgot my second point. Which is that I kept saying after all those PC Engine RPGs playing a Squaresoft SFC RPG would destroy me and I was right. Destroy me more.

7 Likes

Ganpuru Gunman’s Proof

I am gonna make un-researched claims about this game like it was made by Brownie Brown who made Mother 3. It certainly looks the same. You’d even go “this is a Mother 3 fan game” if you didn’t look at a almanac. It also looks like they held up tracing paper to PVMs and copied sprites from Link To The Past.

Which is fine. This is a Zelda-like. With Crayon-Shin-chan inspiration. A meteor has crashed in the old west and unleashed a space criminal. You are a young boy who gets willingly possessed by a tiny space cop. Then you have to go to the dungeons and beat the aliens and then go to the sheriff’s office to collect rewards and new items.

I got inspired to play this because of some zelda-like for SFC I played years ago on Xbox, I think. I might have just watched a youtube longplay it a different time. I am really honestly not sure. Searching for SNES zelda-likes’s best source is a NeoGAF thread from 2013. There are a lot of banned posters in that thread. Remember when SB1 and GAF had a rivialry? That was fun and stupid. We’d join and make really incollous posts “What does J Allard think of Wave Race Blue Course” and then get perma-banned. Amazed the mods had energy for that and like, bad people. Then again SB1 allowed a lot of bad people.

Anyways I don’t think I’ve tracked down the game I am thinking of but there are at least 10 Zelda-likes on SFC and that’s a lot.

Ganpuru? It is fine if you think child abuse can be a punchline, which if you like Crayon-Shin-Chan you do.

17 Likes

Do Panel De Pon on Hard.

3 Likes

is Brain Lord a Zeldalike

6 Likes

Link to the Past minus puzzles (yay) plus blackface imagery (boo)

3 Likes

is it Marvelous cuz this post reminded me I still haven’t really played Marvelous and I just wanna pretend we were thinking of th4e same game

5 Likes

It might indeed be Marvelous. I booted it up for sixty seconds just now and went “I remember this Monkey’s ass.”

FF6 update: grinded on the rapids, suplexed a ghost train, recruited a feral child into my doomed rebellion against the empire, two girls met one of them instantly asked if they could love another person.

Kain being played for legitimate tragedy and immediately having a weird scene where a dancing girl flirts with him is strange as hell.

Sure hope I wasn’t supposed to get Mog in the moogle cave because I didn’t.

Cotton 100% This is much more pleasant than other Cottons. I approve.

I have…36? SFC cartridges in my apartment. I gotta finish cleaning this SFC this week once the kid is in school so I can play these and get rid of them because looking at them I felt a giant wave of embarassment. Not sure how yet, but somehow gotta par these down before the month is out.

Just Embarassing myself over here. The Year of The Super Famicom continues.

7 Likes

You’re ok

4 Likes

FF6: Alright I am gonna get a lot of progress done: 2 hours later “Oh that’s where Tina is, shit.” Well the famous Opera Scene is accelerating towards me. Much like the end of the world.

Should make special note that when Celes meets everyone in Narshe and the gang goes “She’s like totally a baddy” her response is “I don’t give a damn about what you think of me. judge my actions.” And I went “that’s cool.”

Popitto Hebereke: Sunsoft Mascot Puzzle Well Game. It looks great because it is SFC Sunsoft. Why choose this one? Well if you like the Hebereke characters and their gibberish nonsense talking styles (And with coming off FF6…)

Super R-Type: RType lost something here. It is very slow and it takes a long ti-AH SHIT GIANT LASER restart stage idiot. Remember about that laser. Punk. I hadn’t played this since ZSNES in 2002.

Pop’N Twinbee: there’s a reason early 2000s video game internet communities celebrated Konami. This is as good as shooters get for SFC and I would have ignored it if not for last year’s PC Engine playthrough where I was similarly impressed with Detana Twinbee. Emotional Fortitude for the Bell System will very. I grabbed a bell that sent my speed to zero at the start of stage 2 and never recovered.

Shanghai III
I think what I want to do in video games is play Shanghai forever. The time linit is very strict on this one, but you can turn it off. I have yet to see a lose Shanghai 2 or 3 cart in my searching because damn I love Shanghai.

