So Famicom Bunko: Hajimari no Mori as mentioned in the tweet I am on Day 3 of 6 so far. It’s cute and good. If you’re gonna have art about kids they gotta act like kid and be stupid like kids. This moron saved up all his money to buy a flashlight (a novelty at the time the game takes place apparently) and then he gives it to the first girl he sees and doesn’t get it back from her. He’s spent the next two days trying to find her.
Actually mostly just trying to help an old lady remember what he forgot. But good writing is good writing. It’s clever. It uses Adventure game to good effect. All the story elements are visible from space and it does have that “The Good Ole Days Were Better.” (During Imperialism? After the war when everyone was poor and starving? After Japan becomes a power house and all the rural villages were emptying for the big cities?)
I’m mostly looking at everyone complaining it is hot and thinking it is probably 85 degrees. And then I get sad and want to apologize to my child. Our high tomorow? 96!
There’s a pretty good article about the game on HG101 by an writer I am not familar with:
I finished this. The last day of 6 is as long as the rest of the game about 3-4 hours. It has a lot of surprises from RPG battles to Mode 7 Segments. It does a lot with a little and more than you would think.
Living in 2024 and dealing with the constant imminent climate change reality made me outright cry at the messaging of the game. Which is more or less the Forest Spirits are losing their home because of the constant deforestation caused by man. It ends in hope because we have to have hope every day as a new forest is planted.
It has like a best in breed Elementary School age romance. Unlike the other kid SuFami game I played the kids here are appropriately smart/stupid selfish/kind and unable to deal with being a human sometimes.
It wouldn’t be that hard to translate (I’m opening to doing it RomHackers!) outside of a segment where a senile old man talks in circles. That was really hard on my JSL brain.
There you go y’all there is in fact an untranslated Hidden Gem. A short “download” game about a boy going on summer vacation.
Goemon 4 aka Ganbare Goemon Kirakira Dochuu: Boku wa Dancer ni natte wake sucks. I hate this game. I’ve spent 3 nights on this shit. No more. I’ll get to why I quit later.
While it simultaeously looks beautiful at times, this was thrown together with whatever assets they wanted from the past 3 Goemon games. In this one the core 4 PCs are scattered across 4 planets with locks and keys involving the other characters on the different planets. You know I hate that.
The game requires you hold attack and run to make 90% of the jumps. It loves planting an enemy just off screen where the large knockback will kill you. Lots of bad level design. You know I hate that.
Ebisumaru is complicated because he is a flaming homo stereotype but also how often do you get a gay character in a 16bit video game. Of course the female character gets threatened with sexual slavery to pay off a debt, but turns out they gotta buy ingredients for sugiyaki.
What made me quit is at the end of each world you have suddenly play a completely different game. Remember when Sonic Mania made you play puyo puyo? Well now you have to play Puyo Puyo but the controls suck and your oppponent is Stage 4 on normal good. I’m not particularly good at puyo and it really made me sweat (because it is fast) and took 5-6 tries.
The next one I played was a timing minigame followed by track and field horseshit and somewhere between input lag and the mister and my controller it kept saying my ABABABABABABA was horrible. Which brings me to the 3rd boss-minugame which was just track and field and frustratingly difficult and my ABABAB was ruining my body. After about 8 tries I went Fuck It and gave up. No Auto-fire did not help.
My thousand year old memories is Goemon PS1 is not that fun and I know Goemon 2 is pretty great. This felt like it was asset-reuse and B-Team while Konami proper got ready for the next gen. There is a bit of Post-DKC Rendered Graphics.
Guess I should play this physical of 3 I bought for some reason. Or just play 3 on the Mister with no effort at all.
I didn’t play Goemon 3 today but I did clean the cartridge and setup the console again. The game was the dirtiest I’ve ever had a SFC cart that was not visibly dirty. I was disgusted as I pulled alcohol dipped Q-tip after Q-tip away from the cart to find them crusted black and brown and yellow. It was gross. Game works now.
A big goal in the back of my mind was to finally play Ihatovo Monogatari. I did! Finally tonight, in Japanese. I guess my basic fluency reach some new level in the last few years. I remember trying it before maybe right when the translation came out and noping out pretty fast. Here I just sat down and played it till I got very sleepy. It’s pretty basic. You pretty much just play until the game decided to tell you a Miyazawa Kenji story. Which yeah duh. I am unfamiliar with his works, but this is a starting point before my kid reads Galactic Railroad in Elementary School.
