Gegege no Kitarou - Youkai Daimakyou (NES)

I'm sure most of the people reading a blog like this will be cultured enough to have some familiarity with Gegege no Kitaro, but for the few that don't it's an incredibly popular and influential folk horror comic for kids from the mid-20th century that essentially re-introduced the concept of youkai back into Japanese popular culture. Of course, such a cultural megalith has had a ton of adaptations into other media, including lots of videogames, of which this is one.

It's a platform game, but unlike a lot of 1980s licensed platformers, it's actually got some cool and original ideas! You start out on a map screen, pretty reminiscent of the ones in Namco's Dragon Buster II, and it's litterd with various spooky-looking buildings that obviously contain the stages you'll be traversing. What interesting is the form those stages take. They're only about two or three screens across and the loop infinitely, but each one has one of three possible goals to complete.

Some stages want you to kill a quota of enemies, which is fairly standard, others want you to collect a quota of the ghosts floating around the stage, and the third kind are both the most conceptually interesting and the fiddliest to play. They have you accompanied by a little flamey ghost friend that follows you around like Tails in Sonic 2, and the goal is to move around the stage in such a way that the ghost touches (and lights) the wicks of all the candles strewn about the place. This mostly comes down to standing next to a candle and either crouching or jumping to get the spirit to float to the right height, but still, I appreciate the effort put into making something a little bit different. With some refinement of the basic formula and some skillful stage design, this could have been fleshed out into its own game, maybe.

Whatever the stage type you're in, after you've performed your task, two doors appear. Going in the one on the left takes you to a boss battle, the one on the right just takes you straight back to the map with the stage cleared. I don't know if there's any long-term consequences for skipping the bosses, other than missing out on the big points payday you get for defeating them. The bosses inhabit their own mini-stages, which are tall rather than wide, with you starting at the bottom and climbing up to the boss at the top. Though they're pretty formulaic, I have to say that the bosses are very charming. They all appear in the form of massive looming faces made up of a mixture of sprites and background tiles and there's just something about them that I love.

Gegege no Kitaro isn't a game that will change your life, but it is one that's got a lot of charm and it's decent enough fun to play, too. It's also a game that really strongly looks and feels like a Famicom game. Like, if you imagine in your head a game that kids might be playing at home in 1980s Japan, it'd probably look something like this one. It did get a US release, renamed to "Ninja Kid", despite the complete lack of ninjas. I reviewed the JP version, though, just because this is yet another game I "discovered" through my habit of buying dirt-cheap Famicom cartridges with cool-looking label art.