Want to play more FF6. Just wanna sit down and burn through the whole thing.

11 Likes

Super R-Type : RType lost something here. It is very slow and it takes a long ti-AH SHIT GIANT LASER restart stage idiot.

SA-1 cartridge mods How One Man Is Fixing The SNES’ Biggest Weakness | Nintendo Life

I need the Gradius III one just so I can pretend to beat Gradius III

3 Likes

IMG_0633

The year of the Super Famicom continues, kind of. I got a Nintendo screwdriver (I somehow did not own a Nintendo screwdriver) took apart and cleaned up the “new” SFC. It feels more like my SFC, except is a finnicky 29 years young (and that is young for a SFC) that is having trouble booting games. Like say all the ones in the picture.

Games not working makes my embarassment easier. Almost all those in the picture were in the previously mentioned Yahoo Auction so I may have in fact got super burned. I am staring at revising my review wondering what to do about that. And then do I knowingly sell dud games on a marketplace? Just dump them to bookoff? (Yes). Canabalize them for their white plastic backs? (Also yes.)

Not actually playing anything but testing reveals some of other carts are quite finnicky, or my Super Famicom is.

Either way real hardware sucks. Roms and emulation rule. I have a bootleg retrotink 2x coming my way so I will try that soon and have opinions almost certainly.


It felt like a model kit. I am impressed how much of it was snap together and still strong after 29 years (the board is stamped with 1995). Also some of the parts say Korea on them.

14 Likes

Gradius III works at least. Konami really was a Qing back then.

4 Likes

This particular model is one of the most finnicky. If I had had almost any other SFC I could replace the cartridge reader in about 10 seconds but this one has it soldered on so I would have to do a whole thing to replace it.

Desperately trying not to just buy a snesclone on yahoo auctions just to see if it is the games or the console.

Further reading.

2 Likes

okay after cleaning for a second time most of these games do work. But looking at the Final Fight that has like…a melted bottom? I am not gonna bother.

So very brief impressions of some SPORTS

Hat Trick Hero Soccer by Taito. I thought I had played the PC Engine version of this but maybe that was Hockey? Either way this is fast with a Side View of the court. As a non soccer lover I probably shouldn’t own any soccer games. It doesn’t beat Namcot’s PRIME GOAL . The arcade version has giant impressive graphics that the Super Nintendo couldn’t hope to match.

Super Formation Soccer Soccer by Human! Very impressive use of Mode 7 as you have a behind the player camera moving up and down the field. These early games I should just be impressed with the amount of sprites on screen and no flickering. The sprites are cute and stout and not detailed. I kept fouling and ended up down 3 players and watched the computer Belgium (to my America) proceed to score 4 goals in a row on me.

High Impact Football I bought this from the beautiful Doki Doki Bouken Game Shop on the coast. This is side view American football. It has screen shake so it might as well be a modern video game. It uses it for every high impact hit. You have teams like Texas, LA, New York and The Africans and Europe. That next to last one really put a sour taste in my mouth. The pass interface didn’t really make any sense if there was any sense to make of it. I mostly watched interception after fumble after interception happen, which I guess was exciting but I kept thinking about Madden or Troy Akimen football or at least wondering there has to be a better football game for the Super Famicom.

Dragon Ball Z Super Saiya Densetsu Would you believe the DBZ games page of Wikipedia is exhaustive? Anyways this is one of the games marked with the In-Laws name so I am tempted to keep it. It is a combination RPG/card collector DBZ story teller. So it is doing a lot with a little. The sprites are hilarious for their amateur but really trying. Nothing is the proper scale. I had just gotten Piccolo to level 2 (which refilled my stats thankfully) and reached to start putting some games away before the family came home and tapped the cartridge and killed my game. So I will try again at least until Yamcha dies or whatever. It does a good job of capturing Dragon Ball Z feel. I should mention both it and Hat Trick Hero have music that would not be out of place in the waiting room to have an uncomfortable and embarasssing cyst removed.

7 Likes

It’s Final Fantasy’s Number One Favorite Octopus.