A game that got a re-release here was Iron Commando, so I booted that up since it is also in the Is. seems like a bad belt scroller.
Finally a game I had covetted for 30 years and yet never really played for whatever reason was Jurassic Park. I loved Jurassic Park in 1993. I had a Sega Genesis, with admittedly the much cooler/weirder JP game. This game made me want a manual just to figure out what I was doing. I eventually got to the first person segments which run at roughly six FPS and suck. Just slowly making dinosaurs explode with a rocket launcher or a bolo gun. You know, whatever. I guess I am collecting eggs until Ian Malcom decides to give me a fucking keycard.
But low-res SNES FPS made me launch Wolfenstein 3D I’d also not recommend playing it this way. It runs at a higher frame rate but a horribly low resolution that everything is just pixels. Also the Germans speak English in this one and that really threw me off. The Year Will Finish!
A year or two ago I went on my own little GOEMAD diet, where I played all those Super Famicom Goemon games after trying Legend of the Mystical Ninja again and going gaga over it, to the degree I went “maybe the Super Famicom is actually 100 percent awesome and I should be playing all these games”, but my enthusiasm decreased with every sequel. I was going to make a huge post about it but never got around to it cuz I just got like…really sick of those things. The comedy is fucking dogshit – constantly think of the Game Center CX episode where they cut to Arino looking totally stonefaced during the game’s “jokes” – the minigames get worse and worse, and I can’t remember if I played the translation patches that cut the more problematic bits or not but I do know I just hit a breaking point where I knew I couldn’t recommend these to anyone cuz they offended me. Mostly because they were so unfunny but y’know. The other stuff was bad too.
Legend of the Mystical Ninja is still badass though. The others have too much bullshit, even if they are gorgeous.
Just did the first Impact fight in Goemon 3. This game also sucks for different reasons. It’s neat they change it up. The towns have a much more top down angle that I think works the best I’ve seen and weird they went back to the 2/3rds angle in 4. The levels are open ended which means lots of annoying dead-ends complicated by needing to find 4 manikinekos in each to get an extra heart. I am fearing they are gonna start multiplying damage on the back half of the game so am seeking this out and it just means playing the levels in the most tedious way possible. Frequently (2 out of the 3 action stages) so far have shown me one at the beginning of the stage making me believe I am missing a secret door for the whole stage then it drops me back at the beginning at the end so I can pick it up and I just wasted a lot of time stressing.
There is this hilarious moment that I had to watch a walkthrough for where in Japanese it says “You Should Use That”. See a switch is on the otherside of a barrier. You find out your charged coin attack can pass through the barrier but didn’t trigger it. I looked up on youtube. The english fan translation (With Slurs!) does explain this is how you hit the switch but you actually have to crouch to reach it. Which is a real fuck you from Konami.
The comedy sucks shit in this one a somehow even more of a gay stereotype imposter Ebisumaru in a nun’s outfit stole a time machine. I just got to New New Oedo so we’ll see what it has in store for me. The game has a laugh track sometimes. Man the humor sucks.
It is a really great looking game though. I wonder if this and 4 were in development simultaneously because 4 and 3 stole a lot from 2 and I haven’t seen anything from 4 in 3 yet. That was confusing you get it.
I just beat Goemon 3. It is better than 4 but still sucks. Halfway through the game it dumps you in an overworld. All the stages, flags, triggers, keys, and objectives are behind talking to all NPCs and getting lucky. You just wonder around in circles like a Japanese Adventure game hoping to trigger something.
Like a good Search Action you slowly amass a pile of keys and need only remember which key for what lock or discovering a new lock. Cycle through your 4 heroes in every room. It is never interesting. You just go “okay I gotta use this key.” I got stuck on the last real stage for an hour because I forgot one of my keys and spent time looking for a Key Card in the level. Fucking great game there.
The gay panic doesn’t stop and also doesn’t have anything to do with the plot. The big bad eventually just appears and you fight them. The evil cross dressing Ebisumaru just has a gay panic scene and is thrown away. Okay. The humor sucks.
I keep thinking about Zelda 2 where I am yum yum for that game’s brand of obtuse just walk around bullshit or how Goemon 3’s moment to moment stuff isn’t horrible but @closed and I kept just repeating “This Sucks.”
It’s better than 4 in that you can play it. It doesn’t require pixel perfect jumps and flawless track and field button mashing. It’s a real drain and will be happy to sell it.
Incantation: washed away Goemon with the sweet taste of a 1996 Platformer by Tidus. In which you are boy wizard collecting wheat to pay a Toll Ogre for the oppurtunity to fight the boss. Not good and think it steals backgrounds from Capcom’s Mickey’s Magical Quest. Also looks pretty close to the cancelled/released/dumped crazy shooter called I think Little Busters? Time to look that up. Nightmare Busters! That game owns. @dylan let’s play this one soon.
My 12 dollar 100 in 1 cart had Mystical Ninja on it so I loaded that up. On the one hand I do not like that the player characters and the enemies have zero friction so you can get caught in a death spiral real fast. On the other, all the mini games in this one are real fun and betting on High and Low was way more enjoyable than anything in Goemon 3. Was just giggling and screaming at winning at gambling. 1 much more janky so I didn’t exactly like it but hey.
Shoutouts to the GameFAQs Goemon 3 Walkthrough writer for barely understanding Japanese. Don’t worry bud, fluency only means you’re groaning at all the jokes.
Oh here’s a good joke. You do Straw Millionaire and at the end of it and the game you give a cucumber to a Kappa and he gives you the missing 3 of 8 Iron Plates you need because they clearly ran out of time for the game. That’s funny. Then you are supposed to order the plates to make a message I guess. Though I stared at the message in bafflement.
Oh there is also a beautiful effect of clouds being reflected in rain puddles in one of the towns as you run by. Screenshots wouldn’t do it justice.
Also this Fantasy aesthetic is certainly of a kind. Reminds me of 80’s Warhammer, Brian Froud and the kinds of things you could buy in a shop that sells dragon sculptures, dream catchers and wolf tees
You must play it with save states just so you can go do something else. There’s a password system but you only see it when you game over and it dumps you at the beginning of each world.
I uh…eventually turned on cheats for the final boss because it was very late and it turned out he took 42 hits. The other bosses took like 5.
Spent the evening with SMW romhacks. Several with very generic names that in varying ways crashed or froze.
I spent the majority of time with Sicari (original I think, though I’ll have to track down remastered.) it might as well be a weird european developed original platformer. As it it screams depressed trans-girl made an obsessively overly everything romhack. New music, levels, sprites, 10 pages of story, two girl characters, the creator has the name of a pokemon though I know nothing else about them I am only giving conjecture.
They love single block jumps and always having run on. I’m not a full blown SMW sicko but after dying in Sicari 25 times switching over to SMW but slightly different I think I prefer SMW.
Tonight’s theme, on December 1st, the last month of The Year Of The Super Famicom, is mediocre games with bizarre titles. I’ll start with what I just played.
Blazeon this might be the slowest shooter I’ve ever played. It’s by Atlus and AI. It’s The SFC’s answer to Gaiares if Gaiares sucked. You can capture and become enemy ships which are usually way bigger. Two or three taps of the environment and bullets and you return to your base form and wait around 45 seconds for the possible chance a capturable enemy. Imagine I put “Real Game Play Footage Here” of me sitting in space for 30 seconds for the 2nd(?) Boss to appear.
Stage 2 theme is nice.
Sandra no Daibouken this took forever to find in my romset because it was marked as XANDRA a character that is traditionally not in Japanese. This is a prequel platformer to Legend of Valkyre. It sucks. Your little Dinosaur dies in one hit at the slightest touch of a dust bunny. There is too much talking. It has maybe my most hated crime of platformers. Large ledge you have to charge jump to get over. God I hate that.
Pikiinya is a terrible puzzle game about bug eyed penguins trying to get strange fruit. It looks creepy. I could not figure out the rules and despite there being a How To Play it did not explain them. Impress your friends with Pikiinya!
Trinea is a terrible top down melee shooter thing. Like a lot of the games tonight if you just saw the screenshots you’d forgiven for thinking woah cool. Actually playing it sucks. Zero friction or moment. Despite the fact I hate Pocky and Rocky I can recognize its good qualities. Which Trinea does not have.