12 Likes

One of the Tecmo Super Bowls?

1 Like

Well the world has ended in Final Fantasy VI. Unforunately for everyone, a new day dawns still. Bread must still be baked, children must learn, the future must be prepared.

The second of the game opens with Celes and a better in RPG story than I have seen other places. Except it kinds of doesn’t work since it is about feeding random fish to an old man until he either recovers or dies. I think my first time through I feed him for 25 minutes until he died. This time I had the Prima Strategy Guide open and fed him only good fish because after 15 minutes nothing was happening. I thought the monotony was maybe the point, except it got lost in “what exactly am I doing?” because I was feeding him the perfect balance of good and bad fish so it never tipped into either way to an advancement. I can’t be the only person who had this experience.

I find a lot of this interesting. It is certainly better than Final Fantasy XVI in like, every single way. Celes, the “traitor”, who has been in a coma for a year since a collaspe and had made peace to just take care of the only one in her life she could call family despite the crimes he had put her through at a miserable rock at the end of the world during the end of the world, is the one who decides Kafka must die, and the group must get back together to do this.

It’s an in game mechanical struggle to get anywhere in the world, I just got my 3rd party member and it really feels like something. I have encountered 2 different party member who avoided or declined my goal of suicidal justice. Last time we saw Kefka he got stabbed through the chest and laughed it off only to destroy the world for no reason. He was already dangerous, but he has absolutely no end goal outside of wanton destruction. You reunite with The Monk as he is holding up a house to protect a child. The house was destroyed by an uncaring Kefka from his golden tower in the center of the world.

There is only misery here and yet life must go on. The first hero we met, Tina has lost her inherit magical powers and has become a normal foster mom to a dozen children who were made orphans on the day of the collaspe.

Every hero has the guilt of they didn’t do enough to save the world when they were right there. Everyone wrestling with what can they do right now.

That the Kingdom of Figaro has just continued without pause while both rulers have been absent and the world is been ruined isn’t great I admit. Divine right of kings and that I guess. Also Edgar is explicitly a pedophile, that doesn’t sex the 12 year old magic user in your party because even he has a moral standard for what is too young. If they took that out for the Woosley or the newer translation, that’s great. There’s like a young girl that lives in his bedroom and it is never explained. The maids in the guest room go “yeah he’ll fuck any woman young or old.”

Like everything in the game that is just 2 or 3 lines of text but it is there. To seemingly contradict myself, the writing remains very good throughout. I keep thinking they chose Celes to get the band back together, and everyone has been left to their own devices for a year. And none of those devices so far were “we should kill Kefka.”

10 Likes

Okay I got everyone in my party but Tina. And Tina can stay with her adopted children. it feels wrong to take that from her. Now it is just the question of how much grinding/collecting I want to do.

I am glad I braved Kefka’s tower and got wiped out and had to do a dungeon again so I could learn a lesson I already knew. You get so much experience and AP from the tower and that is really where you want to level. Sure every fight’s a boss battle but umm-yeah…

The World of Ruin really indulges in the mechanic mindset in just giving you sicko RPG dungeons and your dozen characters and Genjuu and wants you to find a dozen broken systems to win with. I admit I have defeated every dragon with Banish/DeZone and I’d do it again. Those guys hit the whole party for like 1500!

Balancing and grinding the 14 characters is not fun or interesting. There is like the 5 spells you want everyone to have and they are all time sinks. The Mime and especially the Yeti come so late into the game you don’t really have a use for them because you have so many other options.

I get they had to dangle Locke for a long time but again by the time you get him and can go do cleanup you’ve probably leveled 8 other characters so the promise of doing the same thing for a 9th is well exhausting.

Every time the dialog returns I do get reminded how well written the game is but that has fallen so by the wayside at this point, i am sure it will come back for the finale.

One of the best games ever made, 11/10. Genji Glove and Equalizer for 8 thumbs up which is not how the thumb system works god dammit.

Oh I thought this game took stuff from Mother 2 but Mother 2 came out 6 months later which blows my mind.

8 Likes

with the genji glove and the master’s scroll you can Thumb 8 times

4 Likes